How easy it is these days to pull down noble people! One small clip, one twisted quote, one fake post, and a lifetime of service seems to crumble under the weight of slander. But what’s interesting is that those same noble souls, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Nehru, seldom have armies of defenders shouting from podiums. They don’t need to. Their strongest advocate is their work.
Just look at what they did.
Mother Teresa didn’t argue with critics who called her names. She simply continued to pick up the dying from gutters, giving them dignity in their last moments. For every word of hatred spoken against her, a hundred destitute souls slept peacefully in clean beds that night. She didn’t raise her voice; her compassion did.
She could simply have pointed to the scoreboard.
And Gandhiji! Ah, my dear adversaries of the Mahatma! You stand on the very platform of free speech he built for you. You speak your mind freely because he fought for that right. He faced the British Empire with nothing but truth and a walking stick. He took bullets of insult, imprisonment, and ridicule, and still refused to throw a stone back. And when he fell, the whole world stood up. That, my friends, is the scoreboard.
It’s like criticising a batsman who has just hit a century and won the match for the country. You can shout from the stands, call him lucky, mock his style, but he doesn’t have to shout back. He just needs to smile and point to the scoreboard.
It speaks louder than all your chatter.
Sadly, we live in a time when we forget to look there. We have professional critics who never played the game, leaders who never got an education, but pretend they have, experts who never served a soul, and historians who rewrite history without lifting a broom to sweep their own doorstep.
And yet they judge, harshly, loudly, daily.
Maybe it’s time we, the silent spectators, start turning the critics gently toward that scoreboard.
“Look,” we should say, “at the numbers glowing there, at the millions fed, the millions freed, the millions inspired.” Look at the schools, and colleges that rose from Nehru’s vision, look at homes born from Mother Teresa’s compassion, and look at freedom flowing from Gandhi’s faith.
In cricket, the scoreboard is the only truth. It cannot be spun, twisted, or debated. It tells what a man has done, not what others say about him. Maybe our country should do the same. When pettiness and propaganda take over, when trolls shout and anchors thunder, just point them to the scoreboard.
Because in the end, that’s what matters, not the noise of the crowd, but your quiet score.
And when the innings of life ends, may we too have something glowing up there, something good enough for the next generation to point at and say with pride, “Look, that’s the scoreboard.”..!