Having fallen today can India rise tomorrow?
What a day of Test cricket. It was all Dale Steyn; he huffed and he puffed and he blew the house apart. On a wicket where playing a fast bowler was not impossible, it was on the slower side and without extravagant bounce, Steyn breathed fire. He barged in through the gates, destroying any attempt of resistance from India, during two hostile and fatal spells separated by a middle session where Sehwag and Badrinath raised hopes of some kind of a resurrection.
The straight-talking Sehwag said, “We are very angry with the way we batted.” Sehwag was more critical of the fact that they did not last long enough to tire the opposition and stitch meaningful partnerships apart from the one he had with Badrinath. “It was not a pitch where you could get out so easily. If there were a couple of more partnerships their bowlers might have got tired. But you have to give the credit to the bowlers led by Steyn.”
Steyn gave some credit to the ball change before tea as the seam of the earlier one had come apart; but losing six wickets for 12 runs in eight overs after tea is a combination of some great bowling and some gormless batting. India did not have the batting to survive good spells and to have the reserve keeper Saha making a debut as a specialist batsman shows how the bench was planned. Rahul Dravid and Yuvraj Singh were out of the squad much in advance and Laxman was iffy before the start of the match. So what were the choices for Dhoni when Rohit Sharma got injured on the morning when his big valuable chance was about to be served to him in a platter?
With a flimsy batting line-up that had very little experience the three early wickets took the cream away with Morkel taking Gambhir and Steyn getting rid of Murali Vijay and Sachin Tendulkar. In the boiling cauldron at Nagpur today India was desperately missing what you call seasoned campaigners; the players who can bat in the heat of a furnace. One of them is still at the crease in the second essay and these days when he gets going he is a much more wiser, battle-hardened and tough customer than he was in his resplendent days of yore.
Sehwag on his day just requires someone to stay with him and he has shown that he has both application and amazing stroke-play to get near a triple hundred on his own. Today he fell into a trap; India was not even two hundred when after having reached a hundred he chased a wide one shortly before tea. His was the fourth Indian wicket to fall and his tea would have barely finished when he was back opening the second innings for India.
Sehwag was back in the hut in the second innings but he was not short of the belief that is needed after a day like this. “He refused to accept that India stood on the brink of disaster, saying the hosts had the firepower to stage a fight back. ‘They need to play their own shots but they need to exercise patience,’” he was quoted in a Cricinfo story.
A target of 150 plus on a fifth day wicket with Harbhajan and Mishra could be a tricky one for South Africa; but in order to get there India would have to play a different ball game than the one they played today.
The Prodigy Of Prodigies
“During the summer of 1997 The Times Magazine published John Woodcock’s personal selection of the 100 greatest cricketers in the history of the game. This immediately sparked a wide-ranging debate in the cricket world but it was universally agreed that no one was better qualified to undertake so daunting and essentially controversial a task,” said the back of the book that was published in 1998. Woodcock had covered over four-hundred Test matches for The Times alone.
The innings was opened by W.G. Grace at number one and Donald Bradman at number two followed by Gary Sobers. For the batsman at number 25 Woodcock observed that he ‘has all the credentials to become one of the two or three greatest batsmen in the game’s history, as well as one of the most engaging’. “At Perth in Western Australia early in 1992 Sachin Tendulkar made a century for India against Australia on a lively pitch with a brilliance that no other batsman in the world could have surpassed. He was eighteen at that time—the prodigy of prodigies,” Woodcock wrote.
Then he spoke about an innings in 1997 at Cape Town describing Tendulkar as a veteran of twenty-three and his country’s captain. He played an innings of 169 against South Africa that began in a crisis and lasted for five and a half hours and was virtually flawless. But only time will tell for how long he is able to withstand the pressures of being India’s leading batsman, the relentless idolatry that goes with it, and the worry of wondering, when he is captain and India are on tour, where their next wicket is going to come from.
Time has only served to confirm that Tendulkar, even after 20 years on the road, still has the capability to produce a timeless gem. The few injury-marred Test seasons and the 2007 World Cup where he was, for reasons apparent to no one bar Greg Chappell, made to bat at number four rather than his favoured and successful position at the top of the order are among the major disappointments.
Ricky Ponting did not make the cut as he was a late bloomer but Shane Warne, Brian Lara, Barry Richards, Sunil Gavaskar and Graeme Pollock along with other legends all found a rightful mention.
On India’s 2009 tour of New Zealand, former Kiwi all-rounder Richard Hadlee called Sachin Tendulkar as the greatest batsman ever to grace the game. Hadlee, 57, who became the first official inductee to ICC’s Hall of Fame on the first day of the Wellington Test, said he was in awe of Tendulkar whose achievements down the years “clearly had been phenomenal”.
Hadlee said comparisons with Donald Bradman should also drive Tendulkar as a player. “Well, Sir Donald Bradman has been regarded as the greatest player ever,” Hadlee said. “He played just Test cricket. He hasn’t played any other forms of the game. Clearly, that is understandable. But to see Sachin and other players actually adjust to different forms of the game and different conditions all around the world, even though the average is fractionally more than half of the Don’s is in itself incredible. You got to respect it and write those performances.”
Mike Atherton, in a November 19, 2009 piece for The Times spoke about the advent of the helmet and how it helped modern players and wrote that “to suggest that Tendulkar — or, indeed, any modern, armoured or, to use Vivian Richards’s phrase, “pampered” player — is the best ever is demeaning to those former greats who stood at the crease in the knowledge that their next ball could be their last.” Fair enough; but just one factor and not the factor that decides the art of batsmanship in its totality; a heavily padded and protected Mike Atherton averaged 37.69 and I don’t buy the argument that his average would have dipped dramatically if he came out without a helmet or gone up had he dressed like an astronaut.
In all Bradman came to the crease in an international fixture a total of 80 times in one form of the game and scored 29 centuries with a phenomenal average of 99.96. “Though his batting was not classically beautiful, it was always awesome. As Neville Cardus put it, he was a devastating rarity: ‘A genius with an eye for business,’” Matthew Engel is quoted in Bradman’s Cricinfo profile page.
