How can cricket be so popular in India ?

Written for Hostel-1 Magazine Anubhooti'2010.

Prologue:

Let's accept. Cricket is the most popular game in India, at least for the sake of this article. But is it possible to imagine that in a still developing country like ours, that a posh looking, celebrity filled, infrastructure hungry and equipment wielding sport as the most popular one? It is well known that the cricketers are making forays into arenas like advertisements which were the stage for actors and models and this pushes up their financial rating. And all these give an illusion that cricket is in the league elite games (like golf, pool) far beyond the reach of common public of this country. Or is it so? As a person grown with cricket all around different forms, I beg to differ, even in my whimsical times, like when I was writing this article.

Some attribute this popularity to watching cricket on TV. Agreed, that thanks to many wonderful schemes (like the free TV scheme by the TN government), the idiot box has reached places where even water, food and clothing can't reach. But could it spurn popularity of a sport? I don't think so. It is rather due to the versatility that cricket offers that people play cricket and make it popular. Wait, did I say versatility ? Isn't that cricket requires a huge oval ground to play or that it requires exquisite equipments which on a man resemble a warrior going to the battle field ? No. If you leave those who have grown up playing cricket only in big lush green grounds with well laid pitches and practised inside 3 sided mosquito nets, others would recall at least 10 different forms of cricket that they have played in their life.

Exquisite Equipments and big ground? Rethink:

The ground:

It is well known that, in India, the so called "tennis balls" are used the most not for playing tennis but for playing cricket. So much so that there are "tennis balls" manufactured exclusively for playing cricket. Indians respect Tradition, so we have left the name of the ball with tennis. Along with a bat, we can take to any place and start the game. In narrow lanes between houses, in the balcony and inside the house (not inspired by Dhoni), inside class rooms (to impress class mates), on the road (especially with the next door beauty watching), between two wings in a hostel (Yay!), tennis court, hockey ground, and so on (yeah, include cricket ground). During one of my visits to a hilly village near Kumily in Kerala, I found that cricket was played on a barely flat surface, where the slope was more original and truthful than the mythical slope in Lord's pitch. The bowlers had to literally run down the hill climbing down and up several meters during an over. Not just hills, even the beaches are not left out, for it gives a great opportunity for people to show off their diving skills.

The bat:

What if we don't have a cricket bat, which might be expensive to many people ? No worries!! All that is needed is some structure with enough width and height and can make balls run in all directions. It can be made of wood or steel or iron or cobalt or nickel or gold, doesn't matter. Then there were those writing pads which became bats in the class during the recess time. There were the racquets of tennis, badminton, so as to play cricket with their appropriate balls (e.g. Baddy cricket). And if not anything we have our palms which could act as bats for most type of balls. I remember the childhood days when we hunt for bats and end up looting the firewood stock, nor can I forget the bat we made for our own, carved out of a wooden scrap lying on the road side. Long before the mongoose bat that Hayden used 'for the first time', I have used mongoose, raccoon, rat, mouse, beaver and similar bat species. Yeah, may be my sixes were never farther than 25 meters, but Hayden can not claim to be the first.


The ball:

Are there balls beyond tennis/rubber and cricket balls (beyond those 'pink' balls that MCC is planning)? Practically infinite, I say. How can we forget those weightless, gravity defying plastic balls, that can be hit so well that it makes you feel like Yusuf Pathan. Then there were those cork balls, which resemble sober and calm, but can hurt as much as a cricket ball. And even the ball need not be an actual spherical rubber stuff but something that is small enough to be hit for a distance by the so called bat. Very many different candidates come to my mind. I still have vivid memories of playing in the streets of Madurai with the Coconut tree trunk as the bat and Hing ka dubba as the ball with the electric post donning the role of stumps. In fact, for a long time my highest score in a cricketing innings was hit when the ball was a rubber toy stolen from our neighbour's kid. Then there are always 'quick to make' paper balls (rolled paper), which most often are made out of the Exam question or answer papers and form the vital part of the cricket played inside the class room during the recess time. The list here would go on.

