Bananas and biwis: The two things Virat Kohli wants for cricket World Cup 2019

Virat Kohli | Matthew Lewis-ICC/ICC via Getty Images

If we cannot stand up for our right to bananas from the sahibs why did we win Independence at all?

The Indian cricket team wants to have it both ways. They want to have kelas and not be akela at the same time. Is that too much to ask for?

Virat Kohli and team management have asked that they be provided with abundant bananas when they go to England for World Cup 2019. They also want a reserved train coach and permission for wives to travel with the players for the entire duration of the tour.

Or as Shobhaa De tartly tweeted, “Our cricketers want wives, girlfriends and bananas on foreign tours. Not necessarily in that order.”

Our cricketers want wives, girlfriends and bananas on foreign tours. Not necessarily in that order.

— Shobhaa De (@DeShobhaa) October 30, 2018

But there’s no need to be snotty. Or to crack monkey jokes. Our bechara cricketers do work very hard as World Cups blend into T-20 merges into IPL. They have to deal with sporadic allegations of match-fixing and scam. There is more intrigue and political interference in the BCCI than the CBI and the RBI combined. And then on top of all that, there are all those taxing Manyavar and cola ads. The Economic Times reported last year that Virat Kohli had hiked his endorsement fee to Rs 5 crore a day for new contracts, surpassing Mahendra Singh Dhoni at his peak and Ranveer Singh and Shah Rukh Khan.

Look at it this way. They could have asked for private jets, cheerleaders and peaches from Fergana. But what could be more wholesome, family-oriented and aam aadmi than bananas, biwis and British rail? It is entirely ludicrous that the media is even talking about this. These are just basic swadeshi comforts and are being denied to our star sportsmen. It’s grossly unfair. It’s not like they are demanding a Rs 2,989 crore ‘Statue of Unity’ made with Shyam Steel to bolster Team Unity. Instead, we can all unite behind our deserving sportsmen for the price of a few bananas and a train ride. And, no villages or tribals will be harmed for it.

Let us not forget that bananas are what make us great. Mother Teresa apparently said that in India, a woman dying on the street will share her banana with anyone who needs it while in America people hoard bananas to sell at a profit. And that is what makes mera Bharat mahaan.

It should also make our post-colonial blood boil in righteous indignation to learn that the English cricket board had failed to serve our men in blue their fruit of choice during the tour that ended 11 September. Now, we know why the ODI and Test series went the way they did, with our boys slipping on the banana peel that wasn’t. Who knows what they were served instead. Tart strawberries and clotted cream? Apples? Oranges?

As The Indian Express has sagely observed, “Does the Board want India’s fast-bowlers feeling empty, denied the comfort of their preferred form of fructose, as they charge towards their opponents? Clearly, a psychological war is afoot.”

If we cannot stand up for our right to bananas from the sahibs why did we win Independence at all?

As the Express goes on to point out, bananas have been the focal point of anti-colonial movements across South America and the Caribbean from the end of the 19^th century. In his book Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, Dan Koeppel writes that in 1912, the US invaded Honduras and granted United Fruits the broad rights to build railroads and grow bananas in that country. In 1918, the US military put down banana workers’ strikes in Panama, Colombia and Guatemala. An emissary of Pope Benedict XV who travelled in that region described the banana as a “weapon of conquest”. Pablo Neruda even wrote a poem called La United Fruit Co. where he said:

The Fruit Company Inc.
Reserved for itself the most succulent,
The central coast of my own land,
The delicate waist of the Americas.
It rechristened its territories
As the “Banana Republics”.

So, snigger at demands for bananas at your own potassium-deficient peril.

But be warned. Just because our cricketers want bananas, it does not mean India is on its way to becoming a banana republic where oligarchs control the economy through exploitation and kickbacks. Not at all. The richest 1 per cent in India cornered only 73 per cent of the wealth generated in the country last year, according to an Oxfam survey. And the poor cannot complain. After all, 67 crore Indians, the population’s poorest half, also saw their wealth rise. By 1 per cent, but rise it did. Enough to buy bananas at least.

The larger point is that the privileged also have basic needs and it is unfair to deny them that. It is high time we understood this simple truth. There are needs and there are entitlements. Let’s understand the difference.

And it’s not just about cricket.

There’s heptathlete Swapna Barman who was born with six toes on each foot and could never afford a shoe that fit. “Every time I hit the surface, I feel a dull pain but I am used to it now,” she told The Indian Express. Her coach said, “Our past attempts to contact Nike and Adidas for custom-made shoes were met with stony silence.”

Or, take gymnast Dipa Karmakar. We learned that all she had were a pile of gym mattresses held down with ropes to practise on instead of a vaulting table when she tried the deadly Produnova vault.

Some need shoes. Some need vaulting tables. And some need bananas, a reserved coach and their wives on board. Or to put it another way, if they cannot have shoes, at least let them have bananas.

Surely, when they asked for the bananas our well-padded cricketers were thinking of the Barmans and the Karmakars and using their star power to champion the basic needs of all our athletes.

Anyone who thinks otherwise can go slip on a banana peel right now.

The author is a social commentator and writer.