There was much joy, hype, finger-pointing and attention-seeking, neither of which was unexpected, as India’s cricketers returned to Mumbai. As Kipling had hoped, we treat those two impostors, triumph and disaster, the same; with melodrama! And so people waited in the rain, in stifling humidity, in crowds with not an inch to move and they could not have been too different from the people who abused and heckled the cricketers six months ago. Maybe our much abused movies, with no subtle shades of character, with only black or white, know India better than the others!

The awards were welcome for this is a genuinely outstanding achievement but I’m a little uncomfortable with singling out individuals within a team for greater honour. Good teams seek to minimise, indeed to destroy, the cult of the individual. It has been a problem with our cricket and it is a touch dangerous to fan those fires. And you have to have sympathy for our hockey players who work as hard and dream as vividly as our cricketers. But they play a sport that is run by callous, indifferent people and so cricket and hockey are at different levels on the remuneration ladder. A young ambitious chef straight out of catering college doesn’t get paid the same as a young ambitious investment banker. But while private enterprise can be market driven, governments cannot differentiate between one and the other. Now if only we could confiscate hockey from the current regime, we might have happier tales to narrate!

... contd.