Why sportsmen's autobiographies disappoint.

When Sachin Tendulkar released his autobiography recently, I knew that at least one person would not be buying or reading it.  Me.

While I’ve always considered him an intuitive batting genius, I’ve never heard him utter an intelligent remark about the game. So, even if it was going to be ghost-written, I was under no illusion at all that the book would offer any insight either on how he approached or planned his innings or any other nuances of the game.  

But, given his stature, there was tremendous anticipation before the release of the book. I am sure it sold well, even if the reviews were not too favourable.

Why are autobiographies of most geniuses invariably disappointing and why do we feel the need to read autographies of sportsmen, at all?

In his review of tennis-player Tracy Austin’s autobiography (“Beyond Centre Court”) David Foster Wallace writes (you can find a pdf version here.) :

Almost uniformly bad as books, these athletic “My story”s sell incredibly well; there are so many of them. And they sell so well because athletic stories seem to promise something more than the regular old name-dropping celebrity autobiography.

Here is a theory. Top athletes are compelling because they embody the comparison-based achievement we revere- fastest, strongest- and because they do so in a totally unambiguous way. Questions of the best plumber or best managerial accountant are impossible even to define, whereas the best relief pitcher, free-throw shooter or female tennis player is, at any given time, a matter of public statistical record. Top athletes fascinate us by appealing to our twin compulsions with competitive superiority and hard data.

Plus they’re beautiful. Great athletes are profundity in motion. They enable abstraction like power and grace and control to become not only incarnate but televisable. To be top athlete, performing, is to be that exquisite hybrid of animal and angel that we average unbeautiful watchers have such a hard time seeing in ourselves.

So, we want to know them. These gifted, driven physical achievers. We too, as audience, are driven: watching the performance is not enough. We want to go intimate with all that profundity. We want inside them; we want the Story. We want to hear about humble roots, privation, precocity, grim resolve, discouragement, persistence, team spirit, sacrifice, killer instinct, liniment and pain. We want to know how they did it. What goes through their minds? Is their Agony of Defeat anything like our little agonies of daily frustration?

So ,the point then about these sports memoirs’ market appeal: Because top athletes are profound, because they make a certain type of genius as carnally discernible as it can ever get, these ghost-written invitations inside their lives and their skulls are terribly seductive for book buyers. Explicitly or not, the memoirs make a promise- to let us penetrate the indefinable mystery of what makes some persons geniuses, semi divine, to share with us the secret and so both to reveal the difference between us and them and to erase it, a little, that difference …to give us what we want, expect, only one, the master narrative, the key) Story.

However seductively they promise, though, these autobiographies never deliver. And “Beyond Centre Court” is especially bad. The book fails not because it’s poorly written, but because what any college sophomore knows is the capital crime of expository prose; it forgets who it’s supposed to be for…. None of the book’s loyalties are to the reader. The author’s primary allegiance seems to be her family and friends.

DFW then talks about the air of robotic banality that suffuses the sports-memoirs genre and how the books turn out to be disappointing and stunningly inarticulate about just those qualities and experiences that fascinate the readers.

It remains very hard for me to reconcile the vapidity of Austin’s narrative mind, on the one hand, with the extraordinary mental powers that are required for world-class tennis, on the other.

Real indisputable genius is so impossible to define that maybe we automatically expect people who are geniuses as athletes to be also geniuses as speakers and writers, to be articulate, perceptive, truthful, profound.

The real secret behind top athletes’ genius, then, may be as esoteric and obvious and dull and profound as silence itself. The real, many-veiled answer to the question of what just goes through a great player’s mind as he stands at the centre of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might be : nothing at all .

It may well be that we spectators who are not divinely gifted as athletes, are the ones truly able to see, articulate and animate the experience of the gift that we are denied. And those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it- and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence.

I felt that this, to a large extent, explains why Sachin – undoubted genius, though he is, when batting- was unable to offer any insights in his autobiography ( As I admitted, I haven’t read it. I’m going by some of the reviews I came across).  Unfortunately for him, his ghost writer too lacked an understanding of what to provide to the readers.

Take life one day at a time.

Good batsmen have better powers of concentrations and stay focused right through their stay at the crease. They should not let themselves be distracted even during the breaks. This is what we’ve been told.

Greg Chappell, in his column in The Hindu, explains how that piece of wisdom did not work for him and how he needed to change his approach.

