'World Cup obsession unhealthy'

Led by captain Rahul Dravid the Indian team is celebrating its first Test series win in England in 21 years. While many question Dravid's lack of aggression in enforcing a win in the third Test, he continues to be Mr. Dependable not just for his team but also for its newer brand.

With the BCCI saying yes, maybe and then no to limiting cricketer endorsements after their disastrous World Cup performance, the love affair continues between cricketers and their favourite brands.

Proctar and Gamble has just snapped up Dravid and he joins an international league of Gillette endorsers including Roger Federer, Thierry Henry and Tiger Woods. In June, while shooting for this commercial Rahul gives us a glimpse of why brands find him irresistible.

Anuradha SenGupta: Rahul Dravid, it’s a million dollar question, what is it like being Rahul Dravid? If I had to figure out what you are, what’s your DNA, what makes you tick, where should I like at you to get a really clear sense of who you are, when you are out there playing?

Rahul Dravid: I feel most comfortable or most at home when I’m playing the game, when I’m actually playing the game or playing a cricket match or when I’m practising. It’s what I have always done. It’s what I have always wanted to do as a young boy. So definitely I’m the most comfortable in that environment. I can switch off from the rest of the world. It doesn’t matter. Little things like the stress, the pressures have no meaning any more. It’s just the game, bat and the ball; it’s me versus them. And obviously when I’m with my family, I can just be with myself.

Anuradha SenGupta: Muhammad Ali said and I quote, I think I quote this quite often but it’s a favourite quote. He says "Champions aren’t made in gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them- a desire, a dream, a vision, They have to have last minute stamina, they have to be a little faster, they have to have the skill and the will. But the will must be stronger than the skill."

Now when you hear this kind of a philosophy that articulates what it is like to be a sportsman, how much do you relate to it or how much would you embellish it with your personnel experience?

Rahul Dravid: Very much, you know constantly improving your skills and to keep improving your skills requires a lot of hard work, dedication constantly and I think that’s where will comes in, that sort of determination. That’s what he says, a vision, a ability to look at the future, where you want to be, what do you want to be counted as, what is it that you really want to achieve, what is it that you want to leave behind after you have had the opportunity to play the game or do what ever you do.

And you got to motivate yourself through that through will. At various stages in your career, there will be different things that motivate you but there comes a point where motivation must come from within you.

Anuradha SenGupta: But Rahul, this philosophy of being a champion or a true sense of being a sportsman, how much of this purity can you hang on to in the world that you are living in, competitive, commercial, political that almost every sport is today and your sport for sure?

Rahul Dravid: Every sport is, you cannot play a sport at this level without having these things. The very fact that competing against other countries and to be able to play at another level or to organise events like Wimbledon, there is finance involved to it, there is economics involved in it. We cannot escape from that fact. I think professionalism and economics may take away the innocence, the purity like you mentioned, but it also helps enhance skills. Today people are getting to see much higher level of skill, all across the sports because people can afford to devote time and energy to a single thing.

Anuradha SenGupta: So you are seeing there is no romance of true sports and purity of being a champion?

Rahul Dravid: There is romanticism involved to it. I would have liked to play a few games of cricket where it didn’t matter.

Anuradha SenGupta: Would you have liked to play in another era?

Rahul Dravid: I don’t know. I would have loved to sample it. I would have loved to play in the 30s and the 40s and go to long tours. Those days they were gone for six months; they used to travel by ships. They played matches where the pace of the game was much leisurely. So yes, there was more camaraderie between the players and the teams in that era, and I would have loved to have sampled that. But I have really enjoyed in the era that I have played in.

Anuradha SenGupta: But you would not swap? If I said this is a time machine and you could swap.

Rahul Dravid: As long as I could come back.

Anuradha SenGupta: The vicissitudes of the game, the ups and the downs, the glaring spotlight, the media inquisition, how do you insulate yourself because it’s a skill that you must have to develop over the years? In the mid 90s when you debuted did you know that you would need the skill, the diplomacy, the "no comments" and all of that?

Rahul Dravid: No, I didn’t think I will be needing that. It was a different time then.

Anuradha SenGupta: It’s been just 10 years.

Rahul Dravid: It was a different time. I don’t want to sound old. We reminisce a lot, the players who have played in that time. It was just beginning then, you could just sense that because India had opened up but the last four-five years have been completely different. I think the pressures were a lot less, life was a lot simpler. I remember, we have played games, you could go down with your team mates and eat in hotel restaurants and go out in taxis.

Anuradha SenGupta: You can’t do that now, can you?

Rahul Dravid: You can but it would be reported, someone would be following you and it takes charm out of the thing. It takes the charm out of doing something. Then you prefer sitting in your room.

Anuradha SenGupta: Isn’t there a moment when you are quite happy with the attention, the photographs, you are like a demigod? It must be feeling good at some level.

