Shashi Tharoor on cricket
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Shashi Tharoor had an opinion piece in the NY Times about cricket and American apathy towards it. I must say that it cannot be one of his stronger attempts at writing (actually the only Tharoor I have read is bits and pieces of ‘India from Midnight to the Millenium’). The bottom line of the piece is - Americans are too brutish to get cricket.
Besides being humorless and filled with bromides, (”And the notion that anyone would watch a game that, in its highest form, could take five days and still end in a draw provokes widespread disbelief among results-oriented Americans.”), the piece also demonstrates a blissful ignorance about baseball while making a facile attempt at comparing it with cricket.
In describing the futility of interesting Americans with cricket, he states:
Why try to sell Kiri Te Kanawa to people who prefer Anna Nicole Smith?
Pray tell, which ‘people’ prefer Kiri Te Kanawa to Anna Nicole Smith? Being too much of boor to have heard of Kiri Te Kanawa before this piece, I’d rather not make the acquaintance of these splendid people myself.
tafkap, unlike you, I have heard of Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, the great Maori soprano. I have her CD of Maori songs which is really a brilliant bit of music … and what a voice.
In case my point was missed there is nothing wrong in knowing or appreciating Kiri Te Kanawa - but it is idiotic to judge a people because of their collective ignorance about her in comparison to a local ‘celebrity’ (or freak show, however you want to call Anna Nicole. I put people in quotes because I assume by people, Tharoor meant Americans in general). I can guarantee you that the average Indian resident even though a likely cricket junkie prefers his favorite hip gyrating Bollywood starlet to Dame Kiri any day.
It’s particularly ironic that he’s making the case for cricket being some kind of transcendental sport, when the game is mired in commercialism at its crassest, and scandals ranging from drug abuse and match-fixing to murder. Tharoor may wax lyrical about how the game of cricket is uniquely suited to the Indian ethos, but the fact is India are now slinking back home after an early exit from the world cup, while the people still around are the South Africans and the Australians, who play the game with every bit as much professionalism as baseball in America.
To use the same ill-fitting metaphor, the game of cricket itself is now more Anna Nicole Smith than Kiri Te Kanawa.
I am not sure if you are being sarcastic here but if not:
And these are just a few examples of the “professionalism” in South African and Australian cricket, and American baseball.
Me too but not because I was into Maori classical music: But because she was a regular presence in magazines in the late ’80s as the face of Rolex watches.