Indian Heroes --- written in Nov 2006

Today's useless worry: We Indians don’t respect our heroes. I saw this headline on one of the online newspapers and it just touched me. It is true and in my view one of the biggest reasons that we will never be able to really command respect. We hold our leaders (in any field) in a very high esteem but only till they hide their "humanness" from us. It is almost like they have to be gods to be respected (or they should be respected by the rest of the world before we can give them a shot at it). As soon as a great leader shows his human face we do not waste a moment in bringing him down to earth (and below). Latest case in point, Ganguly's exclusion from the playing 11 (well... 12 or 11.5…whatever). I keep saying that rather that excluding him so unceremoniously the Indian cricket board could have given him a chance to "voluntarily" step down or retire. But looking back at the situation I feel that even doing that was being unfair to the most successful captain in the history of Indian cricket. Not to forget, he has been one of the most successful batsmen we have ever had and an above average bowler too who got us out from a many a tight situations. Considering the quality of talent that is getting a chance to play in Indian cricket today, Ganguly certainly deserves a place. What happened here was exactly the thing that I am talking about. For the duration that Saurav was a God in cricket in a way that he could stand up to the most aggressive teams in the world and put India on the list of serious contenders for world cup, we were singing songs about his greatness. But as soon as he lost a couple of series and began showing his frustration publicly, he was no god anymore. And as far as India is concerned, he never was great. We shoved him aside like he is a nobody. There is no doubt in my mind that great people have personalities that make them great. Greatness is a sustained state of behavior and external stimulus may be able to ruffle it but great people always do great things and are out of league of an average person. So Ganguly will continue to be a great personality since he was that way before we spotted him and we did not give him his personality when we picked him for the Indian team. Similarly we cannot take it back from him. But what is lost in the whole process is the self-confidence of an average Indian. We lost one more ido whom we could look upon for confidence when facing the tough competition of today's world. We could say that if MK Gandhi, Ramanujam, S Ganguly and Aryabhatta could emerge from India and show the world that we deserve a unique place in the world, so can we. All the other names that I mentioned above (MK Gandhi, Ramanujam and Aryabhatta) sustain their reputation as "great people from India" since the west agreed that they were so. There has never been an internal effort from within India to recognize greatness. We want to pick and choose extraordinary people and then wait for them to prove their worth, not before us but before the western world. And in the process they seem to show even a hint of normal human behavior we treat them like dirt. I do not know who in his right mind can captain Indian team in near future and give it all he has got without worrying about that fact that greatness in India is temporary until certified by the rest of the world.

As long as we depend on others to tell us what we can or cannot do well and who should do it, I do not see India as a nation having its own way with the world. I know that things are going great right now for India but we should not forget that we are doing well because we have been chosen to do well by others. And as long as our well being serves the world interest we will be doing fine, but what after that? We need inspirational leaders and we cannot get those if we keep digging their graves ourselves. Though cricket is something that touches me deeply this story will be true for any other field. Just change the name of the person. Some examples: Jagmohan, Vajpayee.... <>