PRATAP SHARMA writes from Delhi: Most of India’s best cricket writing is done by non-cricket writers—try Prem Panicker, Ramachandra Guha, Mukul Kesavan—who feel no obligation to be parrots of players, administrators, advertisers, sponsors, et al.
And as if to prove the theory, The Hindu‘s political columnist Harish Khare has a scathing piece in today’s paper on India’s early exit from the World Cup, after the “unrealisitic and unjustified national hysteria” whipped up by the above worthies.
Khare makes the provocative point that India was able to win the World Cup only when a strong, purposive and self-assured Prime Minister presided over the nation’s affairs. Be that as it may, there are a couple of stand-out lines in the article.
“The 2007 defeat would be worth the national pain if we manage to underline two collective failings:
a) an almost civilisational inability to distinguish the ridiculous from the sublime, and
b) a visceral disinclination to realise that the external world will not lower its standards just to accommodate our mediocrity.”
That set me thinking on something I have been thinking for a while now. We cannot go into the second round of a “World” Cup with barely a dozen serious participants. We cannot win an Olympic medal half-way decently. We cannot pick up a Nobel Prize in medicine or mathematics. We cannot make a movie which will sweep the Oscar or BAFTA awards, or an album which will win big at the Grammy’s. We cannot write a global best-seller.
We cannot make a single product—a car, a computer, a phone, a TV set, a plane, a submarine—that the world will queue up to buy. We cannot create a single, magazine newspaper or television channel that can stand shoulder to shoulder with the best of the world. We cannot nurture a world-class University. We cannot build a laboratory or do pathbreaking research or making an earth shattering discovery. We cannot think of an Indian multinational. Etcetera.
You get the picture?
Yes, there are glorious exceptions—our philosophy, our yoga, our ayurveda, our food. But, as the saying goes, the exceptions only test the rule. Which opens up an interesting question: just how good are we as a nation and just what are we good at as a nation? And let’s not even get started on corruption, communalism, casteism, criminalisation.
Are we, as Khare suggests, a mediocre nation just wallowing in our own vomit while merrily providing the numbers for the world to gape at? Are we just a nation of telephone operators? A nation of consumers waiting to be sold to?
Why?
Read Harish Khare’s article here: Beyond the humiliation at the World Cup
An interesting question, and an important one. It’s easy to get gung-ho about how the world looks at us, but it is vital that we don’t forget why they are looking at us. Because we represent a vast market that they sell can to, and get work done out of cheaply. But beyond that what? We can’t keep banking on our past to take us into the future. But, sadly, we are doing little of note in the present to find our place in the sun. The IT, IIT, IIM chimera is just that, a chimera. Our products are run-of-the-mill. Our academics is in a mess. Our scientists are more politicking than otherwise. Our best are outside. Our movies, arts are mediocre. What we have achieved in 60 years as a democracy is not to be sniffed at, but we can’t run away from the reality that it all adds up to precious little on the world stage.
Surely, our classical music is as good as any in the western world whose encomiums Mr Pratap Sharma seems so keen to earn?
I suppose this is also an exception and continue to wallow in post-World Cup Self pity..
http://www.ibnlive.com/news/indianborn-wins-math-nobel-prize/top/37047-11.html?xml
And what does the author mean by ‘we’?
Does Albert Einstein make all the Germans in the world, nuclear physicists? Would Tom Hanks make all Americans great actors?
Its sport people. OUr national self worth is not determined by the success or failure of young men and women’s achievements in fields. Nor is it a ‘success-by-proxy’ for our own ‘failures’. Sometimes a World Cup loss is just a World Cup loss.
Our folk arts, our indigenous skills… and many such lesser known aspects of our culture are as good as any in the world, if not superior. It’s just that the way we market them, not showcasing them the way they deserve to be, which is inferior. It’s mediocrity that gets media attention (bollywood, fashion, indipop). We don’t need to denigrate ourselves even more than we already have for decades.
As a nation we only achieve .1% of what we are capable of. What ever is know to the outside world in our past, we have to nothing spectaculr in the present for the world to take note of. We are nation of billion people who don’t really contribute much to the nation. Most of them just eat & live.