by Anupama Krishnakumar
[box]Cricket and India – Need we say more? Inseparable, that’s the word. Anupama Krishnakumar shares some thoughts on the cricket craze in India – what she finds interesting about this phenomenon, inspite of not being a fan of the game.[/box]My 90-year old grandfather keeps a diary. If you are wondering what a 90-year old does with a diary, well, he keeps track of test and ODI cricket match schedules! He will never miss a match which India is playing; he doesn’t mind watching matches that doesn’t feature India too. All that matters that it has to be a game of cricket!
My mother loves Gundappa Viswanath! She can go on for hours and hours about her favourite, charming cricketer!
My husband is hooked on to Brian Lara’s Cricket on the X-box!
My two-and-a-half year son exclaims fours and sixes for all the random shots that he hits with his sometimes blue, sometimes red, sometimes cream bat (yeah, he has three of them!) and the ball of any size or colour that he can lay his hands on!
Coming to think of it, I am an aberration in the family as far as cricketing tastes are concerned. The thousand different terms confuse me; a match, more often than not, doesn’t get me hooked except when it’s a nail-biting finish that it is heading to. I used to pray that Tendulkar should hang on at the crease, once upon a time, not because I really was keen on the game, but because Grandpa would ask me to! I could never say no to the old man’s innocent craze!
Despite my so-called lack of enthusiasm for the game (Did I say I love tennis? Well, that’s a different story altogether!), I am always awestruck at the kind of influence that a bat and a ball and eleven men have on the psyche of millions of people. Cricket is a game alright, but that’ s just for the rest of the world. But for scores of Indians, cricket is a religion in its own might! We worship those men in blue – Sachin Tendulkar, Saurav Ganguly, M.S. Dhoni, and earlier, Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev and many more! Young girls fill their walls with their posters. They even dream of lives with their cricketing Gods! When Dhoni’s marriage news broke out of the blue, a million hearts were broken; that in fact became a fancy headline for the media! Cricket crazy, we are, aren’t we?
Get on to the street on a lazy weekend or a holiday in any Indian city; street cricket will invariably invite you. Be it a team of young boys, young adults or adults, they are out there, soaking in the spirit of cricket, shouting, concentrating and arguing! Pass by an electronic goods showroom on the day of a match, you will find at least fifty men glued to the display TV sets merrily following the proceedings of the match and clapping and reacting enthusiastically!
Indians scream with joy when India wins, they burst crackers, they garland their men of honour, they hold them close to their hearts. Remember the time India won the first T-20 world championship? Come on, we are a nation that still looks back at 1983 with an unbelievable sense of pride!
But we feel let down too, when the ‘boys’ lose. We hold everything against them – even the most straight of statements are twisted and given a new meaning. We scoff at them for being irresponsible! The cricketers are perhaps the fewest of souls that can rise to glory and fall to ashes at the wink of an eye!
The times I really wonder whether this craze is even worth it, is when people die of heart attacks at the loss of a game or when the sport becomes a breeding ground for controversies and no longer remains a game.
Let’s take the case of the IPL. The IPL is in a way India’s pride; it has had cricketers from across the world rushing in to be a part of the IPL scene. But, the controversies that have raged on are indeed a big disappointment and surely tarnish the reputation of a cricketing event that has a mighty big fan following across the globe.
And of course, clichéd I may sound, but, it is also quite upsetting that other sports do not garner as much attention as cricket does.
Yet all said and done, cricket has scored its biggest victory in India as a sport, for, it’s not just urban India that is hooked on to it, but also the semi-urban and rural areas that celebrate the spirit of cricket. A game of cricket is perhaps an expression of a common man’s desire to be recognized; his claim to stardom, a small share of it!
I had visited a south-Indian village a few years back as part of an academic assignment. The village was caught in the clutches of poverty; people were struggling for basic amenities, didn’t have enough food and clothing; their shelters were poor. Yet, the village kids flashed bright, confident smiles and most of them went to school. One evening, I saw a bunch of them with a bat and a ball – all poised for a game of cricket. After having watched them for a while, I walked up to the boy who seemed to be dominating the workings of the match in question, and asked him, ‘So, whose bat and ball are these?’
‘It’s mine,’ he said and I wondered if that was why he was dominating!
No, not actually, he was seemingly the best of the lot!
‘My uncle who’s working in Chennai got it for me,’ he declared proudly in Tamil.
‘That’s nice,’ I told him.
‘So, which cricketer do you like?’ I asked.
No prizes for guessing.
‘Sachin,’ came the response prompt and clear.
And that in a remote village, deep inside Tamilnadu.
That’s India. That’s cricket. That’s cricket and India!
Khelo India Khelo!
Pic : ali_pk – http://www.flickr.com/photos/ali_pk/
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