DID ever before a billion hearts beat to such a distant, and improbable, cause as they did this weekend? In fact, do Bermudians — all 65,773 of them, by the last CIA head count — even know how interest in their affairs has suddenly gripped the world’s largest democracy? Bermuda will, by every indication offered by their captain Irvine Romaine, return to their North Atlantic homes in good cheer. They say, they were happy to just have been in Trinidad for the first round World Cup matches. In India, for them, our hearts are heavier. How we willed them to win and find collective redemption in a cricket victory. They instead appear content, possibly in the comfort of having their offshore banks give them the highest per capita income in the world. How we would have hailed that victory as the self-reliant utterance of what is an overseas territory of the United Kingdom. Bermudians, by the way, voted to rebuff independence in a referendum in 1995.If Bermuda were not up to the designs of India, hopeful of gaining entry to the Super8s through a magical feat on the islanders’ part, look at the country they sportingly lost to Sunday night. Early morning Monday, as victory was sealed in the Caribbean, thousands of Bangladeshis spilled out on to the streets of Dhaka in celebratory defiance of the interim government’s ban on marches and processions. You have to wonder, don’t you? Why did they hold the celebrations till final confirmation of a win over Bermuda? Having beaten India, they should logically have taken the win over Bermuda for granted. Shouldn’t they have? Not if you thought like an Indian these past couple of days.The Indian cricket team — aging and ridden by politicisation — will sort itself out. But for an entire cricket-watching people like India’s, the absurdity of taking their numbers in terms of eyeballs and ad-spend as entitlement to a match-winning squad may take more doing to sort out. That statistical lifeline we thought we were hanging on to these past few days — recognise it for what it was. The last straw.
