Chak De India

"A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a cricket team, long suppressed, finds utterance."

I can almost feel Nehru turning in his grave after my shameless use of his historic 1947 speech to describe a cricket win, but there are times when lofty prose is needed to aptly describe monumental achievements, and this is one of them. India won the Pataudi trophy, defeating England in England, 1-0. For the cricket dabblers, statistically minded and perennial cynics, it is a result which merits little attention - India had just about pipped an opposition that wasn't the evil hegemon Australia or the old enemy Pakistan (even though no one had given India a ghost of a hope before the series). Yet for the acculuturated cricket lover, a test cricket romantic, and an Indian team follower, the magnitude of this victory cannot be dimmed. To understand these layered feelings, one has to have lived the hopes, some successes and many failures of the Indian teams of the 1990s and 2000s.

My love affair with cricket began with the '92 World Cup, all of which I watched snuggled up in blankets during a chilly winter vacation spent in Patna (like all of my vacations, really). It was a forgettable world cup for India, who lost to everyone except Zimbabwe and eventual winners, Pakistan. Yet it was also the arrival of a short, scrawny and curly haired Sachin on the One Day stage - the sight of a little 19 year old boy taking on and dominating tall, strapping, fast bowlers, beamed into millions of TV viewing homes, pan dukans, restaurants and villages brought him instant fame and celebrity. It was the simultaneous birth of the television fuelled One Day cricket as we know it (colored clothing, white balls et al) and the cult of Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar. As the great man once modestly said, "I'm the child of the one day game".

In all this razzmatazz, what was lost was India's love for Test cricket. The wham-bam-thank you-ma'am kind of instant entertainment that one day cricket provided had captured the imagination of a generation (my generation) but had also made the coquettish joys of the Test cricket format appear quaint and an anachronism. Where Pa would rave about the crease occupation prowess of Gavaskar and Vishwanath, I would sing praises of the stylish Azhar and the maverick Jadeja's hitting. Even though the rise of One-dayers are identified as cause and decline of Tests as effect, there is another mechanism at work encapsulated by an inversion of the Latin saying, "'Quod me nutrit me destruit" (What nourishes me also destroys me). One-Day cricket hasnt just destroyed Test cricket as it was known, it has also nourished Test cricket. Apart from subsidizing Tests with the millions that it rakes in (check out the difference in stadium crowds in the two forms) , it has also created a more result oriented Test match culture where 400 runs in a day has moved from the realm of the impossible to eminently probable (incidentally, one of the reasons why Dravid chose to play safe at Oval).

Adapting the framework that I have laid out to the specific case of India, certain observations about this victory come to mind. The young architects of India's win, Karthik, Dhoni, RP Singh, Sreesanth are all between 21-25 years old, about my age or older. They must have watched the '92 World Cup sunggled in their own blankets, whether in Bangalore, Ranchi, Lucknow or Kothamanglam. Their imagination must have been fired by the same SRT, whose images must have been beamed from the same Doordarshan. This, in itself, was the biggest contribution of the TV fuelled One Day game - the democratisation and spread of a sport dominated by the Bombay Boys and Delhi Dons to cricketing backwaters of Jharkhand, Kerala and Uttar Pradesh. If you include current discards Sehwag, Pathan, Raina and Kaif to this lot, what you get is a demographically more dispersed Indian team. And the long term success of Indian cricket will be built on this wide platform.

Now, coming to the second significance of this win: As a part of a long farewell year or two for the Galacticos of Sachin, Dravid, Ganguly and Kumble, this win on English soil after 21 years is a culmination of a golden generation who have been part of many almost there moments together. There have been the memorable ODI successes like the 93 Hero Cup, 97 Titan Cup, 98 Sharjah Coca Cola Cup, Mini World Cup win in Dhaka, reaching the finals of 2003 WC but the disappointments are too many: 12 ODI tournament finals without a win, 96 WC semi-final, 03 WC final whitewash and the biggest of them all, the 07 WC disaster. If the ODI record is chequered, the Test record has recently become better, without the success that should have accompanied it. On nearly every occasion when India were poised on the brink of an overseas Test win in the 1990s, they were thwarted - by the weather (Wanderers '97 against South Africa), or by their own tendency to crumble (Barbados '97, chasing 120), winning a solitary Test against Sri Lanka in the 39 Tests they played. In the 2000s, this trend was reversed, with India's wins abroad being only second to Australia yet they caught an even worse affliction: of losing the next Test after a win (against England, Australia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, South Africa and even West Indies) resulting in the only outside the subcontinent win last year in West Indies.

Even though India's golden generation has achieved a lot - a WC final, stopping the Aussie juggernaut in Tests and nearly beating them at home, defeating Pakistan in Pakistan, what it has finally done is convincingly beat a good non-Asian team in foreign conditions. The nation had achieved Independence from the foreign domination 60 years back. The cricket team has taken its time.

