JOIN USWhen India goes batty
It isn’t often that god comes to bat at number 2 for India, and shows one billion plus people (holding their combined bad breath) that he has a scratchy, nervous human side too. Not once, not twice, but six times. But then there has been some magic in the air over the past five weeks. The 2011 ICC World Cup has generated a madness seldom seen before.
Was Malik calling up lesser mortals at Mohali with his menacing: “I’m watching you”? Was Dawood downloading “dollars” into secret accounts, as some cynics insisted? Fact is, we don’t care. For the time being (and till the finals on Saturday) the world for us Indians (with the Tricolour painted on grinning cheeks) has simply shrunk into those handful of stadia – Chinnaswamy, Mohali, Feroze Shah Kotla and now, of course, Wankhede in Mumbai besides the others in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka where our air planes and television sets took us.
Beginning the day when India met Bangladesh for the first match, time just stopped for this cricket-crazy nation. No, the birds didn’t stop singing, the wind didn’t stop blowing, tsunamis did not halt in their tracks; but politicians of neighbouring (sparring) countries did stop making loaded political statements and almost put their arms around each other. New Bollywood films did not release and radiation threats definitely didn’t seem to matter to us.
Every time a match was on, phones stopped ringing, text messages stopped coming, roads emptied of all traffic, housewives got lunch/or dinner out of the way early, kids abandoned their PSPs, offices got deserted and nobody was pinging anybody, even on Facebook chat.
What we have been witnessing is the power of cricket, at its most awesome. Such is the mania generated that cricket has become the only flavour of the season. Every Indian and her grandmother has an opinion on what their team captain has to do. At Mohali he had to bat first before the dew factor turned the game, in Mumbai on Saturday we are yet to decide. The entire country and its grandson knew that we could not afford to take our eyes off the ball for even a second (even on television screens) otherwise it would be stumping out a wicket and landing the wrong team in the finals.
Conversations across the country started and ended with the C word, restaurants and pubs watched glum faced as people stubbornly refused to be wooed by their big screen experience offer with champagne thrown in. This was not IPL, concentration was key to the game. Too much was at stake. We had a cup to bring home. So we left office early, postponed the dentist’s appointments (you bet he was relieved too as he had to watch the match as well) and just stayed inside homes and in farmhouses.
Closeted in with friends and family, glued to the plasma TV, ordering Butter Chicken and Chinese, we drunk ourselves silly to combat the tension. We discussed and analysed and strategised.
With summer holidays more than a week around the corner, the entrepreneurs were shrewd enough to notice this obsession and a slew of cricket camps for budding Dhonis and Sachins shrewdly erupted across the length and breadth of the country. Tennis coaches went into deep sulk while cricket camp organisers and coaches with over bookings already laughed all the way to the bank. Just how many of those school kids will attend the camps remains to be seen but for now Daddy is too engrossed in the matches to care.
For fat ladies with flowery hats and plump cheeks sitting in hot stadia, for little boys who forgot to take fingers out of itchy noses and for teenage girls who didn’t want to look at Aamir Khan’s new handlebar moustache but rather Ashish Nehra’s large crooked teeth: it has been a trying time. All that matters is cricket, all that we can hear is the sound of bat meeting ball and the roar of excitement that swept across stands and sitting rooms.
We have just returned breathless from a rollercoaster ride of high emotion. We have fallen in love with Sehwag’s swashbuckling style, we have wiped a silent tear with a sweaty but smiling Munaf Patel confessing to the holiday declared in his village school in Bharuch. And yes, we have returned from the dead when Sachin was declared out right in the beginning of the Mohali match, and then saved.
The World Cup fever has done more tweak emotions in our lives.
It has reduced (or should the word be lifted?) us from being lowly mortal beings, with 9 to 5 jobs, families and finances to take care of, homes to build and children’s education loans to pay off, into higher beings who are so meditatively into eating, drinking and breathing cricket that we have almost reached a state of nirvana.
We have bought India hats from department stores, blue Ts from the roadside, we have coloured our faces orange, green and white, we have been waving the National Flag in stadia and at home and we have learnt to scream “Chakka laga” at the top of our voices. Yes, we have lost our marbles but we don’t care do we. Balls are what matter now (no pun intended). We are waiting for the stadium gates of Wankhede to be thrown open on Saturday. And why not. It is our time for a tryst with destiny once again. Jeetega bhai jeetega… desh hamara jeetega.