The Hindu Business Line : Sportsmanlike spirit!

I had refrained from commenting in this column on all the sound and fury arising from the Sydney Cricket Test between India and Australia to allow for the dust to settle down and the picture to become clearer.

ne does not have to know the intricacies of the game to have a take on the behaviour of the dramatis personae on all sides at Sydney and in India. In brief, the whole commotion deserved to be nipped in the bud, instead of being whip ped up and dragged on for so many days at a stretch.

Not to put too fine a point on it, everybody lost his head, in total disregard of the spirit of sportsmanship. In the process, basic canons of inter-personal relations which are applicable to every situation in every walk of life fell by the wayside.

Tension and frayed tempers are part of any competitive sport, especially when the stakes are so very high and the players are painfully conscious of the eyes of the world being unrelentingly on them. John McEnroe, the famous Tennis star, often went ballistic at fellow players and the umpires.

In such a sober game as chess, there have been episodes of some players kicking chairs and tables about and marching out in a huff.

In years of yore, players were true sportsmen in the sense of taking in their stride such flashes of belligerence. Till about a decade ago, one hardly heard of any team making an issue of trading of abuses, leave alone taking the extreme step of asking for formal investigation and punishment.

If at all the insults were felt to be hurtful, or, even when a player was unduly sensitive and took something that was not an insult as one, his feelings were assuaged by the offending person withdrawing the remark and apologising with grace.

In the case of Harbhajan Singh and Andrew Symonds, the same goodwill would have put paid to the spat without the need for any kind of intervention by any third party. The question is not whether Harbhajan called Andrew a monkey.

Andrew thought he heard the m-word and took umbrage. All that was needed was for Harbhajan to say, “I never meant to hurt you, but if you feel hurt, I am sorry”. Nothing more would have been heard of the incident.

Cultural prisms

In this connection, it is as well to take note of yet another dimension to the imbroglio. Cultural prisms introduce their own distortions in the use of language.

Monkey in the Indian context is not a terribly ugly abuse: Associated with Hanuman, the great devotee of Rama, it may even be taken as having a sacred connotation.

There are many other examples which call for great care in communicating across cultures. Homely in British usage means simple or unaffectedly natural while in the US, it has the pejorative sense of being plain or unattractive in appearance. Thumbs up, perfectly in order elsewhere, is an objectionable gesture in Australia; so is crossing of legs in Indonesia.

Nonsense is a word which, when used in Bengal, will make the native flare up, whereas elsewhere it does not cause that much offence. Khiladi simply means a player in Hindi, whereas in the South, it denotes a devious, unscrupulous pe

Baal, in Hindi, meaning hair, is used in polite circles everywhere, but is offensive in Bengal. Serving banana chips is viewed as an insult to guests in that State.

Thus, cultural divide can be a source of trouble. But the sure-fire recipe in all such cases of misunderstandings is to unreservedly say “sorry”. The word acts like a magic balm and cools down the temperature at once.

B. S. RAGHAVAN