How about stumps? Any set of wooden sticks held up with stones, an electric pole (even if the street dog has marked its boundary there), wall paintings (of stumps), cooldrink tray, a chair, an array of bricks and many other such innovative reusuable structures can form stumps. So the next time you say that cricket requires exquisite equipments and infrastructure, think again.

Cricket is a Calvin ball game:

One of the main reasons for cricket being popular is because it falls under the category of Calvin Ball**. As with Calvin ball games, it doesn't get constrained by rules. Wait, aren't there bodies like MCC, ICC regulating how cricket is being played ? Heck, who cares? Not even BCCI cares, then how can you expect the Indian public to worry about them. We can change the rules at will to suit the climatical, geographical, political, horizontal, vertical and many other arbitrary conditions. Think of this great feasibility. Depending upon a variety of factors, like the number of people available, the type of equipment available, the kind of place, the amount of time, you have a version of cricket. And the rules of the game generally depends on who argues best and who has the power.

What is a game of cricket if it doesn't have fights about rules. Most people find it joyful to spend more time arguing about rules rather than actaully playing itself.You start the game with bare minimum rules and the rules for sixes, fours, wides, noballs, wickets, catches are argued upon as the game goes by. Hence there are multiple strategic breaks like in IPL, just that these breaks don't have boring commercials rather than interesting fights.

This freedom from rules gives cricket the ultimate joy to people master games with specific rules. For instance, the worst player in the regular cricket played in Hostel-1, would be the best player in the box cricket played in the same place. As Calvin would say, "Down with the rules".


** Calvin ball is a fictitious game invented and played by Bill Watterson comics' characters Calvin (6 year old kid) and Hobbes (Calvin's pet tiger). Calvin hates to play the typical sports filled with rules that constraints your joy and creativity. They want to play games where rules can be changed dynamically so as to suit people, especially Calvin himself so that he could win.


Who can Play cricket ?:

Cricket offers a good balance between the ultra fast paced sports and the ultra slow paced ones. It's slower than those "you blink, you miss sports" like the legball, and it is far faster than those "games played outdoors". As with most sports, cricket also is beyond the segregations of region, religion, caste, community, species, genus, family, etc. But unlike other sports cricket fits everyone in the league i.e. there is a place for everyone in some form of cricket or the other.

Let me give an example: Can you imagine to play a sport when your leg is injured? You may say golf, but I consider golf as one of those "games played outdoors" rather than a sport. Here you spend most of the time moving around huge lawns on some kind of lawn mowers rather than 'playing'. So all sports will ditch you, but cricket won't. You become a keeper and make a rule to rule out runs behind the wicket. While you bat we will have a bye-runner.

It doesn't matter if you can't catch, you change rules to have one-pitch catches. If you can't at all run, then remove runs from the rules and make the number of balls a batsman bats without getting out as the score. It's so flexible, you see. Given the different versions of roles that people can play in the team, sometimes you wonder how they can ever be part of a team. For instance, how can we imagine people like Venkatesh Prasad doing the roles for India when they can't even bat against a 6 year old bowling or field a slow moving tennis ball. But they did, because of bowling excellence.

Other forms of cricket

Is that all, you ask? No, I say. If everyone goes off and you are all alone, you still needn't loose hope. Open up your computer and start playing for Dhanier, Tenhelker, Sehway. EA Sports cricket apparently doesn't have the rights to use Indian players' names and hence has some above mentioned completely unrelated names. Though Sachin Tendulkar might have hit the second two hundred in an ODI innings (after Belinda Clark), there have been innumerable number of quadruple centuries that my friends have hit against hopeless teams in EA Sports cricket. And not to forget those other wonderful versions of games like Anil Kumble cricket, Alan Border cricket etc., apart from those coming in different mobile phones.

And even if the Electricity board plots against you and cuts the power, even if you don't have any equipment to play cricket, you still can be with cricket. For this gets us to one of the simplest, purest and easiest form of cricket: "Book Cricket". All you need is a decent enough book and may be a pen and paper for scoring i.e. if you bother to add score. It is suspected that the term ''bookie'' for those who are involved in gambling in cricket comes from book cricket. For you can easily mark those pages with '0' and '6' and open those pages as you wish to suit the need of the player. For instance, after watching India loose the 1992 World Cup match against Australia by just 1 run, I resorted to book cricket and made India thrash Australia by more than 400 runs, with even Venkatapathy Raju scoring a 50.


