I told you that I would be back if India won the last game ... WELL HERE I AM.. NOT JUST BECAUSE THE DEFEATED PAKISTAN.. BUT BECAUSE TODAY... THEY ARE THE WORLD CHAMPIONS OF CRICKET AFTER DEFEATING SRI LANKA.....
Many a times I have seen a match where our bowlers could not contain the batting side and they outplayed us defiantly eventhough we had gained the advantage early on....
Today I couldnt really understand the game.. for this Indian Team was doing the same thing to the Lankans... and it was feeling good. I was not sure if it was a true feeling of confidence or jubiliation or really a dream ... I still feel it. It seems its not really true but I have fed this dream for so many days and months and years that I would be destroyed if the bubble burst.. and I ended up waking up on my bed .... waiting again for the India SL match to start...
So I pinch myself...
And it hurts.. But I smile.. for I have done this before....over and over again.. to convince myself that its really true.. and that India has really won the World Cup Cricket Tournament... and that I witnessed it live with a bunch of other Cornell grad/undergrads... ... I really really cannot grasp the impact ...
Well, to be practical.. it doesnt matter so much for us does it.. People staying so far away from the actual action. I mean if our happiness quotient is 40x we would like to show its 160x because thats what we want ... and yet at the back of our mind we still have to do 2312414 other odd jobs for lab / home etc.. and its so different from home where even if you are 40x happy ... you will become 1600x happy just because of the sounds and sights around you. I am pretty sure.. there are still parties going on in India .. on the roads and streets. People making a whole lot of noise with bottles, utensils, Blow Horns, Car Honks etc etc.. dancing half drunk on the streets and I miss being so far away from it.
Nonetheless, I did decide to not work today in lab and probably even tomorrow. I will take a couple of days to recover. My head is still heavy, which is mostly because I havent slept last night and my throat's parched and silent.. due to all the shouting and cheering. Yet I dont want to go to sleep for some reason. I still go back to the same old news articles which wont change cause its really late in India but just in case I have missed the odd interview of the sight screen attendant... you never know !!
In my last post I had spoken about how cricket as a game affects us as a community and how I have justified the Indian teams's performance according to my life line... ( a rather ingenious pastime most Indians enjoy... of associating and entangling their own life with the ups and downs of the Indian Cricket Team) and thats the first thing that hit me. Unlike the last World Cup final in 2003, I was not watching this from home. I was in a small college based town in upstate NY where there will still enough fans to organise a communal screening of the game on a big screen and enough noise to attract "whiteS" from around the corner..... Some of my fellow spectators were still learning the rules of cricket such as "what is an over?" while others as usual were busy dissecting every delivery of Harbhajan Singh and how he really needed to check his line and length in order to contain the batsmen... It was truly a very mixed audience which was even exciting. Cricket was breakinc boundaries.. Indian cricket was breaking barriers of a different kind. Suddenly we now have two seperate generations of Indians talking about their experiences about the Indian team winning the world cup..
And I am part of one of them....
(More to come later...)
Many a times I have seen a match where our bowlers could not contain the batting side and they outplayed us defiantly eventhough we had gained the advantage early on....
Today I couldnt really understand the game.. for this Indian Team was doing the same thing to the Lankans... and it was feeling good. I was not sure if it was a true feeling of confidence or jubiliation or really a dream ... I still feel it. It seems its not really true but I have fed this dream for so many days and months and years that I would be destroyed if the bubble burst.. and I ended up waking up on my bed .... waiting again for the India SL match to start...
So I pinch myself...
And it hurts.. But I smile.. for I have done this before....over and over again.. to convince myself that its really true.. and that India has really won the World Cup Cricket Tournament... and that I witnessed it live with a bunch of other Cornell grad/undergrads... ... I really really cannot grasp the impact ...
Well, to be practical.. it doesnt matter so much for us does it.. People staying so far away from the actual action. I mean if our happiness quotient is 40x we would like to show its 160x because thats what we want ... and yet at the back of our mind we still have to do 2312414 other odd jobs for lab / home etc.. and its so different from home where even if you are 40x happy ... you will become 1600x happy just because of the sounds and sights around you. I am pretty sure.. there are still parties going on in India .. on the roads and streets. People making a whole lot of noise with bottles, utensils, Blow Horns, Car Honks etc etc.. dancing half drunk on the streets and I miss being so far away from it.
Nonetheless, I did decide to not work today in lab and probably even tomorrow. I will take a couple of days to recover. My head is still heavy, which is mostly because I havent slept last night and my throat's parched and silent.. due to all the shouting and cheering. Yet I dont want to go to sleep for some reason. I still go back to the same old news articles which wont change cause its really late in India but just in case I have missed the odd interview of the sight screen attendant... you never know !!
In my last post I had spoken about how cricket as a game affects us as a community and how I have justified the Indian teams's performance according to my life line... ( a rather ingenious pastime most Indians enjoy... of associating and entangling their own life with the ups and downs of the Indian Cricket Team) and thats the first thing that hit me. Unlike the last World Cup final in 2003, I was not watching this from home. I was in a small college based town in upstate NY where there will still enough fans to organise a communal screening of the game on a big screen and enough noise to attract "whiteS" from around the corner..... Some of my fellow spectators were still learning the rules of cricket such as "what is an over?" while others as usual were busy dissecting every delivery of Harbhajan Singh and how he really needed to check his line and length in order to contain the batsmen... It was truly a very mixed audience which was even exciting. Cricket was breakinc boundaries.. Indian cricket was breaking barriers of a different kind. Suddenly we now have two seperate generations of Indians talking about their experiences about the Indian team winning the world cup..
And I am part of one of them....
(More to come later...)
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