Can cricket cause delusions?
Mass delusions, believe you me. The most prominent of these delusions is cricket diplomacy, which is a contradiction in terms. The model, obviously, is the Olympics, which were instituted as a form of surrogate warfare by the Greek city-states, in which everyone could work off their aggression without seriously hurting each other. Someone wins, someone loses, but it’s all on a manageable scale. However, when someone loses, someone gets upset, so this is not a very good model for diplomacy. Diplomacy is all about win-winning. So it’s scarcely surprising that moments after Indians and Pakistanis play a diplomatic’ match, they go right back to shelling each other in the mountains. Another delusion, pervasive among the intelligentsia, is that of cricket as metaphor, or cricket as a barometer of deep anthropological truths. Several authors, who are usually occupied in writing excellent books on mass culture, political psychology and other obscure areas, have written books on cricket while i
