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One Monkey and a
pack of wild dogs
Jagmohan Singh
 In
India, it is very difficult to escape cricket. If India wins, it is
the saviour of the country and if it loses, the national honour of
the country gets sullied. I don’t like cricket but am forced to
watch them at home, listen to commentaries while traveling in buses
and trains and share joy if India wins and anger if India loses a
match.
In
an interesting reverse flick, a Sikh Indian, unlike his fellow
Sikhs, who are generally at the receiving end of racial abuse, has
been accused of hate talk. The words that he is supposed to have
used are interesting. The match referee has said that he called the
white-lipped Andrew Symonds, a “monkey”. Apparently he is supposed
to have said the same on an earlier occasion too.
Is
monkey racial abuse? My God! I have called my son, “Bandar jeha”—“you
monkey” a thousand times during his upbringing. School children who
do too much of dancing and playing are fondly called monkeys.
I
looked up on the internet to see if there is an Australian colour to
the use of the word, which we may not be familiar with. I could not
find any.
Off and on, I watch cricket on television. What comes out clearly
is that the Australian cricket team has been converted from being
professionals to a “pack of wild dogs” as leading cricket
commentator Peter Roebuck has named them. The manner in which they
conduct themselves on the field, the way they talk during the
post-game presentation ceremonies and they way they write in the
media –all in bad taste.
Who can forget the brusque manner in which Australian captain, Ricky
Ponting brushed aside the BCCI chief and the minister for
Agriculture, Sharad Pawar during a prize distribution ceremony
sometime back. Sharad Pawar himself did not want to precipitate the
issue, though Ponting was unrelenting.
Cricket is no longer a sport, it is an industry. The political
establishment, the media, the stadium owners, the advertisers, the
telecasters the sponsors and the cricket administering authorities
--all have very high stakes in the game. Why else do you think that
apart from the players themselves, nobody is worried about the fact
that the players do not get rest and play for 8 months in a year!
The moolah keeps coming.
I
am not condoning the aggressive behaviour of Harbhajan Singh or any
of his team mates. In all sport and more so in cricket in India, we
are always looking for the “killer instinct.” A five day match is a
war and a one-day match is a battle, always to be won. In case of
an Indo-Pakistan match, saner elements have to pray that the match
ends in a draw so that peace prevails in the stadium and elsewhere.
I
am happy to recall that when asked to write an essay on Cricket in
my matriculation examination, I quoted George Bernard Shaw, who
said,” Eleven fools play cricket, eleven thousand fools watch them.”
No tomfoolery this. I mean it.
9 January 2008
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