The Cricketing Nation
Don’t worry yet, I am not writing about IPL.
Hockey may be India’s national game, but be it a school ground, public play ground or just a small nondescript lane in a corner of the town, it is cricket that dominates. We are a nation that breaths the game and have made it a part of our identity. Young brats put up make-shift wickets in small lanes and play away the summer holidays. Playgrounds that should ideally serve two teams playing against each other usually buckle under the pressure of population, letting in a dozen cricket pitches emerge, occupied by more than hundred people.
Visuals of cricket was never away from me wherever I travelled in the country. When I struck conversations with strangers and told them where I hail from, my city was identified by cricketers who made it home.
I was sitting uncomfortably in a cramped mini-bus that was taking difficult mountain roads of Garhwal, when the man next to me started a friendly talk. When he asked the usual ice-breaker question – “where are you from?” I told him I am from Bangalore.
“Rahul Dravid,” he responded immediately. He seemed a little excited for a moment, and paused for a few seconds. I gently nodded.
“He is from Bangalore, right?” he said, and continued, “so lot of people play cricket in Bangalore? You have many good players from your city.”
Those were the days when Karnataka contributed considerably to the national cricket team, with names like Javagal Sreenath, Rahul Dravid, Anil Kumble and a few more. Needless to say, lot of people indeed played cricket in Bangalore.
“Do you also play?” I asked him to keep the conversation moving, “is cricket very popular here too?”
“Yes of course, everyone enjoys cricket,” he said in a tone that sounded slightly sober, “But we can’t play here. You need level ground to play but there is hardly any place large enough to play. But they do play in the lower regions like Dehradun and Haridwar.”
Garhwal is a mountain region where ‘level ground’ is almost like an oxymoron. The mountainous terrain is always sloping, and any level ground if exists is used for agriculture.
But walking the slopes of Auli next day, I was to find out that what Garhwalis lacked in favourable terrain, they made with their love for the game. At 10,000 feet high in the mountain, a bunch of young men had managed find a gentle slope amidst patches of snow, and had started their game early in the day. It was such a place that if the batsmen hit the ball a little hard or sent it to the wrong place, the ball would take a plunge in the valley and roll down a few hundred meters. But that did not seem to deter them and they were happy just to have something as close as it can get to level ground.
If that is the story in mountains, it is obvious that you will bump into people playing cricket everywhere when you are in the plains. The “Rahul Dravid” identity was visible in many other places, especially in the North. I heard the same exclamation in a few small towns of Rajasthan too, where the cricketing icon was larger than the city itself. Other things that Bangalore is known for – like the technology hub, software enterprises or the traffic jams did not seem to stay in the top of their minds.
And then I got pulled into the game at times during my journeys. Travelling with an enthusiastic bunch of volunteers in a tsunami relief mission in TamilNadu, we had jumped when we saw a bunch of kids playing in the fields and joined then for an hour’s play. Only a few months back I had found myself with a bunch of kids in Aihole village who wanted me to join them in a game. I was walking on the road admiring the archaeological splendors of the village when a kid came running into me with a bat and shouted – “come, join us.” I obliged readily and was delighted when they offered me to bat first. For next 30 minutes, I was a kid among the kids.
When I was walking the lanes of Rishikesh, I bumped into a photographer from London who was searching for his ‘India Shots’ on the streets. We talked for a while and discussed of images we shot in the last few days. As he scrolled through his photos on the camera LCD, he paused at a picture of children playing cricket, looked at me and said, “this is what India means to me – it’s people, the temples, it’s culture, street cricket.. that’s where I see the real India.” I nodded, fully in agreement. That indeed, real India is.