Mexico 1970, IX Campeonato Mundial de Futbol. The ninth men’s World Cup, the first broadcasted in colour.

The footage from Mexico 1970 is mesmerising. The pale, sun-bleached grass, the heat one can sense from the brightness of the pictures, the royal blue of Italy a cooling shade against the ground, the Brazilian yellow vivid, forming an association of colour with weight when worn by Pelé and Rivelino. Rivelino even rocked a proper ‘70s ‘stache! Pelé leaping over an English marker; Gordon Banks moving through air, birdlike almost, somehow getting enough palm and power to thwart the ball.

Then the final. I’ve watched that game in full, many times over. It’s an exhibition—no, a demonstration—of what it means to truly play football. Many consider it, rightly, the most artistic football ever produced. I think it was the most relaxed that sport ever got. Play the footage, open another tab with a street capoeira beat, and you’ll know what I mean.

And, of course, Carlos Alberto’s goal. The final goal of the tournament, possibly the greatest team goal ever scored, given context and beauty—a sequence of short, deliberate passes, a cheeky stepover, more unhurried passing, players moving around each other as if they were in a synchronised dance, Pelé’s pause, just for a breath, his right foot going over the ball and holding its arc, and, while walking, a casual pass rightwards, as Carlos Alberto roared in like a bullet train and took his shot without breaking stride.

Italy, at the time, had a reputation of being defensive gods— the two Milan clubs had won four of the last eight European Cups. And yet, Brazil made them chase ghosts for ninety minutes in the oppressive Mexico City noon.

I was born in a World Cup year, about three months after Lothar Matthäus neutralised Diego Maradona in Milan, and West Germany—runners up at the previous two World Cups—finally got their gold. The first football tournament I properly watched was also a World Cup: France 1998. I remember that we had moved the television to the bedroom, because some matches would start at 9:30, and some after midnight. The World Cup, back then, was the most important and prestigious trophy in the sport. Club football was intense, deeply entrenched into local community and rivalry, but the World Cup was the big deal. Pele and Maradona’s legacies were cemented after their heroics in national colours; Ronaldo, and I, would have to endure heartbreak before catharsis four years later.

The World Cup announces itself some months before the actual tournament, as teams start qualifying and missing out. This time, Italy dominated the headlines after missing their third consecutive World Cup. Italy won the World Cup in 2006. Since that time, their men’s football team has won as many World Cup matches as their men’s cricket team: one. For me, who grew up on Maldini and Del Piero and Totti, there was an initial shock, but over the years, seeing how insular the Serie A has become, how distant it is to other major European Leagues, their absence isn’t a surprise anymore. Italian football has developed a knack for a nosedive.

It was good to see Norway qualify for the first time after ’98, when they beat Brazil in the group stages. I have faint memories of Tore Andre Flo bustling past the Brazil defenders for the equalising goal. My heart, though, was made up by Haiti and Curacao qualifying. This is a 48-team World Cup and three American countries co-hosting and qualifying by default meant more spots for the continent, but there’s something to be said about Haiti playing against Brazil, Curacao against Germany, that makes the tournament richer.

Aside from the qualification process, there is also the pre-gaming, which starts as the regular domestic season enters its final laps. Back in the day, ESPN would treat us to special documentaries on every World Cup in a chronological order. You didn’t want to miss Hungary in 1954 and Pele in ’58. By the lead-up weeks, you’d reach 1982 and Socrates—how Brazil messed that Italy game up, only they’d know. Maradona in ’86, Maradona in ’90. Baggio, good lord. These days, I use YouTube for that kind of footage.

And there’s, of course, the written word. Until 2018, Brian Glanville would publish an updated edition of The Story of the World Cup every four years. Somewhere back home, I have about five different editions. Glanville has since left us, and Simon Kuper and Jonathan Wilson have written wonderful books for this summer. Kuper and Wilson have decades of experience reporting and covering World Cups, and their new books are genuinely rich in detail, worthy of your desk or coffee table.

There’s also a new series, a three-parter on the history of World Cups, written by Jonathan O’Brien. Last month, I was very kindly given access to a review copy. An essay on World Cups, and the book, was published on Scroll today.

Some excerpts:

“The World Cup, by design, is simultaneously heavy and weightless. Weightless because name counts for nothing. You could be Cameroon, in just your second ever World Cup, facing defending champions Argentina, and you have an equal chance at victory. Heavy because its quadrennial cycle brings tension and anxiety. Four years is a generation in football; lives change in that time.

And the best way to experience a World Cup is to ditch the abstract and watch it through the 3D glasses of history and context, the past breathing under the surface, the stakes of the future. For example, apply just one layer of context to Cameroon’s victory against Argentina in 1990: Argentina were led by the world’s greatest player of the time, or perhaps ever, Diego Maradona; the World Cup was happening in Italy, where Maradona played his club football; and Cameroon, African champions but a motley crew to the global eye, beat them 1-0 on the opening day.”

Maradona’s Argentina would recover and reach the final, where they’d face the same opponents they’d beaten four years prior: West Germany. The man asked to mark Maradona in Mexico City was now West Germany’s captain, and perhaps the best midfielder in the world. By the end of the night, he’d lift the World Cup—the last for a team called West Germany.

Then, there’s the story of another number 10.

“It is day two of the 1998 World Cup, and Italy are losing to Chile. The Bordeaux sky is faint white, awaiting dusk. With seven minutes left in the game, the referee points to the penalty spot and gives Italy a lifeline. Baggio, 31 years old, wearing number 18, places the ball on the penalty spot and takes four steps back. Both sections of the crowd are on their feet, hooting at him. Behind his restrained face lies a raging storm.

The significance of this penalty has nothing to do with the score. Neither does it have much to do with Roberto Baggio potentially becoming the first Italian to score in three World Cups. All its weight comes from another penalty, four years prior.

Baggio then wore jersey number 10, the number reserved for artists and maestros. He was the best player in the world. He stood above the penalty spot in Pasadena, California, with the 1994 World Cup on the line. And then he hit his penalty over the bar, into the crowd behind the goal, sealing the fate of the game and his life. Many in Italy still consider Baggio one of the greatest to have ever worn their blue, but the defining image of his career was that ball sailing into the Californian sky. He would later say it was the one episode he would erase if he had a magic wand.

So when, four years on, in Italy’s first World Cup match since that wretched afternoon, the referee blew for a penalty, everyone looked at Baggio. Did he have the heart to go again?

He scored; Italy salvaged a draw.”

There’s much more in the essay—on Brazil’s heartbreak, Pele’s arrival, Maradona vs England, a World Cup in Qatar, and Donald Trump.

The 2026 Men’s World Cup starts in four days. The book is genuinely excellent. Pick it up!

We’d heard of Kylian Mbappé. We’d heard that he had broken into AS Monaco’s first team when he was sixteen. Sixteen year olds don’t play senior football, but Mbappé, the word went, was nothing like anything we’d known before. We’d then seen him twist Manchester City and Juventus in the Champions League. Paris Saint-Germain shelled out 180 million of their crispiest Qatar-kissed euros, making an eighteen-year-old the subject of the second-most expensive transfer in football history. That he was special was not up for debate, but how special remained to be seen.

And now, in the compressed heat of a World Cup knockout game, opposite Lionel Messi and Angel di Maria, Mbappe was leaving some of the world’s most experienced defenders flailing, grasping at thin air. There are moments when you know you’re watching someone ascend between planes. This was not another winger blessed with a lean body and fast-twitch fibres, or a forward with a thunderous shot. Mbappe had both those gifts, which he’d reveal generously over the following weeks, but he had that other, intangible quality that separates the elite from the rest: everyone was always catching up to him.

This crack of lightning, piercing through the Argentine defence, was an announcement of arrival.

**

Kylian Mbappe was born five months and eight days after the greatest night in French football history. Under an inky Paris sky and the shimmering floodlights of State de France, France beat Brazil 3-0 to win their first Men’s World Cup. One of thirteen participants of the inaugural World Cup in 1930, hosts in 1938, France had waited an eternity for this moment.

French football was considered European royalty in the mid-eighties. Carried by Michel Platini’s genius, France won the European Championships in 1984 and reached the semi-final of the 1986 World Cup. They also won gold at the Los Angeles Olympics. And just when they should’ve taken the next leap towards greatness, they fell on a series of trapdoors, failing to qualify for the next European Championship and the next two World Cups.

The home World Cup came as respite and an opportunity to reclaim some of the lost lustre. Still, success meant quarter-finals, or, at best, the semi-finals. France weren’t yet ready to take on the heavyweights. They crossed all those hurdles, but the elation from reaching the final was broken by fear: they’d have to face Brazil—the defending champions; a lineup of Ronaldo and Rivaldo and Roberto Carlos and Cafu and Bebeto; the country that produced Pele, Garrincha, and Rivelino; the country where football went mud-caked and came out looking resplendent.

France did not let Brazil enter the match. The 3-0 final score was fitting for France’s dominance, and equally charitable to Brazil. Later that evening, the limestone beams of the Arc de Triomphe were lit up with the face of a new national hero: Zinedine Zidane. Usually the creative pulse of the side, Zidane had scored twice in the final and put the game past Brazil’s reach.

To have watched Zidane play is to have seen football turn into ballet. He glided through grass, whether running towards or with the ball. He was loose, able to stop, turn, or slide through spaces. Defenders running full speed into a tackle were forced to apply emergency brakes, and then change directions and chase him at full speed. But, for all that languidity, he was never late to a ball or a tackle. The ball, whenever it came to him, stopped dead at his feet, like a stress ball landing on velvet. Everyone else sought to control the ball; the ball, itself, came to Zidane’s feet to be loved. He’d do with a touch—a pat from the back of his heel, a gentle caress from his sidestep—what most needed a kick for.

Football had many players with rare gifts, but Zidane was the one you watched even when he did not have the ball. He was so mesmerising a creation that two movie directors set up seventeen cameras to follow him for an entire game, and then turned the footage into a feature film. On sensory experience, Zidane was the successor to Mark Knopfler and the precursor to Roger Federer.

Zidane represented something else France had long wanted to claim. He was born to Algerian parents in La Castellane, a residential suburb along the northern edge of Marseille. His father had moved from Algeria in 1953—the year before the war of independence.

France was flourishing at the time. The prosperity of the post-war years brought industry, which brought factories and construction sites. And that brought with it a problem: labour. So France opened their ports. The immigrants came, en masse, from Algeria and Morocco, Senegal and Mali. The state built housing for them on the outskirts of the major cities, and gave those districts a collective noun: banlieues.

The 1998 World Cup-winning team was called Black, Blanc, Beur—black, white, Arab—a wordplay on the tricolour’s Bleu, Blanc, Rouge. Zidane, the son of Algerian immigrants, had won France the final; Lilian Thuram, born in Guadeloupe, had scored both goals in the semi-final. Around them were Patrick Vieira, Theirry Henry, Marcel Desailly. The team was visibly, undeniably, a product of the banlieues.

The French received them with a long, warm embrace. But the story, manifesting over one glorious summer, had a tension simmering underneath. A significant chunk of the republic wanted the immigrants to shed their language, culture, and faith, and wear traditional French garb. Jean-Marie Le Pen, a politician who had previously called the national team a collection of players from foreign countries, reached the second round of the presidential election in 2002.

Three years after that, in October 2005, two teenagers—Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré—were electrocuted in a power substation in Seine-Saint-Denis, while hiding from a police check. Twenty-one days of riots followed. Nearly nine thousand cars were burned across France. The government declared a state of emergency. Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, surveying the burning suburbs, called the rioters racaille—scum. When France imploded, in shameful flames, at the 2010 World Cup, Minister Roselyne Bachelot referred to players of colour as “immature banlieue criminals.”1

Seine-Saint-Denis was and is the poorest department in metropolitan France. More than a quarter of its residents live below the poverty line. Youth unemployment in some of its communes runs past thirty percent. It is eleven miles from the centre of Paris; in some parts, you cannot reach it by metro at all.

**

Bondy is in Seine-Saint-Denis. It was here that Kylian Mbappé was born, to Wilfried and Fayza—Cameroonian and Algerian. Wilfried was the coach and director at AS Bondy, the local football team; Fayza was a professional handball player. Kylian was six years old during the 2005 riots.

He wanted only football. He’d watch hours without break and sleep with a ball for a pillow. By the time he was six, he was enrolled at AS Bondy. Antonio Ricardi, the under-13s coach at AS Bondy, told the BBC, “Kylian would always think about football, always talk about football, always watch football - and if he wasn’t doing that he’d be playing football games on the PlayStation.”

Ricardi also understood, quickly, that he had stumbled onto something rare. “Kylian could do much more than the other children,” he said. “His dribbling was already fantastic and he was much faster than the others.” When Kylian was eleven, his talent and reputation quickly outgrowing Bondy, he was taken to Institut National du Football de Clairefontaine—an academy nestled inside the lush woods of the Rambouillet forest.2

Every year, Clairefontaine trials the best young players in the Greater Paris region, and from there, about two dozen make it through. Then comes their point of difference. Unlike most academies in Europe, even the best ones—in Barcelona, Amsterdam, or Munich—Clairefontaine doesn’t mould young footballers for archetypical football roles. Its purpose, almost ideological, is to produce a complete, versatile footballer. The trainees are subject to two years of the most rigorous and methodical coaching, at the end of which they’re ready for any football, anywhere.

At Clairefontaine, Kylian learnt how to use his feet and body, how to move without the ball, and how to use the gift of speed he was born with.3 He was in his final year, a few hours away from turning fourteen, when his family got a call from Real Madrid. The club wanted to give Kylian a trial. So, the family flew down to Spain. Receiving young Kylian and crew at the airport, according to this report, was Zinedine Zidane—the past shaking hands with the future.

Wilfried and Fayza were impressed, but they believed it was too soon. In France, they reasoned, he would develop faster, the pathway from academy to a first team unencumbered by a royal team’s ambitions. They were right. At just sixteen, Kylian was walking out for AS Monaco.

**

By 2018, by the end of that quarter-final against Argentina, Kylian Mbappé had arrived. He scored twice that afternoon. Then he scored in the final—only the second teenager, the first since Pelé, to do so. He returned to Paris Saint-Germain colours and continued piling on the goals.

Four years later, he met Argentina again. Mbappé, by now, had become a phenom, technically and physically on a different plane to everyone else in the tournament. He had outgrown the club that had paid €180 million for him, and was now in a courtship with the sparkling white royalty of Real Madrid.

In the final, though, Mbappé was the forced antagonist. The match, and so much of the tournament, had been largely seen through Lionel Messi. This was perhaps Messi’s final shot at glory, one last chance to bury the accumulated heartbreaks of the previous decade. Argentina were 2-0 up at half-time.

In the French dressing room, Didier Deschamps—captain of the ‘98 World Cup winning side, coach now—was tearing into his team. The France team were listening, despondent, when Kylian rose: “It’s a World Cup final! We’re down by two goals. We can come back. Guys, this is every four years!”

The second half started, and more minutes went by. Argentina’s defence, built with muscle and trademark South American grit, smothered everything France could offer. They didn’t let Mbappé come near the goal. Then, with just over ten minutes remaining, France were awarded a penalty. Mbappé converted and entered the rare group of players to have scored in two World Cup finals—Zidane was one, Pelé another.

A couple of minutes later, as the average global heart-rate was rising into the 130s, Mbappé saw a lobbed pass on the left side of the box. Most would let it bounce, then either shoot or take a forward touch. Mbappé flung himself sideways, and while parallel to the ground, lashed his right leg at the ball—all in a blink. It was a perfectly-struck volley, and yet, utterly inexplicable in form and the speed of its execution. 2-2.

This is the moment where Mbappé’s stature became clear. Messi had spent sixteen years in an Argentine shirt pursuing that elusive, golden World Cup trophy. He was thirty-five, and this was almost certainly his last chance. And yet, watching Mbappé in those minutes, it felt wholly probable that a twenty-three-year-old was about to take it from him single-handedly. There are very few players in the history of football about whom such a thing could credibly be said.

The match went into extra time. Messi scored, Mbappé scored. With seconds to go, and both benches preparing for a penalty shoot-out, Mbappé found a loose ball in the penalty box, like the one he had found four years back, but this time within a shot’s distance from the goal. He twisted past one defender, wriggled past another, and uncoiled his right leg. If one were to extract the collective sound emanating from Argentina in that moment, it would be the Spanish version of, “Oh, fuck.” Somehow, perhaps by divine intervention, an Argentine leg came flying, and Mbappé’s shot was blocked.

The penalty shoot-out went Messi’s way and football’s most enduring romance of the 21st century finally got its just ending. Mbappé was the tournament’s highest scorer, and for long stretches, including the final, its most dominant player.

**

In the summer of 2024, Kylian Mbappé left Paris Saint-Germain on a free transfer and joined Real Madrid. His journey at PSG had been left unresolved. The club was renovated on the idea that assembling the most expensive players would produce the most successful team, with Mbappé as the centrepiece. There were seasons when the PSG frontline read: Mbappé, Messi, Neymar. The Champions League, the one trophy all that Qatari expenditure was underwritten for, never arrived.

Luis Enrique joined as coach in 2023, and immediately declared his ideology. Football, as he conceived it, was a collective enterprise, a system of interlocking commitments. Messi and Neymar had left by then. Mbappé, whose gifts were of the kind that bends systems toward itself, found himself, perhaps for the first time in his professional life, at the margins of a coach’s vision.

The year after he left, PSG won the Champions League, dismantling Internazionale 5-0 in the final. It was the most emphatic victory in the history of a major European final. Meanwhile, in Madrid, Mbappé scored 44 goals in his first season—more than any debutant in the club’s history. Real Madrid ended the season trophyless. Last night, in Budapest, PSG won their second consecutive Champions League title. Mbappé, for his part, scored 42 goals in 44 games in another barren season for Real Madrid.

There is a popular theory, now supported by evidence, that PSG have become a better team without the overarching shadow of Mbappé. And that Real Madrid, for all the individual production, are suffering from it.

The questions tailing him from Paris—about tension, discomfort, and misalignment—have become audible again. Mbappé wasn’t solely responsible, of course, but had a part to play in the strained relationship between Real Madrid and their new coach, Xabi Alonso, in the first few months of this season.

Subscribe now

Football had been waiting, for some years, for the generation after Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo to produce a worthy successor. It’s no ordinary task. The mountains those two men built, through a combination of individual and collective glory, through a dominance so relentless every other player in the sport became a supporting character, cannot be scaled by just about anyone. Mbappé is the closest thing to either of them.

The World Cup comes at an apt moment. Kylian Mbappé will arrive in the United States this summer 27 years old, fully formed. He’ll be just about the same age as Zidane was in 1998. He’ll lead a French unit happy to orbit around his atmospheric talents. He’ll wear the captain’s armband on jersey number 10—Zidane’s number—and carry French pluralism and excellence along with him. Twelve of his teammates grew up in the banlieues; twelve play for Europe’s elite clubs, like Bayern Munich, Barcelona, and Real Madrid. The players France left out of their squad could probably finish third in this tournament.

If I were to stick my neck out for a prediction: Kylian Mbappé will receive the World Cup trophy on July 19th from, in all likelihood, Donald Trump. There are other great teams at the tournament, but none as stacked as France, none with a spearhead as sharp as Kylian Mbappé.

The story goes something like this: in the winter of 1998, or thereabouts, a young writer from Jalandhar named Kumar Gill received a melody to write lyrics to. The verse was warm, very ballad-y, with rising two-note phrases; the chorus, long and heavy, carrying a sense of desolation and melancholia, as if composed for a solo violin. To that tune Gill wrote his words. He wrote about longing for his lover through the night, the incessant downpour of sadness from his eyes, the dense gloom of loss.

The song was recorded and released. When Kumar heard the finished product, he swore never to work with the singer again. The singer was another young, strapping lad from Jalandhar named Sukhbir; the song, Ishq Tera Tadpave.

The song descended on India like a ball of fire. Within six months, it was playing on loop on every radio station and music channel in the north. Within twelve, Sukhbir was a national celebrity. Every party anthem cassette and CD in the early 2000s had Ishq Tera Tadpave as the last song on Side A.

The song occupies a singular, unique space in Indian consciousness. It’s not an exaggeration to say that no party, no gathering or celebration is truly over until Ishq has played and everyone has sung the hook—“Oh ho ho ho, Ooh ho ho ho”—as a makeshift choir. There is no dancefloor across the country that goes empty when this song plays. Give or take, and this is complete speculation, I’d say around seven out of every ten above-thirty adults in India will be able to hum the hook and the chorus. DJs have learnt the trick: cue the hook in, maybe the first four notes, and the crowd fills in the rest. Most find it impossible to not move their bodies. I have seen Oxford scholars, hopped up on Bengali literature chauvinism, lose their robe of poise once Sukhbir’s voice thunders through the speakers.

India produces a few hundred thousand songs every year, many of them good. And yet, Ishq Tera Tadpave endures. I’ve always wondered why.

This is, in fact, anthem season. Every four years, between April and May, FIFA commissions a famous musician to write a song for the World Cup. The brief is quite demanding: the song must have a hopeful, inspirational tone; it should nudge people off their seats; it should carry some cultural essence—vanilla pop numbers rarely fly; it should have enough push and pull to sit neatly behind montages and highlights. And ideally, a World Cup anthem should have enough recall value to be remembered and associated with the World Cup long after the tournament is over.

The theme song for this summer’s World Cup, Dai Dai, comes via Shakira and Burna Boy. It feels like a song suited for beach shacks, those late-afternoon pulsers that play in the background as visitors lean back on cane chairs with margaritas to watch the sunset. The lyrics and the music do nothing, just one loop blurring into another. About two minutes into the song, Shakira goes, “Pele, Maradona, Maldini, Romario. Cristiano. Ronaldo.” Burna Boy responds with some footballers of his own, to which Shakira, incredibly, starts reciting names of participating countries. The more I hear the song—I found I only have the patience for a couple of runs—the more it feels completely airless.

World Cup theme songs have become a global, cross-sport phenomenon. Even cricket does those now. One can understand the pressure on the artists, who are given broad-stroked prompts and asked to engineer a cult hit. Not all of them succeed.

So, what makes a good anthem?

The Groove

Rhythm can be loosely defined as a depiction of events happening over time. You brush twice a day and eat thrice—that’s a rhythm. You wake up in the morning and sleep around midnight, you drink coffee within a few minutes of waking up, you workout every evening, you curse your trainer every third pushup. We live in rhythms.

Rhythm is also how we meet music. When sound enters the ear as a pattern of waves, our brain extracts the pulse before registering the melody. It then starts predicting where the next beat will fall. Finding the beat to fall approximately close to where it expects is a form of pleasure. A song meant for a wide audience must give them a steady rhythm to hold onto.

A groove is the manifestation of rhythm into music. A rhythm is numerical, a groove is sentient. And groove is what makes a song.

The first World Cup theme song I heard was Ricky Martin’s The Cup of Life, rewritten in English from the Spanish original, La Copa de la Vida. It begins with four shots of fireworks, like a drummer tapping his sticks to cue in the band, and then dives straight into a steady batucada groove often heard on the streets of Brazil. In a batucada groove, multiple instruments play in conversation with each other, often in different rhythms but always locked in. In The Cup of Life, that groove is the song’s heartbeat. Even as heavier percussion and a full band dips in and out, the groove stays.

The song’s tempo—120 beats per minute—sits in the perfect spot for its function. Over the last few decades, as our neural relationship to music has been dissected through brain activity research, scientists have found the range of 110-120 BPM (beats per minute) as the optimal tempo at which listeners like to dance. Afro-Brazilian rhythms, like batucada, can span a wide tempo range, as they travel between streets and carnivals, but their sweet spot overlaps significantly with the dance tempo range. Notice how, through the song, your body feels locked in with the tempo.

