“Of all the races in the Galaxy, only the English could possibly revive the memory of the most horrific wars ever to sunder the Universe and transform it into into what I'm afraid is generally regarded as an incomprehensibly dull and pointless game”
- Douglas Adams, Life the Universe and Everything (1968)
“That cricket is going to stay in India there cannot be a shadow of a doubt; it has taken hold all over the country, and chokras can be seen playing in every village with any sort of old bat and ball that they can lay hands on. I should hope that it will do something to get over any racial antipathy; for instance, it must, I think, bring the several races together more and more, in a spirit of harmony that should be the spirit in which cricket is played. Unquestionably, it arouses excitement and enthusiasm, and extreme ambition that one's own side should succeed, bit it also ought to lead to friendliness, and that is what is needed in India. East will always be East, and West, West, but the crease is not a very broad line of demarcation – so narrow, indeed, that it ought to help bring about friendly relations.”
- Lord Harris, A Few Short Runs (1921)
“Cricket civilises people and creates good gentlemen. I want everyone to play cricket in Zimbabwe; I want ours to be a nation of gentlemen.”
- Robert Mugabe, attributed in Helen Exley, Cricket Quotations (1992)
“Isn't cricket supposed to be a team sport? I feel people should decide first whether cricket is a team game or an individual sport.”
Sachin Tendulkar
We Indians are just crazy about cricket. Cricket dominates our conversation and we are never satisfied by it. Cricket isn’t just a game to us. ((as put by various posters I have seen during Indian matches)) We Indians have come to a consensus that cricket is a “religion” and the Indian cricketers are veritable “gods”. Ask any person around you who was the first president of our country he may stutter a bit before replying or he may not even reply ((this isn’t an exaggeration. I saw this program on TV called V IQ. You’d be surprised on what are youth knows and more importantly what we don’t but I’ll write about that later)). In any case, ask the same person who captained India during India ’s world cup victory in ‘83 and he’d reply in absolute confidence that it was Kapil Dev. We just know it. In fact our national consciousness was probably most affected by this victory than any of the other great events that have happened in our country since the independence. (You see even though I talk about the “other great events” I real don’t know about any other and to some extent I don’t care.)
But we aren’t obsessed about the game itself. We don’t want to know the nitty-gritty’s of the game, the fundamentals of great batting nor the essence of good bowling. We don’t care if Don Bradman was the best batsman who ever played. We don’t want to know that Courtney Walsh was one the greatest quicks to have ever hurled the red cherry. Shane Warne the man who could spin the ball like no other doesn’t interest us. We’d rather not be reminded of Jonty Rhodes, one of the most athletic and exciting fielders in contemporary cricket.
No, what we always want to know is that India has won the match it has played. We just want to know that “our ” team is victorious. It has become a habit for us to expect success from our “heroes” in every single game. These expectations are to some extent born out of patriotism to our motherland but the fact of the matter is that for us Indian victory is our liberator from the struggle of life. Cricket is the morphine that can numb away our pain and the opium that helps our spirits soar free.
A morale-crushing empire subjugated India for a long time. The effect of this rule can be seen even today in the 21st century where we still lack the confidence in ourselves as a nation to such an extent that we rely on the Indian cricket team to lead our way. Through them we want to show the rest of the world that India “too” is a great country. When Sachin Tendulkar walks into the ground and scores a century, be it against Australia or Kenya it is celebrated by each and everyone in our country. The people of India enjoy Pathan’s success more than Pathan himself may but the moment he fails to perform we want forget him and look for our next hero who will take us to victory again. Such is the fickleness of the follower of Indian cricket. For us, our cricket stars are the very expressions and examples of what we feel we have failed to accomplish in our lives. We think their on-field achievements cover up our shortcomings. Their success against any other team is celebrated as a victory against the country itself. ((Most people who follow the India-Pakistan cricket matches would agree to this. I have lived in the UAE for sometime and have been fortunate enough to look at both sides of the coin. The “clash of the sub-continental giants” as the matches are dubbed, are eagerly awaited by people on both sides of the border. The respective teams are cheered on with much zeal and enthusiasm. A win would mean pride and honour among the common man and loss would mean humiliation and this too, to the common man itself.))
It is an open secret that our nation today is struggling against various cultural, regional, lingual disputes. But not even cricket, the same game that I called our liberator, can help us overcome these differences. This is evident in the now infamous Chappell-Ganguly spat, which not only was made very public but also made very ugly by the public. The incident reached a crescendo when Ganguly was put out of the team, Kolkota as a “whole” rose against the “injustice” suffered by their ‘dada’. Chappell’s reason for “kicking” Ganguly out may have, albeit been to help him improve his game ((it could also have been political or summat but we can’t say for sure. He’s playing better now isn’t he?)) but the only thing the locals of Kolkata understood was that their ‘dada’ was being victimized. ((I would hate to see what would happen if the selectors put Tendulkar out. (I guess the country would go into a general state of anarchy. The government may even have to declare an emergency) Personally though I feel it is high time he bowed out))
In all fairness though this situation isn’t unique to India. Everybody in the world has a team or individual they cheer on with keenness. But the Indian fanaticism towards cricket has no parallel. Of late though, many new players such as the Mittals, the Tatas, Shilpa Shetty and Meera Nair, the Arun Nayars and the Liz Hurleys have begun to represent India on a global level. There may come a time when India is finally a ‘super-power’. When such a time comes people of this country may realize that cricket is just a game and that while cricketers earn money if they perform or even if they don’t, we don’t earn anything not even satisfaction.
For now however, India have began their World Cup campaign disastrously and they need to do something about.