Epilogue:

The next time you see an enthusiastic chap walking along the corridor practising a shot without a bat or bowling without a ball, you will realize the impact of this sport. Unlike other games you don't even need to play cricket to be with the cricket. It is that simple and that flexible.

As I wind up my arguments on cricket's popularity, it is necessary to note that a lot of comparisons have been made largely to make fun and nothing really serious (except may be about golf). I have been part of the various club and institute cricket teams over the last 14 years and have had an urge to write this for years based on what all have I seen. And also have enjoyed being part of and playing Football, Basketball, Hockey at various levels and do appreciate and understand those sports well. So it is best to take the article lightly and not send hate mails to me. Thank you.

Amish .... an inspiration

Amish .... a great inspiration for me and anyone who chases a simple life ...

Whenever I get into an argument battle of why we should lead a life copied from the 'illusionary' freedom culture of the West, I look at the Amish and feel all hope can't be lost. Even today they live 150 years back, literally, in terms of everything around them. This in the so called 'most happening' country in the world.

They can not be an inspiration for the world to live like them, but are an inspiration to not to accept any alien culture blindly. They show us that even if the whole world moves in one direction, if we understand and believe in our identity, we can still lead a simple and happy life.

Back in 2005, I read this article in The Hindu from where my interest in Amish started ... and it was a pleasant surprise when I came across an Amish family during my roaming in rural Canada ...

Hindu Article Link
(http://www.hindu.com/mag/2005/11/27/stories/2005112700490800.htm)

A Police Constable, a doctor, a lorry driver .... contd

It's a cricket match where they get-together, not for watching, but to play.

The last time I played for my club team Students Jr CC (now renamed as Writer Ramaswamy memorial CC) in December (in Salem, TN: http://salemdca.com/), I looked at each of the team members from a non-cricketing perspective. We had just won the second division trophy last year and had got promoted to first division and were playing the first match. We are all amateurs with a great interests in 'playing' the sport and some of them having immense talent.

When we are in the ground we rarely talk about non-cricketing things. So when I found that our opener was complaining something to our team's one down batsman, about some non-cricketing problems, I started realizing that we were in fact in a completely different world away from the identifications that we have in the outside world.

opener (a lorry driver): See, these policemen keep bugging us around. What do you suggest on keeping them friendly?
1 down bat(a Police constable, with a smile): If you treat him (with cash!), Police is your friend

The ball-game in amateur cricketers is quite interesting. The hands which were till the day before (or sometimes minutes before) were wresting a lathi, a computer keyboard or a lorry gear, suddenly starts doing magic with the bat and ball. The game here is not the leisurely tennis ball cricket with rules framed by ourselves, but the cricket which produces the multi-millionares of the countries (read: Indian cricket team members) who play among these amateurs to raise their levels.

There's quite a different world of cricket in the states and districts quite far away from the IPLs and ODIs that the general public in India these days are interested in. I will try to throw a glimpse or two on this alien world in this blog sometime later.

Our team:

A Police Constable, a doctor, a lorry driver ....

A police constable, a doctor, a lorry driver, a software engineer, a mosaic worker, an
electrician, an engineering student, a customs official and some more
were gathered. What place do you think would they have gathered at the
same time sharing the same place and having a word or two across ?

The near-death experience ....

Note: Copy pasted from my travel diary of the March 2006 trek along the Kabbinale/Addahole river in the Shirdi ghats of Karanataka.

