The Hindu : From the good to the great: the Srinath journey

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Mar 12, 2003

Sport

Sport - World Cup

From the good to the great: the Srinath journey

By Nirmal Shekar

He is a good man. You don't have to be his best friend to know that. Javagal Srinath is that sort of a good man. He radiates goodness and just looking at him you are sure that his heart is as pure as a mountain stream in the Scottish Highlands and as big and precious as the Kohinoor.

If he did not have the ability to hurl a cricket ball at commendable speed and with such wonderful accuracy and skills, he'd probably have ended up at the Infosys complex in Bangalore, and after a hard day at work, you can imagine him catching a quick shower and stepping out to listen to a discourse on the third chapter of Bhagavad Gita in the neighbourhood community hall.

Srinath is a pacifist who has been pushed into the war zone. Whether you believe, like George Orwell, that sport is `war minus shooting' or not is irrelevant. But competitive sport does have all the elements of a skirmish. And Srinath is something of an outsider in the battlefield.

Even when he throws his arms up in triumph after a strike, even when he is all pumped up, there is not so much a raw edge of aggression in his gestures as the merest hint of happiness that his skills have been rewarded. It is the honest smile of an essentially honest man whose dedication and excellence have been rewarded with a promotion at the office.

In my mind, it is Srinath who is the finest representative of Indian cricket. Read finest as "most fitting" and "most appropriate". The reason is simple. Cricket is essentially a middle class sport, driven by market forces and hyped by marketing messiahs whose target audience is the middle class. And Srinath, more than any other player in the side, epitomises honest urban Indian middle class values.

You might say why not Sachin Tendulkar? My answer is No for a simple reason again. Tendulkar is far too gifted, a genius of the top order. He represents us, yet he doesn't represent us. Through honest hard work and athletic skills, middle class kids can hope to become a Srinath. But they can only dream of becoming a Tendulkar.

A Tendulkar happens once in a century, perhaps twice if a country's sporting culture is that rich. On the other hand, Srinath is Mr. Average and Mr. Excellent rolled into one, the average employed here in the sense of an Everyman and not in derogatory fashion.

As for someone like Sourav Ganguly, he has the arrogance and bearing of a privileged upper middle-class boy, which he was when he took to the sport. He can never be the most appropriate representative of the Indian middle class in a sport that is a middle class religion in this country.

It is in the fitness of things, too, that Srinath should have happened in an era when the Indian middle class has made its biggest strides since Independence. The best of the middle class have left their mark everywhere, from the NASA to the Silicon Valley to the IITs and the board rooms in the corporate offices of this country.

And a vast majority of the successful ones have found their place in the sun through essentially honest means, through sheer hard work and perseverance. On the cricket field, Srinath represents all those values, all the values that the Indian middle class has sworn by.

And, yes, he is a good man, as good as they come in any sport in an era when goodness is being burnt to ashes in the heat of competition in the trenches of sport.

In another era, an era when sport was sport and players were mere players — not like now, when a sport like cricket is religion and the best of players are demi-Gods — Ramanathan Krishnan, the best tennis player India has produced, was very much the Srinath of his times, in terms of the values he held dear and in the manner in which he conducted himself on the court.

As they have often said of Srinath in recent times, so they did of Krishnan then. They said he couldn't become the No.1 (Krish came as close to it as any Indian has done, at one point in his career he was world ranked No.2) because he lacked the "killer instinct.''

Krishnan, to be sure, won more than any other Indian player at the highest levels. And Srinath has struck more then most other Indian fast bowlers at the international level. You don't have to treat your opponents like a hungry lion treats a zebra in an African jungle to win in sport. What you need to do is to merely apply your skills with tremendous focus and willpower.

But, then, if the argument is that a Krishnan or a Srinath failed to make psychological capital in the theatre of sport by choosing not to indulge in gestures of ugly, naked aggression, then perhaps there is a point there.

Then again, you can be sure that Srinath would much rather prefer to be what he is, who he is. If he has to change to achieve what he has not so far, then he would much rather not have that.

That some of the best moments of Srinath's career have come at age 33 after he was forced to `come out of retirement', is probably down to the fact that he is now free of the pressures that he shouldered as a younger man who was expected to be a match-winner for India on the bouncy, seamer-friendly wickets of Australia and South Africa.

When he finally does leave the game for good, one of the big regrets of Srinath's would be the fact that he failed to win a Test series for India outside the sub-continent or even accomplish anything as memorable as Kapil Dev did in a Test match at Melbourne against Greg Chappell's Aussies 22 years ago.

But for the good man who might have quit without ever touching true greatness, the best moment may very well come next weekend in South Africa.

If he can stretch his rich vein of form into the semifinals and final, then perhaps the good man will have a pretty good chance of being remembered as a great man as well in the context of Indian cricket.

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