This is a story about a girl. Her name is Dipika. She plays a sport for a living. It’s called squash. It’s a racquet game – like badminton and tennis. She is pretty good you know – she recently won a bronze medal in the Asian Games. But I doubt you’d know about that since you’ve probably been giving all your attention to another Deepika. Did I also tell you the Asian Games is going on at Incheon? I had never heard of Incheon till I saw a massive banner in the South Korean Cultural Centre on the Ring Road in Delhi, wishing the Indian contingent luck. Incheon is evidently South Korea’s third-most populated city after Seoul and Busan – I bet you didn’t know that bit of trivia.

Let’s get back to Dipika though. The one who spells her name with an “i” instead of two “e”s. In December 2012, she did something no Indian woman had done before. She broke into the top 10 in world Squash rankings. It’s a fairly big deal you know – Squash is played professionally by more than 100 counties. More recently, in the Commonwealth Games held this year in Scotland, she won the gold in the doubles category along with Joshna Chinappa.  I sincerely hope people who have pinned the “Yes” badge to their social media display pictures in solidarity with Scotland’s independence bid sent Dipika a congratulatory note too. I don’t think it’s an unreasonable or outlandish expectation, since a lot of our liberals who are supporting Scotland’s cause also feel very strongly for Deepika’s cause. The one with two “ee”s, that is.  And since this is about women’s emancipation, shouldn’t Dipika, the one with a single “i”, receive some attention too? After all, what is better advertisement for the “cause” than a woman making the country proud at an international sporting event?

I understand social media has started setting the agenda for news in media organisations – particularly the online news segment.  It’s a rule of the game that you have to comply with if you want to survive in a market that has no dearth of choices. It obviously doesn’t help that squash as a sport is as popular in India as Kabaddi in New Zealand. To make matters worse, Dipika was up against someone who has a team of PR professionals working round the clock. It’s definitely not Deepika’s fault – we all do our bit to come across looking good. But then what about a sense of proportion on part of the media?

It’s a fairly simple argument – could the Deepika-Times of India story have gained half the amount of mileage in pre-Twitter era? If the answer is no (and I don’t think anyone will say otherwise), are we then guilty of reporting news that only catches the fancy of a highly miniscule, Twitter-using population?

We have always, as a nation, sucked at sport, but no one seems to have a reasonable-enough explanation about why that is. All we have are eloquently-written hollow editorials every post-Olympics debacle (a regular phenomenon every four years) that begin with comparisons with China – on counts of population and GDP – and end with lamentations about disparity in medal tallies.  But should we even expect much? One of our most popular prime-time news anchors had to be told in the middle of an interview by the interviewee that Squash is not an Olympic sport.

In fact, there is almost an irony to the situation.  A watershed moment in the Indian broadcast media landscape were the Asian Games of 1982, which Delhi hosted. Most people from my parents’ generation remember it as the first thing they saw on coloured television sets. The Union Government had allowed the import of 50,000 colour television sets so that Indians could watch the spectacle in colour. So it’s unfortunate that the same Asian Games, 32 years later, are being treated with such derision by the media.

At the time of writing this, #GetWellSoonTOI was still the number one trend on Twitter and it has been almost a week since that godforsaken picture. The next time we get caned at an international sporting event, we should maybe just shut up.  It’s all right to condemn someone or something, but to harp on about it just because it’ll guarantee hits is simply making currency out of a subject that sells.

Before I forget, Dipika is currently world number 12 in the World Squash Rankings. Her full name is Dipika Pallikal.