No apologies, please!

(bdnews24.com, April 1, 2011)

It’s cricket season and crunch time, with the semi-finals showing who has the power to stay in the game and compete for the coveted World Cup. Bangladesh, unfortunately, crashed out some days ago, when South Africa beat the team quite comprehensively. As host of the opening game, the nation must have been devastated, but team captain Shakib Al Hasan could do little to change that, except for a simple apology. “Just sorry,” he is reported to have said.

But a small explanation followed: “The way we finished the tournament was not the way we wanted to finish. We wanted to finish on a high. But that can happen in cricket. We didn’t play good cricket throughout the tournament. Though we won some matches, we didn’t play good cricket.”

After the semi-final between India and Pakistan on Wednesday, the Indians certainly went all out to rub defeat into Pakistani’s faces and egos – and, as could almost be predicted, there was another apology forthcoming, this time from Pakistan team captain Shahid Afridi, who congratulated the Indian team for the win they managed to achieve, and then went on to say, “At the same time, I want to say sorry to my nation. We tried our level best but couldn’t make it…”

While these seem like rather irrelevant apologies for more widespread and important issues like global warming or peace on earth, apologies do make things go more smoothly in many cultures. Bizarre as it may sound, officials at the Tokyo Electric Power Company in Japan are now saying many sorries for messing up on radiation readings after the disaster that hit that country last month caused cooling systems at a nuclear power plant to fail and thus leak deadly radiation into the water and air. Is it something that they could have prevented? Perhaps, yes. But is it something that apologising for could fix? Hmmm, that is a point to be thought about long and seriously, once the crisis has been dealt with rather more effectively, that is.

It is easy to say sorry. We all do it, so quickly and casually, often not really meaning it in the least bit. Apologising for dropping an atomic bomb on a nation may be a little more significant than saying a shamefaced sorry for stepping on someone’s toes, or dropping water on someone’s shirt or even breaking a glass at a dinner party, but neither does much to rectify the situation, often not much to mollify the person upon whom the error impacted most.

Would it not make more sense, I often think, even as I myself may be apologising for something I have done that I should not have done, to have not done, to not affect someone or something in a way that should deserve an apology? Or is that the story of living in cloud-cuckoo land, where dreams come true and idealism is the local form of government?

Apologies are excuses for what should not be done, someone said when I talked to them about this particular piece that I planned to write. Sometimes the feeling is that you do something that you know you should not, because it gives you some odd, perhaps perverse pleasure in doing it, even as you know well that you are doing something wrong, maybe even something so uncharacteristic that it is not obvious that you are doing it. Saying sorry allows you to make mistakes deliberately, consciously, as a purposeful act of fulfilling some purpose or the other.

I could attack my colleague with a knife, for instance, just because I think he slighted me in the lunch room by not passing me the salt; it will be done knowing that it is really not my usual norm of behaviour, but I need to get it off my chest, off my mind, off my list of to-do tasks for the day. There is an anger that needs to be addressed, dealt with, deleted from my mind, which can only be done by stabbing my work-friend. But having done it, or even merely trying to do it, I would be horrified, conscience-stricken, shamed enough to want to undo the very thought. So I would say sorry, many times over, attempting to delete the action and make my colleague see me once again in the same light as before my ‘error’.

Would an apology stem the blood, if there was any? Perhaps not. Would it make my workmate feel better, if I had actually shown my anger or whatever emotion I had inside me? No. But it would, viscerally, make me feel as if some of the harm has been alleviated, mitigated, undone.
All I would need to do is say sorry. And that, like I said, is often seen as solving a lot of problems…