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Monkey business
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Sound Off! Is the outburst against the crowd’s taunting of Andrew Symonds making him out to be a special kind of victim? asks Prasanna Chandrasekharan
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India lost the one-day series against Australia, but who cares? We managed to to reduce the margin to 4-2. You’d think, looking at the celebration, that we had won the series.
It hasn’t been without its moments of ugliness, however. The crowd at Baroda showed their sentiments by throwing plastic bottles on the field. Also doing the rounds is the story that Andrew Symonds has been targeted and abused. My first reaction to the story was: “So, you can dish it out, but you can’t take it?”
Anyone would have noticed how Symonds would go up to the Indian batsmen and say things obviously not about the weather. All part of how the game of cricket is being played nowadays. Then, I see the clipping in the news that gives me pause. There was a shot of members of the crowd scratching under their arms while making rude sounds, all directed at someone not in the frame. If that was at Symonds in particular, it is shocking.
I recall an earlier incident where the crowd was badly behaved. Last year, I went to the ICC Champions’ Trophy final in Mumbai, between Australia and the West Indies. The crowd was rooting for the Windies, the underdogs. Team Australia was clinically demolishing the opposition. Glen Mcgrath was fielding at a point near the boundary, close to where we were sitting. Some people in the crowd called out to him and he politely turned and smiled. Then the calls took an ugly turn. It became, “Hey, Kangaroo, go home; Aussie go home.” I was so embarrassed, I wanted to leave right away and disown any relation to people who can do this. Mcgrath just went on playing his game. Australia won, of course. And not one mention was made of this incident.
Today, however, we are asked to take action against people who invoked a different species of animal, a monkey.
Why was being called a kangaroo not offensive? Why is being called a monkey an act of racial abuse? Is there a hierarchy that makes one animal more excusable than the other? Or is it the colour of the person who is the butt of this crudeness the problem?
What can we do about this problem of crowd behaviour? I think we need to look deeper at our education system.Today we cheer the killer instinct of the youth, the courage to take the battle to the opposition and succeed at all costs. What we are not looking at is the price we are paying for this aggression. We are creating a nation of people not especially concerned about respecting other people and their spaces. In the meantime, the sport seems to have gone out of the game.
And as for Andrew Symonds, I am sure that he has been a victim, but am not so sure that in all this monkey business, we got the true culprit.
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