My scribble

And finally, India won! India: now the world champions in Cricket, truly deserving ones at that! You don’t get many moments in your life when tears roll down your eyes in happiness – so, when you get them, cherish them, forever!

Honestly, this unified feeling of more than a billion Indian cricket fans is ‘Literally Indescribable’ 🙂

April 2^nd 2011: Mumbai – Every other ‘celebrity’ was reduced to ‘mere ordinary’ when Dhoni hit the winning six. The last ball of the world cup sailing into the colorful crowd at Wankhede stadium was a perfect dream-come-true symbolism for an ordinary Indian fan that truly deserved this victory.

After all the crap this ordinary Indian fan (Of course, I am one too) had to go through, like

• Indian team not doing well under arrogant, out-of-form captain.
• People getting beaten by the cops outside Indian grounds.
• Mad rush for tickets, unreasonable prices (due to stupid BCCI management).
• Lack of availability of a decent website for the world cup (working in favor of mediocre Yahoo! ICC website & over-scientific ESPN Cricinfo).

And then if that was not enough, extreme cynical judgment of Indian celebrations & unfortunately negative portrayal of India’s cricket fans.

Analyzing how people express their joy is silly IMO – since Joy can mean different to individuals.

Joy can be dancing, singing, venting out your deep-rooted angst, partying, praying, charity, alcohol, drinking milk, going naked, screaming loud, touching, hugging, kissing, reading, writing, tears or anything else, absolutely anything (as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else).

There’s no Harvard degree for ‘How-to-celebrate-your-favorite-team’s-win’ or ‘How-to-be-a-good-fan’. No media in this world has the right to judge what exactly the ‘correct’ form of celebration is, because there is NONE. I personally don’t relate cricket to nationalism or religion but it still makes me happy when someone shouts “Bharat Mata ki Jay”. I may not be a part of it but it still brings a smile to my face when I see hundreds of people performing Yagya (a Hindu ritual) or praying at a mosque for team India’s win.

My request to the popularity-hungry media (websites, blogs, Facebook pages & TV) – please try to melt yourselves in this frenzy rather than hunting rare cases of abuse & charging the entire fan fraternity with it.

Moving away from rant to joy, this victory belongs to players who sweat it out under the sun & their die-hard fans who support them in any condition, anywhere in the world.

This has to be one of the most special events in global sports history –

• No sport is followed so big by one country (You might wanna add an exception of Brazil & Argentina for soccer but they’re not as big as India even collectively. Plus the players play for their clubs more often than for their countries). One Billion fans is a huge thing considering the world population is 7 Billion.
• Dedicated focus of a large media (Yes, Indian media is quite big on world stage – got to give credit where it’s due :)). Enormous expectations!

As expected, significant slew of global media WSJ, Guardian, Al Jazeera, ESPN USA (with a full section on cricket on its homepage, here’s the best piece), Xinhua news & many others across the globe have taken note of this achievement in a big way. (This para updated at 10:55 PM EDT Apr 3, 2011)

Although I just mentioned that I don’t relate cricket to nationalism (I belong to minority with for that opinion :P) – now, I have a feeling that this win might have an extremely positive influence on Indian people, especially the youth. Not a bad time to remind ourselves that India is the ‘Only Young Nation’ in the world with rapidly aging rest of the world. As New York Times mentions, it might boost general Indian confidence after a series of corruption scandals.

For me, India is celebrating its emergence on the world stage along with this world cup win.

The world needs a lot of positivity now, after economic gloom & Arab revolutions’ bloodbath & Japan disaster. Let me shout out loud “Indiaaaaah … Indiaaaaah” & Let the world listen (Happy & Proud)