Dhoni and the Noble Savage!

The New Indian Express carries one of the most delightful socio-economic writing on cricket I have read in a long time. In a celeberation of Dhoni and the new Team India, The Magic of Dhoni, Shiv Visvanathan sees Dhoni as exemplifying the new India. He calls the big three - Tendulkar, Ganguly and Dravid - as the "past continuous", and Dhoni the "future". He writes,
"Dhoni is small town, small time India’s next story. Move over Mumbai and Bengaluru, Jharkhand is here. Rousseau’s natural savage has found his metier — the cricket bat. Dhoni excites rather than inspires. He cuts to the core of India’s merging middle class dream. Dhoni is a new brand in a world where brands have to resonate differently because the social grammar of success is changing."

"Dhoni is small town India’s symbol accidentally discovered by cricket. He is Eklavya without Drona or Arjun, all fingers intact, all thumbs up. He is first among the new equals. He represents small town India whose time has come."

He draws lessons for the marketing professionals, "To put it bluntly, a marketing strategy that is based on the Big three will not be that successful. Vintage is not what India wants. It needs ambush, surprise and in this sense Dhoni is closer to the social genius of India unfolding. Today one has to model one’s malls and marketing on Dhoni. Indigenous firms should realise that marketing strategies based on the Dhoni model could out think the Wall Marts and other external threats. They must remember that Dhoni brand while being desi is not swadesi."

"It is desiglobal, the local spiraling out to the world but not losing its emotional location. In marketing terms, the big three are horizontal. Dhoni is vertically integrated. He is symbol of the new chain of being that links the little town with the big dream to the theatres of global India. He is scalable, fitted to any niche from Jharkhand to Mumbai and the Diaspora. Scalability, integration, charisma, a sense of evoking a social genius makes Mahendra Singh Dhoni, the Indian of the year, sociologically."

Sociologists like Shiv Visvanathan are right in drawing these conclusions. But given the yo-yo nature of our teams fortunes and the ultimate test of an Australian summer awaiting, the marketing men may better advised to wait till Dhoni's men get back from Down Under, before pitching full time for Team India.