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April      Last updated: April  15,  5:00 p.m.

V.P. Bhatia

Critical dependence on one or two star players is proving demoralising for the Indian team.

In my school days in native Jhelum a usual sight on our most frequented river road dotted with many temples and ghats was of a retired primary school teacher who was generally known by his poetic pen-name Nirala. A half-comic character, he could be seen reciting his latest poem at one crowded ghat or other in the mornings or evenings before a bunch of people, mostly school urchins. What however made him more interesting was that he always went about wearing a sleeveless canvas gown flowing right upto his ankles, with every space, nook and corner on it occupied by a painted advertisement in four languages—English, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi on both sides—front and back—of his gown, reading ‘Nirala garm masala, bazar se sasta our aala’.

For, after retirement he had also specialised in preparing a scorchingly pungent mixture of various Indian spices for household cooking, selling it in small packs at what he claimed to be cheaper than the market price. Needless to say, he was taken more as a funny life-size walking poster of his own wares. But he was venerable still, carrying himself with dignity like an elephant with a portly figure, not the least perturbed by children's pranks. He was welcome still to sit anywhere he liked at a shop or even a doctor's clinic and even served with refreshments.

Uncontrolled batting; Ad-Mad World

I am often reminded rather nostalgically of that wandering vendor of spices whenever I see our famous cricketers butting in as sophisticated modern versions of the good old Nirala, as live agents of aggressive commercial ad spots of cold drinks, motor tyres, ready-made garments, tooth pastes, not to speak of cricket bats and balls in between TV coverage of cricket matches at the most suspenseful moments. For instance, it struck me particularly odd one day, when the TV viewers were treated with a totally inept scene of our new captain Saurav Ganguli promoting Britannia Biscuits instantly after he was given out at 13 runs. And again, a few minutes later came Sachin Tendulkar in an amusing ad of Pepsi Cola standing back to back with filmstar Shahrukh Khan soon after he was out at some 30 runs or so.

And last of all, almost five or six of them, including Azharuddin, Kumble and even old stars like Kapil Dev, now the coach of Indian team, appearing in a collective commercial of "Wills accountrements and accessories" soon after the entire team was out at a miserable score of around 150 or so. For, so it happens that after a short flash in the pan of 3-2 win against South Africa in one-day series on home ground, our team has lapsed into its old moribund ways even under the more confident captain, Saurav Ganguli, at Sharjah. In fact, it was even painful to see our cricket stars facing South African and Pakistani bowlers as frightened rabbits, except for one face-saving win when both the Indian and Pakistani teams collapsed, the Pakistanis more than the Indians.

Obviously, this is because our team has come to depend critically on, Tendulkar and Ganguly's uncontrolled batting after which demoralisation set in. Others say, our cricket stars have become too big for their boots, disregarding the need for continuous practice, taking their ad assignments more seriously. Otherwise, it is rarely that they can still win an odd match when they pull together as they did in World Cup against Pakistan at the height of Kargil war.

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Anyway, even otherwise, the Nirala syndrome comes more forcefully on the memory’s screen when I find colourful cricketers of not just India but other countries as well flaunting labels of brand products of various multi-nationals on their caps, shirt sleeves, shirt fronts and backs, trouser lines and shoes besides those manufacturers cricket bats and balls on cricket fields. The less said about the hoardings all around the stadium and painted ones on the ground the better. So with all this medley of dazzling TV spots, flashing and blinking all over and parading our cricket stars as walking advertisements fetching more money from ad companies than from the cricket boards, our good old ‘Nirala’ seems to be a pioneer of the modern ‘ad mad’ world. In any case, one wonders why the collective performance of the team goes down, as the individual records of our heroes goes up. Pretty soon after they have established themselves.

Batting machines as money-making machines

This reminds me how a famous American journalist, probably Walter Lippman, had a dig at President Eisenhower who took his presidency less seriously than his addiction to Golf by describing him as "the famous Golf-player whose part-time hobby was American presidency". For Eisenhower, resting on his oars as charismatic. Allied commander in Europe during the Second World War, had left almost everything of his administration to his Foreign Secretary, John Foster Dulles, a bigoted ‘Cold Warrior’ known as ‘Mr Dull Plural’. So here too we find our star cricketers getting less committed to their real business than acting as icons of ‘the ad mad world’.

This is, however, not to run down or under-rate our talented players but to point how this globalisation business is proving too powerful for anybody's good, with a flood of consumer culture engulfing everything.

