Our spinners are not just those who win cricket matches for India. The best of them toil and spin in the cause of converting black into white.
Had these excellent men and women focused on the Tokyo Olympics, for example, our athletes would have returned with 100 medals, all of them gold.
They would have run the 200 metres in five seconds or thrown the discus over 200 metres. Well, maybe not actually run or thrown. But that’s what our record books would have shown thanks to the spin, and we would have to accept that. You can’t argue with statistics (or statisticians), you know.
ADVERTISEMENT
And it isn’t just current events. These gifted folk can rewrite history to show that Milkha Singh actually won his race at Rome as did P.T. Usha in Los Angeles. What is the use of having such experts on the payroll if we can’t get them to turn their attention to sports too, and not restrict themselves to economics and politics?
Virat Kohli was dismissed first ball in the Nottingham Test? Maybe the western powers thought he made zero. But we know, with our superior mathematics and our superior statisticians that he actually made a century.
Which side are you going to believe? A bunch of people in whose lexicon, ‘put’ and ‘cut’ don’t rhyme, or an ancient civilisation which invented the zero? Aggressors who ruled us for decades, or those overflowing with nationalism?
ADVERTISEMENT
For that is our statistical specialty – reducing the figures where they should be reduced, as in the case of COVID-19 deaths and exaggerating them when discussing financial handouts. Why bother to train as an athlete or economist when you can get the numbers you want by the simple strategy of plucking them out of thin air?
Why struggle to govern, or be known for governance when it is simpler to do what you want and tell the world what someone has called the “reconstructed truth”? Truth is in the mind of the beholder after all.
We owe Uttar Pradesh an apology. We believed that it was one of the worst-administered States in the country with its rapes and killings and encounter deaths and deaths owing to shortage of oxygen and overall disregard for human dignity.
Now we know better. Did you think you saw bodies of COVID-19 victims floating in the Ganga? If so, how wrong you were.
We are told that UP is a sterling example of governance. Greatest number of vaccinations, fewest number of something else, exactly the same number of a third thing that is the ideal. “Unparalleled” is the word used by our two top politicians without any irony to describe UP’s sheer sterlingness. Also “incomparable efficiency”. Also true.
Why do we scoff? Our spinners are the best in the world. Law and behold! Our alchemists know how to change base metal into gold. And that’s something we should have focused on before the Olympics. Thank god we are doing so at least before the elections.