WHY PLAY TO A DIFFERENT GALLERY?

The Indian cricket team went to Pakistan in 2004 – after a gap of 14 years for a full “friendship tour” held in the shadow of the Kargil conflict. With a general election around the corner, the series was so rife with diplomatic overtones that allusions to the Us-china pingpong diplomacy of 1971 seemed to pale in comparison.

Back then, when the Indian cricket team went somewhere, I usually tagged along. So, one March afternoon, I found myself standing on a tree-lined street in Lahore that looked like an alternative-universe version of Delhi’s Lodhi Road, wondering what this confluence of cricket and politics would offer over the next two months. As a North Indian carrying an onerous secondhand burden of Partition, I was in a country we’d been told we must be very scared of, surrounded by people we should be very wary of.

But Pakistan 2004 was an epic eyeopener because what the Indian team, and the small entourage that accompanied it, found across the border was a warm welcome that slowly mutated into lasting friendships. We would get extra helpings at restaurants; taxi drivers would refuse to take money when they learnt we were “mehmaans” (guests); paan was fed directly into our mouths at night markets; someone even sent one of our touring party a Persian carpet to take back home. Every time politics was discussed, the locals would say “koi masla nahi hai” (there is no issue), so much so, that it became our “takiya kalam” (hard to translate – loosely, a habitual phrase used without relevance) during the trip.

The tour was a perfect example of sport’s power to overcome the boundaries imposed by politics. We had gone there for the