Cricket, cities, eccentricities

This week's Saturday Story is about the character of cricket fans in each city during the World Cup.

At the Himachal Pradesh Cricket Association Stadium in Dharamsala, where India played New Zealand, I was an eyesore in my faded Nirvana t-shirt, faded shorts, faded boots, a faded laptop bag and an equally faded personality. 

“How the *%*& are you going through? You’re not a woman…. oh, you work for them?” a man said, as I jostled 200 people in a bloody-minded effort to access the press box.

The man was wrong on a couple of counts. Sure, I was no woman. And I didn’t work for ‘them’, aka the International Cricket Council, either. And profanity triggers me.  

‘I, good sir, happen to work as a sports journalist with the Deccan Herald, and I have this thing around my neck which gives me ungodly powers at cricket stadiums. So, #$%^ you!’

That’s what I wanted to say. Instead, I said, ‘Sorry sir’, and resumed my boar-like progress towards the turnstile. In fact, that’s only one of the hundreds of ‘sorrys’ I would dole out that afternoon, but that one meant the most to me, for I was able to look beyond his paint-smeared face, and let him know that he was heard, acknowledged, and ignored. 

After a dystopian start in Ahmedabad, I had travelled to the about-to-choke Delhi, the impossibly hospitable Hyderabad, the inexplicably well-planned Lucknow, and then Dharamsala, Chandigarh, Bengaluru, Mumbai…

Looking back

Now, I sit at a hipster cafe in Mumbai, thinking about the number
of miles I have covered the last few weeks. 

I have travelled close to 20,000 km by air alone since leaving my home, in Bengaluru on October 4 for what is my first World Cup as a sports journalist.

The thing is, I would have done worse than the man at Dharamsala had I been in his place. Blinded by rage, I would have failed to see the purple tag and the ID card on the neck of someone headed for the media room. I would have thrown a tantrum because I, at this point, would have been in a queue for hours, lined up like cattle, and being treated by the police as if there was nothing more dangerous than a crowd eager to watch a cricket match. 

The line just snakes its way towards one of the many
turnstiles where you and your ticket are almost all you get to take beyond those gates. Sounds a bit like a political organisation of questionable repute back in the 1940s, but the difference is that you get to walk away from this one. Well, kind of. 

Amidst all these moving parts, a match happened. Someone won. Someone lost. Some are happy. Some are not. 

I am typically at a press conference by then, and I don’t have to deal with the worst of the exasperating egress. Now you see why sports journalists are so easy to loathe!

The point of this essay isn’t that. It is: ‘Does it make any sense at all for a fan to go to a stadium for the experience any more?’

City character 

Frankly, if I weren’t a cricket journalist, I wouldn’t go to a stadium. I do love the game and the values it instils in those playing and watching, but the very thought of being treated like cattle at a slaughterhouse is enough to put me off. 

But then, these visits inadvertently end up revealing the character essence of the city. You see India through a lens so unique that you’d never settle for a substandard version peddled by your travel agent. I have seen India and its people in myriad ways, through a million narratives, but never
like this.

Having just returned from a slow-paced work trip to Sri Lanka, I was prepared to survive the long hours of One-Day cricket. Trust me, it takes plenty of coffee and other stimulants to achieve that level of acclimatisation, but I eventually got there. So, I, half-wittedly, assumed that the World Cup would be similar. It wasn’t. 

Snacky Ahmedabad

Having ingested more processed cheese in one sandwich than I do in a year back home, I waddled onto the bus designated to pick us up for the stadium, bloated and weary. I considered taking a cab a little later, but that would mean a security check so severe that I’d have missed most of the game explaining why I was allowed to carry a laptop into the stadium. No thanks. 

While the magnitude of the Narendra Modi Stadium slapped the spatial awareness out of me, the realisation that that venue wasn’t abuzz with the festivities we associate with the tournament became clear as we got closer and closer. 

There it was: a mere 25,000-odd people at the end of it. That’s a handsome number at most venues but at a stadium built for 1.2 lakh people, it is embarrassing. 

Still, walking through these stands, you could smell the deep-fried everything in the hands of fans. Their love for snacks trumped their love for cricket, and so it shows on the silhouettes of people, but Gujarat isn’t obsessed with the sport. It has other things going for it! 

Hello Delhi!

I frantically rushed to the Feroz Shah Kotla in Delhi for my second game. It looked far better than it has in ages, and the crowd was younger and more diverse, but it was one that spent more time looking at the game through the phone than it did with its own eyes. It was an unsettling realisation of the times we live in and what is to come. Still, they turned up, and that is a testimony of some sort, I suppose.  