My own experience was that, to bat for long periods, I had to break my innings down and train myself to play one ball at a time. Once I acquired this skill, I found batting for long periods became easier.

Prior to this, I had tried to concentrate non-stop by forcing myself to focus fiercely from the time I walked in until I got out. During this period, I tried to follow the bowler and the ball for the whole over so that I didn’t lose concentration.

What I found during this phase, was that I tired very quickly and actually began to make mistakes after a relatively short period of time. If I did succeed using this method, I was usually so tired that I couldn’t relax easily afterwards and I was generally ‘flat’ for a few days.

On reflection, it dawned on me that this method was bound to fail and I had to find an alternative method. The alternative I chose was to train myself to concentrate for one ball at a time.

Concentration is the ability to focus on what is important at that moment.

From that point, my practice sessions became a contest with myself to see how well I could manage the conflicting messages in my head. Training was no longer an exercise in polishing my technique, but a mental exercise in engaging with the bowler at the appropriate time.

What I learnt to do was to switch-on to the bowler once he reached his bowling mark. The fiercest concentration was saved for the time that the bowler reached his delivery stride until that particular play was finished.

In between balls, I had a quick look into the crowd to give my mind a break before returning my attention to the field of play. I re-engaged with the bowler again once he got back to his mark.

The look into the crowd was an important part of my concentration routine. If I was playing at home, I would pick out someone whom I knew to look for. I astounded my family and friends when, at the end of the day, I could tell them what time they had arrived at the ground, who they had spoken to and what time they had a drink or something to eat.

Once I perfected this routine, I was never fatigued during play nor was I exhausted at the end of a long innings. Effectively, I had only concentrated at full intensity for a matter of minutes, even if I batted all day.

One of the challenges for me during net sessions with multiple bowlers was not to face up to the next ball until I was switched-on to the next bowler. It took me a while to get my routine down pat, but once I got into the flow of it, I found it easier to get into the ‘zone’.

Interestingly, I actually faced fewer balls in my allocated practice time once I started doing this, but actually felt that I was getting more out of my net sessions. Once I perfected my mental routine, I found it exciting to see how long I could bat before I made a mental mistake.

The sentence, “Concentration is the ability to focus on what is important at that moment” makes a lot of sense. Far easier to break up a task into multiple, manageable chunks and tackle it one at a time.

The erratic geniuses.

In a brilliant article, Osman Samiuddin tries to provide an explanation for Pakistani cricketers’ propensity to pull off amazing victories from the brink of defeat. The match would be slowly slipping away from their hands…till something magical happens.

What we know about what happens, roughly, is this. Pakistan are in the field (almost exclusively so), drifting, amiably and contentedly, to defeat over five days, or one. They are comatose flat. Bowlers, uninspired, are on autopilot, the fielders heavy and ponderous. If there is a target, it’s down to, say, 45 off the last 10 with seven wickets in hand. If it’s a Test, the target being chased is a small one, under 200, or if it is the first innings, the opposition are 200 for 2. Coasting.

Sometimes, but not always, it takes an unusual dismissal to turn on the light – a run-out, an electric catch, a part-timer taking a wicket. And then there is total frenzy, so overwhelming and real you can almost hold it in your hands. Such is its force that it can be deeply moving even through the sensory dilution and sanitisation of TV, even on ball-by-ball commentary online. But to let it get right inside your head and start rearranging your brain – like acid but a lighter, less paranoid burn – you have to be there as it happens.

There is music, not heard but felt, a beat somewhere in the background, rising, unrelenting. Up front is the dissonance of a reality that is proceeding swiftly but with an impact that is unveiled languorously. Wickets begin to fall in heaps, twice, thrice in an over and each one seems the only logical conclusion to that particular spell of play. There is an appeal almost every ball, most justifiable. Fielders start hitting the stumps and taking catches which, in other situations, we can easily imagine them dropping.

How do the Pakistani cricketers manage to transform themselves from an erratic and listless lot to an inspired team, seemingly in one magical moment?

It’s a combination of three major national characteristics – laziness, impatience, and latent brilliance. Since we’re lazy, we don’t get engaged until we sense an opportunity. But once we do get engaged, our impatience drives us to get the job done quickly, and our latent capacity for brilliance makes it all happen. Seen another way, we are an enormously gifted team that’s too lazy to apply itself. But when the circumstances are right and an opening appears, our natural gifts take over, with our innate impatience ensuring a speedy resolution

Osman offers an interesting metaphor. The Qawwali. And the state of ‘haal’ it tries to achieve.

