For all its groan-inducing moments, the world still retains a talent for pleasantly surprising me. Things like Digvijaya Singh falling in love and getting married, Kangana Ranaut standing up to “a silly ex”, and Vijay Mallya falling on his knee-padded knees to seek forgiveness in some hotel room, all show that despite the two bottles of Rohypnol and churan kept on my bedside table in case things go bum-up, some folks in this world can indeed bring unexpected joy to me.

As has the notoriously joy-giving Prime Minister Narendra Modi this Sunday via his latest episode of Mann Ki Baat, where he plays the role of Atal Bihari Vajpayee even as he speaks twice as fast as the former prime minister. Modi started off wishing everyone happy Easter — disappointing many commentators waiting patiently for him to leave it out since Goa isn’t going to polls this year — and then proceeded to address the humungous hardships faced by students appearing for exams while the T20 World Cup is on. (Deal with it, munchkins.)

But then came the moment when the prime minister completely bowled me over. Sixty per cent of India is young, he said, and yet we suck at sports. I started to listen to him with the kind of rapture kids once had when listening to the mellifluous voice of President A P J Abdul Kalam. After wishing both the Indian and Australian cricket teams the best — Aha! So, not a thorough endorsement of ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ — for their match that evening, Modi proceeded to talk, quite passionately, about how India needs to become a proper footballing nation.

His trigger was the Fifa Under-17 World Cup that India will be hosting next year. The World Cup is truly a Big Deal moment that needs to be recognised as that not just by grown-ups given to doling out gyaan but also by youngsters who can get an unprecedented ringside view of what not even the much-flaunted Indian Super League can offer: the world’s best footballers in that age category in action, a pool from which footballers like Spain-Chelsea’s Cesc Fàbregas and Germany-Real Madrid’s Toni Kroos had emerged.

Modi, over almost five minutes in his 30-minute talk show to the nation, asked young Indians to pull their socks up their collective calves and run with the ball in a manner a bit more physically demanding than required in cricket. Pointing out that we were once not abysmal in the sport, he reminded listeners that we had won gold in the 1951and 1962 Asian Games, and came fourth in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics.

(That, incidentally, was because Hungary withdrew from the Olympics and gave India a walkover in the opening match, with India beating only Australia and losing in the semifinal to Yugoslavia and to Bulgaria in the game for the bronze. But hush.) “Our Fifa ranking is so low that I don’t have the courage to say it,” the PM continued, sounding like a Youth Congress activist in UP. For those who don’t mind wincing, India is currently ranked 160th — sandwiched between the Dominican Republic (approximate population 10 million) and Malta (445,426 as in 2014) — in a list of 209 nations. And a Fifa ranking is far more empirical than the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business ranking, where India ranks 130th.

The good thing about being a Pied Piper (PP) with a following is that if a bona fide PP like our PM — or my friend Chetan Bhagat — says, ‘Let’s play football’, folks will play football. Hopefully, at the cost of not coming across as an anti-national. So, I’m super glad that Modi has extolled the virtues of football, instead of sniffing glue or building a temple.

Modi hopes that the 2017 Under-17 World Cup will spark genuine interest in making playing football popular in India, bringing the beautiful, simple game to “every village, every gali”. Swami Vivekananda may have been the original inspiration for Modi to get all footie-in-mouth. The original Naren had famously said, “You will be nearer to heaven through football than through the study of the Gita.” But the Naren Who Walks Among Us knows that football is a sport played and followed with fervour across the globe — unlike cricket that’s followed seriously in countries Hrithik Roshan can count on his fingers. Ergo, India becoming a footballing power is about global branding.

And like that other tiresome celebration of that false national virtue of ‘jugaad’, please don’t go on and on about our ‘glorious’ footballing past — when we either won by playing barefoot or lost because we played barefoot, as if playing barefoot got you extra points. The easy way, of course, is to proclaim ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ before bothering to reach, never mind score, any goal. But even easier would be to keep being aspectator nation and diss Indian football. The way dissing India’s plans for economic progress and development actually stops these plans from ever materialising.

