The Karna Syndrome and Rahul Dravid as the hero

As someone who is not a fan of cricket, I never watch the game live, but I do check the scores periodically. And since growing up in India you simply cannot avoid being exposed to the game, I have a fair understanding of it, although I will be the first to admit that I am no expert. Frankly, I have no desire to be, either, as I prefer other sports such as American football or athletics. But I find that I have to respect Rahul Dravid as a true hero. We live in a time when there are few true heroes; those who are lionised by the media turn out often to be little more than tin gods with feet of clay — to mix metaphors. In fact, India does not lack in genuine heroes, but they are never the limelight. There are unsung heroes, for example Prof Eachara Warrier who waged a lonely and valiant, and finally, failing battle (but oh, what a magnificent failure it was!) to make the state come clean about what happened to his son, Rajan. He disappeared, presumed killed by the Kerala police, during the 1970s emergency. Then there was Major Shaitan Singh (Param Vir Chakra, posthumous) of the 13th Kumaon Regiment, C Company. He and his men fought to pretty much the last man in Rezang-La in Ladakh in 1962, and successfully prevented a Chinese advance on Leh. There is E Sreedharan, the man who made the Konkan Railway and the Delhi Metro a reality, in the face of what seemed like insurmountable odds. Or the unknown couple who planted 100,000 seedlings of shade trees along rural roads in Karnataka. A website http :// goodnewsindia . com / documented many such unsung heroes, although it has not been updated for a while now. But the Indian public is conditioned to think only in terms of politicians, movie stars and cricketers as heroes. There is a concerted effort to brainwash the public into mindless adulation of what I consider undeserving people. Most politicians today are only interested in fattening their offshore, numbered Swiss accounts; movie stars are obviously creations of propaganda; and cricketers — as is evident from their lack of application in the ongoing series in Britain — are not exactly stellar exemplars. [caption id=“attachment_60435” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Sachin Tendulkar (L) is the obvious hero, the flashy one who conquers all before him. But Rahul Dravid may have had the greater impact, as he has reserved his best performances for those times when his team really needed him. Punit Paranjpe/Reuters”]  [/caption] I remember an old song from the British band Jethro Tull named ‘Thick as a Brick’ wherein, in passing, they ask: “So where the hell was Biggles when you needed him last Saturday? And where were all the sportsmen who always pulled you through?…” Biggles, of course, is the much-larger-than-life aviator hero of dozens of teen-age-boy-adventure-fantasy books that I remember my friends consuming avidly back when we were in high school. So where, indeed, was Biggles? All cultures, as above, look to sports heroes as role models: and that is reflected even in the lyrics from the unremittingly bleak Jethro Tull. I am also reminded of Paul Simon’s plaintive, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you…” This is from his hit ‘Mrs. Robinson’ from the delectable The Graduate, quite possibly the most hilarious coming-of-age film of all time. Joe DiMaggio was an American baseball player generally considered to be a dignified and unpretentious hero (or so they say. He was before my time, so I have no first-hand knowledge of him, and anyway I am not a fan of baseball). But all this is background for thinking about Rahul Dravid, who, perhaps, is a bit like Joe DiMaggio. The Wikipedia entry on ‘Mrs Robinson’  suggests that DiMaggio was a man of grace and dignity, with a fierce sense of privacy, fidelity to the memory of his wife, and the “power of silence”, according to a eulogy by Simon upon DiMaggio’s death. There is another role model: Jerry Rice of the San Francisco 49ers, quite possibly the greatest wide-receiver of all time, and a sure shot for the American football Hall of Fame. Once more, humble, unpretentious. I remember once encountering him in the cafeteria at the San Francisco International Airport, and he, with family, just sat down and had a meal like a real person, not some rich celebrity. Which he was — there were no gun-toting bodyguards. And always overshadowed by his quarterback, Joe Montana. But that combination, Montana-Rice, now that was legendary. Despite the fact that I have never in my entire life watched a full cricket game on TV or in a