By IANS
New Delhi : Perhaps for the first time, India’s vice-president joined the president at the country’s annual top sports awards presentation ceremony as several changes were witnessed at the Rashtrapati Bhawan here Wednesday.
Newly elected President Pratibha Patil, who presented the awards, was flanked by Vice-President Hamid Ansari, who was also elected recently, and Sports Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar on the birth anniversary of India’s hockey wizard Dhyan Chand.
“The tradition has been that the vice-president and the prime minister are also invited every year for the function. That they do not attend the function is up to them,” one of the organisers from the Sports Authority of India (SAI) told IANS.
“So far as I remember, I have never seen the vice-president at the function. Only some cabinet ministers and all the top sports officials from the Indian Olympic Association (IOA), SAI and, of course, the sports ministry usually turn up.”
Traditionally, the president sits on a slightly raised platform in the Ashoka Hall, with the sports minister on his/her right and the minister of state for sports on the left.
But on Wednesday, the skim-trim Ansari sat on the right side of Patil and Aiyar on the left.
When there is no minister of state for sports, as is the case at present, only two chairs are placed on the platform.
It was also perhaps for the first time two persons, a man and a woman, acted as announcers, replacing a popular Doordarshan newsreader who used to double up as the announcer for several years.
The man and the woman took turns to call the names of the winners and read out their achievements before they received their prizes from Patil.
There was another departure from the established norm as the announcers also used a fair bit of adjectives to describe the athletes’ achievements. Earlier, the woman announcer used to simply read from the bland text.
Also, they reminded the gathering that Aug 29 was the birth anniversary of Dhyan Chand, after whom one of the awards is named – given for lifetime achievement in sports.
Whenever a sportsperson came forward to receive his/her award, the television cameras and the photographers stood on a broad staircase-shaped stand and all clicked almost at the same time.
The sports awards were instituted in 1961 when the government started with the Arjuna Awards, which remained the highest recognition in the country until 1991 when the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna award was introduced.
However, the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Trophy remains the oldest award for universities.