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Ila Reddy's avatar

Superb piece, as usual :) I knew you would write about this and was eagerly awaiting it! It was worth the wait. No matter how good someone is at what they do, it's hard for me to overlook irresponsible behaviour such as endangering others due to their personal choices, especially during a pandemic. Particularly love the initial paragraphs on empathy and look forward to reading more from you!

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Sarthak Dev's avatar

Thank you, Ila! :)

Couldn't agree more. It is so hard to look away from this kind of behaviour. Yeah fine, great backhand there, but I don't want the virus from you. How difficult is that to get? xD

I hear you on the personal essays. I have written some before, but never really made it a theme. Will get to writing more. :)

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Is this anything?'s avatar

Loved this. I was just reading Rohit's column on this and while that has a lot of facts, I like that this one is personal. Of course we know that there is no empathy in you anymore but well, I digress.

I think it is important that things are called as they are. I love that you didn't choose to end the article on a diplomatic note. When an illness-infection can infect you and move on to others who cannot be a athletic as you are and others who cannot afford the best care in the world, I think it is a moral responsibility to get vaccinated. Otherwise, just sit at home. This man here is brilliant at what he does but that doesn't mean he will get to move around differently.

I read somewhere if it is time to discuss his brilliance over the brilliance of his contemporaries (Yea that Swiss and spaniard), and I feel it is important to widen the definition of brilliance while we are at it

Yeah, I think it is time

(I love your writing, you!)

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Mahima Vashisht's avatar

Daddu, I keep running into your comments and forgetting what I wanted to say because of what works of art they are!

Your last line reminded me of the last Sarthak piece I read - where Dravid spoke about how we need to broaden the definition of talent. Perhaps empathy needs to find a place in that definition as well? It definitely deserves a place when one's icon becomes bigger than their sporting career, like Djokovic's certainly has.

Sarthak, my favourite thing about your posts is how they make a sports-illiterate person like me care about what happens within and beyond lines on the grass ❤️

PS: We need a new Substack made up of #DadduComments alone!

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Sarthak Dev's avatar

+1 on Daddu's comments. Truly works of art, and incredibly warm. They never fail to leave a broad grin on my face.

And thank you too, Mahima! <3 I am so glad that you find these pieces coherent and relatable. One goal I set for every piece is to make it readable for those who may not be initiated to the central idea, so your words are wonderfully encouraging :D

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Is this anything?'s avatar

I was trying to be intelligent with the ending of my comment by making a callback to Sarthak’s previous lost on this man. Sab banta dhaar ho gaya mera. Sarthak is brilliant isn’t he?

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Is this anything?'s avatar

Previous post* not lost. Sorry, old age issues

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Sarthak Dev's avatar

Thank you so much, man.

I could not agree more about moral responsibility and privilege. Just stay at home, otherwise, yeah! No wonder Novax Djocovid was trending.

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Karthik Amarnath's avatar

Sarthak, nice writeup as always. I understand your perspective, and your internal conflict comes out very well in your piece.

That said I’d like to think that history will be kind, and perhaps empathetic to Novak. I may disagree with his perception of the pandemic today, or question his positions and personal choices. And I’m not looking to justify his actions. But your point that

<i> realisation will dawn that athletes who have trained for excellence all their life have the same vulnerabilities as us. Elite talent of hitting a fluffy yellow ball does not necessarily mean that their limbic cortex has also turned to steel.</i>

certainly resonates with me. To add to that, with sportspersons, especially sports superstars, its sometimes easy to keep aside how exacting their professional lives are, and more so how highly compressed their timeline for professional growth is, especially compared to the time it takes to build emotional maturity (it takes time even for a person in a more “laid back” profession).

Yes, the Dravids and Federers have achieved sports superstardom while continually being great ambassadors of the sport (and of society at large), and perhaps the stars of today and tomorrow, born into a culture of global awareness might make even these guys seem ordinary.

