The Indian cricket scene, and "A village cricket match"

The more I kept looking at the wonderful photos at this collection, the more I had a tough time selecting my favorite of all.

At the end, I went with the following one:

It is sheer joy expressed all around--even the older women who might not have even held a cricket bat in their lives, and might not know a gully from a square leg.  And the Communist juxtaposition is essentially how India is--rarely a consistent story, and eternally filled with contradictory narratives.  Or, as Pankaj Mishra described it,

 India not only lives, as the cliché goes, in several centuries at once; it is also a land of multiple narratives, which continuously and often painfully overlap.

As one might hypothesize from the huge hammer-and-sickle murals in the photo, this is in Kolkata.  The caption at the source is:

Indian cricket fans celebrate a boundary as they sit outside and watch the second semi-final of the ICC Cricket world Cup between India and Pakistan in Kolkata on March 30, 2011. 

While the television set itself is obscured in this photo, I can imagine that it sits delicately on a very shaky furniture, supported by everything from newspapers to bricks.

Another photo depicts a comparable scene across the border, in Pakistan:

The source notes:

Members of Pakistani gypsy families watch the Pakistan-India cricket match in their makeshift tent in the slums of Hyderabad, near Karachi, Pakistan on Wednesday, March 30, 2011

The challenge for all these countries, where cricket is practically a religion, is to ensure (and to follow-up on the Communist visuals) that this religion does not become the new opium of the masses. I am afraid though that it is indeed becoming the case, unfortunately.

All these are a long way from "A Village Cricket Match" that we read, perhaps in the ninth grade.

That was one hilarious piece of writing.  The village characters were fantastically crazy and comical.  The description of the game is a must-read. 

This village cricket match itself ends in a tie, and the piece ends thus:

The match was a tie. And hardly anyone on the field knew it except Mr. Hodge, the youth in the blue jumper, and Mr. Pollock himself. For the two batsmen and the runner, undaunted to the last, had picked themselves up and were bent on completing the single that was to give Fordenden the crown of victory. Unfortunately, dazed with their falls, with excitement, and with the noise, they all three ran for the same wicket, simultaneously realised their error, and all three turned and ran for the other the blacksmith, ankle and all, in the centre and leading by a yard, so that they looked like pictures of the Russian troika. But their effort was in vain, for Mr. Pollock had grabbed the ball and the match was a tie.

And both teams spent the evening at the Three Horseshoes, and Mr. Harcourt made a speech in Italian about the glories of England and afterwards fell asleep in a corner, and Donald got home to Royal Avenue at one o'clock in the morning, feeling that he had not learnt very much about the English from his experience of their national game.