Cricket is our religion; Sachin is our God

Ever since the summer of 1996 , my addiction to cricket and the world cup has remained; a lot less fanatic, but subtlety consistent zeal still drives me to unconsciously mutter a prayer or two for the players out at the field who are trying to keep up the expectations of a billion fans like me and make this game of cricket an engaging sport.

It comes as no surprise to me that a new comic is being published n India, which features Sachin Tendulkar as a super-hero, only next to superman and the like. I often wonder for those few hours we watch them on the screens smashing balls, grabbing wickets, diving for catches how is it that they feel being demi-gods to the public? I am reminded of the dialogue from the movie spider-man “With great power comes great responsibility”. It suits the responsibility we usher upon those eleven players, to win a match, that has now become more detrimental than life itself!

This fact has only been furthered by the incidents of last week, when hell had broken loose after India was defeated by Bangladesh and the Pakis didn’t make it to the super-8. I had sat saddling with disappointment at the edge of the couch watching one wicket after another fall, mouthing many grumps. End of the day only two questions remained in my mind – 1. Which player’s house will be vandalized in India? 2. Which player will be vandalized in Pakistan?

Has the Gentleman's game gone out of hands, is a topic still in debate and will continue to be for decades to come. We often hear about the extremes of fad that drives fans to kill themselves after a defeat. Fans destroy homes of the cricketers. Fans burn effigies of their heroes. End of the immediate uproar and anxiety a defeat brings to the nation, rage dies out and the zealousness continues. Can anyone forget the unsettling era of Ganguly’s captaincy?? Amidst this clamor, the country and its media forgets those eleven players who are mere mortals like any of us with emotions and problems and not consistent machines that are being threatened and pushed to perform like gods.

It is often sad to see the extent to which a public reaction torments these players, which is evident from the recent developments of a series of resignations in the Pakistan team and board, not to forget Woolmer’s unfortunate demise. Nevertheless to say as an ardent fan of cricket itself, one will miss the Pakistan team with entertaining fast bowlers like shoiab and hitters like Afridi. May be I can never understand the extremist view of the cricketing world and the players who are the scapegoats of the unforgiving cricket-buffs.

At such moments I reluctantly recall G B Shaw for his definition of cricket as a fool’s game and soon decidedly ignore it when I look forward to the next match with absolute gung-ho. And this time it is the deciding match of tomorrow. Ho Hail The Indian Cricket Team!

The summer of 1996

With the cricket pitch soaring high… I am reminded of the world cup of 1996, when India lost to Srilanka so miserably in the semi-finals at Calcutta. It was the year; I had started to understand cricket and actually blend into the cricket fever that India thrived on!

After the victory at the quarter-final match against Pakistan, the Indian cricket players were no less that demigods for me and my best friend Annie. By then we knew every cricket score and every cricketer’s score, who had taken the highest wickets, Number of 4’s and 6’s tendulakar had smashed and blah! (Quiet remarkable for two girls who didn’t know how cricket was played till then!) . We decided to put all this energy into use. Well! Playing the game was out of question and 12 year old girls had better things to do than burn their skin playing cricket with the boys!! We came up with this most time devouring project of making a cricket book, which kept us on our toes the whole of the summer of 1996.

It began with the piles of ‘sport star’ magazines we had collected over the cricket season and the gambit of cricket shots it contained. We had very religiously used a lab-notebook and stuck carefully picked pictures on the left hand side on the plain paper and written out details on the right hand side. Like we had a page with close up picture of tendulkar and the right hand side we had details like – no of runs, average and all possible nitty gritty details! I wonder what we wanted out of this supposed book of records, which we even bothered to update as months went by. The cricket book had become an obsession that I would want to have my eyes on it all the time. It was like we had fallen in love with the cricket book to distraction. As if this was not balmy enough, we also supplemented the cricket book with Sachin and kumble notebooks, with pictures of the two cricketing divas!? [If the NDTV existed then, they could have featured our efforts in the news titling it “‘Two 12 year girls turn berserk, innovative cricket fans’ ... After the break”

The cricket fervor caught on to us so much so that we retorted to a zillion superstitions and prayers to make India win. India’s loss depressed us immensely. I would also coax my mother to pray and read her prayer book while India was out at the field. We had even bought the music cassette sung by Sanjay Manjeraker which had favorite songs of all the Indian cricket palyers!! By the June of 1996, we had reached the peak of insanity and cricket(ers) was the world to us. It became an obscene reality that we heard, watched and talked cricket. It had turned from fad to patriotism to personal! It was time to stop…

I don’t recall what happened following that summer… except that we had school to go to ,we were turning teenagers and we had much more to look forward to in life and our cricket book and fanatic-sm was buried deep under the dusty book rack! … 11 years down the lane, the ‘making of our cricket book’ still brings a smile on my face and the remnants of my friendship with Annie.