Life is tough but

             

     It is the IPL season and, personally, a break from watching cricket as the cardinal purpose of life.I'll watch every time Sachin Tendulkar bats, most CSK matches, and every other time my Twitter timeline gets too excited to make any coherent sense. A distanced, passive viewing of IPL helps to provide a semblance of balance to my life: for perhaps the first time ever, I won't feel guilty for not caring about cricket matches. Does that take away much of my cricket time for the next two months? Not quite. It gives me the space to devour all the cricket books that I have collected over the years; the time to read my favorite ones again is especially priceless.It's perhaps true of all sports. Maybe, most of us have crossed the stage of engaging with sport as a healthy distraction. It's life which comes in the way of sport. I can't think of any invocation of the number 89 without feeling a deep sense of betrayal by the world at large. Which cruel universe would rob Stefan Edberg of his French Open title? That too in favor of Michael Chang? Will it ever happen again? The most natural, swift, compulsive serve-and-volleyer ever, nearly won over the dirt. That's as romantic a sporting story as any. Yet. The trauma persists. Perhaps this is true of all sports. The pain of losing, as Bill Simmons explicates, is a common thread across all sports.So, I was re-reading Gideon Haigh's On Warne a couple of days ago. If ever a cricket book deserves multiple readings, this is it. I was struck by a particular passage on the importance of sport at large, a passage so insightful that you nod along as if someone just answered the question you have feared to ask yourself all along: Why on earth do I take cricket so seriously.What is unique to cricket, though, is that it clubs the pain of losing, the bittersweet tie, the stalemate of a draw, the unfathomable draw with the scores level, with the torture of a million ambiguities, and then it slows it down, spreads it over infinity, and plays it on loop. It gives you the guillotine and also leaves you ruminating if you were the intended target at all.