Tracking the India-Pakistan World Cup cricket semifinal match without audio and video is a strangely disembodied experience. It is somewhat like watching the stock market ticker where numbers keep changing in a clinical fashion, leaving it for you to imagine what they represent. Once you separate human emotions from it, it is nothing more than changing digits.
As I write this Sachin Tendulkar has just got out at 85 missing his much anticipated 100th international century. I can guarantee you that people were more concerned about that than whether Prime Ministers Manmohan Singh and Yousuf Raza Gilani can make any progress in their bilateral talks. It is just as well that Tendulkar got out at 85 because this would not be the century he would have cherished considering he survived at least four distinct ousters.
Speaking of the disembodied experience that digitally tracking the match is, when Tendulkar got out nothing dramatic happened on my computer screen. His name was quickly replaced by Suresh Raina. I am beginning to like the stoicism of following only digits.
Television channels in India have been ignited with bombast about the semifinal being a mother of all mothers of all battles in all wars, or something like it. Talking heads popped up everywhere in the run up to the game offering what each thought was the most compelling perspective about the wisdom of mixing cricket and diplomacy as Singh seems to have done in inviting Gilani. Diplomacy on the sidelines of a cricket match is nothing new in the subcontinent. That device has lost its novelty. Of course, as excuses go this is as good as any to bring the two sullen neighbors together.
No one expects that by the time the semifinal is over later tonight in India, the two prime ministers would have solved all bilateral problems. In fact, no one expects that the two would have even begun to talk substantively. They both know one of the teams has to lose and both wish in their private mind that the loser is the rival team and not their own. There is only a slight advantage in India winning the game. Handing Pakistan a defeat in the World Cup semifinal can only make the people of India munificent, which in turn can allow Dr. Singh to be more flexible while dealing with Gilani.
Conversely, if India were to lose, you can be sure of a sense of national bereavement. There would only be a funereal indifference towards everything, particularly bilateral talks. On balance, Pakistan wants and needs a World Cup victory way more than India because the country has nothing else going for it. India wants and needs it too but it can absorb a loss much better than Pakistan.