“I cried because I had no shoes
Then I saw a girl with Jimmy Choos...”
From Ballad of an Indian Idiot by Bachchoo

I know very little about cricket, having developed a subconscious fear of the game after being struck in the head while being ordered to bat in the nets under the banyan tree in the front compound of Bishops School Poona (now Pune) when I was, as the Americans say, an alumnus of that august institution.

One dared not make a fuss about that sort of thing in my day. It was all part of the game and dropping the bat to clutch one’s forehead and pick up one’s specs from the mud was considered unsporting and sissyish and it was enough to get Mr Sewell, our Welsh sports and PE master, to tell me to “get out of it”.
As a consequence I have never been enthusiastic about the game and don’t know much about it. When someone says “long leg” I think they are speaking of Ethiopian girls and till last week I thought “Silly Midov” was what someone on WikiLeaks called the last Soviet finance minister.
So what happened last week? I was in Mumbai and was compelled to watch the semi-finals and then the finals of the cricket World Cup. Living in Britain, one is always half-conscious of cricket. Like royalty, it stays in the background until there is a death, a wedding or a scandal. Very, very few, apart from some male fogeys at the BBC are bothered about how many innings Worcestershire beat Yorkshire by in the county quarter-finals — if there is such a tournament.
Even when there is a game of British teams at Lords, as there must be on very many days of the season, there is no hoo-haa in London town. Yes, if the Australians are playing the Melbourne Cricket Council for the Ashes, then there is more than usual attention and people casually ask each other the cricket score while watching Arsenal play Manchester United on TV.
British cricket crowds never spill out in celebration as I witnessed Indian crowds do last week. And this has nothing to do with any notion the world may have of British reserve. The reserve is all too non-evident on days when Chelsea is playing Millwall in the Premier League football finals at Wembley. (Incidentally, I am not a football fan either. I watch the World Cup and can, if challenged, define accurately the off-side rule!). British hooligans are proudly the best in the world at creating havoc on the streets of foreign cities when the football World Cup is in play and England is either winning or losing, which in the World Cup which doesn’t allow draws, leaves very little to chance.
The atmosphere in Mumbai this last week of the cricket tournament was tense. On the Wednesday of the semi-finals, when we already knew that Sri Lanka had beaten New Zealand in their own semi-final encounter and when India were to play Pakistan in Mohali in the Punjab, Mumbai, a living and traffic-jammed Gaia organism at other times, seemed to hold its breath. The streets were empty, the power-grid overworked as millions of TVs and (millions fewer) air-conditioners were switched on for the afternoon and into the hours of the night.
The Pakistan-India match was, to appreciate its full context, more than a game of cricket. The Indian Prime Minister had invited the Pakistani one over to watch the game. Pakistanis who had never held a prime ministerial position were given easy visas and flooded over the border to watch the game.
The two Prime Ministers were pictured on TV sitting next to each other on sofas, watching. I held my breath, waiting to see if they would, like lovers at the cinema, hold hands. It was that sort of occasion — friendly rivalry on the pitch and the hope of a renewed dialogue in the stands and in the nation. There were girls in the Indian stands holding up posters which said “Pakistanis Indians, Friends Forever”.
The match lasted a tense eight hours and India narrowly won. There was an outbreak of celebration in Mumbai, Delhi and I expect in every crook and nanny of the country — and there was no doubt a certain amount of gloom in Karachi and Lahore, but I hoped that both nations would remember that it was a hard-played match and after all, cricket is only a game, not a test of military prowess in which one side may, for instance, take 90,000 prisoners of war and then release them on generous terms.
Then came the final against Sri Lanka in Mumbai. That was pretty close and undecided till the last moments. India won and there followed the ceremony of awarding the Cup and man of the series medals.
The whole purpose of writing about these events, the outcome of which the world already knows, is that I found the Sri Lankan captain’s speech at the prize-giving ceremony, a model of the sporting spirit. It was, in the catalogue of acceptance of losing the game, equivalent to the Gettysburg address. He congratulated India and even called it “the better team”. There was disappointment in his tone and nobility in his words.
Contrast then the unsporting, paranoid loser’s comments of the fellow called Afridi, the Pakistani captain who slinked off to whence he came and had this to say: (My translations from Urdu) “Allah has given the Pakistanis clean hearts, whereas the Indians are small-hearted and small-minded. No good can come out of talks between the two countries because an outside power doesn’t want it. The Indian press is filthy, our media are a hundred per cent better...”
I don’t suppose anyone, Indian, Pakistani or Icelandic, considers Afridi a valid or insightful commentator on the hearts and minds of nations or indeed on the gifts of the Creator to various populations. And when he says that a foreign hand prevents the dialogue between India and Pakistan, one can only suggest that he read a bit of subcontinental history. As for the press, a free one is better than one that looks over its shoulder to suck up to the dictator or chaotic corrupt party in power.
Former Pakistan skipper Aamir Sohail immediately regretted Afridi’s remarks. He said they were “untimely” and “immaturish”. This last coinage, an amalgam of “immature” and “amateurish” should be immediately incorporated in the Oxford Dictionary of New Usage.