After all the tears,It’s Chak De India
Published by manish September 23rd, 2007 in Random.
(Pictures courtesy: Indiatimes)
In the month of March, when I posted this the entire nation was shell shocked. A nation of avid cricket lovers, just could not believe that their team had been knocked out of the World Cup (the 50 over version).
Cut to six months later and the entire country has long forgotten that day. For today we are back in the finals of the Twenty20 World Cup. The interest in Cricket is back among the masses. People are beginning to realize how much they always wanted to watch the fast food version of the game, how much or how little they knew about it (India had played only 1 Twenty20 game before this world cup). Come tomorrow, this Team will be battling it out for the finals of the inaugural edition of this cup. It’s going to be a mother of all battles, since they play the finals against Pakistan. A World Cup final between India and Pakistan is a mouthwatering prospect and I really can’t think of any fast food items which can come even close to the taste of this.
Pakistan have been outstanding in this tournament. They have not lost a single match (the match against India was tied) in this tournament yet and it remains to be seen if they can keep an unbeaten record.
So anyway’s, from my last post till today, a period of six months has flown by, and if there was a resurgence required for me to resume my blogging, this was it. People complained that they were tired of seeing the sulky faces on my blog, which reminded them again and again of the bad days. Since then things have changed. India is firing again and what remains to be seen is what transpires in the mother of all battles between the two arch-rivals, tomorrow.
Whatever be the result, India is back to its winning ways, and so am I to my blogging ways.
4 Responses to “After all the tears,It's Chak De India”
- 1 Trackback on Mar 6th, 2008 at 3:50 am
Synkarma, seems to have become a cricket blog, with the last 3 posts talking only about cricket.
Let’s a hear a little more about the other stuff and the challenges in the enterpernuerial world.
Misbah thought he is sending the ball to no man’s land. He forgot there is a Malbari in every corner of the world.
Sport is important to the psyche of any nation locked in the rules of the industrial age. It becomes less so in the 21st Century where video gamers can invent their own sports fantasies without recourse to a real game. Sport has such a hold on people that people can get involved in following sports by simply watching a scoreboard. I was at Wimbledon in 1985 sitting outside the arena where Boris Becker was in the process of winning the title and how were we following this game, we were sitting on a mound watching the electronic scoreboard on the stadium wall.
Cricket as it happens is mostly played in commonwealth countries and what are commonwealth countries but those nations which were formerly enslaved by the British Empire - as if the gift of this colonial exploitation was a fond association to reminisce the glory of the days of global plunder. Yet when I check the history of cricket there is evidence that the bat and ball games originated ancient civilizations, and so the industrial age enslavement and the facts of Empire rule do not matter. After all, what is sport if it wasn’t fueled by some rivalry and some deeper history.
Look at soccer, is Celtic vs Rangers a football game or a battle of soft power that echoes the relationship between catholics and protestants, or England vs Scotland - have noticed how excited Scots get when their identity is reconfirmed against a nation that lives in the dreams of being a “footballing power” which cannot even beat Croatia today. It is time England began enjoying playing soccer with commonwealth nations, at least they have a chance against India, Pakistan and maybe Australia.
Sport in IMHO is an extremely important thing to think about because it fits into the context of the 21st Century - and just as empires and industrial ages defined the relevance of sport to the human condition, so it is that we must see how it relates to the 21st Century mind.
Not that the 21st Century mind is alive and in full flow. Sport becomes an intelligence when it informs us of the absurdity of nationality, when we actually learn at an individual level how to harness its excellence (because we are watching excellence when we are watching professional sport) and how it relates to the powerful way it transforms a society and how one can personally enhance through it as an energy rather than as a time passing distraction.
If due attention is paid to sports at a much deeper level of significance, within it lies keys to define what freedom is and what freedom isn’t and it is the only language that allows emotion to resonate without it becoming the reason to create local, national or global conflict - for sport is an intelligent mechanism to define our animalistic competitive desires, but it is also a construction where people come together to raise the bar on standards of performance and somewhere in that exists something that we can learn from, not just simply enjoy.
OK India won something in 1983, and England won something in 1966 and the US hope to win something in any year to improve merchandising and media payback opportunities. When it comes thinking about sports, has anyone ever thought about people in Malawi. Simply read the opening lines of the Wikipedia entry about sport in Malawi
“Athletics in Malawi has been shaped by its history as a colony in the old British Empire; the most popular sports come from Britain.”
How far have we really come as 21st Century thinkers my friends, how far have we really come?
M.