You Win Some, You Lose Some!
Sunday, 19 November 2023 just wasn’t India’s day. After dominating the tournament for a month and a half, it emerged second best in the finals of the cricket World Cup. Even so, there was little justification for the despondency that set in all of us in the aftermath of the game. Now that emotions have cooled, we may find that there is much to celebrate and much to learn from this grand event.
India may have lost the World Cup, but it won the tournament. This was because it was by far the best team that competed. Quite apart from its 10-1 record, it had the best run rate. Virat Kohli scored the maximum number of runs and fours; he also made the most fifties. Shami, had the best bowling figures, besides the the largest number of five-wicket hauls. But the law of averages was bound to catch up sooner or later and it did.
Much more significantly from an economic and sociological point of view, on display in the Indian team, throughout the tournament, was a bewildering diversity- a testimony, if at all one was needed, of upward mobility that now exists in our country, now slowly but surely turning it into a huge 350 million strong, expanding middle-class economy.
In stark contrast, I remember, when amongst much fanfare, India recorded its first series win in England more than fifty years ago. The achievement was remarkable because the talent pool available then was so small. I recall my friends and I noticing that about half the team came from Mumbai.
Over the years, cricket has lost its elitist character: current Indian teams are selected on merit from a much larger pan-India talent pool, with many players coming from very humble backgrounds. Ravindra Jadeja’s father was a watchman in Gujarat; Siraj’s, an auto driver in Hyderabad; Kuldeep Yadav’s, a brick kiln owner in Kanpur; Rohit Sharma’s, a caretaker of a warehouse in Mumbai who could not even afford school fees of a few hundred rupees a month as school fees for his talented son! All these cricketers and many like them, hailing from many different tier two, three and four towns all over the country have done the country proud.
The same story has repeated itself in profession after profession. 10,00,000 young men and women, for example, take the civil services annually; about 0.1 per cent succeed. The new tech-savvy entrants are again from small towns and villages spread across the country, unlike in earlier times when selected candidates were mostly drawn from graduates in humanities and social sciences from elite colleges in metropolitan cities.
In cricket, the credit for the transformation can be credited to the much-reviled Lalit Modi who played a major role in creating the IPL. This league created a belief in parents that there was a career in cricket for a talented player, even if he missed making it to the national team. For the rest, the change could largely be attributed to the higher rates of growth resulting from the economic reforms of the nineties. These generated greater employment opportunities which in turn created a new aspiring and upwardly mobile middle class. The cricket field is thus a metaphor for and a reflection of a larger social reality.
As for the loss itself, we could all benefit from the advice of a charioteer guru to his favourite disciple on an ancient north Indian battlefield: your right is to action only, Lord Krishna advises Arjuna, not to the fruit thereof. Therefore, perform your duties, he exhorts, relinquishing attachment, and be indifferent to success or failure.
We may all find it easier to come within “our zone of excellence ” and achieve success when we don’t feel pressurised. Perhaps it was wrong on our part to hype the event and weigh down our players with a billion expectations. The Aussies had no such problem!
(The writer was Chief Commissioner of Income-tax and is the author of the Moral Compass- Finding Balance and Purpose in an Imperfect World, Harper Collins India, 2022)
