World Cup Or No World Cup, Let Sanity Prevail

So here we go again. It takes just one defeat in a mere game of cricket to cover-drive the logic out of our soul and make us do silly things like pick up roadside bricks and aim at innocent windowpanes.

Last time, we vandalised Mohd Kaif’s residence and this time this World Cup had MS Dhoni’s under-construction house almost under similar attack. At least we are proving more consistent than a certain Virender Sehwag. (Dravid bats for Bank of Baroda but no bank dares to rope in Veeru. Reason? He’s a Non-Performing Asset, they insist).

At times I worry, why we heap so much of anger on the players which they don’t deserve? The answer, as I see it, is because we love them to an extent they don’t deserve.

Karl Marx (Or was it Groucho?) described -- he meant no evil -- religion as the opium of the masses and cricket in India has emerged as a powerful religion. Now when cricket assumed religion’s status, it could not avoid the fanatic part and no wonder we behave like fundamentalists and not personal, practitioner of the new religion.

We wanted Dhoni to bail us out from the ignominy of a defeat against Bangladesh, which he could not and that got our goat, cow, buffalo and the entire heard. Spare a thought for Dhoni, what could have been the state of his mind when he got the news? Do we want ourselves to believe that he can still focus solely on his game and give his best to achieve that theoretical Super 8 dream?

Wish we could love them little less, keeping it instead for say, the younger brother, little sister, a dear friend, the roadside tea-stall owner, an aged co-passenger, a lady pedestrian or even the neighbour’s dog.

Our love in this case is clearly blind and nobody knows it better than the shrewd ad-men, who con us into buying craps with our hard-earned, blood-stained money. Spare the Dhonis, watch the matches till they don’t affect your bread-and-butter, clap even the boundary comes off Lara’s bat

Let’s pledge to be practitioner of the religion and not remain a lunatic fanatic. Cricket is indeed a wonderful game, so let sanity prevail.