True to our history

Published : Aug 04, 2001 00:00 IST

I'VE been thinking a lot about the Rajputs in the last couple of weeks. Our history, and indeed our literature, is full of stories of these brave, valiant and proud men; of how their courage shone on the battlefield and of how they put honour above all else. But with all the pride we seek to evoke, all the ballads we sing, all the movies we make, comes the realisation that the Rajputs did not win too many wars against the Mughals or the British. The history books will also tell you that they fought a great deal among themselves, which wasn't much use when they had to combine against a common enemy.

I have been thinking about the Rajputs because it is amazing how similar our cricket culture is. We sometimes seek to assign qualities to our cricketers that they do not possess, we make them larger than life and often replace reality with desire. But more than anything else, we prefer to fight amongst each other rather than combine against the opposition. The deathwish is rampant in our cricket and it begins at the top.

The more I see how our cricket is run, the more I am baffled. Cancelling the three-game tour of Australia was a good move but it should never have been accepted in the first place. The Australian newspapers are now saying that this is further proof that you cannot trust India and while you may not agree with everything they say, they are right on this count. We led them up the path and then ditched them. But at least it was a decision that was taken in the interest of the National team and that in itself is a rare moment.

Meanwhile, we continue to fiddle around with our domestic cricket without hitting at the core. We continue to change the paint over a rotten wall. Isn't that what happened to a lot of the buildings during the earthquake at Ahmedabad? A poor foundation and a glossy finish? And our technical committee continues to be over-ruled. Small men make big decisions and big issues stay under the carpet. The desire to go one up over your colleague rather than your opponent is fierce and bewildering.

But that is not the only deathwish in our cricket though it is a fairly substantial one. By itself it would suffice but there are more. At a time when Indian cricket was seriously looking up after the tour of Zimbabwe, at a time when everybody with the good of Indian cricket at heart should have been hoping to build on the gains and eradicate the errors, all we are interested in is whether Sourav Ganguly and Sachin Tendulkar hate each other.

And so we build these conspiracy theories and we find enough people happy to add fuel to the fire. Sadly the truth is that vested interests in Indian cricket control too much more than those that desire good. Creating dissent can be profitable to some, especially when the people who should stamp it out sit around and watch. Over the last one week, the BCCI has been invisible.

That is why Sachin Tendulkar has to address a press conference at home to tell people about his injury when there should have been an official release from the BCCI with a quote from him. And of course the BCCI will do nothing to tell people the official view on this so-called rift. The number of people in India who want Indian cricket to slide is staggering. And that list begins within the offices of the BCCI.

But I guess we get what we deserve. And that is why this is a request to all cricket lovers to go beyond cricket for the good of Indian cricket itself. Let us expand our horizons and realise there is a lot more to this game than individual stars, their love-life, their eating habits, their taste in clothes and their apparent dislike for each other. For Indian cricket has become too narrow, too star-driven and too incestuous. It is unbelievably weak. And it is being left behind every day, partly by the inability of the administration to see daylight and partly by the fascination for the narrow and the sensational.

We need to grow and instead every force is aimed at dwarfing us. There is a fantastic world outside ours, a world that we can have a room in, provided we take off the shackles we have put on ourselves. Our cricket is becoming increasingly like Calcutta football where everybody locked themselves into this small world thinking there was nothing beyond. Then they saw where the world was and realised they were playing a very poor level of football. But they were so locked by the rivalry, so consumed with beating each other that everybody stagnated.

Around the same week that I read of the gossip and innuendo, and grieved further over an administration I could not see, I read a few comments from Steve Waugh in Wisden Cricket Monthly about his decision to take his team to Gallipoli and share in a bit of Australian history. "I don't want our focus just to be cricket. We don't want to be seen just as cricketers or see each other only as cricketers," he said explaining how they wanted to get a different perspective to life and a greater identity as Australians.

"We were able to share our emotions among ourselves. We talked about it as individuals. The guys had to explain to their peers what the experience meant. I guess that is what we want the modern day Australian cricketer to do. We want them to be open. We want to know each other and we want to know about the world. We don't want to be seen as one-dimensional cricketers. Because we were able to share our emotions I think our visit to Gallipoli will pull us together in times of adversity. I think that is something that will remain with us for the rest of our lives."

Australian cricket is growing; intellectually and in terms of results, and make no mistake, they are linked. We are growing increasingly one-dimensional. In terms of intellect and desire in our cricket, we do not exist. We need to win matches and we need to think about how to win them. For that we need to grow; not to limit ourselves to stories about rifts between Ganguly and Tendulkar.

There is a lesson from our history should we want to see it.

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