11 Men and a Ball

It's the first nice day in months, pleasant breeze, cloud-ridden sky, and here I sit with my gorgeous husband. Inside. In a dark room, watching a screen as 14 grown up men wearing idiot suits run up and down after a little red sphere that never hurt anybody.

As I write this the man moves in tandem with the movements on the screen, his muscles jerking as the puppet master in the helmet and pads pulls his strings. There is something about men and cricket. It's fascinating to watch them (for small periods of time once every four years).

Watching them, you see the theory of evolution from reptile to humanoid play itself out in their features. When their favorites score, they take flight like a particularly graceful pertradactyl ancestor. When the favorites slump, their jaws jut out and stomachs protrude as the shoulders slump. Their articulate shouts of rage (aaaaargh..) make them, well, neanderthalic. This impression is hightened by the way they become oblivious to their surroundings, an elephant could come and sit in their laps and scratch behind their ears and they'd just grunt.

You also realize another truth. That popular stereotype about women being the gossipy ones hung up on preening? It's all guano. Have you seen the world cup uniforms? Checked out their colors and the decorative swirls and the matching hat and gloves? Can any man look me in the eye and tell me that's not preening? As for the bit about how men don't gossip, what do you think commentary is? And, in a demonstration of the gender bias, they even get paid for it. Perhaps the most damning indictment is that men accuse women of being fanciful and prone to belief in old wives tales, yet believe in out of body travel themselves. This is called 'astral projection', and this is what men are attempting to do when you see them concentrating fiercely on the TV screen. They are trying to infuse the player on screen with their own talents and skills. If you're sneaky, you can probably catch a male you know practicing a cover drive in front of a mirror and then doing the arrogant bat wave to imaginary spectators.

Basically, this is why outsiders, especially women, are barred from the dressing room. So they won't witness the giggles as player X buffs his nails, player Y does his hair and player Z drones on about his latest commercial.
Prasad and Sohail only had that fight because Aamir said his pecs were better.
Because of rising gender awareness and activism, in recent years there has been an increase in attacks on those traditional fortresses of institutionalised male adolescent behaviors, i.e., cricket and wedgies. We have managed to drive wedgies into a defensive corner, but cricket is rapidly becoming the final frontier.

With cricket, men can once again be the snotty nosed, reactive 14 years olds they once were. If playing, they can jump, run, dive, shout and throw things at each other without anyone telling them not to. A lot of times they are even encouraged to do this. When they don't; other men who aren't playing get upset and set the stands on fire. They can shove each other (batsman and bowler in mid-run), they can give dirty looks, they can even curse each other. In Inzamams case, he tried to brain someone with a bat for calling him 'aloo'.
As a group activity, cricket is even more fun for a man. Just as a woman always needs to ask if she looks all right, men need the affirmation of "haan yaar achha shot tha" or "uff…lay li" from each other. It's all about positive reinforcement and a sense of security, even if only one side gets to wear codpieces.

For those who have missed the point so far let me state it clearly and unequivocally.

1. Cricket retards male intelligence.

2. Cricket absolves men of all sense of responsibility towards any but the team.

3. Cricket reduces marriage to a sociological experiment that is suspended for 36 days this year.


I will now provide evidence. The back page of todays 'Star' (a news daily from Karachi) carried the story "Man sells house to go see world cup". It related how one 'chacha-e-cricket' couldn't find a sponsor to send him to watch the world cup so he just upped and sold the house. I wonder if he had a family. What does he intend to do after he comes back? In another story, a man watching cricket in a shop in India stabbed the shopkeeper when he tried to turn the TV off. When India lost their last match, people took out protest demonstrations baying for the teams blood and burnt an effigy of Azharuddin with a necklace of shoes around his neck. In the last world cup a man got mad at the way a match was going and threw his telephone set through the screen of his television set.
One of the best cricket players in the world has decided he's the Islamic version of captain planet and goes around running for office. The rationale being that leading a 14-man squad gives you the experience necessary experience to lead a 140 million squad. We mustn't forget though, that this man won the world cup all by himself once.

My conclusive piece of evidence is that my husband has yet to form a complete sentence today.

In a related development, WAW (woman against world cup) today announced its poster girl for this year's world cup. Her name is Lorena Bobbit!