There is a lot more to cricket than just the helmet and those are also factors that need to be considered if any comparison has merit in the first place. The Don played his 52 Test matches against four opponents in nine grounds—five grounds in England and four in Australia. Thirty-seven of those 52 matches were played against England and 15 against the other three oppositions namely South Africa, West Indies and India all in his home conditions. Sachin Tendulkar played on 32 different Test match surfaces before he first played a Test match at a surface where he had played a Test before—the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai.
Sachin Tendulkar has played on close to 60 different Test match surfaces and the limited overs game has taken him to even more parts of the cricket-playing world. He may have come out to bat on 80 occasions in just about two or three seasons in the 1990s. From 1989 to 2000, Sachin Tendulkar played 79 Test matches and scored 6416 runs at an average of 57.28 with 24 hundreds. Ponting was a late bloomer; his 2001 tour to India was a very dismal one and his resurrection as a batsman began after it. In that tour Ponting scored 0; 6, 0; 0, 11 in five innings of three Tests. After that disastrous 2001 tour for Ponting his average in 42 Tests was a decent-but-average 42.96 with seven hundreds to his name while Tendulkar had 25.
The comparisons of Tendulkar and Ponting began only in the years after 2002 and 2003 and then in the injury-marred period of Tendulkar; where he largely-remained stationary while Ponting had more than a few out-of-the-world seasons. In November 2002 Tendulkar was 19 hundreds clear of Ponting and in the period that followed and established Ponting as a modern great he made 21 hundreds as opposed to Tendulkar’s four and the gap was narrowed down to two hundreds.
The gap stands at six today with Tendulkar at 45 hundreds and Ponting with 39; there is no comparison in the ODIs where Tendulkar leads with 45 hundreds and 93 scores of 50 plus with a batting average of 44.71 and a strike rate of 85.90 and Ponting has 28 hundreds and 74 scores of 50 plus with a batting average of 42.88 and a strike rate of 80.28.
In terms of adaptability, Sachin Tendulkar as an 18-year-old on his first tour to Australia made two hundreds; a 148 not out in Sydney and the much talked about and unrepeatable 114 at the WACA in Perth. In subsequent tours Tendulkar has made four more hundreds in Australia to go with five scores of fifty plus; he averages 58.53 in Australia. He has never come back without a hundred from a Test tour and Brisbane is the only Australian ground among the ones he has played Test cricket on where he does not have a hundred. In 2003 he got a shocker from Steve Bucknor at Brisbane; and then despite being in decent nick that tour was a disappointment for the Little Master until he reached Sydney and accumulated runs with the ascetic discipline of a monk rather than the flourish of a genius; an unbeaten 241 and then a 60 not out salvaged his tour.
Ponting, on the other hand, has had a miserable time in India and he got his first and only hundred in 2008; twelve years after his first tour in 1996. His average in India is a poor 20.85 and he has two fifties to go along with his only hundred. The home and away average of Ponting is 60.08 and 49.23 respectively but for Tendulkar it has been ‘equally-comfortable’ playing home or away with averages of 55.28 and 55.44 respectively. Clearly the Little Master is at home in all conditions.
The Timeless Charm Of ‘The Godfather’
Last month I was writing something or the other almost everyday but I could not post anything between the fifth of January and the 19th; for the better part of this time I did not have my broadband connection as I moved place and was not foresighted enough to put the request for a connection shift in advance.
Another reason was that I could not keep the focus of a post narrow and every now and then a tributary would come out and threaten to become bigger than the river; or branches taking over the tree. So I kept cutting these branches and saving them and towards the end of January I had so many of them that now my blog has enough to survive for three weeks with just a bit of wood polish here and there. One of the branches is an unexplored and new one for me: films and all sorts of things related to films.
Starting the 25th of February for three days Cinedarbaar and Instituto Cervantes are presenting Horror Cine Experience in New Delhi at Instituto Cervantes, Hanuman Road; the entry is free and it opens with ‘The Others’—starring Nicole Kidman. I haven’t seen any of the other movies on the three-day schedule but if they are close to ‘The Others’ then it sounds like an exciting and horrifying time.
At present I am more of a DVD-watcher and visits to the cinemas are rare. I generally look out for thrillers, drama and espionage movies and I rely on the IMDB rankings. If I have to go to the past there are many movies I’ve seen repeatedly following a long-break which comes from having seen them twice or thrice in the days after my having seen them first; The Godfather comes to my mind immediately; it continues to amaze me.
I had read the book a few times before I saw the movie and found both as unique pleasures. The wisdom of the Don, played to perfection by Marlon Brando; and the passing of the Corleone family’s control to the youngest son Michael, played superbly by a young Al Pacino, forms the core of the movie with the violence being the backdrop. James Cann is brilliant as Sonny, the hot-headed eldest son of Don Corleone. The ones who stand out in the support cast are Diane Keaton (Kay Adams), Robert Duvall (Tom Hagen) and Richard Castellano (Clemenza).
Michael, who is not involved in the ‘family business’, puts his hand up to kill Sollozo and McCluskey—after the Don is shot and is badly injured but alive and the family decides, after another attempt to kill him at the hospital is foiled by Michael, that the only way forward for them is to take out ‘the Turk’ Sollozo and the Police captain McCluskey. With a painful swollen jaw Michael says that if somehow an arrangement can be made for him to get a gun at the place where they would take him for a meeting then he’ll kill them both. The family manages to find the place at the right time by tapping a police source; as McCluskey was rule-bound to leave his contact details when out of office.
During the chilling build-up Tom Hagen says to Michael, “You shouldn’t let that broken jaw influence you. McCluskey is a stupid man and it was business, not personal.” Michael had not said anything when his elder brother Sonny and the family’s ‘caporegimes’ were having a go at him; but he gives Hagen a reply. “Tom, don’t let anybody kid you. It’s all personal, every bit of business. Every piece of shit every man has to eat every day of his life is personal. They call it business. OK. But it’s personal as hell. You know where I learned that from? My old man. The Godfather. If a bolt of lightning hit a friend of his the old man would take it personal. He took my going into the Marines personal. That’s what makes him great. He takes everything personal… And you know something? Accidents don’t happen to people who take accidents as a personal insult… Damn right, I take that broken jaw personal; damn right, I take Sollozzo trying to kill my father personal.”
