Washing away the sins of making money

By M H Ahssan

Wilfred Owen’s very moving First World War poem Dulce Et Decorum Est questions the old adage that it is beautiful and good to die for your country. Owen was one of the celebrated British war poets who died very young in the war. Love for your country is a peculiar thing and as much as it does great good, it can also be dangerous. Which is why, said the great man, patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

But this is not about patriotism and its many conditions and definitions. This is about cricket. Now that the Indian Premier League is over — although the fascinating hoopla surrounding it continues — we will be thrown straight into the jaws of jingoism with the World T20 championship.

Already, we saw signs of it during the IPL itself as several television talking heads started jabbering about how the IPL was about the country, about how all they wanted was for Indian players and teams captained by Indian captains to win and how IPL had done great damage to the image of cricket which would all be sorted out once the Indian players played for the “country” in the World T20 championship. Indeed. (These are Indians generously paid by television channels as experts and analysts, well aware that a league is based on cities and that each team is made up of a mix of Indian and foreign players who are picked up in auctions.)

But how about the fact that cricket is not played for the “country”. It is played for the sport of it. And for money. Cricketers are paid by private bodies to play against one another. Yes, in these international fixtures, they play under the name of the country they come from but the State, the government, has little to do with them. (Hockey players play for their “country” and we all know how interested we are in them, pretend breast-beating about the demise of Indian hockey aside.)

Yet, we pretend. We cannot seem to accept that there is no shame in playing a sport for money. The day of amateurs in sport is long over. Even in the Olympics, once an amateur’s domain (and before that of course, a war-like event), big stars and performers make big endorsement money. So what? No one else is expected to work for free and even soldiers are paid — perhaps not enough, but that’s another matter — what could be called guilt money to fight and possibly die on our behalf.

But the minute talk of cricketers and money begins, we start to get hypocritical and sanctimonious. They are after all professional entertainers and they deserve to be rewarded for their skills and compensated for their effort. Playing cricket is not an act of charity and these days, even those who work in the social sector are compensated for their efforts.

If a parallel can be made to the arts, no one expects painters, dancers and writers to work for free. As if, had they hopefully been starving, they would have produced better work. The idea of the malnourished painter producing works of genius belongs to legend. The modern ethos is that work — even intellectual and artistic work — must be paid for. We are at that interesting crossroads in our society when we are moving away from a restricted, pseudo-socialist past to a capitalist era.

Most times we applaud our economic success but whenever there is a crisis, we tend to retreat to our comfort zone of hypocrisy. Part of the problem could be our own guilt with the amount of money we make, while we are well aware of the continuing plight of the starving millions. Cricketers become an easy target and we pull out these presumably unbeatable shibboleths like “country” to bolster our arguments. How about it’s just beautiful and good to play and leave the country out of it?

But then, perhaps, if our sports stars gave back more to society and shared their incredible wealth — as international sportspersons do — then we might be less judgmental. Next, let’s target all those fat cat businessmen and ask them to give back more. Now that will be fun and an entertaining sport of another kind.