Cricket: India's National Pastime

So far I've eaten Indian food, gotten henna ("mehndi" as they call it here) done on my hands, had "chaat" in the afternoons at the office (traditional Indian street food), but last night I did something truly Indian - I attended a cricket match. The match was part of the relatively new Indian Premier League, which is more commercial and less "pure" than traditional cricket. These matches are considered quite short by cricket standards, but they are still about the length of a traditional baseball game (which I know many people in the US consider too long!). The teams playing last night were the Deccan Chargers (from Hyderabad) versus the Royal Challengers (from Bangalore).

I went with a group of about 20 Googlers, and we all left straight from work. Although the stadium wasn't terribly far away in terms of distance, it took us 1.5 hours to get there because of the traffic. On a related note, I crossed the street for the first time here in India! That was an experience in and of itself. After miraculously making it across the street without being hit, we headed to the stadium.

The scene was similar to what you would see outside a stadium in the US, except of course with an Indian flair. There were people selling souvenirs, people trying to scalp tickets, etc. When we entered the stadium, the men went through one line to be searched, and the women were diverted off to the side. I was escorted into a small, temporary enclosure, out of sight of the men, where a female security guard ran a metal detector over me and patted down my legs.

Although we were assigned a certain section of the stadium (based on how much we paid for our tickets), within the sections it was general admission. We had pretty good seats - only 5 or so rows behind the field (which is circular). Food is sold in the stands (ice cream, chips, dishes of spicy corn, etc), but the vendors actually walk through the seats, as opposed to only up and down the aisles. No alcohol was sold at the stadium, which, given the rowdiness of the sober fans, was probably not a bad thing!

Since this league is more commercial, there are even cheerleaders, much to the delight of most of the men. For some reason all of the cheerleaders were white; aside from them and a few foreign players from New Zealand and such, I was the only white person in the stadium. As you can imagine, I got a few stares, and more people trying to take my picture.

Thanks to the help of my co-workers, by the end of the game I'd say I understood about 50% of the basics of the game. The odd thing about cricket is that one team goes through all of their batting (and hence run scoring) first, and then the second team goes. Therefore, at halftime the score is bound to be something to zero. It's also a rather high scoring game. The match last night was around 177-135, with Hyderabad coming out on top.

I'm coming to realize just how popular cricket is here, so I'm glad I got to experience it firsthand! Pictures to come :)