Column

We seem to be a manic-depressive nation. All hell broke loose the other day when our cricket team lost miserably to Bangladesh. MS Dhoni’s half-built house was attacked in Jharkhand. Elsewhere, pictures of cricket heroes were torched. Blame was flying all around. Was it a betting scandal? Did the selectors play politics and choose the wrong team?

When so many questions get asked publicly, the one thing one expects is a thorough analysis of the debacle, followed by a search for better answers. But all the fuss suddenly died when we thrashed lowly Bermuda a couple of days later. It seemed almost cathartic. All the mayhem was instantly forgotten, instantly forgiven. Why blame the team for losing one match? Cricket is, after all, only a game, everybody rationalised. Calculators were brought out to figure out how, despite botching up the Bangladesh match, we might still make it to the Super 8.

Why are we like this only? Why does the Indian team show no consistency? Why do talented cricketers play like zombies one day and like world beaters the next? Why do our people idolise cricketers one day and demonise them the day after? Why are we so uninterested in ever finding answers to these questions? Why are we so fickle?

I have some kind of answers —based on hunches and observations — to share. At the surface level, it’s obvious to me that we don’t quite accept the connection between effort and reward. Tendulkar may flop in match after match, but his cricketing income never suffers. Big failures against the world’s best teams do not dent his bank balance. Instead, he gets rewarded with even more lucrative endorsements. One century against a Bermuda is enough to rescue Sehwag’s reputation as a swashbuckling cricketer. One swallow does indeed make an Indian summer.

I am aware that the Gita tells us to focus on right action, and not its rewards. However, in practice we have completely misinterpreted this to mean that there need not be any link between work and reward. Rewards come and go for mysterious reasons that we mortals need not concern ourselves with. This is the reason why Indian stock market investors think they have a god-given right to high rewards even if they have invested in the wrong places and for the wrong reasons. If anything goes wrong, market speculators must be blamed for it, never mind if your own motive was speculation and instant profit.

Coming back to cricket, if we want to improve our team’s performance, the first thing we need to do is re-establish this link between performance and reward. Apart from a basic retainer, every cricketer should be paid only on the basis of performance, and I am talking not only about the BCCI’s reward structure. Every advertiser who wants to sign up a Sachin should build in a performance-based reward system where the bulk of the money accrues only if the cricketer scores runs, gets wickets or takes brilliant catches. If this happens, Indian cricket will start mending itself.

Unfortunately, even this obvious solution has its problems in the Indian context. If we devise a system of performance based rewards there is a good chance that real performers will make a huge fortune. But that brings us up against another Indian failing — the inability to accept other people’s successes without excessive envy.

I have heard of a case where salesmen in a company were offered high commissions for selling more; but when one particularly talented salesman sold enough to rival the CEO’s salary, the commission structure was viewed as a scam and instantly disbanded. Needless to say, sales performance started falling. The moral: creating a sensible reward structure for performance means we as a society must learn to celebrate success and not merely feel envious about it.

This won’t happen overnight. As people with low self-esteem, we think win-lose. We see other people’s successes as a threat to ourselves. This is why we often belittle other people’s achievements.

Not comfortable with success ourselves, we tend to identify our hopes and aspirations with one-dimensional heroes — whether they are cricket stars or film stars. This is probably why we take the failures of our cricket stars so personally. We see our success in them, and when they flop, we see it as our own failure and are unable to cope with it.

r_jagannathan@dnaindia.net