Hot pursuit

Then came Hyderabad, and the city made plenty apparent that one could fall in love with a place despite its horrid weather. Dragging myself through the pre-heated oven that is Hyderabad to watch Pakistan play Sri Lanka, I was pleasantly surprised, chuffed even, by all the green jerseys in attendance.  

The visa rules ensured no Pakistani fan, not even a journalist, would yet land on Indian shores for the game. While engaging with the one fan from Pakistan, Mohammad Bashir, who happens to hold a US passport, it became abundantly clear what the agenda was — to keep Pakistani fans out of the country. But the ‘Chicago Chacha’ didn’t mind it one bit. He was engulfed by plenty of attention and love from those around him, even if they were not allowed to get too close to him. ‘Strict orders’ apparently.

Charming Lucknow

By the time I wrapped my head around the sport-has-to-co-exist-with-politics reality and woke up in Hyderabad thinking I was in Lucknow, I was actually in Lucknow and staring at the facade of what is possibly one of the most beautiful stadiums in the county. It, like the rest of the city, possesses a charm that bleeds into the people too. 

Hilly Dharamsala

On the topic of charm, nothing comes remotely close to Dharamsala. I could use up the next few days of expressing the magic that is the venue, but let me reduce it to this: if you had to use a synonym for ‘beautiful’ and had only stadiums to express it, this would be it. 

The majesty of the venue comes not just from its proximity to the Dhauladhar range, but also from the people of this region. Their love for the sport is incidental, and it is mostly only because they want to watch the stars in action, but that is not a bad thing now, is it?

What is, though, is that it took me nearly four hours to get to my hotel after the game. Clearly, the city does not have the roadways to host a game of such significance. Then again, once you rest your lactic-acid-pumped legs — all because you chose to avoid the traffic and walk 8 km uphill — and look up, you see those mountains and feel relieved, if not grateful.

Chandigarh is always refreshing, with Le Corbusier’s hands still evident in the architecture, and a rather progressive demographic waltzing the streets.  

A few hours later, after tucking an abysmal sandwich offered on the flight into my bag, I was home for what was to become my first World Cup game at the M Chinnaswamy stadium.

Home run

That’s the thing with cities such as Bengaluru (or as I prefer to say ‘Bangalore’) and Mumbai (or as I still prefer to say ‘Bombay’). The crowds always throng the cricketing venues irrespective of who plays, what the tournament is, and what the stakes are. 

In fact, my sports editor gets more phone calls for tickets on
the days leading up to the match than he does from his colleagues
in months. He does his best, but there’s only so much anyone
can do. 

This stadium-going culture is mostly prevalent in these cities, not to forget Chennai and Kolkata (‘Madras’ and ‘Calcutta’ for me). These venues are right in the heart of the aforementioned metros.

It is probably a coincidence that the four cities with the grandest of receptions and knowledge of cricket are the ones whose names
I anglicise unapologetically. It could be my status as an Anglophile or my desire for nostalgia. 

Either way, I am here in Mumbai for now, internalising the fragrance of this wondrous city through the metal skeleton that is the Wankhede stadium.

It’s possibly the most well-rounded crowd I have had the privilege of interacting with, and it’s little to do with their
knowledge of the game. It’s the way in which they approach this stadium, as if a sanctum sanctorum, and the sport, as if a religion.

You come away from stadiums having read these on placards often but no stadium envelops you with a feeling so visceral, one that tells you what this sport truly means to people of this grand nation.

On top of that, they gave us ‘God’ aka Sachin Tendulkar. So there is that added pressure on the people to turn this tedious process into a pilgrimage.

So, as the teams lined up for what was going to be India’s semifinal clash against New Zealand, it occurred to me that their deity was in attendance, as was his statue in the far right corner of the venue.

As I basked in the stories of my childhood through Tendulkar’s story, another man attempted to make his claim for the throne. Virat Kohli had surpassed Tendulkar in centuries scored in ODIs, a moment sealed with a bow to the original king.

Oh, Bombay. She is the truth, the Mecca, the theatre of dreams, the city of forever.

From here, I move to Ahmedabad to round off the tour as I once again enter the belly of the beast, but this time for the crowning glory of a new world champion. 

But mostly, I look forward to all those genial faces that I meet as I once again visit the sandwich shop for my yearly supply of cheese. Most patrons will stop me mid-bite and ask this one question or variations of it. 

‘Are you from South Africa? Oh, West Indies?’ 

I will smile in the face of this delicate racism and respond with a ‘Sorry sir, I’m from here’, and then fly back to Bengaluru in a few days to hear the same on Church Street.

A truly wonderful country, this. And cricket does a better job than politics in bringing it all together.