We Love Cricket!

We love cricket, don't we? After all, isn't that what gives India the feeling of being a nation? Despite having a myriad of religions, Indians have a common religion—cricket. Cricket is so much in our blood that the Government of India had practised even "cricket diplomacy" to improve Indo- Pak relations. And why shouldn't we love cricket? The "gentlemen's game" is indeed one of the precious legacies left to us by the colonial rulers.

We love cricket. Cricket is so important that we cannot keep ourselves from sharing even split-second occurrences of what goes on and outside that sacred 22-yard distance and of what goes on in the lives of cricketers on and off the field. After we lose 'very important' cricket matches, some of us vent our ire on certain cricketers and their personal lives, and some others express our solidarity with them in their 'moments of crisis'. We get emotional and enthusiastic, we scream on the top of our voices, we give expert advice to cricketers on how to play and how not to play—after all, we can't afford to show laxity given that we are dealing with the pan-Indian religion. We "bleed blue" and we almost overlook those who bleed to death. On 26 March 2015, social media was replete with pictures, videos and messages about the Indian cricket team because we had lost a world cup semi-final match to Australia. And this was a very important event, wasn't it? The electronic media chose to highlight this, given the fact that electronic media houses can't afford to overlook it. And why not? Overlooking it would certainly be inimical to their business interests. The same day, the news of a Dornier-228 of the Navy crashing off the Coast of Goa (even when it was an event that happened on 24 March 2015) could scarcely make its presence felt in the electronic media; the print media seemed to be much more concerned than its electronic counterpart about the Indian Navy personnel involved in the crash. There were very rare instances of people forwarding this news through Instant Messaging applications or through social media websites. Two young officers in their 20s—Lieutenant Kiran Shekhawat and Sub-Lieutenant Abhinav Nagori—lost their lives in watery graves. But should we have bothered about it? They bled to death in the course of their job, while the Indian cricket team had gone to perform a 'national duty'.

We love cricket. We do not use social media, not even in the form of one-liners, to spread awareness about the death of the cragsman Malli Mastan Babu even when he used to unfurl the Indian flag on the summits that he scaled. His being an alumnus of some of the most prestigious educational institutions of the country even when he had been from an economically-underprivileged background isn't a qualification good enough to make a social media presence felt posthumously; understandable it is, because he wasn't connected with cricket.

We love cricket. We don't mind expelling some university students if they felt like supporting the Pakistani cricket team. After all, such an act would be an insult to the integrity of India, wouldn't it? We deify cricketers. We post photoshopped images on the social media—images that show Maria Sharapova genuflecting in front of Sachin Tendulkar because she had earlier expressed ignorance about the "God of Cricket". Why shouldn't we? Ignorance about the God of Cricket is tantamount to ignorance about the God of the pan-Indian religion.

We love cricket. It is apt that when the Government of India decides to bestow the Bharat Ratna—the highest civilian honour—upon a sportsperson, it should inadvertently be on a cricketer.

In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Marcus Antonius had repeatedly used the phrase "honourable men" to convey something to the "friends, Romans, countrymen". I hope that my erudite readers will be quick to establish a relation between my resort to the sentence "We love cricket" and a usage of the aforementioned phrase in Julius Caesar.