But for some my own basic instincts and courage and tremendous help from Sunny, I would probably haven't been here to write this. When we hit the first pool-like place on the Kabbinale river, I was the first to jump inside water. Even the swim-know guys were hesistant to get their bodies to contact the ice-cold water, but swimming had never been a necessity for me to get into flowing waters. Being along the wild-stream, the pool had tricky rocks which were both slippery and had deep hidden pits. In my 'try to swim' assignment, I hit upon one slippery rock, whose slope took me to the deepest part of the pool, and I ended up gasping for breath, with the height of water above my head. I tried in vain for a few seconds to climb up the same rock back to safety, and finally decided to call for help. My mates first thought I was just making some funny tries and were just staring at me with a smile on their face. I kept attempting to climb the rock in vain and hit upon a simple idea. I kept one leg on the slopy n slippery rock and another down on rock under more than 6 feet of water. The slippery rock had the coutesy to allow me to keep my leg on it so as to balance myself, but not to climb it. This gave me time to regroup my mental and physical composure and calmly I told my onlooking friends that I might be drowning. They were surprised a bit, but soon Sunny and Rohan removed their shirts to get into water. It was a tricky few seconds, with me standing on my toes of right leg and balancing on algae covered rock on left leg, when my friends learnt that I don't know swimming and how I was standing. Every second streched something on my thigh, but I kept my position. Just then I was thinking to give another try on climbing a different rock nearby, sunny got into water and got me out of trouble.

.... When we hit upon another beautiful pool, I was again the first to get into water when Rohan remarked with a smile, "The people who don't know swimming are those who jump into water first", and the saga continued ...

PS: After this, within a couple of months, I learnt swimming good enough to save myself :-)

What do you do ?

The Intercity Express was speeding towards Bangalore when my neighbour asked, "So, what do you do? ". I was happy to remark, after four years of ambiguous answers, that I was a student doing my M.Tech. It was another matter that I struggled to explain when I was asked what specialization I'm working on.

For the last few years my travels have seen me giving an array of different explanations for this question, "What do you do?". It ranges from absurd to brilliant and have brought a range of expressions of smile, anger, confusion and what not. Many different reasons can be stated for this, ranging from the ability of the person who asked the questions to my own knowledge of what I do. But invariably, it has only caused me to rethink how I identify myself.

The old day perception about the term 'engineer' and 'engineering' to the common man was civil engineers running around in the construction of bridges and dams. There have been a couple of instances, while traveling in villages during my college days, I have had to rush to rescue myself being labeled a 'builder'.

Today things are changing and any working engineer is labeled to be staring at the idiot box all the time writing software codes. But in Villages things may not still be so, though they may not necessarily term you a builder. For they might have heard some of their relatives studying strange engineering courses like instrumentation or telecommunication in the ever growing pool of engineering colleges. Once we had been trekking in the western ghats of Kodagu district of Karnataka with a number of IT friends. We were passing a village when a villager joined us for a chat. The initial introduction contained the familiar question, "What do you all do?" (Of course in Kannada!). One of the friends tried to give the answer in a clumsy way with terms of computer thrown here around when the villager remarked, "So you guys are in IT?", he continued, "I know a friend's son working as software engineer in Bangalore ...."

If the case with the general public can confound, then learned people can perplex you. I have had hard time to convince that I spent four years in an IT company without writing a single line of software code. I don't know if they think that I lie, but hey, I'm not lying, please believe me! (Well, I'm bullish here not to consider assembly code as a software code)

Forget about others, our own team mates can sometime confuse you. Often, a hardware design team member like me would be approached with some astonishing requests, by the software guys who write code which run on this very hardware. "Hey, I have a hardware problem for you to solve", would he (or she!) come with the 10"x12" PCB, "This board won't work". "What happened?", I would ask for which would come a perplexed reply, "I thought you can find that out" as if I was a magician. And then, there are cases we could be mistaken for repair center workers, "My team member says there was some smoke and this board doesn't work after that, can you make it work ?"...

After all this, you can still be disappointed. Returning from a tedious affair at work, my manager took me for dinner at his house. We were welcomed by his wife (who is a doctor) with a strict instruction, "You people go and wash your hands properly. I know the lead in the soldering station is very dangerous". We could only give a wry smile and remark, "We do a lot of things apart from soldering".

Even after so many years, I haven't figured out how to answer this question "What do you do?". I doubt if I will ever.

PS: Inspired by Robert Lucky's 2002 article under the same title in IEEE Spectrum Reflections Column.
PPS: This article is deliberately incomplete, especially in its inquisitiveness to explain specific situations.