"Everything is officially going to hell." The verdict of a reader quoted by All Things Pakistan said perhaps better than anyone else why the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore marked a defining moment in Pakistan's agonising descent into chaos.

Six Sri Lankan cricketers and their British assistant coach were wounded when gunmen attacked their bus as it drove under police escort to the Gaddafi stadium in Lahore.  Five policemen were killed.

The death toll was small by South Asian standards.  But what defined it -- beyond the audacity and apparent sophistication of the attack -- was the assault on the identity of a country where cricket, as in neighbouring India, is a national obsession.

"An ambush targeting the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore earlier this morning has literally sent waves of disbelief and shock across Pakistan," said a post on Metroblogging Lahore. "Citizens of Lahore are specifically terrified at the extent of sophisticated weaponry used by terrorists in an incident that caused unprecedented damage to the country's image and its cricketing future."

"Why can't we ever just have a slow news day ... every day there's something new," complained another post on Twitter.

South Asia is no stranger to violence, from the days of partition onwards. But there seems to me to be something qualitatively quite different in what is going on now, in which brutality and the alienation of the local population is not so much incidental but central to the method.

It's been there in the assault on traditional Pakistani music and culture, in the deliberately grisly videotaped beheading of a Polish geologist last month, in the targeting of girls' schools in the Swat valley and now in the attack on the Sri Lankan cricketers.

Even in darkest days of the Kashmir insurgency which set Pakistan and India at each other's throats you didn't see anything like this -- in fact one of the signs of normal life there came from boys out in the street playing cricket.  In Afghanistan, the hardline Taliban which banned most sports appear to have been less hostile to cricket, as Reuters Kabul correspondent Jon Hemming wrote in this feature about the country's fledgling national cricket team. I've even seen Pakistani soldiers spontaneously playing cricket the harsh terrain of the Siachen battlefield beyond Kashmir, bowling a few balls in the drizzling snow under the lee of steep mountain walls.

Pakistani officials are already speculating about Indian involvement in the attack on the Sri Lankan cricketers, in revenge for last year's assault on Mumbai.  This speculation will probably run and run -- it's echoing through comments on blogs and on Twitter. But it may obscure a more important point. When you attack a national institution like cricket, it's an expression of brute power, an assault on culture akin to the burning of books.

According to the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, quoted by the Independent: "I think this is a deliberate attempt to undermine the government at the time when there is a huge political crisis in the country. They are trying to create a vacuum of power in which eventually they can take over."

(Reuters photo: Pakistan's Salman Butt in match against Sri Lanka)

The militant attacks in Mumbai have shaken, saddened and angered people across the world, not just in India. It has thrown up so many issues which go way beyond winning and losing as seen on a sports field.

The Indian cricket board have worked hard to resurrect action on the field by persuading England to agree to return to complete a two-test series, offering all support to allay fears of their players for their safety.

The Indian media have been busy reporting the aftermath of the attacks and there has been furious debate in the British media whether it is proper for the England players to return to India this soon.

Whether sports should go on in turbulent times has been debated for ages. At the 1972 Munich Games, Olympics chiefs decided the show would go on despite Palestinian gunmen killing 11 Israeli athletes and officials.

Cricket teams are refusing to travel to Pakistan because of security concerns by teams in the wake of many suicide bombings.

Some even doubt whether the sub-continent can hold the 2011 World Cup.

Should cricket go on in India in the middle of the latest crisis? Can Indians turn their minds to their first love?

It wasn’t the way Saurav Ganguly wanted to walk off into the sunset. A century in Nagpur, the final test of India’s most successful test skipper, would have made it memorable.

Instead, the ‘Prince of Kolkata’ was dismissed first ball in his final innings, becoming only the second cricketer after England’s Billy Griffith to score a century in his first test innings and a duck in his last.

India went on to win the test, sealing their first series victory over Australia in seven years. But Ganguly’s bid to go out with a bang had fizzled out.

