Wednesday, February 27, 2008

How Durst You? The National Honor Argument

If you didn’t know it before, you know it now: Indians take their cricket really, really seriously. It’s always interesting to me how so many Indian fans like to think that it’s just about the cricket, when, in reality, the actual game matters very little to them. It’s about Indian glory, Indian dominance, Indians shining — all the usual upper-middle class mumbo-jumbo about a rising India we’ve been hearing in India for the last 15 years.
And so, without missing a beat, the Harbhajan Singh scandal has been portrayed as nothing less than a full-scale assault on the Indian identity. More than a few ex-cricketers and Indian statesmen have argued that just the accusation that an Indian could be racist — true or otherwise — is too much; after all, they say, Indians waged a campaign against racism (that is, British imperialism and, later, South African apartheid).
It’s strange, because these people are relying on the same sloppy thinking that, well, racists employ.

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