May 2007

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Message for May ‘07

THE STRENGTH OF CHARACTER

The Nation has been recently super-charged with the emotions engendered by our common love – Cricket – which has ranged through the entire gamut of abundant hope, and the depths of despair.

Inevitably defeat brings forth recrimination, and the search for culprits to blame and hang. Once a suitable ‘decoy-devil or devils’ is identified, all abuse is heaped on him or them, effigies burnt, homes wrecked, and the mob departs in the dubious satisfaction that justice has been done, and restitution obtained.

The sad fact is that, in seeking immediate individual ‘culprits’ we miss the plot and the point. The system which inevitably brings forth these aberrations of promise and performance, of unreasonable rewards and expectations is never seriously examined or rectified. So history repeats itself, and the cycle goes on from high hopes to dismal despair.

We need to look at the blemishes in our national character, which idolizes people and not performance, which increasingly meters success by measurements of money and material yardsticks – and in the process lose our sense of balance. We add politics to this mix which increases the incendiary effects.

Most successes and careers are short-lived and the really successful man, cricketer or whosoever, is to be judged by not only his performance on any given stage, but in the manner of his leaving it. A leader or performer of character, knows when he has to depart, for a well-timed’ departure is the final act of grace, and indeed of humility – to acknowledge that one has reached the limit of one’s utility to the given role, and is humble enough to acknowledge it.

Perfection is purely and simply, as we Masons acknowledge, an attribute of Divinity, and so is indispensability. All men, cricketers included, are human and dispensable, and the sooner one acknowledges it the better he and the nation are for it.

Character, therefore, as nurtured through breeding and building is the bed rock on which individual and national foundations are laid. Mere symbolisms unsupported by actions; are treacherous to the construction of such moral edifices. Our fraternity makes valiant attempts through its tenets to build these columns of character, and holds out a glimmer of hope that could relieve feelings of doom and despair, even if, ipso facto, we cannot get ourselves a more conscientious National Cricket team, by our fraternal exhortations !