Looking back at 2011: A cricket fan is born!

As the year draws to a close, looking back at every little event that has made 2011 memorable, the World Cup Victory seems to take the cake; for me it was the night when a cricket fan was born, says Get Ahead reader and Bangalore-based architectural journalist Apurva Bose Dutta.

The night of July 17, 1994 -- as a 12 year old, seeing my dad and elder sister glued to the Italy-Brazil soccer World Cup final, I planned to watch it wanting to decipher what it was that made them stick to it. And well... a week later an article penned by the little enthusiast titled 'A football fan is born' was printed in the Tribune.

17 years hence, now with a husband who is as much, if not more, crazy about sports (with cricket topping the list), I have now felt another sudden urge to write as I realise that 'A cricket fan has been born'. This is one of the major changes that have crept in me as I step into 2012.

For all that I know you all might be labelling me as the one being crazy, of not being attached to cricket. But in spite of the fact that I grew up in a house where my parents, my sisters wanted to watch each ball of the match rendering me incapacitated to understand their obsession, I was quite unmindful of the game.

The Indo-Pak World cup semi finals (in 2011) hype somewhere made me a bit excited, apart from that fact that it was happening in Mohali. Born and brought up in Chandigarh, even after having stayed in places like Delhi, UK and now Bangalore, Chandigarh still makes me smile every time I am reminded of it. With the semi finals on a Thursday, I was expecting my husband to take a half-day and come back home for the match, but alas he didn't. Well, so at 2 pm I did something which I had never done all my life -- switched on the TV to watch the match.

The frenzy that had been created made me want to watch the first 15 minutes after which I was sure I would get back to my work.

There was something in the words of our national anthem, there was something in the reverberating tones of the 35,000 crowd gathered to watch their team India play, there was something so honest on the face of all the players determined to do it for their country which subconsciously compelled me to rise up and sing the anthem with them, and put a little prayer in front of the Lord too to make the 'win' happen.

Somewhere, the camaraderie with cricket was commencing without I being aware of it. Each ball was then watched without any distractions. This might freak you all to know but this was the first time I was ever watching an entire cricket match on the television.

India won the semi finals and moved on to the finals. My husband was still trying to fathom what had gone wrong with his wife since it was this time her telling him, that she wanted to watch the entire match uninterrupted and without any flicking of channels in between!

I was totally shattered when Tendulkar got out, more so because due to that 'avoidable' flicking of channels, I missed the standing ovation he would have got from his country. And somehow I just lost my interest in the game, with no hope of India winning it and stopped watching it. But who knew that an hour or two later, I was still to experience the craze, the reason why 'Dhoni' is what he is and I was yet to know that after having left being a crazy Salman Khan fan 10 years back, a day would come when similar feelings would rise for another celebrity and that too from the cricket field!

I can assure you, the moment the seamless final six went off Dhoni's solid bat, I screamed and shouted for the next ten minutes, the loudest that I have ever done in my life. When a defining moment comes along, you can do one of two things -- define the moment, or let the moment define you. And Dhoni actually managed to grasp both of them.

I was totally in sync with the country all around -- whether it were the emotional players on the ground who huddled over each other, whether it was the 70,000 crowd in the stadium who couldn't believe the victory, whether it were the exciting commentators, or whether it were the people in our apartments, who came out in their individual balconies screaming. I hadn't felt like this before -- the entire country hadn't experienced this before, it was a feeling unparalleled, a feeling that brought the entire population of 1.2 billion together. It was truly symbolic of the 'unity' that India has always revelled in.

It was difficult getting sleep that night... It's funny that as much as excess of disappointments snatch your sleep, the same holds true for an overindulgence of happiness too. It was exhilarating and the excitement didn't stop there. It carried on and would do so for a lot many days to come. There was an excitement of flicking every channel to see the news. As an architectural journalist I always preserve clippings from newspapers discussing architecture and design.

But ever since we won the World Cup, I have cut out those moments of victory, those words of happiness and excitement to pin it out for a moment which we were 'privileged' to experience. The excitement even carried on while shopping at a mall the following day -- wanting to badly buy an Indian cricket tee shirt that could be flaunted around too.

Well, I can't conclude before mentioning Mahendra Singh Dhoni. I don't understand most of the terms in cricket, but what I understood and what reflected the most was his calmness, his will to make it happen after everyone lost hope, his ability to peak out at that time when everything was crumbling -- the players and the nation. This one man stood there, having bore the brunt of his previous individual performances in the World Cup, fielding off all the brickbats that were hurled at him for his decisions -- he showed his real strength. And he gave the world a team to be proud of -- a team who knew that if by some reason two of their best batsmen couldn't pull it off, they would handle their responsibilities. Even though the initial fielding was beautiful which showed their determination to give the match their best shot, it would have been easy for everyone to fall apart with a scorecard they amassed in the first few overs. And leading them was a man whom India and the world have now come up to respect, admire and get inspired from. Rightly for Dhoni, "Impossible was not a fact, but an opinion".

The feelings got heightened seeing Amitabh Bachchan get atop his car roof after the win and shout like anyone else (ouch is that speaking too much of devotion to the 'Bachchans'!!!). But then you realise that if legends like him and Sonia Gandhi could do it, it was the uninhibited exuberance that seemed to be flowing out.

India got united again that night and the happiness that the country exulted in persisted for a long time -- when you would go out on the streets or in the mall, there was this win masquerading as happiness and connecting everyone of us.

As we approach 2012, the question on everyone's lips is -- is the world truly coming to an end in 2012? At this juncture, without an ascertained future, don't you all think it was apt to experience this irrevocable piece of happiness? I think so. Let's learn from the Indian team to stand out collectively against all odds, let's stop pulling them down for their little mistakes. After having given such high-spirited smiles on our faces they need to be on a pedestal which no one should pull out for the next few years. Let us learn from them to have an abiding belief to build up even when you can't see a positive future. As they say, 'Stick to the fight when you are hardest hit, it's when things go wrong that you must not quit."

As I bid 2011 farewell, I feel elated whenever I remember the World Cup night and realise that sometimes happiness is bestowed on you by people who are not connected to you personally, but only through a country, as beautiful as 'India'...!