Thursday 31 January 2008

Monkey Business

There's always something to say in the world of cricket. Handled the Ball stood silent through the World Cup final fiasco, the entire Twenty20 World Championship, and all through Australia's tour of India (where the monkey incident started). So much has happened and still the lazy bloggers at HTB said nothing.

But now it's impossible to keep quiet.

Where does one begin? What the hell??

So, the charge has been downgraded from racism to "offensive". It completely misses the point. As Symond already pointed out, he's not overly sensitive to racial remarks, he was just taking a stand against it, saying there is no place for it. He wasn't actually offended. Being called a monkey is at best mildly offensive. Except when it's intended as a racial slur, and in that context it's more about drawing a line in the sand saying no comment of a racial nature is acceptable. To ignore the comment as being what it was, racial and just making it out to be a regular offensive comment, misses the point entirely.

Secondly, let's forget about all the nonsense about "monkey gods" - you only need to go back to the Australia tour of India to see the crowds to understand the context behind the comments in the first place. It's not about the much revered Hanuman, it was implying a person was less the human because of their skin colour. That's not on.

The monkey incident in India was much worse than what happened at Sydney. It was disgusting. It should not have been resurrected in Sydney.

That of course assumes he actually even said "monkey" in the first place.

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