To the uninitiated, a Qawwali can sometimes feel like a living, breathing but random collection of voice and sound until, suddenly at one moment, it surges together. And then transformed, it becomes momentarily a single, powerful force. Take also, the alaap, that sudden vocal burst in a Qawwali. Is that not exactly like a riff of wickets by one bowler from out of nowhere, at odds with everything that has gone before?)

The literal meaning of haal is state, as in a state of being, and it can refer to a number of different states. But it has come to be interpreted, more often than not, as one ultimate state of ecstasy, much sought after but rarely achieved, in man’s journey to get closer to God. “In the ecstatic state,” explains Idries Shah in his book Oriental Magic, “Sufis are believed to be able to overcome all barriers of time, space and thought. They are able to cause apparently impossible things to happen merely because they are no longer confined by the barriers which exist for more ordinary people.”

One of the primary objectives of Qawwali is to attempt to bring the performer as well as the listener to haal.

Is it similar to the ‘zone’ that sports psychologists talk about, as when a player is said  to "enter  the zone”?

Where haal deviates from the zone is in the idea that the latter can be sought, that through a series of steps or rigorous preparation and practice it can be achieved. Many sports psychologists – but not all – believe that using different techniques of visualisation, goal-setting and self-motivation can help athletes to achieve and stay in the zone. Pakistan employs no such techniques and never has done. Just as Abu Mohammad says that Qawwali rehearsed and recorded in a studio is the imprisonment of the form, so it is with Pakistan. Net practice and training – the rehearsed recordings of sport – are generally imprisonment for Pakistani players. That is not where they shine. For them, as with Qawwali, it happens live and it happens unprepared. 

Enlightenment, goes one saying of Zen, is an accident, as it could be in haal and as it is in Pakistan cricket.

Do read the full article.

Cricket match in Bangalore, circa 1850.

Captain Albert Hervey of the 40^th Regiment of Madras Infantry describes (on page 51) of his diary, “The life of a young officer” published in 1850, a Lagaan-style, cricket match played between his team consisting mainly of Indian sepoys and an all-English team of officers based in Bangalore. There’s also a description of a post-match incident when English hospitality was not accepted.. 

The good folks at Bangalore, hearing of our characters as cricketers, a challenge was sent us, and arrangements made for a match between their eleven and ourselves; but this challenge was taking us at a disadvantage, for many of our best players were away with the "left-wing;" we were, therefore, badly off, though our lads were game to the backbone, and eager for the trial. Two of the best bats from among the officers volunteered, and were taken in for want of better, to make up our eleven. Tents were pitched, the ground marked out, and the wickets placed by knowing hands, umpires selected, and scorers told off, all very proper. 

Our men were nothing daunted, although they were much out of practice; they had never before played against Europeans, and their present antagonists, they were informed, were first-rate players. All the cantonment turned out to see such a novelty, viz., that of natives of India playing at that true English game; and it was a sight worth seeing, too; the whole ground was covered with European and native soldiery from the different corps in the place, besides ladies and gentlemen spectators, for whose accommodation tents were pitched and refreshments laid out by the mess of the gallant regiment to whom we were opposed. 

The game was played very fairly and with great  spirit, though it was evident to all present that the advantage was on the side of the Europeans. The first day's result was, however, in favour of our men, notwithstanding their want of practice. That of the second day was against us, which made the match in every way a drawn one, and both parties separated highly satisfied with each other, the Europeans in great glee, and our lads so excited that they declared, had the "left-wing" been present, there would have been no difficulty in giving the "soger logue," (the soldier-people,) a thorough good drubbing. We were to have played the dragoons, but we left Bangalore before a match could be got up. 

It was highly amusing to mark the behaviour of our gallant countrymen towards their darker comrades on this occasion. Not knowing the customs of the natives, the men had prepared a kind of collation with plenty of drink, to be partaken of by the sepoys as well as themselves. The soldiers came up to our men as soon as the game was over, and, slapping them on the back, one of them said:— 

"Come along, boys, and take a bit of something to eat and a glass of beer!" 

"No, sar! no can eat, no drink! Salam, sar, no can do that;" replied a havildar of ours. 

