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23 August 2004
The British love a teary-eyed loser
This is not to be inexorably harsh on Paula Radcliffe, but I could not avoid pointing to this telling comment from a Reuters story:Poor Henman has been the unluckiest tennis player ever to play at the Wimbledon. Every single time he marches through his draw he comes up against an unbeatable player and when the draw looks simple enough, Henman either injures himself or comes a-cropper against crummy opposition in the opening rounds itself.Tears Flow as British Hail Plucky Loser Paula: The British do love a loser -- especially a plucky one who bursts into tears -- and she was front-page news across Britain Monday. "Poor, Poor Paula" said the Daily Express over the headline "Nation shares the anguish as dream ends in tears." "Tears of a Hero" said The Daily Mirror which declared "Sad Paula will forever be a national hero." It was in sharp contrast to the vilification tennis player Tim Henman has to face every year when his dreams of Wimbledon glory are shattered yet again because he simply was not good enough on the day.
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Books over the months
In keeping with the political fervour both in India and in the United States, I decided it was time to turn to books written by or about politicians. Long before the Democratic National Committee pitchforked Barack Obama into cult icon and national celebrity, I had been following his campaign for the Senate seat in Illinois. What drew me to Obama were his credentials -- son of a Kenyan economist and a typical midwestern Kansas-raised white woman, worked as a community organiser in between college and law school, went to Harvard to study civil rights and was the editor of the Harvard Law Review. While the current political scene in India can claim to have seventeen self-proclaimed "St.Stephanians" in the parliament not to mention a finance minister with a law degree from Harvard, an Information and Broadcasting minister also with supposedly a business degree from Harvard, the Prime Minister with a doctoral degree from Oxford, men and women of Mr Obama's repute are hard to find in the American political panorama where having an ordinary, mediocre background apparently earns big points with the rural demographic. Yet, and perhaps on account of his opponents, Mr Obama is all set to become a senator from Illinois. But what pleasantly surprised me was Mr Obama's charming and delightfully written memoir titled Dreams From My Father. In the book, he details his struggles as an African-American (true in more senses than one) who strives to find his roots and identity through an everchanging American society which was at first bedevilled by open segregationism and now combats closet racism. The language is rich and finds Mr Obama in the prime of his writing prowess with some of his depictions of mood and sketches of people and a threadbare, pointed and studied introspection into his own self and into the unsure, skeptical minds of his brethren rivalling and often excelling the powers of the best contemporary writers. Mr Obama has in spades the deeply personal sense of community and belonging that expresses itself so fluently in his prose which I found distinctly absent in Jhumpa Lahiri's prose. There is none of the latter's patrician condescension as Obama rivetingly anecdotes his experiences as a black kid brought up by his white grandparents or as a righteous organiser relentlessly campaigning for better living standards in the South Side or Altgeld in Chicago or as a long-lost "prodigal" son returning to the land of his father weeping over its caricature in Hemingway's books and smarting from the blows of the colonialism that are still sorely felt there. A brilliant piece of part-fiction part-fact coming from one of America's most promising and politically astute minds. Since then, I have returned to Conrad Black's Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and find that while Roy Jenkins' gentle, warm humour is absent in Black's style the latter makes up for it with his acerbic, sharp calls and oftentimes rather cruel yet exact judgement of character.* * * * *
