Reportedely, Dhoni offered Harbhajan the last over in the Twenty:20 final.?Harbhajan demurred.?He was not confident of the pitch for his offspin yorkers.?Sharma bowled instead, and the rest is now embedded in the annals of cricketing lore.?This cameo (interpreted to suit my purpose) contains a message for our political leadership.?For it shows what sound leadership can achieve.?Here was a youthful captain on the horns of a dilemma.?He approaches his most experienced bowler.?The bowler admits his shortcomings, and forgoes the opportunity for individual glory. He does so, I presume, in the interest of the team?the collective.?The buck passes to the captain, who has to take the ultimate decision.?Should he persist with experience or risk the unexpected??He knows that the latter, if unsuccessful, would trigger endless commentary and maybe even excoriating invective.?He refuses to be flustered, focuses calmly on his task, and accepts the risk?willing to share the burden placed on Sharma.?
The cameo is a metaphor for risk taking and innovation.?It is a metaphor for what collective spirit and conviction can achieve.?It is a metaphor that is worth stretching to convey a point to our politicians across the country.
I have been writing a column on mainly energy related issues for several years, and while going through some of my older pieces, was struck by how little has changed over the past decade or so.?The issues back then are more or less the issues of importance today.?Energy security was a priority a decade back. It remains on the agenda today.?Bombay High?s declining oil & gas production was a concern then. It continues to be one today. A debate raged on market pricing versus administered pricing for petroleum products, then.?It is still an unresolved issue. The list goes on.
This is not to suggest that nothing has happened.?Much has, in fact, been initiated over the past decade. But the rhetoric of change has been much louder than the reality of change, and that the substantive challenges of ten years ago remain very much the same today. The energy sector is not exceptional.? The same can probably be said for almost every area of activity in which the government has a dominant say.
Conventional wisdom tells us that the price of democracy is incrementalism.?We must not expect radical change.?The gap between the rhetoric of ten years back and the reality of today in the energy sector exists not because decision-makers do not know what to do.?They know it better than any one else.?The gap exists because they?believe it cannot be bridged without committing political harakiri.?They believe that the electorate would punish them if they raised the price of diesel and gasoline, even though by not doing so they know they will bankrupt their Navratna companies. They believe there would be a dharna?if they raised the tariff on electricity, even though by so doing they know?that they stand a better chance of making good the promise of uninterrupted supply.?In short, conventional wisdom has it that the voter is a gullible hedonist who cannot see beyond his immediate needs and is therefore unwittingly prepared to sacrifice the future for the present.
The metaphor of Dhoni?s last over suggests that this might no longer be the case.?It suggests that the voter, in the shape of the youthful citizen, is not so gullible.?He sees the consequences of populism. He challenges the?idea of incrementalism and wants a leader prepared to innovate and take risks.?It is a metaphor that?turns conventional wisdom on its head.
I admit that I am stretching?the point. But this is deliberate.?For,?whilst India is?the destination of choice today,?it will not remain so if our leaders continue to be limited by orthodoxy and cliche.?It is hard to say what Dravid would have done, but it?s reasonable to suspect he would not have taken the risk of allowing a rookie to send down the last six balls.?This is because, as a seasoned practitioner, he is all too familiar with the consequences of failure.? He would have followed convention and tried to minimise risks.?But then, he might also have reduced the probability of such a dramatic victory.?
A few months back, Dhoni?s house was ransacked.?This was after India crashed out of the?World Cup in the West Indies.?A few days hence, Dhoni may well find himself at the receiving end of a reinvigorated Australian 11 and the current hype will take on a different hue.?That will be cricket?like anything else, subject to cycles of fortune and circumstance.?Whatever the future twists, the essential message of our South African triumph must not be lost.?The youth are impatient of underperformance.?And of explanations that justify underperformance.?Indian leaders must?break out of their conventional straitjacket and?countenance ?radical? next steps for a change.
?The author is chairman of the Shell Group of Companies in India. These are his personal views