Or so we thought.

After the match and the presentation ceremony, his admirers clamoured for the 36-year-old left-hander to come out of the players’ dressing room.

Ganguly obliged, took off his shirt and hurled it into the midst of his delirious fans.

It was a throwback to 2002 when a frenzied Ganguly took off his shirt and waved it from the Lord’s balcony after India achieved an improbable win against England in a one-day tri-series final.

Many felt the gesture simply reinforced Ganguly’s image as unpredictable and aggressive, although he appears to have mellowed since then.

At Nagpur, Ganguly showed his old flamboyance and popularity gained from elegant batting and leadership still remained.

Taking a final look at his fans, a bare-chested Ganguly walked off into the dressing room.

He had signed off in style.

Has the meltdown begun for Australia’s triumphant cricket team? That is the big question. It was not just India handing them a record 320-run defeat, the match also showed up a flat Australian team who were well behind from start to finish.

Australia are suffering much more by the retirements of Glenn McGrath, Shane Warne and Adam Gilchrist than they would admit. Their replacements have come nowhere near making an impact on the game.

Their leading batsman Matthew Hayden has repeatedly failed and express paceman Brett Lee was so bad he was not given a bowl an entire session in the Indian second innings in Mohali.

Australia’s meticulous planning has also been called into question.

Their batsmen fell to the swing bowling of Zaheer Khan and Ishant Sharma while their bowlers have struggled to find any movement.

Captain Ricky Ponting admitted his team were outplayed in Mohali and was confident the number one test team would bounce back. A week’s break is expected to help the tourists pick up the pieces but will they really be a force in the Delhi test starting on Oct. 29?

India are favourites to win the Delhi test and clinch the series.

Is this Australian side capable of finding the answers?

Have Indian batsmen lost their skill to tackle quality spin bowling? That is the big question that has followed their crushing defeat in the first test in Colombo last week.

Their innings and 239-run defeat on a good Singhalese Sports Club ground pitch saw a line-up boasting Virender Sehwag, Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar, Saurav Ganguly and VVS Laxman bundled out twice around four sessions of play.

Off spinner Muttiah Muralitharan, test cricket’s highest wickettaker, captured 11 wickets, but Indian batsmen were also clueless against debutant Ajantha Mendis, who snapped up eight with his mysterious mix of deliveries.

Indian batsmen have struggled under pressure against off spin in the past, contrasting with their command against leg break bowlers, including Shane Warne.

In Colombo, even the wristy Laxman misread the subtle googly from Mendis twice while Dravid looked even more unsure.

With the batting heavyweights towards the final stages of their careers, the concern in the Indian camp is understandable, Mendis having ripped through their younger set of batsmen in the Asia Cup final, scalping six for next to nothing.

Former batsman Sanjay Manjrekar acknowledges the challenge.

“Indian cricketers have traditionally been good players of spin but that doesn’t mean the current or future generation of cricketers will continue to be so,” he said on cricket website www.cricinfo.com.

“In fact the batsmen who have been part of the side since 2002-03 have been better players of fast bowling than the batsmen in the 90s.”

Dravid says one has to be a very good player of spin to break into the national side but then the demand changes.

“When you got into the Indian team, you had to become a good player of fast bowling to survive at that level,” the Deccan Herald newspaper quoted him as saying.

“Over time, playing so much fast bowling, focussing so much on that, some of the ways in which I played spin probably changed,” he says. “I used to be a lot more positive against spin.

Are the soft hands, supple wrists and deft footwork becoming a thing of the past for India? The second test starting in Galle on Thursday should provide some answers.

India start a three-test series in Sri Lanka on Wednesday which will answer a few questions on how different will be their approach in the island where they only have a modest record.

Their confidence will come from the sheer experience among their batsmen and their consistency in tests playing abroad in the last two seasons.

