There is something evil about taking sides. Especially when it concerns something as silly as cricket. I had always known this. But it just got worse one night during an India Pakistan match. India ended up winning and you can of course imagine the amount of fuss that a bunch of college kids can pull off when this sort of thing happens. But it is not about our euphoria that I want to talk about. Its something else that I noticed, something I would have missed had it not been done precisely so I could notice. Something subtle, not at all blatant. A group of boys targeted the one muslim boy in the hall(other than me) and booed for Pakistan in the brashest of tones making no mistake about who it was intended for. I was surprised at my own reaction. I laughed. And I relished the hope that someone would ask me why I laughed. Because all these ’cricket patriots’ would have no qualms about searching for greener pastures in Australia or America once they finish college. And for all you know they’d still be cheering from there when India wins. I suppose that’s how one would be expected to be patriotic in this era of murky globalization. Work for the Multi-National Corporations, but make sure your heart stays with the Indian cricket team.
Patriotism taken in the wrong sense can be as much of a germ as religious fanaticism. There is some kind of sinister connection between these two ideas. Indeed the former can be even more dangerous. Let me explain why I think so. A religious fanatic, though itching to convince the rest of the world to adopt his ideology will have a certain amount of hesitation when it comes to voicing these ideas. This is simply because deep down he realizes that people do not take kindly to brainwashing when it comes to their personal beliefs. Ergo ,almost uniformly the expression of a fanatic is through brute force of a clandestine nature rather than a well reasoned verbal argument.
However when it comes to a misguided patriot he is fettered by no such reticence and can be as vociferous as he wants about his concerns as long as it is veiled under some vague notion of national interest. This can be quite a damning issue considering the fact that most of the horrors of the last century were committed in the name of extreme nationalism. Public opinion in this case will be predictably one sided as no sane citizen would want to suffer under the blight of being a traitor. Look at what happened in the US when the crowd was at the prime of its war frenzy. Food outlets were targeted by the mob on account of their serving ‘French’ fries following France’s decision to not dirty their hands in the Iraq fiasco. Hardly mature, wouldn’t you say?
My point is very simple. Any sort of collective ideology has a tendency to always bring out the worst in people. It could be as benign a concept as democracy to fan the flames of intolerance. In an ideal world patriotism would mean furthering a nation’s progress, eliminating slums, encouraging female education and so on. But that we know very well is not the situation. In reality its more about drawing battle lines and enforcing it through hate speeches, some subtle some not so much. Its become a measure of the amount of loathing that you can harvest for your neighboring nation. More about hating some stranger a thousand miles away than about loving someone who lives across your street.
I don’t know if its my inherent cynicism that makes me say this but I have always been of the opinion that patriotism should be more of a utilitarian concept rather than an emotional one. It has definitely got to be something more productive than flag worship. One of my friends was telling me about how tears start coming down his eyes every time he listened to the national anthem and it took all the self control that I could muster not to give him one sound whack on his head. But I didn’t do it. It’s a free country isn’t it?
