Suman K Sharma
I am no fan of cricket. Not at all. I would rather switch on the Animal Planet than watch a cricket match. But India losing to Pakistan in the on-going World Cup series has perked up my ears. (Our team lost to Zimbabwe as well, but that’s besides the point). In UP as many as seven persons have been arraigned for raising pro-Pak slogans after the event. Pakistan has gone one step ahead. Its Interior Minister, Sheikh Rasheed, gushing as he was at the feat of his team, pronounced it ‘a victory of Islam’! Now don’t go asking him how he would define Afghanistan’s credible defeat (the Afghani players are Muslim to a man!) at India’s hands, or the excitable Mr. Rasheed might charge you of blasphemy and what not.
The game loses its fun part when India and Pakistan are playing. Who cares if the players of one team displayed the skills of ebullience, camaraderie, cooperation, agility, astuteness and cunning superior to that shown by the other? That is no cause to celebrate the winners. What matters is that they shamed the opposing team. They proved their superiority over it. It was not a match between two teams of players, but a battle fought by sworn adversaries.
It wasn’t just a game. It was out and out a fight.
Oh, yes, I have heard of a thing called sportsmanship. It is an English term that stands for fairness, determination and grace whether you win or you lose. But haven’t we, the denizens of the sub-continent, bravely thrown out the Angrez? What have we to do now with their fanciful ideas? Let our antipathy, our hatred, our rage for each other take full possession of our senses when we are on a pitch. A face off is a face off. If not in a battle ground, then on a cricket ground. Better a cricket ground that be. Instead of bullets and bombs felling the enemy, let wickets fall to balls. A fall would be a fall; and a win, a win.
Think of the immense difference it would make if this concept were followed universally. No bloodshed, no war casualties, no spoilage of environment and no draining of resources. Armies would still be required though. Armies of players, I mean. A nation would then be as mighty as deft and nimble its bowlers, batsmen and wicketkeepers are. The UN, instead of despatching armed peacekeeping contingents to the war-torn countries, would detail match-hardened umpires to the troubled areas for settling the more complex of issues.
During the last two decades, some 17.50 lakh people have lost their lives in major and minor conflicts, namely, the Tigray War (Ethiopian-Sudanese clashes), War in Darfur (Sudan), Boko Haram Insurgency (Nigeria), the Iraq War, the Rojava Islamist conflict (Syria) and of course, the war in Afghanistan. A major part of the casualties – 12.60 lakhs – are attributed to the global war on terror. It is not deaths and injuries alone. Those in conflict are nations economically the poorest in the world. Violence has impoverished them further. Hunger and all sorts of privation are the fate of the survivors there.
Could such violence-spawned misery be averted by full-blooded cricket or the like brush of sport? The combative urge of the antagonists satisfied; agreeable solutions might be churned out of exertions of the players. Sceptics today might laugh the idea off as so much of moonshine. But they would be discounting man’s capacity for innovation. Eventually, humanity is going to realise that violence must be substituted by more physical – and yet positive – ways to give vent to collective wrath.
Belatedly though, I am realising the importance of cricket.
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