Missing Melbourne

Source: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/04/cricket_passion.html

It has been a good number of years since I last rode the Bombay-Bangalore Udyan Express. The journey used to be an annual ritual, most often taken in the second week of June to mark the start of another school year. Almost taking up a full twenty-four hour cycle, the Udyan makes for an ideal rail journey, long enough to savor the experience without being so long that it crosses from the pleasant to the prosaic.

The train would usually arrive at Yelahanka, little over an hour away from Bangalore City, a little ahead of schedule. Udyan rookies were easily identified: they were the city-bound that would start preparing for disembarkation as the train ground to a halt at Yelahanka. The more experienced amongst us would settle down for the extended delay that invariably occurred at Yelahanka; some mighty evil gremlins must inhabit the short strip between Yelahanka and Bangalore City. Hot chai in hand, we would greet the onrushing heat and dust of a June morning.

There used to be a laziness about Yelahanka station in the early morning, a laziness punctuated only by the obligatory cricket games that took place on the maidaan just behind the station. Those cricket games became a part of the Yelahanka routine; chai, delays and cricket. I could never make out the score, or indeed, follow how the game was placed. The players were destined to be nameless, one year’s gangly pacer blending with the next year’s pudgy batsman.

Still, those games stay with me. There was something hugely comforting about seeing the cricket in full swing every time we pulled into Yelahanka, breaking the monotony of the subsequent delay. I daresay that I paid only peripheral attention to the game in play, but scurried singles and rip-roaring fights (the latter a vital component of any self-respecting game of gully cricket) became a part of the Yelahanka landscape.

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Back in boarding school, a place where students did not watch or own a television, we relied on an excess of goodwill to watch cricket matches. There was the government mandate that required all cricket matches featuring India to be broadcast on Doordarshan; in a place starved of cable tv, Doordarshan, and its endless Kumble-at-the-Kotla filler segments, was the best that we could do. Then there were the teachers that owned tv sets (few) who were kind enough to open their doors at all hours of the day to us cricket kooks (fewer still). With over thirty students sometimes crammed into a space designed for half that number, we watched many an Indian victory…and defeat.

Sometimes though, we had to make do with the radio. I still take joy in pointing out to old-timers that I too have had to follow cricket matches on a transistor set, ears pinned to the speaker in a vague effort to cut through the static. My memories of the 2003 World Cup are liberally interspersed with the BSNL jingle that greeted every boundary. And who could forget the air of incredulity with which the commentators announced every Ashish Nehra wicket at Kingsmeade? As India’s campaign got back on track after a disappointing start, some of the powers that be came to believe that the World Cup could prove too much of a distraction for those of us preparing for our tenth standard exams. Overtly banned from sneaking our way into an obliging teacher’s residence, my buddy Vikrant and I caught most of Pakistan’s innings in the Centurion game on the radio. Perched atop the dorm’s table tennis table, we listened as Saeed Anwar worked his way to a century before Wasim Akram and Rashid Latif added a late flourish to lift the team to a competitive total. We were not getting any work done and when somebody mentioned the prospect of Akhtar versus Tendulkar, we knew that we were not likely to get any done either. Hotfooting it halfway across campus, we made it in time to catch the start of the Indian innings and what would go on to be a famous 98 and an equally famous Indian win.

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Boxing Day at the MCG is not a particularly old tradition, but it is one that has attained a privileged status in short time. Waking up at 4 am in Bombay seemed the natural thing to do for an India-Australia series kicking off in Melbourne. I caught the first session, long enough to be reassured that Zaheer Khan was fit. Despite my best efforts to delay our departure on a family holiday until the tea session, the family demurred. We were on the road and relegated to the now-unfamiliar role of listening in on the radio. The ghats brought a whole lot of static with them and before long, loss of radio reception entirely. Text message updates from obliging friends were all that I had to go on, coming in short pings whenever something of substance happened. Sadly, a test match cannot be reduced to short pings; it is the moments between the pings that make for the substance of a test match. Try conveying the pressure exerted by Zaheer Khan as he toys with the batsman over the course of an entire spell: outswinger, outswinger, inswinger, outswinger, Oh My! That One Held Its Line, bouncer. Some complexities are beyond the text message world.

Arrival at our hotel by the sea saw some minor panic in the ranks when my cousin and I found the television to be wholly dysfunctional. Repeated nagging of the staff saw the problem rectified. The first and second days at the MCG were thus experienced alternately on television, by radio and text message during power cuts, and then by television again. Breakfast was wolfed down in a bid to catch the post-tea session, while the actual day did not get started before stumps in the afternoon. Most significantly, I was off the web, disconnected from the alternate world that many of us inhabit on a constant basis. Initially, I would wonder what other folks on Twitter thought of James Pattinson’s breathless examination of the the Indian batsmen, or of Tendulkar’s jaw-dropping knock in the first innings. Gradually, the urge subsided. I was transported back to an earlier cricket-watching time, no better or worse, just different. I was taken back to school.

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There is a lai (rhythm) that sports commentary is expected to follow. The more mundane occurrences are expected to be narrated in steady, noncommittal pulses, while more momentous news should be conveyed with the appropriate air of drama. There is a balance that is needed, indeed expected. Curse the commentator that brings down the house over a dime-a-dozen play-and-miss, or maintains a tone of equanimity when a bouncer sends a hapless batsman hopping.

On Day 3, I found myself relying on the observance of these commentary conventions more desperately than ever. When static forms the bulk of a radio broadcast, one is forced to rely on the occasional background swell to distinguish important events from less reportable ones.  So it came to be that as my cousin and I lazed on the back seat in the sun, we picked out Zaheer Khan and Umesh Yadav bringing India back into the match during Australia’s second innings. We had paused by a small school when Brad Haddin’s wicket fell. Even with the sun at its peak, a game of cricket was on in the school yard.

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Do the IPL and the Big Bash represent the pinnacle of professionalism and commercialization of the sport? To this question, I am afraid I do not have an answer. They are no doubt at a remove from bucolic days on the village green, when amateurism and the Hambledon Club represented the soul of cricket. I, we, will need to see.

Here is what I, we, have seen: there are two crickets, two cricketing cultures that live alongside each other. Look for the soul of cricket in commercial cricket and you might be disappointed; you will also most certainly be misguided. For the living, breathing soul of the sport is out on every street in the subcontinent, out in every yard, gully, maidaan. Out in every space. It fills gaps, it provides backgrounds, it takes center stage, it buzzes, it drifts, it entices, it irritates, it distracts. It is there.

People go to great lengths to live this sport. Why? Because people go to great lengths to do a lot of things. To put three square meals on the table. To get somewhere. To just get by and when possible, do a little more than that. Living in a non-cricketing country, I sometimes forget how fundamental that impulse can be. It envelops you, without letting on that it is even there, that it is even a “thing”. The soul of cricket is dead. Long live the soul of cricket.