GENIUS is not half as exciting as its prodigal twin - Flawed Genius. You may respect the former, may even be in awe of it, but when it comes to genuine affection, overflowing love, you always lavish these on the latter.
Little wonder that Brian Charles Lara, the last cricketing Emperor from the Caribbean islands who has once again reappeared in all his pomp, now dominates the consciousness of fans all over the world no matter that West Indies, as a team, continues to plumb the depths.
As a once-great Empire lies in ruins all around him - with ominous signs pointing to a terminal decline rather than a temporary slump in the fortunes of Caribbean cricket - Lara has stood alone and apart, looking down on mere mortals from his magnificent throne.
As Sanath Jayasuriya's men stridently marched to a first ever 3-0 sweep by a Sri Lankan team in Test cricket, Lara batted with the sort of authority and sense of purpose that have eluded him for a long time as he piled on 688 runs in six innings, scoring a double century and two hundreds.
At such times, watching the left-handed maestro bat is the same sort of unforgettable experience as watching a volcano erupt or setting your eyes on a great river in spate. Batting is neither an art nor a science at such times; instead, it becomes a force of nature.
Such an exalted level of batsmanship becomes all the more attractive and thrilling simply because it comes much against all expectations, at a time when the sports press in the Caribbean was calling for Lara's retirement from the game, writing him off as a spent force.
But, then, great forces of nature are never spent. They just bide their time and strike when you least expect them to. As does Lara, time and again.
Consider the man's scores in the three Tests in Sri Lanka: 178, 40, 74, 45, 221 and 130. Who could have wished for more when your team was going down 0-3?
Then again, Lara's cricket is hardly about numbers. When on song, he is, arguably, the most attractive active Test batsman. In terms of consistency and technique, Sachin Tendulkar is marginally above the Trinidadian, but not even the Mumbai maestro can offer such great watching pleasure as does Lara at his very best.
He is perhaps the last of the dinosaurs that have adorned the sport in the sunny islands of the Caribbean. In the last 50 years, some of the greatest natural geniuses - mark my words, not merely greatest players but greatest natural geniuses - in the game have come from a scattered chain of islands in the Gulf of Mexico.
Given how far and how fast West Indies cricket has declined and how other sports such as baseball and basketball - with a sure American flavour that beckons the talented ones in these games to the promised land - have come to capture youngsters' fancy in Barbados and Antigua and Trinidad, Lara may well be the last of the giants.
Even as recently as seven or eight years ago, if someone had said that a West Indian side would lose three Tests in a row to Sri Lanka in the early days of the new millenium, you might have considered referring the gentleman to the psychiatric ward of the nearest hospital.
But, today, even as Lara reinvents himself as a batsman of rare brilliance, the demise of West Indies as a cricketing super-power is indisputable.
And this is not just another sporting crash of the sort we see time and again in a capricious world where even giants are not spared of cruelty. For, this is not merely the fall of a great sports team.
It is, in essence, the demise of an empire, the decline and decay of a magnificent sporting culture diagnosed of an illness that seems terminal.
And it is precisely because of this one tends to savour the brilliance of Lara all the more. For, who knows if we'd ever again get to feast on the deeds of such a genius from the Caribbean on a cricket field?
While he is still around, let's have a ball. And it is just as well that the great man says that he has rediscovered his hunger for runs, his passion for the sport, while offering thanks to the greatest West Indian cricketer of all time for his resurgence.
"My batting has changed over the last few weeks," Lara said recently in Colombo. "I have been trying to get my hands coming from behind the ball rather than from gully after speaking to Sir Garfield Sobers, who said I had to stop chopping across the line of the ball. You can tell when technical changes are working and this has played a very big part in my batting here.
"But it doesn't end here as I want to score more. We have Test matches coming up against Pakistan, India and New Zealand and I want to maintain the form that I am in. I have set my sights on scoring the most runs for the West Indies. I am still a long way off Viv Richards' record," said Lara.
When you average close to 230 runs a Test match - as Lara has in Sri Lanka - then Richards' record is certainly under threat in the short term from Lara.
But, with the flamboyant left-hander, you never know. A string of single digit scores could very easily follow a superb run of big ones. No player has ever had the capacity to look like a millionaire one day and a pauper the next as does Lara.
And it is precisely because he tends to occupy extremes that we like him so much. Unlike Tendulkar, Lara is not simply a genius. He is a flawed genius, which makes him all the more fan-friendly, so to say. Most of us like our heroes with feet of clay. It makes them look just that bit less intimidating, a bit like all of us ordinary mortals.
Lara has, of course, obliged us from time to time. Whether it is walking out of a tour of Australia or taking a holiday with yet another trophy girlfriend when the team needed him on the field, whether it is a dispute over player-pay or plain sulking through a season when his mind was not on the game, Lara has featured in every bit of drama enacted in West Indies cricket in recent times.
All this means only one thing: Brian Charles Lara can never be a demi-God like Sachin Tendulkar. On the other hand, he is - and will always be - a charismatic, gifted, flesh-and-blood sporting giant who, as a batsman, would tempt the Gods out of heaven and on to cricket grounds when he is on song.
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