That’s not Cricket.

I have never been interested in Cricket. As a child I would watch little boys running around playing ‘air-cricket’ (they bowl imaginary balls and score imaginary ‘sixers’ with imaginary bats) and I would think that they were the children my mother had told me to be nice to. It’s not really Crickets fault, I am not athletic and so I am just not a fan of watching people play anything, and will sit through a game of tennis or cricket or whatever if there is absolutely no other choice in the matter.

So you can all imagine how much ‘me time’ I enjoyed this past weekend as India blew to the finish line, winning the World Cup after many, many, many years.  It was a great moment for Indian cricket fans and as a fan of India in general I was happy to hear the news.  But cricket, what little I knew of it, wasn’t what it used to be.

I was raised on Air-Force stations around India. Many of my air-force aunties and uncles followed cricket like a moth follows light and so I often found myself at somebody’s home watching whatever the big match was. Even though everyone in the room was Indian not everyone supported the Indian team.

Which is why, when I ‘came of age’ and fell in love with Imran Khan, the Pakistani team’s captain, I saw no reason to not support my man. Later, a crush on Sir Vivian Richards evoked an intense (though short lived) passion for the Windies. They say that once you go black you can’t go back. Well I went back with a crush on Ravi Shastri, thus briefly supporting my homies, and finally came full circle to my first and only true love, Imran Khan, where I remained until the early 90s when he retired and I went off to college to spread my legs – oops I mean wings.

With zero interest in the run-rate, or how many overs were over, the only way I could be involved in the cricket fever that enveloped my country men and women was to pick the player I thought was best looking and spend hours fantasizing about his bat and balls – oops I mean spend hours supporting his team (I need coffee).

Supporting a non-India team was seen as a freedom one had and not as ‘anti-Indian’ or unpatriotic and I always had company. Some uncle or aunty believed that the Sri Lankans, or West Indians, or Kiwis, or – horror of all horrors – the Pakistanis deserved to win.  Based on what I recall, the ‘defectors’ believed that being Indian was the one thing that made no difference to who they supported – this was after all sport and not war.  And as men in uniform who had actually fought in a real war they knew exactly what they were talking about.

Sadly this is not a feeling I get around a lot of Indian fans today, especially if we are playing Pakistan.  Somehow the support and cheering goes beyond the game at hand. It seems to have a jingoistic flavor to it. A flavor I reject, because like all proud Indians I know that’s not Cricket.