Bring The Noise

What does a fan look like?

At around 11:15 am on Friday, 31st January, nearly ten thousand walkers spilled over to the Jawaharlal Nehru Marg in Central Delhi. Some headed home, others to work, all of them drifting away from the Feroz Shah Kotla Stadium, where Delhi were playing a Ranji Trophy match against Railways. Actually, let’s correct that last bit. Virat Kohli was in the Delhi team playing a Ranji Trophy match against Railways. The faithful had come here to watch him at his den.

Many of them had lined up on Thursday morning too, for the first day of the game. The scene was barely believable. Bodies pressed against steel barriers at 4 am, three and a half hours before the gates opened at 7:30, five and a half before the first ball at 9:30. By mid-morning on Thursday, the crowd had swollen up to 16,000. Nobody, in Delhi or outside, remembers this kind of frenzy at a domestic game.

Here for an audience with The King. Credit: Business Standard

The toss poured cold water on everyone’s immediate wishes. Delhi were fielding; it would take hours, maybe a day, for Virat Kohli’s turn to bat. Kohli spent the entire day in the field, not always active but constantly energetic. And the fans waited. They spent most of the day willing the Delhi team to bowl out Railways and then lose two quick wickets - anything to catch a glimpse of the great man with his MRF bat.

They came back on Friday morning, lining up again before the sun. Someone rode four hours from Manesar, on both days.

You’d want to use these pictures - sixteen thousand people turning up on a Thursday morning for a domestic red-ball game - as the sign of passion for cricket in this country. Not that there’s ever a dearth of such signs. Every big match sells out in minutes, every stadium gets blanketed in home team colours.

A common refrain, sung between writers, advertisers, fans, and cricketers themselves, is that cricket is a religion in India. It is, but there are layers to it. And those layers were visible on Friday.

Kohli emerged around half past ten, walking out in front of the pavilion that bears his name, into a wall of sound that would make Coldplay's India concerts blush. It didn’t seem to matter that this version of Kohli was not quite the Kohli. This was a shadow, stripped of form, drained of runs, his usual imposing confidence replaced by something fidgety and uncertain.

From the first ball, he looked vulnerable, unsure of which deliveries to hit and which ones to leave. The comeback to Ranji Trophy, a lower form of cricket than playing Pat Cummins and Scott Boland on a green Brisbane track, was supposed to be comfortable. What’s this?

Then came that one moment – a straight drive whack that tore through the smoggy morning air, a flash of the old authority that we know him for. Here was the great man, still capable of incredible things. On the next ball, he was gone, his wickets splayed like the legs of a wooden chair hurled from a balcony six floors up. And with him went the congregation. Half the stadium had emptied by the time the next batter took guard. The two teams continued to play cricket, but that wasn’t the point. It never had been.

This week, Delhi could have fielded ten strangers against eleven ghosts, and the twenty-odd thousand would still have come for Kohli. In fact, midway through Thursday and Friday, this Delhi crowd, here for the Delhiest of all Delhi boys, went up in chants of “RCB! RCB!” for Kohli’s Bangalore-based IPL team. On both days, the tight stadium security was breached by fans who wanted nothing but to touch their god’s feet, to pay him their obeisance. Kohli might’ve giggled, might have sighed, but I doubt he was surprised.

Last year, I was at the MA Chidambaram Stadium in Chennai, when MS Dhoni refused to take singles in the last over of a game where Chennai Super Kings needed every run they could steal. The packed crowd roared – mostly in joy, but a little in amusement – watching this farce of him deny strike to an established international batsman. But Dhoni knew, and they knew, who the party was organised for. So why even pretend otherwise?

This isn’t some recent trend. Decades back, it was an unwritten joke that every time Sachin Tendulkar got out, there would be a surge of surplus power at electricity offices because half the country would switch their televisions off. I may have partaken in this routine a few times.

In India, the game isn’t the main draw. Not for everyone anyway. The gods who play it draw the attention, bring bums to seats. Cast the net wider, away from cricket, and the shapes are immediately recognisable.

Every evening, an odd ritual takes place in Bandra, Mumbai. Hundreds of fans - on days, reaching up to thousands - walk onto the smooth concrete of HK Bhabha Road. They stand, necks craned, eyes fixed on the walls of Mannat, as if every stone holds stories of the man who lives behind them. Shah Rukh Khan’s home rises above them like a temple, and they are his pilgrims.

