An open letter to MS Dhoni from a hater

Hi Mr.Dhoni,

There have been plenty of occasions for me, in the past, to address you.This one, as India bows out of the World Cup Semi final, shall be the most appropriate for a Dhoni hater like me to do that. A Dhoni hater, as regarded by the ‘true’ lovers of the game,  are haters of the Indian team as such.They suppose that we are now celebrating India’s exit out of the tournament out of so much hate for you.I don’t have the time for them as to exonerate myself from the ignominy. Let us remain traitors, as such.

I actually wanted to address on the occasion of you, completing 100 wins as the ODI captain. I am your hater and I cannot unfetter myself out of my strong impressions on you to come out and congratulate, on such a humongous achievement. Enough said.

As I can see the whole of India, rarely in its 65 year long history, cutting across divisions, from a Brahmin to a Dalit, from a Christian to a Parsi, from a Kashmiri to a Kannadiga, from a CEO to a municipality scavenger, from a RSS-man to a Naxal sympathizer, as though in pursuit of an Alexandrian conquest, aligning behind a single individual.That is behind you. The social media likens you to a Rajnikanth or Ajith Kumar and not a single Kamal Haasan fan or a Vijay fan seem to be offended by it. Even during the India-Pakistan wars of 1971 or 1999 or the Indo-China war of 1962, did the nation display such unbreachable solidarity. Cricket, and (unfortunately) cricket alone has been succeeding in uniting India.

Therefore, in some ways, you are the privileged individual who symbolizes Indian unity.This is not to say that you are the first or the only one to conjure this sort of unprecedented euphoria. But, for people who are less than 30 years of age, like me, the Dhoni cult is something that is remarkably peculiar.(and for haters like me, obviously abhorrent)

In 2004, on a hot afternoon, a lanky,unattractive, long haired boy wicketkeeper was reported to be tearing the Pakistani pace battery to smithereens. He was said to be a MS Dhoni. “Enna da peru, Dhoni, kappal nu??” was my first reaction on hearing your name. You had ended up scoring 148 in an ODI. A few months later, during a Diwali eve, India lead by my Rahul Dravid, was chasing a mammoth 290-something against Srilanka in a home ODI series. I was talking with my relative that India will lose if Dravid loses his wicket ( I don’t remember Sachin playing the series, may be he was out on an injury) as we were losing early wickets. He replied immediately, “Dhoni irukaanla??” I saw you walking out of the pavilion to take strike. I went out, having no interest to watch India lose. After coming back, he beaming at me, “Dei India won”.

“Oh , enga thala evlo adichaaru?”

“183 da”

“Oh mass ah?”

“Dei Dhoni da”

“Avan evlo adichaan?”

“Dhoni than da 183 not out”

The next day newspapers carried an image of you holding the cricket bat with its handle to the crowd and the other end tucked within your elbow. It was your pose after hitting the winning runs. It was like seeing a ‘Predator’ Arnold Schwarzenegger posing with his AK-47.

This is precisely why the Dhoni cult is so peculiar to us.We still cannot divorce that old unforgettable image of yours from what you symbolize today.But there is a question, has India not witnessed a bigger cult formation before?Is Dhoni a bigger star than Sachin Tendulkar?

Sachin Tendulkar, many may recount, was a legend even before people of my age, had learned that an ‘over’ in cricket consisted of six deliveries. Sachin, to us was born with the halo around him. For you,we built it.Sachin was the cricket equivalent of the Superstar Rajnikanth. Mr Dhoni, you don’t have a cinema equivalent yet.

Inspite of all this, I still have serious reservations against you. I would have anyday rooted for your promotion up the batting order, to shepherd the team in difficult circumstances ,atleast when the Indian team was trying to regroup as a unit post the retirement of its ‘Fab Four’.I would still go to great lengths in defending my stand that you were the worst test captain India ever produced.Is it really unfair, to expect from a captain who has 3 ICC limited over trophies in his kitty, to reproduce atleast half of his virtuosity in the longer format of the game, especially in overseas conditions when it is all the more needed? People forget test debacles and try to defend you with your fabulous exploits in the ODIs which is precisely the act of burying the fully grown pumpkin under a small mound of rice. You were not interested in test cricket, just like these people are and were glad to retire when you felt you had a replacement. Isn’t test cricket, as my Dravid says, life source of cricket? You were a Basha in ODIs and a Lingaa in test cricket. Let me stop here, sensing my susceptibility to become interminable whenever I am asked to accuse you.And more importantly, what I have already said against you so far, is too much, for this occasion by any standard.

