The Hindu : Sport : Time we got our priorities right

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Sunday, Nov 26, 2006
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Time we got our priorities right

It is because we, as a people, get our priorities wrong that the men and women we elect get theirs wrong, writes Nirmal Shekar

It is a rather sad reflection of our value system as a people that our elected representatives (honourable Members of Parliament) should have ill-advisedly resorted to high rhetoric after the Indian cricket team's morale-shattering defeat in a One Day International against South Africa inDurban recently. There was the pungent aroma of populist sentiment about Thursday's debate in Parliament.

But then, that, in itself, is not a matter of such alarming concern as the fact that some MPs appear to have foreseen an incipient apocalypse in the Durban defeat, a matter of national shame that might outweigh the Union Agriculture Minister (who is also the President of the Board of Control for Cricket in India) Sharad Pawar's concerns regarding the spate of farmer-suicides that have smeared the face of a newly self-confident nation.

When politicians turn their attention to the country's one secular religion — cricket — you immediately know that one of two things has happened: the Men in Blue are on a glorious run or they are teetering on the abyss.

Irrepressible temptation

The sport is so popular in a country of over a billion people that the temptation is clearly irresistible for the men and women who depend on people's votes to get elected to the high office. Actually, these people know more about how to make hay when sixes and fours rain, as well as when wickets tumble in quick succession, than even the marketing messiahs who have kept the hype machines going whenever the Indian cricket team is active at the international level.

Then again, MPs are busy people; they seldom waste their time and energies on trivia. That the issue of the Indian cricket team's poor performance should have come up at all in Parliament clearly points a finger at us, as a society.The point here is about values. Why are the politicians doing what they are doing? The answer is simple: it is because to many of us — including to many of those who vote for these men and women — quite often, our very sense of Indianness — and the pride we take in that identity — isinextricably inter-woven with our national cricket team's fortunes.

An archaic definition?

Sport, says the new, revised Oxford English Dictionary, is a pleasant pastime, a matter affording entertainment. Or, if you please, to play a sport is to frolic or gambol, an occupation of the nature of a pleasant diversion.

In this day and age, when cricket in this country sparks the sort of primal passions that politics and commercial cinema do, you might think that this is an archaic definition. Yet, the truth is, we have somehow managed to lose sight of the real meaning of sport, at best a trivial pursuit that makes no serious contribution to a nation's progress.

It is because we — as a people — very often get our priorities wrong that, in turn, the men and women who we elect also get theirs wrong.

There is, of course, no attempt here to take a nostalgic ride down to the days when sport was merely sport in all its pristine purity. This, for the simple reason, it never really was that, in reality. From the glory days of the Roman Empire down to era of the 20th century's darkest villain — Adolf Hitler — politicians have used sport to stoke tribal passions.

It is tempting to jump to the conclusion that the world has come a long way since the Berlin Olympics in 1936. But, human nature doesn't change quite as quickly, quite as easily. Nineteen years ago, in a tiny interview room in the subterranean depths of the All England Lawn Tennis Club in Wimbledon, over 50 sportswriters awaited the arrival of a teenaged German amidst sepulchral silence. The handsome strawberry-blond young man arrived with an infectious smile,and then said: "Hey, I just lost a tennis match. Nobody died out there."

That was a half hour after Boris Becker, aged 19, champion in 1985 and 1986, had lost to the Australian journeyman Peter Doohan in the second round of the 1987 championship.

Nobody died at Kingsmead

Surely, nobody died out there in Durban on the cricket field. But the deaths in Vidharbha and elsewhere in the country among farming communities caught in the trap of institutionalised deprivation are real.

It is time we got our priorities right.

And, it is time, too, that we realised that it is a folly to inhabit extremes when judging the national cricket team. For, no Indian team of recent years was ever as good (in world beating terms) as we imagined it was. It is just that we were victims of hype and our own wishful thinking.

On the other hand, no Indian cricket team was ever as abyssmally mediocre as we now believe Rahul Dravid's side is in its South African sojourn.

The truth is somewhere in between — a territory most of us have never ventured into.

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