Michael then learns the game of trust and deception when he is away in Sicily and then later when he comes back following the death of his brother Sonny. In the company of his father—the Don had formally retired and handed over the family business to Michael—he learns how to run the business of the Corleone family.
“Michael Corleone had taken precautions against every eventuality. His planning was faultless, his security impeccable. He was patient, hoping to use the full year to prepare. But he was not going to get his necessary year because fate itself took a stand against him, and in the most surprising fashion. For it was the Godfather, the great Don himself, who failed Michael Corleone.”
The Don died on a Sunday morning, working on his tomato vines; a task he loved because it brought back memories of his childhood in Sicily 60 years ago. The Sun was hot that day and he suffered a stroke and Michael and some men at the mall gate ran to the garden and carried him to the shade of the patio. With a great effort the Don opened his eyes to see his son once more. He smelled the garden, the yellow shield of light smote his eyes, and he whispered, “Life is so beautiful.” He died surrounded by men, holding the hand of the son he had most loved.
At the funeral Hagen asks Michael if has an idea about how his enemies are going to come after him. Michael tells Hagen that the Don had repeatedly told him that whoever sets up the meeting with Barzini would be the traitor. In essence, the Don teaches Michael that it takes a friend and an enemy collaborating together to bring a man down; in this case, the one to set him up for the other to gun him down. The background score is wonderful and the use of light and darkness has the touch of a genius. The Godfather is Francis Ford Coppola at his best.
“What do you care what other people think?”
In the spring of 399 BC, three Athenian citizens brought legal proceedings against Socrates. He was accused by them of failing to worship the city’s gods, of introducing religious novelties and of corrupting the young men of Athens. The severity of the charges called for a death penalty.
In Symposium and the Death of Socrates, a 1997 title of Wordsworth Editions, five dialogues have been offered in one volume for the first time. In Symposium, a group of Athenian aristocrats attend a party and talk about love, until the drunken Alcibiades bursts in and decides to discuss Socrates instead. The setting of the other dialogues is more somber. The 70-year-old Socrates is put on trial for impiety, and sentenced to death. Tom Griffith’s Symposium has been described as ‘possibly the finest translation of any Platonic dialogue’. In an introduction to the book, Jane O’ Grady says that ‘as far as we know, he (Socrates) left no writings at all’.
Socrates was in the habit of approaching Athenians of every class, age and occupation, and bluntly asking them, without worrying about what they would think of him, to explain with clarity why they held certain common sense beliefs and what they took to be the meaning of life. There are numerous stories about such incidents in which one can relish and enjoy the Socratic way of thinking. His was celebrated for his wisdom, and one of his friends (according to the account in the Apology) asked the Delphic oracle if there was anyone wiser than Socrates, getting the answer no. Socrates found in questioning others that in at least one respect he knew more—in knowing that he knew nothing.
He wore the same cloak throughout the year and almost always walked barefoot (it was said he had been born to spite shoemakers). Xanthippe, his wife, was of infamous foul temper (when asked why he had married her, he replied that horse-trainers needed to practise on the most spirited animals). He dubbed himself (referring to his mother’s livelihood) a midwife to knowledge.
In The Trial of Socrates, journalist I.F. Stone notes in the book’s preface, “This project has its roots in a belief that no society is good, whatever its intentions, whatever its utopian and liberationist claims, if the men and women who live in it are not free to speak their minds.”
The reaction of Socrates to his death sentence was that of legendary equanimity. The dialogue Phaedo gives an account of Socrates’ last day. It is an account that leaves one mesmerized and in admiration of the way in which Socrates consoles his friends and answers their queries in a lucid and serene manner. In the dying moments Socrates exhibits, more clearly than ever before, the wisdom and the courage associated with him.
A small extract from Plato’s Phaedo: “And as we went in we found Socrates just released from his fetters, and also Xanthippe—whom you know—sitting beside him holding their youngest child. When Xanthippe saw us, she urged us to be silent, and then said one of those things women will say: ‘Socrates, this is the last time your friends will talk to you, or you to them.’ Socrates glanced at Crito: ‘Make sure someone sees her home,’ he said.
…. “Most of us, up to that point, had been reasonably successful in controlling our tears, but when we saw him drinking, saw that he had drunk, we could do so no longer. …Apollodorus had been crying incessantly even before this, but now he started howling aloud. In his grief and distress he made everyone there break down—apart from Socrates himself.”
“Really!” he said. “What an extraordinary way to behave! The main reason I sent the women away was so that they wouldn’t disturb us like this. I have heard it said one should die in silence. So keep quiet, and be brave.” On hearing this everyone present was ashamed and stopped crying.
The Consolations of Philosophy and Status Anxiety is a book by Alain de Bottom; where he has set six of the finest minds in the history of philosophy to work on the problems of everyday life. Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on some of the things that bother us all: lack of money, the pain of love, inadequacy, anxiety, the fear of failure and the pressure to conform. The Independent described de Bottom’s book saying: “Single-handedly, de Bottom has taken philosophy back to its simplest and most important purpose, helping us to live our lives.”
Though given an opportunity to renounce his philosophy in court, Socrates had sided with what he believed to be true rather than what he knew would be popular. In Plato’s account he had defiantly told the jury: “So long as I draw breath and have my faculties, I shall never stop practising philosophy and exhorting you and elucidating the truth for everyone that I meet.”
The death of Socrates has been a subject of intense interest to painters. Among the many paintings done on the subject, de Bottom describes the one painted in Paris in the autumn of 1786 by the then thirty-eight-year-old Jacques-Louis David. Socrates, condemned to death by the people of Athens, prepares to drink a cup of hemlock, surrounded by woebegone friends. David got his commission in the spring of 1786 from Charles-Michel Trudaine, a wealthy member of the parliament and a gifted Greek scholar. When the picture was exhibited at the Salon of 1787, it was at once judged the finest of the Socratic ends.
