India won!! A billion people won!! 1/6th of the world won!!

I know I am too late to write about it but I was too busy all day but am still too much into its trance to write about anything else.

If there is anyone of you out there who cannot make a head or tail out of the title then let me give you a brief history of it. India plays only one game(it plays others but they are not worth mentioning) and that is Cricket. It is India’s religion and cricketers are Gods. Pakistan is its arch-rival and a match between India and Pakistan is no less than a battle. Yesterday India won the Cricket’s twenty20 World Cup against Pakistan in a match that brought the entire subcontinent to a standstill for the entire duration.

Details of the match can be found all around the blog and news world and I am sure there is not one aspect of the game that has not been discussed. And I went surfing all over the web and came across this blog iccworldcup07 that had covered the entire twenty20 world cup in ABSOLUTE detail. My hard luck that I found it after the world cup was over.

But what I want to talk of is the spirit of revelry and joy that swept around the country with the final catch by Sreesanth. As soon as the match was over and the Pakistani captain gave his impossible remarks on “all Muslims around the world” (it has been discussed in good detail at Soul witness ) the entire India was out on the streets celebrating and rejoicing. There we youngsters on the streets S..C..R..E..A..M..I..N..G INDIA INDIA!! And my city, Ahmadabad, has a road called C.G. Road that is the unannounced address for all occasions of joy. People somehow always land up at CG without any invitation. Its as if the entire city has been ordered to meet there. And once the crowd gathers up you find a motley of people befriending strangers at unbelievable speed. It seemed as if everyone knew everyone and all of them were brothers in the sense that our Pledge wants us to.

Coming back to the CG road we had one fellow with the Indian flag dancing ON the car waving at thousands around him. Another one was with a trophy (which is supposed to be a world cup ) in his hands on the bonnet of the car and the entire crowd had a smile sooo content that it seemed as if all of them had deliberately forgotten India’s shameful loss at the world cup in early 2007. Bu then that is how it has to be. Life is to forget the scars and celebrate the victories.

I was elated to see the amount of joy a single victory brought us. India is a nation starved of victories and hence when we win, WE WIN!! Nothing about our victory is small or dispensable. It is our pride and we want to enjoy it. So the cynics (if there are any, yet) PLEASE leave us alone. Let us bathe in the glory!!