"Arrah, honey!" exclaimed an Irish grenadier, "we'll take no excuse; and by the piper that played before Moses, ye shall have a raal drop of the cratur, too! come along!"

"No, sar! I Hindoo mans! I neber drink! I lose caste 'spose I take the rack; that no good for me!" 

"Well, thin, lave the drink! Come in and take something to eat; do that now, there's a darling, Jack Sapay that ye are!" 

No, sar! salam, sar! Main Mussulman hoon: nahin ka. sukta ! no, sar!" 

"Is it ka sukta do you say? Well, then I don't know what that manes, its gibberish to me! Will ye take a cheroot, thin?" 

"Master sodger give cheroot, I take and make smoke; but no can eat, no can drink!" 

"But ye are all a queer set of fishes, that ye are!" exclaimed the disappointed soldier. "By the buttend of my Brown-Bess, what is it that ye will do?" 

"We go whome!" replied a Sepoy; "go to camp. Roll-call feade got we go, sar, salam, sar, salam!" 

And away they went; thus ending the colloquy which I myself overheard. The sepoys were not accustomed to such instances of true English hospitality, and their caste prejudices prevented their eating and drinking with our gallant countrymen; this I explained to the soldiers, and the Irishman remarked: 

"Bad luck to them, say I! There's as fine a roasted sheep in that there tint, as ever y'er honor would wish to dine off, with plenty of raal good pratis! Do ye think, sir, that they sapays would eat it, if we sind the whole up to the camp? 

"No, not a bit of it," replied I; "they would most probably think it an insult, particularly after having once refused." 

"Ah, you have a queer set to deal with, your honour !" said one of the party. 

"You may say that, my man," rejoined I; "but never mind, do you eat the mutton yourselves; and here is something to wash it down with, and to drink the healths of your sable-faced fellow-soldiers!" I put five rupees into the hands of one of the men, and walked away. 

"Thank ye, y'er honour," called out Paddy; we'll do that same, and wish you long life and happiness, sir!" and, touching their caps, they marched off in high glee to spend the five rupees, and I was informed the next day, that two or three soldiers were taken up drunk by the night patrol. I suppose they must have had "a wee drap in the e'e," in drinking the healths of "Jack Sapay."

Cricket is the root cause of our Olympic debacles.

Sports columnist, Nirmal Shekar, writes in his piece in The Hindu:

As a professional sportswriter, I am sick of hearing the question over and over and over again. I find it almost nauseating. If there are tens of millions posing the question, then, over the four decades that I have spent in the profession, there have been tens of hundreds of answers, from serious commentators and sports critics down to lay persons.

Why does a nation of over 1.2 billion people end up with just a few pieces of bronze and silver every four years in the most celebrated event in sport? 

This is a clever (but overused) method of using a clichéd subject for a column, by making it appear as if others are mouthing such clichés, while the writer himself is sick and tired of the question, but is forced to use his valuable column space to answer the stupid question. Something like the technique used by MGR to sneak in and take part in hot scenes in his movies, entirely imagined by the heroine, while he himself was pure and blemishless.  

Anyway, let me not get into details of those dream scenes. Back to Nirmal Shekar.

He discloses the reason for the repeated Olympic debacles:

..if you chose to leave aside all serious analysis as to why Indian track and field athletes, swimmers, gymnasts, hockey players and other Olympic participants fail to live up to our — and sometimes their own — expectations and came around to zeroing in on a rather reductionist, and surely controversial, viewpoint, the answer might be simple.

For, this question raises its ugly head for only about two weeks every four years. The rest of the time — for three full years and eleven and a half months — we are obsessed with, worship and shamelessly pay obeisance to a sport played with any degree of seriousness by eight-and-a-half nations. Let us, then, accept the truth. We are a one-sport nation. And even a toddler would tell you what that sport is.

So, let us forget the London Games. In a few weeks, the Indian cricket team will be playing in the Twenty20 World Cup in Sri Lanka where the conditions will suit Mahendra Singh Dhoni and his boys to the hilt.  

Ha, yes . Cricket is the root cause of all evils plaguing other sports in the country. QED.

He goes on to admonish the cricket-lovers:

…..we don’t care about them for three years and eleven-and-a-half months. We don’t care about their impecunious circumstances, their heroic struggles, their fight against-the-odds and battles with cynical, self-serving sports administrators heading often corrupt sports bodies.

