Why it’s not ok for Kapil Dev and his audience to laugh at mental health issues

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‘Palmolive ka hajaab nahin’. That catchphrase for a shaving cream became legendary in the gravelly voice of cricket icon Kapil Dev.

But now Kapil Dev is getting more “jawaab” than he anticipated on social media after sharing his views on mental health at a recent event. “These are American words: pressure, depression. I don’t understand all this. I am a farmer who enjoyed playing. If you enjoy, how can there be pressure? When the clip went viral around World Mental Health Day, Kapil Dev faced enormous blowback. There is still a huge stigma when it comes to speaking publicly about these issues. It can feel like an admission of personal weakness and failure or dismissed as a whimper.

Every time Virat Kohli, Simone Biles or Deepika Padukone have discussed their mental health issues, they have taken a certain risk. When tennis star Naomi Osaka spoke about her problems and said, “It’s okay to not be okay,” she stood up to trolling. She said she didn’t want to be the face of athletes’ mental health, but when swimmer Michael Phelps told her that by speaking out she could have saved a life, “it was all worth it.”

Kapil Dev undid much of that hard work by saying that real athletes don’t cry about mental health. As for being “a farmer who enjoyed playing,” let’s not talk about farmers and mental health given the number of farmer suicides.

But in a sense, the biggest damage Kapil Dev inflicted was probably to his own reputation. Someone on Twitter called it a “peak WhatsApp uncle moment.” In fact, Kapil Dev also criticized the students who complained about the pressure. “AC school main padhte ho, maa-baap fees detey hain, teacher aapko haath nahin laga sakta, aur aapko pressure hai…” (You study in an air-conditioned school, your parents pay your fees, the teacher can’t put a hand about you and you complain about the pressure!) I mean, stop whining.

But while Kapil is an easy target, what about everyone else around him at that Chat With Champions event? They were laughing, cheering him on, licking everything in fanboy/girl mode. That was what was truly embarrassing. The 1983 World Cup hero belongs to a different era, but Saina Nehwal on stage with him is surely more aware of the debilitating effects of pressure on athletes of his generation. The audience, many men in suits, many of them surely parents of teenagers, punctuated his remarks with loud applause.

And somewhere, some depressed young man sank further into his shell, not because of Kapil Dev’s comments, but because everyone around him reinforced his views with their smiles and applause. Or his silence. No one intervened, not even politely, when he angrily said that if you have passion, then you shouldn’t have pressure.

It’s not that surprising. Many value the attitude that Kapil Dev espoused. Shantanu Deshpande, founder and CEO of the Bombay Shaving Company, recently advised young people not to do “random rona-dhona,” forget about “work-life balance,” and “spend 18 hours a day for at least 4-5 years. Both of them certainly sincerely believe in this school of tough love, where if you can’t stand the heat you have to leave the kitchen. Except it might also have helped youngsters learn to cope with the heat. The disappointment lies in the lack of empathy: instead of lightening the load, he took it lightly.

Most of us have no idea that someone was struggling with depression until it’s too late. We then spent days replaying their latest conversations and emails, trying to see if somewhere there was a cry for help that we missed. But it seemed so normal, we say, forgetting depression is “normal” too. Amrita Tripathi, co-author of ‘True Stories of Dealing with Depression’, once said that a senior psychiatrist told her that a national mental health survey found that 1 in 10 Indians had some kind of mental disorder. “Then she turned around and said that doesn’t mean the other 90% are in good mental health.” Asking for help around mental health is difficult. Kapil Dev and hearing from him just made it harder.

But in the end, he is a retired cricketer now playing at a dumb spot. Comic Danish Sait brilliantly tricked him into his Ramamurthy Uncle avatar by saying “Pressure cooker? Why is he pressuring himself to make rice? I say ban that too.”

Maybe Kapil Dev can now star in a pressure cooker ad where she’ll have to admit the pressure is very real. And not American either. “Pressure cooker ka jawaab nahin.”

But the rest of the audience has a lot more to answer for.

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