Sports in India have always had a love-hate relationship with society. While we as a people always like to look up to our stars, more often than not the aspirations of youngsters aspiring to emulate their heroes fall on the wayside, done in by the pressures of education, family, society and very often poor facilities.

For every one star, there are 100 others who fall on the wayside. Economic hardships, the desperate need to make ends meet and even social stigma have worked against them, and many a star is lost before he or she was born. However, things have changed for the better in the recent past. While even now the pressures mentioned above remain, sports and the industry of sports has thrown up many opportunities which were practically unheard of in the past. So essentially, while not everyone can be a Sachin Tendulkar, many can follow their star through an array of openings that have come up, thanks to the commercialisation of sports.