Scenes on an average evening outside Mannat. Credit: Livemint.

Most days, SRK isn’t even there. They know this, yet they come. The ritual demands presence, not promise. They press against each other, smartphones raised, collecting proof of their pilgrimage. For a few precious minutes, they stand in the growing darkness, breathing in the salt-heavy Mumbai air, telling themselves that somewhere beyond those walls, Shah Rukh Khan might be doing the same. Some smile to themselves, satisfied with just this much – the chance to share a slice of sky with a living, breathing star.

It is mad, absurd, a complete waste of time, but it is beautifully pure. And it doesn’t stop there.

In the book Reel India, author Namrata Joshi meets Vishal Singh. Vishal’s Lucknow home is a living shrine to Shah Rukh Khan, from the colour of his car to the paint and wallpaper that goes inside his rooms. Even his Diwali lights bend to this devotion, spelling out movie titles instead of traditional blessings.

“There’s not an inch of space in his life – physical or emotional, personal or official – that hasn’t been taken over by Shah Rukh Khan. Even his online existence, be it on WhatsApp or Facebook, is entirely dedicated to SRK; there is precious little about Singh himself. His internalization of SRK’s identity is scarily complete to the extent that Singh has even legally rechristened himself ‘Vishahrukh’.”

Reel India is a lovely book, and with every chapter, every new idol, the idea of fandom finds new territory. For example, Bhopal is teeming with John Abraham-lookalikes, their hair backbrushed in a Dhoom-era sweep, bodies wrapped in leather jackets, and rumbling sportsbikes in tow to make a complete frame.

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In 1963, the Daily Mirror coined a word for this madness: Beatlemania. Young men and women fainting at concerts, screaming until their voices cracked, reaching out for a touch of divinity in human form. The gods wore suits and sang love songs, and their fever spread through television waves and radio signals, crossing oceans, infecting new cities with each passing week. The phenomenon would repeat itself – with Michael Jackson, Madonna, Jordan, you name it.

In The Beatles or MJ’s time, devotion was a game of patience. Their visits were brilliant but brief, leaving fans to sustain their faith on scraps of starlight. Television and print appearances were rare too. The gaps between sightings were deserts to be crossed.

Today, your chosen god is everywhere, always – their lives spilling across screens in endless digital communion. Every Instagram story is a sermon, every tweet a sacred text. You know the taste of their morning coffee, the brand of ramen they like ordering. Tour dates are snooped in before official announcements. The worship never sleeps, never pauses, until your own identity dissolves into their digital shadow.¹

Thing is, art can be consumed in genres. You can love jazz without caring for blues, worship JRR Tolkien while ignoring JK Rowling. Your experience isn’t barricaded by these choices. We have a different, maybe more complex, relationship with sport. It asks for a bit of commitment to the whole play, not just the leading actor. And sometimes, our resistance to it reveals a few not-great things about us.

When Yash Dhull fell on Friday, the roar that followed made him sound like an opposition captain, not one of Delhi’s own. The U-19 World Cup trophy he brought home, the promise he carries in his young shoulders, the sacred significance of playing for his state – all of it dissolved in the fever of anticipation. In that moment, he was merely the last obstacle between the crowd and their deity.

He isn’t alone in this strange martyrdom. For his entire Test career, Rahul Dravid batted one position above Sachin Tendulkar, knowing his dismissal would spark celebration in his own homeland. The crowd’s joy at his departure wasn’t even apologetic – it was pure, electric, honest in its impatience to welcome the superhero to the crease.

And when Kohli got out, the same fans wanted nothing to do with cricket. You couldn’t finish a cup of chai between his first steps back to the pavilion and the Kotla turning into empty bowl of plastic seats. It was like someone had pulled the plug on a public television screen. Himanshu Sangwan, the bowler who broke ten thousand concurrent dreams, had to apologise on Instagram for celebrating Kohli’s wicket, as if he had committed sacrilege instead of playing cricket.

At this level of emotional investment, our engagement comes with conditions.

