The I in the Institution

It’s a disease that cuts across areas as diverse as sports, science, politics, business and even spirituality. Either we tend, as a people, to acknowledge and celebrate individual achievement more than that of the team, institution, or the nation, or we haven’t really had the chance to do much of the latter. Let’s get back to cricket for once. We have had no dearth of individual records. For a long time, the highest run-scorer in Test matches was a fellow Indian (Sunil Gavaskar), whose record of the most Test centuries (34) still holds. In the same era, we had the highest wicket-taker in the history of Test cricket (Kapil Dev).

We rightly celebrated the achievements of both. But what was the ranking of Indian cricket in both versions of the game in that era? A World Cup victory apart, how much were we able to achieve overseas in spite of the fact that so many international teams had lost so many of their stars to the Packer circus? But we were quite satisfied with individual success instead. In fact, we probably sought succour in it for our lack of success as a team, our repeated losses overseas, even a home series loss to Pakistan in what was, significantly, Gavaskar’s last Test appearance and where he played perhaps one of his greatest innings ever at a minefield of a wicket in Bangalore.

It is possibly a hangover of the same under-achieving times that our journalists have been busy asking all and sundry, including the Pakistani captain and coach, the Australians, the South Africans, and in the case of the television news channels, any passerby, if Rahul Dravid was right in pulling the plug with Sachin at 194. It is a different matter though that no such demons seemed to assail Tendulkar’s mind as he sold Moin Khan a dummy, bowling him between the legs on the last ball of day three. As he pumped the air and celebrated, his team-mates joining in, did you ever get the feeling he had spent the previous night tossing and turning in the bed, having been denied a double century? The Tendulkars of the world know they can conjure up personal milestones like these with the facility with which the rest of the world orders a sandwich at McDonald’s. But it is much tougher, and rarer, for the Indian team to begin a series overseas, particularly in Pakistan, with such a big victory.

This argument, therefore, is not so much about cricket, as about our fundamental worldview. Because if cricket imitates life in the subcontinent, defining our attitudes, responses, the way we define success and failure, how we react to the game also often provides an insight into our collective minds. It is because we have failed to build teams, institutions, and even a nation, that succeed, that we are left to savour the achievements of individuals alone. This cricket team, therefore, has confused us. It is performing well as a team and its members are performing well as individuals. Or, look at it differently. The team management has given these individuals autonomy so they can perform well and strengthen the institution. We enjoy and value the success of this institution. But when that comes in conflict with the interests of our favourite individuals, we get confused — even if the people involved are not bothered. That is because they represent the spirit of this new, competitive, hungry and successful India. Those of us who encourage this chatter on why Sachin did not get his double hundred or Irfan his fiver are still frozen in old times. We undermine this new balance of individual performance and institutional success that is so rare in our cultures.

Sport, very often, reflects national and cultural approaches and outlook to life in general. Americans, for example, would often tell new immigrants to learn about their way of life by watching — and learning — their version of football. Therefore, this same individual versus institution confusion reflects, or rather blights us, in other, more serious areas. Murli Manohar Joshi versus the IIMs, for example, is a very good case study. That Joshi is bright, the most educated in this Cabinet, most eminently qualified for the job he holds, is not something anybody doubts or questions. But now, in a classic “individual is better than the institution” fight, he happily puts himself above the cause. He overrides his own party (please read parts of its manifesto as published in Shubhajit Roy’s story on The Indian Express front page, Friday morning, promising autonomy to higher institutions). He also overrides his own Cabinet, most of which, probably with one exception, is on the other side.

Finally, and that proves my argument, he forces the faculty at his own IIMs, who were on the opposite side on the issue, to leave to the chairman, who, once again, is an individual. Not one of his Cabinet colleagues has defended his fee-cuts in public, the prime minister, the Cabinet, haven’t whispered a word in support and he has not only succeeded in reducing it into a ‘Me versus My Institutions’ issue, he is also winning. What else do you expect in a society to which it comes naturally to put the individual above the institution, or the team.

We can psychoanalyse ourselves endlessly. Maybe, as in cricket, in most fields the only success we have found to savour has been that of the odd individual who was so talented, so determined and so fortunate as to have succeeded, defying the system and the odds. Look at science, for example. While Dr Joshi is rightly reminding us of the achievements of the Vedic times that we may have unfortunately forgotten, the fact is that Indian science has given us almost no world class success stories except the few individuals who have won Nobels working in foreign labs, in foreign environments. We have no patents or inventions to boast of, but a few Nobel laureates, yes, and who cares if they carry alien passports?

Maybe deifying individuals comes naturally to us. Looking at the big picture taxes our minds and patience. More than that, building institutions and teams requires hard work, doggedness, energy, vision, ambition and, above all, sacrifice, selflessness, even anonymity. It is too much work, isn’t it? So it is much more convenient to leave it all to some individual who will perhaps do it all for us. It is tempting, particularly for the lazy, it may even work in the short run, but it never pays in the long run. If you still have doubts, just ask the Congress party.

Write to sg@expressindia.com