It is a mournful time in Bharat.
Our trusted partner in the Quad has stabbed us in the bat and in the ball.
That too in a stadium named after the world’s most invincible leader, Narendra Modi.
Had this happened in an arena named after, let us say, a Jawaharlal Nehru, or such-like, the hurt may not have been so piquant
That was a time when India was a loser anyway.
So great is the crestfallen grieving that many go hungry to bed, although, thankfully, there are no killer aircraft on their way to relieve the hunger with death, as they do in Gaza.
Yet, the woe, that our own flamboyant flypast, done in the sure antecedent knowledge that victory would be ours, were a waste of aviation turbo fuel, merely making noise.
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There are the old-fashioned fools who still think cricket should be “just a game,” like hockey or football, or kabaddi, or archery which invite no flypast, only some joy in the hinterland.
These are Indians whom our great leap forward from 2014 has left behind, like remnants of some mere family gathering.
They do not mind losing this or that once in a while, even advocating that an occasional fall makes the soul more upright.
We, of course, know there are only two kinds of people in the world – the winners and the losers.
And after interminable years of philosophising, thank Lord Ram that we are now among the winners, applauding kindred unrelenting winners like Israel in the teeth of apologetic legal and ethical hogwash.
To win must mean to win at any cost, be it in the matter of cricket or politics, one and the same thing actually.
But here is the worrying poser: how could we lose so abjectly in a colosseum that bears the name of the ever victorious yodha, Modi?
And when you know that even our beloved armed contingents like the CRPF etc. had fervently and publicly prayed (duly displayed on national television) for a national triumph in the World Cup, it is unendurable that our so-propitiated gods should have turned a deaf ear even to our all-conquering forces.
Soon enough, there will be vengeful mavericks, enemies of the sanatan, who will demand that the name of the stadium in Ahmedabad be changed, just as many other inauspicious names of our tepid past continue to be supplanted by our contemporary history’s winners, be they names of streets, or buildings, or monuments, or days in the calendar, or, indeed, the name of the republic itself which has lately come to be desecrated by the political opposition who call themselves INDIA.
Coming to the contest of the day itself, was there a conspiracy to lay a pitch low and mean so as, ostensibly, to neuter the Aussie firing machine of hurlers?
Was it thought that just as the low and the mean have been so successful in the republic’s political life, it would be so in cricket as well?
Or was a treacherous ploy engineered by Modi-baiters in exchange for favours to this or that saboteur, posing as a groundsman?
And, should not all other high-level investigations now underway be suspended so that the real culprits in this oh-so-humiliating snub be first looked into and the culprits duly hung, drawn and quartered, so that no World Cup is ever lost again?
Also read: The Indian Cricket Team Was Burdened By the Weight of a Nation Which Always Wants to Be a Winner
The least ragamuffin citizen is convinced that the holy grail belongs to that which is sanatan.
Imagine what would happen if the US were to lose a baseball series to Japan, as friendly a country to them as Australia to us; would not the president there order a no-holds-barred enquiry by the justice department into the perfidy?
That is, if Donald Trump were the president.
There will also be those so-called patriotic diplomats, in reality leftists moles in the foreign office, who might now advocate Bharat’s exit from the Quad as a first diplomatic protest action against the Australians.
As if our everywhere-prime minister does not have enough on his 24×7 plate in terms of righting interminable wrongs left over by decrepit Congress regimes of old, counselling short-sighted world figures to take a deep breath at their woes and enhancing the global good by being all things to all sides, be they Israelis or trouble-making Palestinians.
What of the players who lost in the end after winning everything before?
Clearly, spiritual help is indicated, such as can come only if they first get used to wearing saffron uniforms at all practice sessions.
If that talisman works in politics, how can it not work in cricket?
Thus armed, no team from an erstwhile penal colony may ever have the gumption to best our hegemony of thousands of years over world history, even if there was no cricket in Vedic times.
Further, the matter of renaming the stadium in Ahmedabad may also be entrusted to a high table of astrologers for corrective remedies, so that come a next final match in that hallowed arena, the stars may mandate our victory before the first ball is bowled.
Note that when the Aussies lose an Ashes series, they lose merely some old pot of ashes.
When we lose a cricket series, all our claims of vikas, i.e. development, come into question.
And that too just in the middle of elections.
Had we won the World Cup, who would have dithered from voting the ruling party into power here, there, and elsewhere.
After all, such a victory would have been no less than a surgical strike, or a G20 presidency.
Badri Raina taught at Delhi University.
