Friendships and fandoms

Why it doesn't irk me that India's recent Test travails have been met with equanimity

I learned pretty early on in my life that fandom and personability are two different things.

Many years ago, I remember waiting by the lobby of The Oberoi in Mumbai to steal a glance of the India T20I side. It wasn't exactly nice of them that they slipped out of the back door and disappointed the large crowd that had gathered. Yet later that night I cheered harder than anybody else in the Wankhede when MS Dhoni hit the winning runs. This is the difference between fandom and personability: my loyalty to the India players wasn’t tied to who they were as persons but who they were as cricketers and as icons.

There is a deliberate tribalism intrinsic to fandom which is absent from our day-to-day attempts to glean whether a peer is “nice” or not. The means of fandom are its very end – we cheer an athlete on for the primitive pleasure of belonging to an in-group – whereas the drive to conjure up a smile when we walk by a familiar face is rooted in the human desire for acceptability, not the innate pleasure of smiling itself.

Which brings me to the main subject of this article, Virat Kohli. A cricketer and a man I could write a million words on.

Kohli's fandom is unquestionable. In fact, I have an archived essay from 2022 that explains why I think he attracts such a big, young and loud fanbase. Kohli wins India games and he does so with style. There is an entire motivation industry that has sprung out of Kohli to cater to the needs of depressed teenage boys in India. He villainizes oppositions and blows kisses to his girlfriend. And when things don't go his way, he doesn't shy away from being publicly vulnerable.

But is Kohli personable? I suspect that he isn't. Now, obviously, I don't know him from Adam, but he frequently comes across as the type of person that doesn't care too much about keeping up with appearances.

He barks at journalists. He scoffs at analysts. He feuds with team-mates. He struggles to get a rapport going with one of the most agreeable figures in Indian cricket. It would all fit—of course the India captain who swears at opposition players doesn't gain his self-worth from being liked by his opponents.

In some ways, Kohli is the diametric opposite to his Test captain Rohit Sharma, who isn't gifted with the kind of demagoguish, crowd-pulling magnetism that characterizes Kohli. Indeed, it took well into a decade since the start of his international career for Rohit's fandom to swell within the range of Kohli's, a crossroads that owes itself as much to his World Cup success in 2019 as it does to his burgeoning reputation as a laidback leader of men.

Rohit's fandom is intrinsically tied to his personability. It is not his ability to berate the out-group that mobilizes his fans, but his willingness to listen to a ludicrous question at the press conference and respond with wit. He gets along with analysts – outsiders who are here to tell cricketers what they are doing wrong – in a way few others in the Indian circuit do. His frustration on the field leaks out not as bitter vituperation but as misplaced humour. This does not make Rohit a strictly better human being, but it does make him more personable.

This is the likability bias at play, which means exactly what it sounds like—our subconscious tendency to favour people who appear warm, approachable and relatable. Rohit's candid responses and self-deprecating humour don't just entertain; they humanize him in a way that is unique amongst cricketers.

Why then do the Kohlis of our world exist? Because inauthenticity comes with a cost, and some people consider this cost too burdensome to incur. I don't know for sure whether Kohli is that kind of man, but my gut tells me that he probably is.

You probably know what I’m about to tell you next, that the likability bias is a rational response to informational constraints. If we could neatly categorize all the seven billion people in the world into different bins – safe and unsafe – then we wouldn't need to depend on their agreeableness as a proxy for whether we might get along with them. But we can't, and that's why heuristics such as the likability bias survive the test of time.

And this is why it doesn't irk me that India's recent Test travails have been met with equanimity by many pundits and journalists.

Some context here: I've been following the op-eds and analyses that have been written in the wake of India's home series defeat, and I cannot shake off the feeling that these reactions would have been a lot less consolatory had this defeat arrived five years ago. Make no mistake, I am not complaining. I am merely making the claim that if we undertook a serious text analysis of the media perceptions of Kohli the Test captain and Rohit the Test captain, we would (almost certainly) see a higher share of negative verbiage in the Kohli era.

And dare I say I think this is because of the likability effect—the afterglow of the many people Kohli pissed off when he was Test captain.

I'll be honest: I don't think particularly highly of most cricket media. I think that because of the fact that the primary market for cricket lies within the subcontinent, and consumers in the subcontinent aren't active readers, cricket media in the digital age has been colonized by lazy, incompetent non-professionals. It doesn't surprise me that these non-professionals operate not on thought-out insights garnered from first principles but on the feel and vibe of a situation; that they give free rein to their personal likes and dislikes of players to cloud their cricketing judgment.

Nor am I any longer surprised by the bias of ex-players when it comes to gauging player contributions. For I see it and I think back to the broadcast commentators who fully lose touch with cricket once they stop playing it and resort to simple System 1 thinking to answer complex questions, sometimes resulting in banal yapping that is so saddeningly divorced from the insight they used to radiate as players. Elite cricketers are not necessarily elite lovers of cricket but of playing cricket.

I say this with good authority as someone who considers himself constantly at the receiving end of the likability bias. I've never quite cared for social niceties and diplomacy as much as I should and it has rubbed several people the wrong way—enough to deprive me of my share of professional and academic opportunities.

But I've discovered over the years that I can either be bitter about this and let that disillusion me about my place in the world, or I can compartmentalize the little things and take them in my stride and give life my hardest shot because ultimately I cannot change other people. My point is that maybe we should stop wailing about the differential media perceptions of Rohit and Kohli as Test captains, because guess what?—we all engage in this business.

Part of the motivation for writing this article stems from the knowledge that hard times await the India Test side. Australia is going to be a brutal challenge. The Kohli fandom will make snide remarks about Rohit's "friends in the media". Every objective analysis of the cricket will be judged by whether or not it blames the leadership.

I won't have much to contribute to this discourse, but I do want to point out that much of this is the intrinsic nature of fandom. Our personal likes and dislikes naturally colour our opinions. And to me, this is generally okay because fandom also presents us with several moments of beauty. The seeds are bitter but the apple is tasty.