So one of the biggest events of my stay here in India is about to begin, when the Indian national cricket team starts the 2011 Cricket World cup in Dhaka, Bangladesh playing and hopefully defeating the Bangladeshis (India is kinda heavily favored to win) on saturday. To say cricket is important to Indians is like saying that most Egyptians are mildly excited to see Mubarak leave office.
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| He's actually yawning |
Indians go absolutely crazy for cricket and this world cup has dominated the news for the last week. The Indian national team is under huge pressure to win the cup after the rather disappointing loss in the 2003 world cup finals to Australia. One of my new Indian friends who happened to be at the finals in 2003, described it as a house of cards collapsing (Australia really embarrassed them in the finals). Cricket is probably the only thing that the British gave India that is not treated with some disdain. One of the best examples I can show pre-world cup is the magazine that I accidentally bought the other day.
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| And Outlook is the Indian version of Time magazine |
The tagline for this magazine is Genius. Giant. Gentleman. A 51st Century Legend. The entire magazine, some 104 pages is dedicated to this one cricket player, Sachin Tendulkar. The guy is like the Michael Jordan of cricket, but hes had a career that spans roughly 2 decades, his first match was in 89 when he was 16. The guy is also a class act off the field, and has avoided the massive amounts of corruption that has plagued other top indian cricket players. Anyways cricket is rather confusing to the untrained eye (aka Americans) but due to the cricket world cup mini-game on my cellphone I have successful learned how to play and the rules.
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| Videogames are educational |
The terminology is also falling into place as well (things like overs, centuries, and wickets). I even managed to understand how well India played in their last friendly before the World Cup (they beat NZ) and understood that we couldn't leave the apartment to play soccer until we saw Dhoni (Indian cricket player) hit a century(score over 100 runs). If you are interested I suggest not reading the wikipedia entry on cricket as its kind confusing, but rather try this website http://www.howtoplaycricket.org/ or watch a video (you'll still be confused). Anyways when India triumphs in the World cup at the finals on April 2nd, I fully expected a massive celebration in the streets similar to Madrid after the Spanish team won the World Cup this summer.
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| Please let India win |
So will wrap up this ramble about cricket and leave you all with this picture. A undetermined prize if you can tell me what music video this is from.
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| My current feelings for cricket |
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