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False gods of cricket: reflection of India's plight

The performance of the Indian cricket team overseas mirrors the plight of the nation after 50 years of freedom. The fiction cuts athwart the reality; the contrast could not be more stark. Advertisements carried by the television channels feature this or that member of our cricket team perform amazing feats in non-cricket activities, each of them a superhero. Their gawking admirers run to the nearest shop, or phone in, to buy the products sponsored by the commercials, the entire world is bowled over by the spectacle of the on screen charm and brilliance of these players. Unfortunately, the advertisements are interspersed with live telecasts of the actual performance of our team in their fixtures overseas -- the heroes turn into pygmies in a jiffy.

Perhaps their inability to perform better in foreign lands does not for the present matter so much to the cricketers. Cricket to many of them is by now only a distraction. The juicy stuff is the revenue they earn from the advertisements. As long as they perform tolerably well in the domestic circuit and hold in thralldom the clientele at home, the advertising agencies will conceivably not dispense with them.

The Indian consumer market consists of two to three hundred million reasonably comfortably placed citizens. The cricket players are picked up by the advertising agencies to beguile these two to three hundred million. Should these households continue to be attracted by the non-cricket idiocies enacted by our players on the small screen, the products they advertise, the theory goes, will continue to have a ready market.

In other words, the turnover of the products will be such as to justify payment of high fees to the players Their actual performance in the international arena, whether in a one day or a test series, is for the present therefore considered irrelevant. In case the domestic clientele do not forsake their loyalty, our cricketers could continue to score zero after zero after zero in overseas matches or bowl umpteen number of overs conceding a hundred runs or more without getting a single wicket or spill one dolly catch after another. They will nonetheless not have to worry whether their next meal ticket is to come from.

The only danger lies in the transmittal of persistent reports of disastrous performance by them in overseas tours persuading the consumers at home to conclude that this bunch of players, whom they had idolised this long, are a good for nothing lot, not a patch on a Brian Lara or a Shane Warne.

There is a built-in inertia in the system, global reality sinks into the psyche slowly, lugubriously. The inertia will not last forever, though. Cable televisions show live some of the matches played overseas. The foreign teams simply walk over our team, and the weaknesses of the great heroes at home are horribly exposed. In the circumstances, enough being adjudged as enough, the domestic passion for cricket is likely to begin to decline. Where that will leave our cricketers and their earnings is an open question. But tomorrow is tomorrow; meanwhile, our players, despite their run of the mill record, will keep enjoying a rollicking good time.

Does not the state of our cricketers by and large mirror, 50 years following Independence, the plight of the nation as a whole? Cricketers are able to make a fabulous living because the consumers of the products they endorse assume them to be world beaters. The moment awareness will spread about their actual worth, it will be both dog day afternoon and curtain time. The sense of self-confidence our cricketers exude stems not from their cricketing skills but from their ability to earn high fees. This will vanish once the advertising agencies devalue their market worth, which may happen in case consumers make up their mind to turn to other loyalties.

Is the situation the nation confronts much different? We have, in the course of the past decades, bragged of several logos. We are the largest democracy in the world. We are the undisputed, indispensable leader of the Afro-Asian movement. We also happened to be the main organisers of the non-aligned movement. We have been a great civilisation for the best part of 5,000 years; our message of truth and non violence has reverberated round the world, evoking awe and reverence from everyone. The unity in diversity which we have demonstrated is the envy of the world. We not only have the noblest of classical literature and music and sculpture and architecture, we are also world beaters in field hockey. And we have the world's largest standing army.

Advertisement of oneself and total lack of a sense of proportion have joined hands together. It has been a devastating exhibition of oral eroticism; for the best part of the past half century, our leaders and administrators have proceeded to tell the rest of the world: why we are far superior to them, it will with much condescension that we agree to cohabit with them. We have carried this haughty, unsavoury message not just to Nepal or Sri Lanka or Bangladesh or Myanmar; we have said the same thing, over the again, to several of the African and Latin American countries.

We even ventured to fight one or two small wars to legitimise the point about our being world beaters. As long as we picked on Pakistan, it did not involve any risk, that country suffers from most of the same maladies as we do. But the brush with China was sort of a rude encounter, from which we have not yet fully recovered. Pomposity emerged as our second nature. It was a minor border skirmish at a couple of spots, but our politicians and journalists have throughout the decades chosen to call the incident as the Chinese invasion. Given our poor economic performance, which has actually worsened with the "reforms" few take us seriously in the international arena. And we have been rubbished in field hockey in the last few Olympics.

The domestic problems were and persist to be grave. The nation is riven by ethnic cultural disputations and caste, class and religious animosities. When freedom came, close to three quarters of the nation were functionally illiterate. The land distribution was acutely uneven, so too was the structure of distribution of urban assets.

Nothing has changed significantly in any of these spheres, over the five decades. The British for their own reasons had setup an empire into which the different parts of the country were bundled together. That was absolute rule from above. To float successfully a democratic alternative to this arrangement, we needed a different grammar of politics. We have however clung determinedly to the British format. That has brought small change. We have therefore resorted to television advertisements to convince ourselves what a great nation we are.