Read the passage carefully and answer the question that follows.
Passage I
All of us play but we are not athletes. We are homo ludens (Latin for play) and our playfulness is unproductive. But athletes play for profit and contest for prizes. It is the transformation of our play and games into athletics that leads to medals. What makes Haryana such a fine place for athletics in India? With barely 2% of India's population, people from Haryana won around 40% of the gold medals in the recently concluded CWG 2010.
People in Haryana tend to count the gold medals of the Hyderabadi shuttler, Saina Nehwal and the
Delhi wrestler, Sushil Kumar, in their tally. This is because both of them are Jats. People of this dominant caste form more than 20% of Haryana's population and, therefore, in popular perception, Haryana is Jat-land. All sports are oriented towards the Olympic slogan 'higher, faster, and stronger’. But the ones in which Haryana got medals stand for plain force and aggression like wrestling, boxing and shooting. Anthropologists call them contact sports because the opponents have bodily contact in them. Shooting is a combative sport because opponents use a combat weapon. Such sports are a substitute of war or training for it.
Haryana is India's pride in contact and combative games. I can think of t hree reasons for it, viz.
historical geography, peasant culture of perseverance and a feeble government policy. Firstly, the province has
a volatile history of continuous aggression due to its geographical location on the frontier. Secondly, the people of Haryana have valued physical strength and perseverance due to its peasant culture. Thirdly, the sports policy since 2006 has honed the killer athletic spirit in Haryana. The half-hearted policy does not create achievers but supports the successful ones among them. Punjab was divided on religious lines in 1947. The non-Sikh majority parts of this truncated Punjab were constituted as Haryana in 1966. Like a horseshoe, Haryana encircles Delhi from three sides and the culture of both is similar. At the popular level, people are rough and tough - meaning 'rough by tongue and tough in body'. In the medieval times, Haryana flourished when weak rulers ruled Delhi.
Most of the area remained under Delhi's tutelage but small principalities also dotted the arid
landscape of Haryana. Mostly, people of the region joined the Mughals and Marathas in repulsing invaders. But
the same locals did not mind plundering Delhi or looting the retreating armies sometimes. The British
colonialists expanded from the east. They conquered most of India with the help of soldiers from western UP
and Bihar. But, in the late 19th century, the colonial strategists honored ordinary peasant castes by calling them 'martial races' in united Punjab. This was a clever way of taming the aggression in this frontier region.
This smart move was also to recruit rural Punjabis in the colonial army so that they could be used
to thwart the southward expansion of Tsarist Russia. There is a family resemblance between military/hunting
activities and wrestling, shooting, races, riding or archery. For the military serving population of Haryana,
therefore, such sports come easily. Secondly, before the advent of machinery, agriculture was a backbreaking
occupation. The size of agricultural income had a direct relation with the quantity of sweat produced during
one's toil.