The good, the bad and the Sidhu

In a different, dark phase of his life, Dermot Reeve snorted cocaine and did commentary duty for Channel 4 — simultaneously.

The former England all-rounder has said he didn’t remember a thing from two days of talking through an England-New Zealand Test match. But his colleagues didn’t notice, they thought it was the funniest two days of commentary they had heard. Reeve also threw in off-air Imran Khan impressions.

Reeve, part of the Warwickshire Three (the others were Paul Smith and Keith Piper) who had issues with drugs that were revealed to the public, became a pariah in the county he captained so successfully.

He is now fully recovered, and from all accounts, all there. Good for him.

Too bad that some of the stuff that made those two days of commentary so memorable for Reeve’s colleagues and listeners isn’t being passed around to certain members of the commentary team that is doing duty for the World Cup.

I point to the dangerously unfunny Indians on show, chief among them being Sunil Gavaskar.

For a couple of decades now, Gavaskar has made the repetition of banalities a lucrative profession. This is obvious to anyone listening to him.

If a pitch has low bounce, for instance, you can expect Gavaskar to say something like: ‘This pitch has low bounce, which indicates that the ball will keep low after pitching and will not bounce very much.’ (Actual quotes by Gavaskar are too boring to repeat.)

Gavaskar’s status as a legend of Indian cricket has vaccinated him against criticism, and to be fair, he grew in the commentary box during the days when the only adjective authorised for use to describe a stroke was “magnificent”; at least until “tracer bullet” was introduced.

Yet, there is something in Gavsakar’s commentary that is below banal. This is his preoccupation with personal achievement — and survival.

At times, this is merely petty: you will always find Gavaskar thinking on the batsman’s behalf when he is approaching a landmark. His assumption is almost unfailingly this: the guy will slow down to achieve the milestone, no matter what the state of the game.

At times, it gets plain ridiculous. Like his theory of “conserving energy” which is his advocacy of being less active on a cricket field. (Ian Chappell had a really good laugh about this one time.)

These are examples from what the rest of India calls the Bombay School of Cricketing Philosophy, of which Gavsakar is emeritus professor.

But there is something I believe cricket lovers find even more galling: this is Gavaskar’s positioning of himself, through his partisanship, as a defense counsel for India and its cricket.

The worst example of this came not in his commentary, though. It came in his writing about the death of the wonderful Australian left-hander (and extremely entertaining commentator) David Hookes.

Hookes had died as a result of blows from a bouncer at a bar. Gavaskar suggested that he somehow deserved it—Australians provoke fights.

We deserve better. And what do we get? We get Navjot Sidhu. Reeve and Sidhu have been on the same panel several times now through the World Cup.

I suspect Reeve, who has been through the process himself, would be wondering how someone merely on Pepsi could do such a wonderful impersonation of someone on coke.

But he doesn’t. Not for me anyway. Sidhu might be the guffawing judge of comedy shows, but what he says isn’t remotely funny. He is, in fact, a case study ripe for academics. The case of the sardarji as a joke.

The sardarji joke has long been a part of Indian popular culture. It goes back to the raids of Nadir Shah after the fall of the great Mughals, when Sikhs organised themselves to mount guerrilla attacks on the invaders’ camps at midnight to protect or free women.

These acts of nobility, were, however, twisted over the ages by Hindus to suggest that Sikhs were only in their senses after midnight—hence the 12 o’ clock jokes, whose later avatars reference the more neutral noon.

In the 80s, with the ascent of the bumbling Giani Zail Singh to the highest office in India, the jokes found a face. But the stereotype of the sardarji as a member of a slow but hearty martial race changed dramatically with the advent of the Punjab problem.

Suddenly, to the multitudes of supposedly patriotic Indians, the words Sikh, Khalistan and terrorism had unavoidable associations. The jokes took a back seat.

A positive, if somewhat uncompromising, image of Sikhs came through as well—in the shape of KPS Gill, whose role in crushing terrorism in Punjab most Indians saw as brave and laudable.

It took time, and some healing, to restore the sardarji to his place in our popular culture. And not a little controversy: the demand for people selling joke books to be arrested; the implication of Anil Ambani’s telecom company for the circulation of material offensive to Sikhs and so on.

All the while, prime minister Manmohan Singh was, subliminally at the very least, recasting the image of the sardar as the calm, rational intellectual in the minds of Indians.

And then what happens? Thanks to television, we get Navjot Sidhu: the sardarji as a joke. A man who makes no sense. But try telling him that.

Ian Chappell had to invoke the turban doing this. Sidhu was ranting pointlessly about Bishan Bedi’s coaching solution to everything (run five rounds) when Chappell asked: “Isn’t he a sardarji as well?”

The ‘outsiders’ see it. The New Zealander Simon Doull has tried to make the best of the situation in the studio. Sidhu has the awful habit of interrupting, especially, if someone is making sense.

And if the sardar flailed his arms at second slip as much as he does in the studio, he would have injured teammates at gully (this might explain why most of his fielding for India was done in the deep).

So Doull had taken to counting Sidhuisms whenever he was on the panel. After a while, (23 in half-an-hour) he gave up. The irony was lost on the subject in any case.

Irony isn’t our thing, apparently. Even the promos where Harsha Bhogle and Sourav Ganguly repeat Sidhuisms while Sidhu says “cut the mumbo jumbo” sound lame. Compare that with Nasser Hussain on Tendulkar reaching his 92nd 50: “Just his 92nd 50, 47 hundreds. Rubbish player.”

But the promos are there for a worrying reason. The channel thinks the commentary format—with Sidhu as its centerpiece—works. This is impossible to measure in India, because all cricket works.

On another channel, with rights to other series by dint of which they claim top spot in the TV ratings, there are guys who speak the same nonsense, but while seemingly also trying to chew a stone-hard idli. That ‘works’ too. Meaning we still watch cricket.

—The opinions expressed by the writer are his personal