…We have failed the Koms and the Yogeshwars and the rest as much as we seem to believe that many Indian athletes have failed us. They don’t owe us as much as we owe them.

And concludes on this grand note:

Nothing reflects our unity in diversity — and is a greater tribute to it — than our national obsession with cricket.

Sorry Mary, we forgot about your gas cylinder and the constant problems with power failures in your little house. But that is who we are.  

Yawn.  Will someone who knows this writer tell him a few things?

·         It is true that cricket is patronized in cities and large towns. But I’ve seen no evidence of the game being an obsession in smaller towns and village, where- if we are to believe our Census bureau- 60-70% of our nation lives. Tap them for your sport, by all means. We will applaud the effort.

·         Even if 100 million people are passionate about cricket in India, it is a staggering number which I suspect is more than the populations of Australia, England, New Zealand and South Africa added together. So, it does create an impression that the whole nation is doing nothing else.  But the reality is that it is still less than 10% of our population. Dip into the other 90%.

·       How does my love of cricket come in the way of progress of other games? Is it a zero-sum game? Are the cricketers encroaching on a hockey ground?  Or having their net practice in a shooting range? By all means play your respective games in your respective arenas and earn glory for the country. I am sorry about your struggles, but I assure you as a cricket-lover that I haven’t caused any of them, not do I wish that you should struggle. If the media is focusing only on cricket, don't blame me. Get them interested in your sport.

·         It is my choice not to watch or buy a ticket to watch Mary Kom in action. While I admire her spirit and her tenacity and would like her to get gas cylinders in her house and win a gold medal at the Olympics, I find boxing a barbaric sport and refuse to have anything to do with it. Same with Sushil Kumar, the vegetarian wrestler who bit his opponent’s ear and caused much blood to ooze out. In my view, wrestling is one of the ugliest events you can watch.But I do recognise that there are others who like to see their favourite wrestler chew chunks of the opponent's anatomy. I respect their right to choose and enjoy their sport.

So, please spare us the sanctimonious lectures. And stop trying to make cricket-lovers feel guilty and accountable for the poor performances in other sports, when we have enough ‘poor performance’ to contend with in cricket itself.

There must be a reason- other than cricket- why a nation of over a billion people does badly at the Olympics. Find it.  If you are obsessed with blaming cricket constantly for your ills, you will never get out of your misery.

My team! My country!

Sachin Tendulkar has decided to opt out of the ODI series against Sri Lanka. Fair enough. If he wants to spend time with his family or wants to be at Wimbledon, that’s his choice. If the selectors feel that he has earned the right to decide when to play and when to sit out and want to keep humouring him, they are stupid, but we can’t do anything about it. And if Sehwag feels that “as Sachin is 39-years old, he should be given the right to choose when he wants to play”, he is entitled to his senseless views. We can only pity him.

It is only when this routine decision is given a different spin and made out to be a selfless and noble act, it gets my goat. 

Here is Sachin as quoted in TOI:

"You know if it is an individual sport you have various things to think of, if you are not in right frame of mind you know it doesn't affect your team, you are individual there but being part of team sport you have got to be absolutely on top of your game and especially when you represent your country then all these things are extremely important.”

So, if we are to believe his pious, sugary statement, he dropped out in the larger interest of the team, beloved country and Bharat Mata. 

What he conveniently glosses over is that his constant flitting in and out of the team means that someone like Gambhir has to keep unsettling himself by changing his batting position ( from opening to No.3 and back) just to suit the whims and pleasure of one individual. This could have an adverse impact on the team. If I were selector, I would rather invest on Gambhir ( as he has the potential to contribute for many more years) and ensure that he is not disturbed, rather than pander to the whims of a 39-year old batsman who has had a glorious past, but who wants to hang on forever on his own terms.

The killjoys.

After the defeat in Australia in the Test match series, P.Sainath of The Hindu did an exhaustive analysis and came up with this conclusion: 

Just weeks ago, the pundits said this was our best chance ever to beat Australia in Australia. Our best team possible. Did the best team ever age in weeks? What happened? 

IPL happened. And happened long before the disaster tours. A team full of players carrying injuries playing 90 days of sub-standard club-level cricket happened. That prepares you only for more sub-standard stuff, year after year, not cricket at the highest levels. They continue playing there with injuries because the BCCI-IPL has brought big bucks to the privately-owned side of the sport, not to the domestic game. 

