Jokes Apart | Elon Musk, Virat Kohli and the courage of false conviction

I have nothing against fame or money. Just the rich and famous are inordinately fond of sunglasses and they buy hundreds of pairs of these, more than they can ever wear in a lifetime. If you store away these sunglasses in a chest and forget about them, you will do just fine. It’s like Imelda Marcos’ shoe collection, an end in itself. The problem arises when you actually start wearing these shades, while you are out shopping, dropping your kids off at school, at work, at play, at night, indoors, outdoors, even when you are sleeping. Your vision gets blinkered, the world begins to lose its colour and complexity, and one begins to see everything in terms of black and white.

Both Elon Musk and Virat Kohli suffer from this affliction. While the former has gone from stargazing (Mars) to navel-gazing (Twitter), the latter has struggled for far too long to do what he was born to do: Put bat to ball. Both have fetishised a personal conceit; they are convinced that they have got it right. As this column will argue, that is far from being the case.

Musk is convinced that Twitter is the “de facto public town square” or “the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated”. Is it really?

For one, most of India, and all of China, are not on Twitter. Less than 50 million Indians are registered on the microblogging platform. How can matters vital to the future of humanity be discussed on a platform when more than half of humanity is not even a part of it? Twitter has 206 million active users worldwide; the world’s population stands at about 7.9 billion.

But statistics are boring. Let’s leave the numbers by the wayside. Is Twitter even remotely close to being a town or public square? For one, people in the town square are civil to each other, apart from the occasional madman who spits and shouts abuses at passersby. This madman’s behaviour can be rationalised: economic distress, undiagnosed mental illness, the lack of a safety net provided by family or the state. Twitter, on the other hand, is overrun by perfectly healthy mad men, women and persons, dignified by the term ‘trolls’, who spend most of their time shouting and spitting venom in an anonymous vacuum. Also crowding Twitter are vain, self-aggrandising individuals, pretenders to the Vox Populi throne, assembly-line experts showing off their authority. It’s a deeply flawed and feudal world, of serfs and landlords, followers and influencers.

If at all Twitter can be called a public square, it is one in a provincial town in the backwaters; a place whose inhabitants, like in all mofussil towns, are convinced that they occupy a geography that is nothing less than the centre of the universe — Musk’s conceit. Wait, it’s even worse: Twitter is the well in the provincial town square full of smug frogs who think they are princes who rule the world.

There is an even more appropriate metaphor to describe Twitter: It’s not so much a town square as a school classroom. Having taught in a school, I know from experience that the brightest kid often is the most silent; the show-off with buckets of false confidence dominates the discussion. The prejudiced moderator on Twitter is like the compromised teacher, partial to her favourites in class. In school, the chosen few are selected to be prefects; they are then given badges they can pin to their shirts (and which will leave gaping holes in your shirt or blazer pocket). The Twitter manifestation of this is the coveted blue tick.

The influencers remind me of the school prefects who helped organise SPIC MACAY concerts. These were the folks who never actually collected the footwear. The volunteers did the dirty work; the prefects would only guide the visitor to the shoe room.

Twitter debates are not really about debating. They are about hijacking the conversation and keeping the spotlight focused on oneself. The algorithm is an ice tray and the Twitterati like ice cubes fit neatly into their slots in the ice tray. Should Hindi be the national/ link language? There’s no debate; it’s predetermined which cube will go where. Too often, controversy is created for personal gain. Ajay Devgn’s remarks came uncannily close on the heels of the release of his film, Runway 34.

Musk is mistaken in the belief that the future of humanity will be decided by a feudal word game which limits the number of words you can use (the serfs are given less number of words to play with; the landlord gets almost double). He should use his money to do good in India, actions that will fetch him actual goodwill, like gifting a Tesla as a wedding present to Tina Dabi; launching a Scotch whisky for Rs 300 and upending the world’s largest whisky market, or linking all of India in a hyperloop of e-rickshaws. That would be a real disruption.

Like Musk, King Kohli too has been a victim of self-deception, of falling prey to a conceit — it just takes one innings and all will be well. That one innings (or two) haven’t come in the longest time. In the ongoing IPL, Kohli has failed on featherbed pitches and grounds with the shortest of boundaries.

Kohli is like a great writer going through writer’s block. The writer suffers in silence, in the privacy of her room, while the sportsman suffers in the cruel harsh glare of floodlights and TV cameras. The blocked writer can go away from her writing, read the work of writers she likes. The sportsperson is fearful of getting rusty (and her place in the team) if she goes away from the game. Pujara, also out of form like Kohli, has been playing county cricket for Sussex, and it looks like it’s working for him.

Kohli needs to stop thinking that he is Kohli. As captain, his vocabulary had started reeking of management jargon, the worst of traps. The cliches came thick and fast about leadership roles, an uncluttered mind, taking the bull by its horns. He tried just that the other night in an IPL game, deciding not just to open but to face the first ball. He perished after an uncomfortable first over. For Kohli fans, it was a horror to watch. You can’t but not feel for him.

But for the last couple of years, he’s been convinced that it’s just a matter of one or two good knocks. The conceit has become a bugbear. The team management has encouraged this delusion, prolonging his agony. Kohli has spoken defensively about shutting out “outside noise”. None of this has helped. Maybe Kohli should take a leaf out of the blocked writer’s blank notebook. He should take a sabbatical, do something unrelated to cricket and come back fresh, with that schoolboy’s hunger for runs he is known for.

Famous authors too are guilty of succumbing to the aura of their own name, which by late career has become a brand name. It’s never a good idea to become a brand name to yourself in your own head: “I am so-and-so; whatever I say and write is of value to the world”. (“I am Virat Kohli; I’ve done it in the past and I’ll do it again”). Publishers might go on putting out your books but the exercise lacks literary value. The imposter syndrome is not necessarily debilitating; at times, it helps one to step back, step up and start anew. It’s better than going on and on and on, even when it’s not working out.

To sum up, Musk should get over his fantasy that the future of humanity will be decided by bad aphorisms. The only good that ever came out of Twitter was an indie film called Zola, based on a 148-Tweet viral thread by a waitress from Detroit. She live-Tweeted her experiences, as they happened, in Florida’s underbelly of prostitution and strip clubs.

Kohli should get over the idea that he will get back to stroking the ball beautifully as long as he continues to fail in the thick of things.

Different personalities, different conceits. If only they took their sunglasses off.

The writer is the author of ‘The Butterfly Generation’ and the editor of ‘House Spirit: Drinking in India’. Views expressed are personal.

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