When your mobile phone goes cactus, there's little way to avoid an Indian.

Time and time again I've spent many hours troubleshooting my way through some technical problem with some unflappable guy or girl on the other end of the line in Bangalore.

The phone salesman who served me at Westfield Bondi Junction this morning was Indian.

So whenever I'm in a flap about something to do with my phone, and hot under
the collar, I usually encounter an impassive, protocol-following Indian who smiles a lot and is awfully polite but remains single-handedly, implacably, incapable of making any decision on his or her own, no matter how trivial, without the authority of their manager.

So it was that I arrived for my morning constitutional at my local café silently fuming and swearing off anything to do with mobile telephony, Indian call centres and Indian shop assistants altogether.

But I had India firmly on my mind.

Then it struck me: why, when there are so many Indians on this fair earth, over a billion of them, a good number of those young, smart and upwardly mobile, is the Indian Olympic team roughly equivalent in size to a bankrupt west African republic, and why does India find it singularly impossible to win gold medals when China, the only other nation with a larger population, chews through the stuff like an industrial smelter?

It's not like Indians are hopeless.

They once qualified for the FIFA World Cup, but didn't play because they weren't allowed to play barefoot (strange but true).

Indian cricketers are some of the world's best. India produces a procession line of grandmasters in chess. It's men's hockey team actually won gold at the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

However, if you watched the opening ceremony the other day, you wouldn't have failed to miss the entrance of the Indians into Beijing's National Stadium. As anticlimaxes go it was like John Farnham standing in for Glenn Shorrock in the Little River Band.

Fifty-seven athletes, 42 officials, for a country of 1.1 billion people.

Australia, population of 20 million, sent nearly ten times that amount of athletes to Beijing.

Over at Asia Times Online, writer Neeta Lal has penned an op-ed piece called "India's Failure of Olympic Proportions", which reports that India has won a total of 17 medals since 1900, 12 since Partition in 1947.

Funding for Olympic sports is a tenth of what China spends, Lal argues, with half of that cannibalised by petty officials.

But an "all-pervasive bureaucratic insensitivity towards sports" is the real problem, combined with a "lack of a strong and vibrant sports culture.

Sports education - which ought to be an integral part of school and college curriculum - is sorely missing. This is largely because of the mindsets of Indian parents and teachers who accord little importance to sports education and excellence.

"Fans can hardly expect glittering medals," Lal writes.

"Instead they're left with sub-par training camps, inferior coaches and low-standard sports infrastructure. It should be no surprise then that the National Institute of Sports (Patiala) - the 'training ground' for most Indian Olympic athletes - functions without such basics as a physiologist, psychologist or nutritionist."

A dire prognosis.

But just as I began writing this story, news filtered through of a seismic event in Indian sport, what will go on to be one of the great feel good stories of the Games.

Air-rifle shooter Abhinav Bindra, a Sikh competing in the 10-metre event, has won an individual gold medal.

Gold!

Delhi is in bedlam. YouTube has melted down. Some crazed fan has given the bespectacled 25-year-old MBA student a hotel to keep in Chandigarh, his hometown. India has never seen anything like it.

Now as sporting disciplines go, the 10-metre air-rifle event is about as glamorous as pigeon racing, but who are we to begrudge this wonderful nation its moment in the sun?

Indian sport's golden summer has been a long time coming and against all expectations. Let's celebrate it while it lasts.

I've got a feeling it won't be long.