On 13th March, 1996, India played Sri Lanka in a World Cup semi-final at the Eden Gardens in Calcutta. The estimated attendance was north of 100,000. India started well, then were bludgeoned by a diminutive genius from Colombo², who was matched by our own diminutive genius from Bombay³, and then we imploded. Fully, completely, to the point where the only thing keeping the match alive was the formality of the final couple of wickets. As the scale of the implosion became clear to the irate crowd, they started throwing their frustration at the Sri Lankan fielders in the form of bottles and paper. The night ended in infamy. The match referee had to step in and suspend the game, deeming the crowd reaction too dangerous, and eventually saved everyone time by announcing Sri Lanka as victors.

About twenty-seven years later, the reaction was not nearly as violent, but as intolerant of sport’s basic tenets of victory and defeat. As Australia reached within striking distance of winning the World Cup final at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, around 90% of the crowd walked out, unable and unwilling to be witness to their team’s moment of heartbreak. And with them went the pretence that around 100,000 “cricket fans” had sold out the world’s largest cricket stadium on World Cup final day.

The last few overs of the game played out like a televised training session - no sound other than the echo of the ball ricocheting off bats and boundary hoardings. After filling our lives with joy over a month, the Indian team were left alone at their lowest and saddest. They collected their silver medals in silence, the air around them hollow where it should have been thick with love, with gratitude, with the kind of support that transcends victory and defeat.

Full disclosure, every time I think of this, I feel a bit of heartburn. Ninety thousand lottery winners got to witness a home World Cup final, and they saved their passion only for potential triumph. These weren’t fans, I tell myself, but glory-hunters – moths drawn not to the flame of sport but to the sparkle of victory, interested only in the jingoism that comes gift-wrapped with success.

***

Last week, Coldplay painted the sky over Ahmedabad and Mumbai in fireworks, ticker tape, and balloons. Nearly 134,000 people attended their Ahmedabad show on Sunday, making it their biggest single show ever. Since then, a lot of online chatter has revolved around how a big chunk of the attendees - nearly 400,000 over two weekends of shows - would struggle to sing through one Coldplay song on a karaoke night. That they were here for the reels and that the “real” fans should’ve been here. A couple of my friends are still seething, and that would be a trivial description of their rage. I feel their pain.

Imagine if Quentin Tarantino or Martin Scorsese were to make a dark thriller with Shah Rukh Khan, and people with free time and quicker internet gobble up all the tickets. There will be a minimum 20 unit rise in the national average blood pressure.

Gatekeeping, I guess, is a natural impulse towards something we like. We want our favourite things to remain pure. How I wish that a Ranji Trophy game in India’s capital could be thronged by fervent cricket fans. And how I wish that the public discourse could be dedicated to those who truly watch and follow the game, the real fans, instead of the passersby hypnotized by large silhouettes.

And every time this instinct kicks in, I find it difficult to define what a “real” fan looks and sounds like.

Utter devotion to the art form is probably the obvious boarding pass. If I call myself a cricket fan, you’d expect me to at least have sight of the game at large, to have some love for it beyond the jerseys and the names on them. A Coldplay fan should be invested in them a little, maybe know a few songs, listen to similar artists. Fair. Fandom is a form of love, and love demands knowledge, intimacy, commitment.

But, isn’t crossing cities, emptying wallets, and enduring six standing hours some kind of love? Isn’t there love in standing guard in pre-dawn darkness in a narrow lane outside a stadium that smells like a thousand people urinating together? Maybe a little transactional, a wee-bit myopic, but it is still an expression.

The more I experience it, the more I find this collective fever to be bizarre, bonkers, absurd. The scale and extent makes no sense. Most days, I find it hard to describe. But it adds colour, brings the noise. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that I’d rather have the Kotla filled with 16000 boisterous voices, screaming for Virat Kohli, than twenty-five bespectacled nerds who can give a TEDx lecture on the prestige and legacy of the Ranji Trophy. It might sound like noise, but it’s alive.

1. Eminem was prescient about the extreme shades of this spectrum. In “Stan,” he painted a portrait of obsession turned poison – a fan dissolving into his idol until the lines between worship and madness blur completely.

2. Aravinda de Silva’s knock of 66 was so pristine, your knees wobble while watching it

3. Tendulkar’s 65 was probably less pristine and more brutal. His dismissal started the collapse.