The Abuse Theory

There was a free abuse program at Mitchell Johnson’s Facebook Page which was about him, his family and the Australian Cricket Team in a movement lead by a set of online Keralites who were all set to save India. They always had this belief that Kerala had the right to save India from all kinds of problems, like from Maria Sharapova, Pakistan Hockey Team and others. Yes, they feel that India is at its best because Keralites abuse random people in Malayalam.

So, what happens? Australia wins by a huge margin and Mitchell Johnson plays a big part in the victory. Ever heard of Karma? It is like a vampire who has known you and comes back to bite you and suck the blood out of you. Did they think that this could negatively affect Australian team? I would say that it did only the positive, and it gave out the idea that there was no professionalism or sportsman-spirit coming from here. Did they think that it could affect Maria Sharapova in a negative way? Her game hasn’t come down. Serena Williams was always supposed to win the US Open. Asian hockey is no longer the powerhouse, and they can’t even say that the Pakistan Hockey Team is playing worse.

Some credit for the same should go to a few Malayalam newspapers who translated a few things said in English like they were the masters of two languages, but it turned out that they were good at none or only one. Do they even know what sledging means? Otherwise, they could use the same word. But what they have been doing is to create new things out of nowhere; they are the magicians of the new world. If you don’t have command over the language, what is the point of having studied journalism?

These newspapers have been trying to re-invent tennis these days, and the sport actually came to them very late. They are surely figuring out a few things about the game now. It is mostly the media which creates abuse – they are calling for the same in an indirect way and when they find that the crowd has taken it over, they report the same. It is like a win-win situation anyway. May be if there is no abuse, the newspapers and channels can speak about the forgiving nature of Keralites.

What does the abuse talk about? It doesn’t mean anything other than degrading India in front of the whole world. The biggest shame about it is that a state which boasts of hundred percent literacy is leading the charge or is the only big player in doing the same. There is the pathetic display of a culture or rather the absence of it, which was never really part of our life. Once again, I also blame the movie 1983 and its one pathetic dialogue about abuse to make this evil spread – it was actually like making abuse cool and legal.

I would guess that the free abuse program on Ranjini Haridas has finished, or was getting to repetitive. Prithviraj Sukumaran turned into the crowd favourite and Sreesanth is no longer the enemy. So, here are our people finding new replacements for abuse. As they keep abusing one or the other person all the time, there is a certain amount of freshness in the procedure. After all, doing something constructive has actually ceased to exist. Being the cool bad person is the trend.

With Indian Cricket Team losing the match with a certain amount of disgrace, I only hope that Anushka Sharma will be spared. In a normal environment with intelligent people, we shouldn’t be afraid for a Bollywood star who has nothing to do with cricket except for being the girlfriend of one of the major cricketers. But this is a strange world that we live in, and people mostly have no idea what they talk about or what they do. Don’t we need a law against online abuse instead of this chaos?

***The photos used in this blog post are from the Official Facebook Page of ICC Cricket World Cup 2015

TeNy