However, they will have to play aggressively if they are to overcome Sri Lanka, always tough to beat at home with the slow pitches not very different from those in India.

India’s modest record in Sri Lanka, where they lost 2-1 the last time way back in 2001, will surely play in their minds.

However, they have a few things going for them.

Although wicketkeeper Mahendra Singh Dhoni, the one-day captain and leggie Anil Kumble’s deputy in tests, has pulled out citing fatigue, the team have the personnel to step into that breach.

Dinesh Karthik, his likely replacement, is rated a better ‘keeper while Virender Sehwag, the vice-captain, is vastly experienced and will be motivated by the fact that his batting form is superb and he can show his leadership qualities to provide the selectors an extra captaincy option for the future.

Sachin Tendulkar, back after another injury layoff, will be determined to get the 172 runs that will carry him past Brian Lara’s record for most test runs.

However, the real battle could be between Sri Lanka’s formidable batsmen and the Indian bowlers.

Sri Lanka skipper Mahela Jayawardene, Kumar Sangakkara and Sanath Jayasuriya (he could return from test retirement for his first test in seven months) are in splendid form.

Sri Lankan batsmen have traditionally played Kumble well and Harbhajan Singh, has the tendency to lose rhythm if he does not take an early wicket.

On the other hand, Sri Lanka’s unorthodox spinner Ajantha Mendis, who sliced through the one-day line-up in the Asia Cup final, could be a challenge at least early on in the series, bowling in tandem with the wily Muttiah Muralitharan.

That means India, at best, may have to be content with a series draw.

Back in the early 80s, cricket had already captured the hearts and minds of impressionable kids like me, my elder brother and our band of boys who had nothing but disdain for those ‘studious’ kids who were more into science clubs and lending libraries.

Hardy Boys, Famous Five and Nancy Drew were considered a conspiracy hatched by mothers to keep kids at home. While other kids went to bed safely tucking their favourite book under the pillow, I hit the bed with my batting pads and gloves on. India Poised!

Luckily, our mother felt better off sending us to the playground in our residential colony rather than spend money on books and a lot more on replacing broken lamp shades and window panes - collateral damage as my brother and I played eleven-a-side ‘Test’ matches at home, where the bowling side got a chance to bat only after the entire opposition was bowled out.

Given my cricketing skills, my brother and his ‘Indian’ team (which again is him calling himself everything from Kapil Dev to Roger Binny to Madan Lal) never took more than 5 overs to clean up my batting order, irrespective of who I was representing the Aussies, the Windies or the Englishmen.

Coming to think of it, he always got to be India and won too, something which I never accepted in the true spirit of the game.

As I dragged myself away from the wicket after trying a left-handed wallop a-la Graham Yallop, I always felt ‘it’s just not cricket.’ I hated ‘India’ though Sunil Gavaskar was my favourite and I was plotting moves to hijack my brother’s Indian team.

That opportunity presented itself when the World Cup came calling to Indian homes in 1983. We still didn’t have a TV at home (we had to wait till 1986) and our parents had already warned us against either pestering them to buy a TV or seeking permission to go over to our neighbour’s place (one of them had a Dyanora Colour TV and the other had a Solidaire) to watch.

I still remember going over to their homes to watch PT Usha, MD Valsamma and Charles Borromeo win medals at the Delhi Asiad (1982); and watch grainy images (via Sri Lanka’s Roopavahini) of Maradona crying off the pitch after kicking Brazil’s Falcao and Paolo Rossi winning the Football World Cup for Italy at Espana ‘82.

Watching LIVE cricket on TV was still quite an ask though in December 1982, the national broadcaster Doordarshan managed to beam images of Sunil Gavaskar’s India getting drubbed by Pakistan led by Imran Khan and the wily Sarfraz Nawaz. The heavy defeats ensured that I swore off watching Test cricket, much to my mother’s glee.