But tempo, by itself, is not enough. For example: a kick drum loop at 120 BPM becomes stale after a few seconds. Sustaining interest needs surprise. Researchers studying the brain’s reaction to rhythm and tempo also found clues about syncopation—basically, variance. There is a small pocket of just enough syncopation, but not too much, which forms the brain’s ultimate pleasure zone. For this, The Cup of Life goes traditional, with tamborim accents that land just off the expected beat and a montuno piano riff that repeats beneath the surface.

Martin wrote in his autobiography, Me, that his team had approached the album “with the sole mission of getting the entire globe to dance and sing in Spanish.” On the evening of 24th February, 1999, Ricky Martin performed La Copa de la Vida at the 41st Grammy Awards, backed by a full conga and percussion band, a horn section, and dancers on towering stilts. The room, as any Grammy night room, was packed with the brightest showbiz talent in the USA. As Ricky Martin moved from the elegant first verse and asked, “Do you really want it?” Madonna and Celine Dion were on their feet. The rest of the room was up with, “Go, go, go! Allez, allez, allez!”

Percussion is, of course, one way to project rhythm. You can use melodic instruments, the way Hans Zimmer uses cellos and violas to create propulsion in He’s a Pirate. Or, if you want to go really earthy, you bring out the most naturally available instrument in the world: voice.

During the Second World War, Cameroonian soldiers used to sing to each other through long marches. Some phrases carried pain and helplessness, some others carried defiance. One of those phrases, sung as call-and-response to boost morale, was “Tsamina mina zangalewa”. It roughly translates to, “Where do you come from?”

In 1986, a band called Golden Sounds recorded these chants in their Makossa song, “Zangalewa.” Makossa means dance. The song crossed the Atlantic and DJs in coastal Colombia were soon playing it on repeat. And when a Colombian superstar was asked to make the theme song for the 2010 FIFA World Cup—the first football World Cup in Africa—she dipped into her childhood.

“I decided to bring a little bit of my culture too, which is attached to Africa with an umbilical cord,” Shakira said in an interview. “I was raised listening to music that was heavily inspired by African music.”

Waka Waka, like The Cup of Life, leans heavily on energetic African—Latin percussion, topped generously with digital, club-music beats. But its driving force, its rhythmic engine, comes from its vocal lines.

The Melody

There is one common quality amongst all the songs we remember well: we can sing the melody. You could be woken up at 3 am, and you’ll nail the chorus of Country Roads. Similarly, rare is the person who hasn’t hummed “Wise men say, only fools rush in…” at least a few hundred times. A memorable melody is, almost by rule, easy to hum.

Ease comes from repeatability and small vocal movements. Waka Waka feels fun to sing because of its cycle of two syllables: tsa mi-na mi-na eh-eh wa-ka wa-ka eh-eh. The pattern repeats so quickly and frequently, it catches on before we realise. In The Cup of Life, the chorus—“Go, go, go! Allez, allez, allez!”—holds little melodic resemblance to the rest of the song. But, like Waka Waka, it’s easy and repeatable—three single-syllable hits followed by three two-syllable hits.

And notice how, in both choruses, the notes in the cyclical patterns feel adjacent. These patterns—called conjunct melodies in music theory—are easier to sing because the vocal cords have to make smaller physical adjustments between notes. They’re also easier to remember because the brain can encode a smooth, continuous shape more readily; it naturally recognises scales in linear progression. For e.g. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star spans a range of six notes, first ascending then descending in adjacent intervals.

Shape is an important signal for remembering a melody. A 1978 study by psychologist Jay Dowling found that most brains store melodies through two axes: the shape—the pattern of ups and downs; and the tonal framework—the functioning of scales that we’re subconsciously familiar with. In his book, This is Your Brain on Music, Daniel Levitin says, “a melody is an auditory object that maintains its identity in spite of transformations, just as a chair maintains its identity when you move it to the other side of the room, turn it upside down, or paint it red.”

This has a direct consequence for how anthems function. A song that will be sung by sixty thousand people in a stadium—or by the millions watching on television—cannot depend on precision. The melody must be robust enough to survive being reproduced badly, in the wrong key or at the wrong pitch. It must be memorable, and it must sound good for a listener to even be interested.

The Arrangement

Much of the latter is a function of orchestration, or as is commonly known, arrangement. A slightly broader term, inclusive of mixing and mastering, is production. Most musicians are sticklers for this. In fact, playing the same melody on, say, an oboe and then the trombone, and playing it with the rest of the song to check which one sounds better, is very much part of the songwriting process.

The horns in The Cup of Life come in short bursts, like fireworks. And when the song begins to take off, the horns give it momentum. The choice seems conscious. Brass instruments work excellently as sources of energy because of their natural depth and our deep association with them with fanfare and celebration. The intro melody of Shakira’s Hips Don’t Lie, immediately transporting you to a party, is played on a trumpet. Similarly, consider what the keyboard riff is doing for Ishq.

The stomp-stomp-clap rhythm of We Will Rock You is perhaps the greatest living example of a simple idea, driven through a conscious musical choice, turning a song into an anthem.

Cultural Significance

Composing and producing a song aside, does an anthem necessarily have to convey something grand? Does cultural rooting matter to its success? One can argue otherwise and make a strong case: you don’t ever think of a song’s roots while singing or dancing. As Ishq Tera Tadpave is proof, you often don’t think of the lyrics either. Our entire generation danced to Barbie Girl without ever, unfortunately, looking at the lyrics.

But, zooming in, a World Cup anthem needs to have a cultural grounding. It needs to be rooted to a place, ideally the host country. La Copa de la Vida might be the only exception because it’s written in Spanish, by a Puerto Rican artist, as a complete homage to Brazilian music. The World Cup it was written for was held in France and “Allez, allez, allez!” is the extent of French influence in the song.

Waka Waka is a more textbook example because it carries genuine African music into a significantly African tournament. But, I want to talk about another song. It wasn’t written for a World Cup, but licensed and repurposed for one.

Wavin’ Flag was written as a song about Somalia. Keinan Abdi Warsame—K’Naan—was born in 1978 in Mogadishu. His name means traveller in Somali. His grandfather was a famous Somali poet, and his aunt a renowned singer. In his book, K’Naan recalls how whenever he was frightened, whether during violence in Somalia or being bullied by classmates in Canada, his grandfather would comfort him with the words, “When I get older, I will be stronger. They’ll call me freedom, just like a waving flag.”

Wavin’ Flag’s lyrics address war, displacement, poverty, and the agony of losing your home to violence. When Coca Cola selected it as their promotional anthem for the 2010 World Cup, the lyrics were rewritten, with a more hopeful tenor, for a version called, “The Celebration Mix.” You couldn’t speak about war and displacement in a theme song for a tournament played in a continent most affected by war and displacement, now, could you? K’Naan kept the chorus; he wouldn’t have it any other way. The song became a global sensation, with the chorus as its emotional anchor. You hear the lyrics as you sing them.

Subscribe now

Four songs, then. One written to “make people dance”; another born out of military chants; one, a poem about a painful childhood; and one, the result of exuberance, of not letting heartbreak come in the way of a dance beat.

They share many of the same foundations. The tempo is right, the melodies are simple and easy to hum, the rhythms compelling, pressing the right buttons within us. But foundations do not make an anthem, and Shakira and Burna Boy are about to learn this soon. You can lay every beam and pour every footing and the thing can still stand there, perfectly structured, with no life inside.

The true magic—the uncomplicated freedom of La Copa de la Vida, the choral percussion of Waka Waka—is born from human ingenuity. If it were so easy to engineer an anthem, Ishq Tera Tadpave wouldn’t be the most awaited song at every party, twenty-six years after its release.

The last of his sixes took his team, Punjab Kings, to within two runs of victory with nine deliveries left. They got there with a single and a wide. In the dugout, players and staff exchanged high fives and hugs. On the pitch, Shreyas tapped fists with his partner, Shashank Singh, pulled off his helmet, blew out some air, and that was that.

Nothing in the pictures told you that Punjab Kings had just completed the highest ever chase in T20 cricket. They didn’t tell you the significance of getting there with eight deliveries to spare. It’s one thing to execute a record chase, completely another to stroll and hop your way there.

On the receiving end of this, the Delhi Capitals, their faces drained and empty. At the halfway mark, with 264 on the board, they must’ve believed the match was half won. No batting lineup, however deep, chases that down. Not after fielding for two hours in Delhi’s brutal afternoon heat.

Evidently, it was not enough even for a tight finish.

Between them, the two sides faced 234 balls and hit 82 to the boundary—a four or a six every three minutes, for close to four hours. It was extraordinary viewing, equivalent in sensation to eating an entire bar of Toblerone after every meal for a week.

A record chase should leave you on your feet, adrenaline coursing through your body. This one left numbness. Shreyas played several gorgeous strokes that evening; KL Rahul’s innings was an exhibition of neat lines drawn into the Delhi air. I cannot recall a single shot from either knock. Compare this to, say, the near-photographic clarity with which I remember Sachin Tendulkar’s six off Andrew Caddick at the 2003 World Cup—a match I haven’t watched in years. I could draw the line of Caddick’s delivery, point to where it pitched, trace how Sachin swivelled onto his back foot, the arc of his downswing, the exact roof of the Kingsmead Cricket Ground the ball sailed over. This isn’t nostalgia talking, because I remember, just as vividly, Harmanpreet Kaur’s six over covers in last year’s semi-final against Australia.

These shots left a mark because the game around them had texture, richness, many different skillsets colliding. The sixes came as release. For most of this IPL season, teams have compulsively operated with the volume knob turned hard right, leaving no time for breath, nevermind release.

Recently, Muttiah Muralitharan—coach these days at Sunrisers Hyderabad, but holder of 1347 international wickets in his youth—was asked about this incessant flood of boundaries, the soaring team totals in the IPL, and how to not make bowlers feel like props at a batters’ play.

He said, “If we give fair wickets, the spectators will say it’s become boring because the T20 followers want entertainment, so they want to see the fours and sixes. That’s why the tournament is built like that. It is a big business at the moment, sponsors and everything, so you will lose the sponsors and interest of the people if you change it.”

Most others would’ve phrased that answer differently. They would’ve perhaps leaned into the technical and physical skill required to hit so many boundaries, how good their own batters are, or how power-hitting is the nucleus of T20 cricket in the 2020s. Murali, to his great credit, did not muffle the bowler underneath the IPL employee. He smiled through his answer—he always smiles—but read those words again, and you’ll notice a tone of resignation.

**

The Indian Premier League was born with a mishit.

It was the evening of April 18th, 2008. The M. Chinnaswamy Stadium in Central Bangalore, resplendent under floodlights and fireworks, was decked up for a carnival night. At the inaugural match of cricket’s new, glittering show, out walked two new teams. The Kolkata Knight Riders, owned by Shah Rukh Khan, wore a jet black jersey with gold details and gold helmets—Shah Rukh wanted his team to look like medieval knights. Opposite them, the Royal Challengers Bangalore. Owned by a liquor baron, named after a whisky brand, a lineup of 35-year-old Test cricket specialists dipping into a discotheque.

T20 cricket, just four and a bit years old at the time, was still a child. A tournament like the IPL was a solo trip to Disneyland. Nobody knew what to expect.

And so, the first evening. Sourav Ganguly and Brendon McCullum, two firebrands at opposite ends of their careers, pushing and prodding but unsure what tempo to assert. McCullum was on 8 runs off 8 balls—slow by every measure. He needed to hit or go, so he hit. A couple of thrashed fours loosened his limbs and perhaps the mind. But something, you could tell, was still simmering. He swung again. The next ball kissed the outer edge of his bat and flew over the boundary behind him.

Mishit it might’ve been, but it landed with a crack. A Bollywood dance number blared through the speakers, the crowd were up on their feet, even the VVIPs rose up. We were away.

This shot set off a chain reaction whose impact neither McCullum, nor Shah Rukh, nor the league’s creator Lalit Modi could’ve anticipated. Before the match, the International Cricket Council (ICC) President, Ray Mali, had said to Modi, “Congratulations, you have taken cricket to the next level.” They turned out to be prophetic words.

McCullum went into a trance, flaying every bowler coming his way, most into the low-hanging second tier of the Chinnaswamy Stadium. The home crowd, yet to form true loyalty to a franchise team, danced with him anyway. McCullum finished that evening with 158 unbeaten runs off 75 deliveries. Kolkata Knight Riders racked up 222 in their 20 overs. And the collective breath of those present, presenting, in the dugout or watching from home, was taken away.

The next afternoon, Chennai Super Kings put up 240 in their 20 against Kings XI Punjab, who responded with 207.

And just like that, a new order of cricket was written. This old sport hadn’t known a cocktail of drama, glitz, and fireworks as potent as this. From here, it was going to be sixes in bulk. Bats would get fatter and boundary ropes would be pulled in. Teams would get to hoard the world’s best talent. The scariest hitter in the world would bat alongside a technical genius and the most prolific batter in the world. The hitter will score 175 in one afternoon; the prolific guy, soon becoming the face of the sport, will touch nearly one thousand runs over one sweltering summer. Some years later, teams would be allowed a substitute, changing the game’s tenor and rhythm, empowering batters with even more freedom. And all these logs of lean muscle would make hitting boundaries their entire personality.

The audience, long thirsty for something fresh and punchy, would lap this up. They’d be fed so much they’d stop tasting what they’re eating, but they’ll come back for more every evening. At the ground, there will be a DJ dedicated to raising the decibel level and your blood pressure. He’d scream into the mic every thirty or so seconds. On commentary, ex-cricketers will shuffle between selling you cars and asking you to stop what you’re doing and watch a man obliterate bowlers.

**

T20 was invented to fix a few problems. One, most other cricket—Tests and ODIs—happened during work hours. And two, Test and ODI cricket took up hours, often without adequate bang for buck. It was niche and inaccessible for those on the outside looking in. Much market-research later, the answer was a shortened format, played under dark skies and floodlights.

But you’ve got to be careful while compressing a complex, moving entity. Traditional cricket, for all its visible sluggishness, holds tremendous nuance. Bowling requires putting your ankles through many times your body weight—six times an over, over after over. Batting requires facing projectiles at highway speeds, hurled from twenty-two yards, often moving sideways off the surface or through the air. Both skills are extremely difficult—they’re supposed to be, that’s the point.

Cricket at its best places a batter in conversation against a bowler. A seamer finds the right length on a moist pitch and the ball holds its line till the last moment before darting away. The batter plays and misses, plays and misses. The slip cordon walks in three yards. The bowler, ravenous, goes fuller and quicker. Every ball is a question. The batter, if he’s any good, listens. He shoulders arms to one, defends another with soft hands, then punches the next through cover, rebalancing the tone of the argument. This is where cricket breathes. The sport accumulates meaning through pressure, and it is in resistance to pressure that character is revealed.

Take Virat Kohli. Amongst a garland of great innings, some of his finest T20 outings came when the bat was made to work hard. His unbeaten 82 against Pakistan, on Diwali 2022, came against three Pakistani seamers making the ball bounce and swerve on a spicy Melbourne track. The game had almost slipped out of India’s hands. There’s another 82 not out, against Australia in Mohali—Kohli the batter, beginning to enter stratosphere; and India, still playing an archaic version of T20 cricket, on the precipice of getting knocked out of a home World Cup before the knockout rounds. You have many others—the 72 in the 2014 semi-final against South Africa, the 89 in the 2016 semi-final against West Indies. Fine knocks all. But slightly obscured by their volume, you’ll find his 49 and 55 against unyielding Pakistan bowling attacks on abrasive pitches. Played between a few weeks of each other, those two innings turned Kohli from good to great. Pressure knocks make a batter, and it’s doubly true in Test and ODI cricket. None of his nine IPL centuries would’ve given him remotely comparable satisfaction.

Ask Sachin Tendulkar about his favourites, and he will not default to Sharjah ‘98, but Chennai ‘99; Lara will speak of Barbados, not Antigua. Good batting, like good boxing, is an act of resistance and dominance both.

**

I was at the Wankhede Stadium, on March 5th, watching India play England in the semi-final of the T20 World Cup. I will remember that night for how special inhabiting Wankhede felt: the chants rolling across the stands, every other minute; the boy in the next seat venting to me, a complete stranger, about Varun’s bowling; the uncle to his right, a man weary from India losses, sitting with crossed fingers till the final ball; bhel distributed in the row below us; boxes of aamchi in the row above; the yelps, the groans, and the roar from Bumrah’s yorkers at the end.

Writing this two months after that evening, my remaining memory of the cricket is fairly broad-stroked. India batted first and scored 253 in 20 overs. 253 should be an insurmountable total, the kind which deflates the opposition. England nearly chased it down, falling seven runs short, the match on a wire until the penultimate over.

But, even at its final turn, when thirty thousand of us sat with clenched bums, the contest hinged on one question: could the English batters clear the boundary a couple of more times? Not what the bowlers might do, the ways they could own the night, perhaps the pitch playing tricks. Nothing, just the distance the batters were capable of covering.

In the final at Ahmedabad, three days later, India batted first and scored 255. Given the wide boundaries of Ahmedabad’s fishbowl, New Zealand stood no chance. It turned out to be a boring, colourless World Cup final that, looking back, was decided within the first half an hour.

Eight days later, on the first day of this season’s IPL, Sunrisers Hyderabad scored 201, which the Royal Challengers Bengaluru chased down with five full overs to spare, as if to confirm that T20 cricket, in all forms, was a loop, the same melody moving between instruments without change in register or tempo.

Subscribe now

In school, during computer lab periods, while the teacher made her rounds checking if we’d finished our C++ assignments, we played a browser game called Stick Cricket. It was cricket reduced to its barest bones—a stick figure at the crease, a thinner stick-figure bowler delivering the ball, and two or three shots to choose from. You picked a direction, pressed your arrow key, and the ball flew. It was incredible fun: I once scored some 400 in 10 overs playing with Bradman and Sobers. You could finish an entire match in the time it took the teacher to walk from one end of the lab to another. It was too ludicrous a caricature to venture beyond browsers and mobile phones.

By making cricket a mirror image of this, by pushing the conditions so far in favour of the batters that bowlers become secondary citizens, you deny the sport its central tension. And without tension, without a strong pull to a push, there is no story. You lay the road for fewer matches that test every skillset of the sport. You arrive, eventually, at scores above 250 in World Cup semi-finals and finals, and 264 getting chased in two hours flat, without sweat. You arrive at a version of the sport where the highlights reel and the full match feel roughly the same, and every frame has the same species in the centre. No amount of shrieking hyperbole from the commentary box can conceal the foundational hollowness of such a thing.

T20 cricket, this format so full of possibility, has been reduced to an inert television programme. It’s weak sport. And everyone is worse off, even the batters.

The pictures show an easy afternoon. Not the best thing to see as you sit down to work.

Now in its third year, the contest is South Korea’s eccentric response to a chronic-insomnia crisis that is, by all clinical measures, global. According to this Economist report from 2022, “The average American adult snoozes almost two hours less than their great grandparents did. More than a third of Americans get less than seven hours of kip a night.” For help, we’re turning to technology.

The worldwide market for sleep-tech devices—Oura rings, Eight Sleep mattresses, Whoop bands—is valued at nearly $30 billion, expected to soar to north of $100 billion by the next decade.1 Matteo Franceschetti, co-founder of Eight Sleep, thinks the addressable market for his company is “literally everyone in the world”.

The same Whoop band worn by a Bengaluru jogger to gamify her morning routine yields, on the wrist of a fast bowler, a data stream that can determine whether he starts the weekend’s match. And the first thing checked every morning is the recovery score—a measure of sleep.

Professional sport was the first industry to treat sleep as a performance input.

During the mid-to-late 1990s, Manchester United Football Club devoured English football. Their league title in 1993 was their first in 26 years, and it opened a dam that no team in England could hold back. Between 1993 and 2001, they won seven league titles, three domestic cups, and a European title. Their coach, Alex Ferguson, became Sir Alex Ferguson for his contribution to English football. Concealed behind his public persona as a red-fisted disciplinarian was a man fascinated by innovation and experiments.

It was around the first surge of titles that Ferguson met Nick Littlehales, a mattress industry executive who had become the marketing director for Slumberland. Littlehales approached Ferguson with a fundamental question: had the club ever considered how sleep affected performance on the pitch? The question was obviously rhetorical. No one was measuring sleep, anywhere in the world. Ferguson, intrigued, invited Littlehales to United’s Carrington training ground to speak with the players and medical staff.

The first practical application of Littlehales’ theories involved star defender Gary Pallister, who was plagued by chronic back problems. Littlehales evaluated Pallister’s sleeping environment and discovered that his bedding was contributing to his spinal issues. By providing personalised mattresses and pillows—and educating the player on spinal alignment during rest—Littlehales helped produce an immediate and identifiable improvement in Pallister’s condition. The experiment evolved into to a regular consultancy where Littlehales worked with the entire United team.

Under Littlehales’ guidance, Ferguson implemented radical changes to the club’s training schedule. Traditionally, pre-season involved gruelling morning sessions. Ferguson, however, decided to double up on training, instituting both morning and afternoon sessions, but with a critical caveat: players were required to sleep or nap in specifically designed recovery rooms between sessions. This was an early implementation of multiphasic sleep—the idea that recovery should not be limited to a single nocturnal block but should be distributed across the 24-hour cycle to meet the elevated metabolic and neurological demands of elite training.

Littlehales also introduced sleep kits for away matches and international travel. These kits ensured that players had personalised bedding and environmental controls (such as light-blocking tools) regardless of the hotel they were staying in, thereby minimising the “first-night effect” and other disruptions to the circadian rhythm. By 1998, the England men’s national team were commissioning personalised sleep kits.

Westwards, the NBA and NFL coaches took note, although they were slower to integrate sleep scientists into their conversations. In the 2009-2010 NBA season, the San Antonio Spurs, under Gregg Popovich, invited a specialist from Stanford University to help optimise rest. Simultaneously, the Portland Trail Blazers began a partnership with Dr. Charles Czeisler, the director of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School.2

The NFL centralised sleep initiatives in 2018 when it announced a multi-year league-wide partnership with Sleep Number, providing every active player in the league with a 360 smart bed. These beds utilised SleepIQ—a non-wearable biometric sensor system built into the mattress that tracks heart rate, breathing patterns, and movement.

And while Manchester United and NBA franchises have the resources to innovate, the reach of sleep into professional sport became most starkly evident when, in 2016, Brentford Football Club, then in the second tier of English football, started working with Danish sleep expert Anna West, the founder of Sleep2perform.

In this interview with Training Ground Guru, West said, “At Brentford, we divided the players into a traffic light of profiles after doing the screening. Reds had a racing mind, problems falling asleep, nights when they never even went to sleep. This had a big impact on their performance and injury risk. Even if a player was a green, which meant they were sleeping well, there were still improvements that could be made.”

Today, almost all elite teams in the Premier League, NBA, and NFL have formal sleep protocols. They dedicate millions of dollars to sleep every year.

In Seoul, the man who won this May’s edition told a local newspaper he had no particular technique. He simply lay down on the grass, closed his eyes, and stopped trying to be awake. I wonder if he’s interested in becoming a sleep coach and making a couple of cool millions.

Subscribe now

Before I go, here’s Max Richter’s eight-hour album, Sleep. “It's a piece that is meant to be listened to at night,” he says. “I hope that people will fall asleep listening to it, because the project is also a personal exploration into how music interacts with consciousness.”

Around the time Hinge was reaching rarefied air, I had the chance to speak to Jordan Himelfarb—managing editor at Toronto Star—about his new book, Interregnum. A short review was published in today’s Deccan Herald. Himelfarb and I spoke for nearly an hour, and most of it circled the question of storytelling within chess.

First, a scene.

On the afternoon of 12th December, 2024, the Habitat Comedy Club in Mumbai was buzzing. Three panelists sat behind a table on stage with microphones. To their right stood a giant projector screen, almost stretching between floor and wall. The audience was not the usual comedy crowd. They were young men and women, and some in early middle age, who had gathered on a weekday afternoon to watch a chess match.

