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Rooting for the sub-continent

I have a major problem, one that is threatening to turn our otherwise quiet home in suburban Delhi into an ear-splitting war zone. On one side of the border that has sprung up this past fortnight is me, on the other is the most delightful woman in my life -- my teenaged daughter. I am rooting for India despite the disastrous performance of our home team in the first two matches they played in the World Cup series. My daughter is rooting for Pakistan. Each time an Indian wicket falls, she shrieks in glee. When a Pakistani is forced to retire from the field, I clap and dance.

Initially, the result of this open hostility was a cold war: She looked through me and I looked through her. Then I went down with a stomach flu -- I have a strong suspicion that the virus did not land on my dinner plate accidentally. The cold war has since turned into a hot one and last night, when the Pakis made the Aussies eat humble pie, our home resembled Drass being shelled from the Pakistan side of the Line of Control.

Her support for Pakistan, I had supposed, stemmed from a teenager's crush on Shoaib Akhtar. That only made it worse: Backing the Pakis is bad enough, I ranted at my wife (who, being a firm believer in a world without frontiers, has maintained remarkable calm), falling for one of them? That's unpardonable. Fearing that I would suffer a stroke, my daughter called a truce, sat me down and told me why she was rooting for Pakistan.

I had obviously underestimated my daughter's -- and, I guess, her generation's -- intelligence. There's no way India can win the cup, she argued. So would you rather have somebody else walk off with it or see Pakistan, a sub-continental country, win it? I was stumped.

Notwithstanding cynics and Cassandras who have refused to take note of Atal Bihari Vajpayee's bus ride to Lahore, the media hoopla over the event appears to have had a far-reaching impact. As we enter a new century and a new age, we have a new generation thinking in terms of sub-continental solidarity. If we have them here, I am sure you have them in Pakistan. It is a comforting thought that our children could yet grow up without the animus of these past 50 years and treat Partition and all that has followed as nothing more than mere footnotes of our sub-continental history.

But that could well remain a dream: Politicians have an amazing ability to sour possibilities and wreck potentialities. The near-open war that is being waged by Pakistan along the LoC in Jammu and Kashmir shows how determined is a section of the Pakistani establishment that the Lahore Declaration should be consigned to the dustbin rather than be made the charter of a lasting relationship.

Mian Nawaz Sharif is busy fighting his own battles and cannot afford to come down on this section of the establishment, at least for the moment. And if he cannot assert himself fast, he may end up losing the initiative he had a couple of months ago. If that were to happen, we could well say goodbye to the spin-off from Vajpayee's bus yatra.

But let us not digress from cricket. Sachin Tendulkar's brilliant batting was more than just cricket -- it was a lesson for those of us who put ourselves before the nation. Once again, cynics would say that his decision to return to the field rather than mourn the death of his father in Bombay was spurred by the realisation that it would do wonders for his image and PR. I think that is balderdash.

There are moments in each one of our lives when we are faced with an opportunity to demonstrate our ability to rise above the ordinary and become a hero in the truest sense of the term. Sachin Tendulkar was faced with this opportunity and he seized it. He could have well stayed put in Bombay. Nobody would have grudged him his moment of private grief. But he rose above the ordinary and batted for India. His nation, he decided, came before his grief. Nothing could be bigger and more important than India.

In my view, that decision, and not the fact that he scored a magnificent 140 runs, is what has made him a hero. At least for those of us who believe that family is secondary to country; that self comes after nation. Sachin's act is no less than the bravery of our soldiers fobbing off the intruders in Drass.

I wonder if the parasites who are fattening themselves off a certain lady's proclivity for the melodramatic were watching the match yesterday. Most probably not, since they were busy pretending treacly concern over her security. It would be unfair to expect them to subscribe to the view that the nation can be above the personal; that India is more important than family.

There I go again. I had promised myself not to write about politics and about the nautanki being staged on Akbar Road in Delhi. But it is a fatal attraction from which it is so difficult to steer clear... And the comparison cannot but come to mind each time I think of Sachin Tendulkar rising above the ordinary and emerging as a hero, not just a cricket hero.

Happily, my daughter agrees with me on this point.

Kanchan Gupta