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Shashi Warrier

Of cricket and communists

In every cricket match, the home side have the privilege of fixing the pitch to suit themselves. This was one of those rare occasions when the pitch was fixed for a good match rather than for a home team win. But, perhaps, we had an unfair advantage.

The Aussies complained that the air in Delhi -- where they had the misfortune to play earlier -- makes their eyes water and their chests heave. Thereby, they handed us a winning tactic: play as many matches as possible in Delhi.

Delhi's filthy air -- to which India's cricket team are acclimatised -- is only the latest version of Delhi-belly. In the old days, visiting cricketers spent more time in toilets than at the nets, giving the home side a twofold advantage: the visitors would be (literally) drained by the disease, and deprived of the practice so essential for them to understand the pitch.

There seems little prospect of Delhi's atmosphere getting any less filthy. Pollution aside, there will also be a greater risk of coming into contact with one or more of a whole range of communicable diseases. The don'ts that visitors have to follow will multiply. Don't drink the water. Don't eat the food. Don't go out at peak hours. Don't breathe deeply or, better still, don't breathe at all. And Delhi being the capital of the country, and therefore the centre of political gravity, will continue to be a Test and one-day venue.

I wonder what cricket will be like 20 years from now. If at all we're still playing cricket in India in 2016, one of the two following scenarios could well apply. The Aussies (or visitors from any country where the air is still breathable) will, months before any series in India, import cylinders of compressed, noxious Delhi air -- collected at peak hour at any of the three or four busiest traffic junctions in the city -- so that they can get their teams started on acclimatisation programmes breathing the muck that passes for air in Delhi.

Members of visiting cricket teams will have to spend increasing amounts of time every day on the acclimatisation machine, starting with five minutes and going up, over three weeks, to perhaps six hours a day. They might even invent a cylinder that can be incorporated into the cricket uniform. Or perhaps they'll have their daily constitutional, a 10 kilometre jog, right behind a truck with a particularly offensive diesel exhaust.

Alternatively, they might bring -- with their own food and their own water -- their own air. Players will call for shots of oxygen as they now call for bottles of water. The drinks trolley will be preceded by an oxygen trolley equipped with face masks for players to take deep breaths of clean air from.

But this won't take care of dangers such as dengue fever and terrorists and God knows what other serious health hazards that might emerge in our garbage-choked cities. Visitors would be well advised to come with bullet-proof cricket uniforms rather like space-suits with built-in life support systems.

A third possibility recommends itself. Let's build a cricket ground on the moon, inside a pressurized dome. Television will take care of the audience. The low gravity can be handled by using equipment made of lead or something equally heavy. I'm sure visitors would much rather go there than come to Delhi.

The Soviet Union is dead and buried and out of its ashes have arisen more than a dozen countries, each with its own history and culture. There's restlessness in Cuba, and the question in everyone's minds is -- after Castro, what? China maintains both its gerontocratic system and the hardness of its line but, when it takes Hong Kong back next year, will it open up just a little? Karl Marx's ghost must be heartbroken.

The most painful thing for Marx's ghost, however, would be the crassness of the communist elements of the governments in Delhi and some state capitals. To anyone who knows the numbers, it's increasingly clear that the public are being taken for a ride by the administration. Here's why. India's real income has increased by about two per cent annually in the last quarter century. In other words, it has more or less doubled in that time.

Salaries of government servants, on the other hand, have increased by an annual average of six per cent. This, mind you, is an increase for civil servants who are neither civil nor offer any kind of service. To say that a bunch like this is either representative or oppressed -- or to deny that they comprise a notably obnoxious elite -- is idiocy of a very high order, but that's what our communists have been saying.

As we move southwards, the idiocy becomes more pronounced. We have the 'grand old man' of Kerala's own brand of Communism, E M S Namboodiripad, saying in public that India won Independence thanks not to Gandhi's non-violent movement but violent struggles after the second world war, such as the Punnapra-Vayalar uprising. Who outside Kerala (or, for that matter, in the state) knows of the Punnapra-Vayalar uprising?

To glorify small, local, ill-directed revolts edifies neither EMS nor his party. But the meanness of his vision is clear: His purpose is to enable supporters to claim freedom fighter pensions on the dubious grounds that they are descended from participants in those 'rebellions'.

Communist parties all over have tried to catch their members young, perhaps because they know that when the gloss comes off the idealism they'll lose members. But EMS wants primary school children inducted into political parties. The notion of five-year-olds following an ideology that encourages violent means towards a totalitarian end is enough to give anyone -- Marx included -- the heebie-jeebies.

You might not agree with Marx but you can't deny either his breathtaking imagination or the splendour of his vision. The moment they became part of the government in Delhi, though, our communists lost all contact with the Marxian vision. Unfortunately for us, they seem to have lost all contact with reality as well.

Illustrations: Dominic Xavier