Priority of the minutest things we don't interpret

Sachin Tendulkar is in arguably the best form of his life. He seems to make batting seem effortless in all forms of the game, including the T20, something he seemed to be ill at ease with so far. Everything he is touching is looking poetic and beautiful and it is difficult to imagine that a few months ago, critics were sharpening their knives and looking longingly at his throat.

It is an interesting concept, this notion of form. In sports of all kind, we see athletes moving in and out of form, going through phases where they can do nothing right, where every effort to hit a ball or swing a club ends in disaster and then suddenly without warning, the sun bursts out of the clouds and divine melodies are sung with the bat, ball, racket and club. Form can change from year to year, as in the case of Sachin, but it can oscillate bewilderingly in a manner of minutes. The same bowler who gets hammered before lunch, makes the ball talk in disconcertingly good Swahili in the second spell. A humiliating loss in the first set can easily reversed with a command performance in the second. The fact that we have a word for this, is comforting for it gives us a sense of what is at work here. We can nod our heads sagely and mutter homilies about form being temporary and class being permanent and offer pointless but well meaning advice from the safety of our perch. But as an idea, the notion of form is mysterious, for in effect it is another way of shrugging shoulders and looking upwards to the sky and muttering about God's inscrutable ways.

What invisible alignment of forces, what alchemy of physics, bio-chemistry, bio-mechanics and hormonal juices makes us soaring geniuses one day and spluttering buffoons the next? More vexingly, what produces the occasional magic, when a ball suddenly leaps off the deck, kisses the bewildered batsman's hairline edge and thuds into the keepers gloves, giving no chance to the batsman, nor indeed to the bowler to repeat what he just pulled off? What makes us take nine catches fast and low and spill the tenth one a sitter begging for refuge in our hands? What do we mean when we talk in terms of 'timing', another word that masks ignorance with its apparent certitude? We know what phenomenon it is attempting to describe, but do not know enough about how to make it happen.We drape a cloak of certainty over the essential uncertainty that surrounds our lives. Explanations abound in classifying the consequences of the uncertainty; we have constructed vast and intricate structures around these artifacts of doubt. We understand reality in its cruder form, it is when we put it under the microscope of the individual event and ask of it direct personal questions that it clams up in sullen silence and offers us words instead of explanations. We think we know how the world works with a far greater sense of certainty than we really do. Our belief in new age remedies and age old attempts to tell and influence our future is a pointer to the essential helplessness we feel over our condition. The answer to Sachin's form might well lie in his stars. It is certainly as good an explanation as anything else.