I Wasn't There!

I missed it! And no amount of consolation would make me feel any better (not that any of my friends were trying to do that either). Just as I entered my room after a round of Sunday evening shopping, the frenzied state in which my roommates were in coupled with the score line at the bottom of the TV screen told me the entire story. I had missed the greatest cricket match ever played. And for a cricket lover like me, this was a tragedy of the highest degree.

But as I tried to put the tragedy behind me and the truth actually dawned upon me, the cricket lover inside me came out of hiding again, this time in a more jubilant mood. Because this one cricket match seemed to signify so many things all at the same time. South Africa had won an absolute humdinger, one which you had to pinch yourself a hundred times over to believe. One which the Gods must have pinched themselves a thousand times over to believe. One day when you couldn’t help feeling that for once that ambrosia had found itself the wrong breakfast table, one that belonged to the Proteas. One day when a group of eleven ‘mortals’ (and I get the feeling I can be prosecuted for using that word) rose above themselves and reiterated in the strongest possible manner that ‘impossible’ is nothing more than just an entry in the English dictionary. And through all this, cricket had emerged the biggest winner. For those of you who still think that it’s just another mundane pastime on lazy weekends, I would say you would have to be pretty audacious to repeat that.

And in this euphoric state, another more beautiful truth dawned upon me. A truth which went much farther than just cricket itself. A team which had been the subject of some of the most horrendous racial abuse down under had retorted back in the most magnificent style possible and humbled the same opposition. I just couldn’t help holding myself in awe as I realized the amazing irony of it all. A black South African had played the nudge which had leveled the scores. The player who had been among the most vocal in protesting against the racial abuse that they had faced back in Australia had hit the winning runs of the very next ball. And all this had come true because of some exemplary teamwork from a team which, of late, has come to resemble South Africa itself because of the diversity it possesses. A team which itself was banned from playing the game for more than 20 years because of Apartheid policies in the country. A team which has weathered the roughest of storms and has finally risen like a Phoenix stronger than ever.

And through this process of rediscovering truths, a thought loomed at the back of my head. I just couldn’t help find an almost eerie, uncanny resemblance of this sequence of events to a movie I had watched the previous night. It was named ‘Crash’ and it portrayed the conditions of racial discrimination which prevail in Los Angeles even today. As I was walking out of the movie hall with my friends, I asked them about their opinions regarding the movie. One of them felt it didn’t mean a lot for people like us on the other side of the world and that it were the people in the U.S. of A who should really be worried. Which made me introspect in astonishment: can we really afford to be so callous as to brush away such hard truths under the carpet? Truths which hit us in the face almost every day and which we very conveniently choose to ignore with amazing regularity. The movie delineated the lives of colored denizens of L.A. who hail from all kinds of backgrounds. They included blacks, Hispanics and Asians, all of whom face discrimination which can reach shocking levels at times. Nevertheless, they are left weaker in their fight as they spend a lot of time fighting amongst themselves. Somewhere here I felt that we couldn’t just think of this as a localized problem. Doesn’t this spookily remind us of the manner in which we nations fight out amongst ourselves and within ourselves in the quest of some truth which probably evades the best of minds? How we long to achieve victories which more suit our fragile egos and which impede the very process of our evolution. And then I ask myself the question that has been lingering since then: whom do we blame? Do we keep looking for champions such as Martin Luther King Jr. to change the world or is it somewhere within us that the real champion lays. Because decades after the great revolutionary tried his best to change things, they don’t really look and feel different, do they? What does it take to really unite and come up with efforts similar to what the South African team produced?

And as I still wonder whether to look ahead to the future with hope or despair, something within me tells me that I was lucky that I wasn’t there in L.A. in situations the movie portrayed. But the cricket lover returns and makes me repeat: I wasn’t there at Wanderer’s on Sunday night!


Published for a cricket crazy special person ,with permissions from my dude Abhik who is the original author