Skip to main content

When Cricket Becomes War

Illustration by Copilot Designer


Why did India agree to play Pakistan at all if the animosity runs so deep that Indian players could not even extend the customary handshake: a simple ritual that embodies the very essence of sportsmanship?

Cricket is not war, in the first place. When a nation turns a game into a war, it does not defeat its rival; it only wages war on its own culture, poisoning its acclaimed greatness. India which claims to be Viswaguru, the world’s Guru, is degenerating itself day after day with mounting hatred against everyone who is not Hindu.

How can we forget what India did to a young cricket player named Mohammed Siraj, especially in this context? In the recent test series against England, India achieved an unexpected draw because of Siraj. 1113 balls and 23 wickets. He was instrumental in India’s series-levelling victory in the final Test at the Oval and was declared the Player of the Match. But India did not celebrate him. Instead, it mocked him for his occasional failures like missing a catch. He was asked on social media why he didn’t leave cricket and go to drive his father’s autorickshaw. He was insulted time and again merely because of his religion.

Even the legendary Indian cricketer Sachin Tendulkar applauded Siraj’s achievements and said that Siraj played a crucial role in India’s victory against England. Tendulkar also added that Siraj was not extended the laurels he deserved.

I am no fan of cricket. In fact, I think of the game as a lazy person’s way of spending time in the sun during winters. I know the game evolved much from those lassitudinous 5-day tests to one -day shows and even better 20-twenties. Gentlemen supposedly played for honour back then, and now gladiators play for sponsors. The cricketers in India are now commodities auctioned in the market run by a corporate nexus which is led by a politician’s son (who doesn’t seem to have a brain). I find the entire thing as ridiculous as it ever was in my imagination right from my childhood.

I have written in this space repeatedly that the most deleterious disservice that the Modi Inc. has done to India is the communal hatred they [the right wing] injected into the country’s veins. Now, even our cricketers are infected! What a pity!

They ceased to be cricketers the moment they let such venom of hatred enter their hearts. I understand that they were instructed by their country’s government not to shake hands with their Pak counterparts. There you are: your government is responsible for the toxin that your heroes spewed in Dubai today.

I am against that government. Because of the hatred it keeps pumping into the country’s bloodstream year after year. By a 75-year-old man and his criminal gang. At 75, you’d expect a MODIcum of wisdom from human beings. But then, you can’t expect wisdom from brutes, said Nietzsche in a moment of brilliant insanity.

A Malayalam weekly celebrating Siraj's contributions


Comments

  1. Hari Om
    Quite so... I was unaware things had gotten this bad, but it's true that sport - and particularly cricket - are supposed to be above such nonsense. Sigh... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  2. I am only sorry that Gavecattle velsaskar, the cricketer's cricketer did not levels come out in support of Siraj and his proven mettle. He is a gentleman and human being. Why they played with Pakistan? For money, as the game has denigrated itself to the levels of a weekly cattle shanty, where mutts would be bargained for. Not having shaken hands... That is the Nadir of the gentleman's game.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. A lot of money is involved. But hatred of this degree is new.

      Delete
  3. Ah, sportsball. Fans can be so awful to the athletes.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...

Helpless Gods

Illustration by Gemini Six decades ago, Kerala’s beloved poet Vayalar Ramavarma sang about gods that don’t open their eyes, don’t know joy or sorrow, but are mere clay idols. The movie that carried the song was a hit in Kerala in the late 1960s. I was only seven when the movie was released. The impact of the song, like many others composed by the same poet, sank into me a little later as I grew up. Our gods are quite useless; they are little more than narcissists who demand fresh and fragrant flowers only to fling them when they wither. Six decades after Kerala’s poet questioned the potency of gods, the Chief Justice of India had a shoe flung at him by a lawyer for the same thing: questioning the worth of gods. The lawyer was demanding the replacement of a damaged idol of god Vishnu and the Chief Justice wondered why gods couldn’t take care of themselves since they are omnipotent. The lawyer flung his shoe at the Chief Justice to prove his devotion to a god. From Vayalar of 196...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Our gods must have died laughing

A friend forwarded a video clip this morning. It is an extract from a speech that celebrated Malayalam movie actor Sreenivasan delivered years ago. In the year 1984, Sreenivasan decided to marry the woman he was in love with. But his career in movies had just started and so he hadn’t made much money. Knowing his financial condition, another actor, Innocent, gave him Rs 400. Innocent wasn’t doing well either in the profession. “Alice’s bangle,” Innocent said. He had pawned or sold his wife’s bangle to get that amount for his friend. Then Sreenivasan went to Mammootty, who eventually became Malayalam’s superstar, to request for help. Mammootty gave him Rs 2000. Citing the goodness of the two men, Sreenivasan said that the wedding necklace ( mangalsutra ) he put ceremoniously around the neck of his Hindu wife was funded by a Christian (Innocent) and a Muslim (Mammootty). “What does religion matter?” Sreenivasan asks in the video. “You either refuse to believe in any or believe in a...