The 100-gram Conundrum
My very first memory of ‘100
grams’ is that of my childhood. In the extreme winter climate of Kanpur, it was
those 100 grams of roasted peanuts, bought for just 1 rupee, that worked as an elixir to beat the severe
cold. On a winter afternoon, the 100 grams of shell peanuts were a cozy
companion for me and my friends on my terrace or in the school playground.
It may sound politically
incorrect in the current context to say that the 100 grams was a large quantity
to last over an hour’s gossip. In today’s context, we strongly believe that 100
grams is too small a quantity to deny a medal to our own Vinesh Phogat. Reams
of arguments have been written across newspapers, magazines and social media raising
enough hullabaloo over the actual weight of 100 grams, just short of challenging
even the MKS system. The proponents of the conspiracy theory have just missed
quoting one important caveat of the definition of a gram. As the definition says
- for greater precision, the mass may be weighed at a point at which the
acceleration due to gravity is 980.655 cm/sec2. Now, that is something
our attorneys should also check.
I have always been classified as
an underweight since the time I first heard about the term BMI. Despite that,
my weight has never been 50 KG as far as I remember. Therefore, it surprises me
no end to know that a well-built wrestler could also fall into this category of
weight. To top it all, the act of shredding
2 Kilos of weight overnight also amazes me. My close friend Upadhyay had
recently published a screen-shot of his weighing machine proudly claiming a 5
KG drop in his weight over 5 months of hard work. Or, is that only a girlie
thing to fret over 100 grams? My wife, who maintains is healthy BMI, too gets
hyper over a 100 gram increase in weight whenever she checks it on a Sunday morning.
And then she moves the weighing machine to every room to recheck the weight –
she seems to remember her school science very well and is always doubting the
exact gravity and the variance of that across rooms.
But this 100 gram of weight, in the current context, is just not equal to the roasted peanuts. It
is worth a real metal. For a Haryanvi Olympian to return without a medal is
like a Malayali returning from Gulf without gold. Both will be looked down upon
in their respective states.
Our cricketers, however, find all
this noise around 100 grams of weight and thereby denial of the metal quite
nonsensical. They have always exceeded the expected weight of a sportsperson
and still have been able to carry loads of golden metal whenever they went
abroad. And they never had to wait for 4 years to get their next chance for the
metal. They are also equally intrigued by the inability of Vinesh to drop her
weight by 100 grams. They have a very simplistic solution for the same – she should
have just removed her gold chain which would have dropped the weight by more
than 100 grams. They just don’t comprehend the difference between the gold they
buy on every foreign trip and the gold that our athletes get a chance to
compete for, once in 4 years.
The arbitration appeal may go
either way. Our heavyweight attorney, to our delight, may end up making light of the contentiously
heavy 100 grams. But Vinesh is going to carry this weight of 100 grams all her
life and that could feel heavier than the biblical cross for her.
