Miscellanea/Shashi Warrier
Of cricket and Communists
At Mohali we got it right. For once we didn't indulge in our fondness
of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Austrialia, in the last
league match of the Titan Cup, fell five runs short of the number
they required to make it to the final.
In every cricket match the home side have the privilege of fixing
the pitch to suit themselves. This was one of those rare occasions
when the pitch was fixed for a good match rather than for a home
team win. But perhaps we had an unfair advantage.
The Aussies complained that the air in Delhi -- where they had the misfortune
to play earlier -- makes their eyes water and their chests heave.
Thereby they handed us a winning tactic: Play as many matches
as possible in Delhi.
Delhi's filthy air -- to which India's cricket team are acclimatised
-- is only the latest version of Delhi-belly. In the old days,
visiting cricketers spent more time in toilets than at the nets,
giving the home side a twofold advantage: The visitors would be
(literally) drained by the disease, and deprived of the practice
so essential for them to understand the pitch.
There seems little prospect of Delhi's atmosphere getting any
less filthy. Pollution aside, there will also be a greater risk
of coming into contact with one or more of a whole range of communicable
diseased. The don'ts that visitors have to follow will multiply.
Don't drink the water. Don't eat the food. Don't go out at peak
hour. Don't breathe deeply, or, better still, don't breathe at
all. And Delhi being the capital of the country, and therefore
the centre of political gravity, will continue to be a Test and
one-day venue.
I wonder what cricket will be like twenty years from now. If at
all we're still playing cricket in India in 2016, one of the two
following scenarios could well apply. The Aussies (or visitors
from any country where the air is still breathable) will, months
before any series in India, import cylinders of compressed, noxious
Delhi air -- collected at peak hour at any of the three or four
busiest traffic junctions in the city -- so that they can get
their teams started on acclimatisation programmes breathing the
muck that passes for air in Delhi.
Members of visiting cricket teams will have to spend increasing
amounts of time every day on the acclimatisation machine, starting
with five minutes and going up, over three weeks, to perhaps six
hours a day. They might even invent a cylinder that can be incorporated
into the cricket uniform. Or perhaps they'll have their daily constitutional,
a ten kilometre jog, right behind a truck with a particularly
offensive diesel exhaust.
Alternatively, they might bring -- with their own food and their
own water -- their own air. Players will call for shots of oxygen
as they now call for bottles of water. The drinks trolley will
be preceded by an oxygen trolley equipped with face masks for
players to take deep breaths of clean air from.
But this won't take care of dangers such as dengue fever and terrorists
and god knows what other serious health hazards might emerge in
our garbage-choked cities. Visitors would be well advised to come
with bullet-proof cricket uniforms rather like space-suits with
built-in life-support systems.
A third possibility recommends itself. Let's build a cricket ground
on the moon, inside a pressurized dome. Television will take care of the
audience. The low gravity can be handled by using equipment made
of lead or something equally heavy. I'm sure visitors would much
rather go there than come to Delhi.
The Soviet Union is dead and buried and out of its ashes have
arisen more than a dozen countries, each with its own history
and culture. There's restlessness in Cuba, and the question in
everyone's minds is, after Castro, what? China maintains both
its gerontocratic system and the hardness of its line, but when
it takes Hong Kong back next year will it open up just a little?
Kari Marx's ghost must be heartbroken.
The most painful thing for Marx's ghost, however, would be the
crassness of the Communist elements of the governments in Delhi
and some state capitals. To anyone who knows the numbers it's
increasingly clear that the public are being taken for a ride
by the administration. Here's why. India's real income has increased
by about 2 per cent annually in the last quarter century. In other
words, it's more or less doubled in that time.
Salaries of government
servants, on the other hand, have increased by an annual average of 6 per cent. This,
mind you, for an increasing civil servants who are neither
civil nor offer any kind of service. To say that a bunch like
this is either representative or oppressed -- or to deny that
they comprise a notably obnoxious elite -- is idiocy of a very
high order, but that's what our Communists have been saying.
As we move southwards the idiocy becomes more pronounced. We have
the 'grand old man' of Kerala's own brand of Communism,
E M S Namboodiripad, saying in public that India won Independence
thanks not to Gandhi's non-violent movement but violent struggles
after the second world war, such as the Punnapra-Vayalar uprising.
Who outside Kerala (or, for that matter, in the state) knows of
the Punnapra-Vayalar uprising?
To glorify small, local, ill-directed
revolts edifies neither EMS nor his party. But the meanness of
his vision is clear: His purpose is to enable supporters to claim
freedom fighter pension on the dubious grounds that they are
descended from participants in those 'rebellions'.
Communist parties all over have tried to catch their members young,
perhaps because they know that when the gloss comes off the idealism
they'll lose members. But EMS wants primary school children inducted
into political parties. The notion of five-year-olds following
an ideology that encourages violent means towards a totalitarian
end is enough to give anyone -- Marx included -- the heebie-jeebies.
You might not agree with Marx but you can't deny either his breathtaking
imagination or the splendour of his vision. The moment they became
part of the government in Delhi, though, our Communists lost all
contact with the Marxian vision. Unfortunately for us, they seem
to have lost all contact with reality as well.
Illustrations: Dominic Xavier
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