I’m still processing the bilious sortie by Shashi Tharoor, the Indian diplomat and author, outgoing undersecretary-general of the United Nations and failed candidate for the top job, in the opinion pages of last Friday’s New York Times. It’s the one where he announces that America and Americans are congenitally incapable of comprehending cricket, that the condition is incurable, and that after valiantly performing such educational mitzvahs as diagramming cricket play possibilities on bar napkins for baseball fans during breaks in World Series games, he has now given up; and hereby retreats to the world of connoisseurs who will gather, he tells us, to watch the final at the home of an expatriate where “of course there will be no Americans.”
Here’s his parting shot:
So here’s the message, America: don’t pay any attention to us, and we won’t pay any to you. If you wonder, over the coming weeks, why your Indian co-worker is stealing distracted glances at his computer screen every few minutes or why the South African in the next cubicle is taking frequent and furtive bathroom breaks during the working day, don’t even try to understand. You probably wouldn’t get it. You may as well learn to accept that there are some things too special for the rest of us to want to waste them on you.
Lovely! Elegant! Thoughtful! Um… diplomatic! Ever considered working for the United Nations?
Alright, so everyone has an off day. And sure, yeah, most people in the U.S. don’t get cricket. Not exactly a novel observation. So why not leave it at that? Instead Tharoor decides to actually argue the case, justifying his dismissal of this thing called “America” with an array of absurd statements. Americans, he says, “have about as much use for cricket as Lapps have for beachwear.” They follow baseball instead, which “is to cricket as simple addition is to calculus.” Tharoor has “even appealed to the Hemingway instinct that lurks in every American male by pointing out how cricket is so much more virile a sport.” All to no avail. But thanks to satellite television and the Internet, now “you can ignore America and enjoy your cricket.” After all: “Why try to sell Kiri Te Kanawa to people who prefer Anna Nicole Smith?”
But all of this is mere appetizer for the main dish, the Comparative Analysis of National Character. Take it away, maestro:
In any event, nothing about cricket seems suited to the American national character: its rich complexity, the infinite possibilities that could occur with each delivery of the ball, the dozen different ways of getting out, are all patterned for a society of endless forms and varieties, not of a homogenized McWorld. They are rather like Indian classical music, in which the basic laws are laid down but the performer then improvises gloriously, unshackled by anything so mundane as a written score.
Cricket is better suited to a country like India, where a majority of the population still consults astrologers and believes in the capricious influence of the planets — so they can well appreciate a sport in which, even more than in baseball, an ill-timed cloudburst, a badly prepared pitch, a lost toss of the coin at the start of a match or the sun in the eyes of a fielder can transform the outcome of a game. Even the possibility that five tense, hotly contested, occasionally meandering days of cricketing could still end in a draw seems derived from ancient Indian philosophy, which accepts profoundly that in life the journey is as important as the destination. Not exactly the American Dream.
All together now: MACACA, PLEASE!
Seriously: What on earth are you talking about? And what does it tell us about what you see when you think of America, and what you see when you think of India? And with all due respect, what kind of UN Secretary General could you have possibly made with a worldview at once so rigid and so fey?
It’s tempting to engage in a line-item refutation exercise, going through the brother’s points, trivial and serious, one by one. For instance, it’s not Lapps, you’re supposed to call them Sami now. Don’t they teach you anything at those urbane cocktail parties? Also: Ever heard of jazz? And best of all, did you read the letter in the New York Times where the writer schooled you on the more-than-12 ways to get an out in baseball?
But all that is noise. What really disappointed me about this article, now that I’ve had a little time to think about it, is the unthinking, crude cultural nationalism, the willingness to truck in stereotypes, the implied view that no matter how much globalization and immigrant entrepreneurship and diasporic arts and international travel and trade mix our populations and produce hybrid souls like the bulk of the readers of this site, National Character is pre-determined and will prevail. Way to validate our concerns, our dreams, our debates, our professional and political and personal choices!
Instead we get us versus them, a view of the world that is positively Bush-like in its reductionism and reliance on obsolete understandings of the nation-state. Not surprising in the end, I guess, from someone whose novel was called “The Great Indian Novel” (oh but you see, that was ironic) and whose forthcoming book is “The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone: India, The Emerging 21st Century Power.”
I’ll believe it when we beat Sri Lanka.
