A name that means unbeatable
On Thursday, a man named “the one who cannot be defeated” retired from cricket by reading out a list of his defeats.
His name is Ajinkya Rahane. Ajinkya means unbeatable. Parents in India do this. They pour a big hope into a name and hand it to a child who has done nothing yet to earn it. Undefeatable, they wrote on him, on a day when he was far too small to argue.
Then cricket went to work on the name, the way cricket does. He was dropped. He was written off. His team lost matches. He made mistakes, and he said so, plainly, on the way out. Cricket had shown him defeat many times, he admitted.
Two kinds of defeat
Look at the word itself. English is lazy with it. We use one word, defeat, for two things that are not the same.
There is losing. That is a scoreboard thing. It happens on one afternoon, it goes into the record, and then it is over. You can point to it. You can count it. It has a date.
And there is being defeated. That is a different thing. It is not one afternoon. It is what happens when the loss moves in and starts paying rent. When it decides who you are, and how you will walk into the next room.
Adelaide
Start with Adelaide, because it was as bad as it gets. India were bowled out for 36. Their lowest total in nearly ninety years of Test cricket. The match was over inside three days.
Then it got worse. Virat Kohli, the captain, flew home after that first Test for the birth of his first child. Mohammed Shami left the field in Adelaide with a broken arm and played no further part. The injuries kept coming, until the team was missing most of its first-choice bowlers.
Rahane took over a side that was losing, without its captain, and short of players. He led it to win the series. Two matches to one, away from home, sealed in Brisbane at a ground where Australia had not lost in over thirty years.
So the name was right the whole time. On the scoreboard he was beaten, in Adelaide and often after. In the place that actually decides these things, he never was.
Kipling and his two impostors
Rahane is only the latest to reach a very old idea. That victory and defeat are impostors did not begin with him, and it did not begin with cricket.
In 1910, Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem for his son. Most of it is one long sentence, held open by the word if. In the middle sits the line everyone remembers. If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same.
Impostor is the right word. Triumph and Disaster arrive in different clothes, and they run the same trick. Each wants you to believe the moment is the verdict. Both are lying. Those two lines now hang above the players’ entrance at Wimbledon, where every summer someone walks under them towards one impostor or the other, and mostly does not look up.
The older answer
The idea is older than Kipling, by a long way. It is there in the Bhagavad Gita. Verse 2.48.
Do your work, it says, standing steady, and let go of the result. Stay even whether you win or lose. That evenness is the whole practice. The verse gives it a name, samatvam, which means balance. It makes no promise that you will win. It says only that the outcome was never yours to keep, so hold on to neither side of it. Do the work well, and let the scoreboard do what it likes.
You are here for a reason. Give it everything you have. The winning and the losing will sort themselves out, and they were never the point.
That is easy to write and very hard to live. Which is probably why it has needed saying, over and over, for a few thousand years, in whatever room happens to be free.
And then, me
I should own up to something before I go back to him.
For some weeks now I have been occupied. Mentally, physically, emotionally, all three at once. This blog runs on a simple rhythm. Something new every week. That is the goal I set myself, and lately I have missed it, week after week.
So I lost. A small, private contest with the calendar. Perhaps that is a defeat. And yet here I am, at the page, writing this. Which is the same question I have been putting to everyone else. Once you have turned up, are you really defeated?
Cap number 278
He answered that question long before I thought to ask it. I am drawn to the quiet ones. The players who do not show off. Who stay out of the noise. Who never chase a fight or a headline. Rahane is one of them.
Which is why his words surprised me. He spoke of defeat, out loud, many times. My team lost. I made mistakes. Cricket has shown me defeat. And I kept wondering why. He is so far beyond it.
Consider the record. In 85 Tests he made 5,077 runs, with 12 centuries and 26 fifties. He led India to a series win in Australia, against the odds. He led Mumbai to their 42nd Ranji Trophy title, a national record.
A name that means unbeatable, and a career that spent nearly two decades earning it.
A man with all that does not need to speak of losing. He did anyway. And that is why I believe him about the one place he said he was never beaten. In the hearts of the people who watched him.
On Thursday he signed off. Cap number 278. Quiet to the end. Beyond defeat, and still honest about every loss.
PS: Here’s something I wrote years ago with a video that still gives me goosebumps. .
6 responses
you wonderfully enunciated what has been flowing through my mind. We need more like him, and less of the mercurial perform-once-blow-it-all-up-and walk-around-getting-clicked-with-your-girlfriend type; even though bcci has made rules regarding that. The team follows the captain. Ajinkya Rahane honored that position. The current lot does not. My 2 paisa opinion as an old geezer non cricketing type.
Suranga! Great to see your comment after so long. You cannot imagine how much that pleases me.
You have said the thing I left unsaid. Rahane honoured the chair he sat in. The chair did not honour him back very often, and he stayed anyway. That, really, is the whole of it.
And your two paisa, as you call it, is worth a great deal more! 🙂
Every article you write my friend, you seem to be writing the Bhagwad Gita. Gems on their own…each of them.
And mind you, your absence was felt. I missed you and your article, Kavi
That is very kind sir. And it made me laugh, because I set out to write about a cricketer and somehow you have caught me writing about how to live.
The absence was only life doing what life does. Good to be back at the desk, and better still to find you still here. Thank you very much Sir!
We play two games simultaneously. One like cricket which is a finite game – with clear win and lose result. It is here that we feel what you wrote beautifully, ‘Triumph and Disaster arrive in different clothes, and they run the same trick. Each wants you to believe the moment is the verdict. Both are lying.’
Finite games like cricket have clear winners and losers. An infinite game does not have defined rules. It has no clear beginning, no clear end. Life is an infinite game as Simon Simek says. He asks a fundamental question – ‘when we die will anyone among us be declared a ‘winner of life’?’ We play the infinite game our way and create our rules.
A good player like Ajinkya Rahane knows what game he is playing.
Superb blog post! You once again drew our attention to the most important aspect of life.
Thank you sir! The finite game and the infinite one. Yes. The scoreboard belongs entirely to the finite game, which is why a single bad afternoon can feel like the end of the world and then turn out to be almost nothing. Rahane seemed to know which was which. He played the finite game hard, and refused to let it tell him who he was.
The idea, if I remember right, began with James Carse before Sinek carried it further. Either way, you have handed me the frame I was reaching for and could not quite name. When we go, no one reads out a winner. We only hope we played our own game well.