I woke up groggily on Saturday morning at 5 a.m. cursing alarm clocks, unearthly hours, patriotism and — most vociferously — time differences. I pulled on the first blue clothes that I could get my hands on, walked outside to a beautiful, clear, starry sky — “a night sky,” I corrected miserably — and trudged over to Forbes College. Once there, however, I forgot my sleepiness in an instant. Not many things can, one, motivate me to wake up at 5 a.m., and, two, imbibe me with energy at that godforsaken hour, but watching my country play in the Cricket World Cup Final is one of them. It helped a teensy bit that we won, of course.
Cricket, as every good South Asian knows, is not a sport; it is a religion. Think of it as our version of a Super Bowl. My uncle happened to be flying out of Bombay airport towards the end of the semi-final against Pakistan. The passengers, eyes glued to the tiny television screens in the airport, flat-out refused to get on the plane. As the end drew closer, the crew gleefully joined them, abandoning the scheduled take-off to watch the win. This is India at its finest, most united and most manic — and I love it.
Princeton, to my surprise and delight, was no different. Our South Asian contingent of 40 pairs of strong lungs clad in proud blue uniforms yelled and swore and jumped and danced and cried our way through over nine nerve-wracking hours of cricket. We streamed the match online and watched it on a projector. Our most anguished moments were when the feed stopped working — and even in those few minutes of the game that we missed (though they were hardly likely to be life changing), we were frantically texting friends and family. My conversation with my mother during those moments went something like this: “Feed died. Score?” “134-3.” “Better.” “Yes.” “Score?” “136-3.” “OK ... Now?”
And we all brought the usual host of superstitions and prayers with us. If something great happens when you’re sitting in a particular spot, the general rule is that you’re not allowed to budge from that exact position for fear of disturbing the positive aura. All in good fun, of course, but in the spirit of full disclosure, I gave some serious thought to banishing someone from the Forbes Blackbox Theater because something terrible happened when he entered. And let me be clear: I am not even considered a serious fan. Many Indians make so-called deals with the powers that be to affect a successful match: “If India wins, I’ll give up chocolate for six months!” It’s strange, sure, but endearing if you think about it: We all want to contribute in whatever wacky way possible and do our part for the success of the team.
One of the most important contributions is the yelling. No joke. If you don’t scream your guts out — as one ardent Princetonian senior sternly informed us — you’re responsible for the loss. Lost your voice? Bonus points! We worked our way steadily through the variety of chants that every Indian grows up with: We predicted victories, sang out the cricketers’ names and jeered at the opposition mercilessly. I have to say, though (and I took care to avoid saying so among the die-hards) that a huge source of pride in this tournament was the fact that three out of the four teams in the semi-finals were South Asian: Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India. We may say unmentionable things about them while we play them — but we are, ultimately, from the same subcontinent, and we were proud of their success in addition to our own.
And as Zeerak Ahmed rightly mentioned in his column, divisive politics — a problem from which all three of these countries suffer — are forgotten in the wake of fervent national pride. The Indian population inundated all forms of social media with its euphoria (apologies, Princeton, apologies), but one of most touching things I saw on that day was a circulating Blackberry message. It called out Raj Thackeray — an infamous propagandist of these divisions — and said, “A Delhi boy, a Jharkhand captain and a Chandigarh lad won the World Cup on your turf and dedicated it to a Maharashtrian legend. Your politics of hate have failed.” (Delhi, Jharkhand, and Maharashtra are Indian states; Chandigarh is a union territory.) We love cricket, yes — but we also need it, sometimes, as a reminder of what is important and what is not.
In that spirit, soon after the match ended and we had finished our maddened shrieking and hugging, we stood together in Forbes, Princeton, New Jersey and spontaneously belted out our national anthem with an unusual tenor of emotion and affection for our home. I missed my people, and wished I was among them to witness this, but I have to say — we did a damn fine job of bringing India to Princeton.
Camille Framroze is a philosophy major from Bombay, India. She can be reached at framroze@princeton.edu.
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