Elephant in the room

Dear Friends,

After a gruelling seventeen day affair, BFI selected the teams for Asian Games and World championships in various categories. Jaggy and I made the cut for the open team at the top of the table, and we are proud to be able to represent our country in this upcoming event.

A lot of you reached out with congratulations and wishes for upcoming events – privately and publicly. Your support, wishes and love was overwhelming, and we are extremely grateful.

There was, however, an incident that impacted the pleasure. And it is this incident that I want to address in this post.

I deliberately waited on this, as I wanted to wait for people to express themselves fully.

The incident –

in the penultimate round of the trials, we lost a big match to Tewari and Sumit. This propelled them ahead of others contenders and improved their chances of making it to top 3. Three deals contributed to this result, one in defence and two in declarer play for us – and my partner had the decisive hand and action in all of them. Concerns were raised about this result by some of the players, who complained of deliberate underperformance.

The committee

Taking cognizance of these concerns, the BFI formed a committee to evaluate the hands and reasonings. The committee consisted of chairman technical committee, operation director of selection trials, and CTD of the tournament. After evaluation, the committee found the charges to be baseless, and conveyed the same to selection committee.

Players who had raised the concerns were satisfied with committee’s findings and proceeded to play the last round.

Most of these players have gone on record in public fora saying they were satisfied or not pursuing matters.

Public outcry

Some members of fraternity went on to social media platforms and community chat rooms, assuming and accusing the worst. Without any evidence to entertain, or benefit of due process to involved parties, they played the role of judge, jury and executioner. They even went on to call into question the competence of the committee, and efficacy of BFI – thus claiming that they can judge better without any evidence to consider. They even went on to accuse the BFI of being a party to the crime.

Oh well, its a free country, with freedom of expression, unless defamation… 

Was this defamation? You decide, since the concerned parties are in no mood to knock at the courts doors.

I do however, have stuff to say.