By K. Datta, IANS
New Delhi : Chandan Singh Rawat, a member of India's gold medal-winning football team of the 1951 New Delhi Asian Games, is struggling with age-related ailments, made worse by a severe financial crisis – where even his spectacles breaking is a major setback.
The 1951 gold medal victory over Iran is remembered by a winning goal scored by Mewalal before a packed National Stadium, now re-christened Major Dhyan Chand Stadium to honour the hockey wizard. But the role of players like centre half Chandan was no less important.
Pottering about his house in the hill resort of Darjeeling, the 82-year-old veteran's only source of sustenance is a monthly cheque of Rs.3,500 sent courtesy union sports ministry, something all Asian Games gold medallists are now entitled to. The amount used to be a meagre Rs.1,500 till recently.
Also a member of the Indian football team for the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, Chandan's plight became known when he wrote to Yashwant Singh Alwar, head of the Athletes' Commission in New Delhi, seeking his help to get his arrears for the first three months of this year released.
Chandan, who represented the Services in 1949 and 1950, decided to opt out of the army to join East Bengal and seek a full-time career in football, a mistake he has lived to repent. He had served in 5 Gorkha Rifles at a time when the army's Gorkha Brigade was a force to reckon with in Indian football.
"I spoilt my life for the love of football," he said in anguish; realising in his autumn years that "I ruined my life. Everybody makes mistakes in his life, but I made the greatest of all mistakes."
Had he continued serving in the army till he was entitled to a pension or taken up a job, he says, he would be earning a good pension today. "Just fate!" he told IANS.
Leaving East Bengal for arch rivals Mohun Bagan before ending his playing career with Kolkata's Rajasthan Club, Chandan began taking up whatever coaching assignments came his way. The last time he was remembered by the football administrators was in 1997 when he managed India's gold medal-winning team to the SAFF Cup in Kathmandu, Nepal.
He is a little hard of hearing but otherwise "manages to carry on somehow" after recovering from a heart condition suffered in the severe cold of last winter, Chandan said as he nostalgically recalled his days as the country's leading centre-half, "called midfielder these days".
The last setback he suffered was when he recently broke his spectacles, he said with grim humour.
Of his three sons, two went missing during the Subhash Ghising-led Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) agitation for Gorkhaland in the 1980s. Chandan doesn't know for sure if they're dead or alive.
The third, Mrigendra Singh Rawat, 41, is unemployed despite having graduated from college two decades ago. "Ghar mein baitha hua hai (he is sitting at home)," the old football hero says of this son, wondering if anyone would offer him a job.
This is no way a sporting hero should be passing his old age. Not even if he has made the greatest mistake of his life of opting out of the army for the love of football.