I greet you all with conflicting thoughts post victory of Australia against South Africa and the impending jingoistic jamboorie scheduled by the fervent,hopeful but intensive planners and faithful for Ahmedabad.
It was the deep-seated and subconscious strain of anti-colonial feelings that came to the fore at Eden when large sections provided emotional support to South Africa in continuation of its love for Nelson Mandela’s release,his decades of incarceration and the freedom of South Africa from the narrow and venal confines of Botha’s apartheid in the early nineties.We have never examined our natural but shared feelings of fraternity with all those post-colonial countries that struggled and won their freedom against their colonisers.If it was West Indies or Srilanka or even Pakistan in cricket whenever they played against a White nation.It was Brazil or Argentina if it was football against an European nation.So was it with hockey.Wokes might call it inverted racism, but it was always there,our enlightened subconscious,if you cared to look deeper and inwards.
I remember reading Ashok Mitra celebrating this historic anger each time Viv Richards belted English leather to the ropes or over.Eden Gardens refused to convert its hallowed stadia into a crass cacophony of cheap Bollywood numbers and odious gather of eager-beaver Deejays, screaming like insane inmates over megaphones trying to stir and incite the crowds to mindless frenzy every break or interruption available after overs,wicket fall,drinks or little injuries sustained on the field.
Rehman’s Vande Mataram is the new battle cry to synchronised claps, bizarre drums, techno-music turned to earth shaking decibels, further tweaked to surreal night skies by the twinkling glow worms brought alive on handy mobile phone cameras.A sea of blue Tees sweep the camera scans to consecrate what is left of consumed minds.Eden, quite mercifully was still somber and enthusiastic in sharp contrast.Small wonder Kolkata, still gives one the feel of an intellectual capital while Mumbai with the din and clamour of the buying and selling in Dalal Street,the Centre City Mall or the Visarjan mellees of Ganapati Bappa Maurya – all of it packaged and wrapped in a Wankhede – the undisputed commercial capital.The camera pans hungrily for attention-starved Bollywood stars,the nubile and pretty,the wealthy and powerful Ambani’s,the faceless,screaming upwardly moving millennials. At Kolkata’s Eden the cameras go sluggish and neo-real on long takes, catching the multitude of faces and emotions of the common Renoir-like, caught in the celebration of the joys and heartbreak, in the conquest and competition, inevitable in sport.
Two days from now ,an unspoken madness awaits, the grand finale at the formerly known Sardar Patel stadium, now renamed as Narendra Modi; as we conjure wild spectacles of what will it be,going from here. Earlier it was a hurried rechristening,the rather rushed up golf-cart drive around,waving to surprised crowds,shifting the Indian and Aussie cricketers to their respective playing nets,asking(ordering) them to an unplanned introduction of the Australian and Indian Prime Ministers,holding up the game,trying to steal the show and front-face himself before the assembled fans in the stadium and the many millions watching on TV in India and abroad.
This time round,it shall be the culmination of a dream come true.India in the finals,at home and in His stadium where he shall sit or strut,smile or grimace,shake or fold hands with dollops of the banal to imagined audiences with condescension or disdain.His Praetorian Guard will be in attention while the humongous hundred thousand attending distracted,confused or in inebriated supplication.The many, many millions on the media this time, just not OTT platforms but those for gratis, shall also seamlessly join in periodically,in between breaks, for the inevitable ubiquity- face of Baba Narendra splashed like an obscene blotch of angry paint defacing the cause celebre – the finals of a cricket match ,India vs Australia.
The patented, magnified Modi shall dominate,bigger than any event at hand.While young wannabe journos sift through ominous images of a Hitler at the Berlin Olympics or a Spartacus Maximus and gladiators at the Roman Colosseum and the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, revelling in glee and greed -when fact and fiction blur ; a real-time spectacle of spectacles shall unravel, for the cup that will cheer.
As Modi continues to bend the laws and norms of Election Commission, every article,its clauses and sub-clauses in the Constitution, as he stamps his signature on everything that moves or doesn’t and the Assembly Elections cry for a free mandate – I dread to recall the fate of Chandraayan 1 in his August presence.
The gladiators of the game are about to be short changed.
Another story of another kind. https://www.theindiaforum.in/society/cricket-world-cup-india-india-and-about-india
wingedream 
This is thought provoking.
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