Education differentiates India's southern cricketers
South India, with its Dravidian roots, has its own culture that seperates it from North India
Tariq Engineer
25-Feb-2013
South India, with its Dravidian roots, has its own culture that seperates it from North India. In Open, Suresh Menon argues that the South’s emphasis on education has typically resulted in a more modest, better educated cricketer, but worries that the IPL’s riches might spell the end of this trend.
The two strains worth exploring in the southern players’ distinctive character are Brahminical inevitability, and a conservatism that comes mixed with insecurity. Even before the days of Prasanna, whose father told him he had to focus on his studies no matter what, the southern parent’s mantra has been: academics before sport. It might have mutated into ‘academics alongside sport’ over a period, but we are still some way before ‘sports above everything else’ takes over. Cricket as a career is beginning to be seen as an option, however, but this might be at the cost of education.
Chennai, Hyderabad and Bangalore have traditionally been cities of academic excellence. There is a certain inevitability to a child going from school to university to a ‘safe government job’. The government might have been replaced by an MNC as the aspiration, but, in essence, the story has not changed. Add to that the uncertainty of a sporting future, and the insecurity that comes with it, and the cry is for ‘something to fall back on.’ That ‘something’ in the south has always been education, even among the wealthy businessmen and technocrats who keep the chair warm for their offspring.
Tariq Engineer is a former senior sub-editor at ESPNcricinfo