“Plato sits at the foot of the bed, a pen and a scroll beside him, silent witness to the injustice of the state. He had been 29 when Socrates met his death, but David turned him into an old man, grey-haired and grave. Through the passageway, Xanthippe is escorted from the prison cell by warders. Socrates’ closest companion Crito, seated beside him, gazes at the master with devotion and concern. But the philosopher, bolt upright, with an athlete’s torso and biceps, shows neither apprehension nor regret. That a large number of Athenians have denounced him as foolish has not shaken him in his convictions. David had planned to paint Socrates in the act of swallowing poison, but the poet Andre Chenier suggested that there would be greater dramatic tension if he was shown finishing a philosophical point while at the same time reaching serenely for the hemlock that would end his life, symbolising both obedience to the laws of Athens and allegiance to his calling.”
Socrates offered humanity a way out of two powerful delusions: that we should always or never listen to the dictates of public opinion. To follow his example, we will best be rewarded if we strive instead to listen always to the dictates of reason.
Richard Feynman—Nobel laureate, teacher, icon and genius—with a gift of story telling carves a beautiful small story about himself and Arlene, the girl he marries within the span of the story, where she teases him with his own line throughout the small and poignant story. Arlene would always corner him by saying: “What do you care what other people think?”; which is the name of the story as well as the book. (The essay also looks at how Feynman was educated by his father: have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look at what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, “Is it reasonable?”)
The scientific spirit is the spirit of Socrates and the reason why it has been such a popular subject for artists is because he achieved the almost-impossible in trying circumstances: asked to choose between truth and reconciliation, Socrates chose the former and calmly drank the hemlock.
Notes:
Symposium and the Death of Socrates – Plato, Wordsworth Classics, 1997; translated by Tom Griffith
The Consolations of Philosophy and Status Anxiety—Alain de Bottom; Penguin Books, 2000, 2004
What do you care what other people think? –Richard Feynman, Penguin Books, as told to Ralph Leighton; First published 1988, Penguin Books 2007
Janet E. Lorenz essay on ‘The Trial of Socrates’; Magill’s Literary Annual, 1989. Salem Press, 1989. eNotes.com. 2006.
My Guru Is More Enlightened Than Yours!
A few days ago Suhel Seth was animated on a Times Now ‘Newshour’ debate about the growing violence against Indians in Australia. He had ample reason to be upset; but in his impatience he did not let a significant point being made by another person on the show to sink in. On being asked to define racism, Suhel quickly retorted that racism is an attack on a particular race and then did not listen when the other participant completed it by saying that by a supposedly different race; which was the whole point he was trying to explain. Some of these attacks he said were by mixed gangs and were more criminal in nature than racist and some others were clearly racist by nature.
Most societies have ways of being self-critical and looking within when a crisis emerges; and a shrill and jingoistic response never helps in solving the problem. It is a matter of concern that Indian students find themselves vulnerable in Sydney and Melbourne but it is also true that Australia has accepted that there are pockets of racism in the country, which they are trying to address, but that does not mean that the entire nation is racist. We should resist using a single paintbrush to colour the entire nation.
There is also a very competitive rivalry between India and Australia on the cricket field and the players have a fan following and a genuine admiration in the rival camps. Shane Warne has come forward to facilitate better understanding and it is a move that should be complemented in every possible manner. The cricket players are brand ambassadors and the likes of Steve Waugh, Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and Adam Gilchrist, for example, can come forward to ease the relationship. The world now is a global village and efforts that reduce human conflict are the ones that count the most in preventing crime—racial or otherwise.
In 2007, India won the Twenty20 World Cup and MS Dhoni and his boys were received by a cavalcade of thousands and thousands of fans as the team moved in an open-top double-decker bus from the airport to Mumbai’s Wankhede Stadium. Andrew Symonds did not like the ‘over-the-top’ celebrations and he was in India as part of the Aussie squad for a seven-match ODI series.
On September 28, 2007 Cricinfo reported: “Something has been sparked inside of me, watching them carry on over the last few days,” Symonds told AAP. “We have had a very successful side and I think watching how we celebrate and how they celebrate, I think we have been pretty humble in the way we have gone about it. And personally, I think they have got far too carried away with their celebrations. It has definitely sparked passion inside of us. It has certainly spiced it up as well.”
“Something gets triggered inside of you, something is burning inside of you—it is your will for success or your animal instinct that wants to bring another team down,” Symonds said. “We have been at the top for so long, it is like someone has taken the favourite thing you own from you and you want it back.”
It wasn’t a quote that can be termed as wise but that is no excuse either for crowd behaviour or for BCCI’s denial mode when incidents offensive towards Symonds were reported. A cricket blogger rightly observed: Niranjan Shah, the BCCI secretary, went so far as to say, “What the media and Symonds shouldn’t forget is that the Australian crowds are far more dangerous and volatile than their Indian counterparts.” Even if this were true, what does this have to do with the price of fish in the land? There is a principle at play here: Racisim in cricket in India is not on!
Another report in Fox Sports concluded: “Racism is evil, repulsive and the sport should confront it head-on wherever it is encountered. India is enjoying its new power and influence. Along with other black nations, it had been patronised by pompous English and ignorant Australians. Revenge should not be so ruthless and ungenerous that a game is made unmanageable. India, with its many millions of dollars, has the power and opportunity to restore cricket. It just doesn’t appear to have the leaders.”
Symonds later said that he had gone to the Indian dressing room and spoken to Harbhajan Singh one-on-one to make it clear that the word ‘monkey’ is offensive, denigrating and a racial slur in his terminology (this is the essence of it and not the exact words). It was a charged ODI series and Symonds performed brilliantly and Hayden had a mouthful of things to say.
Many writers in India expressed that the crowd behaviour was obnoxious and India owed Symonds an apology. The Cricket Board pretended as if nothing had happened. If there was any doubt that the man found it offensive then it was cleared in this tour and there was no ambiguity regarding the connotation.
In the Sydney Test in January, the stump mike revealed nothing and match referee Mike Procter had no legal authority to rule when it was one man’s word against the other. It later came out that no one was close enough to hear the exact words. Eminent economist Lord Meghnad Desai, professor emeritus of the London School of Economics, in a recent article traced the origin of the conflict to the fractured Sydney Test. “I would ask the two governments to get the two cricketing sides together and appeal to all to view the matter in the spirit of cricket, where winning or losing was never meant to matter.”