A few thousand miles eastwards, in the banquet hall of a luxury resort in Singapore, eighteen-year-old Gukesh Dommaraju sat across from the defending world champion, Ding Liren. At stake, the world championship title. The hours went by, and the crowd at Habitat cheered Gukesh’s moves with full throats, as if they were shots in a football match between Manchester United and Arsenal.

After four hours of push and pull, will-he-won’t-he tension, the match heading towards a draw, Ding moved his white rook to f2.

Interregnum begins with Ding’s world championship triumph in 2023. “Ding is slight and wan,” Himelfarb tells us. “Eye contact is not his forte. Ding likes to watch the rain, read poetry and philosophy. He detests leather shoes because they remind him of businessmen, of people with power over others.”

When Ding reached Singapore to defend his title against Gukesh, he had not won a game in over three hundred days. He had been hospitalised for depression. Magnus Carlsen, never one to hold his words, declared him “permanently broken.” And yet, Ding showed up, crediting coffee for pushing him through the pain.

White rook to f2, in that situation, was a blunder. Ding knew it the instant the piece landed on the board. At Habitat, the panelists—professional chess players, among them Tania Sachdev, who represents India—rose from their chairs, recognising what the move had done to the game. On the projector screen, two faces told the whole story: Ding’s dazed eyes darting across the board, Gukesh’s narrowing on the pieces, confirming to himself that what he was seeing was real. The crowd released a thunderous “YESS!”

Gukesh put his hands over his mouth and got up from the chair. He moved his king to e5. He was going to be World Champion—the youngest ever, four years quicker to the summit than Garry Kasparov.

“Interregnum,” according to the Oxford Dictionary, means “a period of time during which a country, an organization, etc. does not have a leader and is waiting for a new one.” To that end, Himelfarb traces a timeline in sync with the book’s name—from Ding Liren’s World Championship title in 2023 to Gukesh’s in 2024. But the book reveals itself, quickly, as a fix to a different problem.

And chess has a couple. The first is the simplest: it is nearly impossible to enjoy casually. Learning the game properly feels like enrolling in a semester of applied mathematics. Knowing the rules will win you games against your three-year-old nephew, but your empire’s influence effectively stops there. To watch the professionals, to understand what they’re thinking, to feel the tension in a position, demands a wealth of knowledge that most people will never acquire.

At least, that’s the impression the game gives off. And it’s a forbidding one, thick enough to act as a barricade against ever considering chess as a hobby pick-up. If you’re winding down after a hectic day, the last thing you want is to rev your brain back into an overdrive of positional calculations. A quick game of FIFA, an episode of Seinfeld—these ask nothing of you, which is precisely the point.

This feeds into its second problem: the absence of a colour palette to dress its characters in. To play chess professionally, one must live the life of a monk or an addict; nothing else would suffice.

If I were to ask you to describe a chess player, how would you go about it? You’d think of short hair, a tad unkempt. You’d think of crisp shirts and analog watches, maybe a suit and spectacles. They’d have the gaze of a mathematics professor. They’d be the kind of person who enters a party late, eats their dinner quietly in the corner, and leaves at 10pm. The kind you’d have to explain every joke to.

“Chess has long had a communication problem,” Himelfarb told me. “It’s an abstract, technical game. But it’s also a beautiful, dramatic game, full of interesting characters and profound emotions. I wanted to capture all that in a way that resonated for chess fans and newcomers alike.”

Himelfarb’s own interest in chess spiked with The Queen’s Gambit. The Netflix show appeared in the first year of the Covid pandemic, that suffocating summer when we had too little social interaction and too much time on our hands. Episode by episode, as the lead protagonist Beth Harmon moved through those ornate, tense American rooms, her life a breathless loop of preparation and performance, Himelfarb found himself drawn into her life. Beth, contoured in drab shades, held within her all the obsession, anxieties, and insecurities as one finds in athletes of more glamourous sports.

The truest portrait of a place is found in the lives of the people who live there. Interregnum is their story.

Ian Nepomniachtchi—affectionately called Nepo—was born as the Soviet Union was crumbling. He was raised on Chekhov and Pushkin and the hop of the knight. Of all his brilliant rivals, Magnus Carlsen once said, Nepo might be the only “genius.” But genius in chess is a fleeting tag. In the 2021 World Championship match in Dubai, Carlsen administered such a thumping that Nepo, mid-tournament, “apologised to his chess-obsessed country and cut off his topknot like a disgraced samurai.”

Magnus Carlsen himself is rendered not as just another character but a force of nature. He completed fifty-piece jigsaw puzzles at two; by five, he could name the capital and population of every country on earth. Carlsen knows he’s the best. During the World Cup in Baku, Carlsen asked his social media manager to draft a tweet, to be posted only if he won the tournament. It read: “Chess? Completed.”

Carlsen’s arc presented Himelfarb with a temptation of diving head-first into the technical side of chess. After all, it’s impossible to find a player with a larger vocabulary than Carlsen.

And yet, Himelfarb resists. He sprinkles technical detail the way a good travel writer sprinkles local vocabulary—just enough to ground you in the place without losing you in it. We learn that the Queen’s Gambit Declined was used as a positional weapon, that the Reti Opening places bishops on the flanks to gaze “sentry-like” across the board, that a knight on the rim is dim.

But, every move is narrated as a glimpse into the psyche of the player who played it. For example, Gukesh Dommaraju insists on playing a version of the Queen’s Gambit Declined against the advice of his entire team because he has sensed a fragility in Ding Liren.

Interregnum brings the reader close to the board, but gazing at the players. That’s where, Himelfarb insists, true drama lies.

Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit was a transformative show for chess. It did for chess for Drive To Survive did for Formula One: bringing a legion of fans who were previously uninterested, and opened their eyes to the stories that hover over the board. The effect was immediate: Chess.com’s membership more than tripled to over 150 million users. Chess sets sold like IHOP pancakes.

Players began streaming, and the game spread, nearly overnight, to corners of the world where it previously had little profile. Consider Hikaru Nakamura, who thinks of himself as a streamer first and a chess grandmaster second. He gets cranky when he has to break his streaming schedule for a tournament. His Twitch channel surpassed one million followers even as his tournament results declined.

Subscribe now

But, all these characters, Nakamura and Gukesh and Carlsen and Ding Liren, are men. What about the women?

Chapter five of Interregnum dives into the most jarring loose thread within chess’ fabric: the gender disparity. Thirty years after Judit Polgar breached the world top 10, drawing to a close all doubts about the ceiling for women in the sport, there exists an unmistakable institutional apathy.

“It is social residue from a previous century,” Himelfarb told me. “The most important barrier to parity is a history of sexism in the sport - from derogatory comments to sexual harassment and abuse. In recent years, the chess world has finally begun to reckon with this, which is crucial. To see women at the very top of the sport requires bringing more girls to the game and encouraging them to stick with it. That begins with showing girls that the chess world is welcoming and safe.”

In Interregnum, Himelfarb dedicates generous space to India—the birthplace of chess at shatranj. India is home to more grandmasters than any other country. Today, it gives chess.com its highest share of membership. The office of an organisation I once worked at kept a chess board on a small round table, two plastic chairs on either side, for employees to sit down for a quick game. I don’t remember finding the spot empty too often.

Viswanathan Anand, one of the sport’s all-time greats, has overseen India’s recent chess dominance with the care of a parent. It’s hard to find a chess grandmaster in India who hasn’t trained with Anand, either at an academy or at his Chennai home. Chess is part of Chennai’s cultural fabric. You’ll find schools dedicating extra-curricular classes and coaching centres where hundreds gather to learn the sport as an exercise in cartography. Take a flight to Chennai during a major chess event, and as you descend, you’ll spot a bridge painted in the chess monochrome.

Sometime this year, Gukesh will defend his title against the precocious twenty-year-old Javokhir Sindarov. Vaishali Rameshbabu will play for the women’s championship against defending champion Ju Wenjun.

In the paragraphs leading up to the 2024 championship match, Himelfarb illustrates Gukesh’s anxiety and fears in patient lines. At break on the first day, Gukesh confessed to feeling the championship slip from his grasp. That evening, he went to a beach and spent hours watching people bungee-jump from a bridge.

On the next afternoon, after all was played and done, Gukesh, his hands trembling, eyes watering, arranged the pieces in correct order, as he had done after every game since childhood. One chapter of his life ended there, drenched in tears and gold, and another began.

After Gukesh landed in Chennai, soldiers escorted him through a crush of cameras and screaming schoolchildren. He was showered with flower petals. A shy, 18-year-old boy from Chennai was, briefly, the centre of India’s attention, a position many had only seen cricket heroes take.

We experience sport through stories. Stories make us stay up nights and crowd into clubs, screaming at a screen. Jordan Himelfarb’s Interregnum argues that chess produces them in every genre. One just needs to look.

The South Summit Ridge is a narrow straight opening to the peak of Mount Everest. Every May, it fills up with climbers in bright, puffed up nylon jackets, looking like the Michelin Man, thick sunglasses, oxygen masks, and layer upon layer of insulated clothing.

More than 800 climbers reached the summit in 2025 alone. Amongst them was Sherpa Kami Rita, on his 31st visit. In the 21st century, more than 12,000 have reached the top of Everest. It has now become a thing people do.

These are insane numbers. They, of course, come with an asterisk of accompanying sherpas often made to carry the climbers’ luggage, but reaching the top of Everest, with its fat dossier of fatal warnings, is staggering nonetheless.

Tenzing Norgay tried five times and failed. On one attempt, he reached within 400 metres of the summit and had to turn back. Then, Edmund Hillary arrived from Auckland, a beekeeper with years of Himalayan climbing experience, and together they left basecamp in early April of 1953. For seven weeks, they climbed and paused, with primitive equipment and oxygen systems. On 29th May, they reached the top of Everest and clicked a few pictures.

It’s a bit different today. The route is known, the camps are planned months in advance, sherpa teams do most of the grunt work. Climbers acclimatise for weeks at Basecamp and wait for the weather to turn kind. Once the window opens, they can go from camp to summit and back in less than a week. Climbing the highest mountain in the world is now a sliced project.

I have been thinking about Norgay and Hillary recently, especially while watching, on loop, the winning lap of the 2026 London Marathon. Sabastian Sawe, from Kenya, and then, eleven seconds later, Yomif Kejelcha, from Ethiopia, running past the finish arch while the first digit on the clock was still 1, sprinting 21kmph through the tape, and then through the idea that a human being cannot run 42.2 kilometres in less than two hours.

Running is hard work. Distance running, harder still. In the incredible book Born to Run, author Christopher McDougall recalls a Sports Injury Bulletin article about long distance running. “Athletes whose sport involves running put enormous strain on their legs. Each footfall hits one of their legs with a force equal to more than twice their body weight. Just as repeated hammering on an apparently impenetrable rock will eventually reduce the stone to dust, the impact loads associated with running can ultimately break down your bones, cartilage, muscles, tendons, and ligaments.”

To finish a marathon in less than two hours, one needs to endure this demolition while maintaining an average pace of 21.1 kmph. Most of us wouldn’t dare try this on a treadmill, even for 10 seconds, even with an ambulance service on speed dial. The nutrition, in the lead-up and on race day, must be precise—sufficient fuel without a gram of excess weight. Oxygen uptake must be exact. The weather must be mild, the course flat with long straights. This sort of feat exists more on paper than in reality.

There is an odd cruelty in sport. When someone does something incredible, we celebrate it, and then immediately cast our eyes forward, waiting for someone else to do it better. It also strangely illustrates the point of sport: the idea of pushing past limits, often internal, sometimes collective.

This wait, for someone to breach the sub-two barrier, had been our preoccupation for 128 years, since the first ever marathon at the London Olympics and Johnny Hayes’ finish time of 2:55:18. For the first few decades, the minutes dropped rapidly on the world record, like an overweight man losing kilos after regularly hitting the weights. Then it moved it fractions: ten seconds here, one minute there. Between 1968 and 1998, there was a reduction of two minutes in the record time. A 1991 research paper suggested sub-two hour marathon could happen, but don’t hold your breath.

Generations of the greatest runners we’ve known tried and came back with personal bests of 2 hours and sundry. Even Haile Gebrselassie took 239 seconds too many. Long distance running matured and became a million-dollar industry. Runners wore perforated vests and shoes with engineered foam. Entire departments at medical colleges dedicated themselves into calculating the combination of physics and biology that might get us there. Nike poured a few million dollars into Breaking2.

In 2017, Ross Tucker, a sports scientist at the University of Cape Town, showed us the numbers. Marathon times had improved by two per cent in fifteen years. The record then was 2:02:57. To break two hours meant shaving off another three minutes from a time that had already been shaved and shaved. “We want to do a double Usain Bolt on the marathon record?” he asked.

Our Roger Bannister moment just wouldn’t come. It has now arrived, thanks to Sabastian Sawe and Yomif Kejelcha, who, by the way, was running his first ever marathon. One of the first to offer congratulations was Eliud Kipchoge.

Two years after Tucker conveyed his concerns, Eliud Kipchoge went to Vienna and ran 42.2 kilometres in 1:59:40. Twenty seconds to the good, the ultimate barrier broken. But—and this is a pretty significant detail—the event was an exhibition, not a race. Kipchoge ran alone, behind pacemakers arranged in an arrowhead formation, parting the air so he could move through a pocket of reduced drag. His nutrition and hydration were calculated to the last granule. His shoes were prototypes too advanced for official racing. The entire thing was a proof of concept funded by Nike and INEOS, and performed by a champion runner. Kipchoge’s finish made it a pathbreaking day for sport, but it was still a mundane, slow Saturday for the bookkeepers.

Come to think of it. One of the greatest runners of all time, holder of two Olympic gold medals, effectively spent the two fastest hours of his life showing others what could be done.

At the halfway point of this year’s London Marathon, six runners had formed a pack behind a set of pacers. The projected finish time was 2 hours and 1 minute. The last pacer dropped out after 25 kilometres. Running nearly 10 miles without a pacer to block the wind should’ve pushed Sawe back. Instead, he sped up. He broke the record for the fastest mile in a marathon somewhere around his 24th or 25th. Alongside him, step by step, was Yomif Kejelcha. Sawe surged past Buckingham Palace and down The Mall, past the thousands lined up on both sides, and crossed the finish line at 1:59:30. He did not know his time before finishing. Eleven seconds later, Kejelcha came through.

Subscribe now

Records are celebrations of singular achievement, but their real life begins after, in what they made possible. A record says: here is where the boundary stood, and here is a human being standing beyond it, and now the rest of you know that the ground over there is reachable. Kipchoge’s two hours in Vienna did not count in any official register, but it counted in the minds of every elite marathoner alive.

Similarly, when Bolt finishes 100 metres in less than 10 seconds, when Nadia Comăneci lands a perfect 10, when Phelps wins eight gold medals in one Olympic Games, the achievement is collective, at a species level. It’s a dot on the timeline of human progress, like astronauts circling past the dark side of the moon and splashing back on Earth.

The Roger Bannister Effect refers to the notion that once an impossible barrier falls, others follow quickly. Within two and a half years of Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile, ten more runners did the same. Ten thousand Test runs was once considered an unimaginable achievement, just like twenty Grand Slam singles titles. Both have been passed, many times over. The magnificently-named Gout Gout from Australia will one day finish a 100 metres race quicker than Bolt’s 9:58, if not by LA2028 then by Brisbane 2032.

Sometime this month, a traffic jam will happen again at the South Summit Ridge. May, after all, is peak climbing season. Five hundred climbers, give or take, will reach the top of Everest, walking through the pass that Hillary and Norgay opened seventy-three years ago.

Sawe and Kejelcha have opened a comparable pass, though theirs is on flat ground, at sea level, measured not in altitude but in seconds. A sub-two marathon, inconceivable just a couple of decades back, is now part of our folklore. Somewhere in the world, a young runner will wake up with the first ray of sunlight, and chase their dream. And that dream will not start with the digit 2 anymore.

Short, with brute upper-body strength and the hand-eye coordination of the gifted, Pant could hit the ball a mile. He reminded us of, yes, that guy. And we’d been obsessed with that guy since we first laid eyes on him at an Australian summer, and then in Mumbai, and then, brutally, in Johannesburg. We had always wanted our own version. In Pant, we saw those shades. There was a bit of Gilchrist in Pant’s square cuts and bottom-handed flicks.

There was also, in Pant, a bit of the old Dhoni. The Dhoni who would play the most audacious shots in the most seemingly unlikely situations; the Dhoni who had the entire subcontinent in awe, a Pakistani army chief included; the Dhoni who was a biker turned cricketer. Captain Dhoni, the calmer, more calculated avatar, had given us many great afternoons and evenings, but he was impossible to emulate. No one can balance serenity and genius like that. But in that process of Marauder Dhoni turning into Captain Dhoni, we had lost a bit of his rawness we had loved so dearly. Pant brought that back.

The timing was worth noting. Dhoni had begun his home stretch—albeit without a definitive finish line—for India, having relinquished his captaincy to Virat Kohli. In a couple of years, if not earlier, the pathway to India colours would be clear.

And so, Trent Bridge and that six off Adil Rashid to announce himself. That century at The Oval. Sydney, twice. By that golden afternoon in Brisbane, he was a national hero. Ahmedabad and Cape Town were affirmations of something we knew well.

You can make a serious case that Rishabh Pant is India’s greatest ever wicketkeeper-batter in Test cricket. And he’s just 28.

But what of limited-overs cricket, its pace and zest, the things Pant seemed made for when we first saw him? The other two guys were naturals. Eight years of sparks later, Pant isn’t within an earshot of India’s ODI and T20 teams.

There are plausible explanations. In Test cricket, teams keep attacking fields, which allow Pant’s natural audacity to flourish through regular boundaries. That is Pant’s oxygen. Deprive him of boundaries for too long, and you’ll see him itching. The defensive fields of limited overs cricket cut off the supply for long periods. So, all we get is the occasional night of fireworks. But this is also a simplistic explanation. Pant is far too talented a player to not have worked out routes to quick runs.

Maybe he will, in time. But what we have, right now, is this player who is one of the first names on the team sheet in Test cricket, and a neither-here-nor-there player in limited overs. And yet, auction after auction, IPL teams splurge on him as if he somehow might find light. Zilch. It has been eight seasons since Pant racked up more than three 50+ scores in a single IPL season.

In the 2025 auction, Pant was bought by Lucknow SuperGiants for a whopping 27 crore, making him the most expensive player ever in the league’s history. LSG made him captain, possibly bending to his aspirations over more accomplished CVs, like Aiden Markram, who leads the South Africa T20 team. So far, Pant hasn’t generated the runs or the tactical nous. Last night’s outing against the Kolkata Knight Riders was an illustration of Pant’s frustrating returns with the bat and the lack of a captain’s instinct. He batted poorly, almost scared to take the kind of risks that would’ve pushed his team forward, and then selected LSG’s most out of form batter to start their one over shootout.

Subscribe now

You will have to travel long and hard to find an Indian cricket fan who doesn’t adore Rishabh Pant. In fact, you might find many who once fought for him with their friends and families, convinced that the boy will one day become a great.

I think all of us, including the Lucknow SuperGiants owners and coaching staff, seek in today’s Rishabh Pant the Rishabh Pant we saw when he came as a spike-haired, broad-shouldered teenager from West Delhi, who took the IPL and Indian cricket by storm, who reminded us of Gilchrist and a young Dhoni. It’s hard to resist that impulse, and it becomes harder every time he does well in Test cricket, which is often.

The next auction is in roughly eighteen months. It will be fascinating to see if the scent from Pant’s youth can last that long. It’s either that, or Rishabh Pant finally figures out a way to platform his extraordinary gifts in more than one format.

Sometime that afternoon, I wandered over to the ticketing website, just a passerby peering through windows. FIFA served me three scrolls of available matches. Second from the top, incredibly, was USA vs Paraguay—the host nation’s curtain-raiser and most anticipated football match in thirty-two years. About a third of the tickets were up for grabs. The cheapest ticket for the game, far up in the nosebleed section of the 70,000-seater SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, cost $1940. That’s nine times the ticket price my friend Arjun paid to watch Lionel Messi-led Argentina play Netherlands in a quarter-final at the last World Cup.

One day after USA’s opener, Haiti play Scotland in Boston. The Category 1 seats for that match cost $1250—almost enough to have bought you a pitchside seat to watch Messi lift the World Cup in Qatar.

**

Every FIFA World Cup montage begins with a scene from Mexico City and one from Pasadena, California. Maradona at Mexico City, eyes closed, arms raised, is a tableau of ecstasy and deliverance, genius turning into God. Baggio at Pasadena is a picture of pain. You see a ponytailed man in a brilliant blue shirt, number 10 on his chest, shoulders caved in, while, in the blurred background, canary yellow shirts flutter like confetti.

Baggio, the best footballer in the world, has just sent the decisive penalty over the crossbar. The 1994 final is over. Everything about him, his life, his career, is collapsing.

But look at that picture again. Not at Baggio; at the light. World Cup finals happen under floodlights, under the theatre and shimmer of night. Baggio’s devastation is lit by the afternoon sun. The sky is clean and blue, the crowd in pastels and beach hats and sunglasses. This is what football looked like in America.

The 1994 Men’s World Cup was the tournament’s first trip beyond its childhood homes in Europe, South America, and Mexico. Football had tried to break into America a couple of decades before, when Pele, Beckenbauer, and Johann Cruyff wore strange jerseys and played to half-full crowds. That experiment was shelved, but not for long. The world’s most popular sport had to find a way into its most powerful country.

Hence, 1994. The Cold War was won, rivals had dissolved, and American corporations were stamping neon logos onto every corner of the planet. The United States were unrivalled leaders of the present and future. Over 94,000 attended the final in Pasadena, where Baggio felt his right foot shatter his lifelong dream.

This was, still, an extended and elaborate trial run. So much about the tournament was late-1980’s-coded: baggy shirts, glossy prints, sunglasses that covered half the face, bald men with mild protrusions playing centre-midfield. All that would soon change. The next time football came to America, it would be a slick, 21st-century product.

**

And so, here we are, back to the land of milk and honey, Cruise and Kendrick, Trump and Tate. Here, David Beckham owns a team from a beach city and Lionel Messi wears its pink jersey. If you’re travelling from another country, you will likely meet an immigration agent in a kevlar vest, carrying an M4 rifle, before you see your luggage.1

The World Cup starts in seven weeks. The war in Iran and Lebanon has now stretched beyond fifty days. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s dehumanising visa blacklist has swelled to 72 countries, amongst them Haiti, Egypt, and Cape Verde, participants at the World Cup. Fans from these countries may be required to pay a bond of $5000 to $15,000 to simply enter the USA.2

The bonds are technically refundable, but for residents of the many countries it is applicable to, it could cost months, if not years, of earnings. While some countries—like Tunisia and Algeria—have a couple of games in Canada and Mexico, where no such bonds exist, most, like Iran, don’t.

As of publication of this essay, Iran are scheduled to play their group matches in Los Angeles and Seattle. You will not see an Iranian fan at the World Cup, even if, through exceptional circumstances, you see their team.

Offside, a 2006-film made by Jafar Panahi, is a story of Iranian girls disguising themselves as boys to watch Iran play Bahrain in a World Cup qualifier at the Azadi Stadium in Tehran. The film is banned in Iran, lest it influence others to commit sacrilege. Since 1979, Iranian women have been forbidden from entering football stadiums. And yet, like water pushing at boulders, they’ve found a way. In 1997, they broke police barricades and entered the Azadi; in 2014, they wore thick veils to cafes and watched Iran play at the World Cup.

In March 2019, a twenty-nine-year-old woman named Sahar Khodayari put on a blue wig and tried to enter the Azadi Stadium to watch her team Esteghlal FC play in the AFC Champions League. She was arrested, and charged with appearing in public without a hijab. She spent three nights in a detention centre and was later summoned to the Revolutionary Court. After leaving the courthouse, Khodayari poured petrol over herself and lit a match, burning ninety percent of her body. She died a week later. Iranians called her the Blue Girl.

