A Game of 3s, 2s and 32s

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, once offered a piece of institutional wisdom, 

“Our power comes from the perception of our power”

IIIT seemed to have taken notes. Their version goes something like

“Our support comes from the perception of our support”

Why do I say so? Well,  read on…

Picture this: you wake up, travel to another college, play basketball for three days straight, win the tournament, receive a congratulatory email from your college, and come home with a hole in your pocket. Oh actually my bad. Technically we earned Rs 50. And no, that’s not a typo. The kind of money that doesn’t so much cover your expenses as it does mock them. 

One of my teammates actually did the math after our last win and once you subtract water, and the basic human need to occasionally eat something, most of us ended up in the red. Technically though, we profited. Technically. But oh well, I am getting ahead of myself.

I first walked the halls of this hallowed institution in July 2025, fresh off over two years of academic penance – “the kind every Indian student is intimately familiar with,” – carrying with me the naive belief that a Tier 1 college would have, at the very minimum, Tier 1 sports facilities. I will not elaborate on how that expectation aged. Some wounds are still fresh.

Now, for most of you that number 32 must ring a bell, right? What I will say is that the college, to its immense credit, cares deeply about sports. Deeply. So deeply, in fact, that it has constructed an entire system to ensure students engage with physical activity. Behold the 32-attendance mandate. 32 appearances at the football ground per semester for your first four semesters. Bold vision. Ambitious policy. Truly the stuff of athletic revolution.

Now, here is where things get interesting.

For those of us who play for the college, who represent its name on scoreboards across Hyderabad, the institution has designed a parallel, and I use this word generously, complementary system. We receive a sports credit directly. Wonderful. Eternally grateful. And then the complementary features kick in. We have a grand total of 4 attendance allowance per semester for tournaments.

Now, some context here is important: a standard external tournament runs for 3 days. So that’s roughly one tournament per semester on the house, and the second, should you be so ambitious as to want to compete twice, comes at the cost of your own leave quota. The same quota that determines whether you clear the 85% attendance threshold. The same threshold whose breach results in grade drops, and boy do I have an experience to share.

Which brings me to the 18th of May, I checked my results with the cautious optimism of someone who had been counting his absences very carefully. Now, I admit I am no Ramanujan, but believe it or not I can count to 4 rather accurately. I, according to my math, stayed well within the mandated limit. What I found instead was that I had somehow overshot the quota in two subjects and consequently received grade drops.

Now, the next day was supposed to be my birthday. I know right, what a day to have your results announced on? I mention this not for sympathy but purely for narrative color.
It turned out that my leaves for the college’s own tournament had simply not been accounted for. An error. A human one. Completely understandable. It was rectified a week later.
What was not rectified, and cannot be, is the week I spent drafting emails to the academics office instead of, I don’t know, existing normally? Maybe celebrating my birthday in peace? All because I had committed the crime of representing the college in its own tournament.

I mean you just can’t script this stuff.

Now, the money. Let’s return to the money because it deserves its own paragraph.The college does not currently offer travel and dearness allowances that reflect, to put it modestly, the current decade. More often than not, players cover their own expenses and are reimbursed partially, and let’s not get started on the timelines of these approximations of reimbursements.

After all this, and I chuckle as I write this.

One of the congratulatory mails from the college went something like

“This remarkable double victory reflects … the continuous support of the institute,”

In the case of the very tournament that earned us this congratulatory email, the TADAs never arrived at all. What did arrive was the prize money from winning first place, which, after being divided and cross-referenced with individual expenditures, yielded, as mentioned earlier, approximately Rs 50 per player.

The college’s support, it turns out, is best understood as moral in nature. Financial support is a department yet to be established; maybe the new building will have a room to spare for it.

Now of course we don’t do it for the money, never have, never will. But it just goes to show the amount of support (or the lack thereof) the college provides to the very people that go out of their way to bring laurels to its name.

I want to be precise about something – because precision matters here – I am not asking for a gymnasium the size of a small country or floodlit courts imported from the NBA. These are not infrastructure problems. These are paperwork problems. Attendance policies. Reimbursement policies. Leave calculations. The kind of thing that costs nothing to fix except the willingness to fix it.

And yet here we are.

Word on the street is that some reparations are being made as we speak. Something about the football ground finally getting some grass and the construction of new sports facilities in the new buildings. But, I say “word on the street” because the word is literally on the street. For all we know, they could all just be rumours, since the college doesn’t bother with informing or consulting the very people that are eventually supposed to use these facilities – and who will be affected the most from such decisions. But oh well, maybe I am expecting too much of them.

And so to sum things up, this system, in its current form, manages a rather elegant contradiction: on one hand, it mandates sports attendance to encourage students to be more athletic; on the other hand, it makes actually being an athlete a logistical and financial obstacle course. It is, in its own way, impressive. Truly impressive. If only they spent this much effort towards a more productive cause, so that a few years down the line maybe, just maybe, Ping! can write articles actually appreciating the college’s efforts instead of well, this.

I’ll be honest. It pained me to write this and yet, here I am on a rather hot May evening, writing this. I spent the last year doing everything I could to bring this college’s name to podiums across Hyderabad. I will probably do it again, and again. But there comes a point where silence starts to feel like complicity, and I’ve reached mine.

Keen readers might notice that a similar article had been published a couple of years ago as well (you can read it here). The funny, or should I say sad, part is that the situation remains pretty similar. So similar, that one could read that article today and still find it relatable. So similar that all the issues mentioned in that article are still issues today. Full marks for consistency, I guess.

To close, I’ll simply echo the college’s own words back, with the clarity that only experience can provide, “The college’s commitment to our success is truly inspiring, provided ‘commitment’ means a well-worded email, dispatched promptly after we do all the heavy lifting.”

We look forward to the continued support.

PS: I can only speak from the basketball court, and I want to be clear that we are, relatively speaking, one of the better-off sports. I’ll leave it to your imagination what the situation looks like for students representing the college in sports the college has perhaps not yet gotten around to acknowledging exist. My thoughts are with them.