As a fan of cricket, (not a fan of Indian cricket, because my patriotism steadily declined to nought post the retirements of Rahul and Sachin), I am nobody to pass a judgement on India’s show in the CWC 2015, as absolutely clinical and uncharacteristically sublime, given the pathetic overall form of the team in recent months.

And personally, I felt that your hand in India’s stellar showing was all there for us to see. I genuinely admit, that there were moments in this World Cup, where I felt, my long dead patriotism was showing signs of resurrection before being overpowered by the Semi final disaster.

But, Mr Dhoni, none can deny your admission to the canon of Indian greats and there will be so much hate for all the love you will manage to win in the future as well. We will remain haters and we will have a reason to defend.

Now, as a captain, it will be really agonising to have lost a hard-won trophy, inspite of having outdone yourselves to retain it. But as you may see, you have so far, succeeded in building a team for the future,which is no less a marvellous and an equally thankless task. We need you to lead the team in the next edition of the WC as well.Let us hope that my next letter to you, after four years, at the end of the 2019 WC be less cold and more patriotic.

With hate,

Jeeva P.

The Fourth Class

From the little of what I have been able to understand about our educated, well paid middle class citizenry , I could split them into four broad classes evaluating them based on their political consciousness. These classes are unfortunately , not so distinct and may overlap here and there on various parameters.

The first class shall constitute the set of people who are not interested in politics or economics or even any discipline that does not help them earn an extra rupee. I express my admiration for this class ,the reason being that when you throw a political question to them , they in response, take out and brandish their ignorance proudly as a badge of honor. The second class involves people who are genuinely interested in politics and make very occasional,  desperate attempts to learn something . They are too time-constrained  to venture into these affairs since there is no contingent need for them to know .

The third class is an admirable section of people , who may be called as public intellectuals ,who have no qualms in stepping out of their domains and indulge into deep political learning to evolve a remarkable political consciousness.

The fourth class shall comprise of the set of pseudo intellectuals who theoretically belong to the first and second classes in terms of political knowledge, but succeed in masquerading as the first and only politically enlightened class of this country. It is this class which is special, that I shall talk about in this article.

THE FOURTH CLASS: WHAT ARE THEY TO ME ?

Let me begin generalization of the characteristics of this class even though there is not much diversity in them to work them into a clear hierarchy.

• ·         This class spends not more than one hour on news channels and papers and dedicate the rest of their leisure to social media.
• ·         This class has little or no knowledge on the very Indian concepts of caste, caste based reservation, license raj, strikes, secularism, Non- Alignment movement, feminism, National Freedom Movement, the Indian Partition theory but is equipped to speak for hours about them.
• ·         Since most of the aforementioned concepts have in one or the other way been ‘Indianised’ by M.K.Gandhi or Jawaharlal Nehru, they have a deep abhorrence and against these leaders and love fantasizing on conspiracy theories concocted about them by Hindu right wing groups.
• ·         This class firmly believes that India is poor because it is overpopulated and that Indian farmers have created large, unmaintainable  families for themselves and as a result commit suicide ,succumbing to their insatiable need to procreate.
• ·         This class believes that India languishes at the bottom of the table of developing countries only because of a lack of a well –built, dynamic Prime Minister who is not fettered by the compulsions of coalition politics.
• ·         This class has a sub-section of people who believe that the Muslim rulers of India were basically foreign plunderers who exploited our country and were transferring all the wealth of India to Persia and Arabia for more than five hundred years. They also equally believe that the British were no less than genuine evangelists of science, modernity and human progress who wanted to distribute the fruits of their prosperity to the barbaric, backward people of the Afro-Asian continents.
• ·         The class, as a whole believes that anyone who abstains from exercising his vote can be accused as a national traitor and that the present democratic system will help India reach unfathomable heights in the future.

