This is Not Cricket

I don't know how to react to what happened this morning.

I could be shocked. Cricketers have never been attacked before. India's previous tours passed without any incident. Yes, there was an incident involving the New Zealand team some years ago, and another one near the English team hotel in 2005. England were also in Mumbai when the Taj attack happened. But in none of those cases were cricketers attacked so directly, rashly and boldly. None of them injured any cricketers.

All our years of cricket-fanaticism has, to use a cliche, lulled us into a false sense of security. Because cricketers in the subcontinent are honoured, respected and worshipped, because they have always been, to use another cliche, demi-gods, there's this sense that no one, not even terrorists would do anything to them. When India cancelled their Pakistan tour (which was replaced by this tour), I joked that the Indian team shouldn't be worried about their security because even terrorists want to watch India-Pakistan cricket. That was the first thing I thought of when I heard this news.

Yet, I'm not shocked. It has never happened before, but it was always on the cards. Someone would think its a good idea and order some other people to do it. Terrorist strikes happen so often that I've become numb to them. I glance at the first two paragraphs of the report, and move on to the inside pages of the newspaper.
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I could be afraid. As Barkha Dutt has been telling us for the last hour on NDTV, Lahore is very close to the border. The terrorists could just cross over and open fire in Amritsar. The bigger fear is for the sport in India. Every cricket match, more than ever, is a likely terrorist target (this includes the IPL). For the big cricketers, like Sachin and (perhaps) Dhoni, every public appearance is a security threat.

But these risks have always been there. This incident has only given images to attach to this fear.
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I could be angry. But there are too many people to be angry against. There's the ideologues and the terrorists for conceiving and carrying out this act. There are the Pakistan security agencies who haven't been able to arrange for something as simple as a safe journey from the team hotel to the stadium. There is the chaotic Pakistan Cricket Board run until recently by incompetent army officers which somehow believed that a successful and safe cricket tour could happen in these times.

However, the diffusedness of the anger dims it and renders it tame. Anger is replaced by sheer helplessness and frustration.
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I think I'm only sad. Sad for the policemen who died because some people thought it was important now to play a game of cricket. Sad for the cricketers who were injured - they travelled from their own troubled land to another one hoping to alleviate the panic that seems to have spread amongst the cricket playing countries about touring the subcontinent. Sad for Pakistan Cricket - some of the most colourful and individualistic cricketers over the years have come from there. Sad for Cricket itself, because what seemed like a sacred line has now been irremediably crossed.