Alcove

Science, culture, complexity

Tag: Jasprit Bumrah

  • A masculine build-up to the Ind-Pak cricket match

    This post benefited from feedback from Thomas Manuel.

    Every time I watch an ad about the upcoming India-Pakistan men’s cricket match, as part of the ongoing T20 World Cup in Australia, I’m reminded of Cutler Beckett’s line in the Pirates of the Caribbean film series: “It’s just good business.”

    Beyond the field, there has been new animosity between the Indian and the Pakistani cricket boards, with the former having said that the Indian men’s cricket team won’t travel to Pakistan for the 2023 Asia Cup. But even beyond the administrators of cricket and their realpolitik machinations, there are Star Sports and Pepsi.

    Star Sports has been running an ad depicting life in a fictitious town called “Dardnapur” (Hindi for ‘no-pain town’) peopled with many men of considerable strength, capable of lifting motorcycles, having their fingers slammed by a closing door with nary a wince, and so forth. But when India lost to Pakistan at the Asia Cup, as a young boy narrates in the video, these men were sent to tears. So, the boy says in an address to the Indian men’s team, “Right this wrong, win the match and end the wait.”

    (The ad benefits from an ambiguity: India’s loss to Pakistan contributed to the end of its last Asia Cup campaign, so “ending the wait” could apply equally to beating Pakistan and winning a major tournament. On the flip side, at the ad’s end, the screen shows illustrated faces of the two team captains, Rohit Sharma and Babar Azam, gesturing to each other in an aggressive way.)

    In the Pepsi ad, India’s frontline pacer Jasprit Bumrah askes if viewers have the guts to watch the upcoming match against Pakistan from the PoV of a camera fit into the batter’s stumps (a.k.a. the ‘stumpcam’), followed by the ad spelling out something about a QR code to be found in Pepsi bottles.

    Obviously women and people of other genders are welcome to share in these sentiments but neither ad features any women and there has been no indication that either of these brands – Star Sports or Pepsi – is interested in advertising to women in this matter. Instead, both brands are investing in associating the match with shows of strength and guts, an inescapable parallel to the violence in Kashmir as well as to the fact that India-Pakistan face-offs in the cricketing sphere represent one of the few remaining ways in which the two countries directly compete for victory.

    There have been a few articles in ESPN and similar outlets about the Indian and the Pakistani men’s cricket teams trying to relax, stay away from the hype and focus on playing the game (see here, e.g.). But everyone else – from the administrators to the people at large, mediated by advertisements of the sort described above – are either pushing or are being pushed the triumphalist narrative that the match is a proxy for India being “better” than Pakistan, to project India as a highly competitive and – assuming India will win the match – tough country. Even the ICC is partly to blame as it starts major tournaments by having India and Pakistan face each other.

    All this brings to mind the term ‘hegemonic masculinity’, coined by various sociologists in the 1980s and which has come to encompass the following features, among others: shows of achievement, use of physical force and heterosexuality – all of which have been put on display in the two ads and in the actions of the Indian cricket board.

    Even “frontiersmanship” has raised its head: according to Wiktionary, it stands for “the craft or skill of being a frontiersman, of succeeding in settling a frontier” – which in this case is relevant to the regions of ‘Pakistan-administered Kashmir’ in western Kashmir and Aksai Chin in the eastern portion, over which India has disputes with Pakistan and China, respectively.

    The person who announced India wouldn’t go to Pakistan for next year’s Asia Cup was Jay Shah, who has three identities here that matter: he is BCCI secretary, president of the Asian Cricket Council (ACC) and son of Union home minister Amit Shah. Shah junior said he was making the announcement as the president of the ACC, yet it’s laughable that the decision was motivated by anything other than the Indian government’s grouses with Pakistan in Kashmir.

  • Dream11: How hard should we work to play cricket for India?

    The TV ads for the fantasy cricket app Dream11 seem objectionable, to my mind. Thus far, I’ve seen three high-profile players of the Indian men’s cricket team in these ads: Rohit Sharma, Shikhar Dhawan and Jasprit Bumrah (there may be others). Each player stars in a version of the ad in which the ad summarily chronicles their childhood pursuits of becoming a professional cricketer. Dhawan’s and Sharma’s ads both extol lots of hard work and commitment to the demands of the sport, as does Bumrah’s ad but I think to a lesser extent.

    What the ads fail to mention is that India is a country of 717 million men (2020) but for all of whom there is only one men’s cricket team. We’ll obviously need to subtract those younger than 18 years and older than 40 years, but assuming a highly conservative estimate that men of the ‘admissible’ age make up only 10% of the total, we are still left with 71.7 million men. Consider New Zealand, on the other hand, which had almost 250,000 men in 2020 – including those on either side of the 18-40 group – and still fielded a cricket team among the world’s best in that year.

    Simple logic dictates that by virtue of having a larger pool of talent to pick from, the Indian men’s cricket team should be orders of magnitude better than those fielded by other countries – and simple logic is clearly wrong. The exploits of the Indian men’s cricket team have demonstrated, repeatedly, that if you put 11 sufficiently talented and qualified players together, train them, and give them the resources and the opportunities to get better, they will get better. And the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has the money, the political heft and talent pool to achieve this – but it won’t.

    Instead, by considering only 11 (or 15, 21 or whatever) players at a time, the BCCI has created a hyper-competitive environment that is conducive neither to the fair selection of cricketing talent at the bottom rungs nor the selection and retention of talented players at the highest level. The abundance of talent only forces players to be in form at all times – or in excellent form sometimes – under threat of being replaced, even as the hierarchy of contracts with the BCCI tapers rapidly towards the top, squeezing more and more resources into fewer and fewer players, and ultimately leaves more for itself. The consequent demand for an intense physical regimen will in turn privilege richer players over poorer ones.

    As such, the BCCI has been administering an unjust model of cricket in India, and which companies like Dream11 are glamourising in uncritical fashion. Dhawan’s Dream11 ad – embedded above – concludes with the man himself saying that he plays for India because he dared to dream that big, in effect saying those who don’t make it didn’t because they didn’t dream, because it’s their fault, because dreaming is all it takes. The inequitable nature of this model only further undermines the knee that the Indian men’s cricket team took ahead of their game against Pakistan on October 24, in support of the Black Lives Matter movement – although we must admit there wasn’t much left to undermine.

    Given India’s population and the popularity of cricket around the country, it should by all means field 10 teams – maybe even 30, one for each state. Uttar Pradesh’s population alone is 40x that of New Zealand, and to echo Nayantara Sheoran Appleton, making better use of so much talent will always be a better idea than to coerce people to reproduce less. In the same vein, brands like Dream11 should stop glorifying the sort of backbreaking work required to break into the top 11. Doing so only glorifies the absurdity of rigging a system to produce only 11 men (or 11 women, for that matter) and then claiming this team is better than every other combination of 11 people drawn from a base of 71.7 million (or 67.6 million).

    By the way, that’s 5.97 x 1028 possible combinations without repetition.