A month after her passing, under tremendous pressure from FIFA, Iran allowed women into the Azadi for the first time in four decades. The occasion was a World Cup qualifier against Cambodia. The initial allocation of 3,500 tickets sold out within minutes. Inside, the women who made it chanted Blue Girl, Blue Girl. Iran won 14–0.

**

World Cups are sundials one tracks life with. I was a boy in ‘98, and I remember the World Cup because the TV was new, the colours were bright, Ronaldo was rapid, and Zidane played like he had more time than others. The 2002 edition passed through my aunt’s wedding—a fortnight-long event that started with railway station pickups and ended with teary farewells. By the final, the house was empty, just the couple of us in front of a television watching Ronaldo bury his ghosts from ‘98. I was in college in 2010, pulling nights at a shady startup in 2014, and covering the tournament in 2018. The ball stayed round while the life around it changed.

The 2026 edition comes to us when we desperately need something to hold onto. The air outside, and behind our screens, is grey with ash. International and domestic laws apply only to the marginalised. Resistance feels both imperative and futile. I have never thought of a World Cup as a global sanctuary, but I have also never felt so depleted of hope about the world.

The football bits will happen, inevitably. Some underdog team will reach the quarter-finals, some teenager will carve his name into our consciousness, and a genius will make the impossible look pedestrian.

A World Cup, though, is made by the vibrant backdrop to athletic excellence. The sound of fifty beating drums in a tall stand, bodies painted in national colours, eyes red from all-nighters spent travelling between cities, fathers lifting children in the stands, a beardless twenty-year-old on his first World Cup, a seventy-five-year-old clutching a replica trophy. Stories of a city taking to the streets with brass and drums, and another, far away, seeking refuge in alcohol. This is the heartbeat of tournament sport, the light we carry home.

**

On paper, the decision to give the USA hosting rights was sound. The World Cups of this century—Japan/Korea, Germany, South Africa, Brazil, Russia, Qatar—were held in countries that had to build from scratch or improvise. The United States were ready with the stadiums, the airports, the hotel rooms, the highways, and the dollars. They hadn’t hosted the Men’s World Cup or the Olympics in three decades. This was the moment.

Predictably, the suits in FIFA and the USA were waiting for this moment too.

The first tranche of tickets for this World Cup was released in October. FIFA had promised accessible pricing like at previous World Cups. They arrived, instead, with ‘Dynamic Pricing’—a term borrowed from airlines and taxi-platforms, in which the cost of a ticket rises and falls depending on demand and availability. It was a thin, transparent smokescreen.

By April 2026, ticket prices had gone up exponentially. The most expensive tickets for the final are currently going at $10,900—nine times the amount fans paid for the same ticket in Qatar.3

Even that sum doesn't guarantee you what you paid for. Fans who bought Category 1 tickets—the most expensive section—found their seats shifted without consent or intimation, to accommodate new VIP sections. They logged in on the ticketing portal to see a different seating map from what they had been provided during earlier sale windows. The Athletic spoke to Kiara Gilmore, who bought Category 1 tickets to a match in Arlington and found her seats moved to Category 2. “It’s just frustrating when you think you’re paying for one thing, and you get another, and then they change [the map] on you.”

Then, there’s the travel. A round-trip train from New York City to New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium costs $150—nearly twelve times the regular $12.90 fare for the roughly 15-minute, 9-mile ride. A parking spot across the highway will cost $225 per match.4

Dan Corry, an English economist who has attended the last eleven World Cups, told The New Yorker, “At other World Cups, the focus seems to be on making sure the fans have a good time. The ticket prices are reasonable, there are fan fests, and the host cities work out how to get fans to the grounds for free. It just doesn’t feel like this World Cup has the idea of making sure the fans have a good time at its center. There are all sorts of other agendas going on.”

Pannalal and Chaitali Chatterjee, from Kiddirpore, Kolkata, attended ten consecutive World Cups, from 1982 to 2018. They lived lives of attrition, rationing every purchase, whether rice or cloth, with one eye on their World Cup fund. “We don’t have kids,” Pannalal had once said. “Football is our only child and whatever we spend, we spend on something we love.” Pannalal passed away in 2019, aged 90, before he could raise ten to eleven.

Maybe Corry will travel to the World Cup this time, but Chaitali won’t. It’s unlikely FIFA will care for either.

More than a million fans travelled to Qatar between November and December 2022. The final, between Argentina and France, recorded nearly 1.5 billion views and an average live audience of 571 million. No sport, no spectacle, comes close. For FIFA, this is the money spinner, and they love money; no one who has watched FIFA operate for any length of time would pretend otherwise. But there used to be an unwritten law that the World Cup existed, at least in part, as an open-doors celebration of the sport. For the Dan Corrys and Pannalal Chatterjees of the world, for the Iranian women and Haitian men trying to escape their lives for one fleeting week, for a backpacker from Athens to share fries with a banker from London. That pact has not just been broken but mocked and spat on. What remains is a tournament designed, with great sophistication, to extract the maximum possible amount of money from those who give the tournament its life.

Every once in a while, you wonder who the sport serves. And then you open Twitter and get the answer. And, to think, the Los Angeles Olympics is two short years away.

My breath was already heavy, my strides uneven. It wasn’t meant to be like this. I had been running medium distance—between 5 and 10 kilometres—for years. A tall, muscular man tapped on my shoulder, saying something to the effect of, “chin up, smaller strides.” It was kind, timely, and the right running advice. The run got easier, but only for a fleeting moment before I looked up and across from the road and saw the Thiruvanmiyur MRTS station, and next to it the left turn towards home. Then it started to hurt.

It was 5:30am on a Sunday morning. My bed was a 15-20 minute light walk away. No one would know if I snuck out. To my friends, I could cherrypick any excuse: wasn’t feeling well, hurt myself, overslept etc etc. I could get myself some nice ginger lemon tea in the morning, watch football later.

At this point, I wish I had an inspirational moment to share. Like, the playlist serving up Europe’s The Final Countdown, and when the intro synths hit, I felt like Sylvester Stallone in a boxing gym. Or some generic Kobe Bryant quote about quitters being losers. Nah. All I got was the milestone board for 5 kilometres. There were sixteen agonising kilometres still ahead of me. But that board gave my video game-conditioned brain a slightly more hopeful signal: 25% completed.

I took out my phone. On the night before, while strategising for the race, I broke the distance into four full passes of Shine On You Crazy Diamond (both tracks), with two-minute walks to recuperate in between. Give or take another 5-10 minutes for exhaustion, and I’d still finish within my 2:15 target.

So, huffing and panting, I gave myself one more pass of Shine On. If the run went south, I’d take the next left home. If not, I would be halfway through the race anyway.

Thing is, I kept tricking myself to find an excuse to stay on track because I had trained bloody hard for this race. I hadn’t missed a day of strength or cardio in weeks. I played intense five-a-side football twice a week. In the week leading up, I had abstained from kebabs and chocolates.1 Part of me didn’t want all of that to result to an abandoned race. That would suck.

I then ran the best half hour lap of my life. It wasn’t all that quick; I stuck to my race pace of ~10kmph. But my form, breath, energy levels were exactly where I had wanted them to be. Heart rate was at a nice 140ish. The sky wasn’t dark anymore, but a faint shade of white with little specks of orange. The easy chill of dawn was mixing with sweat to form a balm on the body. And, by the final saxophone solo of the song, I had crossed the 10km milestone.

The rest of the race was not nearly as floaty. It was painful and exhausting, often making me question the life decisions I had taken to end up here, miserable on a weekend morning. But the progress bar kept moving rightwards, so I clung on.

The medal collection booth was inside a resort on the East Coast Road. Next to it, heaving bodies laid strewn across a lawn like breathless grasshoppers. I found myself a spot and sat down. And this sensation of great relief and pride washed over me. Relief because I didn’t have to run again for many hours and days, or maybe ever; pride because I had emerged on the other side of something I didn’t think I was capable of.2 At different points of later runs—most memorably, through a forest incline in Yercaud—remembering that small stretch between the Kasturbha Nagar and Thiruvanmiyur stations helped me push through.

Why am I telling you all this? Because, lately, many have questioned whether that was me posing for camera or truly feeling those feelings. I mean, not me specifically, but people.

This past week, our Twitter and Instagram timelines have been flooded with pictures from Hyrox Bengaluru. I read through a lot of captions, to get a sense of the people attending this monstrosity of a fitness event. Many were first timers, many others pushed for personal bests. Some finished it all alone, some with partners. And, without exception, the expression on their faces at the finishing arc was pure joy and gratification. That beaming smile, with or without a phone camera staring at you, is a 24-carat organic emotion.

Am I happy for them? God, no. I am jealous. For the uninitiated, let me quickly run you through Hyrox’s format. Hyrox is a “hybrid” race, broken up as eight repetitions of 1 km runs and a workout station.

The first workout station is the SkiErg, where you pull two cables for 1000 metres. Then you run a kilometre and walk into the sled push—shoving a weighted sled across a synthetic floor for fifty metres. Another kilometre of running, followed by the sled pull. Another kilometre of running. Then eighty metres of burpee broad jumps—the most diabolical exercise known to humanity, the result of a cocaine addict finishing a push up and saying, “this ain’t enough, brev.” Another kilometre of running, if your legs are still working, that is. Then comes the rowing machine where you have to pull one kilometre. If done well, this is your recovery station. One kilometre of running. Then you lift two kettlebells, 24kgs each, and walk for two hundred metres. You place them down and join the runners for yet another kilometre. By this time, start evaluating your life insurance payouts. Because, awaiting you, at the end of this run, are sandbag lunges. Lunges toast your quadriceps anyway. Imagine lunging with weights after your quads are basically thin strips of lactic acid. Anyhow, endure you will. Beyond the lunges is another kilometre of turf. The final station is called wall balls—appropriately named, a hundred repetitions of squatting with a medicine ball and hurling it at a target a metre or so above your head.

Over the last couple of days, since the conclusion of the event, there’s been a tangential discourse about Hyrox. Some have called it a performative event, done only for Instagram dope.

Firstly, WHO THE FUCK ENDURES THIS FOR INSTAGRAM, MAN?

Okay, deep breath taken, let’s dig. What is performative behaviour? A loose definition would be to perform something for external validation. Yes? For instance, attending a concert with your camera out, just to show people you were there, instead of losing yourself to the music. A truly pathetic way to live, but hey, it’s apparently popular.3

Similarly, AI art is performative because there is no rigour of studying the subject you’re claiming to own. You just want an artist’s tag without the work. An authoritarian head of state claiming to be pro-women when his party used the bill as a fig leaf on a more harmful bill? Performative.

But, book clubs and fitness events are... a good thing? Because—and I say this without partaking in either—even if you’re doing it for the serotonin hit of social validation, there is a net positive impact on your life. Reading and fitness will never be harmful. Sure, if you aren’t careful, you might end up reading self-help nonsense and vomiting your bile on LinkedIn, but you’re still sitting through a full book! Maybe, one day, you’ll choose Amitava Kumar over Ankur Warikoo.

Yesterday, I saw pictures of a lady, clearly fifty-plus, who battled anxiety and social stigma to show up for Hyrox. She reached the finish line running. Someone did those burpees while bound to a wheelchair. There were middle-aged cancer survivors and septuagenarians at the podium. A friend, who now owns two Hyrox medals, has been training at a specialised gym for the last year.

The landing page of Hyrox says it’s for everyone. It is good copy. Truth is—getting to the starting lines of these events takes months of work. That path goes through long-term fitness and nutrition discipline. Rare are the nacho-munchers who can just wake up and nail a long run.4

And boy, does India need some good habits. According to the 2024 WHO Physical Activity Factsheet for India, nearly half of the adult population (49.4%) is physically inactive, failing to meet the global recommended levels of at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity or 75 minutes of vigorous activity per week. Nearly 50% of at-home protein intake in India is derived from cereals, such as rice and wheat. These grains are considered low-quality protein sources due to their incomplete amino acid profiles and poor digestibility.5

A population that moves too little and eats too little of what it should desperately requires fitness to be packaged as fashionable.

Subscribe now

The bandwagon effect is a psychological pattern where people do something simply because others are doing so, often driven by the desire to conform. How often do we do this, with food, travel, and movies? Hell, I watched Gangs of Wasseypur after everyone around me started raving about it. Goa’s entire tourism industry today is funded by the bandwagon effect triggered by Dil Chahta Hai.

Not all of it ends well, of course. I recently ate at a popular pizza place and needed palette cleansers after. Hyrox, too, has its critics, amongst them some learned fitness coaches. But the critique is about the intensity of the exercises, not the idea of the event itself. Most, if not all, will egg you on to develop the strength and then give it a proper shot. Screw abs, the post-run sweat is what it’s about, they all say.

At the half marathon in Chennai, all those years back, someone with a prosthetic leg crossed me. And, I’ll admit, I’m a horrible person and it was a bit of an ego-blow, but it was also truly, very inspiring. I wondered how much he must’ve trained to even get here. I tried finding him after the race for a high-five, but to no avail. Maybe this was his first such run too, maybe not. But, we both had wrecked our Sunday morning to chase a stupid, enormous feeling.

The chat was buzzing, instead, with news about Arsenal, who were struggling against Sporting CP in Lisbon. The score there was 0-0, thanks largely to Arsenal goalkeeper David Raya’s athleticism. So, with fifteen minutes left of the night’s football, we smelled the inevitable dagger and switched seats to Estadio Schadenfreude.

The dagger didn’t come. Kai Havertz scored in the dying minutes to give Arsenal a 1-0 win. But the ride was worth the time. For fifteen minutes, we were giddy with the prospect of Arsenal losing a Champions League match to a team with 1/5th its annual revenue.

See, the Arsenal men’s team is a good unit.1 They now take a 1-0 lead against Sporting back home for the second leg of the quarter-final. A semi-final spot beckons.

At the time of drafting this, they lead the Premier League—the English top-division league—by nine points, with six games remaining in the season. The caveat being—Manchester City have played two games fewer. So, that lead is slimmer than it looks.

But, it’s a lead nonetheless. If their stars align, they’ll soon be lifting their first league title in twenty-two years. Twenty-two years, for a team as storied as Arsenal. Can you imagine? The last time they called themselves English champions, we were asking “A/S/L?” on Yahoo Messenger and Donald Trump wasn’t thought of as a candidate for the Oval Office. It’s been a while. They’ve come close, though, finishing agonisingly second in the last three seasons. They have not won a trophy of any kind in six years, despite spending a billion pounds in transfer fees.

They had the chance of breaking that rut in the last fortnight, which they squandered in typical style—first, in a final, against an out-of-rhythm Manchester City; then, in another cup, against lower-division Southampton. The problem, still, isn’t in the knockout blows. Those can happen to the best. The obvious pattern in those two games, and much of what Arsenal have served up over the last couple of months, is the tension in their attack and defence. They are completely bereft of edge, almost scared of their own lead.

So, irrespective of whether you wear an Arsenal jersey to your grocer or not, this isn’t a normal situation. For some, this is a nature documentary unfolding in slow frames, the iguana struggling to run away as the viper slides closer.

A lot of that flavour comes from Arsenal’s recent history. Arsenal are one of England’s great football institutions, behind only Liverpool and Manchester United for trophies. For most of the late 90s and early 2000s, as English football transformed from its mud-caked, shipyard aesthetics to a slick, 21st century media product, Arsenal were amongst England, and Europe’s, best.

Their head coach was a tall, elegant Frenchman named Arsene Wenger, and the aptness of the name was never lost on anyone. Wenger brought a scientist’s eye to a sport that was considered the preserve of manly men with a kink for watching bodies collide. His team was peerless, simultaneously capable of French lyricism and English pugnacity.

Arsenal played their home games at the Highbury, where its narrow football pitch was flanked on all sides by crowds sitting at a handshake’s distance. They’d suffocate you, and just when you began gasping, they’d scythe through you in straight, electric lines. They finished the 2003-04 Premier League season unbeaten—to date, the only English team to achieve this in the last 138 years.

And then, their best started leaving. Captains, leaders, captains-to-be—they all left, one by one. Theirry Henry and Cesc Fabregas flew away to Barcelona’s promise of European pre-eminence; Robin van Persie stayed within the country, but switched jerseys for title-rivals Manchester United; and Ashley Cole committed the cardinal sin of joining cross-London rivals, Chelsea. All of them filled their cupboards with new gold medals while Arsenal’s success completely dried up.

This exodus and draught also coincided with the snowballing of social media from a quirky place on the internet to a vicious, relentless part of our environment. And, holy hell, we let the Arsenal fans know. For a team that talks a big game, for a team that has “the greatest team you’d ever see” as a refrain on one of their most popular chants, their ability to end most years as also-rans was unmatched.

Eventually, their own patience broke. Arsene Wenger, well past his best-by date, was chased out of the club he built. The scale of his own misery was broadcasted on his 1000th game in charge—an occasion for tributes and celebration. The sun was high and shone its best March glow on London. It was going to be Arsene’s day, Arsenal’s day. How could it not? Then, Chelsea beat Arsenal 6-0.

From there, it was a freefall. They spent millions on fresher mediocrity. They lost games they should’ve won. Newly promoted teams made them look silly and fragile. Brentford faced Arsenal for their first Premier League match in a century. Their manager, a lean, athletic Dane with flowing hair like Mads Mikkelsen, came to the pre-match broadcast and said, “We’ll beat them.” Brentford 2-0 Arsenal.

YouTubers entered the discourse. Arsenal FanTv, a fan-cam channel run and populated by obnoxious, mentally-stunted men with a lust for camera and theatrics, grew to more than a million subscribers. Their most popular content inevitably followed an Arsenal loss, when these fans, after paying eye-watering money for a ticket and watching their team get bullied, vented with red faces and hoarse voices.2

In that directionless team played Mikel Arteta—solid, hard-working, always available for his team. One could see why Wenger, or any other coach, would trust him with the captain’s armband. He had an unmistakable school prefect vibe. Today, he’s Arsenal’s head coach.

Arteta’s first team was a joy to watch. That young group played football as if they were created from Arsene Wenger’s blueprint. Then he tore all those notes up and assembled a team of men built like night club bouncers whose collective style of play will one day make Arsene Wenger retreat to a cave near Shutter Island. The running pejorative for Arsenal references their inability to score goals from open play.

But what draws the neutrals to this viewing gallery isn’t really their football. It’s everything around it. Arsenal under Arteta have the energy of a start-up built by teenagers who treat The Social Network as the bible. Every press conference, every social media clip, every leaked dressing-room speech radiates a desperate anxiety to be perceived as elite.

Before a Premier League match against Brighton in April 2022—a match Arsenal needed to win in order to keep alive their hopes of finishing in the top four, a match that came on the heels of a 3-0 mauling by Crystal Palace—Mikel Arteta walked into the Arsenal dressing room holding a lightbulb.

A literal lightbulb, which he then switched on. Which means, at some point before the match, Arteta or a member of his staff sought out that bulb and a power source and tested whether the thing would actually illuminate on cue, and that was considered a good use of everyone’s time. He gathered his players in a circle and told them that Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb. Then, he told them a bulb by itself is nothing, that he wanted a team that was connected, that shone, that transmitted light and energy and passion to one another. He used the word “electricity” several times. He told them to go out and turn the metaphorical light on.

And then, Arsenal went out and lost 1-2 to Brighton.

In May 2023, Mikel Arteta brought a chocolate-coloured labrador puppy to Arsenal’s training ground. He named her “Win”, hoping to emit a winning spirit amongst his troops and remind them of their sole purpose at the club. That summer, Arsenal lost the league by 5 points. They’d lose next season’s league by 2 points.

In the summer of 2024, during preseason, Arteta realised that none of his methods were working. He decided that what his squad really needed was to be robbed.

He took them out for a team dinner. What the players did not know was that Arteta had hired a team of professional pickpockets and deployed them among the tables, disguised as waiters. Over the course of the meal, while Arsenal’s millionaire footballers ate and talked about holiday destinations, the pickpockets moved through the room, lifting wallets, phones, and car keys. When the meal was finished, Arteta stood up and asked everyone to empty their pockets. Cue: dread, shock.

The lesson, Arteta explained, was alertness. The opposition will take from you the moment you stop paying attention, and you will not even know it has happened until it is too late.

In truth, the head coach of a top club bringing bulbs and adopting motivational dogs has merit. Good leaders find innovative ways to gain edges. At Arsenal, with their backdrop, these become fodder for memes. And, my god, they are humanity’s greatest gift to the memeverse.

On the pre-match press conference this Friday, Mikel Arteta asked Arsenal fans to bring their breakfast and lunches to the match against Bournemouth. It was time for the players and the fans to “lock in”. Saturday, full time: Arsenal 1-2 Bournemouth.

Around this time, next week, Arsenal will be preparing to face second-placed Manchester City in Manchester. Win the game and that’s the league title done. Lose it, and suddenly, City are breathing down your neck. The viper will open its jaws.

There is one guarantee—whatever happens, it will be a watch. If Arsenal win the league, they won’t reach the finish line cruising. They’ll get there fumbling, knees scraped, hands brown with mud. If they lose, if it all comes apart in one glorious explosion, it will make for the most spectacular wreckage you’d wish to watch.

Either way, hug your nearest Arsenal fan.

Meanwhile, the cricket keeps running, restless and relentless. Batters hit 90-metre sixes every third delivery while the bowlers wonder if the money is worth the insult.

In this year’s opening round, the Delhi Capitals (DC) are chasing 141 against the Lucknow SuperGiants (LSG) at the Ekana Stadium in Lucknow. And 22-year-old Sameer Rizvi is guiding them to a victory.

Two years ago, Rizvi was plucked out of Uttar Pradesh’s domestic cricket anonymity by the Chennai Super Kings. They paid INR 8.4 crore for him—a figure that sounds crazy but reflects how highly their think-tank rated him. Despite a sparkling start, Rizvi’s run in yellow lasted all of eight games. He was back on the market last year.

Now, wearing different colours, he’s playing the knock CSK knew he was capable of, the kind that makes experts lean forward and nod. He’s doing this on a pitch where bowlers have a say and boundaries have to be earned.

The Delhi Capitals started their chase tumbling, losing four top-order batters for a paltry 26. From there, Rizvi and Tristan Stubbs, young of age but blessed with fortitude, have carried the innings. Rizvi has supplied the pyrotechnics, climbing into LSG’s bowlers every time they’ve missed their length by an inch.

Rizvi crosses his half-century with a deftly-placed boundary. On commentary, ex-cricketers weave a garland of superlatives. Some knock, this, they all say. Every player and staff member in the Delhi Capitals dugout is standing. Amongst them, in the front row, is Prithvi Shaw.

**

Prithvi Shaw applauds with his arms above his head. His teeth flash through his wide grin.

He looks different from the others in the dugout. The cheeks are puffy, the arms a little soft where everyone else’s are lean and muscular. His t-shirt clings a little at the waist. He claps hard, though, and the grin doesn’t waver.

The Delhi Capitals blue-and-red falls well on Shaw. He has only ever worn these colours in the IPL. Shaw came to this franchise many years back, as an 18-year-old, months after leading India to the Under-19 World Cup title. At the time, he was also the brightest talent in domestic red-ball cricket—the litmus test separating the good from the elite. After six years of sparks and patience, the Delhi Capitals jettisoned him in the winter of 2024.

Shaw spent the summer of 2025 without an IPL team. December’s auction, for the 2026 season, was turning out the same way until the Delhi Capitals signed off on a late punt.

They took that punt because they remembered what the 18-year-old could do.

**

Prithvi Shaw’s lore starts from when he was shorter than his bicycle.