Rahul Dravid: I am not cribbing or complaining about it, I’m just stating the reality of the matter. For someone like me who has been getting this attention for 10 years, maybe it’s easy for me to say that it doesn’t mean that much to me. If you had asked me this question 10 years ago, it would have been different. I have been through the whole thing now.

Anuradha SenGupta: It’s an intrusion?

Rahul Dravid: I would not go that far in calling it an intrusion but I definitely think that in some ways if I could just play without dealing with these external factors.

Anuradha SenGupta: How do you deal with it? What are the safety valves? How do you insulate yourself besides saying "no comments", saying no to controversies?

Rahul Dravid: For me it’s been a learning process because I didn’t start with this; my generation of cricketers have grown into this. I really have a lot of admiration for some the younger players of today. I think they have come into it and deal with the situation straightaway. These are young boys just out of college, not even in college and they had to deal with this. For me it’s been a process of learning. One of the ways I have dealt with it is I have kept things in perspective whether I have succeeded or whether I have failed. And I have been lucky in my personality; I am that kind of a person.

Anuradha SenGupta: What kind of a personality? I want you to describe it.

Rahul Dravid: I don’t know how to describe it. I don’t get carried away that easily whether it’s success and I don’t get too down on myself whether it’s failure. Just trying to keep things in perspective and just to remember it’s a game. I still find that purity and joy when I play the game. As a young kid, I didn’t even know this is India and you would be playing cricket, and there would be all this. I just played this because I just loved the game and there was no other reason why I played it.

Anuradha SenGupta: You are one of those lucky guys whose parents allowed him to play a game and see it as a career? So what was the role that your parents played in shaping who you are today?

Rahul Dravid: They played a huge role. They made sure I never ignored my studies. They kept reminding me that cricket was not the be all and end all of everything. There is more to life than cricket and that sort of helped me.

Anuradha SenGupta: Before you went to the World Cup I remember the interviews that you did, you seemed to be downplaying the momentous of the World Cup. In fact you said we have an unhealthy obsession with the World Cup. Was that because you had a realistic sense of where your team was headed or was it because you genuinely feel we over-hype it?

Rahul Dravid: I downplayed it because I genuinely feel we have an unhealthy obsession with it. I truly believe we could have done much better than we did. When I look back now what kind of frame I went with, what were my thoughts. I went in with a very positive frame of mind to the World Cup. It didn’t work out; it’s a different thing. But I definitely think that we have an unhealthy obsession with the World Cup. And I think the obsession with it tends to start too early in India.

Anuradha SenGupta: So how deeply disappointed are you because that would have been the last World Cup you played or you still going strong for the next one you think?

Rahul Dravid: It is probably unlikely that I would play another World Cup. I have got to be realistic and look at it. I am 34 now and the next World Cup is four years away. And the game is getting younger and the people are coming in. You never know what is going to happen in future but I almost knew that it was my last World Cup. And obviously, I was deeply disappointed by it.

Anuradha SenGupta: How emotional did you get personally? Forget everyone else, forget everything around. You, yourself personally and this milestone.

Rahul Dravid: I obviously got very disappointed and emotion about it for a while but like I said, you got to move on and that’s why I try to keep the whole thing in perspective and keep the whole thing in balance. And whatever is done is done and you can’t change it. You got to move on and there are new challenges. The world hasn’t stopped because the World Cup is not ours. My life hasn’t stopped because we couldn’t do better in that World Cup. There are new challenges, there are new things to do, there is a life that’s going on around you. That’s where I feel that other countries are much better than us. They are very good at finding this balance, like Australia doesn’t stop going for excellence or trying to raise their system or trying to raise their team.

Anuradha SenGupta: What is it? Is it about being Indian or Australian? Is it about the way we are administrating the game or is it about our genetic make-up?

Rahul Dravid: I think it is our obsession with cricket and cricket is the number One sport in this country and World Cup is the biggest cricket event. So, we get obsessed by it. And maybe it is our obsession that help world cricket run.

Anuradha SenGupta: I am sure you are more aware of the fact than us that the backlash and the resentment towards players’ endorsement and things like that. How do you balance it?

Rahul Dravid: You just have to accept it in some ways that this is the way it is going to be. If you get too hard on yourself then you actually start believing in everything that is written about you, whether it is good or it is bad. And then you are in trouble, if you take everything too emotionally. You got to just cut yourself off from it and put yourself in some kind of a cocoon and know that as long as you are true to yourself and as long as you can look into the mirror and say that I gave in everything that I had and that’s what I can only ask from myself.

Anuradha SenGupta: What is your favourite spectator sport?

Rahul Dravid: I love watching tennis. I have started enjoying watching golf.

Anuradha SenGupta: Can you redefine yourself as a professional golfer you think?

