That I didn’t watch the game, not a single over, will obviously require an explanation, since while it is not legally wrong to not watch the must-watch, it is socially unacceptable. Already, someone has left a threatening pile of pre-festival sale fliers at my door, and I have told the house help to skip work today for her own safety.
George Orwell, in his 1945 essay, ‘The Sporting Spirit’ had written, ‘Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard for all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words, it is war minus the shooting.’ And truth be told, India-Pakistan bouts on the cricketing field, even in the World Cup, aren’t ‘serious sport’ any longer. It’s become batting-bowling minus the war.
Spectators, whether in the stands or in front of screens, once reflected the badass-ness between the players on the ground of these two cricketing nations. Imran Khan would stare at Sunil Gavaskar on his way back to the crease and find Gavaskar staring back at him. India-Pakistan was such a Nietzschean affair. Fast bowler Sikander Bakht, in delightful frustration, kicked the stumps out of the ground on more than one occasion. Javed Miandad’s boing-boing monkey jump in front of keeper of the faith Kiran More at the 1992 World Cup was an unmatched expression of what was at stake.
Now, it’s all very hon-bonhomie, with the Indian side, looking like a hipster crowd who are all brand ambassadors of personal care product company Beardo, playing in the ‘right spirit’ with – rather than visibly against – a genteel Pakistani bunch. It’s now left to the spectators and commentators to hyperbole baby bol.
All you have to do is check older games like the 2003 India-Pakistan World Cup match at the Centurion. The three battering Rams of Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis and Shoaib Akhtar against Sachin Tendulkar as part of India’s proper, ATF-propelled run chase of 274. This was war without the shooting, but not bereft of the Beautiful Violence that ‘serious sport’ provides, and should provide. Unless you’re one of the ‘Ind-iah! Ind-iah!’ crowd or, on the other side of the fence, ‘watching it for the game, not supporting any side’ type of gobi ka supporter. Instead, what we have now is manufactured riling up everywhere except on the cricket pitch. Anyone who has watched any game of any sport with me knows that I can get total bonkers while following what’s happening on the ground. Even the constipation show of last week’s Arsenal-Manchester City Premier League match had me foaming shaving gel in the mouth when Mateo Kovacic showed his studs not once, but twice, and didn’t get the red card. India-Pakistan was once made of such sterner stuff. Yes, it was certainly buoyed by their ‘extra-curricular’ hostility outside cricket. But it was not solely fed by it. Irrespective of the quality of any India-Pakistan game, the great white ball of fire has shifted elsewhere – to India-England duels, even Australia-India matches, never mind the one-sided affair the other day at the Chepauk.
So, forgive me if I denied myself the demographic dividend of yesterday’s ‘sporting rivalry like no other’. True, I may be ageing gracelessly and need more bang for my bakwas when I’m watching a game these days. But India-Pakistan cricket holds no wonderful terror for me anymore. The India-England game on October 29, on the other hand, does.
Instead of doing national duty, and magically helping Rohit Sharma and his hipster squad simply by supporting him from a sofa as many of you did, I had a Saturday well spent, pujo shopping, catching a play, and having the kind of lovely Chinese meal in a restaurant without a TV screen that can only happen when the cricket mob still thinks it’s 1998.
