The Indian culture does not value athletics or physical fitness activities (or medical health, for that matter) as much as other countries. And it is showing.
After spending a month there in March, I agree totally. EVERY adult male has a giant gut, and beyond their early 20's the women are all over weight as well. I was not really expecting that.
Obesity is not the issue causing this. India has an almost billion person population with a 15% obesity rate with 0 medals while the US has a 33% obesity rate with 80 medals and a third of the population.
Funding and culture are the biggest issues. The only sport Indians care about and that you can financially support yourself professionally is in cricket. Unsurprisingly India is quite good at cricket and would def. have some medals if it was an Olympic sport.
The truth is that indian has millions of potential athletes who never pursue their passion because they are pressured by parents to focus on academics and other areas. There is no culture glorifying athletes. The few who do end up being athletes play cricket.
I never said anything about obesity causing the issue with athletics. I was agreeing that the general Indian population doesn't seem to value fitness or health. Which from my limited experience, is absolutely true.
Which just reinforces the original statement, that India doesn't give a shit about fitness/athleticism. We value sports highly in the states, thus we have a large talent pool.
Welp, I spent time time in Chennai, Pondicherry, Bangalore, Mumbai, Jaipur, Pushkar, Agra, and New Delhi. Interacted with hundreds, and hundreds of people on job sites. I'm not sure what else I need to see to support my visual inspection of the Indian population.
You saw like 0.0000001% of the population and feel like you have a justified opinion? Wow. Well, personally I'd be embarrassed to say so, but to each his own.
If you're doing random sampling* then the proportion of the population sampled doesn't really matter if the population is very large. The margin of error is entirely dominated by the absolute sample size and true value of the underlying statistic being measured.
1.25 billion people in India. There are starving people in every country, but you can still have a majority population being overweight. Just like any modern industrial country.
People talk as if an average Indian spends 14 hours a day in a library. There is clearly talent like Dipa Karmakar who was not facilitated with right kind of training facility or equipment, she missed medal by whisker. The stories of Indian athletes doing training by themselves and begging for equipment is now legendary.
Sure but you would expect a few exceptional exceptions when dealing with 1.25 billion people. Also India is a huge melting pot with people from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. I just don't see how this can be the only reason.