Aged 7, he was taken to Raju Pathak, coach at Mumbai’s Rizvi Springfield High School. Pathak put him in the Under-12 nets. Two balls later, he moved Shaw to the Under-16 nets. “He was that good,” Pathak told Open Magazine. “No, the word is natural.”

By eleven, Shaw had signed with a sports management company. There is a picture from the night India won the 2011 World Cup: Shaw at the Wankhede Stadium, sat next to Arjun Tendulkar, both of them 11-years-old, round-faced and bright-eyed. Arjun carried a heavy, incandescent surname. Shaw’s name was already wafting through Mumbai on its own.

Around the same time, a camera crew had travelled across Mumbai for shooting the documentary, Beyond All Boundaries. The film narrated the city’s relationship with cricket through three unique lives: Sudhir Gautam, Akshaya Surve, and Prithvi Shaw.

Makarand Waingankar, one of India’s foremost talent-spotters, said of Shaw: “In every match, he’s the youngest, and he’s scoring against the eldest.”

Two years later, exactly a week after Sachin Tendulkar bid a teary goodbye to international cricket, Prithvi Shaw scored 546 runs in one innings for Rizvi Springfield—a world record for junior cricket. The prodigy had become a news item.

The runs and headlines kept stacking up, and senior cricket opened its doors soon. Shaw scored a century on his Ranji Trophy debut. He scored a century on his Duleep Trophy debut. He had four centuries in his first five First Class matches.

The year after, Shaw’s India won the Under-19 World Cup in New Zealand. Guided by coach Rahul Dravid, his team returned with a 100% win record, often looking a galaxy apart from their competition. Meanwhile, the Delhi Daredevils—who’d later rebrand themselves as Delhi Capitals—snapped him up for INR 1.2 crore. Shaw played nine matches in his debut IPL season, and averaged a four or a six every 4 deliveries.

The ball flew off Prithvi Shaw’s bat. It flew with a force and a sound, and thudded into boundary hoardings. He had a flamboyant backlift, his MRF bat reaching above his helmet—a mirror image of Brian Lara, minus the exaggerated crouch. The bat snapped through its downward arc like a whip. He was naturally wristy, comfortable with anything pitched near his feet, but if the bowler made the mistake of bouncing him, the ball often ended near the boundary ropes.

During that first season, the broadcast camera would cut to Delhi Capitals’ coach Ricky Ponting, the expression on his face an amusing mix of bewilderment and excitement.

The India call came soon. The autumn of 2018 brought a home Test series against the West Indies, starting in the arid climes of Rajkot. Still only 18, Shaw had his own navy blue cap.

Ten years ago, his captain had led India to the Under-19 World Cup title and springboarded to international cricket. He was now the greatest cricketer of his generation, en route to becoming an all-time great. Shaw was the next in line.

Shaw started his new life with 134 off 158 deliveries, barely breaking sweat while flaying bowlers with years of international experience. Many a career had been lost to the crevice between domestic and international cricket. That morning, Shaw made the leap look like a hop.

Ravi Shastri, famous for measuring his words, saw “a bit of Tendulkar, a bit of Sehwag, and a bit of Lara,” in the young man. The grandiosity was amusing, but a part of you knew what Shastri was getting at. Shaw, it was evident, wasn’t thought of as a star-in-the-making, but a comet.

There is another picture of Shaw I remember well. It was taken during the off-season camp before IPL 2019. Shaw, wearing Delhi’s blue training kit, possibly coming out of the batting nets, as Ricky Ponting places his left hand softly on the back of Shaw’s head. It is a small, still image, but it contains one of the IPL’s core promises: extraordinary talent, guided by extraordinary mentors.

Shaw played every match of the 2019 IPL season. His tally of 353 runs included an innings of 99 in Delhi that left a lot of jaws agape, including and not limited to the coaching staff in the dugout.

It was the last time Prithvi Shaw was considered celestial.

**

In July 2019, Shaw tested positive for terbutaline—a banned substance found in some over-the-counter cough syrups. He pleaded guilty, but explained that the cough syrup was taken as a remedy for sickness, not as a performance enhancer. The BCCI accepted his words, but slapped an eight-month ban for carelessness.

In the dawn of his international career—the formative years, so to speak—Shaw was deprived of competitive cricket. Indian cricket moved on, as it always does. The Test team found new openers—amongst them, one Rohit Sharma.

By the time Shaw returned, the world was in lockdown. The domestic schedule lay cancelled, and when competitive cricket finally resumed with the IPL, Shaw looked like he had never played this level before. It’s tempting to say he looked like a different batter, but he looked like a different man.

Ricky Ponting and the other coaches kept talking up his talent, at one point clearly speaking to him through their press interviews. Turns out, they were desperate to bring his focus back. During a run-glut, when practice should’ve been of prime importance, Shaw refused to bat in the nets, even upon Ponting’s insistence.

An injury to Rohit Sharma meant Prithvi Shaw made the cut for India’s tour to Australia for a Test series in the winter of 2020.

On the first morning of the series, under an overcast Adelaide sky, Prithvi Shaw lined up against Mitchell Starc. Ricky Ponting was on commentary for Channel 7. He saw Shaw’s stance, the fissures mushrooming within his technique, and predicted his fall to an inswinger. The next ball, Starc bowled that inswinger. Shaw lunged at it, feet moving at a time-lag with the hands, and inside-edged the ball onto his stumps. Two days later, he was undone the same way by a different bowler bowling from a different angle.

Neither delivery should have taken a wicket. Whoever this version of Shaw was, this was not an international batter. This was also not an international athlete. He moved like a 40-year-old, sluggish and late to everything.

India were sickeningly bowled out for 36 on the final morning; Virat Kohli was flying back for India for the birth of his first child; and Mohammed Shami had broken his arm. The team needed every ounce of batting reinforcement, but they knew they weren’t going to get it from Shaw.

Shubman Gill, Shaw’s teammate from the Under-19 World Cup, had built a reputation for a far tighter technique and work ethic. Gill exuded composure with the bat and had the physique of an athlete. He made his Test debut the day after Christmas, and immediately looked the part. A week and a half later, Gill spearheaded India’s impossible chase to win a Test match they had no business fighting for.

At least for the time being, Shaw had no future in India colours. He’d have to light up the IPL to force his way back.

When the IPL 2021 came around, the world still grappling with the virus, Shaw returned heavier than ever. Face round, back a little hunched, small ripples creasing his shirt at the waist. But, he had returned with a bit of the old batting spark. His 82 against the Kolkata Knight Riders included an over of six consecutive boundaries, every one hit harder than the previous. He finished the season with 479 runs at an eye-watering strike-rate of 160—his best season yet.

The national setup called up Shaw for a T20 series, perhaps to see if the tales of transformation were real. He played one game, where he was casual in the field and careless with the bat. And that was the end of India’s patience with him.

Shaw ran out of runs in domestic cricket. Local newspapers carried rumours of a keen friendship with the bottle. His temper spilled over into public brawls. This one time, he was caught faking an injury during a warm-up game before a Test series.

A defiant Shaw cultivated a social-media persona as a perennially-wronged, oft-misunderstood genius. He sought solace in faith and worship, often broadcasting his hope that the almighty keep a ledger of the apparent injustice he was going through.

Back in the Delhi Capitals’ dugout, Ponting’s once wide-eyed expression at his talent had turned into a brooding resignation.

“There were meetings in the night where we would sit and ponder if Prithvi should play or not because he has been failing,” said Delhi Capitals coach and ex-India cricketer, Mohammed Kaif. “So at night we would decide that Prithvi would not be in the playing XI, and then later on the day of the match, we would change our decision - that, no he will because maybe if he goes big, we would win.”

Faith has a limited shelf life. In the winter of 2024, Delhi Capitals finally severed their ties. Ricky Ponting was leaving for another franchise, and it was time for a full reset. Meanwhile, Shaw’s body fat reached an alarming 35% and he was dropped from the Mumbai team. The worst yet predictable indictment came from his captain at both those teams, Shreyas Iyer, who pointed at his work ethic.

At the next IPL mega auction, Shaw went unsold. The competition had extended to ten teams now, and yet, nobody wanted to carry him.

Pravin Amre, ex-India international, Mumbai cricket stalwart, and assistant coach at Delhi Capitals, traced the problem to the whiplash of fame and money. “Maybe he couldn’t handle the glamour and money, the side-effects of the IPL. His example can be a case study in Indian cricket,” he told The Times of India.

One winter morning in 2025 encapsulated the entire Prithvi Shaw story. Axed from Mumbai, Shaw had moved to the Maharashtra team. As such scripts go, Maharashtra faced Mumbai in a warm-up match before the 2025-26 Ranji Trophy season. Shaw opened the batting and blazed to 181 off 138 deliveries. Clips from his innings reached Twitter’s newsstream. As he was walking back after getting out, Musheer Khan, his ex-teammate from Mumbai, muttered, “Thank you.” Incensed, Shaw responded by trying to grab Musheer’s collar and swinging his bat at him.

**

That 181 didn’t lead to any resurgence. Shaw’s scores from his ten most recent innings, in reverse chronological order, read: 14,5,31,17,1,2,71,22,51,46.

He went unsold for the first two rounds at the IPL auction in December. Then, Delhi Capitals, perhaps placing more weight on faith than rationale, bid for him at base price. They didn’t face any competition.

“We see this as a second chance for Prithvi, and I’m really looking forward to seeing him return to Delhi, take this opportunity seriously and give his best for the team,” said Kiran Grandhi, co-owner of the Delhi Capitals.

Amongst the many genres of stories Indian cricket writes frequently, there is one that doesn’t get enough attention: rare talent that turns every head in a room, and slowly, then all at once, vanishes into thin air, into lower division cricket and commentary boxes and coaching academies, remembered only by those who watched them in full bloom.

Vinod Kambli’s name hovers around this genre like a ghost. He was the real thing until he was lost to his own indulgence.

Talent buys you time. People keep the door open a little longer than they should, because they remember what they once saw. They remember the sensation from watching hard things made to look effortless. But, at one point, that patience runs out. Prithvi Shaw, at 26, is standing at the edge of it.

**

On 22nd March, 2026, the Delhi Capitals posted a 79-second Twitter video announcing Prithvi Shaw’s comeback. The video starts in monochrome, as Shaw walks down the stairs at Ferozeshah Kotla and opens a metal gate. In the background, a female vocalist sings in icy, operatic lines over a piano. Between cuts of him walking on the Kotla grass, sitting in the empty stands, staring into the distance, Shaw narrates his feelings.

One line sticks out. “Some stories don’t end,” Shaw says. “They come back.”

The spot in the starting lineup is a few more miles away. For now, his only chance will come in the silence of the practice nets, around players with half his natural gift, overseen by coaches who didn’t have long international careers but squeezed every ounce out of their talent.

Shaw will also do well to look around. Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, at 15, is the hottest name in cricket right now. Sameer Rizvi is winning games for his franchise. Shubman Gill, who made his international debut six months after Shaw, is India’s Test and ODI captain.

Maybe there is a world where it will take one crisp square cut to turn Prithvi Shaw’s life around. If the ball starts flying off his bat again, and if that’s the only noise he makes, the selectors will have to look his way. He is that kind of talent. Now it’s time to discover if he can become that kind of athlete.

Subscribe now

I’ve seen teenage superstars aplenty. I have faint memories of staying up past midnight and watching Michael Owen wiggle past two, maybe three, Argentina defenders in ‘98. Yuvraj Singh against Australia is a memory I’ll never forget. Wayne Rooney then, at 18, setting alight the European Championships. Messi, somewhere between 18 and 19, moving like an eel on the rain-soaked London mud, leaving Chelsea’s hard-bodied defenders slapping thin air.

But, 15? Isn’t that the age for discovering if you’re any good at all? Not everyone can be Ian Thorpe, Michael Phelps, or Simone Biles.

I have heard stories of Tendulkar at 15, disappointed for not making the India squad for a tour to the West Indies—at the time, the scariest trip in cricket. The selectors were convinced about his talent, but wanted to protect him. He was adamant he didn’t need any protection. Mithali Raj was a newspaper headline at 14, for making it to the brink of India’s World Cup squad. But I didn’t watch them bloom.

Last year, when Vaibhav Sooryavanshi hit Shardul Thakur and Aavesh Khan for sixes within ten minutes of starting life under the bright floodlights, I was astonished by his audacity. When he scored that 35-ball century against a bowling lineup of Rashid Khan, Mohammed Siraj, Prasidh Krishna, and Ishant Sharma, I was in a cafe, standing because one couldn’t watch this stuff sitting down.

This February, he hit 175 in 80 balls at the Under-19 World Cup final. Ex-cricketers from England and Australia were cooing on their podcasts. Some wanted him catapulted into the senior team, age be damned. Except, he was still below the age threshold for playing senior cricket for India.

He passed it one day before the first match of IPL 2026. Sooryavanshi’s turn came on Monday evening. His first six was a slog, a full-forced heave, the kind that’s become staple in the early overs of a T20 innings. It travelled far into the ground seating, but we’ve seen enough of that, even from this kid, that it didn’t evoke exclamation. His second six—a ferocious cut off a delivery that most batters leave in Test cricket, block in ODIs, and dab for singles in T20s—had Dale Steyn hooting in the commentary box. Steyn has watched enough cricket to know the wheat from the chaff. Sooryavanshi had played that shot with an arched back, weight going backwards, and yet, the ball flew off his bat into the digital hoardings. He was doing all this to Matt Henry, one of the world’s leading fast bowlers.

52 off 17 would be the only talking point on our social media timelines if that knock came off Virat Kohli’s bat. We’d be talking up his fitness, experience, and hitting range. That knock, by a 15-year-old kid, after all we’ve seen from him over the last 12-15 months, is beginning to say things I’m not sure I’m ready to hear just yet.

I’m scared of having that conversation. But if such a day comes when I’m left with no choice but to acknowledge it, I’ll recall the time when he hit that six off Shardul, when he made Rashid look clueless, and laugh at myself for not having the audacity he did.

🎼 Score

Last week, while trawling through Twitter’s muck, I found this rare lotus floating around. It’s a clip from a movie many of us can recite in our sleep—the dinosaur reveal from Jurassic Park.

I want to talk about John Williams’ background score in this scene, but before that, watch this clip in full. We’ll come back.

Alright, now. What does Steven Spielberg’s camera show us? The first twenty seconds catch Dr. Alan Grant in shock. He stands up in the jeep and takes off his sunglasses, his eyes widening, as Dr. Ellie Grant is reading from a notebook.

Notice how the score is a series of ominous low notes, question marks without a resolving cadence. The shrill, quick clarinet lines behind the cello give the music a layer of subconscious chaos.

Dr. Ellie gets her head turned around the twentieth second, and the strings swell into a wide, chordal line. It’s Williams telling you that whatever these two scientists are seeing, it’s of massive scale.

Next: 00:24 - 00:40. The brachiosaurus is revealed, walking in heavy, earth-moving steps a few metres to the right of the jeep. The background music moves into an emotional and uplifting mood. But, notice how the strings play long, stable lines and there is nothing too loud jumping out just yet. Usually, major reveals like this are prime spots for introducing something heavy or expansive. Maybe a soaring brass melody or some percussion. All things considered, this is a pretty explosive moment.

So, why doesn’t the music go nuts here? Because Jurassic Park isn’t a movie about dinosaurs, but humans navigating their presence amongst themselves. The two doctors are spellbound. This, right here, is the object of their lifelong obsession, something they’ve only traced on paper, something they’ve never even considered seeing alive, walking in front of them. They are gasping, unable to find words. Williams’ score moves with them.

Next: 00:40 - 00:50. “It’s... it’s a dinosaur.” Dr. Alan finally finds his voice, and you hear the horns slide in with the first pass of the unforgettable melody. We’re here and it’s glorious.

Dr. Malcolm offers his sagely commentary from the jeep: “You did it, you crazy son of a bitch, you did it!” The melody plays once more, the harmony is building, but still in steps instead of leaps. And then, when Dr. Grant starts talking, in rushed words scrambling to come out of his mouth, you hear the melody soaring, every repeat richer and higher. The tempo goes up a notch; the violins are playing at a high pitch, with flutes contouring their trembling voice.

The crescendo lands with the brachiosaurus’ front feet. After a few mellow seconds, the music swells again when Dr. Hammond confirms that they also have a T-Rex in their compound.

The next page-turn comes when Dr. Grant looks to his left and sees a herd of dinosaurs walking through a pond. This frame is the high point of the movie, and, to be honest, the entire Jurassic Park franchise. The score also reaches its highest pitch, the entire soprano and tenor section of the orchestra—the high instruments—playing the melody line and its closest harmony. If the score was an opera group, this would be the moment where the lead singer truly lets fly.

Here’s a trivia: John Williams won the Oscar for the Best Background Score in 1993. But he won it for Schindler’s List. He wasn’t even nominated for Jurassic Park. 🤷

🔖 Bookmarks

Some things that caught my eye over the past week. And a podcast episode.

• Imagine growing up as a kid of revolutionary parents who declared a war against the government. Imagine spending your childhood constantly on the run, having your identity changed, your friends left behind. Zayd Ahers Dohrn was born “underground”, and grew up underground. Here’s his story.

• Anand Vasu speaks to Mohammad Kheir—co-founder of the Alsama Project, which provides education to refugees in West Asia. Within the project exists a cricket programme with more than 800 players and 30 coaches.

• Kenneth Ho, a Hong Kong-based pilot, has a Pokemon card collection worth more than $1.5 million. That collection is now an investment he’s looking forward to encash.

• Here’s one for the writing nerds. has been re-reading and discussing VS Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival on A Public Space. The newsletters focus on Naipaul’s prose, style, and storytelling.

Finally, I joined the folks at BhaJaPod for an episode last week. We discussed scientific temperament, some famous podcasts and famous hosts, and the abyss intellectual discourse in India finds itself in.

Subscribe now

That’s all from this edition of The Jukebox. See you soon!

This was J’s response to me introducing myself the first time I met him. We were at a dimly-lit house party in South Delhi. Punjabi pop remixed with hip-hop beats played through bass amplifiers that only Delhi dudes truly like or endure. A bartender had been hired to serve alcohol from behind a makeshift booth.

J, at the time, was dating my very close friend, S. And S, sweetheart that she is, had spoken about all her friends to J. But, his father?

“He just wrapped up an ultra marathon in the Nilgiri hills, I think Yercaud.”

“Oh, how cool!”

“Yeah, that was his recovery run after the Antarctica Ice Marathon.”

“...”

“...”

“...what?”

And that was my evening done. Every other conversation through that party wafted past me without touch because I couldn’t get over those words.

At the time, I was training for the Ladakh Half Marathon. Without any hyperbole, I considered it amongst the coolest and more physically challenging locations to run in. To register, one had to show proof of a recent nationally-recognised half marathon finished within three hours.

I knew tougher runs existed, of course. I had read about Mauro Prosperi getting lost in the Sahara for nine and a half days. Similarly, I knew about the Great Wall of China run and the Badwater 135 through the appropriately-named Death Valley. I had not, even while slingshotting my imagination to come up with unlikely routes, thought of a sequence of words with Antarctica and marathon near each other.

That night, tipsy from a few too many cocktails and the unavoidable, party-ending shot of vodka, I flipped open my laptop and began looking. And I couldn’t take my eyes off.

On a later conversation with J, I pressed him for his father’s notes about the race. Amongst the many other things he described, much of it a story of visually acclimatising to the continent, I remember, “the lungs freeze when you walk. You’re inhaling ice.” I could feel my gut just cramping. It was an insane thing to even attempt, especially for someone who grew up in the temperate climate of Delhi and Bombay. Then I found out that he had run marathons in every continent bar one. Some people are just wired differently, I guess.

In the last week, triggered by this story about Nathan Martin’s incredible finish at the Los Angeles Marathon, I went back to Google Images for pictures from wild marathons. There are three that came to mind, immediately, for their unique physical challenges.

Marathon des Sables Legendary

A 250 kilometre run through the Sahara desert, where competitors have to carry their entire kit from start to end. This year’s race—the 40th edition of the event—starts next week.

Silk Route Ultra

A 122km run passing through a section of the erstwhile Silk Route. The run begins in Kyagar Village in Ladakh’s Nubra Valley, touches Khardung La—one the highest motorable roads in the world—and finishes at the Leh Market, where you can either pass out or treat yourself to some life-affirming hibiscus tea.

Marathon du Médoc

A full length marathon (42.2 kms) through France’s Bordeaux region. The point isn’t the run, though. It’s the 30+ vineyards the route passes through, and the cheese tasting stations en route. If you’re able to finish a marathon with all that in your body, you deserve a thick medal. One author called it the world’s longest, booziest race.

🥬 Leafy Edibles

Taking a hard left from wine and cheese, Works In Progress has an essay about the history, journey, and influence of brassica oleracea, or the wild cabbage. The story is quite amazing. Most vegetables evolve with time, into versions that retain many characteristics from their ancestors. Not this guy.

The secret to their evolution is in their genomic structure. “Ancient wild cabbages underwent a process called polyploidy. Humans are diploid, meaning that we usually have two copies of each of our 23 chromosomes. Many cabbage varieties are triploid or even more complex.”

The Works in Progress Newsletter

How an unappetizing shrub became dozens of different vegetables

Alex Wakeman explains how centuries of selective breeding turned a single wild weed into everything from broccoli to Brussels sprouts…

Read more

3 months ago · 104 likes · 6 comments · Works in Progress

This essay links to another about the history of the modern tomato, which took me to this report: CRISPR builds a big tomato that’s actually sweet.

“Editing techniques that insert foreign DNA have also been developed further, notably leading to the creation of a purple tomato containing snapdragon flower DNA. The fruit contains three times as many antioxidants as the typical tomato..”

Wild things are happening in food science, while we sip our whey protein-infused matcha.

🚇 Underground Network

Somewhere deep within Reddit, I found this absolutely insane visualisation of the underground fungal network between 67 trees.

❄️ Winter Variables

If you’re born in Delhi or Gurgaon, you’re 31 times more likely than anyone else to spend your life’s savings on a Mahindra Thar. I made that up. But, you won’t be surprised if the actual number is somewhere near that mark. Where you’re born has a disproportionate influence on your chance at success, especially if we’re talking winter olympics.

🪐 The Planets

Last Sunday, during my biweekly trip to Church Street’s bookstores, I walked upstairs from Bookworm’s sprawling ground floor to The Antiquarian—their wooden, air-conditioned room for rare classics and their original, sometimes signed, editions. There I found a vinyl of Gustav Holst’s The Planets.

The Planets is a seven-track orchestral suite composed somewhere in the early 1900s. Each planet is given character and shades, almost humanised, and then turned into its own track. The orchestration wasn’t technically novel, but the usage of traditional instruments was.

In the first movement of Mars, you’ll hear a clicky, wooden sound hovering above the beating timpani and staccato strings. That’s two cellos, played col legno—the technique of hitting the strings with the wooden stick instead of gently caressed with the hair.

Oh, and, once you’re done with the first couple of minutes of Mars, listen closely to the background rhythm in Star Wars’ famous theme Imperial March.

This is, of course, not a shade on John Williams. He’s a genius. You’ll not find too many composers from his time who weren’t influenced by Holst or Wagner. For aspiring music composers, especially those with an interest in classical music, The Planets has always been mandatory study material. No other collection of music illustrates the foundational principles of good orchestration so thoroughly.

That’s all from this edition of The Jukebox. See you soon!

Subscribe now

The sun is high, the beer cans are out, Melbourne is washed in summer and joie de vivre.

Jasprit Bumrah, in crisp whites with blue details, is bowling to Mitchell Marsh. The ball pitches just short of good length—what the Aussies call the “hard length”—and rears up, towards Marsh’s torso. Marsh, surprised by the bounce, can only offer the ball his glove.

Two deliveries later, Bumrah pitches a couple of inches fuller, inviting Alex Carey to drive. The ball doesn’t bounce as much this time, but skids, almost gaining pace on its path. Carey drives, but by the time his bat reaches the bottom of its arc, the ball has already snaked past him, into the timber.