A badly bruised India went to the West Indies and the only game we remember is an ODI victory at Berbice built on stellar performances by Sunil Gavaskar and Kapil Dev. Selective amnesia, one might say!

And, the school reopening after summer holidays and the June monsoon showers disrupting our daily dose of evening cricket at the playground, only added to our woes.

But we seldom missed out on an opportunity to slip and slide across the muddy waters as cricket and clean clothes became unsuspecting victims. Dag acha hai!

The cuts on our knees and elbows had become all too unbearable for our mother and she decided something’s got to be done and yanked us off to our cousin’s place in a neighbouring colony where my grand uncle was recuperating from his illness.

My uncle, being the big daddy of entertainment in the family, got himself shifted out of the hospital as he found the antiseptic environs of the hospital too boring.

A rich and flamboyant businessman from Quilon (70 kms from capital Thiruvananthapuram) with interests in everything from processing cashew to publishing to film production, he used to lug his prized TV and VCR wherever he went, whether it was to our ancestral home in Mavelikara, a village/town 120 km from Thiruvananthapuram or to the capital where he had to be brought down for treatment.

At that time, he had paid a princely sum of Rs 75,000 for a Weston TV and a Hitachi VCR. To put that price in perspective, my father paid Rs 95,000 for our HOME in posh Jawahar Nagar a couple of years before my grand uncle splashed that amount on two gadgets.

Since cricket in the rains was finally banned by my mother, we had no option but to grudgingly visit my uncle every evening, something which we grew fond of as the days passed by. I can’t seem to figure out or remember what helped the turnaround, whether it was the steady supply of apples and grapes since he was a patient or the fact that he refused to allow “Krishi Darshan” (an evening yawn on national TV where all you could see were two men discussing plants and seeds… zz zz) to corrupt and corrode his TV.

My uncle’s Zen-like aversion to farming on TV ensured we got to watch VHS tapes of WWF and ‘Mind Your Language’ for the first time. Tony Atlas, Rocky Johnson (WWE Superstar Rock’s father) and Jesse “The Body” Ventura (former Minnesota Governor) were welcomed with open arms.

New heroes were taking their places in the pantheon and Cricket took a backseat with Kapil’s Devils not doing not crowing themselves in much glory, notwithstanding the skipper’s epic 175 not out against Zimbabwe which we couldn’t even follow on radio as the BBC was on strike on that particular day.

When India defeated Australia in what was a do-or-die match, the powers that be at Mandi House (the HQ of Doordarshan) in New Delhi decided that the World Cup might be worth beaming across the nation and decided to broadcast LIVE India’s semifinal against England at Old Trafford.

We watched in rapt attention as Roger Binny bowled Graeme Fowler to set the stage for Kapil Dev to restrict England to just 213 off 60 overs. India’s chase of the World Cup host’s modest target will be remembered for one shot - Yashpal Sharma moving well inside the line of a full-length ball from Bob Willis to flick him over backward square leg for a towering six. A stamp of authority that proclaimed India’s charge into the final.

By then, the situation at my relative’s home had also changed quite a bit. The audience glued to the TV swelled from just my ailing uncle and his grand nephews to our parents and even his team of doctors who could be heard discussing the intricacies of Mohinder Amarnath’s stop-and-start run-up with the same seriousness as they would his illness, a point noted by my uncle too. The diet pattern shifted too with delicious ‘thattu dosa’ (rice pan cakes made at makeshift street side stalls) and chilly chutney fighting for space with Pork Onion and Beef Double Fry from a state-run star hotel.

June 25, 1983. The final on a Saturday! We felt blessed. If only we had known that match scheduling was a fine art driven more by commercial considerations rather than deliverance after hours of prayers by ignorant souls like us.

Images of the Lord’s outfield, the hallowed turf which I still harbour hopes on stepping on barefoot and also at the Wimbledon Centre Court (yeah, you bet!), left us bewildered, to say the least. My aunt, an ace landscaping specialist who won many an award for the best maintained private lawn, wondered how they managed the various shades of grass at the Lord’s.

