Cricket – A Kind of Pilgrimage
In the backstreets of Calcutta I discovered shoeless boys playing and dreaming of being the next Sachin Tendulkar. I observed the tennis-ball night tournament in Lahore with 265 dedicated teams participating; the annual college Big Matches in Colombo which highlights the sporting year as well as being the most prestigious occasion in the social calendar; the glorious maidans in Churchgate, financial hub of Bombay where office clerks swap shirts, tie and briefcases for white for two hours of daily practice before work; Afghan refugees in Pakistan's Northern Frontier who play in the high-walled enclosures of their homes between washing lines...
This, my first book, was a discovery of the passion for cricket in South Asia. A large format photographic-based book, it was written in conjunction with Into the Passionate Soul of Subcontinental Cricket. My journey of four months around India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka did not visit the conventional venues of the game, like huge cricket grounds and major international matches. Rather it was the unorthodox cricket venues in the subcontinent that were of interest; Bombay backstreets, parks, Pakistan refugee camps, Tamil war zones, Karachi slums and Rajasthani deserts. It was these places that revealed the true identity of the religion of cricket, and often the only thing which united the three countries.