What is the man’s credentials to make such an assessment? Zilch. 

Mukul Kesavan wrote in a column  that the IPL is stage-managed with nexus between the BCCI and the owners. But the most damning point, according to him, is the fact that there are cheerleaders: 

…the most obvious token of the IPL's decadence is the dancing girls. These aren't cheerleaders (though sometimes they pretend to be) because this isn't collegiate America. These are young women paid to tart up the tournament with their bodies, to strut their stuff for mainly male audiences in a country where every adult woman has suffered the predatory gaze (and worse) of Indian men.

This edition of the IPL has them in the television studio as well for the delectation of the anchors. When the governors of cricket in India begin to use female bodies to sell tickets and capture television ratings you know that a cricket tournament has lost its bearings and become something else. And when the journalists who enable the tamasha and the audiences who watch it begin to take the dancing girls for granted, there is a larger sickness abroad. 

Ramachandra Guha, in an op-ed in The Hindu has several points of criticism on the ‘smash and grab crony league”. Just to cite two of his points: 

The IPL has given capitalism and entrepreneurship a bad game. But it has also been bad for Indian democracy, in that it has vividly and even brazenly underlined the distance between the affluent, urban middle classes and the rest of India. Consider the fact that no city in India's largest State, Uttar Pradesh, which has an excellent Ranji Trophy team, was awarded a franchise. Nor any city in Bihar, Orissa, or Madhya Pradesh either. To leave out four of India's largest States — all cricket-mad, and which collectively account for close to half the country's population — must seriously disqualify the League's claim to be ‘Indian.' 

Yet it can still be called ‘Premier,' for it speaks for the more prosperous parts of India, and for the more prosperous sections within them. The very names of the teams are a clue to its elitist character — two ‘Kings,' two ‘Royals,' and one ‘Knight,' this in a democratic Republic whose Constitution and laws (rightly) did away with aristocratic titles of any kind. 

So, what this guy wants is an IPL which is a microcosm of the country, with every state and every tribe from far-flung hamlets represented. And, combining both his points on the states and the titles, we should name teams as “Patna Petty Paupers” and “Bhopal Wretched Beggars”. No kings or chargers or knights to figure in the titles, and no teams from decadent cities such as Chennai or Mumbai or Delhi. 

Why do these fellows constantly need to make us feel guilty for the entertainment we choose? Are they the only socially-conscious people around? Is it a zero-sum game? Is my watching the IPL at the expense of some farmer’s happiness? Who the hell are they to pontificate on what constitutes the right form of cricket? If the spectators didn’t like it, it wouldn’t have lasted 5 seasons. And the spectator has a right to choose his form of cricket. 

IPL was the reason for our loss in Australia? Damn it. There were cricketers in the Australian team who had played the IPL too. 

What’s immoral or vulgar about cheerleaders? Bloody hell, far worse things are shown in the most decent of Hindi or regional movies. 

Why are these fellows such killjoys? Why can’t they tolerate people having some legitimate fun? The only explanation that I can think of is this. 

These are all professional writers who have built their own individual brand by hyping some theory or other. And they make a living out of their writing, and must find as many outlets as they can to get their ‘writing’ published.

An event such as IPL is an excellent means to grab public attention by writing a column or two. For a professional writer, it’s too good an opportunity not to encash on. Sadly for these disgruntled writers, no newspaper would invite them to write a regular column on the IPL, for the simple reason that nobody will read their dreary stuff. Therefore, the only option is to somehow persuade their newspaper to allow them to write a contrarian piece bad-mouthing the IPL and to keep it in line with their brand image. So one guy can write that farmers are dying while we are fiddling, while the other guys can use the chance to hold forth on their respective pet theories cleverly weaving in the alleged ills of IPL. Their hope and intention is that such of their readers who are also IPL followers must die of guilt and shame. 

Ironically, all the papers that carried these critical articles on IPL benefited immensely from the advertisements placed by IPL and the franchisees.

Much as I hate it, ‘freedom of expression’ means that such writers who make a living by spreading gloom and guilt should be allowed to do so.  But I wish they would be socially ostracized for causing incalculable damage to the morale and happiness of the people. 

