Back from the brink

Rohit Mahajan

Before he slipped into depression, Praveen Kumar, the boy from Meerut, shone in London and Brisbane. Then he was dropped from the Indian team. Then came depression, numbing him.

Praveen came from a prosperous farming family in western Uttar Pradesh — and a culture that typifies toxic masculinity, which harms others horribly but doesn’t leave the men concerned unscathed. Did the tough-boy imperative, the compulsion to be unbreakable, contribute to depression? Perhaps. Praveen, India’s highest wicket-taker in the series against England in 2011, seems to have gone berserk after being sacked, reacting in the only way he could — asserting raw power, perhaps due to the macho and combative milieu he grew up in.

It’s not that Praveen was a pacifist before being dropped from the team — shortly after his heroics in Australia in 2008, he was accused by a doctor of beating him up in Meerut; in 2011, he pushed away a spectator who had accosted him after a match; the next year, a weird video clipping surfaced — holding a cricket stump in hand, a foul-mouthed Praveen was threatening a cricket fan with violence!

The anger spilled on the field, and news became stranger still, after he was dropped. He was accused of head-butting a batsman in 2013, and an umpire complained to the BCCI that Praveen “is not in a mental frame to play the game”.

Maybe he really was not. “I used to stare at the fan for close to five hours. I was very disheartened to see that nobody was calling me, even after my achieving so many things in my career,” Praveen said in a recent interview.

He didn’t get much sympathy, maybe because understanding of depression is paltry in Indian households and society, and people going through it are referred to as simply ‘dukhi’, unhappy — a gross understatement.

A large number of cricketers have died by suicide, and such cases have been documented meticulously by David Frith, a cricket journalist from England, in Silence of the Heart: Cricket Suicides.

Cricketers such as Marcus Trescothick, Glenn Maxwell, Mitchell Johnson and Jonathan Trott, to name just a few, have discussed their depression or anxiety in detail. As for India, such is the stigma that few cricketers have spoken it in detail. Virat Kohli, flinty-minded though he is, is one man who did, saying in 2019: “I’ve gone through a phase in my career where I felt like it was the end of the world. In England 2014, I didn’t know what to do, what to say to anyone, and how to speak and how to communicate. And to be honest, I couldn’t have said I’m not feeling great mentally and I need to get away from the game. Because you never know how that’s taken.”

Robin Uthappa, part of the 2007 T20 World Cup-winning team, spoke a year later, words that would shock fans who envy his success and riches: “On days, I would just be sitting there and would think to myself on the count of three, I’m going to run and jump off of the balcony.”

Praveen Kumar got dangerously close to suicide, disclosing in a 2020 interview that he contemplated shooting himself when his spirits were at their lowest: “I told myself, ‘Kya hai yeh sab? Bas khatam karte hain’.” (What’s all this? Let me just end it.) Sitting alone in an SUV, he had a gun at hand and the intent to kill on his mind — but a photograph of his children, which he happened to look at, pulled him back from the brink. Cricketers and other stars can get help from mental coaches or psychiatrists, but the commoners, most often, turn to religion or the supernatural — the proliferation of gurus and saints, and the swelling masses at their feet, suggest this.

But it would appear that people are becoming increasingly desensitised to the suffering of others — goriness has lost its ability to take our sleep away. The ubiquity of the cellphone, and high-quality cameras in it, has contributed to the desensitisation. Newspapers do not publish gory images of people and places destroyed by war or terrorism, but the mobile phone brings them daily to our attention. The banality of trauma — the horrible images and stories of violence that are commonplace on social media — have made people thick-skinned, and they are able to come to terms with it as long as it’s not happening to them. After three months of horror, people are in a state of Gaza-fatigue — images of lifeless children bother us no more. And two years on, no one cares for the suffering in Ukraine.

As for Praveen Kumar, he’s OK for now — let’s hope he’d bring up his children to disdain the toxicity that contributed in making him a man so ready to visit violence on others, or on himself.

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