'The Greatest Rivalry: India vs Pakistan' poster
Credit: Netflix
The vividness of certain past experiences makes you wonder if the intensity of emotions felt at the time were all true or just made-up narratives, concocted visions of the past passing off as truth. With age, there’s a tendency to drape memories of yore with rose-tinted narratives. So, being circumspect isn’t always the worst thing.
And that’s how The Greatest Rivalry: India vs Pakistan was approached.
The intention was to view the three-episode series for what it was, but my biases wouldn’t allow me to be so objective because I was as much part of that story as most Indians and Pakistanis have been since the Partition.
This cricketing rivalry has lost some of its severity and drama and madness in more recent years with fans evolving to understand that the two nations have more in common than they do otherwise. In the 2000s…. that’s not how it went down.
India versus Pakistan meant empty streets, saved-up firecracker boxes brought out, communal screenings, families united between silence and screaming.
Those were my memories, and I assumed that my mind was manipulating it to a degree, but in consuming what was born out of directors Chandradev Bhagat and Stewart Sugg’s piousness to cricket, there is now no doubt that that rivalry had been as impassioned.
The makers couldn’t have chosen a better series than India’s 2004 tour of Pakistan to express the depth of feuding. They also laced it with just enough political jargon and iconography to present the sentimentality of the nations in the aftermath of the Kargil War of 1999.
Cricket was touched on aplenty by cricketers from that era and prior, but what stood out was the lucidity of the writing, the intent of the interviewer, and the social awareness to sneak in every aspect of the rivalry on the field and beyond.
Moreover, it’s done before you know it, and has you feeling some kind of way in that period. If that isn’t good then maybe my mind is playing tricks on me again.