Daily Archives: January 7, 2008

Sanjeev Bikhchandani has an interesting take on it:

it is apparently OK for Glenn McGrath to ask a West
Indies batsman what a certain part of Brian Lara’s anatomy feels like
because it was non racial macho Aussie thing to say – basically gutter
level personal abuse is OK in the gentleman’s game but not anything to
do with race. We in India need to be educated in the tradecraft – we
are but beginners in the subject.Harbhajan made a mistake if (and only if) he referred to Andrew Symonds
as a monkey. Wrong choice of animal mate – you should have used a
reference to some other noteworthy mammal to respond to Symonds’ abuse
- swine or dog come to mind as possible candidates – they are pure
insults and carry with them no racist overhead. For good measure add on
“non-monkey”. After all you cannot possibly be called racist if you say
someone is not a monkey. “You mother*%$#ing, snivelling, lilly-livered,
non-monkey, son of swine” logically ought be acceptable sledging in the
ICC and Australian lexicon.This error by Harbhajan (if he
indeed called Symonds a monkey) gave the Aussies a handle to turn the
tables on the Indians by raising the racism issue. The Indians need to
learn from this and refine their sledging strategy. It needs to be more
nuanced and must take into consideration the subtler shaes of meaning
of various insulting and abusive terms and what they mean in different
cultural contexts – someone in the Indian camp needs to think this
through. India needs a specialist sledging coach (anyone for Gregg
Chappell for this position – after all he is Australian and should be
good at it).We have a situation where a white match referee (from a country that till very recently practised the worst form of racism as state policy) takes the word of two white witnesses (who are not neutral) over that of one Indian witness (who is not neutral) and without any independent witness or corroborating evidence (no
video, no audio, nothing heard by the umpires – can’t blame the umpires
though they seem to be deaf as adders and blind as bats and just in
case this is a racist slur I voluntarily ban myself from selection for
the Indian team for the foreseeable future) bans an Indian player (who
the white Australian captain finds himself incapable of playing and so
will benefit from this ban, and it was this Australian captain who
insisted that the racism charge be laid at Harbhajan’s doorstep).

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