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Cricket considered harmful

It may seem a little churlish, at a time when Anil Kumble's heroics have India's cricket-lovers in ecstasy, to assert that cricket is a harmful, even dangerous, and certainly an unsuitable, activity for India. In all humility, I admit that I am not a cricket connoisseur. I have, however, arrived at my conclusion after due diligence; and in particular, the recent and disastrous tour of New Zealand has strengthened my convictions.

First and foremost, it is a matter of inclination. Indians are no good at organised, highly structured activities -- we like individualistic improvisation, just like in classical music. For some strange reason, Indians are altogether too individualistic to do well at team activities. (Of course, we see this in all the useless arguing we do, too.) We have to depend on flashes of individual brilliance; this may be magnificent spectacle, but it is not a reliable mechanism for consistent winning.

When cricket was a gentleman's game, played in leisurely fashion with nothing much at stake, India could do reasonably well. But cricket has became a professional sport; those capable of teamwork will win. Such as the South Africans and the Australians. Or even the Sri Lankans. I predict that the West Indians, the Indians, the Pakistanis, and the English win never again win the cricket World Cup -- in the long run, it is the well-oiled machine that will win.

The same thing has happened in field hockey, of course. In the olden days, India won based on the singular brilliance of those like that magician Dhyan Chand. But once the Europeans figured out how to win with teamwork -- and so did the South Koreans -- India's dominance ended.

Thus, India's game plan is -- let's go out there and hope Sachin Tendulkar, the Great White Hope, hits a century or Saurav Ganguly knocks a few bowlers around or Venkatesh Prasad runs through the opposition's tailenders or some such thing. This is not a plan, it's the "Panipat Syndrome" yet again. Hope is a wonderful thing, but alas, not very dependable as an indicator of success.

So I think India should concentrate on those sports where individual brilliance is the key -- for instance, chess, or shooting. One such as Vishwanathan Anand or Jaspal Rana should be given the utmost support by citizens and the state -- for they are truly representative of India's culture of aggressive individualism. Besides, they are very close to being world champions in their respective sports.

Second, I object to cricket on ecological grounds. I am extremely suspicious of monocultures of any kind -- which is why I feel a little queasy when anyone claims to have The One and Only Truth. Where there is but one choice, I see the seeds of disaster lurking. Thus, whenever I ventured out to the US Midwest and saw those miles and miles of nothing but cornfields, my heart would sink -- what if there is a new corn blight that wipes out the crop? In its present monoculture form, the entire farming economy would fall apart.

Similarly, with the obsession with cricket exhibited by India's sports fans, we are slowly but surely consigning all other sports to obscurity and to extinction. For instance, can you name any sport in which India has concurrently had two world champions? Billiards would be a reasonable guess, but no, it is a surprising one: women's power-lifting. In 1995, Kunjarani Devi from Manipur and Karnam Malleswari from Andhra Pradesh were World No 1 in their respective weight classes.

Yet, how many people have even heard of Kunjarani Devi or Karnam Malleswari? They have no lucrative contracts with Coca-Cola or Nike or Kingfisher. At least one of them is a Railways employee; and I am certain that they both have to pinch pennies to scrape together the funding for their training. Even the sprint queens of yesterday and today, P T Usha and Jyotirmoy Sikdar, depend on the public sector for support. Whereas India's mediocre cricketers live in clover on juicy corporate contracts.

Similarly, Jaspal Rana was in tears after the Asian Games because he missed a gold medal when his gun misfired yet again at a crucial time -- I suppose because he had no wealthy corporate sponsor who could supply him with proper equipment. And it was heartbreaking to hear Dhanraj Pillay, the captain of the hockey team, who played his heart out at the Asiad, say with understandable bitterness albeit with quiet dignity: "I will never let my son play hockey".

Where is the corporate sponsorship for hockey, for chess, for rowing, for gymnastics, for cycling, for soccer, for track and field? Cricket absorbs it all. Cricket is an incubus, a cancer that is growing unchecked. It is like any number of unsuitable imports that have gone wrong.

That is reason number three. Alien species unchecked by natural predators are a grave threat to a balanced eco-system. For instance, there is the infamous kudzu in the American Southwest. It is everywhere, and it has displaced native flora, and is a nuisance. Similarly, in Kerala, the rapacious water hyacinth (aka African "payal") has taken over bodies of water, proliferating densely and choking off all underwater life under its impenetrable surface mass.

