Let the Trumpets Blow!

In a warped way, the ODIs and Twenty20s that India’s corporates fancy bring in the moolah and also sustain the game’s overall health besides subsidising and sustaining Tests. Virat Kohli and his young bunch Will determine how long India will stay invested in Tests and the duration it will take to reach 1000 Tests. For now, let us celebrate the 500th Test and ideally as you read this, India would have defeated New Zealand. As they say, isn’t sport also about hope and the ‘here’ and ‘now’?

- K. C. Vijaya kumar

India’s latest tryst with a cricketing milestone is seasoned with history. Just as the Gangetic Plains hosts the nation’s 500th Test at Kanpur’s Green Park Stadium, it is time to celebrate a country’s gradual growth in the willow game’s longest version.

It is heartening that a numerical landmark is linked to Tests, especially in the Indian context where popular culture is often bonded to the game’s shorter avatars — ODIs and Twenty 20s. To be fair, cricketers have often spoken about their fondness for doing battle in white flannels over five days but fans and brand managers tend to thrive upon and monetise the transient joys of limited overs cricket.

It is easy to stereotype Indian cricket. In the olden times it was about men unleashing oriental magic through their hyper-flexible wrists or spinners luring batsmen into fatal-traps, cliches as old as the ones about the Indian rope-trick and elephants roaming our streets. The current label is all about the country being a commercial behemoth as far as cricket goes and that leads to grumbling about muscle-flexing and a sense of entitlement.

TRUE, INDIA HAS HAD its share of batsmen offering aesthetic pleasure, spinners weaving a web and obviously the game’s financial heart beats strong from the Himalayas to Kanyakumari. However, being obsessed about just these would do a disservice to the larger picture that has multiple shades ever since India’s maiden Test at Lord’s in 1932.

Being a country where academics took precedence over sport, it was but inevitable that in the early stages, batting and spin bowling — relatively less rigorous than fast bowling, found favour with the masses. But it changed and we have had all kinds of players embellishing our narrative.