The Line Of Decontrol

MALCOM Mclaren, the inventor and manager of the '70s music group Sex Pistols, started by selling their music more as an idea than a commodity. The anarchic notes of the group were confusing, uncreative and had no roots in rock history. But the music was so bad that people had to cock their ears and flood the concerts. They had to see and hear for themselves.

A bit like millions of Indians crashing on to ESPN to watch the home team, whose cricket mostly is so bad that you cannot but watch and wonder. You wonder a lot of things. You wonder how basically Tendulkar first came as just an idea. He was a millennium product in the making. A precursor to Brian Lara, Saeed Anwar, Sanath Jayasuriya, Shahid Afridi and even, after Toronto's last match and the Lahore game, Ejaz Ahmad.

This was before men in the commentary box, guys like Sunny Gavaskar and Ravi Shastri, turned him into an establishment cricketer and truncated his development into a commodity. They zapped him with this build-your-innings, stick-around-till-the-42nd-over kind of crap. Slowly, you saw the idea crack. You saw the enormous range of possibilities that he brought to the crease dwindle. You didn't any more feel that what was happening couldn't be predicted, that it was a movement towards a place unknown. A Benoni came just once in about two seasons.

A rebellion we had started had gone elsewhere. Now it possesses the likes of Afridi. You see in Afridi now what you saw in Tendulkar's early cameos. You see the political incorrectness, even the politics of boredom: be childish, be cranky, be everything that the old farts in the commentary box don't want you to be. In short, be onstage. Stitch your own match shirt with a fabric so thin it shows your nipple clamp.

Point is, if you are a Pathan, these things come naturally. You belong to a gene stock that's an umbrella term for others to explain your idiosyncrasies. You're born with a natural advantage. It's India's bad luck that the Jats haven't taken big to the game. Or the Surds. But attitude and the special type of aggression that springs from it are not such a fringe phenomenon mentally that the Indians have to be totally alien to it and, in the process, trail both Sri Lanka and Pakistan on the subcontinent. The Toronto victories were sedate. More due to Pakistan flawing and a wayward pitch. Our victories are never clawed from death like Miandad's last-ball six at Sharjah or massacres of the type we allowed against ourselves at Gaddafi stadium.

But we are up against a lot of uncool. We don't have the casual confidence that comes from playing from the heart that's like second skin to the Pakis. In a moment of strong introspection and confidence, the Indian team manager Madan Lal, in a private conversation with a photo-journalist, dropped this piece of amazing insight. He said, in inimitable Punjabi, after Pakistan had lost the first three matches at Toronto but with no noticeable impact on the extracurricular activities of the players or their general hip and upbeatness in the hotel lobby: "What about them? So what if they have lost? They have the confidence that they will win in the near future. They keep winning, you see. A couple of defeats here and there don't matter. But for us victories are rare." He went on to comment that if the Indians had lost the first match they would have been reluctant to come out of their rooms. And they would be slinking about in the hotel corridors with hung heads.

 That's hitting the nail on the head. You can handle a few slaughters with consummate ease but not a season flooding with them. An example is due here even at the risk of being a little incestuous. Magazine journalism thrives on the exclusive. That little something that the dailies haven't dug their nose into and chewed the bone to powder.

I had an idea at Toronto. Let's push as many Indian and Pakistani cricketers in a baseball diamond. Let the big hitters of the game have a go at minor league baseball pitchers. Organise a few baseball coaches to watch the event. Get pithy quotes from them. Above all, organise a picture with all the cricketers in one row—holding baseball clubs obviously. Afridi, Anwar, Sachin, Jadeja and Robin. Afridi and Jadeja with their cap turned back. I even had a temporary blurb in mind, the one you give before the desk thinks of something smarter: is Babe Ruth turning in his grave?

 The trick, of course, was to get the cricketers together. And an Outlook reporter, for reasons obvious, hardly inspires trust and confidence in the present cricketing fraternity. You could read in the silences and looks of the Indian players when confronted with this proposition, what new rascality is this guy planning? What new skullduggery could we unwittingly get into if we do what this scumbag asks? In the end just two Indians said yes. Jadeja and Robin. Others backed out because they had cousins coming over, had to pack, etc. On the Pakistani side a whole bunch said yes. The idea was too whacky to refuse. It was far easier to enthuse them. It would also take just an hour or two. And it wasn't that Afridi, Anwar, Moin, Saqlain, Inzimam didn't know who I was. They only knew me too well as the guy who was digging all kinds of uncomfortable things about their teammates. Though in the end Anwar backed out because of fever and others slimed out because they didn't rhyme well with the idea of getting out of the hotel bed before nine, what impressed me was the instant familiarity I could breed with them in spite of having, in their eyes, somewhat dubious credentials.

Interestingly, the two cricketers on the Indian side who said yes, Jadeja and Robin, are possibly the closest we have in terms of matching the Pakistani insouciance. And I don't think their yes was just a coincidence. They are the guys with the sneaker approach, the match winners. The Indians on uranium oxide.

But you need something contagious for others to be infected with that attitude. Maybe something like the freedom trousers I have in mind. With zippers that travel straight down the crotch and strike a line up the rear. And as you undo them all your googlies fall off unpretentiously. These are the freedom trousers. The explosion of body and adrenaline. In them you don't see red. You see only green. And you become chaos incarnate.