I may or may not have unleashed the drunk sailor in me on Sunday. I'm not proud of it but blame it on my accident of birth. I'm an Indian and I cannot keep calm. Especially when there is a cricket match on. World Cup (men's) finals at that. Let me admit, I may be the problem. And everyone like me is part of the problem India seems to be grappling with for decades, or even centuries.
Our inability to chill.
With the wisdom of hindsight, it can be easily surmised that the Indian cricket team lost the match even before the toss was lost. That's what makes this loss even more biting. How does the most formidable team India has ever seen collapse like this on the most important day of their sporting lives? How did the collective skillset of Virat Kohli, Shubman Gill, Mohammed Shami, Mohammed Siraj, Kuldeep Yadav, Jasprit Bumrah & Co and the wall-like leadership of Rohit Sharma and Rahul Dravid fall flat? We were soaring high throughout the tournament, our dominance absolute and unchallenged. And then we lost, and lost badly. Was it just a bad day or something deeper than that?
I propose that the Men in Blue were afflicted by a pervasive, oppressive sense of neediness. We are a needy people. We need. Even when we have plenty. We may be teaching the world the principle of 'simple living, high thinking' but we are a desperately needy lot. And what we need the most is validation. Our sense of being needs to be reassured all the time. We can't savour victory without reassurances about our greatness. We are always out there to prove a point. Even after we have made that point. We are never sure of our most tangible achievements. It's as if our achievements and glories are tenuous as tendrils that even the mildest draft threatens to shake away.
Not just our unseemly bellies, but even our psychological make-up seems to be still defined by our ancestral feast-and-famine cycles. Even while feasting, we cannot savour anything because we are scared of being famished the next moment. We are also prickly about being reminded of our famished days. We are nervous. What kind of civilisational superiority can we claim if our insecurity overshadows our feats?
The Australians, on the other hand, brought the ease of Bondi Beach to the finals. We can call them the denizens of the 'convict colony' pejoratively to ease our sourness but that doesn't change the fact that the real differential was the attitude, not the game. The Aussies owned the ground. Pat Cummins was able to keep his 'big crowd go silent' promise because he discovered our raw nerve. Neither the team nor the spectators wanted or even expected Australia to put up a fight. We were rooting for a complete and immediate surrender. So, the early wickets triggered our insecurity. By the end of the first innings, this insecurity was almost peaking.
"What if?" The question hanging in the clouds of collective sighs over Ahmedabad.
And this was the moment the defeat became imminent.
What if the bowlers don't get their line right?
What if we don't field well?
What if we don't get early wickets?
What if Australian batters don't rely on their stars?
What if Shami and Bumrah don't work?
What if Siraj's bowling doesn't turn out to be magical?
What if, what if...what if!
What if we lose?
And we lost.
We also lost because we are rarely taught about losses. We tend to take everything as a referendum on our 'greatness'. We want to be great all the time, whether we put in the work or not. We feel that the world owes the throne of greatness to us. We are stunned by the weakest hint that it doesn't. We lose our ability to do even the bare minimum when 'greatness' is not part of the equation. Hence, the crowd in Ahmedabad capitulated even before the team did. The stunned silence at our bowlers being brutally hit by Travis Head exemplifies it.
Travis Head kept his calm and took Australia past the finish line. Photo Credit: AFP
In most Indian households, children are egged on to do well not because it will be a source of joy but because the alternative is dreary, dismal and death-like. There's always someone out there to get you. And get you they will! Unless you…(insert suitable verbs and adverbs). We are taught to always look over our shoulder. There's always a shadow lurking behind us, like in TS Eliot's poems. We often sacrifice good for great. Pursuing greatness, we don't even stay good. In our beginning is our end.
This Indian cricket team is inarguably the best. They need to shed the need to prove it. And we, the fans, need to eschew the need to pressure them to prove it.
(Nishtha Gautam is a Delhi-based author and academic.)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author.