Happiness, where art thou?

Written on 23rd March 2003

The two events that marched towards a final showdown during the past few weeks are there now. In the final stage of consummation. And like most of the people, I gave up thinking about one of them, the now familiar war, just because it was too ruthless and inhuman. A humongous mismatch, with the US-English forces way too powerful and sophisticated and Iraq's sanction ridden decade making them that much more weaker than they already were. It was like a boxing match between Mike Tyson and myself. Will you pay to watch it?

Then there was this cricket world cup. A regrouped indian team was performing brilliantly and became a shelter to all, with a state of mind similar to mine, to seek solace. Every time the Indian team won, it gave an excuse to forget the unjust war and its casualities. So we all know that Iraqi lives aren't as valuable anyway. This war started when the first one ended with all those senseless sanctions punishing the already troubled people. Those precision guided bombs are only expediting an expected end to their lives. May be it is for the better. Anyway, back to the shelter of solace. Having shut myself off to all the war hype and the biased media, I was left with this other event to keep the mind occupied. The inevitable final match between India and Australia was much awaited and talked about among all cricket crazy circles.

And then it happened. The final match of the cricket world cup. Suddenly, it looked just about the same as the war. Inhuman and ruthless. Efficiency and machine guided performance versus hapless and weak punches into the vaccuum. The shelter of solace was running for cover. A helter skelter shelter, so to say. Watching the way Australians batted made me wonder if cricket is going to survive as a game twenty years hence. Looks like they figured the equation out and it looked a robotic approach to the game. Super efficient and hardly emotional. It looked like they were executing some well written instructions and had all their if-else conditions sorted out. On the other hand, the Indians, being human, had no clue to what was going on. All the things that they knew about cricket just seemed too old and outdated. There was a much newer way of playing the game, playing like a machine, that they were not aware of.

This might look like fancy cribbing. But I feel that the way Australians played today is going to kill the game some day. Not to say that the Australians played bad or do not deserve to win, but it makes me wonder, if this was all cricket was about, what the hell were we doing analysing this game ever since we were kids? We can blame the Indian team all we want, but even Kasparov struggles when he comes up against the power PC. May be he never lost but that's because he is just one. How can we have eleven people executing same set of instructions and expect there won't be any core dumps? If not anything, there will be hardware failures for christsake ! Remember Tendulkar's cramps when we played Pakistan? Today, the Australian batsmen were running like hell, but where were the cramps?

The ephemeral happiness ! If not war then cricket, we thought. But ruthlessness is every where. Sometimes it is unjust, like the war, but it brings no pleasure even when it is just. I know the Australians would be happy, but could they be happy is the question. They won some 17 matches in a row now. What if they make it 50 in a row? Would you still bother to watch cricket? I will not.Hopefully it is just a phase when things are working out well for the Australians. I am sure they are an emotional people too, it is just that they are too damn efficient.

Happiness, where did you go? Come back. For that matter, Sadness, where did you go? May be my question should be, Emotion, where did you go? If you are there, come out of the hiding. Affect people for good or bad and make them inefficient at times, if that is what it takes to bring back joy.