I have always wondered as to what makes the game of cricket click with Indians. Indian youth and elders alike are more fascinated by cricket than any other game. Critics have always derided the game as time consuming exercise in frivolity. Having watched the game grow at feverish pace through five decades, the bad news for critics of the game, though in minority now, is that cricket in India is here to stay and sadly for them, forever. It only takes time to catch up with this cricket mania and it is infectious.
Though many options are available to children, cricket remains their first choice. Our Indian psyche does not accept other games easily. The success of our men has caught up with women as well. Now a days, we find the women performing really well in the international arena, who are also well recognised and rewarded. So much of time, efforts and money have gone into the making the success story of Indian cricket. Thanks to the electronic media for this renaissance, without which cricket and players would not have made these many headlines.
In our country it is easy to start a conversation with cricket among strangers, similar to Englishmen starting their conversation with weather. Cricket has cut the sex and age barrier and has not spared even the grandmothers. My octogenarian mother in law is a living example of this. She was a stranger to cricket during transistor days, but now sits glued to Television when India plays and loses her sleep when India performs badly.
When our country plays, people cutting across the barriers of religion, language and culture exchange scores passionately or heatedly discuss the on field events.
When we play Pakistan the scenario looks totally different, for it is a war without bloodshed. When our country wins, we get a vicarious thrill of winning a war. Sometimes cricket determines the mood of the nation though, there is no real logic behind this euphoria. The players are raised to the status of demigods. We tend to discover non-existent virtues in our players when we win and conversely discover vices when we lose.
Ours society being a multicultural and multi-ethnic, gets divided easily on the lines of religion, caste, creed and language. Englishmen effectively used these factors to divide and rule our country for more than two centuries.
But ironically they left a magic potion for binding our country called “cricket”. Looking at the positive side, no other game unites our nation like the game of cricket. In olden times we had wars when a nation wanted to prove its superiority over its rivals. Thankfully we cannot afford war in this nuclear era, but we can afford cricket. This is a war which lasts for a maximum of five days, without injuring anyone, except players sometimes.
Karl Marx said that religion is the opium of masses. In the Indian context, cricket is truly our opium. It is a harmless potion, though intoxicating, has no side effects. In any case not a bad instrument for rallying around our country men.
