A Disturbing Trend
The dramatic debacle at the World Cup has revealed to me a rather disturbing
trend. I am not sure if this is accurate, and would like to be challenged, but it
seems to me that India is running out of role models. Most of the people we look
up to have been around for at least 7 odd years, if not more.

Starting with cricket, the great tragedy has not been the fact that we have lost.
The great tragedy is that we actually found ourselves in a position where we had
to turn back to yesterday's superheroes. A lot of us feel depressed at the sight
of a helpless Sachin for we have effectively grown up with him, having seen him
battle through his first two one day innings scoring a duck each and so on (won't it be an
outrage if the SriLanka innings ends up being his last, in which
case he will have a duck in his first and last innings), all this while
treating him like a man from Krypton, feeling a sense of awe at his ability to do
unimaginable things. It appears to be a highly tragic end to this amazing fairytale and I would like to remember him for the awesome 15 years through which he amazed us
and nothing else. Yet, I hate to say this, but this emotion is not good for
India. What India needs is someone who can upstage this remarkable man the way he
himself upstaged Kapil Dev who was then going through a similar phase. We have
had (apparently) false starts, like Dhoni and Sehwag and Pathan, but we just
haven't found someone who can make us forget Sachin. Yes, Ganguly, Dravid and Kumble have
had their moments, Yuvraj may be the future but they are not quite Sachin, Kapil or Gavaskar, and besides, have been around for rather long as well.

Moving on to movies, the trend becomes even more evident. All our heroes are in
their 30s, 40s and 60s. You may argue for Hrithik, but then, he's been around for
8 odd years, and well, hasn't proven himself to be an Amitabh or a Shahrukh. Not
yet, at least.

What about music? We have not found someone who can make us forget Rehman.
Shankar Ehsaan and Loy have been a good distraction, but they have not made
people cry with their genius, have they? Wonder if this is the fallout of the
Indian Idol approach, but we just don't seem to be finding artists who bring
something dramatically fresh and new.

Moving to business, where we do have reason to feel euphoric, we encounter the
same trend - we have not found a Narayanamurthy, Azim Premji or even Sabeer Bhatia in
the last 10 years.

In politics, we saw a glimmer of hope with a lot of younger, good looking, well
behaved politicians appearing around the last election. But again, no one has
really stormed in capturing everyone's imagination. Buddhadev B did seem to be
filling the gap created by the absence of Chandrababu Naidu (whether good or bad)
but he seems to have been upstaged by the overgrown complainer Mamatadi. We do
not even have an Atal Behari or a Manmohan Singh to look up to anymore. Abdul
Kalam is around, but with his tenure ending, who knows what the political scene
will look like (peering very superficially of course).

Looking into other sports and walks of life, the trend continues. We are still
following Vishwanathan Anand, Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi. Sania Mirza is
one exception, and am I thankful for that. We had our hopes in Karthikeyan and
the shooters and so on, but clearly there is scope for a lot more visibility for
these guys. For gods sake, even our commentary teams have not changed - we
launched a vigorous campaign for "Harsha ki Khoj" a couple of years back, but no
one really seems to have taken his place.

Or at least so it seems to me.

I am not trying to undermine the leaps and bounds in the Indian economy, the
Indian psyche and general standard of living (subject to the urban-rural
argument), and this is not an outburst following a general negative sentiment as
a result of the cricket. In fact I believe the overall depression is a lot
overdone since it would have been exactly the opposite had we managed to win the
game against Sri Lanka. We would have all been worshiping our cricketers for
"getting out of jail".

This is just an observation that I have made, and if it is
true, and if indeed we are entering a decisive decade, I believe we are in the
desperate need of a few superstars in the next 2-3 years, without whom our
national shoulders will droop and we will begin to lose all of this relatively
new confidence built painstakingly over the last 10 odd years. And if we have indeed been part of a revolution over this period, there should be hundreds of them lurking somewhere just waiting to emerge in the open. Or am I dreaming?
- posted by Rallix @ 7:08 AM