Once upon a Cricket!!

              I think it was George Bernard Shaw who once alleged, ‘Cricket is game played by 11 fools and watched by 11000 fools’. Well, that 11,000 has grown to hundreds of millions. Simply put if its soccer which makes one half of the world go crazy, then the other half is full of cricket fanatics.

               I have matured enough to acknowledge it now, it’s sad but as a kid growing up in 90’s India, mediocrity was synonymous with Indian cricket team. Team as a whole was feeble, but individuals were sound. Tendulkar, Dravid, Ganguly and brilliance of many others, on a given day, would often be undone by a serious lack of support from rest of team India. India’s home record was decent but away record was a pity. In case of Test matches we would pray for the game to be drawn. Nonetheless Cricket gave us all something to look forward to.

              In the land of multiple religions & cultures and hundreds of languages & dialects, if there’s anything that rises above the differences, it’s Cricket. It’s a bit funny but the best foreign policy tool to gauge India-Pakistan relationship is cricket - if they play together, all is well; if they don’t, there’s obviously a crisis!

               For most of us, one of the fondest memories of growing up in India is being part of the India – Pakistan cricket frenzy. It had always been such a huge event. Who can possibly forget being together with the entire family and neighbors, frightening the sh!# out of the street dogs and cows, with the loudest screams at the fall of every Pakistani wicket.

            Times have changed and so has cricket. The advent of IPL has placed India on the world’s professional sports map. Tremendous amount of wealth has been unlocked because of the IPL. Cricket has finally become a game that is played, just for entertainment!! 

Is “Patriotic Non-Resident Indian” an Oxymoron?

                 Over the weekend I was catching up with an old acquaintance of mine who is based out of India. We were talking about how things have changed with time in India and how much potential India has. During our casual conversation he briefly raised a sensitive topic of patriotism of people who have left their motherland. Our conversation ended but his ‘almost’ questioning the patriotism of immigrants made me think, is “Patriotic non-resident Indian” an oxymoron? Just like “Dancer Sunny Deol” or an “honest Indian politician”?

                We go crazy cheering for India in Cricket, in-fact we become more Indian than the 1.25 billion resident Indians when we beat Pakistan. We become angry on hearing multi-billion dollars scams, and feel proud with ISRO’s successful launches. We feel sad when India performs poorly in sports on world stage (ex-Cricket) and hate how sometimes India is portrayed as a snake charmer country. We absolutely disgust communal violence.

                We celebrate all the festivals with the same zest and passion as resident Indians. We organize Garba’s in football stadiums and basketball courts and play our hearts out during the weekends. We as a community take special permission from local authorities to celebrate Diwali with fire crackers. We have successfully exported the festival of colors - Holi to be part of the American culture (color runs). We build ‘Little India’ in foreign land to resurrect the feeling of our Galli’s. And yes, we do feel proud when an Indian is in a C suite, in our company J

                We felt proud when Nina Davuluri won Miss America and became furious of the backlash that followed. We boast of the record that Indians have created in the US Spelling Bee - winning since last nine years. We might be naïve but we love to think that we are an expert on Indian Politics. Most of the weekend parties end with potential solutions for India’s corruption problems.

                Lack of opportunity might be one of the reasons why some of us left the homeland, but it never meant that we are less patriotic towards India. Today we might be speaking with an accent, celebrate other festivals, sing different anthem but our love towards India has not changed. So call us NRIs, PIOs, or the most recent label, OCI - Overseas Citizens of India, we have one thing in common with resident Indians, we still shed a tear or two when we listen to “Sare Jahan Se Aacha…”