As is the case when you watch cricket with family, the game tends to take a backseat and India’s stuttering start dampened the mood even more. But Krishnamachari Srikkanth enlivened the evening with his devil-may-care attacking shots and his square drive on his knee remains one stroke which I’ve tried and failed miserably through my humbling cricketing years. Some things are best left to the experts.

Another image that remains etched in memory is the “Rolls Royce of Fast Bowling” Michael Holding steaming in from the boundary ropes. I think he did that extended run-up for two or three deliveries but the fallout, again, was copycat “fast” bowlers who badly gasped for breath by the time we reached our delivery stride.

Defending 183 in a World Cup final against the defending champions West Indies was no mean task, a prognosis that the team of doctors who had gathered to both watch the Final and check on my uncle had concurred without much dispute. But hope springs eternal and when Balwinder Singh Sandhu scalped Gordon Greenidge shouldering arms to what turned out to be a prodigious inswinging delivery, we all smelt something. I don’t think Sandhu could ever have reproduced that magic ball, something which the man who’s now a reputed coach has admitted many a time.

But when Viv Richards walked out with his traditional gum-chewing swagger and started smashing and caressing the ball to all corners of the park, we knew it was Game On. Or, was it Game Over? But skipper Kapil Dev had other plans running yards and yards towards the mid-wicket boundary to pouch a Richards’ skier which took forever to come down.

Soon the wickets started disappearing as fast as the hot ‘thattu dosas’ and the pork and beef that made their appearance at the appointed time and we all knew we were witnessing history being made.

When Amarnath trapped Holding leg before, we didn’t know what to do. Though not together, we all had watched in despair as India lost 7-1 to Pakistan in Hockey at the Delhi Asiad. We knew how a defeat could scar a nation’s conscience and the national sport forever.

But the victory against the mighty Windies on June 25, 1983 headlined “MIRACLE AT LORD’S” laid to rest the ghost of that Hockey defeat, and as some analysts say, the game itself.

A new religion called Cricket was born that day. But life and the game are great levelers. My uncle, a man who celebrated life, died a month later.

So some of the cheerleaders are going home, and some of the others are being forced to cover up? If you ask me, that’s a bit of a shame. More importantly, it’s an example of people getting worked up about the wrong things.

A female, feminist friend of mine, living here but born in England, was complaining to me about the cheerleaders, saying they were simply not appropriate in a country like India, and demeaning for women.

I am not sure. As anyone who spends too long watching ESPN will know, cheerleading is a serious business in the United States, a sort of synchronised gymnastics with some pretty impressive routines.

I doubt that many of the girls from the States, or Uzbekistan, felt like they were being exploited when they were invited to India for what promised to be a thoroughly enjoyable few weeks.

That is, until certain, male sections of the crowd, began abusing them.

“It’s been horrendous,” Tabitha, a cheerleader from Uzbekistan, told the Hindustan Times. “Wherever we go we expect people to pass lewd, snide remarks but I’m shocked by the nature and the magnitude of the comments people pass here.”

But who seems to be getting the blame? The men making those remarks, or the cheerleaders themselves?

As one Indian friend told me recently, blaming the cheerleaders is not far away from blaming a woman for wearing a short skirt if she is abused or raped by a man.

Politicians, or at least those from the left and right wings, are up in arms about something they seen as an insult to Indian culture.

But who is complaining that the men making the lewd comments are letting their countrymen down?

Earlier this month, a 12-year-old girl was reportedly bundled in a car in broad daylight in New Delhi and raped by a policemen and his friend.

The policeman has since been charged and sacked, but there has hardly been any outcry
from India’s politicians. Is anyone demanding a serious and concerted effort to clean up the police force?

That of course, would require a major political effort. Far easier to snipe at a few foreign girls making the cricket match just a bit more fun to watch.