In the American island of Guam, the brown tree snake, an import -- likely a stowaway on some cargo vessel -- has devastated native fauna, and a number of native birds are now endangered species. Similarly, the rabbit, introduced into Australia by settlers, has multiplied and become a major pest. Oddly enough, cricket is exactly like these: a pernicious foreign import.

And I repeat myself: India's cricket team is lousy. That is objection number four. India's cricketers simply cannot beat anybody, even a joke of a team like New Zealand, unless it is on specially doctored local surfaces. The Indian team's performance -- and this is a team that allegedly has, "on paper", the world's strongest batting line-up -- is akin to a Hindi movie's plot: entirely predictable. There will be some heroics by one or two people, but the rest of the team just go out there to collapse. It is so routine that you can set your clock by it. India: 142 for 2; then customary collapse, and India: 198 all out. Pathetic.

For instance, when India plays Pakistan on neutral ground, unless I am mistaken, Pakistan generally wins. So if India plays Pakistan at home, anything other than a thumping and devastating Indian series victory is a moral victory for Pakistan -- thus Pakistan won the recent two-match series fair and square, in my opinion.

The reason India is able to win at home is simple: the crowds, the heat (and maybe diarrhea as well). It is said that the Russians can never be militarily defeated on their home soil because General Winter is on their side -- as Napoleon and Hitler both discovered. Similarly, General Summer and General Diarrhea are on the Indian side.

In the withering heat and humidity of India, a visitor has to be mad to be under the scorching sun all day running around (as Noel Coward said, only certain insane specimens will be out there in the mid-day sun). And then he gets the runs, Delhi Belly. Lovely. And you wonder why India wins, did you say?

And that is my next objection. The game is totally unsuited for the Indian climate. It is fine as a pastime for Englishmen starved of sunshine to hang about outdoors in their cool, gentle summers. Not so under the blazing Indian sun, which should generally be avoided as much as possible, as most sensible people understand. Best to go for a lassi and a long siesta, and manana will take care of itself.

Perhaps it is traditional fatalism, but Indian also are not ultra-competitive when it comes to sports. On a television programme the other day about a children's Olympiad in Hyderabad, the newspersons must have said at least five times, "The important thing is not to win, but to participate." Nonsense! But Indians seem to genuinely believe this absurdity. Nobody else does. They are all there at the Olympics strictly to win; nobody remembers who came in a sporting second.

Indian cricketers are also not driven by that fierce determination to win at all costs that produces the consistent winners. I read recently that Australian cricketer Dennis Lillee said that even though the West Indians were massacred by South Africa recently, nobody should feel sorry for the Windies. Remember the humiliations heaped on us in past decades, quoth he. Let's remember and wreak revenge when we can, said he. But an Indian would never say this: good sports, we. The more fools we, I say.

Given all this, I think India should stop obsessing with cricket and let a thousand other flowers bloom -- why not gymnastics, rowing, soccer or track and field? Why not encourage youngsters in these areas? Why not set up sports camps to identify children with potential, and then train them intensively, as all the Communist countries have done, like the E Germans, the Chinese, and the Soviets?

Where is the money going to come for all this? Why, from cricket, of course. If the full social costs of cricket are considered -- including the cost of providing security to all and sundry and protecting the pitches recently for the Pakistani tour -- it will be seen that it is a losing game. The sponsors are not paying for all these disruptions, not to mention the costs of lost staff-days at work when employees surreptitiously listen on their radios.

While I am out of general principle a free-marketeer, there is a role for government intervention for the overall social good. Here is one such shining example. The government should tax cricket tickets ruthlessly; diverting revenues to help fund other sports. I suspect nobody is ever going to be voted out of office for the crime of making cricket matches more expensive.

Furthermore, let there be some edict controlling the number of broadcast hours private and public operators are allowed to show cricket -- some formula whereby they have to show equal hours of other sports, perhaps. I know these are blunt instruments, but desperate times call for desperate measures. This pesky incubus of cricket needs to be tamed.

Errata:

In my previous column "A solution for Sabarimala", I mentioned erroneously that the shrine was open for a day at the beginning of every month. In fact it is open for five days. Thanks to alert reader Vinod for pointing this out.

In a previous column "Death of a Missionary", I said 5,000 Iraqi children had died of malnutrition in the last five years. I was wrong by several orders of magnitude. Thanks to my erudite friend Bapa Rao I learned that the UNICEF estimates that 4,500 Iraqi children die every month. In the last seven years, 1.1 million children under the age of 5 have perished. In effect, Iraq's next generation has been decimated. This is a quiet genocide, without no vivid television images to shock one's conscience. And no protests either. How convenient!

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