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Fanning Enjoyment, Timing Retirement






A fan is admirer gone overboard. Drugged with an excessive sense of the real, a fan misplaces her hero. The actual turns into fabulous. The fabulous is deified into icon. In the process, the fan is uprooted from the terrains of normalcy. She trades the axis of the earth for the spine of the hero-ine. When the bloated ego of the fan's body grows big enough to eclipse the life around, 'fanism' is complete. Pivoted  to one sole direction, a fan is a phoney phenomenon.  

Enjoyment is a requisite for an action, any action. When an individual performs an act, without being fully there, sans real involvement, the performance lacks merit. Some kind of a rupture happens between the doer and the done. Even for the one who watches from outside, the put on side of the act shows. When this is applied to sports, the sporting act raises interesting feels in us. A player begins to play enjoying the game. As he/ she begins to gain further skills and finesse in the art, playing and enjoyment keep growing. In the process the player begins to gather people around. The onlookers watch the act and begin to enjoy it. As the skill and flair grow, the quality of admiration too rises. A bunch of keen onlookers stick to the show and feed on the exploits of the performer. They cross an imperceptible line in the process and turn possessive of the player. Marginalizing other performers, they grow into the actor and turn into fans. Fans come in all hues and colours. But a real fan is drunk on one. When the Rubicon is crossed, abnormality is born. 

Does this begin to create a similar feel on the object of admiration too? Is there a stage when the player too begins to voyeur on herself/ himself? Does the player turn into a fan of himself? When a player speaks of enjoying the game, does he enjoy it the way an admirer does? If not, how different is it ? The relationship of a star with fans is a troubled one. The star who yearns for followers initially is besieged by the  abundance of them at a later stage. This breeds the love-hate relationship. The star would always love to enjoy popularity minus the trouble factor. She / he doesn't want the popularity to take the privacy off. But certain amount of privacy is the price a star has to pay for being a star. In a country like ours, it is difficult to be a star with fans and be expected to be treated like just another man on the road. When a star is beginning to enjoy his art, he also begins to enjoy his popularity. Though he would like to have popularity minus fans, this is not easy. When the star begins to gain popularity, she/he  begins to enjoy the art / game. This enjoyment is silently endorsed by the fans / admirers. 

Then the player has entered a different orbit. The question raised earlier again turns up:  Can there be a conflict between the players enjoyment of the game and the spectators? The player's and the fan's? When the player continues to enjoy the game even when the admirers have entered scrutinizing the player for the fall in performance, can the player still enjoy the fans' endorsement? How long? Is the player slowly unhitching his star from the ride together with fans? How long can a player stick to the game, even when there are telltale sign of downward slide? Is the player / actor justified ? This is a dilemma we encounter time and again when we watch our players or actors finding it hard to quit the scene in the twilight of their careers. Roger Federer is slipping down the ATP rankings but still he is there and he says he is enjoying his game. We too are. Some sensible fans find it hard to stomach this dwindling show, the trip down the rankings and the body failing to keep up with the mind. An ordinary player can make this slow fade out but when the person concerned is big one who has made it big on big stages, the crowd around begin to raise their eyebrows. 

Steve Waugh, Sunil Gavakar, Brian Lara etc are some who took the bow before the crowd started standing up! Lara, especially, timed it to perfection. They never tried to stretch themselves, spreading their resources thin, there by putting anguish into the minds of their fans. How did Lara, the man who put lot of poetry into his batting, who made it look so effortless, willingly hang up his boots? Was it a lack of love or a presence of sense? No master can ever come to hate the game which has made them what they are. No actor who has helped raised his act to different height can ever cease enjoying being in the middle of it. But being part of the public team and keeping retirement away, harping on the theme of enjoyment is no sane act. By this yardstick, Sachin Tendulkar, with all due respects to him, should have retired at least a couple of years back. Does affiliation to the art make one blind to reality? 

Perhaps the only breed which doesn't really retire is the political one. When was the last time you came across a politician declaring his retirement? Tough chance! Politicians age into oblivion. They wither beyond utility. It is amazing why the politicians prefer to often park themselves in to the corners of the show even when they know that their time is up. They sure would state that they still enjoy the game! Can a public player, past expiry mark, stick to the show, at the expense of aspiring youngsters and talented fellow players who are keen to move up? Will it fan discontentment around? Can the word ‘enjoy’, in this context, have a purely subjective reading? The ageing Vishy, Viswanathan Anand, struggling against Magnus Carlsen, ending up so excited by the game of 'that Kid' , is a painful show for the followers of Anand, even if they are not 'fans'. Sure, enjoyment has its private and public sides. 

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