It is this communion – whether of sticking up for the nation, cheering a cricket team or finding pleasure in following cricket (two separate things), of loving one movie and detesting another, of adoring a public figure – that makes a thing popular. Regardless of what quality it bears, being popular is the triumph of quantity, not a mean achievement at all.
But with all the pleasures of being the popular girl or boy in school, or being the fangirl or fanboy of the most popular pop star in your political or social firmament, there is, however, a downside to popularity. It leaves one too visible. The camera lens also doubles as a ready tool for a sniper.
Take last week’s postponement of football matches in Britain as a mark of national mourning upon the death of the country’s queen. Last Sunday’s Premier League games of Manchester United-Leeds at Old Trafford and Liverpool-Chelsea at Stamford Bridge, along with Thursday’s Europa Cup game of Arsenal-PSV Eindhoven at the Emirates Stadium, were called off. Nothing strange about that, I suppose, considering the rare collision of two hugely popular national institutions: football and Queen Elizabeth.
But cricket in the form of the third England-South Africa Test match at the Oval kept calm and carried on last Friday – the first day being washed out by rain, and the second day cancelled because of the death of the monarch. True, Elizabeth was not fond of football, the only time having watched a game at a stadium being in 1966, when she handed England skipper Bobby Moore the World Cup at Wembley. But like at the Oval, where players and spectators observed a minute’s silence and sang the national anthem, surely football players and fans could also have held a communion in the memory of the queen?
It turns out that the real issue was not so much about Britain’s football administrators loving the departed Elizabeth more or less than its cricket administrators, but because football crowds at the stadiums require the scale of management and safety that the far less popular sport of cricket in England needs. With the police force and local safety advisory groups busy attending to the royal funeral preparations tomorrow, there were ‘severe limitations on police resoures’ that are usually turfed out outside and inside football stadiums on big match days.
Which basically boils down to football being called off last week because it’s too popular, while cricket continued because it has less of a following in England. In India, of course, cricket is the ‘football’, with people enjoying from their living rooms Sunday’s Asia Cup final in Dubai where Sri Lanka beat Pakistan, despite the day, rather strangely, being declared a day of national mourning. Which really didn’t matter because a) it was a Sunday b) it wasn’t a dry day.
But coming back to the popularity stakes, being not popular allows one to carry on with one’s business without too many impediments, raised eyebrows, low growls. If a relatively obscure writer had written The Satanic Verses in Gujarati – instead of Salman Rushdie, who had written the English novel seven years after winning the Booker Prize – would the class monitors in the Congress government have brought the book to the attention of Iran’s ayatollah?
The same principle holds for films, businesses, people, almost everything. Being under the radar, niche (which is monetising relative anonymity), drawing attention enough to be noticed by a like-minded few, but not too much to be crowdjudged, allows the practitioner to ply his or her trade quietly, without fuss or fusspots, and freely. Even in these hyperactive, hyperreactive times of ubiquitous critique and commentary.