 “How dare you be happy?” is their refrain, as I blogged once. I would argue that even when the economy is depressed- or particularly when- people must be allowed to celebrate if, when and how they choose to, so long as such celebrations don’t come at the cost of someone else who is not a part of it.

The tribal drive.

The thing about the IPL is that it promotes a new form of tribalism. Members drawn from different parts of India and different countries get together as a team. How do the local spectators relate to their team at all? Why would they root for a team that has just one or two local players?

This piece by biologist, E.O.Wilson, provides some answers.

The answer is that everyone, no exception, must have a tribe, an alliance with which to jockey for power and territory, to demonize the enemy, to organize rallies and raise flags.

And so it has ever been. In ancient history and prehistory, tribes gave visceral comfort and pride from familiar fellowship, and a way to defend the group enthusiastically against rival groups. It gave people a name in addition to their own and social meaning in a chaotic world. It made the environment less disorienting and dangerous. Human nature has not changed. Modern groups are psychologically equivalent to the tribes of ancient history. As such, these groups are directly descended from the bands of primitive humans and prehumans.

.. Today, the social world of each modern human is not a single tribe but rather a system of interlocking tribes, among which it is often difficult to find a single compass. People savor the company of like-minded friends, and they yearn to be in one of the best—a combat Marine regiment, perhaps, an elite college, the executive committee of a company, a religious sect, a fraternity, a garden club—any collectivity that can be compared favorably with other, competing groups of the same category.

.. Our bloody nature, it can now be argued in the context of modern biology, is ingrained because group-versus-group was a principal driving force that made us what we are. In prehistory, group selection lifted the hominids to heights of solidarity, to genius, to enterprise. And to fear. Each tribe knew with justification that if it was not armed and ready, its very existence was imperiled. Throughout history, the escalation of a large part of technology has had combat as its central purpose. Today, public support is best fired up by appeal to the emotions of deadly combat, over which the amygdala is grandmaster. We find ourselves in the battle to stem an oil spill, the fight to tame inflation, the war against cancer. Wherever there is an enemy, animate or inanimate, there must be a victory.

So, that’s what surrogate warfare such as the IPL does. Appeal to the emotions of deadly combat and to the innate tribal instinct in each one of us. Nothing wrong about that, but it’s interesting to know what the biological drive is.

What, me retire?

According to a report in The Hindu :

Sachin Tendulkar made it clear on Sunday that he does not intend to retire anytime soon, and left open the possibility of playing in the 2015 World Cup.

The master batsman, who will turn 39 next month, took on his critics who have been suggesting that he should retire from the one—day format of the game and focus on Test cricket.

“I feel that the retirement decision is something I should decide, because the decision to start was (also) not decided by someone else.

Those who are advising me about retirement did not bring me in the team,” he said at a rare press conference here.

Sachin is right. He need not announce his retirement just because others are asking him to. He can choose to stay unretired as long as he wants.

In the same way, the selectors – if they choose to and if they look at the larger interest of the team- need not wait patiently for Sachin to retire. They can simply drop him and then sugar-coat the decision in suitable platitudes.

When Sachin says “I don’t need anybody to tell me when to retire” or when he says it will be selfish on his part to step down when he is doing well, what he forget is that there is such a thing as “law of diminishing returns”.

This law catches up with almost all cricketers by the time they reach 35 years of age. From this point, any further investment on this cricketer will not necessarily yield negative returns, but will yield lower returns than before. At this point, when you compare the 35-year old cricketer with a promising 21-year old, the former might look better, but if the decision to invest in the latter is delayed, the law of diminishing returns would reduce the former to almost zero in 2-3 years, leaving the team vulnerable and without a mature replacement. Sachin is 39 years old and it would be delusional to believe that he can escape the clutches of the law of diminishing returns.

Investing in a 21-year old on the other hand can result in accelerating returns in 2-3 years. In the next few months, India is due to play most of its matches in the sub-continent, and this is the best time to invest in a younger lot..

Dravid’s retirement was well-timed and characteristically unselfish of him. I am afraid I don’t feel the same way about Sachin. Cricket is a team game, unlike a game like, say, tennis. In tennis, a delayed retirement does not affect a team or other players. The selectors must remember this simple fact,

And it is ridiculous to say that someone has earned the right to decide when to relinquish his place in the team. Past performance deserves tributes, but cannot be held as a reason to stay on for all times to come.