Losing perspective, missing the meaning

March 27, 2015 09:13 pm | Updated November 16, 2021 05:12 pm IST - Chennai

What a pleasant surprise it was! The sun did rise at the appointed hour on Friday morning. You heard the familiar birdsong too from the back garden.

And as you were rubbing your eyes in disbelief, the morning newspaper was full of surprises. There were no mass suicides across the nation; nor was there any hint of a Lehman Brothers-like trigger signalling an impending economic collapse. What is more, there was no sign of a catastrophic epidemic that might threaten a vast majority of Indians.

Bliss indeed it was to be alive at dawn on Friday. Who would have thought it possible on Thursday evening after eleven of our countrymen managed to dispossess themselves of a national treasure deemed more valuable than the Taj Mahal and the Kohinoor Diamond put together?

It is a wonder, too, that the country has not been wiped off the face of the planet in a cosmic cataclysm.

For all the hype th​at preceded the India-Australia semifinal in Sydney, and the outrageously meretricious television and social media post-mortem following the defending champion’s defeat, you might have thought Mahendra Singh Dhoni and his men have perpetrated the greatest crime in living memory.

Shame, disaster, surrender, capitulation, abdication, fiasco, tragedy…well, if all of these could be contained in a single word, surely sections of the Indian visual media might have gladly seized upon it.

Simple matter

Actually it was a simple matter of a seemingly in-form world champion side falling well short against a highly motivated and hugely talented home team which, incidentally, happens to be ranked No.1 in the 50-overs game — and a team that has not lost a single game to India, across formats, in the last four months.

“I just lost a tennis match. Nobody died out there,’’ said a smiling Boris Becker, aged all of 19 years, after a shock defeat to the Australian journeyman Peter Doohan in the second round at Wimbledon in 1987. Becker had created history by becoming the youngest champion at tennis’ most celebrated piece of real estate in 1985 and had successfully defended his title the following year.

In the sepulchral atmosphere of the post-match interview room in the subterranean depths of the All England Lawn Tennis Club, the teenaged German’s sober reaction offered men more than twice his age a sense of perspective.

But perspective depends on point of view, and a lot of people in India — both media professionals and lay fans — choose to stay on a preferred vantage point where the only thing that is ever acceptable is an Indian victory.

Sport, in the ultimate analysis, is important to us only because it is not a matter of life and death. In fact, it comes as a welcome distraction from more serious issues that might turn us all into incurable pessimists.

Then again, as simple a business as sport is, in the larger context, it is still full of complexities. But many of us continue to harbour the romantic notion that everything is black or white.

India’s seven successive victories in the obscenely long tournament blinded many of us to the team’s innate weaknesses even as they magnified its strengths.

As talented as he is undoubtedly, Shik​h​ar Dhawan is no Virender Sehwag — a five-star game changer that every bowler in the world dreaded to come face to face with.

As gifted as he is — and no matter the record number of Twitter followers he has — Virat Kohli is no Sachin Tendulkar. Nor will he ever be the great master’s equal any time in the future.

As plucky and spirited as Suresh Raina is, his exploits pale in comparison with those of Yuvraj Singh — as great a match-winner as any in limited-overs cricket in the new millennium.

As quick and sharp as he often turns out to be, Mohammed Shami is no Zaheer Khan when it comes to crashing through the opposition’s batting line-up.

All of these men performed reasonably well in Australia and New Zealand, even as Dhoni led with tremendous courage and tactical nous. But when they were up against Michael Clarke’s Australia, none of these men — with the exception of the captain — could be spotted on the pedestal that the hype-mongers put them on.

Not their fault

In the event, the fault is not theirs. If you look for people at a higher altitude when they are more often than not spotted at slightly lower heights, the problem is yours.

The point is, we must learn to de-divinise our cricketers and also come to terms with the temporality of sporting achievements.

If you are going to hitch your self-esteem and psychological well-being on the performance of 11 Indian cricketers on the international stage time and time again, then you have to be prepared for a bumpy ride, in the least, or a visit or two to your neighbourhood psychiatrist, at worst.

Sections of the media are to blame too. In an attempt to pander to faux populism, they not only turn the Indian cricket team as the repository of all our hopes but also seek to cater to a few lay fans’ voyeuristic craving for details of a cricketer’s personal life.

Did Anushka Sharma deserve as much attention from the television cameras as she got on Thursday in Sydney?

Oh, well, the less said the better. The scary part is, we might soon become a society that, as the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said, “tranquilises itself in the trivial.”

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