Eyes wide shut

The Indian cricket team is back, having lost to Sri Lanka and Bangladesh in the qualifying rounds of the World Cup. Naturally, fans are furious.
There is nothing as frustrating as a hero who won't win, or a cause that cries shy of celebration. The media planners who have sunk nearly Rs 400 crore in spot ads are a stricken lot.
Who wants to associate a product with a bunch of men whose posterior is increasingly more familiar than their anterior to a billion viewers as they punt back to the funereal pavilion only moments after making their padded entry?
That Indian cricket has entered a lean season must come as a nasty surprise to most of its fans.Two even died of shock. Yet the truth is that this was a crisis in the making for long.
Till very recently, India ranked fifth in the ICC ratings. This is another way of saying that India lost every second match it played.
Its percentage of win at home and abroad in Tests and ODIs in the last five years is less than 55. Nearly half the time then we are watching India lose, no matter how expensive our home theatre system is.
Nevertheless, in our minds both the sport and its blue-clad champions are winners. The image of the game in our minds has no relation to the reality on the ground.
And the reality on the ground is that we are a mediocre cricketing nation. The World Cup debacle shocks us because of our congenital reluctance to face truth.
And the nature of that truth relates as much to our second rate performers as to the collective predilection of a fanciful nation for mythologising.
We tend to prefer fiction to fact, image to reality, myth to history. Earnest misrepresentations of wishful thinking as fact, as the New Zealand poet C K Stead described the new virtual world.
Cricket is a case in point. The compulsive lionising of Indian cricketers as icons or product ambassadors lend them an aura of invincibility.
A kind of robotic beatitude in blues. This is not so much a uni-lateral gaming construct on the part of the media as it is a consensual act of society at large.
We want desperately to feel good, and we have deigned cricket as our official source of good feeling. Having identified our sport, we proceeded to attribute every virtue to its players as shown in many ad campaigns.
Naturally, expectations from our heroes are high. And we talk cricket all the time, on TV and off it. It's as if as long as someone some-where is talking cricket, it is as good as cricket itself.
The interminable discourse alone intimates the proceedings with immortality. So long as the players are off the pitch, the myth that we have made out of our minnows does good all round.
We are happy, for instance, when Sachin Tendulkar signs a million dollar deal and drives a Ferrari.
We need a role model in these mindlessly material times, and since we can't — or won't — bring ourselves to tell the youth to grow up and become like, say, Medha Patkar, a cricket star like Tendulkar or Rahul Dravid seems admirably to suit that requirement.
The trouble is when the visored hero marches out on to the middle and gifts his stumps to the first straight ball. Between the image and reality falls the shadow.
This World Cup is proof that it's not just Indian cricket that needs overhauling. It's the way we look at life. There is a widening gap between what is, and what we choose to see.
What is, is a sport that for long has run out of gas. The facts speak for themselves. But what we choose to see are 11 heroes who can't lose. Which is fiction. The crisis in Indian cricket is one of perception.
Illusion has been sold as reality. What is wrong is not just the way we play the game, even if we manage to win a series against Bangladesh in future.
What is wrong is our take on the sport as well. We may sleep cricket, breathe cricket and live cricket. Unfortunately we don't play cricket well enough.
The question really is, can we live with it?