At the age of 15, I learnt a harsh lesson that has stood me in good stead since then. I’d largely grown up in a sheltered environment till I went to a boarding school in Rajasthan. In this dry and hard place, it didn’t matter if you had won an argument logically. If the other guy was senior to you or bigger than you, you would get hit for talking so much. Honesty, fair play and sportsmanship were words that were drilled into us every day, but reality often fell short of these concepts.
Joining school, I discovered squash and became reasonably good at it. There was one tournament, called ‘ladder’, where players were placed on the ‘rungs’ of a ladder and each player challenged one of the players above him to a match. Whoever won retained or took over that rung in the ladder. The matches were played between the boys, with no teacher present as referee or umpire. One time I found myself against a boy who was a far worse player than me, placed way below on the ladder. Let’s call him Raj from north India. I was surprised that Raj had challenged me because I had seen this big, lumbering guy play and there was no way he could imagine he was going to beat me. Except, I hadn’t factored in that Raj subscribed to a very different sporting philosophy than mine.
A lesson learnt
As soon as the game began (remember: no referees, no witnesses), Raj began to cheat. Shots of mine that were clearly in were out according to him, and vice versa. He would shamelessly obstruct and refuse to play the point again, and then claim obstruction when I was several feet away from him. To my utter, naïve shock, Raj kept shouting, hectoring, shoving, breaking all rhythm, cynically and deliberately deep frying my head. By the time we finished I was exhausted, my so-called skills were in tatters, my feet leaden; I just wanted to be out of that court. Our shouting match continued beyond the game and the real lesson was what happened when I complained. The squash teacher told us to sort it out between ourselves “like men”. Raj’s housemaster backed him. My housemaster refused to support me (maybe I’d given him too much lip). Finally we had a rematch, with a teacher in attendance, and where I should have easily overcome the oafish Raj, I barely scraped through with a thin, bruising win. Undaunted, Raj carried on in the ladder, ending up very close to the bottom, just about where he had started. I, on the other hand, left the competition, my mental buddhi completely disintegrated, as Steve Waugh might put it.
When I told an older cousin from Ahmedabad about this whole incident, he came up with a bunch of choice Gujarati epithets and descriptions for Raj and his modus operandi. The following are reproducible here: ‘Anchai ’ or ‘ Anchas’ means to cheat, to dishonestly break agreed upon rules; ‘ chotto’, as in ‘ ey chotto maanas chhey’ , adds the element of open goondagiri to the cheating — it means to be a thuggish cheat; ‘ naffat’ (both a’s short), which is my favourite, means to be brazenly shameless; and ‘ naffat’ i s elegantly overlapped by ‘nagai ’, which is shameless nakedness, and ‘ naago maanas’, which is a man used to brazenly showing his nakedness. So, a sentence could go: ‘ Ey naffat chotta-ey farithi anchai kari ney potani nagai dekhaadi’ : that brazenly shameless thug once again showed his nakedness by cheating openly. If there is more than just one person — if Raj had an accomplice — you would add the plural: ‘ Ey banney naffat chottao-ey ’, which means ‘Those two brazen thugs...’
Playing into the opponent’s hands
The lessons I learnt — some of which I’ve had to take refresher courses in, from time to time — were something like this: in any argument, if one person is willing to throw all decency and civility into the garbage, then the person clinging on to notions of fair play will always be at a disadvantage. Being at a disadvantage, or even losing, should not mean that you respond by also throwing your civility and sense of justice on the rubbish heap. If you do this, you are playing into the hands of your opponent, who is much more practised, far better at the dirty games than you are. In sporting terms, you don’t want to play the game your opponent wants you to play, you want to make him play the game the way you want it played.
From sports and war analogies this also extends into the moral and ethical fields. If you go down into the dirt in which your opponent revels, you become what you are opposing and then there’s no reason for you to exist as an entity, sporting, moral or political. The ones who are naffat , the chottas , the nakedly aggressive ones with their grotesque agendas will appear and reappear across life in different costumes, bearing different flags. The tough task is to fight them off without being subsumed into their way of operating or into their world view.
