A couple of hours later, while I was still puzzling over the metaphysics of that one, I caught a match between England and Australian veteran cricket teams on ESPN. The players included Allan Border, Dennis Lillee and Graham Gooch. What a star cast. Border held the world record for most Test runs for many years. Lillee was perhaps the greatest fast bowler ever, and once upon a time held the world record for the number of Test wickets. Gooch, Wisden magazine discovered last year, scored more runs — league, county and international matches combined — than any batsman in history. Three world record holders.

Dressed in England and Australia colours, they were playing eight-overs-a-side cricket with tennis balls on a beach, in arena slightly bigger than the ones used for beach volleyball.

Every line between seriousness and frivolity has been blurred, no, has vanished. Of course, all these men have the right to make money any way they please, as long as it doesn’t break the law. Absolutely. But surely they owe something to the millions who have respected their achievements, and even idolised them? Negi is a man whose story should be in every school textbook. Humiliated and forced to give up the game after India’s 7-1 defeat to Pakistan in the 1982 Asian Games final (just one measure of the public venom directed at him: at his wedding, rowdies cut off the power supply to the venue), he returned 20 years later to coach the Indian women’s hockey team to the Commonwealth Games gold. Screenwriter Jaideep Sahni read about him in a newspaper item and was moved enough to write Chak De India. And then the makers of the film insisted that it had to be Negi who taught the actresses hockey. Negi had just been devastated by the death of his 19-year-old son, but he rose to the occasion , especially given that most of the actresses had never touched a hockey stick in their lives. Perhaps I’m getting old, but I do feel that the stirring nature of Negi’s story could be slightly diminished in the eyes of many when they see him trying to do the salsa as hard as some TV actors whose names few of us would know.

Lillee could be bowling on a beach, in informal games 24/7, and no one would think twice about it, but I did not want to watch him play beach cricket for money. Even though he was swinging the ball prodigiously. I did not want to watch, for Lillee’s sake, and for the sake of my memories of that extraordinary bowler. I did, but purely out of morbid fascination.

But anyway, that was an England-Australia game. Let’s look at India. We have ruined most of our classic film songs through remixes, whose only contribution to the originals is one or more of the following: speed up the song, underlay a synthesised beat to the vocals, or have some deep voice growl “Ooh baby” and some hip-hop nonsense in between stanzas. Our highly popular stand-up comedy contests on television thrive almost exclusively on objectionable male chauvinistic jokes, and the hosts and the studio audience laugh themselves silly at each one of them. At our political talk shows, the participants spend most of their time shouting at one another, and often the moderator outshouts them all. In our print media, we ask pretty film stars to expound on the future of the unity and integrity of the nation. I recall one of them being quizzed on who started the modern Olympics, during her run with the Olympic torch in Delhi before the last Games, and she answered: “Was it Hitler?” But her comments on global warming and world peace find space equal to that of a Nobel Prize winner.

India as a nation currently feels more confident than perhaps ever in history. But we are also a nation amusing ourselves to death. A people which brings the same rules to engagement to both Shakespeare and John Grisham, to Kurosawa and Manmohan Desai, is a disturbing proposition. Kent told King Lear: “I will teach you differences.” We must learn the differences, and our heroes must think of them too.

The writer is editor, ‘The Financial Express’