MY COUNTERPOINT

I deem it utterly a purposeless exercise, in this space, to contradict or dispute the beliefs of the ‘fourth’ class and to establish through proper enquiry and analysis, an alternative outlook challenging their ideological foundations. In fact, during various casual ,verbal political discussions with these people , I have attempted to do so and failed grossly, and that was not precisely due to their overpowering erudition. These people , as I have mentioned earlier , speak passionately on the need for a utopian, rapidly modernized world without any social or economic divisions characterized by a very egalitarian distribution of wealth and prosperity. But behind this façade, there is a horrifying self-centredness that determines their political choices and beliefs. These people cannot be overcome through informed political discourse because their curtain of self-centredness shall  preclude any attempt to look beyond their spuriously formed beliefs.

A few years back, when UPA was in power, I was talking with my friend (whose upper caste origin I never related to his political belief till that very day),whom I genuinely believed to have a strong anti-Congress, anti-establishment leaning ,very similar to mine. He was so vehement in his opposition to the crony capitalism fostered by the Congress post liberalization and went on to add that , to obliterate the roots of Congress from the society , a well organised , spirited armed rebellion was necessary. I was nodding all the time in acquiescence till  he suddenly mentioned that a Narendra Modi can lead that rebellion and subvert the hegemony of Congress. I was surprised but I was able to establish with some facts that a BJP alternative to Congress was no less harmful to the country as the previous NDA regime had proved to be. I also added the tags ‘sectarian’, ‘communal’ tags to BJP during the conversation.  I was , meanwhile , apprehending the arrival of a counter-argument from him that would show the BJP in good light with the help of facts and events that characterized its seven year stint in the opposition. But the reply I received,  was shocking.  “The Congress have been running a government for Muslims for more than fifty years. The Hindu population in India has been waning ever since Independence. They brought reservation and stopped all upper-caste people from occupying Government positions and brought India to ruin. The Muslims ruled India for more than 500 years and now this Congress runs the government on behalf of them . How can India prosper ? Why you people are against ‘us’ ruling the country?”

The argument which was initially dwelling on economics and systemic failures threatened to veer into the territory of xenophobia and racism. I could not argue after that. That day marked a watershed in my understanding of public political opinion. I was able to find similar trends on various occasions with different sets of people. There were scenarios  when I had beaten some people with my argument that their beloved political dispensation was essentially pro-corporate and fascist, passing off as an egalitarian, welfare state. Their response suddenly , after so many hours of defending the system, used to be like “Yes. It may be bad. What about socialism then? Has it brought growth and development? Will it save India? Do the Russians and Chinese bathe in milk and honey? Didn’t millions of Russians die due to the Government’s policies??”

My point here is that the last question should have originated from the whole hearted acceptance of my contention that the system which they have been defending for so long, has been proving to be deeply ineffectual and socially deleterious and from a sincere eagerness to know whether a new form of government(not  a party) can change things for the better.  But it used to come out of their sudden frantic desperation to fill the holes of their darling system with the inadequacies of its supposed alternative. Walking out of the hall , everytime after a discussion, I used to get the feeling that they have not changed one bit and their “Yes.It may be bad” admission was just a passing lie . Their shattered drops of their conviction that the system is fair and just , would have regrouped and coagulated into its old firm solidity. When you meet them the next time and happen to talk about some other political development, you find that they are the same people with no noticeable change in what they think.

I do not have a problem with people like them if they openly declare that they vote for a political party only because it benefits them and there is no harm in doing so , in my opinion. But that’s the highlight of the ‘fourth’ class . They are no different from whom they vote for. They are a significant majority with whom I have long stopped talking politics. But I would be really glad to write more for them if they are willing to open themselves up for a mutual trade of ideas. You cannot speak high of capitalism all the time and remain protectionist , when it comes to ideas.