No sense of balance

The only colours we seem to know are black and white. Both our praise and our condemnation are in the extreme, writes Pavan K Varma.

Kuldeep Bhardwaj, my colleague in the High Commission who deals with the press and media, had set up a giant television screen at his home and invited friends to watch the last ODI between India and Pakistan in Delhi. Kuldeep and his wife, Sudesh, is a hospitable couple. They had made arrangements for an elaborate lunch. Alas, the abysmally dismal performance of our team poured cold water over all the trouble they had taken. The match was over before lunchtime in London.

There was, understandably, a great deal of anger and disappointment with our cricketers throughout India. In the span of a few days they had made the transition form heroes to zeroes. The pendulum of public opinion had swung-as it often does in India-from one extreme to another. Those who thought that the likes of Tendulkar and Sehwag and Ganguly and Kumble were God's gift to Indian sports now demonised them as a blot on the nation's honour. Saurav Ganguly has all my sympathies. From being called the Maharaja of Kolkatta, he is now not even being accepted as a foot soldier in Tollygunj.

I have often thought about how Indians oscillate so easily between adulation and condemnation. This tendency is not restricted to sports alone. It can be seen perhaps most spectacularly in politics. A politician who is fawned upon when in power will be viciously denigrated the moment he is out. Public figures find a great number of hangers on when on the ascendant, and deserted when down and out. When Rajiv Gandhi strode to power with more than 400 seats in Parliament, nothing he could do was wrong. When his popularity began to wane a little, nothing he could do was right. We seem to have no sense of balance or proportion. The only colours we seem to know are black and white. Both our praise and our condemnation are in the extreme.

I also find it ironical that we have become a one-sport nation. Cricket is a legacy of British rule. Of course, that by itself is no reason to condemn it. It is an enjoyable game, and if we have effortlessly absorbed so much else from the British Raj, why not cricket? But surely we don't have to be so humiliatingly one-dimensional in the sporting arena. Do we only wish to find a place on the sporting agenda of the world in one game, which has come to us as a colonial legacy, and in which more often than not we end up doing quite badly? What about hockey? Or archery? Or football? Or any of the hundreds of other sports in which nations one hundredth the size of India routinely pick up gold and silver medals?

The truth is that nothing demonstrates better than sports our incredible ability to accept marginalisation without a perceived loss of self-respect. We come back from the Olympics with a bronze medal and actually celebrate our 'victory', showering the winner with accolades and awards. If Sania Mirza makes it to the first hundred in tennis international rankings, we are delirious with joy, and convert her overnight into a national star. It is enough for us that one of us has actually gone so far as to play once against real champions like Serena Williams.

But if we have lost the race in sports, we have taken to the politics of sports like fish to water. However badly we may be doing in a game, the elections to its controlling body are fought with utmost seriousness, with candidates working for months on their support base, and national political parties involved in the outcome. There are often more political factions in sporting organisations than there are players. Those in controlling positions may know less about the sport but they are always fully briefed about who is supporting whom in the politics of sport.

A day before the India-Pak game last Sunday, the correspondent of the Financial Times in Delhi called me to seek my reaction to the fact that the organisers had issued as many VIP passes as tickets for the ordinary man. I told him he should not be surprised because Delhi is indeed full of VIPs. I was delighted later to read that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at least does not think he is one. He paid for his ticket to the game, and, apparently wanted his aides to do the same.

(A Stephanian, Pavan Kumar Varma is a senior Indian diplomat and presently Minister of Culture and Director of the Nehru Centre in London. Author of several widely acclaimed books likeGhalib: the Man, the Times and the recently released Being Indian, he will be writing the column Hyde Park Corner, exclusively for HindustanTimes.com)