Road number 5A in Riverside Township was where we had moved to when Papa had got promoted in the Indian Iron and Steel Company in 1997. The apartments, six of them in each building were separated by neat lanes of tarmac; there used to be a garage in front of each of them too which could vehicles, mostly two-wheelers for occupants from each of these flats. The space behind our garage was a tiny green field, around 10 meters wide and about the same in length providing ample space for us to play a sport of our choice all-day, every day.
As a bunch of kids who were buoyed by the enthusiasm to just get out of home, we often would be quite a nuisance for the occupants of the apartment which was adjacent to this space. A lot of shouting ensued, and of course when the weather permitted, we played cricket, which meant a few broken windowpanes. Kumaresh Jethu and jethi who lived there were the sweetest people around though – never annoyed with our antics, they would in fact patiently hand over the ball if it went inside their place and offer water when it would get too humid.
Perhaps it stemmed from the fact that Kumaresh jethu had been a cricketer himself – as Papa described his former teammate, he was a slow left arm spinner who could keep bowling from one end maintaining the same line and length and nagging opposition batters through a day’s play. The much-revered virtue of patience came easily to him, and he exhibited that with us too – it was him who also exposed many of us to cable television and thus live sport to a lot of us for the first time.
I remember rushing to watching cricket games, as well as the 2000 Olympics at his place – a coloured television which must have been around 21 inches diagonally was neatly kept on a low-rise wooden table facing a sofa set which would inevitably fail to fit the gathering. So, on low rise bamboo stools and on the floor below, we rejoiced Sachin blitz his way to twin-centuries in Sharjah, Zidane break hearts of our gathering by scoring two goals off corners in a World Cup final and Maurice Greene set the world on fire with a blistering run at the Sydney Olympics. It wasn’t just viewing – elders would often add tid-bits and narrate stories about the events, contextualizing why these events were made out to be as big as they were. The next day, we would collect the newspapers, cut the articles and put them up on our respective scrapbooks and diaries, using it as a memory exercise but also ensuring we had a point of reference when a similar event would occur in the future and that we too, could then contribute to the discussion. I distinctly recall informing the room as Michael Johnson lined up for the 400 meters race in the Olympics in 2000 that he had won the title in 1996 too, in world record time and was lauded for knowing that. It filled me up with a sense of achievement and thus I found this whole exercise of consuming sports with a group very rewarding.
As we grew up, and both cable television and the internet became more accessible, we moved away from this habit. Now I would screen sports on my iPad if I am on the move and sometimes on my phone – if I am surrounded by people, I would plug in earphones and celebrate and grimace in private, than show my emotions to people around but every once in a while, when the moment demands, I try and watch sports with friends who I share a common interest with.
November 19, 2023 was one such day.
I was in Jakarta for a work assignment and like the rest of our country, was eagerly looking forward to the cricket world cup final. India had played immaculately well till then – such was our aura of invincibility, that the thought of not winning that final and being crowned world champions didn’t even occur to most. After 12 long years since that famous win in 2011, in another city in the western part of India, we seemed destined to have our moment of glory, and I wanted to make it an experience worth remembering for myself.
Till the semi-finals, my friend Aakriti and I would gather in my room in the hotel and stream it off some website, often using a VPN to try and connect to an Indian broadcaster but the stream would often lag or get disrupted. Surely, that couldn’t have happened on the day of the final. We bought a 7 dollar subscription for the day from the local broadcaster and put together a big screen in our office – we were going to sit where we would be when the first six would be hit by India, and not move from our positions if we got a wicket while we were positioned somewhere – knowing that it doesn’t matter the slightest bit what we were doing some 4000 kilometers away from the Motera but why jinx anything – like over a billion people we wished the team won and if our superstition aids it, so be it. It’s human tendency to give oneself more importance than we deserve and sport exhibits that amazingly – I had worn red when Abhinav Bindra won gold at the Beijing Olympics, so I did the same when Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupati played the final of a grand slam – it was my way of showing that I care. It didn’t mean anything to anyone else but that seldom mattered – on November 19 too thus, I kept a red handkerchief in my pocket and settled down to watch the game - it wasn’t just Rohit Sharma and his team, it was also my team, and I was going to try and contribute to their win in my way!
In my head, I had also thought about other bits that I thought pointed towards an Indian win – the last 3 world cups had been won by the hosts, an Indian captain had lost the toss the last time we won the tournament too, but most importantly in my head, I kept thinking that the game is on 19.11 and 1911 is a very auspicious set of digits in Indian sporting history.
It was in 1911 that an Indian team, Mohun Bagan had first won the prestigious IFA Shield defeating the East Yorkshire Regiment – it signified more than just a win of barefooted players. The cultural impact of the win and the subsequent heralding of the sport was gargantuan, and I expected this 19.11 to be nothing short of that. For ten games till that ill-feted day, our team had seemed invincible. Such was our dominance that a semifinal win by 70 runs felt like a close game!
The Indian innings soon begun and things seemed to go well – we didn’t get off to a flyer but we were doing decently – afterall, putting up a score on the board in a game like this would be daunting for the opponents as they try and chase it down – as the game went on though, it got a little underwhelming – we changed the places we were sitting on, I altered between projecting it off the big screen and on my laptop, desperately hoping that one of these things would contribute to a swashbuckling innings from one of our batters.
We finished with 240, Aakriti and I decided that we needed to move back to our hotel to ensure we did things exactly like we had just days before when India had qualified for the final. She ordered copious amounts of food from the same restaurant that we had ordered from on the day of the semifinal – we invited our friend Billy who had also come down for the previous game – I changed in to the same T shirt that resorted to texting the same set of friends who I had been talking to, during the previous games.
None of it worked ofcourse as Travis Head and Marnus Labuschagne took the game and the World Cup away from us. As the game ended, people hadn’t just trickled out of the stadium in Ahmedabad – my friends had left what was a made-up screening area which we set up meticulously with a borrowed HDMI cable, an extra laptop, an iPad and the hotel television.
As I sat on the desk, now alone in the room which oversaw another stadium, desperately trying to get over the disappointment, I couldn’t help but draw a parallel to watching events in Kumaresh jethu’s drawing room all those years ago to this day sitting in Jakarta, watching sports with people I loved.
Sports tends to be a great leveler and contrary to Kipling’s wishful prose, most of us don’t manage to treat those imposters of triumph and disaster the same, but sometimes, it helps if you fail at it with a group of people you like.
India has qualified for another cricket world cup final today, and I realise 19.11.2023 is one of those days that I won’t forget for a while – not because of the result of the match but because how I ended up watching it – the sense of oneness in jubilation and disappointment is unique to sports and to do it with friends and family is perhaps what makes it worth obsessing over.