On the ball

Diplomacy is one thing, cricket quite another. But the twain did meet in Islamabad last week when Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmoud Qureishi admitted he was keenly following the Indian Premier League matches. So who was he rooting for? “My team has been knocked out—it was the Kolkata Knight Riders,” he said. Well, maybe that was diplomacy at play after all, for later in the evening it transpired that his Indian counterpart, Pranab Mukherjee, too was a Knight Riders fan.