Regarding the result of the Sydney Test, Pradeep Magazine of the Hindustan Times wrote, “Despite all the wrongs done to them on the field, India could have still salvaged a draw and been in a much stronger position to take a high moral ground and tell the umpires and the Australians of what they thought of them”
The Australian media, let us not forget, acknowledged that India was hard done in Sydney and the criticism only started when the BCCI apparently went muscle flexing. Harbhajan may well have used abusive language and not the racial slur as the word he admitted to having used is part of the common north Indian lingo. And the word points towards an abuse but rarely borders on the actual abuse that requires adding one more word. Bastards are sad creatures in India but you can easily call someone a lucky bastard in many cultures. People all around the world need to learn and be sensitive to other people’s cultures.
The television coverage showed Symonds giving a mouthful while going towards his fielding position and he may well have been goading Harbhajan, ‘with his animal instincts’, for all you know. Ian Chappell in the commentary box expressed concern over Hayden’s qualification as a peacemaker and the incident occurred when Harbhajan was involved in a significant partnership with Tendulkar that was proving out to be a thorn for the Aussies.
The crowds and media and some of the Aussie players took to riling Bhajji in every match after that; but the turbaned Sikh is a strong character who used it to perform against the odds on the field. As the months rolled by and seeing the path that the careers of the two players took since Sydney, one can say, with some bias, that in the Symonds-Harbhajan affair it was the plaintiff who came out looking worse than the defendant. Hayden went on air calling Bhajji an ‘obnoxious little weed’ and later Symonds woke up to realise that ‘the devil had farted in his face’ after he called Brendon McCullum a ‘lump of shit’; this time again on a radio show.
I do agree with Mike Selvey of the Guardian that despite everything Symonds deserves sympathy and not scorn. “Symonds may not be the most pleasant of men (I have no way of knowing but anecdotal evidence suggests as much) but that should not be the criterion. He is a troubled individual who needs ongoing support and, judging by the words of Anderson (psychologist), is already benefiting from it. A stitch-up by a pair of goading comedians should not see a man lose his career. The consequences of the alternative, dumping him, are too unedifying to consider.”
Andrew Symonds is too good a cricketer to be lost in fighting inner demons and it would be heartening if his career is salvaged. As for racism, it is a global problem and if we could all begin with ourselves first the results will be faster and more peaceful. Have you heard that great joke where a disciple is fighting another one on the premise that ‘my guru is more enlightened than yours’.
These are a few good links to follow.
Crowd Carry On Over Harbhajan—Greg Baum for The Age
Are We Racist? You Know The Answer Already—Vir Sanghvi for Mint
Bowler Found Guilty But Australia Stand Condemned—David Hopps for the Guardian
Booze-addled Symonds deserves sympathy not scorn—Mike Selvey for the Guardian
The Flight Of Federer
A young correspondent, apparently in love with Rafael Nadal, once left me in a philosophical bind about the nature of all crafts, although she was just talking about tennis. When Nadal was locked in the battle for his life with fellow Spaniard Fernando Verdasco at the semi-final of the Australian Open last year; the girl and her friend were worried about the final as they reckoned, and probably rightly, that only Nadal could take out the Swiss. For that moment it was more to do with Federer losing the next match than Nadal winning the one hanging in balance.
A month or so later a corridor conversation cleared my doubt and left me speechless and I wondered about the nature of art, or, more specifically, the understanding of it. I was telling the girl ‘see how easy Federer makes it look’ to which she, thrilled by the observation, replied “that’s the whole point because it doesn’t even look like he is playing.” She was young and Rafa, of course, is a wonderful player, therefore, I didn’t want to disturb her equilibrium by my oozing admiration of the ease with which Federer operates. I should have told her; please don’t mind, Federer does make people mad. How else can you define what Nikolay Davydenko must be felling in the locker room after today’s match?
Davydenko began his flight in earnest and in top gear and you could see the speed of it like one sees the white streak that a supersonic jet leaves as its mark on a cloudless blue sky. Federer lost the first set 6-2 and was trailing a break at 3-1 in the second. And just like that from that position he won 13 games in a row and Davydenko did not know where to go or what to do. It was as much tennis as it was torture; made excruciatingly-painful by the whiff of the ‘disdainful and regal’ detachment with which Federer conducts himself on court more often than not. And he did it with such finesse today that you could only see the executioner; as the one being executed had been taken out of the equation. The scoreboard for Federer-Davydenko read: 2-6, 6-3, 6-0.
Davydenko then made his presence felt in the fourth set when he came back from 3-0 to three all. The fourth set swayed for a while and Federer blew the first chance to take the match on his serve. He then broke Davydenko again and this time there was no stopping him. Game over.
When Federer is in full flight he is less like a jet and more like a swift eagle; born to fly without leaving a mark in the sky. And he rules the court like some ancient monarch in full control of his territory. No doubt that Nadal handed Federer one tough year and the young Spaniard is one of the game’s best defenders from the baseline; who can additionally pounce and attack when given a loose ball. Nadal forces the opponent to play an extra winner and that is why his presence induces an error.
Unlike Nadal, whose physical game is unleashed in grunts; Federer operates in relative silence. That one year when Nadal won the French Open and the Wimbledon and followed it up with a win in Melbourne the next season was his golden period. And if you come closer and just see the last season then Federer reached the finals of all four Grand Slams and won two. There is no one in the circuit who could make it to even two finals. Nadal could make it to just one and he has already pulled out of the first one this season.
Do you have to be Einstein to see that the Swiss is a cut above the rest?
Cricket: ‘A Boulevard Of Broken Dreams’
India is ranked the number 1 Test team in the world right now while Bangladesh is at the bottom of the pile and compared to India’s 3957 points the hosts have a measly 255; even then the cricket has been entertaining and has fluctuated like only Test match cricket can. Bangladesh bowled well on the opening day of the series and their lower order has batted with purpose and skill on more than one occasion.
This is about all the Test cricket that India was originally supposed to play in an entire season; five Test matches, which have now become seven—courtesy the two that we are playing against South Africa at home. The shortest form of the game is celebrating and cricket has expanded its fan club and found new and rich sponsors; the business end is thriving.
