Sport

Will cricket decline in India?

This is the 24th installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.

As the first Test between India and England moved towards a finish earlier this week, one of my friends announced that he was singing Raga Malhar. This is a legendary raga that is supposed to draw rain from the sky. And indeed, rain fell. If causation could be established, my friend would be a national hero, for millions wanted precipitation.

Like most Indian men, I’m crazy about cricket. Like unrequited love, this passion often seems futile and self-defeating. It’s also mysterious. Why do we invest so much time and energy into following this sport and no other? Why is it the only sport that Indians excel at (relative to others, of course)? In a globalized world, can cricket survive?

Cricket is unique among sports in the amount of time it demands from its followers. In no other sport is a match played over five days. Even one-day cricket requires up to six times the investment a game of football needs. Given the amount of cricket played these days, to follow India’s international matches could take up the productive hours of up to three months of your year. Over a lifetime, if you live till 88, that could be 22 years of watching 22 men run around in flannels or pajamas. Are we crazy?

Until a decade-and-a-half ago, Indians had the time. In the pre-liberalized years, what options did we have for entertaining ourselves? Cricket and Bollywood—whose films were longer than the Western norm, you will notice—were all that Indians had for entertainment. Television was state-run crap (note the tautology), the Internet didn’t exist, there were few malls to hang out at, and so on.

Two interesting trends began in the 1990s, when we began to globalize and satellite TV spread across the country. One, fewer people in the big cities played cricket seriously. Kids in Mumbai and Delhi had many more options for their time, and a young man in Thane now had better things to do than rush off to Shivaji Park at 6 am for nets. The decline of cricket in Mumbai was a natural consequence.

Two, kids in the small towns, who didn’t have so many ways of entertaining themselves, were exposed to the nuances of the game via satellite television, where the best commentators shared their gyan on matches across the world. Their opportunities expanded as these towns became more prosperous. The result of this is the deluge of talented players from the smaller towns over the last few years.

My guess is that viewership for cricket follows the same patterns. People in bigger cities have less free time and more to do in it, a phenomenon that is bound to spread to smaller centres. Eventually, as cricket has declined in Mumbai, it might decline in India as well.

But there is a counterpoint to this. Sport is more than pastime or entertainment—it is also a means of validating national pride. We will always follow a sport in which we excel. And although Indian cricket may seem to be in decline—I shudder to think what the team will look like after Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar retire —we will always do better at cricket than any other sport.

Why are we so good at cricket, to begin with? Part of why we took up the sport is historical circumstance, but leave that aside. The main reason why cricket is suited to Indians, and one that many will find politically incorrect, is genes. People across the world come from different genetic stocks, and are constrained by biology. This is reflected in sports. The odds will always be against a white or brown man winning the 100m sprint at the Olympics, and Africans will always do better than Asians in long-distance running.

Indians, I believe, are genetically disadvantaged when it comes to sports in which pure strength, speed or endurance play a decisive role. We tend to do well only in sports that place a premium on skill—cricket is a classic example. Even within cricket, we’ve been more famous for our batsmen than our bowlers, and for our spinners than our fast bowlers. Even our fast bowlers rely more on skill—swinging and seaming the ball—than on sheer pace, where fast-twitch muscles come into play. Of course, there are variations within the country, where many different genetic stocks exist.

Indeed, this is why Indians declined in hockey, as astroturf reduced the premium placed on pure skill. Ditto tennis, where the sublime skills of Ramesh Krishnan would be useless in this era of the power game. In cricket, even though the speed and fitness required at the highest level of the game has increased, it is unlikely to go beyond the natural capacity of Indians.

And thus, by biology and circumstance feeding on each other, we are bound to cricket. I don’t bemoan this —if Rahul Dravid can get his mojo back, and play as he did when he was last in England, it will all seem worthwhile again. And my friend won’t have to sing Raga Malhar.

* * *

You can browse through all my columns for Mint in my Thinking it Through archives.

Also check out an essay in which I’d touched on this subject, “Do We Really Love Cricket?”

The consequences of cricket

Salil Tripathi has a wonderful piece in the Wall Street Journal today celebrating 75 years of Indian Test cricket, in which he writes:

What the British didn’t realize was that once introduced, cricket’s consequences couldn’t be predicted, nor controlled. Just as the introduction of railways in the 1850s not only sped up communication but also united India, and as Lord Macaulay’s “Minute on Education” not only taught simple English to clerks but also ideas of self-rule and democracy to other Indians, so cricket—with its notion of fair play—gave currency to the idea of justice and unity.

I agree about railways and English, but I wonder if we romanticize the role cricket played in India’s independence struggle. In my admittedly limited view, cricket began to play a role beyond that of an ordinary sport after independence—especially from the 1970s onwards—when we actually started doing well at it, and it served as a source of national pride when there were few others. Similarly, India’s post-liberalization assertiveness was mirrored in the Indian team that Sourav Ganguly and John Wright nurtured, with its refreshing aggression and self-belief. But I’m not sure that cricket’s notions of fair play have ever meant anything to more than a few elite Indians.

That quibble aside, it’s a lovely piece, and I’ve become a fan of Tripathi’s lucid prose—He’s both insightful and readable, qualities few Indian journalists have.

Also read: “Do We Really Love Cricket?”

