Damn our Obsession

A little known(more little known than you might imagine) person named Vishwanathan Anand recently hit number one in the world of chess.

An even more insignificant speck in the world of sports named Saina Nehwal won the World Junior Badminton championship.

Yet another splattered bug on the windshield of world sport named Pankaj Advani is already on his way into the record books in the world of cue sport.

If you're not among the news, and you trust the newspaper instead, well then good for you. You should be well versed about their achievements.

Then again, if you're one of the news channel addicts(my battle against which shall probably be emphasized in my next post) you've either never heard of them, or find yourself scratching your head vaguely trying to remember one of them from an Advertisement for AMD(they make computer processors, by the way). And my dear friends, if you fall into this category of people, this post is entirely in your honour.

I don't blame you.

You're probably more concerned about why yuvraj split with his now ex girlfriend and why dhoni cut his hair rather than how those three (whose names I rather cruelly belittled at first) probably revolutionized their respective disciplines.

They're not unknowns. They aren't little insignificant specks. They aren't splattered bugs on the windshield of a car named 'sports'.

It's just the cricket obsession that has eaten up into their air time. Today, news channels would rather air a segment about how dhoni styles his hair, rather than how any of them actually did the incredible things they did.

I don't blame Dhoni. It's not his fault.

It's ours. I could take the high stand and say I'm nto the die hard cricket fan most of you are and therefore I'm exempted, but I won't. I'm as guilty as any of you are.

It's fantastic to love a sport. Even more fantastic for an entire nation to be so deeply involved with one, but then again, with cricket all I see is a death sentence for most other sports as far as encouraging emerging and established sportspersons are concerned.

Aren't we all taking it a bit too far?

How long can this go on for? it's almost as though the entire craze has taken a turn that will stop at nothing until every little boy or girl in india is holding a cricket bat and parents will all look on with teary eyes and say, "Look honey, he's(or she's)playing his(or her) first stroke!"

If we thought things were getting tough all this while to break in other sprots into the mainstream, just wait till we hit IPL season again and you'll see the final nail in the coffin being hammered in.