I’m certainly in awe of Novak’s sporting accomplishments, but I dont idolize him (in the way that a twenty year old me idolized Dravid). If there was an obvious “criminality” to Novak’s actions, I might view him, and even his accomplishments, differently. But when it comes to pandemic related behavior, I struggle with the idea that there is a shared, unquestionable, standard of covid consciousness that I should expect from anybody. (I know I’m probably in the minority here. )

And I’ll admit to not knowing enough about Novak to construe his actions today as an abuse of privilege, or as a foolish excess of “youth”, or as driven by a genuine belief in his perception of the pandemic. So your point about Novak being a deep thinker kind of whizzed past me. (To be honest, at every stage in life I’ve thought of myself as a deep thinker, only to realize some years later that well..) Its easy for me to think that Novak is like so many ordinary thirty year olds who ten years from now might look back at their actions today and think or feel very differently about them (as I do now with things I’ve said or done ten years ago).

I am not defending Novak’s actions, but I guess I just think it may be a bit too early to talk about Novak’s legacy, and more so, to compare it with (arguably a rose tainted view of) Ali’s who as you rightly pointed out was many things too.

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Sarthak Dev's avatar

Hey Karthik. Great argument, put rather well. Let me address them :)

I am not saying Novak is evil, or a criminal, or a bad person. Not at all. He does enough charitable work to even qualify as a good person maybe. He is an exceptional tennis player.

But the on-court behaviour, which isn't rare, and his pandemic demeanour makes him un-empathetic. That's really what my essay is about.

The standard of behaviour I would expect from you -- even if I don't know you personally -- is that even if you don't believe in covid or the vaccine, you have no right to expose me to the virus. That's not on. Novak went for a photoshoot while under Covid. That, I'm afraid, is deeply problematic. Again, not criminal at all, but a major red flag on how little respect he showed for the welfare of those he would meet in that studio.

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Karthik Amarnath's avatar

Thanks for your reply, Sarthak.

I didnt/dont want to get into the specifics of Novak’s actions, mainly because it would take me into a rabbit hole of specifics about Omicron, vaccines, asymptomatic transmission and the like. But I can certainly understand if the participants in the L’Equippe event felt deceived at not being informed of his status— thats plain lying on his part, and if they didnt share his views about the virus, he certainly did not give them a chance to make an informed decision about the event.

That said, I am not sure this is quite as straightforward:

“even if you don't believe in covid or the vaccine, you have no right to expose me to the virus”

If anything, my belief about the virus is very much tied to my estimation of the danger I might be putting you in. I might care enough about your welfare, but maybe not enough about your beliefs.

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Sarthak Dev's avatar

I hear you. You don't need to care about my beliefs, absolutely. During a global pandemic, the onus is on each one of us to ensure we aren't endangering others. That's where empathy comes in, which is the central point of this essay.

I would disagree about the straightforward bit. I might like to fling knives in the air, because I don't believe knives can hurt. In the privacy of my room, I am free to do whatever I want. When I am meeting you at your place, I shouldn't be throwing knives without checking if you are okay with it.

A scientifically proven global pandemic isn't conjecture. It is really a matter of entitlement vs taking one step back when others, who might be in physical danger from it, are involved.

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Karthik Amarnath's avatar

Sarthak, thanks for engaging in a discussion. I’m going to apologize for persisting it and also for populating your space with another longish comment— I think I’m just working through my own thoughts with these exchanges.

Your analogy about knife flinging while appropriate has a couple of subtle distinctions. One, when you think that flinging knives is not dangerous, I understand it as you dont think its dangerous either to me or to you. If thats not the case, then there is an added subtlety to people’s perception of the danger of Covid (someone thinking that Covid is not dangerous in general, as opposed to thinking that they are somehow magically resistant to Covid). With Novak, I probably havent followed him enough to understand where he falls there.

Second, when the knives are invisible, even if you were flinging the knives in my house, I wouldn’t know it. So if you dont think its dangerous to me anyway, then you hiding the fact from me is disrespectful to me, but I wouldn’t call that unempathetic (In fact, I’d say you might even be empathetic since you could have hid that fact so I dont feel uncomfortable or scared).

