Sex, drugs and sports writing

"Did you do drugs?" That was how Boria Majumdar's session 'Playing the write game' began. Majumdar addressed the question to Ashwini Nachappa, Karnataka's star athlete and spokesperson at large for greater transparency in sports federations in India. Nachappa answered in the negative, and talked about similarities and differences in the treatment of athletes in her heyday and in the present.
Shehan Karunatilaka, author of Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew deadpanned that he preferred to take drugs while writing, not while playing. Vedam Jaishankar, Dravid's biographer and cricket correspondent, posited that drugs were a greater problem in developed countries - where access, knowledge and techniques for masking usage exist -- than in India, where a significant percentage of athletes and their coaches do not have the knowledge or know-how to successfully use performance enhancers and evade detection. Nachappa described an incident involving Aparna Popat, when the badminton star had taken D-Cold medication for a cold, not realizing the medicine had some banned substances.
From there, the discussion went on to the way sports were treated by modern media. Jaishankar emphasized the importance of coverage of local sporting events - and the importance that good local coverage has on players. Nachappa talked about the coverage of athletics against the coverage of cricket - and concluded that if you did well, you would get media exposure.
Karunatilaka then talked about writing a cricket novel - and that a Sri Lankan author was expected to write about tsunamis, war or colonialism, not about the game, even though "cricket is the one thing that unites Sri Lankans, the one thing we are world class at". As an aside, Karunatilaka let slip that he had just discovered that the national game of Sri Lanka was volleyball, a game that no one he knew played.
Majumdar then asked Vaidyanathan about why biographers and cricket writers and players themselves, in their autobiographies seldom talked about their wilder sides - about the womanizing that several cricketers allegedly indulge in, leading to the conclusion that India is still a "closeted country". "We just don't talk about some things," said Vinod Naidu, Sachin Tendulkar's brand manager.