Do you remember the time when India won the World Cup at the Lord’s on June 25, 1983? There was immense joy which ran through blood of Indian cricket fans that year. It was not a planned triumph, not a packaged celebration. The victory happened without any one-not the players, not the rest of the country-expecting it to happen. That was the glory of that miraculous moment. Both the players and the thousands of followers of the game in the country took time to soak in the achievement. It was an incredible achievement for every Indian who belongs to a certain vintage and who followed the match will remember it forever.
On that day, Kapil Dev, Mohinder Amamalh, Balwinder Singh Sandhu, Roger Binny, Dileep Vengsarkar, Krishna-machari Srikant and Yashpal Sharma looked inspired and touched by magic. But they seemed utterly vulnerable as Indian cricketers ran them through. That was also the time when the players were not sucked into the celebrity and commercial circuit. There were no sponsors, no big money, and no manufactured controversies. Compared to the fanfare-on and off the ground-that surrounds the game today, 1983 appears to belong to a pastoral age. It was just the golden dust of the glory of the day that stuck to the players. Many of them went home after that and since then moved on to other things, but the halo that surrounded them has not diminished a whit over the years.
It is not just a cliché to say that Indian cricket has not been the same again. That 1983 victory at Lord’s has inspired generations of cricketers in the country. It continues to fire up the imagination of those who were toddlers or who were not even born in 1983-Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Yuvraj Singh, Robin Uthappa, and Irfan Pathan. The torch of cricketing glory has passed into the hands of a new generation but it all began that fateful day at Lord’s. After weeks of pointless dithering because of the former captain's association with the Indian Cricket League, the BCCI agreed to participate in the silver jubilee celebrations of that memorable victory in Delhi.
Indeed, the country’s cricket administrators, possessing neither their sense of history nor good grace, bad been patently apathetic to this historic moment. One official was on record that the BCCI was more interested in looking ahead, not back. Such insensitivity, however, is not uncommon in Indian sport as sundry hockey players, foot¬ballers, athletes, cueists and judokas would affirm. Had this matter not pertained to cricket and involved a legendary player, the event may not have merited more than a few clucks of regret and very little space in the media.
India’s prowess in sport over 25 years appears limp. In the same period, industry, economy, income and lifestyle have undergone dramatic changes, most of them upwards, strongly suggestive of a third world country breaking rank and trying to find a place in the first world. But where sport is concerned, India has not exactly been shining. Considering the enormous progress made by the country in various other facets of life, why sport should be languishing so far behind is something that should be of national concern, not only of a half-baked ministry that every politician sees as a punishment posting.