With Covid, especially asymptomatic Covid, its a bit more complicated. For instance, when the photo shoot was planned, there was an accepted level of risk for all parties involved, given that Novak would have to be unmasked, and if he had never tested, there would still be a likelihood that he could be positive and not know it. Now of course, thats not the case, and the decent thing to do should have been to inform all parties involved. But here’s another similar situation. If someone had some kind of symptoms, say, mild cold like symptoms (like what Omicron seems to be showing), and they had an event like this planned and so decided not to get tested at all, but then later on it turned out they were indeed positive. There is a similar “grayness” to this act too— and frankly, there are a fair number of occurrences of something like this in the recent past among people I know, people I would never call unempathetic. If you look at the risk in these situations using whatever statistical knowledge we have, they arent very different, and its not even clear which has higher risk.

My larger point is this. Speaking as someone outside, I am inclined to say that Novak is a man of high privilege, has more wealth and fame to last lifetimes, and is sitting at the pinnacle of his career (if not the sport itself). Is it really too much to ask that he not try to subvert systems to further his privilege?

But your essay brought out the point that sports superstars are as human as the rest of us, and in this once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, its hard to say whether our priorities are misplaced or misunderstood. And so if I start looking from that perspective, there are more than a few ways to think about his actions, from ignorant, to idiotic, to immature to irresponsible. Maybe I dont know enough about him to say which or why. As I had mentioned in my earlier comment, I dont follow much about what he says, and havent really watched any of his interviews. I do time and again hear him speak at Championships, like last year at US Open, when he had arguably his most heartbreaking defeat, and he sounded genuinely gracious to Medvedev (which reminded me of another speech at 2014 Wimbledon after he beat Federer). They didnt sound like someone I can easily call unempathetic.

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Sarthak Dev's avatar

Hey Karthik. I am glad we are having this discussion, so don't worry about it. :)

Regarding the knife-flinging, I meant it from a simple POV: it is universally believed that knives can hurt the flesh. I may not believe it, and my actions will follow suit, but when I am in a social situation, it becomes a matter of basic courtesy (read:empathy) to take into consideration what you might think of it.

I am going to move past the details of asymptomatic transmission because Novak did not show L'Equippe the empathy to let them know he has covid. I am sorry I can't overlook that, no matter what the severity of his infection was. If I am not keeping well and you have called me over for dinner, the least I could do is let you know.

Tennis has lesser tribalism compared to some other sports, so I am not surprised that he is graceful in loss, like Roger, Rafa, and most of the others. Like I said earlier, he isn't evil or even a bad person. I am no one to judge what I can't see.

Life in bio-bubbles can result in Novak suffering a dip in form, losing his temperament to fight until the last point, etc etc. It cannot take away basic social responsibility. If anything, a global pandemic where millions have died should increase one's sense of it. It is a time to empathetic more than anything else. I share empathy for Novak's decision to not take a vaccine, not for his actions in Australia.

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Karthik Amarnath's avatar

Hey Sarthak. One last comment, and I wont bother you.

When I read this:

If I am not keeping well and you have called me over for dinner, the least I could do is let you know.

I realized this is probably a very Covid specific notion, especially in the professional realm, which is why the beliefs about the danger, specifics of transmission, impact of variants mattered (to me). I am just thinking there was a time not too long ago when if I had gone back on a professional commitment because I was down with a flu, it might have been frowned upon. In the L’Equippe situation, relative incentives might matter too in the sense of whether Novak keeping his commitment was more beneficial to him or to them.

The lying part definitely bothers me too, but with a caveat that (again) the specifics of transmission might put it in a “white lie” territory, which while not recommended, has some interesting connections with empathy.

Anyway, thanks for the discussion. I dont think I see myself as being in disagreement with you as much as having a differing perspective to look at this.

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SUDHA RAO's avatar

Got a new perspective towards empathy and a new book on Toread list. Thank you Sarthak

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Sarthak Dev's avatar

Thank you, Sudha! :)

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suva.chattopadhyay@gmail.com's avatar

The last two lines are so vivid. I also experience the spectrum of feelings that you feel. Thank you for writing this

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Sarthak Dev's avatar

Thank you so much, Suva!

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