my paean to dravid from last year: the karna syndrome. bangalore rulez!

mar 10th, 2012 CE

i dislike cricket, but i like dravid. he is a warrior, and an unsung hero.

in my opinion, he will eventually be seen as the greatest cricketer to come out of india. 

i think part of his dignity has to do with the fact that he is a bangalorean. bangalore is (still) a dignified city. not to mention the best place to live in india. 

compared to mumbai (show biz types) and delhi (corrupt netas), bangalore (silicon plateau) has better denizens.

http://www.firstpost.com/ideas/the-karna-syndrome-and-rahul-dravid-as-the-hero-60411.html

As someone who is not a fan of cricket, I never watch the game live, but I do check the scores periodically. And since growing up in India you simply cannot avoid being exposed to the game, I have a fair understanding of it, although I will be the first to admit that I am no expert.

Frankly, I have no desire to be, either, as I prefer other sports such as American football or athletics. But I find that I have to respect Rahul Dravid as a true hero.

We live in a time when there are few true heroes; those who are lionised by the media turn out often to be little more than tin gods with feet of clay — to mix metaphors. In fact, India does not lack in genuine heroes, but they are never the limelight. There are unsung heroes, for example Prof Eachara Warrier who waged a lonely and valiant, and finally, failing battle (but oh, what a magnificent failure it was!) to make the state come clean about what happened to his son, Rajan. He disappeared, presumed killed by the Kerala police, during the 1970s emergency.

Then there was Major Shaitan Singh (Param Vir Chakra, posthumous) of the 13th Kumaon Regiment, C Company. He and his men fought to pretty much the last man in Rezang-La in Ladakh in 1962, and successfully prevented a Chinese advance on Leh.

There is E Sreedharan, the man who made the Konkan Railway and the Delhi Metro a reality, in the face of what seemed like insurmountable odds. Or the unknown couple who planted 100,000 seedlings of shade trees along rural roads in Karnataka. A websitehttp :// goodnewsindia . com /  documented many such unsung heroes, although it has not been updated for a while now.

But the Indian public is conditioned to think only in terms of politicians, movie stars and cricketers as heroes. There is a concerted effort to brainwash the public into mindless adulation of what I consider undeserving people.

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