SRINIVAS S*
When the Indian men’s team won the T20 cricket World Cup in June 2024, there was a great outpouring of emotion from Indian players and fans alike. There was the joy following a hard-earned triumph, obviously, but there was also the relief that India had finally won a global trophy after coming close on several occasions in recent times. For India’s opponents in the final, South Africa, however, it was yet another instance of ‘so near yet so far’. Indeed, the South African team received a lot of well-meaning commiserations on social media even from within India. The predominant emotion in the country at the time, however, was one of pride—pride at the fact that ‘our boys’ have won something big at long last.
Now, what makes people identify themselves passionately, and often fanatically, with sports teams and their achievements is an important question. This article, however, concerns itself with two slightly different but just as important questions: whence arises the obsession with winning or success, and how does it interact with the human psyche and society? I consider these two questions important because they concern many of us to varying degrees and not just those people who work in and around the domains of professional sport.
Success in sports
Even in the world of sports, professionals are not alone in pursuing success with an almost religious zeal. Winning, alongside the setting of records, has become the sole point of sports even among people who play various games at the school or college levels. One immediately obvious and unfortunate result of this almost blind emphasis on success in the playfield is that it rids ‘sport’ of its etymological essence, namely, leisure or a pastime. To suggest a turn of phrase, obsessive attachment to the idea of success does not allow sport to be a ‘good sport’.
A second fallout of the obsessive pursuit of success one sees on the sports field is that it psychologically separates the winners from the losers, though everyone accepts, at least in principle, that one cannot exist without the other. What is worse is that the playing regulations in some sports are geared towards sustaining this psychological division rather than addressing or challenging it. In the short formats of cricket, for example, ties, a result where the two playing teams end on the same score, have been discontinued. In football, penalty kicks usually decide the winner if teams tie on the number of goals they have scored in normal time. In tennis, sets (and therefore matches) are typically decided by tie-breakers if both players win six games each in a given set. Eliminating ties from sporting contests may ostensibly make them more exciting for the fans, but they also make them polarizing, which takes away some of the joy of playing and watching sport. Players and fans alike feel some dissatisfaction with the outcome of a game coming down to a tie-breaker, which is more a matter of luck than anything else.
Thirdly, desperation to succeed in the sport one plays may come at an ethical price. While sportspersons often acquire commitment and discipline in trying to develop a ‘winning attitude’, they are also known to play fast and loose with the definition of fair play, raising important questions about sportspersonship. Some of these questions concern the relationship between competing participants (e.g., is it fair to insult an opponent in the name of ‘banter’? Is it all right not to shake hands with an opponent when one does not win?) and others have to do with the psychological and emotional well-being of everyone who plays sports (e.g., is it fair to intimidate opponents? Is it acceptable to shout at a colleague when they have made a mistake?) Answers to such questions are invariably reflected in the actions of those who play sport professionally. Professional sportspeople also tend to influence (though it may be unfair to hold them to higher standards of conduct than others) the playing of sports at all levels, including schools and colleges, and have the power to shape a sports fan’s attitude towards success and failure.
Success in the classroom
‘Winning’ as a watchword is, however, by no means restricted to the sports field. It has infected academia as well, with classrooms in schools and colleges today being incubation centres for success rather than places of meaningful and joyful learning. This is not to say that learning and success cannot coexist in an academic space, but the emphasis on the latter is so strong that the former is often used solely as a means to achieve the latter. Consequently, learning for the sake of learning takes a backseat.
Just like success on the sports field, success in the classroom is measured as well. Only the units of measurement, as we know, are different: for goals, runs, wickets, points, read marks, GPA, ranks, and so on. Inevitably, measurement in the latter case gives rise to competitiveness and comparison just as it does in the former case. Competitiveness and comparison in turn goad students to become the ‘first’ or the ‘best’ in examinations, especially in a populous country like India, where the so-called ‘cut-offs’ for admission into institutes of excellence continue to be extremely high despite there being more such institutes now than ever before.
There are ‘alternative’ institutions, particularly schools, where competition and the pursuit of success are critically examined, if not actively discouraged. Even in these places, however, students are not completely free of social expectations and are apt to be affected by the spirit of competition. In Rishi Valley School, for example, students entering grade nine suddenly find themselves giving weekly tests and receiving grades or marks for their work. At least some of them develop a competitive edge, either of their own accord, or because of some combination of external expectations, peer pressure and anxieties about the future, and end up comparing their ‘performance’ in tests with that of others. This attitude stands in sharp contrast to what J Krishnamurti, the founder of the school, has to say about the dangers of comparison and competition, which go hand in hand:
When A is compared to B who is clever, bright, assertive, that very comparison destroys A. This destruction takes the form of competition, of imitation of and conformity to the patterns set by B. This breeds, consciously or unconsciously, antagonism, jealousy, anxiety and even fear; and this becomes the condition in which A lives for the rest of his life, always measuring, always comparing psychologically and physically.
Perceptive students in schools like Rishi Valley, but also elsewhere, may be aware of the pitfalls of setting store by academic success and would rather live in an environment where learning is not endorsed by a number or a letter in a test or assignment sheet. Still, they cannot often help being attached to numbers or letters because of a vague but (for them) very real fear of the future, and because of the external expectations mentioned earlier. As a result, they find it a challenge to find their way through the emotions associated with tests and examinations.
Beyond success and failure
Familial and/or social expectations often underpin the pursuit of money and fame, which are popular indicators of success in adult life. There can be little doubt that these expectations also help shape a student’s attitude towards studies and sports. Pursuit of success is additionally linked to the self or the ego; in other words, to a mind seeking something to which it can cling. As Krishnamurti puts it: The pursuit of success is the desire for the “more”, and a mind that is constantly demanding the “more” is not an intelligent mind…because its demand for the “more” implies a constant struggle [of the self ] in terms of the pattern which society has set for it. [parentheses mine]
The constant struggle of the self in pursuit of fulfilment or success often causes conflict between what (or where) one is and what (or where) one wants to be. This kind of conflict, as Krishnamurti often points out, constraints the way we live life. Living without constraints, however, does not depend so much on wishing away these measurements or results from our world, perhaps an unrealistic prospect, as trying to change the way each one of us looks at them. As Rudyard Kipling writes:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same…
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.
It is difficult to know whether Kipling intended to convey a spiritual message when he wrote the last of the quoted lines. For the purposes of this piece, however, it may be viewed as carrying one: ‘to have the Earth and everything in it’ entails being completely free of the influence of thought. To put it differently, only a free being, a being free of the thought-strengthened compulsion to compete, compare and succeed, can feel at one with the Earth and live in harmony with ‘everything that’s in it’.
Psychological attachments are a great impediment to living one’s life freely. In this article I have explored one of the strongest psychological attachments of our age, namely the strong desire for and the unapologetic pursuit of success, particularly in the context of sports and academia. The other side of the coin is the fear or hatred of failure, which while not explored in detail here, has been hinted at in passing. Results in a sporting contest and grades in a test may be inevitable as things stand at present, but is it not possible to view them as incidental to an activity—or, to put it in Kipling’s words, as ‘impostors’ without any real or intrinsic value? Doing so might take us a step closer to being happy human beings.
References
Kipling, Rudyard, 1910, ‘If ’. Accessed on 05 January 2025 from the Poetry Foundation website: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if— .
Krishnamurti, Jiddu, 1964, ‘Chapter 25’. Think on These Things, Jaico Publishing House, India.
Krishnamurti, Jiddu, 2006, ‘Chapter 26: Comparison is One of the Many Aspects of Violence’. The Whole Movement of Life is Learning: Letters to his Schools, Krishnamurti Foundation India.