Is there something you’d like to ask…

… John Buchanan? Prem Panicker is due to interview Buchanan, and will incorporate reader-submitted questions that he finds interesting. Almost a Web 2.0 interview, you could say, without the anarchy of a chat. Hop over to leave your suggestions.

And by the by, I’m quite delighted to see Prem blogging regularly on his own space. He’s a magnificent blogger, though he’s often been too busy running large teams of journalists to blog regularly. I’m going to watch that space.

Chandu Borde takes over

Two cricket links for the day:

One, Chandu Borde has been appointed the manager of the Indian cricket team.

Two, for no reason at all, out of the blue, I remember this old post I made back in January. Apropos of absolutely nothing.

Every circus needs quality clowns. Why should Indian cricket be denied?

The next Indian cricket coach: APJ Abdul Kalam

Now that Graham Ford has turned down the chance to coach India’s cricket team, who should the BCCI turn to? Himanshu Gupta writes in to suggest APJ Abdul Kalam’s name. His reasons:

1. Abdul Kalam can give inspirational speeches (not like mangoes), so he can do a better job of India coach rather than Graham Ford who was supposed to give speeches only to players.

2. He’ll write one bestseller book: Indian cricket team in 2020. Revenues will give the BCCI huge financial strength and money through legal avenues.

3. He’ll make Dhoni realize that there’s more to cricket than growing long hair by giving him sufficient competition.

4. A coach’s job can’t be scrutinized through RTI. So, as is obvious, Abdul Kalam also will love to have this job.

I agree with Himanshu, and have an addition to make to his list of reasons: Kalam can continuously motivate his players by reading out his poems in the dressing room. There’s no way a batsman out in the middle would then want to return to the pavilion.

I also suggest that the BCCI give Kalam a large enough budget to conduct a space program on its behalf. He can then send some of our players to Mars, which would not be entirely a bad thing.

On the other hand, even a Mango would make a good coach.

“Natives with Bats versus Officers with Umbrellas”

Quizman emails to respond to my post, “Cricket and the Veshti,” and points out that DB Deodhar used to play cricket in his dhoti. He also points me to a historical piece by Ramachandra Guha which contains this passage:

At first, the British thought little of the attempts by their subjects to take to their national game. They sneered at the Indians’ clothes and their technique, a Bombay journalist remarking of some Hindu players, in the 1870s, that `their kilted garments interfered [when batting] with running, and they threw the ball when fielding in the same fashion as boarding school girls’. At this time the gulf, admittedly, was huge, so much that some early matches were billed as `Natives with Bats versus Officers with Umbrellas’. Slowly the Indians began acquiring proficiency, helped by their decision to discard the cumbersome dhoti for the cricketer’s flannel trousers.

Those, I am most certain, were the days. Though I am sure some of you would argue that our players still field like boarding school girls. Tsk tsk.

Update: Reader Shastri points me to this picture.

Cricket and the Veshti

CNN-IBN reports that a “prestigious cricket club” in Chennai did not allow a civil servant to enter its premises because he was dressed in a veshti.

On a tangent, I wonder—and I know I can check this with two mouse-clicks, but it’s more fun to wonder—whether you’re allowed to play cricket in a veshti. Why should cricket only be played in trousers? Indeed, with a veshti, you could actually catch a ball between your legs without the risk of scraping the skin on your fingers. If you have a really long veshti, you could let it loose in the breeze while running a single, possibly ensuring that you’re inside both creases at the same time. And if you’re at the non-striker’s end, and your partner’s having a problem with the sightscreen, you could stand on your head.

I hope the BCCI takes this matter up with the ICC. The colonial hangover must go, and air must circulate.

(Link via email from Gautam John.)

Olympics logo in epilepsy controversy

I wrote yesterday about how bad the 2012 Olympics logo was, even if it did resemble Lisa Simpson giving head. Well, now BBC reveals:

A segment of animated footage promoting the 2012 Olympic Games has been removed from the organisers’ website after fears it could trigger epileptic fits. […]

Charity Epilepsy Action said it had received calls from people who had suffered fits after seeing it.

Organiser London 2012 said it will re-edit the film. […]

Emphasising that it was not the logo itself which was the focus of worries, [a spokesperson] said: “This concerns a short piece of animation which we used as part of the logo launch event and not the actual logo.”

Ya, right! There’s a horror film in this somewhere. Perhaps this is the return of the antichrist, only not in human form, for how banal would that be? Humans can be eliminated, but once such a logo is unleashed upon the unsuspecting world…

(Link via email from Prabhu.)

Worst logo ever

image

Sigh. Isn’t the logo above, unveiled recently for the 2012 Olympics, in a class of its own for badness? Have the gentlemen who selected this design never heard of the virtues of simplicity? How they must all hate the Swoosh.

And can you believe they paid £400,000 for this? (That’s about Rs 3.2 crore.) Pestilential parakeets plunder.

(Link via email from Aspi Havewala, who also points me to a discussion on BBC here.)

Update: Anon Tipster points me to Tim Worstall’s revelation that the logo shows Lisa Simpson giving a blow job. The two gifs below, created by Theo Spark, illustrate that and go a bit further.

london-copy.gif

Olympics2.gif

Now I like it!

Update 2: Scribbler points me to Andrew Orlowski’s post on how the BBC, showcasing user-generated logos, ran a parody of the infamous Goatse on their website. Heh.