The story of a car

First, the car story. Sachin was gifted a car by Ferrari, whose products he endorses, officially in appreciation of his 30th test century to go past Sir Don Bradman’s record. The customs duty on the car amounted to more than Rs 1 crore; he applied for a waiver, it was granted.

The car is now in Mumbai and the public consensus appears to be that India’s richest-ever sportsman, who earns approximately Rs 20 crore a year, should have paid up.

It’s a perfectly justifiable, sensible point of view. Why should Sachin be exempt from paying duty on what is essentially a gift, especially when he can, going by his annual income, afford it? And when other sportsmen who have actually won cars in tournaments abroad have been charged full rate for their prizes?

The counter-argument is that Sachin has been honoured for the quality of his cricket in India colours (the underlying irony in that — domestic cricket doesn’t count — is purely unintentional). However, this is a sort of a chicken-and-egg theory: Without India colours to wear, he wouldn’t have got where he was in the first place.

The deeper tragedy is that the entire debate will be declared redundant the moment Sachin scores one of his trademark centuries. The World Cup, and his scintillating form then, is too far away in distant memory, there hasn’t been cricket for a long time and the season is still a month away. If there’s a good issue in town, hey, why not ride on it? So discount the average punter’s anger, discount the columnists’ outrage, discount even the Shiv Sena’s ‘‘advice’’. If Sachin is quiet today, not even issuing a statement through his usually on-the-ball PR machine, it’s because he knows there’s only one way to silence trenchant criticism. On the field, with the bat.

The more serious debate, though, involves Sunitha Rao, her father and the All India Tennis Association. Rao Sr’s attempts to put a price tag — Rs 5 crore, for those who delight in detail — on the India crest have won him widespread condemnation; the AITA, when informed by this paper of the ‘‘deal’’, treated it like the latest contagious disease. If it’s money he’s after, let his daughter play in the US, went the cry; we don’t need to sell places on our tennis team.

Indeed we don’t. Which is why the status of the deal comes as a surprise: The AITA is offering a compensation package of Rs 35 lakh a year, Rao Sr wants Rs 50 lakh a year (duration unspecified). It’s a change of tactic convenient to everyone, good PR (wait till the heat cools down) coupled with the oldest trick in the accountancy book: Show the same amount under a different head of expenditure. We can’t pay you Rs 5 crore to sign her up but here, will Rs 35 lakh a year, with lots of goodwill thrown in, do?

Both stories raise the question of whether, when sport is getting increasingly commercialised, we should continue to attach nationalistic emotions in our relationship with our sportsmen. They are, after all, simply doing what they are best at, and getting paid for it, too. If cricketers — and, to a lesser extent, footballers — are full-fledged professionals, other sportsmen are rewarded by the government every time they do well at the international level.

That way, the issue of Sachin and his car, Sunitha and her compensation would sort itself out. They will be seen as financial deals, cut-and-dried and shorn of blurry intangibles — without, of course, selling the India jersey to the highest bidder. As I write this, though, I see Dhanraj walking on to the astroturf and know that it could, should, never happen in India.