On commentary, Harsha Bhogle is exuberant. “Stop it, Jasprit Bumrah! We’re running out of words to describe you, and Australia are running out of batters to play you.” The famous Melbourne Cricket Ground, where the first ever Test match was played 147 years ago, reverberates with the sound of plastic vuvuzelas and dhol.

Australia are 91-6 in their second innings, leading by 196. It’s something, but not enough. The winner of this match—the fourth of the series—will go up 2-1, with only the last match left to come.

***

March 18, 2001.

The shadows lengthen across the M.A. Chidambaram Stadium, or Chepauk, as the shorthand goes. The sea breeze flowing inwards from the Bay of Bengal bounces off its circular concrete structure. Matthew Hayden, batting on a three-digit score, presses his left hand on his navy green helmet, and a stream of sweat flows out from the brim. In that moment, it feels oddly fitting that the Australian kits are sponsored by Kelvinator—a home appliances company best known for manufacturing fridges.

Forgotten from the national setup after a brief debut run in 1993, Hayden has come back as a force of nature. He prepared for this tour by batting for hours on dug up pitches at home. Hayden was always a good player of fast bowling, but that prep gave him tools to use his six-foot-three frame and a surfer’s crouch to devastating use against spin.

Cue: a century in Mumbai, two sparkling fifties in Kolkata, and another century here in Chennai. Over a thousand minutes of batting, and counting, not once has he looked uncomfortable.

Worryingly, he also seems to have slept off the Kolkata shock. He meets Harbhajan with ferocity, pre-empting and then neutralising his drift and turn. The other bowlers are smacked with disdain. Even as the heat mounts, he looks at ease, wiping off sweat and setting up for the next delivery like an ultra marathoner midway through his race.

India have played into Australia’s hands by picking a lopsided bowling attack with only one seamer—Zaheer Khan. While there is merit in going spin-heavy, the lack of seam-bowling options on a fresh pitch is an exposed wound.

Finally, thankfully, the sun dips westward and the umpire calls for end of play. Australia are 326-3. Hayden 147 not out; Steve Waugh 43 not out. The afterglow from Kolkata has been brutally smothered.

***

Many years back, on the same patch of land, a man with broad shoulders and muscular arms stood behind the practice batting strips. He wore a floppy hat and running shorts. Every few minutes, he would grab a red ball, wrap his fingers along the seam, and bring his right arm up and down in a bowler’s motion. And he stood there until twilight, even as his neck went red from the sun and dirt.

A dozen or so teenagers, oversized white shirts hanging off their wiry bodies, stood nearby in a semi-circle, their eyes and ears tuned to him as if they were medical students listening to a surgeon.

After all, he was there to fix a blind spot.

In the late 1980s, Indian cricket had a lot going for them. The surreal World Cup triumph in 1983 was supplemented by the Benson & Hedges tournament win in Australia and a Test series win in England. Around these marquee events, they also bagged an Asia Cup and Rothmans Cup title each. They co-hosted the 1987 World Cup—the first time the tournament had travelled outside England—and reached the semi-finals.

Despite all this glitter, they lacked the one key component of every great team: fast bowlers. India did not know how to produce one. Their fastest bowler wouldn’t qualify as fast outside the subcontinent. All their success, through history, was pegged squarely on gifted and gutsy batters, and an armada of spinners.

So, Ravi Mammen, the managing director of the Madras Rubber Factory (MRF), planted the foundation stone to create a fertile ground. The first call to design the programme for the MRF Pace Foundation went to Australia. If someone was going to instil pace as a function of physicality, fitness, nutrition, and philosophy, it had to be Dennis Keith Lillee—the greatest fast bowler from a country that supplied fast bowlers on a conveyor belt.

A decade or so later, a young Zaheer Khan would board a train from Baroda to Chennai. He was tall and athletic, but weighed in the sixties. He left the foundation more than ten kilos heavier, all in muscle, ready to become India’s first 90 miles an hour bowler. It would take longer still for India to have a bench full of them.

***

March 19, 2001. Day Two.

The sun is visible above the roof of the stadium. Australia are cruising at 340-3, sights set on 500 and beyond.

Steve Waugh tries to sweep Harbhajan and misses the ball. The bowler and surrounding fielders go up in appeal; the umpire isn’t much interested. Meanwhile, away from everyone’s attention, the ball has bounced up from Waugh’s pad, landed nearby, and backspun towards the stumps. Instead of tapping it away with his bat, Waugh has used his right palm. The game pauses for a couple of seconds until everyone realises that the Australian captain has found the rarest and most needless way of getting out.

Ricky Ponting lasts one ball against Harbhajan’s drift. Gilchrist tries another aggressive sweep, and fails. His scores since that century in Mumbai—0, 0, 1.

The ominous shapes of 340-3 have turned into 344-6 in the space of ten minutes and six Harbhajan deliveries.

Hayden is now stepping up gears. One slog sweep climbs into the air and lands in the back rows of the upper deck. A breath or so later, he shimmies down the track and lifts Nilesh Kulkarni into the open space behind the sight screen. The Chepauk crowd is anxious for his wicket, but applauding him anyway.

Harbhajan gets Warne, Gillespie, and Colin Miller caught at three different spots. There is one battle he’s waging against Hayden’s force, another he’s winning blind against the rest of the lineup.

Hayden gets to his double century, and the Chepauk crowd rises as one to salute him. They’re in awe. It’s hard to remember a non-subcontinental batter conquering these conditions so thoroughly. He’s out a few minutes later, the last one to go, beaten in flight by a loopy Harbhajan off-spinner.

The crowd rises once more, to send him off with a standing ovation. The applause soars louder as Harbhajan follows behind him, finishing with seven wickets in the innings, maintaining the cadence from his thirteen wickets in Kolkata. Anil Kumble, his arm in a sling, watches on with brotherly admiration as his future partner falls into the embrace of an adoring crowd.

Australia, 391 all out.

***

There was a leitmotif to Indian batting in the 1990s. First, a pulsing anticipation; then the intoxicating thrill of watching Sachin Tendulkar tear apart the best bowling attacks in the world, his bat drawing neat and satisfying shapes in the air; and then the hush from his dismissal, as India’s hopes left with him.

The team wasn’t short of batting talent. You couldn’t call a lineup of Navjot Sidhu, Mohammed Azharuddin, Sanjay Manjrekar, Ajay Jadeja, Vinod Kambli, then a young Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid, deficient. But when the stakes rose high, when pressure pressed into muscle, everyone looked at Tendulkar.

India’s two biggest matches from that decade illustrate their Tendependence™.

At the 1996 World Cup semi-final in Calcutta, Sri Lanka set India a target of 252. In those days, 252 was formidable, tough even, but nothing herculean. Tendulkar, already the tournament’s highest run scorer, lit up the evening with the sound of his sparkling, clean bat. While the rest seemed to freeze under the weight of the game, Tendulkar flourished, scything through Sri Lanka’s best bowlers at will. When he got out for 65—an unlucky deflection landing into the wicketkeeper’s path—India had only reached 90. From there, India plummeted to 120-8, as Calcutta’s disappointment boiled over into rage and manifested with bottles and burnt paper.

Three years later, India were 254-6, chasing 271 against Pakistan in Chennai. It was the first Test between the two nations in nearly a decade. Tendulkar was playing one of the all-time great Test innings. Then, he got out—partly to back spasms and partly to Saqlain Mushtaq’s trap—and India fell over in a heap, losing three wickets for four runs.

Pakistan took a victory lap as Chepauk gave them a dazy, heartbroken standing ovation. Tendulkar was inconsolable in the dressing room, and didn’t come out to receive his Player of The Match award.

The theme was consistent in debris and wealth. In 1998, India won five triangular ODI tournaments; Tendulkar scored centuries in four of those five finals.

As he climbed from boy wonder to someone Sir Don Bradman saw his reflection in, all an Indian ever wanted was for an ensemble cast that could form a cushion around his genius, give it space to breathe and fail.

***

March 21, 2001. Day Four.

India finish their first innings at 501.

Shiv Sunder Das has scored 84; Ramesh, 61; Laxman has airbrushed 65 of the most gorgeous runs you’d hope to see; and Dravid, refreshed and renewed from Kolkata, builds on his rhythm with 81. Hell, even Sairaj Bahutule has chipped in with 21.

Around them, Tendulkar’s 126 is a masterclass in control and precision. This is Tendulkar the accumulator, far less thrilling than his 90s version, but perhaps more efficient. For long periods, he looks serene and impregnable, as if nothing Australia have, not even McGrath and Warne, is good enough to get him. This is the first series in a decade where his batting contribution is noticed as a matter of fact and not the highlight.

Shane Warne finishes with figures of 42-7-140-2. He’s rarely looked less threatening than these last few weeks.

India’s lead of 110 should prove decisive, but there’s ample time left. Over to Harbhajan, once more.

***

Before Harbhajan can get to Australia, Hayden and Slater get to India. They hack down 80 runs off their deficit within an hour. Coach John Wright is sitting on a cane chair outside the home dressing room, exasperated and desperate. India cannot endure another hour of this.

Captain Ganguly is desperate too. He’s cycling through his companion spinners to find some breathing space for Harbhajan. Hayden plays another slog sweep. By now, he’s playing this shot on instinct, inevitably to great success. This one is only slightly mistimed, a little airy, and that’s all Zaheer Khan needs in the deep.

The wicket isn’t Harbhajan’s, but it sends a shot of energy through him. He twinkles out Slater and Gilchrist from the other end.

Australia overtake the deficit. Justin Langer and Mark Waugh balance resistance with silk. Mark Waugh, the high priest of languid batting, is now 36 years of age, but his feet are moving like he’s twenty-five. He’s soon joined by Steve—his twin brother, elder by four minutes, and the captain of the team. With every passing run, there is a preemptive anxiety setting in amongst the Indians too. A tall target is not easily chased in this part of the world.

The old SG ball, fraying on the sides, is turning but not biting yet. Or maybe the Australians have finally figured out how to muffle it. And then, one ball spits at Mark Waugh. Of course it’s Harbhajan. Ponting comes and goes, as has been his rhythm all spring. Warne doesn’t last long either. Harbhajan, by now, has taken over the Chennai air, the turf, and every functioning mind inside the Australian dressing room.

***

March 22, 2001.

Steve Waugh leans in to defend against Harbhajan, only to find that he’s nowhere near the ball. Jason Gillespie and Colin Miller fend and prod, and become a tangled mesh of limbs. Harbhajan’s length is a thing of rare beauty.

Australia are all out for 264. The scorecard is odd. On the left side are the batters, a line of greats and would-be greats. On the right, in the dismissals section, is a repeating beat of one name. Har-bha-jan Singh, the bha and jan pronounced quickly, like sixteenth notes.

Just one year back, after the death of his father, Harbhajan had considered leaving cricket entirely and moving abroad. “I don’t come from a family with a lot of money,” he told Scott Oliver here. “When my father passed away, I could continue with cricket - but I was going through a lot of dramas out there, problems with the cricket board… Or I could take the easy option and go abroad to work. As what? Could be anything: truck driver, labourer, filling petrol, whatever.”

And now, he has 8 wickets in the innings and 15 in the match, taking his series tally to 32. For perspective, India had picked 50 Australian wickets in that series. The next best after Harbhajan’s 32 were Tendulkar and Zaheer Khan with 3.

India will have to chase 155. It will have to be the highest ever chase at Chepauk, and the highest against Steve Waugh’s Australia. No biggie.

Subscribe now

Glenn McGrath snares SS Das early, which brings VVS Laxman to the crease. Laxman starts creaming boundaries from the get-go. Every Indian, inside and outside the dressing room, has a spiked heart-rate and sweat bubbling from every pore, and here is this man, relaxed as if he’s at a beach, tapping and flicking perfectly decent deliveries to the boundary.

A good length ball from McGrath disappears to the midwicket fence before he can finish his follow-through. Warne and Gillespie are dispatched to both sides of the wicket. Sadagoppan Ramesh, local lad and an intricate strokemaker himself, watches from the non-striker’s end with a smirk. He’s got shots, but none like this.

Then Ramesh plays loosely to cover, sets off for a run, gets halfway and starts wondering if he left his geyser on, which is too complex a thought when the ball is in Ricky Ponting’s hand. Actually, Laxman had started to run too, until he saw Ponting pick up the ball and decided to trundle back to his mark, leaving Ramesh hanging midway, looking like he was thinking about geysers.

Sachin Tendulkar announces himself with three crisp boundaries. India cross 100; they’re flying. The finish line is rising on the horizon.

Gillespie comes around the wicket and bowls into Sachin’s chest. Out. A few minutes later, Gillespie teases Ganguly outside the off stump and finds the outside edge. Out. Rahul Dravid plays possibly the ugliest shot of his international career thus far. Out.

The crowd is on edge and the commentators are speaking in high tones. John Wright steps inside for a smoke. He can’t handle this.

Laxman reaches 66 off a mere 82 balls. In this Test alone, he has scored 131 runs, 92 of them in boundaries, each more elegant than the previous. He smacks Colin Miller on the leg side, expecting a boundary, and then sees the Australians celebrating. Mark Waugh—36, remember—has caught a ball he had no business reaching.

135-7 now. John Wright is typing away at his laptop. “That may be the Test match. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

20 left to win.

The Chepauk crowd has fallen into a pin-drop silence. There’s no shock, just dread, that throat-parching sensation from knowing how this ends. Many are remembering the famous afternoon of January 31, 1999.

***

They are remembering Sachin Tendulkar, struggling but playing with mastery and authority like only he could. Pakistan’s bowling lineup of Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis, and Saqlain Mushtaq powerless in front of his bat. India were 50 away from victory.

The stadium looked the same then—a brutalist open-lid concrete can that absorbed every kilojoule of heat available.

Akram came back with the old ball. You could be one run away from victory with five wickets in hand, and Wasim Akram with the old ball held the potential to wreck your dreams. Nayan Mongia, who, for so long, had been a picture of discipline next to Tendulkar’s rapier blade, tried to heave Akram into the Marina Beach. The ball ballooned up and landed softly into Waqar Younis’ hands.

Tendulkar, then, played a couple drives worthy of art galleries. The greatest left arm seamer to have ever graced cricket could only stand mid-pitch and look. Saqlain was pulled and driven or fours. Tendulkar was gasping between deliveries, completely taken over by back spasms.

Only 17 left to win. The Chennai 2001 crowd can see, in their mind’s eye, Saqlain set the trap. They’re pleading, “Don’t, Sachin. Don’t.”

They can see Sachin step out on the next ball, a loopy doosra from Saqlain. They can see the ball go up, up in the air, Sachin folding over, and the ball falling vertically into Wasim Akram’s hands.

They can see Wasim Akram jamming the ball into Anil Kumble’s front pad; they can see Sunil Joshi meekly placing the ball into Saqlain’s hands; and they can see Javagal Srinath defending an innocuous delivery with the softest of hands, and the ball backspinning onto the stumps.

They can hear the piercing silence of defeat.

***

March 22, 2001.

Sameer Dighe is at the crease. Until thirty minutes before the match, he was a reserve wicket-keeper. He’s now having to steer the final act of a mythological epic—on Test debut, mind you. He takes 10 runs off a Colin Miller over.

Four to win.

Steve Waugh passes the ball to Glenn McGrath. Of course, he does. It’s almost evil. Seven Australian fielders stand near the pitch in a close, suffocating circle. Zaheer edges a typical McGrath teaser to the slips.

Australia need two wickets. India need four runs. Along with the dread from ‘99, it’s impossible to not think of the 1986 tied Test match.

Harbhajan Singh comes in to bat. It will be his long gangly limbs vs McGrath’s probing lines. He survives the first examination. So fitting that the last lines of this epic have him in the centre.

McGrath doesn’t relent. He’s back for another over. India need two runs. Steve Waugh brings the field in even closer. He’s confident that, in a 1v1 battle, McGrath’s ball will beat Harbhajan’s bat.

McGrath bowls a yorker, which Harbhajan squirts away between gully and point. Harbhajan doesn’t even look at Dighe, just runs. Dighe doesn’t need to look at Harbhajan either. They run one, they come back for another. Dighe’s arms are raised. Ganguly is out of his chair, Wright is out of his chair, Chepauk is screaming.

Harbhajan and Dighe confirm with the umpires that this is real.

It is.

India 2-1 Australia.

***

It is often thought that Chennai 2001 is forgotten behind Kolkata’s surrealist magic. I disagree. I think Chennai 2001 gives Kolkata 2001 a brighter lustre. A blowout result would’ve been a damp climax to a series that deserved to end in heat and tension. Similarly, without this match ending in triumph, Kolkata 2001 would’ve been beautiful but orphaned.

Chennai 2001 gives it context and meaning.

India became a substantially better Test team. Until this series, India had a win-loss ratio of 0.562 in Test cricket—effectively, losing twice the games they won. Since, the rate has climbed to 1.605. The transformation was driven by a talented, youthful team with a forward-looking management, sure, but the tailwind from one dreamy fortnight of March 2001 can barely be ignored.

This series also bathed India vs Australia in new light, turning it from one of many big contests to the marquee event in the calendar. For starters, the rivalry became tighter. From the start of the Mumbai Test, the head-to-head reads 22-20 to India. They’ve played thirteen series in this century, seven of which were decided by a margin of one.

The first World Cup final of the 21st century was played between India and Australia. As was the most recent ODI World Cup final, played in front of 90,000 blue shirts under the sweltering heat of Ahmedabad. The Test match that generated the highest live crowd ever in Australia’s cricket history was the Boxing Day Test in 2024, when Jasprit Bumrah almost bowled India to a win.

In Bumrah, India now have the most fearsome fast bowler in the world, scouting and catapulted into the mainstream by John Wright himself. In the last decade, they’ve travelled to Australia and won, twice, thanks to a pace battery of their own, many of whom have walked through the MRF Pace Foundation in Chennai. The role of mentoring aspiring Indian fast bowlers has now been passed over to Glenn McGrath.

The admiration for Australian excellence runs deep within Indian cricket. No country exports more talent to the IPL than Australia. The top three highest paid foreign players in the tournament’s history are all Australians. The first winning captain of the tournament, the only foreign captain in the inaugural season, was Shane Warne.

Harbhajan went on to become one of India’s greatest spinners, finishing his Test career with 417 wickets. The next in line, an even more successful off-spinner, grew up just a few miles away from the camps where Dennis Lillee taught India how to bowl fast.

India vs Australia 2001, when it started, was expected to be the final conquered frontier for the most ruthless Test team the game had known. On the third afternoon in Kolkata, midway through the series, the result was a foregone conclusion. And then the series turned into something that hadn’t been seen before and hasn’t been seen since.

The Border-Gavaskar Trophy is named after two men who symbolised the tenacity that great Test cricket demands. In the spring of 2001, across one steamy month, the trophy earned its name.

Brig. Madan Lal Kheterpal opens his wallet at a dinner table in Lahore. He is eighty years old and his fingers move slowly across a monochrome photograph. He pauses at the two boys in the frame, his children. One of them is fifty; the other, he says, his voice breaking, will always be 21.

The man sitting across from him is Brig. Jaan Mohammed Nisar, retired commander, current chief in the Pakistani Army intelligence, and younger to Kheterpal by a few decades. Nisar had pulled many strings to arrange Kheterpal’s visit to his home, a move that befuddled his family and bosses both. The year is 2001, the smoke from Kargil still circles the air, and yet, Nisar takes down pictures hung on his drawing room wall and replaces them with a large framed photograph of a young Indian soldier and several cricket posters.

Ikkis is, in some ways, a movie about war and Bollywood loves the sound of that. Roughly a third of the top ten highest grossing Hindi films from the last decade have a running theme of armed conflict. Most times, it is national defence; other times, communal pride.

But all war movies here follow a similar emotional brief—stir the blood, swell the chest, send the audience into the parking lot feeling victorious. India’s most recent mega hit, already preparing for its second instalment, is a death metal album of a film that leaves your ears aching by the time it ends. Dhurandhar was 2025’s biggest Bollywood movie. The second biggest was Chhava—a story about the Sambhaji Maharaj defending the Maratha Empire against Aurangzeb’s invading, murderous Mughals. Its theatre run left many broken screens and torn seats across the country, such was the intensity of angst it stoked amongst a passionate audience.

If the theory about cinema reflecting a nation’s mood holds any truth, there is now an evident pleasure India takes in violence. At a broader level, one saw the proof of this bloodlust during India’s most recent armed conflict—Operation Sindoor. News anchors called rumoured strikes on Karachi in the breathless cadence of cricket commentary; social media was alight and frothing with the prospect of dead Pakistanis. For most of India today, war is a Netflix show.

At a micro level, the proof is on every street. Consider three events from just this month alone: Tarun Kumar, a 26-year-old from Uttam Nagar in Delhi, was beaten to death on Holi because a water balloon fell from his balcony onto a woman from a higher social community. A week or so back, during the Men’s T20 World Cup final, a speech-impaired kid in Bihar was killed because he mistakenly cheered for the wrong wicket. At the time of publication of this essay, television channels are carrying interviews of Uttam Nagar residents threatening to play Blood Holi on the day of Eid.

Into this India came a film in which an eighty-year-old Indian veteran sits in the home of a Pakistani intelligence officer and says, on the first night of his visit, when asked why he didn’t bring his family: “You too are my family.”

His son, 2nd Lt. Arun Kheterpal, 17th Poona Horse, is the central character of this film. Arun is an energetic cadet airdropped to the Battle of Basantar during the 1971 War. Throughout the first act, we see Arun’s sparkling eyes and boyish grin every time he’s on duty. His face lights up when he stands in front of the Centurion tank, drinking in the prospect of going into battle seated inside it. Later, his dejection when the war reaches ceasefire, robbing him of the chance for more rides in that tank, more territory conquered. And by the end, when he surges forward for one last skirmish, we see the boy becoming a soldier as Pakistani tanks close around him in a circle. Out goes the babyface, and in comes the clenched jaw, dirt marks on his face, and the percussion from automatic machine guns.

As much as Ikkis is Arun’s story, it’s also the story of his father seeking closure from losing a son who had his entire life in front of him, and whose profession, he knows only too well, pushed him inside that tank. And it is the story of the man across the dinner table, who has spent years carrying the thing he needs to tell, the entire film a journey of him finding the nerve to say it.

When was the last time you saw a Bollywood war movie that knew the gravity of war?

In 1997, on the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence, JP Dutta released Border. The film highlights a different strand of the 1971 War, zooming in on the Battle of Longewala, in which 120 Indian soldiers held off a Pakistani tank regiment rolling through the Rajasthan desert at night. The film never leaves the frontline, from beginning to end valourising the Indian armed forces, but while acknowledging a war’s toll on the soldiers and their people.

Dharamvir Singh is the son of a martyred soldier. His mother lost her eyesight from the shock of losing her husband. When Dharamvir leaves his village for the front, he leaves behind a partner, waiting for a life together. Bhairon Singh walks away from his newly wed wife on the morning after their wedding night. Mathura Das leaves to tend to his cancer-stricken wife, then turns around midway and comes back to the regiment.

Dharamvir, Bhairon, and Mathura all die that night. As do many, many others, across both sides of the border. Loss is the single, immutable truth of all wars.

Border ends twice. Once when the Indian MiG jets rain bombs on the Pakistani tanks, forcing their regiment to retreat and effectively winning India the Battle of Longewala. And once, after all is done, after the sound is muted, when the camera pans wide and you see lifeless bodies strewn across the desert sands. The song playing in that scene, ‘Mere Dushman, Mere Bhai, Mere Hamsaaye’—translating to my enemy, my brother, my shadow—underlines what the movie has been trying to say all along.

Francois Truffaut once said there was no such thing as an anti-war film. The camera makes a spectacle of what it shows, he argued. You can’t film a battle and make it ugly enough that someone in the audience won’t find it thrilling. Spielberg disagreed. Every good war movie, he said, is an anti-war movie.

Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan begins and ends with death. The sea turning red at the Omaha Beach from young men chopped down before we can see their faces; then, Captain Miller slumped against a wall, bleeding out, asking the boy he saved to earn the life. Everything between those two frames shows you the cost of combat. The more you watch the movie, the more you realise that Normandy is the setting for that story, not the story itself.

About an hour into Ikkis, as Brig. Kheterpal is regaling Brig. Nisaar’s family with stories, he falls quiet and arrives at the question the film is written around: “I don’t know what is true—the friendships and warmth I have just experienced, the shared culture I’m familiar with, or the bullets and shrapnel flying across borders?” At the end of that sequence, when Brig. Nisaar uses the word “dushman” (enemy) to refer to opposition, Brig. Kheterpal intercepts with, “What enemy?”

The relationship between the two brigadiers forms the moral spine of the story, of humanity holding its ground against nation-state conflict.

There is a scene near the end of Border where Maj. Kuldip Singh Chandpuri tends to an injured Pakistani soldier, asks him about his family back home, gives him water, and tells him he will be treated like a soldier. It is a small scene, almost throwaway, and it would be radical if it were to be shot today—the suggestion that the man on the other side of the gun is not a concept but a person.

Ikkis reaches its emotional crescendo with its penultimate sequence. Brig. Nisaar takes Brig. Kheterpal to the spot where his son breathed his last, and reveals, looking into his eyes, that he fired the shell that killed Arun. There are no tears, no soaring monologues, just silence. Then, the 80-year-old turns to his younger colleague, a calm smile settling on his face, and says, “The wounds of war never heal. But one day, someone digs up old wounds again, and we go back to the start. Again, and again, and again. That’s how it is, and that’s how it will continue to be. No one knows for how long. It will stop when we stop it.”

As the final credits roll on Ikkis, we are given photographs and text about the Battle of Basantar and the 1971 War. The makers leave us with one number—the casualties of 1971. But, instead of filtering for the familiar crest, their number includes casualties from both sides of the border.

Subscribe now

“When the low, heavy sky weighs like a lid,

On the groaning spirit, victim of long ennui,

And from the all-encircling horizon,

Spreads over us a day more gloomy than the night.”

- Charles Baudelaire (The Flowers of Evil)

Misery is a good place to start. Consider the state of things. India had been beaten inside three days in Mumbai, dismissed twice in a blur, their bowlers swept to smithereens by Adam Gilchrist and Matthew Hayden. Then, days before the Kolkata Test, Javagal Srinath broke down, joining Anil Kumble in the physio’s room. Rahul Dravid, already grasping for rhythm at the crease, was laid low by a fever and couldn’t train. VVS Laxman’s lower back took him to the physiotherapist. And then, as if the play had been written for maximum despair, Steve Waugh called correctly at the toss and Australia racked up 445 runs.

As the sun set on Day Two of the Kolkata Test, India were 128-8, 317 behind Australia, staring at another three-day defeat and a series loss in record time. In the Australian dressing room, cigars and whiskey bottles were laid out, in anticipation for the coming evenings when The Final Frontier would’ve been conquered.

In room number 214 of the Taj Bengal hotel, John Wright, India’s head coach, sat with four cans of Heineken and five cigarettes. He’d call it one of the loneliest, most desolate nights of his life. “The Aussies were an exceptional team,” he wrote in his autobiography, “but we were playing as if we didn’t think we belonged on the same park.”

At a dark hour of the night, Wright got a message from the front desk. Three fans—Vinay, Mahmud, and Sanchayita—had left him a note, hoping it would reach the team: “You guys can still win this. We believe in you.”

The Indian cricket fan’s devotion has never had much to do with logic. It is closer to madness. Your score could be in binary, the team could lose by an innings before lunch on the third day, producing a performance so abject that the highlights package doesn’t know what to show—and still they would come, with painted faces and handmade banners and throats ready to burn from shouting. That note to Wright and team was the purest distillation of that faith.

Cricket is a game of weird laws with weirder names. Amongst them is “Follow on”—asking a team to bat again after falling short of their opposition by 200 runs or more. The leading team has the option to enforce it or pile on the misery and bat again themselves. Historically, to follow on in a Test match was to stand one step away from defeat. If you batted extraordinarily well, you could claw your way to a draw. Winning was essentially unheard of—in 124 years and over 1,500 Tests, it had happened just twice.

Early on the third morning, India were bundled out for 171 in their first innings, giving Australia a lead of 274. Steve Waugh sniffed another crumble and asked India to follow on.

India had not crossed 200 in any of the three completed innings of the series. So when their openers, Sadagoppan Ramesh and Shiv Sundar Das, stuck around for an hour or so without catastrophe, there was that a brief unclenching of the gut within the dressing room. This wasn’t going to be another surrender. Heavy loss, maybe, but they were going to keep the Aussies out in the sun for a bit and salvage a shard of dignity.

At the fall of the first wicket, VVS Laxman walked in to bat, much to the bemusement of the outgoing batter and fifty thousand fans at the Eden Gardens. Rahul Dravid was the vice captain of the team, and number three was his spot. But, Laxman had scored a flawless 59 in the first innings, as if he was batting on a different pitch, against different bowlers, to everyone else. He was the last one out in the first innings, and as he walked back towards the pavilion, John Wright had intercepted him with, “Don’t take off your pads, Lax. You’re going in at number 3.”

Laxman felt right at home. He had batted at three for Hyderabad for nearly five years. He’d later write, “If I had the option, I’d always bat at number 3.” He cherished the challenge, perhaps buoyed by his knock in the first innings, but he also needed to repay the faith.

At the time, Laxman wasn’t a fixture in the Indian setup. He’d dip in and out of the team, score a cute 40 and then struggle for two whole matches. A bad series here meant he’d be out again.

Between the two Tests, Laxman had travelled to the holy land of Shirdi. On the journey, his mind had been cluttered with questions: “I had done everything in my control, so why this test by fire? Why were the runs not coming? Why was I in and out of the team? What more could I do?”

Then, days before this Test, Laxman felt a twinge in his back and went over to Andrew Leipus, India’s physio. As it turned out, it was more than a twinge. His upper body was leaning to the left, like a building with cracked pillars. A disc had slipped in his spine. Amidst that time-crunch, Leipus managed to just about reorient Laxman to get him onto the field.

And so, here he was. In the cauldron of Eden Gardens, the ground he had fallen in love with as a teenager, facing the team against whom he had played his two most substantial innings in India colours, at a delicate point of his career, now carrying the weight of having to spark a miracle. Obviously, he pulled Glenn McGrath for four.

Laxman was tall, almost willowy, but deceptively sharp. His feet glided up and down the pitch as if he were an ice-skater. When the ball came fast, he’d shuffle forward and back; when it was slow and loopy, he would shimmy down the track and meet it full. And sometimes, he wouldn’t move at all. He’d just stand on his toes, let the ball come to him and pat it away wherever he wanted. He could do all this because he had those wrists. Man, what wrists. Supple, elastic, sculpted when the almighty was in a generous mood and had a lot of time, they could drop the same ball dead or send it fizzing across the turf. In a lineup and age of batting capitalists, Laxman was an aesthete, incapable of scoring a dirty run.

McGrath went short again; Laxman pulled him even more crisply for four. At the other end, Australia were landing body blows. SS Das got out. Sachin Tendulkar’s arrival caused the Eden Gardens crowd to erupt, and his swift departure unplugged them entirely. But, within seconds, they realised the batter walking in was hometown royalty, Maharaj, Sourav Ganguly. And they went up again. To have watched Ganguly and Tendulkar at Eden is to have experienced a feral wall of sound that does not so much hit your ears as pass through your body like a shot of electricity.

Ganguly laced Gillespie and Kasprowicz for boundaries through the covers, the ball barely lifting from the surface. With every boundary, Australia packed the off-side field with more fielders, and he’d still pierce them. The crowd, delirious, were eating out of his hands. When the fast bowlers bowled short—his old, nagging weakness—he’d play with soft hands or take it on the body. Ganguly was probably never a great Test batter, but that day, with the game and the series hanging by a thread the width of a hair, he brought the street dog to the fight.

Laxman and Ganguly’s duet completely belied the state of the game. While Ganguly dealt with the seamers, Laxman set his eyes on the emperor, Shane Warne.

Laxman peppered the cover and mid-wicket boundary with boundaries, literally toying with Warne’s lines, forcing the great bowler to switch angles every other minute. And when Warne went short, Laxman pulled him with force to the mid-wicket boundary. Steve Waugh set attacking fields, leaving gaps as bait, and Laxman pierced all of them.

The highlight of the contest was Warne going around the wicket, bowling into the rough, and Laxman hopping forward like a ballet dancer and driving him with the spin—a ridiculously tough shot against a leg spinner—for four. It happened so many times you’d be forgiven for thinking they were repeated clips.

“A lot of players came down the track and hit me inside-out once or twice, but not as consistently as VVS did for two days - or however many days, three days, I can't remember!” - Shane Warne, speaking to The Cricket Monthly in 2016

Laxman’s wagonwheel just from facing Warne that innings could sell for millions at an art exhibition. Warne had struggled against India before, but rarely been dismantled like this.

And just when it was time for the Laxman-Ganguly partnership to crescendo, Ganguly fell. McGrath found the outside edge, Gilchrist accepted the gift, and Eden Gardens fell into a long hush. No one left, because the Eden crowd doesn’t do that, but the overwhelming feeling was that a nail had been driven into India’s coffin.

Rahul Dravid walked into the sapping Kolkata afternoon, still carrying a burning fever. Steve Waugh, ever verbally sharp, reminded him of his demotion in the batting order. “Three in the last innings, to six now. Six to out of the side!”

Eden Gardens rose as one when Laxman tucked Warne off his pads for a single to reach his century. One hundred and sixty-six balls, seventeen fours, batting turned into expressionist art. This was only his second Test century, and just as pristine as his previous one. He took his helmet off, raised his hands, and beamed to the crowd.

At the end of day three, as a tired and cramping Laxman walked back to the dressing room, Steve Waugh asked him to lead the way across the boundary ropes, the entire Australian team applauding from behind.

India were 20 runs in deficit—still breathing, but barely. In the away dressing room, Michael Slater waved a cigar under his nose. “The result is so close, I can smell it.”

That evening, Prem Panicker wrote in his report: “It is possible for India to wipe out that deficit, then put another 250 on the board, and really push the Aussies against the wall, in the fourth innings. It is also possible for me to walk on water, and then convert a jugful of that same water into sparkling champagne.”

***

Day Four. 14th March, 2001. Wednesday. Temperature in Kolkata touching the mid thirties, humidity above 80 percent. Eden Gardens was packed with fifty, sixty, seventy-five thousand, who knows? It was hot and it was loud. Hope was still many miles away, but they got the fight they’d so desperately wished for.

Glenn McGrath and Jason Gillespie returned with the new ball and chests full of fire. They were always going to. Australia’s pride could not be dented by a single day’s batting, however extraordinary. McGrath, in particular, was a force of nature. With a six foot four frame, he’d land the ball on a handkerchief for hours on end, spell after spell, in the morning and afternoon, then once more as you’re counting the seconds until sunset. How long will you survive? Gillespie was different, less skilled but the consummate workhorse who never let up.

That morning, Gillespie repeatedly beat Dravid and Laxman’s bats, sometimes even kissing the inside edge only for the ball to slip past the ‘keeper. McGrath, back to his metronomic best, kept teasing the outside edge. Somehow, Laxman and Dravid saw off the first hour and drew India level.

There is an old story, older than cricket and sport and many holy texts. A sacred bird gets consumed by fire and burns down, and from its pyre, rises again. The Greeks called it the Phoenix. It is a story we tell when reason has been exhausted, when you stand at the precipice of defeat, when India’s most respected cricket writer is joking about turning water into wine. On the night of March 13th, the only thought within the Indian dressing room was about survival and delaying the inevitable. No sacred birds were invoked.

But the thing about the Phoenix is that it burns until it suddenly, impossibly doesn’t.

Gillespie went full and met Laxman’s straight bat. Four. A couple of deliveries later, he went short; Laxman rose on his back toe and guided the ball past the slip cordon. Four. Next ball, Gillespie went full again, and Laxman drove him past the covers. Four. Gillespie returned for another over, Laxman drove him for four again.

Have you ever been to Kolkata for Durga Pujo? Or a Bengali neighbourhood in another metropolitan city during that week? You should. Enter the pandal around 6:30pm, just as the priest is weaving a dhunuchi—clay pot filled with burning camphor, coconut husks, and resin—around the giant Maa Durga idol. Next to him, four percussionists, cowskin drums (dhaak) hanging on their torso, play a triplet-heavy beat with thin sticks. Someone blows into a conch, and its resonant sound rolls through the pandal. And slowly, as the beat accelerates, visitors gather around the idol. The fragrance from the dhunuchi and the insistent, breathless percussion enter your body through different channels and meet somewhere near your chest, the beat building and building, the state of trance both inexplicable and inevitable.

If you ever want to know what such an evening feels like, I’d send you to Eden Gardens on the morning of 14th March, 2001.

Rahul Dravid, so far, had stuck around, barely visible behind the Laxman sound and light show. Without form or health to fall back on, he slowly built up confidence the way he knew best—by surviving, by making the bowlers come to him again and again. Then Michael Kasprowicz reverse swung the ball inwards, and Dravid leaned on his left toe to flick him for four.

One boundary in a thirteen thousand-run career might seem insignificant, in a way that one match amongst a hundred and sixty four does. But, until then, Dravid was the immaculate, obdurate technician who could bat for hours, often without adequate tempo. In fact, his inability to push the run-scoring forward had forced Ganguly and Wright to think in other directions, eventually promoting Laxman to number three.

“For too long, has Dravid been a captive to the demons of his own mind,” wrote Prem Panicker. “For too long, have those who know his ability wondered about his penchant for setting up some opposing bowler as a bogeyman, and tying himself down.”

That shot against Kasprowicz was the morning bell from where Dravid turned from a man batting in chains to one who could balance stillness and sizzle. 19 turned to 40, then to 50. Dravid hit everyone, nearly matching Laxman for tempo even if he couldn’t match the artistry. He smoked Warne for three boundaries in one over. What’s more, he even sledged that day! When he reached his century, Dravid jabbed his bat at the press box. ​​He clearly had things to say.

As India’s lead soared and Eden grew louder, Laxman and Dravid entered a trance themselves. They broke the day down into phases of ten overs and did not once look at the scoreboard. In that first session, they added 122 runs at an Australian pace of 4 runs an over.

They batted, and batted, and kept batting. They hit every bowler Steve Waugh threw at them until he relegated himself to the boundary, leaving whoever pleased to bowl their pies. The hot March sun was beginning to have its effect on the toughest cricket team in the world. Matthew Hayden bowled, Ricky Ponting bowled, even Justin Langer bowled. The crowd at Eden Gardens, impervious to the heat, swelled and screamed with every boundary. The game, now, was on.

Laxman reached his double century. India’s lead had crossed 200. Steve Waugh cycled through his strike bowlers one more time, hoping to get something before the shadows lengthened and the India dressing room could break into a long bout of joy. Nothing. Laxman and Dravid remained undefeated through the day.

At stumps: Laxman 275 not out, Dravid 155 not out, India 315 ahead. Laxman lay on the physio’s table; Dravid on another, nearby, plugged to an intravenous drip. The question of declaration hung in the air as the team gathered at Sourav Ganguly’s palatial bungalow in Behala for dinner.

Around the dinner table at Ganguly’s, John Wright posited that while Steve Waugh’s Australians had become a winning machine, they didn’t know how to play for survival. So, leave just enough time and runs to tantalise them into a chase. And then, unleash Harbhajan Singh.

***

On Day Five, Eden Gardens was packed an hour before the start of play. The streets leading to the stadium were filled with fans who couldn’t snare a ticket but wanted to wave at the team bus. It was a weekday morning, and Kolkata couldn’t care less about pushing paper at a desk.

Laxman finished with 281—the highest score at the time for an India batter. He had batted a combined eleven hours in the Test. Dravid chalked up 180. He says he has batted better elsewhere, because it’s a quintessentially Dravid thing to measure a knock by its difficulty, but this was his most significant batting effort.

India left Australia 384 to chase in 75 overs.

Now: Harbhajan Singh. Twenty-year-old boy from Jalandhar, picked despite his action and demeanour. Many months before this game, Sourav Ganguly had dragged coach John Wright to watch him. Fiery, fiesty, and immensely skillful, he was the perfect Ganguly bowler.

Everything about Harbhajan Singh said spin. And no, it wasn’t the turban and the lineage of Bedi, Maninder, and Sarandeep. It was his long, lean limbs and a torso that lacked muscle, as if tuned for rotation and whip. His bowling action was a thing of beauty. He started with a couple of hops, then spread his arms wide like an eagle, brought them back above his head, ran his right arm over his left, his torso twisting with the stride, and released the ball fizzing all the way onto the pitch. Loop this, set it to a dhol beat, and you have a bhangra routine.

On a flat pitch, Harbhajan was a handful; on anything spicier, he was a menace. The rapid revs on the ball made it spit and bite, like wicketkeeper Nayan Mongia found out early in the day, when a ball pinged off the pitch and broke his nose.

At tea, with two hours of play left, Australia needed 223 runs and India needed 7 wickets. If one were to place a serious bet, you’d think India would struggle to dismiss seven. Australia were likelier to reach their target, however outlandish their effort would have to be. The window for Harbhajan and co. was shrinking.

You’d think that at most grounds, not Eden Gardens. Not with a hundred thousand voices, flares dotted across the circular stands from burning newspapers, a hot mid-March sun, and Harbhajan making the ball hop and dance.

The Australians felt the heat but refused to buckle. Matthew Hayden reached another fifty—his third in four innings. Across from him stood Steve Waugh, the toughest cricketer you’d hope to watch, the kind of batter you’d want to call captain in this situation.

Harbhajan sent another fizzer whose revs you’d hear if you stood close enough, and Steve Waugh could only place the ball into the hands of a close-in fielder. This was the typical Harbhajan wicket, first beating a batter in the air, then off the pitch, leaving him fending and prodding. Six to go.

In came Ricky Ponting, a walking wicket, picking Harbhajan as well as a hammerhead shark would pick Viswanathan Anand’s opening gambit. Out. Five to go.

As the clock ticked down, Ganguly needed someone to support Harbhajan from the other end. Raju was tidy but not threatening enough. So he turned to a weapon he didn’t nearly use enough: the right arm of Sachin Tendulkar. One thinks of Tendulkar and thinks straight bat, straight drive, runs in bulk. Fair enough. Nobody before or since has been so good for so long. But if you had seen him bowl, you knew he was borderline prodigious. He could bowl leg-spin, off spin, seam-up, or dibbly-dobblies. He had rescued semi-finals, taken five-wicket hauls, sent Brian Lara’s stumps cartwheeling.

Ganguly gave him one over. Tendulkar bowled a ripping leg-break and trapped Adam Gilchrist in front. Four to go. Next over, he sent a similar ball to Matthew Hayden, who played the same shot as Gilchrist. Out. Three to go.

Up next, Shane Warne. The best bowler in the world, the greatest spinner to have ever lived, a gift to cricket theatre. With the bat, he was more than capable. Tendulkar vs Warne was the marquee contest within every India vs Australia series at the time. Hissing leg spin vs twinkling feet. The roles had been reversed for this short passage.

You know how, when you have a really talented friend, and you end up in a situation where you have to do the thing he’s good at, you kind of push yourself a little? It’s that weird sense of competition, borne out of not wanting to look silly in front of your friend, but also a little bit of ego that you aren’t inferior. Tendulkar and Warne were great friends, and on that afternoon, Tendulkar bowled a vicious googly that Warne would’ve been proud of in his pomp. Out. Two to go.

Eden Gardens’ sound had become a screech. “Crowds at Eden Gardens have never been truly estimable, its capacity overwhelming logistics, so it might have hosted larger attendances,” wrote Gideon Haigh. “What seems sure is it never felt as full as on 15 March 2001, stands heaving with motion, without a speck of empty terrace to be seen.”

Kasprowicz and Jason Gillespie held on. Every minute felt like an hour. After coming this far, were we going to realise we had been short by a whisker?

Gillespie flicked Harbhajan into a fielder. One to go.

Harbhajan Singh to Glenn McGrath. Seven fielders and a wicketkeeper around the bat. An edge, a mishit, a badly judged leave, anything would do. Harbhajan hopped in, spread his arms, twisted his body, and released a quick, full turner. McGrath misjudged the line and played with his pad. A hundred thousand and eleven Indians went up in a roar, and before the appeal could reach its highest note, umpire S. Bansal’s index finger had gone up.

Australia, all out 212. India win by 171 runs.

***

What is there to say about Kolkata 2001 that the match itself has not already said?

Steve Waugh, who lost very little on a cricket field, called it the greatest Test he had ever been a part of. Even in defeat, he wanted it known that he had been there, that he had stood in the middle of it, that he had felt everything that passed through Eden Gardens on those five days.

Many will tell you that everything that came after—the wins abroad, the World Cups, the belief that India could compete with anyone, anywhere—flows from this single Test in this unique city. Perhaps. History is generous with its turning points. But Kolkata did not feel like a mere turning point at the time. It felt like something greater and less explicable, almost spiritual. There had been no precedent for a story like this, no idea that an epic like this could even be imagined. But here we are, twenty-five years to the day after Harbhajan Singh trapped Glenn McGrath, still wondering if those five days were real.

If you watched it, you know. You’ll carry Kolkata 2001 for the rest of your life.

Subscribe now

At the R Premadasa Stadium in Colombo, I met Nuwan. He wore a mid-2000s Sri Lanka jersey, no name on the back, heat-printed logos fraying from two decades of washing. Nuwan saw my India shirt and immediately reminded me about the 1997 Test match, at the ground where we stood, when Sri Lanka scored 952 runs in one inning. Straight for the jugular. He followed that with a hearty laugh and a tap on my shoulders. The tap landed a bit heavy. Nuwan was short and portly, but the jersey fit him snugly, lining the ridge of his shoulders down to the curve of his side deltoids. His biceps creased the sleeve. There was something very past-athlete about him.

He used to be a club cricketer, but not much good by his own words. He played a few seasons as a floating middle-order bat, shepherding the tempo like his great hero Arjuna Ranatunga. Time caught up with him. His lack of explosive instincts was compounded by a rickety knee, and soon, he was getting in the lineup only thanks to charity.

These days, Nuwan spends half his year in Colombo and half at home in Negombo, which he was adamant I visit next time. He had a specific month in mind too: March.

Why March? Sri Lanka rarely hosts cricket in March, so if he didn’t mean the cricket season of July-August, surely winter was the best time in an island country? “No, come for the Blues derby. You know what it is?”

I did, not from any personal familiarity, but from text—Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman and the many essays about Sri Lankan cricket I’ve read over the years.

The Derby is the annual cricket match between Royal College and St. Thomas College in Colombo. If you’re a talented young cricketer in Sri Lanka, there’s a high chance you’ll play this game. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, turn up every year, giving it the gravitas of an international contest. At times, the noise here is greater than what you might expect at a Test match. The Blues rivalry goes back more than 100 years, played through civil wars and pandemics. Nothing comes in its way.

Pratyush Sinha from Cricbuzz has written a wonderful essay on Ramesh Abeywickrama, the current Co-Chairman of the Royal-Thomian Joint Match Organising Committee.

Here’s a small excerpt to give you a hint of the significance of this game.

“It was a bubble before a bubble,” he says of the years from 2007 to 2009, as Sri Lanka’s decades-long civil war reached its final and most violent phase. “People know the SSC as this historic cricket ground. But those three years, we had anti-aircraft guns inside the premises. Metal gates everywhere. Armed personnel. You could see rifles. It wasn’t just cricket.”