Rahul Dravid: No, absolutely not. There is no chance. The kind of skill that these golfer require, I mean I haven’t played golf much and the only time I played golf was when we are on tour and I just want to have a walk and it is nice and relaxing. You just can’t start at 34 and decide that now this is what I am going to do it now, it doesn’t work like this.

Anuradha SenGupta: Why not? We could have had a double champion.

Rahul Dravid: No way!

Anuradha SenGupta: No such ambition?

Rahul Dravid: No chance. There is no way I can do it.

Anuradha SenGupta: You are realistic, aren’t you?

Rahul Dravid: I will be a foolish if I believe that I can do it.

Anuradha SenGupta: We were talking about brands and endorsements and things. The BCCI reacted to the World Cup performance and one of things that they said was that we need to cut down on the endorsements because I think they were reacting to people’s reactions. And they said three brands per player, etc, etc. What is your concerned about that? What is your argument against it

Rahul Dravid: I think a public forum is not a place to address my concerns, specially on an issue like this which is being discussed. The place for me to address concerns are with the authorities or the relevant people and that’s what I should be doing. There is no point me being coming to public forum and expressing my concerns here because I think that is the wrong way to do it. You also need to understand that we are in un-tested waters here in India. There are advertising, then this kind of an influx of attention of the media. This is all quite new to this country, it is new to cricket, it is new to all of us. In American sport, people have gone through these things.

Anuradha SenGupta: Any learning from there you think?

Rahul Dravid: Definitely, there are a lot of issues that we can look at and look at how they have dealt with some of these issues, when it cropped up in their country. And I am sure the players and the officials are looking at those things.

Anuradha SenGupta: The administrators of the game are under a lot of criticism. Do you think we the public need to be more sympathetic towards them because you know what it is like up close or do you think I have a right to be so impatient and demanding?

Rahul Dravid: We are going to be impatient and that is the truth.

Anuradha SenGupta: What would you like it to be?

Rahul Dravid: I think, like in anything else, whether you are a player or an administrator or you play a sport that is number 1 in the country which affects the lives of so many people, and people are passionate about it and there is so much riding on it, there is going to be a huge amount of reactions and as a player or an administrator you will have to accept it and there is no way that it is going to change.

Anuradha SenGupta: I can’t pick up a newspaper without thinking that this it is a different world you guys are living in, every which way. I am really shocked sometimes that I am reading about a sport? And I am not saying that the world I come from is pure. No, its not. It is media after all but how do you hang on to your true selves? You read the newspapers and you feel that I don’t want to get into India cricket?

Rahul Dravid: If you are in it then you have a better perspective of what is actually the truth. I am not saying that everything is right or everything is wrong but there is mid point to everything. In think the media can sensationalize things a lot but then there are some positive things that do come out of it.

Anuradha SenGupta: It is not as bad as it seems? Is it all magnified when we see or read about it?

Rahul Dravid: A part of it is definitely magnified. The there are things that we can do better as players, as administrators and that’s no doubt. We need to look at other sports and other countries as in how they are playing or running their sport and the success that they have had. There have been some great cricket teams, teams of other sporting success, who have had great success and at the end of the day it is the system that will always win. Make no mistake about it – if you get the system right and you will get the right team. Teams are really the product of its system.

Anuradha SenGupta: Do you miss Greg Chappell?

Rahul Dravid: I miss all the coaches I had. I had good relations with all of them.

Anuradha SenGupta: That’s the part of the answer that you have learned to give over the past 10 years.

Rahul Dravid: No, it’s a truth. I have learned that.

Anuradha SenGupta: No, give me answer to the question – Do you miss Greg Chappell 10 years ago?

Rahul Dravid: I probably would have given you the same answer. No the fact is that I have learned a lot from all the coaches that I have played under and I have got along well with each and every one of them. I have played with and under a few of them and really enjoyed my association with all of them. There is a lot to learn from each one of the.

Anuradha SenGupta: Did you enjoy being the captain?

Rahul Dravid: Ya, I have really enjoyed the challenges. There have been ups and downs. There are challenges being a captain but overall I have always seen it as a honour and a privilege and enjoyed the chance to lead my country and to work with a really good set of boys.

Anuradha SenGupta: Couple of books that had been written about you – One is called 'The Nice Guy, who finished first'?

Rahul Dravid: Never believe in everything that is written in the book.

Anuradha SenGupta: Which is what that you are didn’t finish first or you are not a nice guy?

Rahul Dravid: You can put it anyway you want. When do you ever finishing first? What is first? At the end of the day, it is a constant thing. I don’t think there is ever a first. You are always looking to keep improving whatever things in your life. It is not just about cricket but also about my life after cricket. So, what is a first?

Anuradha SenGupta: Are you a nice guy? After you finish with cricket, do you see yourself in a television channel commenting on the poor guys out there playing?

Rahul Dravid: I hope not. I really hope not.

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