Earlier this week, when news emerged that Virat Kohli and his family would shift to the United Kingdom, apart from the usual trolling endemic to social media in India, there was also a strange surge of support for the decision on social media.
Most of it centered on how India was probably getting unsuitable to live in and those who could afford it should think about making the move. It was a marked departure from the backlash that actor Aamir Khan received a decade ago when he spoke on the growing sense of fear in the country which had even made his wife ask if they should think of moving out of India.
The acceptance of Kohli’s announcement, prompted by reasons different than those of the actor’s, was an allusion to how things were in the country now and how those who could, were opting out.
Then, as the Boxing Day Test dawned, Kohli, on his last tour to Australia by most estimates, went, and in a 60-degree veer off his path – as confirmed by well-informed sources – did that to the 19-year-old, floppy-bodied Aussie debutant, Sam Konstas.
Hot-headed is a term associated with the young; but when it stays on, it can become tiresome. At the MCG, Konstas, on his own journey of blossoming in Test whites, casually telling off Kohli with a half-smile that only the young can manage in the face of the gravest of provocations, cruelly revealed how misguided the mid-pitch run-in was.
Kohli’s baiting, his response when Konstas addressed the indiscretion, beamed live to an early morning India, was awakening to most of us back home. So much like when someone jumps the queue in a government office, drives in the middle of the road while checking messages on his phone, or barges his SUV in at the toll gate line and dares you to do anything about it with an insolence that can be numbing. We’ve all been there, see it happen to us with sickening, everyday regularity.
But is it Kohli alone? Because ,it gets amplified when Kohli does it, it is possible that it is symptomatic of a larger malaise afflicting us as a people, where delivery agents and Uber drivers quietly lament to whoever will listen of encountering a paying people that is shedding its skin and sense of empathy and compassion, of an institutional violence that shows the lower classes its place.
Of how Indians regularly brawl on international flights with an entitlement and sense of privilege that is frightening, or basically how we take pride in our Indian-ness by being boorish and unapologetic about it. And that it wasn’t like this not so long ago. There was an emotional wisdom that is rapidly eroding. Is it somewhat unfortunate that once the flag-bearer of a talented, brash India, Kohli ends up becoming emblematic of this latest Indian stereotype too? It stands out when the captain is a benign, easy-going character and the star performer is a gentle, diffident beast from a bygone India.
Twelve years ago, on his first tour Down Under, Kohli had flipped the bird to a section of the Sydney crowd that was heckling him. It immediately made news, and in a twisted sense, endeared him to the Australians, cricket’s original bullies. Kohli was 23 then, and clearly India’s great batting and leadership hope and here was a young, confident Indian not afraid to give it back.
Back then, this column defended Kohli’s actions as a fitting riposte to this heckling, when his over-the-top, expletive-filled maiden Test century celebration in the Adelaide Test, shocked the purists. Under ‘Kohli f*****g does it,’ one tried to understand ‘What made the Delhi boy so angry?’
“Virat Kohli, 23, was all good batting and bad language. It made for both comforting and unsettling viewing,” we said, the talking point being his ‘rage’ at reaching triple figures. While Sunil Gavaskar called it “school kid” temperament, “others,” the story read, “would be probably confused – whether to let their kids watch a rare flowering or reach for the child lock on the TV?”
Much water has flown since 2012. It is also time long enough to understand that youthful anger is not the same as wearisome bullying. Those supporting Kohli’s decision to leave India, now in the evening of a storied career, would have found this one hard to defend because it is more of the same. The rest, in true patriot fashion, would be busy slagging off Ricky Ponting for calling out Kohli. Nothing much seems changed, yet a lot is not the same anymore.
