Why becoming a cricketer is the dream of most Indian boys?  

Many historians, authors and writers have spent tireless hours journaling India’s obsession with cricket and dare I say, it’s impossible to capture it in words, but it truly is. Much as we might try to explain Brazil’s love for football or America’s carefully constructed obsession for its home-made games like baseball, basketball and football (which is not real football). However, it’s easy to disagree with the football argument as it simply is the most widely accepted sport globally, and Brazil alone doesn’t dominate the love quotient. However, when it comes to cricket, there’s no looking beyond India; the numbers say it all. Without India, it would be hard to imagine cricket as a global sporting force.

So why most young Indian boys grow up dreaming of being a cricketer is fundamentally an emotion hard to quantify, perhaps as complex as the rules of the game itself, because it’s a sentiment and an obsession that runs deep in the ethos of the Indian spirit. To understand this, it must be lived but let’s go back in time to absorb the evolution of this obsession and the significant factors that contribute to it. Bluntly put, the single most dominant factor  for India and Indians is “Idol Worship.”

I’ll draw more parallels for comprehension because India is obsessed with its celebrities and god-like figures and is steeped in traditions of ‘looking up’ and idolising all there is to absorb. Religion, Politics, Cinema and Sport, the four major contributors to India’s macro-psychological construct, have one common thread: ‘ heroism.’

As young children, we’re taught to worship our mythological figureheads, each a fascinating personality with individual superpowers that go beyond one’s wildest imagination. Let alone deriving the virtues of our gods, which is the primary intent, we drown in the fascination of their powers. To put it into perspective, Hinduism has 36 million gods, yes 36 million, but the heroes are just a handful that engulfs the national sentiment.

Idol worship within idol worship in some sense. In cinema, too, it has always been more about the star than the actual substance of the content. To date, it’s the star that sells the tickets, not the reviews or the content. Rarely will you find a box-office blockbuster without a seasoned top star! It’s so extreme that we even have a famous south-Indian actor and mere mortal, Rajnikanth, who has to his name innumerable temples dedicated solely to him. Politics is less about the party or its fundamentals and more about its leader.

It’s easy to highlight this with the Narendra Modi versus Rahul Gandhi debate, but that’s for another article. So in a country obsessed with idol worship, cricket is no different, and we got pretty lucky. What could have been just a mere colonial hangover had a significant shift in perception when heroes were born. A game that India was marginally good at played amongst just half a dozen nations, there isn’t much to celebrate, but the tide shifted in the 70s.

While we had some brilliant cricketers in the early part of the century, India never won matches until much later. At the risk of removing romanticism from the game or justifying the historical framework within which the game rose to popularity, cricket’s extreme complexities have not allowed it to grow beyond its British colonies.

We can speak endlessly on how marketing, technology, media, sports betting and the money side of the sport that has kept cricket in the centre of the Indian psyche for every young child. But let me end by highlighting the superheroes that clearly defined their generation and why we’ll always continue to love the game we do so long as we have our heroes to worship.

The first is Sunil Gavaskar, a hero of the 70s. It isn’t easy to quantify his contribution to the spirit of India’s love for cricket, but it is safe to say he was instrumental in sowing those seeds. He stood like a gladiator taking on some of our fiercest rivals when India wasn’t even considered as competition. Soon followed Kapil Dev in the 80s, a legend who led India to a famous World Cup win in 1983 against all odds, backed only by self-belief.

The 90s and early part of the 21st century saw the rise of perhaps the most famous of them all, Sachin Tendulkar. Words won’t do justice to his brilliance, but he managed to capture the entire nation’s imagination with his sheer consistency of peak performance for over two decades. MS Dhoni followed this, India’s most successful captain who built a new era of confident young Indians that won every major title there was to win. We will end this decade with Virat Kohli, a gigantic personality who has set the bar so high that the fans surgically scrutinise every minor blip.

The world is moving into an era with more people burgeoning the planet than ever, with more problems than solutions and gargantuan amounts of frivolous bite-sized entertainment thrown our way from every direction. Will we ever find the continued time or reason to spend on our obsession and passion known as cricket? How long will this fanaticism last?

Logic says it won’t. But then again, when was love ever logical?

Courtesy The Sublime India Issue by Vissionaire

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