Journalist and writer Alan Ross once said: “In other sports, people have no time to think; a cricket match is a storehouse of thought, of thought occasioned by the game itself, by the beauty, wit, or intelligence of one’s companion, or simply a private unravelling of problems, personal, political, moral.”
Cricket now has no time to think and the speed at which it travels is dizzying and causes nausea. I don’t complain much as there are other benefits. One of them is that my wife is very happy as she knows that I have all the time to be with the family at the expense of a Twenty20 game or even a 50-over one. A good Test match makes me immobile and captive; a prisoner to the inherent beauty of its form. It needs a good sporting surface and then there can be five days of endless possibilities that sometimes produce something beautiful and almost magical.
That is not how everybody likes it and the fuss is all about what is popular and marketable. Enter the Board of Control for Cricket in India. And they are not going to listen to my old-fashioned mother; who, by the way, is on my side and knows the difference between a brutal 20-over assault and the subtle morning session of the opening Test of an overseas tour. It is quite natural to presume that the governing body of cricket in this country—and for good or bad, the financial powerhouse of the game in the world—would also know the difference. On the evidence of it I am not too sure whether they know the difference. And if they do; then what the board finds alluring is different from what this post finds alluring.
About four years ago, I was lucky to be at a training programme where I met an accomplished financial journalist and training editor who was brilliant in explaining all kinds of economic activities by breaking them down to simple basics that he had already hammered in for the participating group on the opening day of the week-long programme. We worked around a lot of charts and market graphs and he then came to the volatility of the market and showed how the financial markets have historically followed a pattern. Look at the fundamentals and if they don’t support the highs of the market then smart money is soon going to swallow stupid money. When the dotcom graph was going up, one just had to walk in dressed and spell a domain name and the venture caps were ready with the money—it may not have been that bad but it surely wasn’t as good as they told us. The sign to look out for a dangerous situation is that when the last person you associate with ‘investing in the IT stocks’—for example, your neighbourhood taxi-driver; with due respect to him —starts talking about precisely that then it is high time that you exit the market. Someone is playing it up. And if that someone is you and your gang then enjoy the spoils; otherwise better save whatever little you have before the burglary happens.
That playing it up is what the IPL is all about. And Preity Zinta—regardless of my bias in liking her as one of the few achievers from my hometown state of Himachal Pradesh—Shilpy Shetty and Shah Rukh Khan and some others expounding on the game are the equivalent of the ‘neighbourhood taxi-driver’ talking of the dotcom revolution with the big difference being my due respect to the imagined taxi-driver. Six gorgeous sixes in an over to a frontline fast bowler places Yuvraj in the company of the great Sir Garfield Sobers; but being a cricketer Yuvraj knows it too well that he still has to make his bones and he knows that they will not be made in front of cheerleaders.
The team owners are the stars and they have an audience, but it is largely a time-killing soap opera audience; an audience that is the enemy of the cricket lover in the same manner as a ‘harlot is the enemy of a decent woman’. This is not an audience that would be reading Harold Larwood’s biography by Duncan Hamilton, or A Corner of a Foreign Field by Ramachandra Guha, or the brilliant biography of Australian spinner Jack Iverson by Gideon Haigh. This audience would not be interested in Boria Majumdar’s Once Upon A Furore nor Harsha Bhogle’s Out of the Box; and this audience would not be visiting the website Cricinfo fifty times in a day. And it gets me worried and makes me sad that it could be this audience that decides the future of the game.
The BCCI is a master of all conditions and unlike the great Sir Donald Bradman it has even mastered playing on “one of those ‘sticky dogs’ of old, when the ball is hissing and cavorting under a hot sun following heavy rain.” On a few occasions when the BCCI has found that it is at odds with the government it has clarified that it is a private and independent body that functions like an enterprise. So it is not answerable to the government. In fact all the parties here, the government, the BCCI, the IPL administration and the franchise-owners, distance themselves from each other as and when the need for it arises.
I am not too sure about the other boards but something that Shane Warne said a few years ago tells me that there are no exceptions. It had something to do with Mark Waugh having voiced a ‘harsh opinion’ about Warnie on air. Warne gave a polite mouthful saying that he understands that his mate Mark Waugh has retired and he’s somehow got to make a buck. Simple horse sense. And something that Gideon Haigh wrote confirmed my own hunch that there is no board that is not willing to prostitute itself. “While the West Indies seemed to tour every other summer, Australians were denied a Sachin Tendulkar Test innings for almost eight years. The reason? India were not perceived as sufficiently bankable—and this is worth remembering lest it be imagined that the BCCI somehow introduced the evils of money to a cricket world of prelapsarian innocence.”
If India is playing 35 days of Test cricket in a season and that too because the board found itself on a sticky wicket after writers and fans and the Little Master himself said that five Test matches in a season are just too few then do I need to tell you where the priorities lie.
I have always been over-optimistic but here I am worried. And that is because I realise that even though I am the one who has invested so much of his life in cricket yet it may turn out to be that my wife has the last laugh. And to rub it in she may choose to do it while having a packet of chips during an IPL match.
In Focus: ‘‘The Mumbai Meat Market’’
“Say that cricket has nothing to do with politics and you say that cricket has nothing to do with life,” wrote journalist and cricket commentator John Arlott. It is a statement that can be appreciated by anyone who is aware of—or has even remotely tried to understand—how the game is run in his part of the world.
Let me say at the onset that just like millions around the world I enjoy watching the mercurial talent of Pakistan cricket and I admire the quality of players they have produced over the years. Sport, though, is not played in a vacuum and cricket at the international level, especially, is a game that has always carried the undertones of the social fabric between the opponents.
Last year it was the Pakistan Cricket Board that did not allow their cricketers to play in the IPL as a measure taken after the November attacks in Mumbai. India’s tour to Pakistan was never a possibility after the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the worst nightmare of cricket unravelled in broad daylight in Lahore on the 3rd of March; when the bus carrying Sri Lankan cricketers was ambushed on its way to the Gaddafi Stadium.
