It?s chaos. Preparations are distressingly short of desired goals. Even the main stadia are far from being completed; there are masons and carpenters lurking around all corners. Debris surrounds the new flyovers as well. It looks unlikely that even 50% of the additional rooms capacity envisaged for meeting the Games rush will be delivered on time. Life has meanwhile become nightmarish for Delhi?s ordinary folks as they navigate lives through the haze and maze of chaotic construction activity. Flourishing, however, are financial irregularities. Around a month before the ninth Asiad commenced, all of the above was noted by Indian newspapers in 1982.

It?s d?j? vu time. What?s key is that even the most trenchant critics of the Commonwealth Games are not arguing that all the Asiad troubles were in vain. Everyone agrees that the capital?s infrastructure leapfrogged that November, with some benefits accruing to sports and the national image on the side. There is no looking glass to guarantee that this October will appear similarly rosy in a flashback that?s two decades into the future. Still, there are lessons to be drawn from a historical comparison. This presents both cheerful and cheerless aspects.

Let?s begin with the nebulous matter of national pride. For some, this relates to hard statistics like the GDP growth rate or the size of forex reserves. Others identify more with warmer stuff like one?s bai finally sending her kid to college. Aamir Khan urges, Atithi Devo Bhava. The MCD is trying to get Delhiites to stop peeing in public. It?s subjective, personal. Nobody can really dictate the performance of this sentiment, especially in a democracy. So, are the Games a good avenue for building brand India? Agreements and disagreements have equal moral validity. But here?s the thing, in the face of such nebulousness, it is the job of policymakers to take a decision one way or the other. Think Britannia. Whether it was the Commonwealth Games in Manchester or the forthcoming Olympic drama, supporters and sceptics have been equally passionate. In the present, policymakers must display vision. Judgement of vision is more authoritatively delivered in the hereafter. Here, the Asiad post-mortems are salutary.

The Indian Express noted on December 4, 1982, ?By any standard, the ninth Asian Games have gone off very well indeed. For this, the organisers deliver all praise. From the colourful, often moving opening ceremony, almost everything has gone like clockwork despite earlier forebodings to the contrary.? The International Olympic Association?s president even suggested that Delhi could be a strong contender for the 1992 Olympics. Here, we begin to enter cheerless territory?a d?j? vu boulevard that offers hurt rather than healing. Continuing with this dream trope, one commentator has had the smarts to invoke Inception. Driving past the Jawaharlal Nehru stadium that was built for the Asiad and has been laboriously resuscitated rather than replaced for this October?s Games, Monty Munford notes: ?The architecture was in place but the dream was collapsing around it. I could see the expressways?but I had been stuck in traffic for an hour.?

As reports of delays, cost escalation and leakages mount up in the media, power players ranging from the Union sports minister MS Gill and the capital?s CM Sheila Dikshit to the Indian Olympic Association head Suresh Kalmadi and the Congress spokesperson Manish Tiwari have been advising citizens at large and Delhiites in specific, don?t get into a tizzy. They are wrong. India and Indians would be well-served by more rather than less tizzy. Whether it is a puddle here or an overpriced treadmill there, how would everyone get onto the same page without the media raising a ruckus? This, however, is not the same as saying that we shouldn?t be hosting the Commonwealth Games. On the contrary, it?s the 28 years gap since the Asiad that appears to have done us in.

In 1982, India boasted of only one truly national sport?cricket. Sporting horizons haven?t expanded much in the interim, discounting occasional meteors like PT Usha, Karnam Malleswari and Abhinav Bindra. An august member of this meteor class Baichung Bhutia says India shouldn?t have offered to host the Commonwealth Games in the first place, spending the money on sports infrastructure instead. His questioning credentials are more sound than that of Opposition members who are full of questions but miserably short of answers. Corruption, they cry.

Were the Games supposed to be vice-free? When everything from telecom auctions to PDS subsidies is mired in profiteering,

Opposition players are being disingenuous at best when they claim to be shocked by the scandals that the media has been unravelling. For that matter, there wouldn?t be many Delhiites who have managed to build their private houses without delays and cost escalations. These are obviously related to systemic problems that India hasn?t been able to fix since 1982, no matter how northwards its GDP and forex reserves have gone. Don?t blame the Games for springing spots that reflect an endemic malaise.

To Aamir Khan and MCD, this correspondent would say that the picture that?s reserved for the outsider doesn?t speak a thousand words. Delhi can?t brush its spitters, squatters, elephants, stray dogs et al under the carpet. If this means it doesn?t look as pretty as Beijing did when it hosted the Olympics, that?s OK. Yes, Delhi promised to be a world-class host. But let the world deal with a new definition of class.

And let?s tear off the halos that people like the Commonwealth Games CEO Michael Hopper have been carrying around. He hasn?t, after all, made any productive contribution. Let?s not obsess over the Australian hockey coach crying, ?My concern is that we will get there and have people stuck on the 15th floor with no working lifts, no air-conditioning, electricity going on and off, no water in the taps and poor sewerage.? These are, after all, the conditions that endure in India. In 1982, foreign media paid more attention to the Akalis, the ?abused? Apu and so on. If its write-up this time around are as unforgiving, it would actually be of less significance than back then. The Games are for us. Let?s enjoy the flyovers, stadiums and all the play. As for the detritus, to be made to apologise for it would be adding insult to injury. Fixing it, however, would only happen over the long haul.