Army chief calls for restoring India's glory in hockey

New Delhi - Indian Army Chief V.K. Singh, who has hogged headlines for a controversy relating to his date of birth, Monday revealed another side of himself – his passion for hockey – as he called for restoring the glory of India’s prowess in the game.

“We need to restore the glory of the game in which the nation produced the greatest team,” said Singh at the launch of an autobiography of 1968 Mexico Olympic medallist Col. (retd.) Balbir Singh Kular.

“As a lover of sports and hockey, I would like to see the hockey coming up,” he said in front of a dozen of legendary hockey players and sports enthusiasts.

He also revealed that he was fond of playing hockey in his younger days.

“This book is about a game that was once called a national game. As a country, we excelled in the game – we can restore the glory we had in this game,” he said.

Taking a subtle dig at Indians’ obsession with cricket, he exhorted them to make efforts to revive the glory days of Indian hockey. “This is a game which requires all of us, it needs much more than what IPL and 20-20 cricket match gets,” he said.

Referring to “Sansarpur to London Olympics,” the autobiography of Kular, Singh said Sansarpur, a village in Punjab that is home to Kular and many Olympic medallists, Singh said here was a place that eats, drinks and breathes hockey.

This is the first sports e-book that can be accessed through computer and mobile downloads which is available on a new e-books portal entitled RockASAP.com.

“I have been fortunate to have been cautiously a part of various historic events in the past six decades of Indian hockey and now is the time to share it in exact entirety,” said Kular, who hails from Sansarpur, a village that has produced 14 Olympic medallists.