The Cup that Counts- The Euphoria that Follows

The Cup that Counts

Every once in a while, for a brief window of time, junk messages from anonymous dudes who claim to be friends stop, concurrent releases of over the top Indian movies stop, "Wassup?" "Nothin' much" vetti conversations between vetti friends stop, time killing arguments with parents stop and in most of the cases, the underlying reason would be: an ongoing cricket season... The cricket mania keeps one/ more parties involved in the above mentioned activities busy and hence an uncanny dormancy soon follows... A dormancy characterized by a lengthy rendezvous with the idiot 'TV' box, updating unnecessary live cricket status feeds in Facebook, adopting cricket as 'Religion' and Sachin as 'God' and various other mild- moderate- extreme portrayal of fanaticism....

As an early teen in 2003, I was characterized by most of these properties... Even as the 10th board exams were knocking my doors, I refused to tame down and exponentially continued to be a fanatical follower of sports (not only cricket)...Though I am no more in the league of people, who religiously follow cricket, I still ponder over this English sport's insane fan following.... I tried hard to reason up an explanation as to how one particular sport played by 11 odd men can stir up a nation of 1.21 billion people (census 2011).... Lets run over a few theories:

The Indian Blogger owes the game's popularity to the numerous advertisement breaks between overs and wickets which has opened up a huge window for commercial exploitation... It says that the huge 'profit' element associated with cricket is the reason why the sport receives a mammoth-scale branding...It says that if commercial breaks are allowed only between innings, then the sport will close out on being branded so heavily and thereby may not be as popular a sport as it is as of now....

One more theory could be the widespread media explosion... Starting from the microscopic dissection of the cricket played to intensive performance charting of cricketing variables, the media blows every ball bowled out of proportion... Live coverages, highlights, pre-match predictions, post match analysis, interviews, replays and what not... Social networking has only aggravated this popularity boom... With the likes of omnipresent 'Facebook' serving as the perfect slingshot into cricket fanaticism...  Any media, you name it, cricket's in it...

Cricket can also attribute its success to the inherent human herd mentality... Wiki defines herd mentality as something like: "how large numbers of people act in the same ways at the same times"... With so much cricket all around, it is possible for a person not keen on following cricket, to stay uninfluenced only up to a certain threshold... Beyond that the bubble bursts probably owing to 3-D peer pressure and/or fear of being left behind...  Cricket, cricket updates at least, then becomes more of a need, rather than a choice...

The Euphoria that Follows

All/some/none of these above theories could explain modern day cricket... Or probably, we should trace back to the sport's British roots to a colonial India... Knowing to what, cricket attributes its success might be  debatable but what is cricket going to do with this success shouldn't be... International cricket seems obsessed with the idea of making Americans believe that cricket does not necessarily mean a bug related to the grasshopper family.... Whatever... But Indian cricket should be used as a means of generating awareness and diverting attention to social issues that need addressing... Especially after seeing how one World Cup could cord in and web the greatest democracy in the world and send its people into a state of frenzied patriotic swells, I am more convinced that this cricketing energy if rightly channeled, can blur the many divides and propel us into the better....