This year, at the last moment, the players have not been picked. May be the owners were concerned about the availability but Rameez Raza had a point when he wrote that ‘the assurances of selection and the clearances given to them by the Pakistan government to participate in the tournament gave rise to false hopes among the fans and the media. The subsequent process of elimination was seen by the public as political and undignified.’
That is about all that Pakistan can be legitimately offended by because specific permissions should not have been sought if there was even a modicum of doubt in the minds of the franchise-owners. The franchise-owners could have easily done this a bit more graciously and taken the business decision early rather than at the last moment when, for instance, the name of a player like Shahid Afridi was announced and there were no takers; in a format where he is more than just handy.
This is what Harsha Bhogle had to say: “We live in times of violence and hatred; there are many people who seek peace but equally some who seek to deny us what we thought was given. Sport cannot exist in isolation, cannot fly free from this cage of reality. We would love the two to be separated but that has never happened. In times of peace, or relative peace, we could produce the path-breaking tours of 2004 and 2006. Now we are all pawns in the drama our subcontinent is enacting and the cricketers are merely more visible pawns. The conspiracy that Abdul Razzaq talks about is the reality of our times. The IPL will be poorer for the absence of some extraordinarily gifted cricketers, but this is just another victory for those that infect us with hatred. To believe there is a conspiracy against cricketers from Pakistan is wrong. It is the times we live in.”
“Make way for the Mumbai Meat Market” was a captivating headline when the players went under the hammer in the first edition of the IPL. Many cricketers expressed disbelief at the amount of money that changed hands on that eventful day where players were traded like commodity futures minus the presence of any visible rationale that governs the various commodities exchanges.
Things changed after that first year, on every front, and we were told that team owners had learned more about how to spend their money while buying ‘their livestock’. On the political front the dynamics changed so much that the second edition of the Indian Premier League was possible only outside India, and was hosted in South Africa. This was also about time when cricket fans and cricket writers were finding it difficult to digest the nauseating speed of the shorter version (A topic for another post, perhaps).
The Pakistan cricketers would tell you, in less than a minute, that they are heroes in India. That wherever they go, Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis, Inzamam, Afridi, Rameez Raza, and Imran Khan and Javed Miandad—in their cricketing avatar—can be mobbed for autographs or they may find themselves in the company of youngsters seeking some advice on any eternal cricketing problem. And I’ve just taken those few big names for we associate more with legends but the fact is that the team is respected, loved, and surprisingly even cheered and supported. We know how Umar Gul ran riot against New Zealand and Gul’s 19th over against South Africa at the World T20 final, when South Africa needed 29 runs from 12 balls with Duminy and Morkel at the crease, has gone down in cricketing legends. I got a message from a friend in Mumbai saying ‘That Gul over was the best bowling at death I have seen since Ambrose and Walsh used to operate.’ We know your cricket; the news of Umar Akmal batting on any turf becomes a buzzword in India. So the reasons, of course, have not been cricketing because we love your cricket. In a way, though, they can be called reasons that make ‘sense’ if not ‘cricketing sense’.
To suggest that there has been any conspiracy is like listening to the ridiculous Hamid Gul and the entertaining Zaid Hamid; both good at using the spinning jenny to churn out preposterous conspiracy theories out of a non-existent yarn. Someone from India needs to apologise for the ‘corporate inelegance’ in which the matter was handled and it should end there.
I’ll touch on the politics now despite the fact that I don’t relish it as much as Test cricket; but in extraordinary circumstances the King becomes a subject and has to be dealt like one. The effigies being burnt in Pakistan and the matter being taken up with the ICC is just plain overreaction and carries no meaning; what carries meaning is again what Rameez Raza said ‘that India should have been large’. Pakistan also needs to be large and look within as the Indian government has observed and this is one of those few things with which the nation may agree with the government.
At the centre of all this is Mumbai; and the still raw, complicated and bleeding ‘Mumbai Meat Market’. The effigy burning only reminds me of the column Thomas Friedman did for The New York Times after the Mumbai attacks. This is an edited extract from Friedman’s December 2, 2008 article: “On Feb. 6, 2006, three Pakistanis died in Peshawar and Lahore during violent street protests against Danish cartoons that had satirized the Prophet Muhammad. More such mass protests followed weeks later. When Pakistanis and other Muslims are willing to take to the streets, even suffer death, to protest an insulting cartoon published in Denmark, is it fair to ask: Who in the Muslim world, who in Pakistan, is ready to take to the streets to protest the mass murders of real people, not cartoon characters, right next door in Mumbai?
After all, if 10 young Indians from a splinter wing of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party travelled by boat to Pakistan, shot up two hotels in Karachi and the central train station, killed at least 173 people, and then, for good measure, murdered the imam and his wife at a Saudi-financed mosque while they were cradling their 2-year-old son—purely because they were Sunni Muslims—where would we be today? The entire Muslim world would be aflame and in the streets.
We know from the Danish cartoons affair that Pakistanis and other Muslims know how to mobilize quickly to express their heartfelt feelings, not just as individuals, but as a powerful collective. That is what is needed here. Because, I repeat, this kind of murderous violence only stops when the village—all the good people in Pakistan, including the community elders and spiritual leaders who want a decent future for their country—declares, as a collective, that those who carry out such murders are shameful unbelievers who will not dance with virgins in heaven but burn in hell. And they do it with the same vehemence with which they denounce Danish cartoons.”
A Friend And A Golfer
Roughly about six years ago, starting around a Delhi autumn and leading up to the coming spring, I spent a good part of the capital’s pleasant season where a visit to the Delhi Golf Club on Zakir Hussain Marg was not an anomaly. The outdoor veranda of the club where tea and snacks are served is a beautiful place from where one can see the lush green course and have a relaxed conversation (I don’t know if the veranda still looks like that). It was in this unrepeatable season that I learned a little bit about golf because a lot of things converged to make it possible.
An old friend and roommate of mine had left a job in Bangalore and found another one in Delhi. I had spent the past few years staying alone in a reasonably-big house by the standards of a bachelor and I looked forward to having an old friend for company and someone to share the rent. The most-important factor was that my roommate had joined Golf Digest India, which was and still is, edited by a common friend Prabhdev Singh. I had been a colleague of Prabhdev’s wife before their marriage and became a friend during this season where everything conspired for the four of us to meet a bit more regularly.