In any case, as said earlier in this columns' too much money spoils any rising star in no time, so that taking it easy becomes a fashion. Gone are the days of the singleminded application, perseverance, discipline and dependability of Sunil Gavaskar, Srikant, Vengsarkar and our earlier batting machine Kapil Dev when you could expect at least a respectable performance from the team as a whole, even in most disastrous moments. Cricket is no doubt a game of chance, but more than that a game of making mistakes so that the less mistakes you make the better. Sachin is hailed as a cricketing genius of all times and rightly so; he is a compulsive batsman. So is Ganguly and Jadeja. Rahul Dravid is shaping himself in the image of Gavaskar—a patient batsman, careful of line and length, but going down because of being too careful. Robin Singh too is up and coming and we have real good bowlers in Kumble, Prasad and Agarkar, though the team seemed incomplete without Srinath. But the vital stamina and consistency seems missing.

In this respect, I remember how a wonderstruck Pakistani commentator had gushingly described the newly discovered Tendulkar in a match at Sialkot when he was hardly 20 as "an unstoppable cricketing prodigy who was really enjoying batting". But the batting machine has now become a freakish one, dazzling once in a while but going down at the most crucial time. One reason said to be is that our undisciplined stars do not keep appointment on the practising field. A foreign commentator has described this phenomenon of dependence on just one or two players as "Tendulkarising of cricket’. He puts him as the richest cricketer in the world, with take-home income of three million pounds a year, four times than that of the most famous Brian Lara of West Indies. His commercial bookings include one of seven million dollar over the next five years with Papsi Cola. And of a similar amount with a tyre company. This naturally leads to jealousies both in the team and the board and diverse pulls. There is loss of killer instinct and the team spirit, and a display of nervousness on the field, reducing even the much-hyped nationalist spirit to lip service. They score centuries at the wrong time; it adds to their personal lustre record but not to a victory of the country. The cliques and group intrigues in the cricket board are another underground story which explodes off and on in the doom’s day foreboding of its secretary Lele, who proved prophetic to the hilt on the eve of the Australian tour which he correctly predicted as a looming disaster. Despite Ganguly-led victory in one-day series on home ground, the players look pulling in different directions except once a while against Pakistan.

Anyway, one hopes to be proved wrong in their next assignment, perhaps in Canada. They need to play more on foreign soil to gain confidence, says a commentator.

How the Parsis found refuge in India from Arab sword, thirteen hundred years ago

It is interesting to note how Pakistan's best known novelist, a Parsi named Mrs Bapsi Sidhwa who now mostly lives in the USA gives a graphic picture of the Parsis' arrival in hospitable India from their original homeland of Persia, thirteen hundred years ago. In her novel The Ice-Candy Man (filmed by Deepa Mehta as Earth-1947) earlier discussed in these columns, one finds the President of the Parsi anjuman of Lahore in 1947 telling the story of their ancestors' arrival in Gujarat in search of refuge from Arab invaders' atrocities and conversion mania as follows:

"When we were kicked out of Persia by the Arabs thirteen hundred years ago, what did we do? Did we shout and argue? No," roars the Colonel Bharucha, and heartily provides his own answer before anyone can interrupt. ‘We got into boats and sailed to India’.

"Why to India?’ A totally new wit sitting at the end of the bunch of Parsi anjuman meeting enquires. "If they had to go to some place, why not to Greece? Why not to France? Prettier scenery (there)... ." At this the Colonel continues as if he has not been interrupted at all, about how they came to Gujarat coast in India and got permission to land and settle here: "Do you think, it was easy to be accepted into a new country? No!" He booms. "Our forefathers were not given even permission to disembark!...

"There is a long pause—Satisfied by the silence, the Colonel continues: "Our forefathers and foremothers waited for four days (in the boat) not knowing what was to become of them. Then, at last the Grand Vazir (of the local Raja) appeared on dock with a glass of milk filled to the brim. Do you know what he meant? It was polite message from the Prince, meaning, ‘No, you are not welcome. My land is full and prosperous and we don't want outsiders with a different religion and alien ways to disturb the harmony.’ He thought we were missionaries.

"Do you know what the Zarathushtis (followers of Zarathushtra, the Parsi Prophet) said?" The Colonel answered his own question and continued. ‘Our forefathers carefully stirred a teaspoon of sugar into the milk and sent it back.’ The Prince understood what it meant: the refugees would get absorbed in the country like the sugar in milk. And with their decency and industry sweeten the lives of his subjects.

"The Indian Prince though, what a smart and civilised people. And he gave our ancestors permission to live in his kingdom. But what to do now. To stay on in Pakistan or to go to Bombay where most Parsis live, asks a tremulous Parsi voice haunted by a thirteen-hundred-year-old memory of conversion by the Arab sword. The answer is to keep strictly neutral and not to interfere in politics at all."