WHY I WRITE ON CRICKET

Today I thought  I would reflect on why I write on cricket. After all, I do waffle on quite a bit on it, don't I? I have blogged for almost seven years now: What's the deal with all this verbiage? Why talk so much about a game?

The answers to that question is quite obvious for some, and I won't go into the most straightforward one. (Besides, there's always a new game or a new player to be talked about, and the game itself has changed.) Today, I want to focus on my particular station as a cricket student who grew up in a cricketing country but now lives 'abroad'

Mostly, it might be that I continue to write about cricket because I'm infected by a deep nostalgia, an incurable homesickness, one that I cannot stop hoping will be cured and palliated by conversation with others who love cricket like I do. The homesickness, the 'homeward bound gaze' of the immigrant is a cliché now, but its emotional impact remains the same as it ever was. While, like many others like me, I miss the cool weather of the Sayahadris, light of the north Indian winters, the brilliant sunshine that warmed my non-centrally heated body as I emerged from a cold UP interior, I also miss the sounds and sights of cricket: radio commentary and street games and men in white on cricket fields. Seven years  of absence have attenuated this feeling, as has the non-stop saturation by international cricket, but the desire to talk about cricket has not gone away.

I still feel words spring to my lips as I watch a game; I still find myself possessed by an incurable itch when I witness cricketing folly or excellence, one that can only be assuaged by writing about it. Often, it has not mattered whether someone read my writings or not. I wrote because I had to, because it was the only way to deal with my reactions to cricket. I often wish I could stop writing on cricket: it takes up a lot of my time; I'm a newly minted father now.

The subterranean and subconscious roots of my interest in cricket lie deep in a set of memories and impressions formed so long ago that their eviction seems impossible.

But I can only stop writing on cricket if I stop watching it or thinking about it. The subterranean and subconscious roots of this interest, though, lie deep in a set of memories and impressions formed so long ago that their eviction seems impossible. Those early imprints made sure I would view sports in a particular light, one that ensured that no matter how deeply I grew invested in the Manchester United and Chelsea, no matter how enthusiastically I might look forward to a Hockey game, some part of the emotional frisson associated with cricket will be missing.

Perhaps if I had stayed on in India, I might have grown away from cricket. I might have become busy in the country's newer attractions; perhaps the EPL or Formula One would have gradually replaced cricket in my sporting priorities. But because I moved across, I took with me my sense of cricket as it was then: the subject of endless conversation and rumination and heartbreak and joy. Those sensations find constant provocation in the attention I pay to cricket, and demand expression in the only way I know how. After all, I'm pretty much useless at anything other than Cricket.

Sometimes it seems that to stop writing on cricket would require not being interested in it anymore; sometimes, it seems I continue to write on cricket because to stop writing on cricket would be to acknowledge one part of my life is over, a loss that seems too great to bear. To stop writing on cricket would mean having to finally accept that I can no longer go 'home'. And so I write.