cheering without conviction

If you’re born and brought up in India, chances are you’re automatically drafted into the cricket fan club. Not as an option, and certainly not as a hobby. It is more like a cultural subscription that renews itself every season. Regardless of gender, when India is playing another country, you watch. Not merely for the sake of it, but also with a mild pretence of giving a shit about India winning.

In a way, it’s nice. Cricket has this peculiar ability to bring families, friends, and even strangers together, to sit in one room and momentarily feel like a united community. But what about those who don’t have a single patriotic bone twitching at the sound of a bat hitting a ball?

At first, you’re patient. You assume it’s a phase. You think the interest will eventually develop, like a taste for olives or black coffee. For someone like me, it never did. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against sports. It’s just this specific sport that has forever escaped my emotional bandwidth. It’s cute, even funny, when you’re a child and can’t tell the difference between a four and a six. But as an adult, or so they like to call me, it starts to feel borderline criminal to not know the rules of this holy game.

So what’s so special about cricket?

Some of you would know the history and explain why cricket isn’t just a sport but an emotion. I, on the other hand, derive most of my cricket education from the Bollywood film Lagaan. That movie alone is enough to remind you that ignorance toward cricket in India is practically a character flaw. So I tried to care. Of course I did. To be acceptable.

Then someone once said, “I don’t enjoy cricket either… but when it’s India vs Pakistan, I have to watch.” And I thought, maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s my entry point. That is when the dormant patriot inside me will awaken and I too will feel the collective rage, the chest-thumping adrenaline, the nationalistic fever.

Some people cry. Some get hostile.

I once saw a man nearly pick a fight with someone for not wearing an Indian jersey.

Excitement, I understand.

Compulsion? Imposition?

That’s where it blurs.

So I kept feigning. Until one day, I didn’t.

For obvious reasons, it wasn’t received well.

“How can you not like cricket?”

“Not even the finals?”

“Come on, it’s India vs Pakistan!”

It was daunting, being on the receiving end of what felt like collective disbelief. It made me wonder, is this really about cricket? Or is it about what cricket allows people to feel? Belonging, pride, permission to be loud, permission to care without irony.

Surely there are others like me. But perhaps the lack of acceptance keeps them quiet.