The benefit of Golf Digest coming to my house every month courtesy my roommate and the pleasure of interacting with an avid golfer and a golf editor gave me some idea about the game. It made me appreciate Arthur Daley’s quote: “Golf is like a love affair. If you don’t take it seriously, it’s no fun; if you do take it seriously, it breaks your heart.” I don’t have much of an idea but Prabhdev told me that it is a simple game but it can get as entangled as life if you start messing with it. I believed him when I read the Gardner Dickinson quote: “They say golf is like life, but don’t believe them. Golf is more complicated than that.”
The first television major I enjoyed watching was the Augusta Masters in 2005; where Woods pulled off a win in a playoff against Chris DiMarco. It made me enjoy the anonymous saying: “Golf is life. If you can’t take golf, you can’t take life.” The part below is from an edit Prabhdev wrote for the magazine he heads.
“I have seen the Woods effect on women from quite close. First, the 2008 Masters. Waiting at the crossover at the par-3 sixth, an eye-catching blonde parked herself next to me. Soon after she started emitting sounds, the kind people make when they see something they like. I shuffled and smiled but unfortunately she wasn’t into turbaned men. The object of her desire strode purposefully down the slope from the tee and quickly walked past us, eyes fixed on his golf ball on the green. There was no way he couldn’t have seen her (or heard her!) but Tiger had golf on his mind. I was impressed with his single-mindedness.
Last year my wife accompanied me to the U.S. Open at Bethpage, just outside New York. One of the days she decided to make the trip to the golf course to see what the fuss was all about. It so happened that while she was there, Tiger finished his day’s play, and he was then to come to the informal interview area just outside the clubhouse for a quick Q&A. My wife heard about this, and she started to wait for Tiger. It began raining and I ran for cover, but there was no budging her. A security official, who seemed to have seen plenty of this before, lent her a pen in case ‘the man’ happened to be in a mood to sign. When he finally arrived was the time I actually should have run for cover. The wife was suddenly transformed from an almost middle-aged (my golf clubs lie hidden as I write this) housewife to a squealing college goer. It became quite a task to get her to leave the place even long after Tiger left, the wife insisting that he might return. I did get sympathetic looks from my colleagues.
You would have to be carved out of stone to remain impervious to such adulation, and Tiger has been subject to this kind of attention on a sustained basis ever since he started playing big-time golf. People chose to think he is god, but Tiger has shown that he is human.
As for those who have invested large sums of money in him, they would have profited equally-well by all accounts. Money on the PGA Tour has grown more than four-fold since Tiger joined it in 1996. Journeymen pros have him to thank when they dive into their swimming pools in the backyard. Like millions around the world, I have thoroughly enjoyed watching Tiger Woods play golf, and I hope I get to see more of the same.
He does have some matters to settle before that. There are three people he is answerable to—his wife, on an immediate basis, and then his two kids when they are old enough to comprehend what they are being subjected to. Of course, how he goes about that is his business.”
Janet Malcolm: ‘The Journalist and the Murderer’
It has taken me a few days—as I have been wandering in the national capital in search of a new house; a task that was to be achieved towards the end of last year but has dragged on to the new one—to pick a subject for the first piece of the year. In this transition phase I discovered a beautiful article ‘Justice to J.D. Salinger’ by Janet Malcolm and then a great one on her. That set the twin search processes in motion that I completed today.
Janet Malcolm is the author of The Journalist and the Murderer, a 1990 book that first appeared as a two-part article in the New Yorker in 1989. As I started following the links—whenever I got respite from the tedious house hunt—betrayal and justice were the two themes that resonated clearly and loudly in my ears. “Freud said nothing is coincidence.”
The Journalist and the Murderer opens with this stunning line: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of non-fiction writing learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and ‘the public’s right to know’; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.”
In a February 2000 piece for Salon Craig Seligman did justice to Janet Malcolm just as Janet later did to Salinger in her 2001 essay. Craig was aware of the background as he had worked as a fact checker in the New Yorker under William Shawn, a decade before his Salon piece and had even checked some of the facts for Malcolm’s photography pieces. In his article on Janet Malcolm—and the conflicts she got embroiled in—Craig lays bare a stunning story of the inherent contradictions of narrative as Janet sees it and dissects the work of a virtuoso stylist in Malcolm with a refined and amazing style of his own. Craig has not pulled punches while writing about Malcolm but he has given, for lack of a better metaphor, ‘the devil his due’. He shows with precision and clarity that The Journalist and the Murderer is not an attack or a question mark on the ethics of journalists—Malcolm’s point is ‘the canker that lies at the heart of the rose; the ethical paradox at the core of all journalism.’ Which is, as he proves effectively, the case with Malcolm’s writing about biography, psychoanalysis, and judiciary.
Malcolm was born in pre-World War II Prague and moved with her family to New York in 1939, when she was 5 years old; just in time when anti-Semitism was rising in Europe. Janet’s father, not surprisingly, was a psychiatrist. She is an author of eight books and has been a contributor to The New Yorker since 1963.
“The public pillorying of Janet Malcolm is one of the scandals of American letters. The world of journalism teems with hacks who will go to their graves never having written one sparkling or honest or incisive sentence; why is it Malcolm, a virtuoso stylist and a subtle, exciting thinker, who drives critics into a rage? What journalist of her caliber is as widely disliked or as often accused of bad faith? And why did so few of her colleagues stand up for her during the circus of a libel trial that scarred her career? In the animus toward her there is something almost personal.
Yet I can’t deny that she brings some of it on herself, with the harshness—the mellifluous harshness—of her work. Malcolm is hard on her subjects. As she sees it, being hard on them is her job; ‘putting a person’s feelings above a text’s necessities’ is, in her arid and damning formulation, a ‘journalistic solecism’. Like Sylvia Plath, whose not-niceness she has laid open with surgical skill, she discovered her vocation in not-niceness. Dryden famously noted the ‘vast difference betwixt the slovenly butchering of a man, and the fineness of a stroke that separates the head from the body, and leaves it standing in its place.’ Malcolm’s blade gleams with a razor edge. Her critics tend to go after her with broken bottles,” wrote Craig.
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