Day 1: March 17, 2016, Delhi and Kolkata
Sports reporters on assignment are often asked to describe the “buzz” at, or in the run-up to, major sporting events. Is a city vibing to its beat? Are people milling around talking about it? Can you not avoid references to it, or its images wherever you go?
Except I am never sure how to measure "buzz", or even what really constitutes "buzz". Here is an example. The World Twenty20, some of you may have figured, is currently in full swing in India.
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I arrived in Delhi early on Thursday morning. I flew to Kolkata in the afternoon. Both are host cities. Yet until I tuned in to the Afghanistan v Sri Lanka game, at Eden Gardens (and if I stretched my neck out the window of my hotel I could probably see it live) I had seen precisely two cricket-related billboards, both in Kolkata and generic ads for the event, and one TV ad, featuring MS Dhoni.
That was, in nearly 12 hours in India, the sum of my exposure to cricket, other than the immigration officer at Delhi’s airport who was quick to figure out that I must be in India for the cricket. Nobody, not the taxi drivers or the hotel staff, brought it up in conversation.
But this is the thing: I am pretty sure billboards are no measure of “buzz”, whatever that may mean. Neither, really, are TV ads. They are functions of the economy of cricket. And taxi drivers are the great cliché of any reporter-in-a-foreign-clime tale.
Big modern sports events, especially in the subcontinent, are exclusive rather than inclusive. The aim, it always seems, is to keep people and real life, out. They exist in bubbles within a city or a country and it is in those bubbles that such things as buzz can be said to exist; inside grounds heaving with security, or in the lobbies of team hotels impossible to get into for all the security.
In fact, the big story on the city pages of Kolkata's Telegraph was of how difficult it is to get a ticket for the big game on Saturday – India v Pakistan in case you had not noticed.
The game was moved here from Dharamsala and tickets are only available from pre-booking online. And even that is no guarantee; once you have registered to buy tickets, you are only able to actually buy them if your name is drawn in a lottery.
That would seem to exclude a large portion of the local population, a portion that might, well you know, in other circumstances be expected to create some buzz.
The other reason “buzz” is such an intangible is that India is so vast it is difficult to even imagine it as one country, let alone one that could be held captive by a single sports event. You could, as I did, easily spend time in many parts of the country and have no idea the World Twenty20 is even happening.
For any tournament to unite an entire country, to create a homogenous “buzz” is nigh on impossible. Forget India, when there is an Ashes Test on at Lord’s does all of London buzz to it? Does it heck.
What I can confirm is that the streets of Delhi and Kolkata are buzzing. They are buzzing with normal, everyday life, exactly as you would expect of two cities with a combined population of, by some estimates, 40 million.
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