It’s been some years since Ashish Nandy penned the phrase ‘‘cricket is an Indian game mistakenly invented by the English’’ as the opening line of his Tao of Cricket. Yet, if anything had underlined just how united is the sport in a global sense, it is the way the community — with its vast demographic links — has reacted in just about all ICC countries, whether full, associate or affiliate members, to the tsunami crisis. And it’s easily forgotten that much of this goodwill has come through the way Steve Waugh and others have become involved in understanding the South Asian culture. Not just as bystanders offering generous rhetoric and little else but by embracing South Asians and the region’s identity. It displays a political maturity as well as acceptance of the bonding that spreads beyond the game. Remember, if you will, how in early February 1996, 10 days before the official opening at Eden Gardens in Kolkata, the serenity surrounding the looming World Cup exploded. Eighty people died in Colombo and thousands were injured as five LTTE suicide bombers drove a truck packed with explosives into the seven-storey Central Bank; an incendiary statement of defiance that also put at risk the games Sri Lanka were scheduled to play in the capital. Australia and Sri Lanka were to resume an embittered rivalry, fired in the ovens of acrimony created during Sri Lanka’s tour Down Under only weeks earlier, in one of the tournament’s opening games barely 18 days after the attack in Colombo. Indeed, even before the explosion spread nasty splinters of shrapnel, embedding doubt and confusion in the thoughts of many, there had been a growing suspicion the Aussies would somehow renege on their game at the Sinhalese Sports Club on February 17. Three years later, under Steve Waugh and his more enlightened approach, the Australians threw off their closeted image and took to the capital’s streets. Sri Lankans were stunned at this new camaraderie as the Aussies took video pictures of the scenes in and around the capital. And when he was injured later in the tour, at Kandy’s Asgiriya with its impressive scenic backdrop, the older Waugh twin was quite happy to accept Sri Lankan medical assistance. When the third series of the Border/Gavaskar Trophy was played Down Under in that Millennium summer of 1999/2000 and the reciprocal mind-bending series of 2000/2001 took place, the Waugh influence as well as the appreciation of new relationship between the two nations was given added drive. It wasn’t because India had begun to grow as a power to threaten Australian dominance on the field (and it didn’t stop at adopting a home for children of leprosy patients, though that alone would have earned Waugh a sporting sainthood). It was, in a sense, a long-overdue acknowledgement of India as a nation, and of the South Asia region, as being important in fields of economic, scientific as well as medical development. Anyone who has stood at Chennai, Mumbai, New Delhi or Kolkata domestic airports, cannot but be impressed by modern India. Sure there are areas where help is needed and there are facets of human life that touch, as well as haunt, the inner mind and create an awareness that influences thinking. If you can help, why not get involved in the welfare side of it. After several visits to South Asia, it becomes a region that is much, much more than a cricket tour, much more than tourist stopover, much more than a place where there are colleagues and friends. That’s why it took just a few days and some telephone calls and e-mails to arrange Monday’s match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground where a World XI plays the Asian XI. While life moves on, and there will be a poignant tribute in silence before the start of the game, the way the ICC and its members have responded indicates just how much care there is as well as a feeling of grief of those who have gone forever. In Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu they are in mourning also for the youth who have been affected and lost. The rebuilding has started, but the succour will go on: a reminder how cricket remembered and cared.
