Room To Read And Cricket

Could the Indian cricket board have used the opportunity of a India-NZ series of little significance to show its social responsibility initiatives through Virat Kohli, other stars?

By Francis Adams

VVS Laxman with his wife and kids. Picture courtesy: BCCI

The two-Test cricket series between India and New Zealand has assumed little importance other than the prospect of another Sachin Tendulkar century at home and the opportunity for Cheteshwar Pujara and Ajinkya Rahane to cement their place in the Test side left vacant by Rahul Dravid and V V S Laxman. 

   The fact that India will be playing a Test match after a gap of seven months is paled by the depleted strength of the opposition, who are without their inspirational and most capped player, Daniel Vettori, sidelined owing to a groin injury. The Kiwis are also in India on the back of Test defeat to a fractured and weak West Indies. Statistic, such as, India's collective Test experience of 715 matches to New Zealand's 316 provide more fodder to the insignificant status of this series.

   The other factor that has taken away the sheen from this series is the upcoming Twenty-20 World Cup in Sri Lanka. It is, thus, not a surprise to see poor spectator response to first Test that began at the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium, Hyderabad on Thursday.

   VVS Laxman's retirement, leaving the Test side without any player from Hyderabad and Andhra Pradesh has also contributed to the lukewarm response to the Test. The second Test in Bangalore is also likely to witness empty seats at the Stadium because the city and the Karnataka state's hero Dravid has retired.

   In such a scenario, the Board of Control for Cricket in India had the worthy opportunity to showcase what  its parent body, the International Cricket Council calls "commitment to the Spirit of Cricket" and use the sport for social good. After all, cricket in India has had broader social impact and has been a catalyst for social integration much before the country achieved independence.

   A few days ago, in Sri Lanka, Angelo Mathews launched a children's book titled Angelo's Big Day in Cricket [Punchi Angelo in Sinhalese and Siryuvayadil Angelo in Tamil]. The initiative happened in collaboration with the ICC and Room to Read, a not-for-profit organisation that promotes literacy and gender equality in education throughout Asia and Africa.

Virat Kohli

   Incidentally, Virat Kohli is the brand ambassador for Room To Read, and along with Kane Williamson in the current New Zealand side, was part of the programme run by Room To Read during the last World Cup.

  Room to Read was born after its founder John Wood was moved by the plight of a school in Nepal that had no books for its students to read from. "I was trucking through Nepal as a break from Microsoft, and this headmaster had 450 students in his school and a library that was completely devoid of books. To me, this is a microcosm of what happens in the developing world: That teachers want to teach, students want to learn, but they have no books," Wood told The Globe and Mail.

  It is heartening to see the ICC devoting space on its website to its social causes and activities, among them Think Wise, that uses the power of cricket to help create awareness about HIV and AIDS.

  Unfortunately, the BCCI's two sites, www.bccicricket.org and www.bcci.tv do not contain any of such social initiative. 

  India still needs such gestures from cricket stars as ambassadors despite the fact that Right to Education has now become a constitutional commitment. Take the case of Andhra Pradesh. Despite South India being India's leader in literacy, the state lagged behind its southern neighbours and was even overtaken by Uttar Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Orissa in the 2011 census.

  Unlike the visible disparity in income in India, literacy is not for the benefit of the elite alone. It benefits those at the social bottom, giving them dignity, status and income potential.

  A couple of social initiatives running parallel to or alongside the two-Test series would have earned the BCCI plaudit, worldwide.

Spare a thought: “The poor and the affluent are not communicating because they do not have the same words. When we talk of the millions who are culturally deprived, we refer not to those who do not have access to good libraries and bookstores, or to museums and centers for the performing arts, but those deprived of the words with which everything else is built, the words that open doors. Children without words are licked before they start. The legion of the young wordless in urban and rural slums, eight to ten years old, do not know the meaning of hundreds of words which most middle-class people assume to be familiar to much younger children. Most of them have never seen their parents read a book or a magazine, or heard words used in other than rudimentary ways related to physical needs and functions. Thus is cultural fallout caused, the vicious circle of ignorance and poverty reinforced and perpetuated. Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble.” - Peter S Jennison [a historian, novelist, and a recently retired book publisher. He reviews inns and restaurants for Vermont Magazine]