Security was tightened further because the families of the President and Prime Minister were often in attendance at the Big Match. Spectators were ferried in buses arranged by the organisers, each one checked before anyone boarded. “A bomb can explode in the bus too, right?” Abeywickrama says. “So we had to think of everything.”

School rivalries can be intense. For thirteen and fourteen-year-olds they are the realest thing in the world, their replica of what the famous ones do on television. I remember walking into elocution and debate contests sizing up my opponents, stretching my arms and legs as I waited in the gallery, as if I was going to finish my three-minute sermon on planting trees and immediately hit them with a two-footed tackle. With that information, do the math on the kilojoules of power I—to be honest, all of us—emitted before inter-house or school matches. It was madness.

In London, home of the Tradition Is Gospel™ cult, kids from Eton and Harrow have been playing an annual cricket match at Lord’s for nearly 220 years. This one year, a streaming platform broadcast the whole match. The playing area was substantially smaller than an international game—the boundary ropes were pulled in and the pitch was laid out on a narrow strip at a couple of long hops’ distance from the stands. One bloke bowled a searing yorker, dismantling the stumps, and his shrill celebration was the only audible sound through the broadcast. The camera panned wide to show a pale and blank Lord’s, just the way it would look on a winter morning when cricket shifts eastwards.

A few hours after this is published, I’ll be on a flight to Mumbai. The cricket match I am going for will not involve any school kids, but hopefully, over the following couple of days, I can squeeze out a morning at Shivaji Park or Azad Maidan, and watch cricket consume the youth of an entire city.

The Giles Shield and Harris Shield finals have also been on my bucket list. I first read about them in a Sachin Tendulkar biography, sometime in the ‘90s. School cricket is the first chapter in Tendulkar’s myth. Scour through a library in Mumbai, and you’ll find newspaper reports of a skinny boy from Sharadashram Vidyamandir lighting up Giles and Harris Shield games.

In the 1988 Harris Shield semifinal, Tendulkar took strike alongside Vinod Kambli. Tendulkar was fifteen; Kambli, sixteen. 664 runs later, their names had been inscribed into the Guinness Book of World Records.

Think of any Mumbai cricketer, and he would’ve played these matches. Scouts from across the city sit in canopied tents. Local reporters beeline near the boundary ropes, hoping to catch the first scent of the next Mumbai or India cricketer.

School cricket in Mumbai—and evidently, Sri Lanka—is a great reminder of why this sport comes to us with our DNA. And why, like some writers have observed, cricket in the subcontinent is neither sport nor religion, it’s a condition.

📖 Reading List

• A New Yorker essay on why some people are able to function on very little sleep. As someone who doesn’t sleep all that well—between five and seven hours every night—this was fascinating. Of course, the author doesn’t advocate less sleep, but finds a few people who sleep four-ish hours every night, and their alertness is not affected at all.

• 21-year-old Texan high jumper Osawese Agbonkonkon is currently writing his second science fiction book. The book is part of a series called “Psychic Suit”, where characters are blessed with psychic powers, and as they navigate life, find themselves at forked roads in the moral wood.

• This report on DNS censorship in India. The data is filtered by internet service providers and websites. You’ll be surprised by some of the names.

• This essay. Deepa Anappara navigates the death of her sister, and imminent divorce, and sets off for the Himalayas.

• It’s been a bleak period for the world, not least India. Here’s a screenshot from a terribly disturbing event in Rajouri, the details of which are too gory to be explained.

  

🎵 Earworm

A full concert by the big beautiful bald head that was responsible for the background score of Arrival.

Subscribe now

That’s all from this edition of The Jukebox. See you soon!

Tonight, if you ask a fan at the stadium for his prediction, you’ll hear what conviction sounds like. He’ll tell you that India will win and qualify for the semi-final; the West Indies will lose and leave to a rousing reception. Probe him further, and he’ll serve a similar-toned prediction for the semi-final. Will, not should.

If you happened to be around Indian cricket’s orbit in the early spring of 2001, hearing things like this must make you feel dizzy. No Indian team, ever, has been this utterly dominant at cricket.

Since its first Test in 1932, India has been the sport’s most colourful underperformer. Every generation, Indian cricket’s conveyor belt would throw up a genius, and that genius would shine bright and brilliant, but inevitably find himself amongst the also-rans at the end of a major series. In the sixty-nine years between their first Test and February 2001, India played 336 Tests. They won a mere 63 and lost 112, placing them sixth on the ten-team table for win-loss ratio.

The crowds filled up stadiums regardless, with outsized passion and expectation. Their unique, quixotic relationship with cricket was never more evident than the two riots at Eden Gardens in 1996 and 1999. Their rage at years of structural incompetence boiled over into flames, and they returned the next day carrying placards and posters.

It’s hard to imagine now, but India’s place in cricket’s imagination and cricket’s place in India’s imagination had undergone seismic transformation. The 1983 World Cup triumph triggered the first explosion. At the time of that win, Indian cricket didn’t have enough money to award the returning players. Within four years, they were co-hosting the next World Cup. Within a decade more, satellite television had arrived in Indian living rooms and cricket had swallowed every other sport’s share of the national attention. Cricket’s popularity was rivalled only by Bollywood, and on some days, not even that.

Internationally, India had emerged as the obvious candidate to lead the sport into the new millennium. The 1996 World Cup, even considering the semi-final riots, had been a success. Jagmohan Dalmiya had served as president of the International Cricket Council. Elsewhere, they ran nuclear tests and hosted the American president for a week. In the late 90s, one associated India—the nation state and the men’s cricket team—with coiled energy.

And then, between February 27th and March 22nd, 2001, India played a Test series that changed the posture of its cricket team, its voice, and the sense of what was possible. At the time, not many would have predicted so. Test cricket was the holy grail and the Indian Test team was in shambles.

I. Prelude

Sydney, 2000. The Indian team had brought in the new millennium watching fireworks over the harbour. From home came a sliver of unrelated good news: a flight carrying the hijacked passengers from IC814 had touched down safely in New Delhi. It was temporary respite. The wounds from a 0-2 deficit in the three-match Test against Australia were still fresh when the third Test came knocking around.

India batted first and were bowled over for 250. Against a hapless bowling attack, possessing neither edge nor precision, the Australian batters filled their boots until they got bored, finally declaring their innings at 552/5. India came back out to bat, expected to crumble again. And they played that part to near perfection barring one batter from Hyderabad who was anyway on the verge of getting dropped from the team.

Vangipurappu Venkata Sai Laxman scored 167, but to say he scored those runs would be wrong. He painted. In fine strokes when the ball was pitched up, in bold flourishes when it was short, his lean arms wielding the bat with a feathery lightness. For every breath of his 255-minute innings, he turned batting into a purely artistic endeavour. The harder the Australians came at him, the more elegantly he replied. If batting could ever be set to a Stradivarius concerto, it would be VVS Laxman at Sydney.

India lost, as India often did back then when they travelled, but Laxman boarded the flight back to Mumbai having cast an impression on everyone watching, not least the Australian team. It wouldn’t be the last time they ran up against Laxman’s brush.

Anyway, 3-0 to Australia. After the Test humiliation, India played an ODI tri-series against Australia and Pakistan, where, out of eight matches—four against each—they lost seven.

They came back home, tail tucked firmly between their legs, to face South Africa in a two-match Test series. They lost both the matches, but the series is remembered for finally uncorking the depth of match-fixing’s rot within and outside Indian cricket. The proliferation of dishonest money had been an open secret for years. Now, we got a tableau of just how many people had filled their bathtubs with cash.

Hansie Cronje and Mohammed Azharuddin, two statesmen of the sport, never played another Test. Cronje was weeping in a court that summer. He was dead within two years.

With Azharuddin’s implication, a part of Indian cricket died immediately. Azharuddin was the shy, lanky boy from Hyderabad who had made it to the top. He was India’s first long-term captain after the peerless Kapil Dev. As India and Indian cricket got more ambitious, Azhar was seen as its moral anchor, the soft-spoken but firm Muslim figurehead in a country that was Nehruvian on paper, but couldn’t control its climate. He was proof that talent and performance could marry grace, and carry you from the bylanes of an old city to leading the Indian contingent at World Cups. That even he could be corrupted served as the final full stop in the romantic’s relationship with the sport.

It is one thing to lose matches, completely another to lose the trust of a nation that rearranged its daily life to watch you play. Indian cricket had known a period when it couldn’t win a race of one, but it had never known a low like this.

Sachin Tendulkar, always the reluctant captain, gave up his captaincy. Kapil Dev was sacked as the coach, his position untenable after the double-sided attack of CBI investigations and a terrible Test record. Into the turbulence strode Sourav Ganguly, firebrand from Calcutta privilege, nicknamed Maharaj, and John Wright, a 46-year-old soft-spoken Kiwi with zero national team coaching experience. They inherited a dressing room that was broken in every way a dressing room can be broken—in confidence, in trust, in identity—but which contained, if you looked carefully, the spine for rebirth in Tendulkar, Dravid, Kumble, Laxman, and Srinath.

Ganguly and Wright took a young India team to the final of the ICC Knockout in 2000. Ganguly scored belligerent centuries against Australia and South Africa, and asked his team to raise the tempo even further. It started with Tendulkar, otherwise the anchor of India’s batting, tearing into Glenn McGrath, evoking memories from ten years prior when he would butcher bowlers with a cherubic face and toothy grin. Then, Yuvraj Singh, a tall, athletic 18-year-old from Chandigarh, cut and pulled his way to 84 in his debut innings. 21-year-old Zaheer Khan, who had moved from Baroda to Mumbai, and pitstopped at Chennai to refine his bowling under the shadow of Dennis Lillee, bowled dipping 90mph yorkers into Steve Waugh’s stumps. In the middle of all this, even Venkatesh Prasad, whose batting skills would rival mine, hit a 75-metre six. The change in ideology, now looking back, almost feels overnight.

All said, Test cricket was a substantially tougher ballgame, where India had no recent evidence of strength. Then, a few days before the series, they lost Anil Kumble—their one true match-winning bowler. They reached Mumbai short of confidence and skill.

Australia reached Mumbai on a winning run of fifteen consecutive Tests. Steve Waugh, their captain and talisman, had called this tour The Final Frontier. Over the decades, Australia had beaten everyone everywhere except India in India. Waugh recognised the unique challenges that an India series brings, but he also had a team so stacked with gold-standard talent, so deep, they were equipped to handle everything. Crossing the frontier seemed like an inevitability.

II. Swept Aside

On the morning of the first day, the two teams stood across from each other, heads bowed, holding a minute of silence for the passing of Sir Don Bradman. There are many ways to describe Bradman, but the simplest maybe that he was the greatest ever, the rightmost tip on the spectrum of excellence. In no other sport has one man ever been so far ahead of a hundred and fifty years of others.

India batted first, and within the first hour, lost four wickets. Home town hero Tendulkar stroked a flurry of boundaries, often giving the impression that he was batting on a different pitch to everyone else, but eventually fell to Glenn McGrath’s relentless probing lines. India were all out for 176.

Australia lost their first five wickets for 99, and for a brief, heady passage, India were on top of the best team in the world. The architect of Australia’s troubles was twenty-year-old Harbhajan Singh, the turbaned off-spinner from Jalandhar who had once ruffled up Ricky Ponting in Sharjah and earned a suspension. Now, on a dusty Wankhede pitch offering generous turn, no Australian batter was truly picking him in the air or off the pitch. One more wicket and India would be beyond the specialist batters, into the tail.

From that delicate position, Adam Gilchrist unleashed a soaring arpeggio of sweeps and slog-sweeps and practically batted India out of the game. His treated the Indian spinners with such ferocity that you were left wondering if the scorecard before had been a mirage. To this day, his 122 stands as one of the greatest knocks ever played by a visiting batter on Indian soil.

Matthew Hayden scored a century too, signposting his gluttonous appetite for runs. Built like a monolith from Mount Olympus, Hayden made full use of his frame to take the pitch entirely out of the picture, sweeping balls from good length, walking down at will. Australia took a lead of 173.

India reached 154-2 in their second innings. Sachin Tendulkar was looking majestic once again, still leading that enduring but kind of one-sided battle with Shane Warne. All hopes for a resurgence sat on his shoulders. Then, Tendulkar fell to Mark Waugh; Ganguly ran himself out; Laxman nicked behind; Dravid was castled by Warne. Four wickets in twenty minutes, four different ways of failing, each leaving to a deepening silence across Wankhede’s circular cauldron. The rest of the lineup, hardly any match for the Australian bowling attack, gave the scorers little trouble.

Australia’s openers wrapped up the 47-run chase without sweat. Three days, it had taken them. What was that thing about frontiers?

Subscribe now

On this day, twenty-five years back, the Indian team was dealt a rude lesson in the chasm between them and the Australians. They were barely playing the same sport. For so long, India’s Test team were known as lambs abroad, but lions at home. That halo, already fragile, now had been punctured.

That evening, Aaj Tak, a new twenty-four-hour news channel—India’s first ever—filled its slots with cricket. Ex-cricketers sat under studio lights and dissected the fragility of India’s batting lineup and the structural differences between Indian and Australian cricket. By the end of the night, the overwhelming consensus amongst the panelists and fans alike was that it wouldn’t take Australia all five days in the second Test at Kolkata either.

This week, let’s start with a football match.

First, the set up. A masked man in a canary yellow shirt started dribbling with a football from his own goal-line. There was no goalkeeper behind him, no forward to pass the ball to. Beneath his shirt, jet black leggings extended into his boots; above, a balaclava that concealed everything but his eyes. He had the physique of a footballer and the vibe of a DC Comics villain.

The turf was a shade of artificial green, clearly machine-made, suited for television lighting, no grass or earth beneath it. The playing area was a rectangle, like football pitches go, but about one-quarter the size of an actual pitch. Just behind the sidelines, photographers stood with wildlife lenses and iPhones. Beyond them, tucked in at a small pass’ distance, the crowd, most of them with upright hands holding their phones.

Our man dribbled about eight yards, and shot towards the opposite goal. The ball skimmed the inside of the left post and nestled into the bottom corner. The shot of a professional. On the other side stood a less athletic man in a different kit. He picked the ball from his net, dribbled, and took a wild swing of his right foot. That shot ended twenty rows into the seating area.

Masked Man one, Joe nil.

This “match” happened on November 3rd, 2025, at the Copper Box Arena in East London. The masked man in yellow was The Mystery Player for a team called NDL FC in Season 2, Matchday 2 of Baller League UK.

What is Baller League?

Baller League is a celebrity franchise competition. Conceived in Germany, its first matches were live-streamed from a repurposed aeroplane hangar in Cologne. The craze has since spread like wildfire to UK and, soon, Miami.

Every match is played six-a-side on a futsal-sized court, fifteen minutes per half. Then, in the final three minutes of each half, the rules are altered according to a spinwheel. Goalkeepers may suddenly be forbidden from using their hands; the match may shrink to three-a-side; or a long-range strike may count double. The rulebook is intentionally designed for content.

Felix Starck, the league’s founder and chief executive, is a filmmaker and entrepreneur who once ran a production company in Mallorca. He created Baller League as an answer to the question: what if audiences want something other than what we’ve been selling them?

“Sport is no longer as easy as just saying ‘look, we’re here now, come and watch us,’” said Starck here. “That’s just not how sport works any more.”

The teams are managed by YouTubers, TV celebrities, and retired footballers trying their hand at new content. In the UK, the league president is KSI—a man who first became famous for playing FIFA on camera and has since become a boxer, a musician, and a seller of energy drinks. When the league launches in Miami in early 2026, its team owners will include Ronaldinho, Usain Bolt, Odell Beckham Jr, and iShowSpeed—a 21-year-old streamer with more YouTube subscribers than Yanni, Celine Dion, and Adele put together.

Matches are streamed for free on Twitch and YouTube. The first season drew north of three million spectators per matchday.

Funds

While Starck is the biggest shareholder, other co-founders include Mats Hummels and Lukas Podolski—former Germany internationals and World Cup winners. Having this kind of weight helps with pulling in names and funds.

Baller League raised a seed round of €7.6 million in the summer of 2024. Last year, they raised €23 million for the Series A round. They’re now expanding in USA and the Middle East. Dedicated arenas are in the works.

Narrative

One decision that strikes me as both brave and telling was their pitch to streaming platforms instead of TV. With the kind of names they have on their roster, it would’ve been fairly easy to aim for a prime time slot. Instead, they’ve positioned themselves as a different product from football—think FIFA Street vs FIFA in the video game market. It’s a shrewd call. YouTube and Twitch has enough of an engaged, burgeoning audience that traditional media doesn’t always reach.

Tennis tried something like this, about a decade back, with International Premier Tennis League (IPTL). Weird teams, weirder rules. Twice, the touring caravan stopped over at Delhi. The second time, the organisers managed to get Roger Federer play Rafael Nadal in a singles match. Think of it. The rivlary of 21st century tennis, in the middle of New Delhi, inside an indoor stadium with no history of hosting tennis of this scale, in front of a crowd that kept shouting, “Chak de fatte, Roger!” Of course I was there.

But, I digress. IPTL shut down after three seasons.

The most popular sports don’t like change. Even today, more than two decades after its inception, nearly eighteen years after all doubts about its potential were blown to smithereens by the bat of Brendon McCullum, you’ll hear ex-cricketers and commentators insulting T20 cricket. In the same way that many people in the 1970s called ODI cricket an obscene indulgence.

T20 is, in fact, one of the smartest structural innovations in popular sport in a generation. No other sport has been brave enough to mess with its conventions so brazenly. That the format eventually attracted a capitalist appetite so ferocious that it now threatens to devour the entire calendar is a different conversation. The format itself is dramatic, viewer friendly, and democratises an otherwise very, very complex sport.

I suspect Baller League will attract some of that spit. The money and attention within it will draw more athletes, which will bring more spotlight and louder criticism. But as long as the product maintains its distance from the real thing—which, I feel, there is a good chance of, given the density of ex-footballers in management and leadership positions—football will be fine.

It will, however, give us a hint about people’s appetite for something different, something a lot more fun and chaotic without the dense overheads of tradition and culture.

🥷 Theft

The India AI Impact Summit, held last week at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi, was meant to announce the country’s arrival as a serious player in artificial intelligence. Over twenty heads of state flew down to the capital. Startups and founders from across India scrambled for floor space inside the main hall.

Young, small-sized teams were working on problems between predicting cardiac arrest to wearables that transcribe offline conversations. By all accounts, it was a creditable show of Indian enterprise.

But, on Day 2, we got the belle of the ball: a robot dog.

You probably know how the rest of the movie went. Its name was Orion. Galgotias University, a private institution based in Uttar Pradesh, presented it as their own creation. India’s IT Minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw, a keen social media user, shared the footage on social media, praising “Bharat’s sovereign models.”

It took mere hours for the veil to fall. Orion was actually Unitree Go2—a commercial Chinese product, available online for roughly $2000. Attention brought embarrassment, which, in turn, brought television interviews and shame. By the following afternoon, the ministry had cut power to the Galgotias stall and asked the university to leave. Vaishnaw deleted his tweet.

The rest of the fiasco followed an all-too-familiar plot—Indian entity takes a blow to its pride, tries to justify theft, then throws the easiest target under the bus, and eventually, forcibly, apologises.

But Galgotia, credit to their defiance, did not stop there. They have gone on a disaster management overdrive. First came the full page ads, on the day after leaving the summit. Then came the reels. And then, the coup de grace—a full, unironic, rap song by their student community.

Two things about this spectacle are especially rich. The first is Galgotias’ defence that the act of passing off a Chinese product as their own was, in some sense, an exercise in student empowerment and innovation. Second, someone got angry because someone else stole their work and repurposed it without credit. This happened at an AI summit. Incredible stuff.

Lastly, Chinese companies are dealing with an internal theft epidemic themselves.

A few months back, I was made aware—completely against my will—of a kind of doll called Labubu. I admire the writer of that article deeply, so I read through it, and immediately felt the transition to uncledom.

This BBC report explains that the name Labubu means nothing. It just belongs to a character in “The Monsters” toy series created by Hong Kong-born artist Kasing Lung.

Lung collaborated with Chinese toy company Pop Mart in 2019. And, boom! Labubu grew from niche toy to a global fixation. Rihanna was photographed carrying one, as was Dua Lipa. At Wimbledon last year, Urvashi Rautela showed up to the Centre Court with four of them.

Pop Mart’s current valuation is around $40  billion. And they have a problem. Because, according to this recent Economist article, factories around the country are churning out knock-offs known as “Lafufus”.

Worse still, there are cheaper variants called “Lagogo,” “Lababa,” and—I promise I’m not making this up—“Lapoopoo”.

One toy manufacturer in Dongguan, Guangdong, told CNN that at peak demand in July, it sold 150,000 to 160,000 fake Labubu toys, pulling in profits of up to 2 million yuan ($278,000). Last year, Chinese courts prosecuted 21,404 people for producing and selling counterfeit and substandard goods.

Theft and forgery, of course, have a history that predates Jesus Christ himself. There are records of bronze and silver theft in Egypt in 1129 BCE. It’s the oldest recurring pattern in collective human behaviour—when something accrues high value, someone will try to make it their own.

Theft of intellectual property is quite on-brand for 2026. An evolving pattern in this AI tsunami is the obsession with performance instead of craft. It is symbolised best, perhaps, by the mainstreaming of AI art. Last year, the Mumbai AI Film Festival drew representatives from Netflix India, Google, and many of India’s biggest film production houses. Many of the festival’s champions argued that AI makes filmmaking accessible; its detractors—among them Guillermo del Toro, who told NPR he’d “rather die” than use AI—were cast as gatekeepers. Cannes now has a category for AI films. BAFTAs an Oscars will inevitably follow.

That stayed on my mind a lot longer than the Galgotias nonsense.

AI music, similarly, is proliferating across YouTube and Spotify. Digital media platforms are willingly pushing AI prose, those endless stacks of, “this wasn’t hunger, but the quiet arithmetic of the intestines.” No sentence means anything.

Merriam-Webster’s 2025 Word of The Year was ‘slop’—defined as digital content of low quality, produced in quantity by means of artificial intelligence. Brian Phillips wrote an essay on this phenomenon, but these lines are worth highlighting and saving.

“The idea of integrity is antithetical to slop. So is the idea that purpose, need, or ambition can exist outside the realms of power and money. The worldview that produces slop is one in which only a sucker would make something for the love of making it. Slop is a radical extension of both the corporate cost-cutting impulse and the impulse in media and entertainment to chase the lowest common denominator. It encodes the belief that no one needs more, no one wants better, speed and convenience are all that matter, truth and beauty are fake.”

🌸 Bloom

Lastly, I want to speak about flowers.

Across from my window, there are three large trees. The one right in front is a rain tree (albizia saman). It’s a beautiful, wide, leafy thing. The width of its umbrella-like canopy takes up mine and the next building’s balcony. V-shaped nested branches curve outwards from a trunk that is formidable but not intimidatingly wide.

Next to it are two pink trumpet (tabebuia rosea) trees, currently in partial bloom. Every morning, I step out with a cup of coffee to check out the many strands of pink sprawled on a bed of green. I’ve tried clicking pictures, but I neither have the photography skills nor the camera to do the sight any justice.

Bangalore is currently in pink trumpet season. Of course, this being Bangalore, someone found coordinate data and geotagged every pink trumpet tree in the city.

Someone else has built a tracker, where you can filter trees by their state of bloom. Oh, the joy of seeing technology used well.

Subscribe now

On the theme of picking things from other markets and calling it your own, let’s play a small quiz. In 1973, two of India’s most accomplished singers gave their voices to a song—we’ll call it X—in a Bollywood movie. Composed by another luminary, that beautiful song is a family evening and karaoke hit till date.

However, four years prior, Dutch-Bulgarian singer Bojoura had released this track below. Listen to it, identify X, and let me know in the comments. :)

That’s all from this edition. See you in the next one!