Gods that failed

Men, Matters & Memories
M L Kotru
What follows is surely is not going to win me many friends. That I will be hated, once you are done with what I am about say, of that I have no doubt. Thank God, I will be quite some distance away, sitting in the quietude of my place, away from all the taunts or whatever else is on offer; mind you, the thought of your anger will  not deter me from having my say,  unmindful as  I have promised myself to be, of your taunts, even abuse, perhaps.
For whatever reason, I have never believed the myth that cricket is anybody’s religion. Yes, the vested interests in the sub-continent have worked very hard indeed to sell the myth since the dawn of independence. And given their perseverance and financial interest in the game, I wonder sometimes if the Cricket Control Board or its affiliates in the States are any different from the mutts, the muttadhikaris or the deceitful godmen running lucrative ashrams, all of them cashing in on our gullibility, the laity, all of us somehow persuaded to believe in the godliness of the sport. Fearing that Lord Indira and his courtiers, worshipping at the altar of their celestial playgrounds might be disturbed by our indiscretions on our cricket fields.
I confess to have been drawn to the myth -that it is a religion – some six decades ago. I had a seen a group of college students, and some elderly babus, purveying their cricketing wares in later 40s at S.P.College in Srinagar but without being contaminated.
The myth gripped me only after I had been in Delhi for a couple of years which also saw me working as a sports reporter in the late Indian News Chronicle. That’s how my conversion and many years later my graha-wapsi to original sports like football did occur, though only as a spectator. No worshipping, please.
These and similar thoughts occurred to me and millions others  inhabiting the sub-continent and lands as far away as England, Australia, New Zealand and the West Indies island States. I am, of course, talking of the cricket world cup madness which seemed to have virtually consumed us, making us all couch potatoes  all these past few weeks.
The present episode of the great myth enacted in Australia and New Zealand will mercifully come to an end tomorrow, the Indian myth having been reduced to ashes on Thursday by the Australians.
And it was only proper that the great world cup myth should have ended with the literal decimation of the greater Indian myth of over the past few decades, a creation of the manipulative skills of the Indian Muttadhikari-in-Chief, the Board of Control for Cricket in India, with the very venerable Maha Acharya Sreenivasan at the helm, until the country’s Supreme Court asked him to take leave of his multi-layered cricket empire. At the personal level I am happy the Indian myth has ended or has been cut to size as it needed to be.
With it we may perhaps be spared for some time at least the cacophony of noises we are subjected to by the millionaire/billionaire purveyors of the revealed (cricket) word, the Shastris, Bhogles, Gavaskars et al. Whose priest -like presence has now become an unavoidable intrusion into our private home environs, thanks to the cricketing mumbo jumbo they sell to us with boring regularity .
Lest you start celebrating, the mother of all cricketing noises will be with us within a fortnight, with that other myth, the IPL, holding forth for a few weeks then on. Let’s pray to the cricket muttadhikaris  to, please, spare us for some time at least the mayhem that  is the IPL. Not to mention the way it has already sullied the cricket myth, long before the Australians shredded it on Thursday.
The Australian iconoclast incidentally had warned us of our mortality in the preceding few months by cutting our cricketing gods to size during the Indian tour down under, downsizing our inflated egos, reducing the Dhonis, Kohlis, Rainas and what have you to mere ciphers.
Our gods had duly been exposed as ordinary mortals, unsure of themselves when their divine gifts were challenged . Very little left to save them as they fell apart, blown away for the present as unrecognizable bit players.
Yes, in Sydney this Thursday their worshippers sat in the stands, some openly weeping, others wondering how on god’s earth could their gods have failed and fallen from their high pedestals.
I felt sorry for the Bollywood actress who moments earlier was seen clapping furiously as her cricketing beau, a newly anointed god, had negotiated a Johnson  bouncer. The next, she stood up, frozen like a statue, seeing her man popping up a dolly catch which went high into the sky, long enough to allow the Australian wicket-keeper to send him packing, off to his Indian home months after he had embarked on his missionary’s tour  of duty.
I am aware of the crazy – inexplicable – love affair between us Indians and the silly game called cricket. Am not biased against the neighbouring countries Pakistan and Bangladesh who perhaps love the game as ardently as we the billion plus Indians. Think of the thousands of heart-broken Pakistanis and Bangladeshis when, first, the Pakistan team lost in the qualifying rounds to the Indian team and the team from across our eastern border fell when the Pakistani umpire, among the vestry best in the tribe, Mr. Aleem Dar, allegedly contributed to their  loss to the Indians.
Both losses were suffered by the two teams in the world cup matches in Australia which, mercifully, for the people of the Indian sub-continent, will draw to a close with tomorrow’s finals. The Indians were having a tough time though, as I write, with Australian batsmen number 2 and 3, leading Dhoni’s men on a embarrassing leather hunt. The mood inside the Sydney stadium then seemed pretty somber, with the Indian immigrant population in the stadium, accounting for 70 per cent of the space available, having virtually lost its collective voice. Not a happy state to be in for them and the team they backed up. Game triers, they continued to be till the very last.

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