Deducing anything about India from the publicity arranged for a reality show called “Sach ka Saamna” is probably a bad idea. But the furore that followed the leak that its inaugural episode featured former Test star Vinod Kambli breaking down, as he told of how he felt his close friend Sachin Tendulkar hadn’t done enough for him when his career stalled, reveals something. Visible in its purest form is our national inability to accept that an idolised public figure could ever be less than perfect.

That Sachin’s such a nice guy is thus so much a part of our national myth-making that we can’t even accept his boyhood friend talking about his flaws. Make the fellow apologise! Nobody can say that, and besides, it must be lies!

Because, in the way we go about things, not only are our heroes nice guys, but nice guys are never capable of not doing quite enough for their friends as their friends would like them to.

It is difficult to pin down why this subcontinental aversion to criticism — or even to nuance, and shades of grey — in how we assess those we consider great should have evolved. Is it a thin skin born of the sustained humiliation of colonialism? Is it because India remains, at its heart, a society where hierarchy is all, and one doesn’t badmouth one’s betters in public? Or perhaps, and this is to me the most persuasive idea, it is the flip side of our well-known tolerance. Just as, in India, secularism suddenly becomes universal respect, here achievement means we are starry-eyed.

... contd.