Cricket & I

I didn’t tune in to the final days play of the 2^nd Test match between India and England. The writing was on the wall and I sort of knew the result that India were going to lose badly. Now you would hardly find a more avid cricket watcher than me. My love affair with the game is an abiding one. I was someone who’d get up early in the morning and watch India play in Australia only to see them losing and feeling lousy all day or depriving myself of sleep to stay up till the ungodly hour when the action shifted to the Caribbean and once again undergoing the same trauma only to come back to the same thing like an addict who is beyond reform. All the important incidents or events have been marked with cricketing reference points. There was a time when India lost a cricket match, the whole world came crashing down on me. I would have trouble sleeping, to have a normal conversation with anybody until the sweet smell of victory would act as a salve on my wounded soul.

But for the last couple of years something has changed or shifted inside of me. Of course, I follow the game and the fortunes of the Indian team, but not with the same zeal or intensity. When I examine the complexity of my emotion for the game that I have religiously followed, I come to the conclusion that other passions have taken hold of me like reading and trying to get to know the world around you a bit better. Then came the IPL, and that was the real turning point. Suddenly, this was not the cricket I identified or felt connected to at any level. Here was an over hyped, sexed up version of cricket with all the razzmatazz associated with a marketing blitz. It was an incessant assault on the senses. For someone who has always put the primacy of Test cricket above everything else, it was hard to deal with. I also got the feeling that everybody was just paying lip service to test cricket but deep down, the administrators, the players even a vast section of the audience was sold to the new commercial enterprise of twenty overs cricket. Then it dawned on me that if they lacked the ambition to take Indian test cricket at the top, why should I invest my emotions and support towards their goal of turning cricket into a pathetic imitation of franchise based American sports. It is not all gloom and doom when Tendulkar gets out cheaply, a loss against Pakistan doesn’t invalidates our identity as a nation. I have moved on to bigger and hopefully better things in life but every now and then a gripping test match gets my juices  flowing and I remember the good old days when I was a hopeless romantic when it came to Indian cricket.