India’s day of glory
Cricket today is India’s principal sport. Where a generation ago it was largely confined to the country’s urban centres, the game has become truly national, having spread across Tier II and Tier III towns and rural regions beyond. Players from humble backgrounds are now part of India’s most promising talent pool, catching the attention of the game’s pundits at home and abroad. Players were once paid a pittance; not so now when television rights and the IPL have made the Indian cricket board the sport’s richest by far. This has meant cricketers generally are assured of comfortable fees at the first class level; at Test level the financial rewards, which include advertisements, are considerably higher, with top stars rupee billionaires, and possibly dollar billionaires as well by the time they retire. Indian women cricketers have also benefited from this sweeping sporting and social exposure.
Complacency and inertia from the game’s administrators are possible threats that could derail the immense strides that have taken place, chief among them the conservatism, and dare one say, the lack of imagination and occasionally the sheer ineptitude of selectors. The abysmal performances of the opening pair of batsmen, come hell or high water, right through the tours of South Africa, England and halfway through the one in Australia, and the persistence in persevering with them, baffled common sense and lacked any semblance of wisdom. The make or break moment in Australia compelled the team management to dispense with the services of the abysmal Murali Vijay, with his partner in incompetence, Lokesh Rahul. Mayank Agarwal answered the desperate call, lack of experience, and all, of Australian condition, performing brilliantly at Melbourne and at Sydney. Memorable times are surely ahead when Agarwal teams up with Prithvi Shaw.
Ajinka Rahane is a spanner in the works. In a desperate bid to avoid the sack, Rahane told the media on the eve of the Sydney Test that he felt good, and hence was on the threshold of a century or even double century, but produced 18 tormented runs before being put out of his misery by an express delivery from Mitchell Starc. Time surely for the precocious talent of the 19 year-old Shubman Gill, who won the under-19 World Cup, to take centre-stage. Yuvraj Singh, a wonderful batsman in his heyday, rhapsodized on Gill’s blazing gifts. The selectors took the call put him on India’s forthcoming ODI tour to New Zealand. Looking to the future, exit Rahane, enter Gill. Any stage has its exits entrances for all life’s players. There is also the talented Shreesh Iyer waiting in the wings, as is the forgotten, classy Karun Nair
Returning to Australia, India’s bowling attack earned the highest praise, and rightly so. With Jaspreet Bumrah leading the pack, and Mohammed Shami in close attendance, India’s pace attack harried and bullied Australia’s batsmen into submission time and again. That no Australian scored a Test century in a home series since 1890 tells its own tale. The spinners Ravindra Jadeja, Ravichandran Ashwin performed admirably, with Kuldip Yadav making a memorable Australian Test debut with his left arm wrist spin, returning figures of 5 for 99 at Sydney.
The first of three ODIs at Sydney ended in a comfortable Australian 34-run victory. Rohit Sharma may have scored a brilliant century, but his was a lone hand. M.S. Dhoni’s laboured 51 off 96 balls slowed the innings beyond repair: better to lose with Dhoni than win without him has been, and is, the motto. The chances of India winning the ODI World Cup in the English summer appear bleak. Dhoni’s leaden bat will be an additional burden on his colleagues, who will be expected to start in top gear with little time to play themselves in.
Meanwhile Hardick Pandya, together with Lokesh Rahul have returned to India to face charges of coarse and indecent language about women on a Bollywood TV talk show. Despite the brouhaha in sections of the media, Pandya’s Test and ODI career thus far, with bat and ball has been conspicuously mediocre. Breeding and decency are the essence of sportsmanship.
Obscurant lunacies invite ridicule
Hindutva lunacies invite ridicule and contempt in India and abroad, more so when their perpetrators seek to engage with the super heavyweights of world science, from Albert Einstein to Charles Darwin and many others, including reputed Indian scientists such as Jagadish Bose, Satyen Bose, Megnad Saha and successive generations who have specialized in fields opened up by them.
Indian Science Congresses which, in the past, attracted India’s brightest and best, while also drawing kindred talent from across continents to the country, in recent years, have been reduced to circuses of absurdist fantasy by papers passed and read by quacks and fraudsters out to make a splash with communities of the gullible and ignorant across the land. There is place for harmless lunatics in every country. America has its Creationists given to disputing Darwin, but they have had no pulpit at serious congresses of science.
Embarrassingly, an Indian university vice chancellor took issue with established, verifiable truths of Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking and Charles Darwin’s work on fossils and the evolution of life on earth, A university vice chancellor entails someone in charge of dispensing knowledge through untrammeled education rather than its adulterated copy. The Government of India’s top science adviser, Vijay Raghavan addressed the larger problem, saying that ‘the gorillas of pseudoscience ‘are huge, numerous and freely roaming the landscape.’ They include sections of the country’s chattering class, seeking relentlessly for the solace of bogus incantations. Mumbo jumbo is their stock in trade. Knowledge and its subversions are their abiding fear: enchained to spurious dogmas, they loath the free spirits of reasoned discourse.
Jawaharlal Nehru is derided and scorned for his call to the Indian people to seek individual and collective liberation from the ‘scientific temper,’ and thus to transform India, liberate her from the scourges of poverty and superstition. Indira Gandhi, true to her father’s vision, promoted science and scientific endeavour in the public space. Isn’t it time that today’s Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke out against the peddled egregious nonsense that clutter Sangh Parivar ranks. After all, he has been, and is, prompt in conveying his personal congratulations to scientists and engineers on each of India’s successful space missions, to go no further. Telling idiots that they are idiots may be the shock therapy to comatose them into deep silence. Militant idiocy with its political trappings can do infinitely more harm than musical hall buffoonery.
Scholar and wit Humphrey House
Empires in their decline are given to serious loss of confidence, as is the case in the United States, as was the case in the late 1930s in British India. The common feature was the oft quoted Humphrey House rhyme “I spy with my little eye.” What did House spy then, and what do we spy today? No surprise, it was the ubiquitous Russian agent, Soviet then, plain Russian now.
When the literary critic and Dickens biographer Humphrey House arrived in Calcutta for a spell of teaching at the city’s famed Presidency College, then a magnet for Bengal’s best and brightest, House was in some bother with the politically intrusive College administration. To be a radical was to court danger from accusation of Communist sympathies or worse, membership of the Communist party. House with his unflinching addiction to the cause of the underdog like his hero Charles Dickens, dispensed with the financial comforts of Presidency for the modest privately funded salary on offer at Ripon College. In his three years in Calcutta, House lampooned its babu Raj culture, its legion of spawned clerks and their lofty absurdity. But House also engaged with Calcutta’s intellectual life, with such iconic figures of Bengali literature as Buddhadev Bose, the poet Bishnu De, critic and scholar Sudhindranath Dutta, to whom House dedicated his book ‘Dickens and the World.’ House returned to the bowers of academe at Oxford, becoming a Fellow of one of its many distinguished instututions. He died in 1950, with decades of fruitful work left in him. Jadavpur University (in the environs of Calcutta) held a symposium on the work and legacy that Humphrey House left to the city and its teaching fraternity. His shade must be moved by the tributes of a later Bengali generation for whom he is is but a hallowed name.
House was a considerable literary figure in England. The incomparable George Steiner’s magnificent tome ‘Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, carried the author’s inscription ‘In Memoriam / Humphrey House…’
