The Sreesanth In All Of Us

The story of the demise of India’s angriest cricketer is the story of an average man who dreamt big, had a taste of a glamorous world, never established himself, kept fighting to stay in that world, and, in the process, threw it all away. By Shiv Visvanathan 

Posted on June 19 Wed, 2013 in Man's World India By Editor

A wise old friend watching my hysteria over the spot-fixing scandal silenced me by saying, there is a bit of Sreesanth in all of us. “What went wrong with Sree was what could go wrong with any one of us. Sreesanth is the boy next door. Only, he does not go to IIT but becomes a professional cricketer.” 

Sreesanth looks like an overgrown teenager. “Look at him,” she said, “he looks like a Malayali Dennis the Menace, impudent, scruffy and desperate for attention. Instead of a hapless Joey, who followed Dennis lovingly, Sree gets a calculating Jiju. Jiju fixes Sreesanth’s life.”

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Sreesanth - A Modern Day Valmiki

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It is not easy to be a Sreesanth. Sreesanth, like most of us, is a process, a rite of passage. He has not arrived yet. Occasionally, he gets a peck at the Holy Grail, but the next moment, he is dropped from the team. To have not yet arrived, like a Dravid, Zaheer or a Kumble has, is a painful thing. You always feel an extra desperation for a cameo role. You want to be a personality, a character, memorable beyond a game. Modest people do not have to have modest dreams. Sreesanth dreamt big. He wanted to be seen and heard. 

In cricket, substance could always do with style. Like any teenager — and remember, most Indian males are teenagers till 40 — Sreesanth enjoyed building hype around himself. He grimaced, he threw tantrums, he created a new dialect in sledging. His encounters made news. He was funky and spunky. He was a caricature of a cricketer, whose adrenaline drove his judgments. Sometimes, when your juices flow and you stand up to artful sledgers, such as Andrew Symonds, you become, even feel like a man. 

You have to watch Sreesanth’s performances from an ethological perspective. He grimaces like a gorilla, beats his chest; when he gets a wicket, he runs, screaming, across the pitch and glowers triumphantly at the batsman. It is animal aggression displayed like a tribal ritual. Of course, one has to be careful. When you encounter a bigger, more violent animal, such as Bhajji, retreat and humiliation is in order. A tear or two makes you human. 

In cricket, like in hunting, you have to go for the kill. Without victory, your antics become a distraction, a sideshow. Being a sideshow is painful when you are on stage. Off stage, you get more leeway. You are seen as entertainment; you command attention. Cricket and B-grade Bollywood have a wonderful affinity for each other. The sports pages are hand in glove with Page 3. For someone like Sree, the world of bars, night clubs and women becomes an appendage to your status as a cricketer. The distractions become the attractions. Late nights chew into your discipline. 

Time eats into sportsmen like a termite. You can be precocious at 20, not five years later. Your fans behave like accountants; they demand a list of your exploits on the field. Your team-mates shrug off the hype, they only want to kill. Suddenly, sledging is not entertainment; it is a distraction, time lost. 

It is not that you do not try. You push yourself hard, but regular results are not easy. You watch senior cricketers such as Dravid and Tendulkar rework their bodies, their styles. There is steel in their temperaments, they deliver like metronomes, and you watch with awe. You know you cannot be them, but you want to play alongside them. You realise that cricket, like character building, is hard work. Practice is a way of life for these stalwarts. 

You start keeping a diary. You promise to keep your cool. You work at it. But your temper bursts like an unwelcome pimple, when you least want it to. Worse, when success is elusive, people sense the buffoon in you. You are laughed at. Life suddenly seems unfair. 

The social world outside does not see all this. On the field, you might be a lesser player, but off the field, you are still a star, a name. Then, the other talents that you have nurtured come into play. You can sing, you have dreams of being a rock star. A film or two might enhance your world, especially if you have two nubile women cast alongside you. The romance of cinema blending with the romance of cricket is your ultimate dream. Suddenly, life and its possibilities appear like fun. It matters little if you have to produce the film yourself. 

You realise that walking the ramp, with a model in tow, is a bit like running up to bowl. Adrenaline pumps through you. The applause is heartening. Instead of drab national colours grimed in sweat, your costume smells of scent. You dance and sing, your body moves with ease and the fantasy of a new spectacle takes over. A star like Sreesanth should be twice born, once in cricket and again in film. It is heady. 

Meanwhile, you work desperately on yourself, at anger management. It just means you have to avoid brawls in public, not beat up intrusive passengers at airports. After all, you have a status to maintain. You are still Sreesanth the star, a man known to chief ministers. Shashi Tharoor, your secret hero, has called you the pride of Kerala. 

Playing for the nation is a heady experience. But then there is the magic world of IPL, part circus, part gladiatorial game, part hype. It is the greatest spectacle of all. Lalit Modi makes Barnum sound second rate. 

IPL is finance capital. Everything is a commodity. Every ball, every run is commoditised and auctioned by punters. An over can provide the earnings of a decade. The trouble with IPL is that it is ruthless. Yesterday’s stars are forgotten. You live in the instant. Everything has to be bigger, better, quicker. You live only as a spectacle, and you need spectacles in daily life. You want the best of women and entertainment. Sadly, life gets inflationary. The more you enjoy this, the less you count in the world of cricket. 

Yet, you feel good in this social world of bars and night clubs and starlets. The juices flow. Your ego inflates as people salute you. Sreesanth is still a star. You are seen as fun, even if friend Jiju helps get the women. Giving in to temptation always appears fail-safe. You cannot go wrong. Match-fixing is sinister. Spot-fixing seems like a cleverer world: a win-win world in which the punter and the fan are both happy. It is like rewriting a tiny part of the script; the integrity of cricket remains untouched. All it requires is a few coded signals. A few minutes become a lifetime investment. It reduces anxiety. Money to throw around is always welcome. Jiju and he convince each other that it is a perfect move. 

Problem is, life is full of reverse-swings. Idiot cops outsmart you. The Delhi police paint you as the artful dodger. A world collapses. One minute you are high on the game and your companion, and then cops pick you up. You think it is a mistake. You ask them to call your political friends. They seem implacable. Life as a joyride is over. You look in the mirror and the sledger has become a sleazeball. You wish time had stopped a year ago. 

Suddenly, you are dirt, contaminated stuff, an object to be analysed. You cannot huff and puff and blow your opponents away. You have destroyed other people’s fairytales. That is what no one will forgive you for. The press performs postmortems on your career. People take your world apart looking for reasons and causes. 

There is only one thing Sreesanth will not be able to forgive himself for. It is the television interview in which his mother and sister protest his innocence. He has destroyed their fairytale too. One can smell sadness like rot in the air. The dream has ended.