P.S. Check out Sachin's pic to know what I mean.

Globalization and the 'New Bollywood'

My new fangled tendency to theorize about Bollywood seems to have finally caught some attention as I realised when asked to write an article on it for The Beaver, LSE's student newspaper (if you can call the back page trash that regularly appears in it, 'news'). The occasion is India Week, an annual event on the LSE itinerary when everyone who ever had a brown ancestor suddenly discovers their Indianness (okay, maybe the other occasion is when Shilpa is called "Shilpa poppadum" on Big Brother). I guess I'm being unfair to the whole jamboree - it does have after all have sessions like 'How to wear a Sari'.... Anyway, not to digress further, The Beaver decided to have an India specific issue and yours truly wrote an article for it. Here it is:



“I don’t like the term Bollywood. We are the only surviving industry to Hollywood.….If you’re the only survivor to say Goliath, its nicer to be called David instead of lets say Boliath”
- Shah Rukh Khan

The adjective ‘arrogant’ is often used for Shah Rukh Khan. Yet, as Baadshah of Bollywood, he often finds himself in an ambassadorial role and tends to be more measured in his responses when they are representative of Bollywood or India. The comment in question, apart from being inaccurate (Latin American, Hong Kong and Chinese film industries are still flourishing) is, in many ways emblematic of the new confidence that a bold, young, consumerist, middle class India now possesses. In fact, if anything is a barometer of this confidence, it is the changing character of Bombay films from 2000 onwards.
It has been a longstanding criticism of Bombay films that they are genre ambiguous ‘masala’ films which are a potpourri of action, romance, drama, comedy. To see the character of a hoodlum involved in a street fight break out into song in the next scene may appear jarring to a new watcher of Bollywood films but is normal for a viewer acculturated to these movies. Add to the mix unnecessary songs and litany of characters and Bombay films begin to appear positively bewildering for a recent convert. When questioned about this aspect of Indian cinema, famous script writer, Sutanu Gupta said:

“(Indian) audiences have a very set belief in the kind of entertainment provided by cinema – they should see part of family life, romance, songs; they want everything. At the same time, they hate hodge podge films. They want to know whether it is an action film, a thriller, revenge or a ghost story or love story. It’s amazing!”

Despite this strong sense of what Indian audiences want, there has been a noticeable evolution in every aspect of Bombay films in the past decade or so. Where this trend has been the most noticeable is with the themes of recent movies. The run-of-the-mill boy meets girl, dances around trees and bashes up the bad guys routine has given way to more mature and thought provoking subject matter. Symbolic of this change was Rang De Basanti (2006), with its unsettling story about the political awakening and radicalization of jaded urban youth. Another lesser known 2006 film, Being Cyrus, completely in English and boasting of an A list star cast was a bizarre black comedy which defied convention and shocked audiences bred on morality tales. Ab Tak Chappan (2004), armed with the tagline “Doctors cure, engineers build, I kill” was a songless (yes, the unthinkable has happened!) film inspired by a real life Mumbai cop who, as an ‘encounter’ specialist shot dead 56 criminals. Omkara (2006), an adaptation of Othello to Uttar Pradesh’s rural milieu continued the process set in place by the same director in his equally brilliant Maqbool (2003), which adapted Macbeth to the setting of a Muslim gangster’s home. Raincoat (2005), inspired by O. Henry’s short story Gift of the Magi broke down the doors of screenplay structure in Bombay films by limiting the action of the whole movie to just one room of a dilapidated house where the two protagonists, once lovers, discuss the trajectory of their separate married lives.

It can be safely said that Bollywood is undergoing a period of experimentation when its filmstars, directors and musicians are no longer afraid of their own audiences. The cause for this new found boldness is pure economics. The purchasing power of young, urban, middle class Indians has increased quite dramatically in the last decade. This is the class which seeks to wear the same clothes, own the same gadgets and demands entertainment in the same manner as their counterparts anywhere else in the world. Cashing in on this phenomenon are sprawling urban multi-screen theatres with ticket prices starting at five – ten times their single-screen country cousins. This has meant that films no longer need to have universal appeal to recover costs of filmmaking or even make profits. Add to that the even higher spending capacity of the burgeoning Indian diaspora and its willingness to lap up all that Bollywood has to offer and then one begins to understand why Bombay films are changing. To put it simply, Bollywood no longer needs the India which cannot pay for it. It has 2 billion viewers from Morocco to Malaysia who more than make up for that.

Perhaps it is inaccurate to say that Bollywood has changed. To say that it has globalized is closer to the truth. And with this globalization, have come stories which are localized. It is a strange dichotomy which needs to be preserved if David has any chance of slaying Goliath.