Art has long been perceived as a boom-or-bust medium: Success or failure, genius or madness, beauty or badness, talent or timidity. We reduce art to a language of duality because a middle ground – a boring in-betweenness – evokes the blue-collared ambiguity of life. A binary gaze tends to uphold the exclusivity of art. We like to believe that rising and falling is a full-time job; it has no room for the part-time digressions of living. This is also what parents imagine when their kids get into the movies or take up a sport. There is no safety net because it’s all or nothing: If you can’t be Shahrukh or Sachin, failure is the only option.
Like most sports, we imagine cricket to be composed of two categories of athletes: the Star and the Struggler. The stars are the faces of the game. Their surnames reset the cultural vocabulary of a country. They are elite, gifted, supernaturally driven humans that look like they were born to compete. When they play, sport transcends the limitations of a career: Cricket becomes an art form, and cricket fields magically expand and contract to sync with the direction of their bodies. The stars are the fairytales that kids are both inspired and fooled by.
The strugglers are the ones blinded by the light of the stars. These are the players who just can’t cut it. Some just aren’t good enough, others choose to slack. Some choose to persevere at the bottom, others quit before the field turns into a breeding ground of resentment. For better or worse, their inability to survive in the top tiers of sport is apparent. There is no doubt about their incompetence.
But the advent of the IPL over the last decade has revealed to the general public a third category of athletes: The Striver. The strivers are the players who form the burgeoning middle of the talent pyramid. They are the stories found in the rubble of fairy tales. It’s an awkward straddling of extremes: not good enough to be great and not bad enough to be hopeless.
We know they have the heart, some even fleetingly shine, yet there’s a certain randomness about their game that forces them to reside within the cracks of time. Their names become nostalgic memories: Swapnil Asnodkar, Paul Valthaty, Kamran Khan, Rahul Sharma, Manvinder Singh Bisla, Shadab Jakati, Manan Vohra, Laxmi Ratan Shukla. Some, like Mayank Agarwal, manage to pull off a last-gasp heist of fate. But the Striver, at his core, is Antonio Salieri to the Star’s Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: "If God didn't want me to praise him with music, why implant the desire? Like a lust in my body! And then deny me the talent?"
Perhaps that’s why 'The Rahul Tewatia innings' holds such allure. 27-year-old Tewatia has been the ultimate striver, shunted from one IPL team to another, barely making his domestic State squad. He has scavenged on cricket’s periphery, an integer in a playground of prime numbers. Tewatia was a struggler for the first 24 balls he faced, a star for the next eight, but at no point did he stop being a striver. At no point did he stop being the “everyman” of professional sport. At no point did he stop reflecting a country’s middle-class fragility.
When future star Sanju Samson was dismissed, one could almost hear Tewatia’s anguished mind: He killed Mozart and kept me alive to torture! 27 years of torture! 27 years of slowly watching myself become extinct. His last six sixes weren’t his own. Convinced that Mozart’s demise was his fault, it was as if he had started composing a glorious requiem mass in his head. Dismissed on the cusp of victory, Tewatia’s walk back to the dugout evoked the insanity of Salieri’s final words: "I speak for all the mediocrities in the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint."
The rhythm of Tewatia’s knock lent humanity – a riveting in-betweenness – to the lofty art of cricket. It forced the sport to celebrate the middle ground and evoke the blue-collared ambiguity of life. Watching him play was like watching the 9-to-5 everyman reclaim cricket as a career – a low-risk profession – from the clutches of princes and paupers. The explosion against Sheldon Cottrell was essentially Tewatia – formal check-shirt, neat tie, brown briefcase, tiffin box – winning Employee of the Month after years of plain efficiency.
The only difference: the world was watching. In the end, his innings doubled up as a plea to parents across the country – that somewhere between legends and laymen, cricket contains a safe and respectable space for middlers to earn their moment. That sport, like engineering or government jobs, need not be a do-or-die leap of faith. That players can simply exist on a pitch with dignity, without the burden of genius. That passion, too, has a place for the ordinary.
The two months of franchise cricket might be a welcome break for international athletes, but it’s just another hard day’s work for the rest. Strivers like Tewatia have been around for ages – for instance, the hundreds of Ranji veterans who never made it to the national team.
But, like streaming platforms for Bollywood aspirants, it’s the IPL that has freed their identity from the shackles of success and failure. Being good at being average is their birthright. The T20 ecosystem has validated them in the eyes of a nation that has no patience for low-altitude flights of fancy. In doing so, it has reversed the stigma of the striver. Striving has long been synonymous with living: a polite opposite of winning. Today, striving is synonymous with surviving: the heroic opposite of losing.
Rahul Desai is a film critic at Film Companion.
from Firstpost Sports Latest News https://ift.tt/2HYsSsf
No comments:
Post a Comment