03 May, 2008

Rigour to the Discourse in the Fabric

Sambit Bal, once my boss at Cricinfo and one of the best men I know, is a cricket writer I admire for his clear thinking and lucid writing. That’s why it hurts when he comes up with a sentence as monstrous as the one below:

Sport runs in Kolkata’s veins; it is ingrained in the socio-cultural fabric of the city, and though fans here can often be irrational, there is also a discernible intellectual rigour to the public discourse on cricket.

I can forgive the cliché at the start of the sentence, but “socio-cultural fabric of the city”? “Public discourse on cricket?” “Discernible intellectual rigour?” Ouch!

Pedantic aside: The ‘though’ makes the ‘also’ redundant.