stadium, I have read enough to understand that Dravid is in that mould of ‘strong, silent’ sports heroes who are always there, dependable when the chips are down. I also have a soft corner for Dravid as a one-time Bangalorean: I lived for some years in that Fair City (apologies to Car Talk). Continues on the next page There is a terrific metaphor about Dravid that I like: the story of Karna in the Mahabharata. Of course, where there is a Karna, there has to be, by definition, an Arjuna. If Dravid is like Karna, Sachin Tendulkar is Arjuna. And Dravid suffers from the Karna syndrome of forever being in the shadow of his nemesis. Although perhaps Tendulkar plus Dravid is a potent combination that strikes terror in the hearts of foes — sort of like Montana-Rice. In the epic, Arjuna is the obvious centre of attention, the apple of everyone’s eye, the prodigious talent. He cannot fail, because the prayers of the entire populace go with him. The greatest teachers are there to teach him; the Lord Himself is his ally. Thus it is pre-ordained that Arjuna will win the highest laurels and emerge victorious. That is a given. Contrast that with Karna: he who is reviled and humiliated as the ‘son of a charioteer’ (although he is a prince); he who is cursed to be bereft of the great brahmastra in his time of greatest need; he who is cursed to have his chariot wheels stick in the mud when he is in grave danger; he whom his foe’s father, the king of the demigods, tricks into giving up his impregnable armour. Thus, it is inevitable that in a direct confrontation between Arjuna and Karna, the former will win. And that is, of course, what happens: there is only room for one master-archer, and as Karna promises their mother Kunti Devi, only one of them will be alive at the end of the war. And we know — it is foreshadowed all along — that that survivor will be Arjuna. But if you read the epic carefully, you will see that the true hero is not the rather one-dimensional Arjuna, but the more complex, more ambiguous, but also more unselfish and ethical (well, most of the time: he doesn’t exactly cover himself with glory with his behaviour when Draupadi is dishonored in the vastrakshepa scene in the royal assembly). There is a remarkable Malayalam book by PK Balakrishnan, Ini Jnan Urangatte (And now I must sleep), which retells the epic from the point of the putative low-caste man, Karna, and the woman, Draupadi. It is a forceful and insightful retelling, a paradigm shift. But I digress. The point is that Tendulkar is the obvious hero, the flashy one who conquers all before him. But in my opinion, Dravid, the quiet, self-effacing one, may have had the greater impact, if, as I suspect, Dravid showed his grit and his temperament in times of crisis, and reserved his best performances for those times when his team really needed him. I have read that Dravid has ‘perfect technique’, whatever that means, but also that his is a trained and focused style, not the result of extravagant talent. And I would always have more respect for the one who applied himself than for the one who is naturally blessed. In India, we also have a penchant for lionising people beyond all sense, and pretending that our heroes are gods, unflawed, incapable of a single false move. This is strictly impossible, considering that we are talking about real humans, not manufactured myths. But we persist in brushing under the carpet the flaws of great men. For instance, we pretend that Mahatma Gandhi was perfect, although he was a deeply flawed man, albeit a marketing genius and a great human being. Similarly, Nehru: despite the propaganda, he was fatally flawed in a Shakespearean way. And Tendulkar, despite all his greatness, appears to play for his own personal glory rather than for his team. Maybe I am wrong, but that’s the feeling I get. Of course, it may well be the case that we will find out some deep dark secret about Dravid which will instantly cause us to lose all respect for him. The salutary example of the fallen Tiger Woods gives one pause. Or for that matter, Ashwini Akkunji, the golden girl of the Commonwealth Games and the Asiad, who has been accused of taking performance-enhancing drugs (although I personally, as her fan, think she was framed and tricked). But somehow I find it hard to imagine that Dravid would ever sound a wrong note. He is, like Karna, I imagine, a man of honour, with a code of conduct like the medieval samurai — death before dishonour. And I would not be amazed to hear that in the long run students of cricket anoint him the greatest Indian player who ever played the game.