CONSPIRACY

On a Sunday afternoon when the sun was setting in, I was crying like a mad sitting on the bed in our room. Everyone was consoling me to stop me from going crazy. I put my face in the pillow trying hard to cope with the pain of India’s defeat to Pakistan in Sharjah (also for the embarrassment of crying for a silly cricket match). No, the agony of not-even-a-10-year-old didn’t reach the Shastris, the Gavaskars, the Kapils or the Azhars, but that moment perhaps represented thousands and lakhs of cricket lovers of our country of that time (I don’t exactly remember the day or the year; but it must be late 80s). That was the passion called cricket which I learned to understand when I was five or six.

Now I believe Cricket is nothing but conspiracy. I have been sticking to this belief for last two decades and whenever getting a scope, propagating it too. My friends hate me for looking down at the game (or an entertainment show?) called cricket. I can’t help it. Things, for me, changed probably during the period of match fixing scandal that rocked the cricketing world. Even now it appears to me that everything is pre arranged in this game. My interest in the sport has come to such a state now that I can’t tell the names of the 11 players of the Indian cricket team. I don’t repent. These recent talks about match fixing in the IPL 2 doesn’t bother me for the same reason.

Money, to be precise big money has spoilt the gentleman’s game in and out. Those days of white shirt and trouser, white gloves with red marks on the fingers, the red duce ball, and the wooden coloured wickets are all gone. The days of five slips and fast (not medium fast) bowlers are things of the past. I may sound orthodox and conservative talking like an old man, but I still romanticize cricket with those days in mind. I looked at it as a sport. Now I look at the game as entertainment as it has changed its colour over the years becoming popular but losing character.

Still, to tell the truth, I was getting back some sort of interest in cricket these days for a man called Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar. Keeping aside all the cynicism about the game, I love, like crores of cricket lovers, to watch Sachin play. I watch him with awe. The determination, dedication and discipline in a player are rare. He comes to the field with all of that and turns out to be an icon in everyone’s life everyday, irrespective of his cricketing virtues.

Today I was hurt to see none discussed about his dedication for the game instead we all discussed when Lalit Modi, one of the living symbols of degeneration of cricket, would be show caused by the self-proclaimed moral bosses of Indian cricket. The man with six stitches on his hand came out in the field, led the team (though they lost) not for money, but for the game itself out of a passion. But LM was more important than ST. Don’t blame media for this, rather blame the cricket administrators who have turned the game so murky!

Today once again I was relieved to be reassured of my own theory ‘cricket is nothing but conspiracy’.

Ps: You are free to interpret the word ‘conspiracy’.