Thursday, March 18, 2010

The great mystery solved

I have finally discovered why cricket is so popular in India. No, its not because it is such a great game. I mean, there are many games such as football or tennis or basketball that are much more exciting to watch and play. Its not because its the only game we are good at. To date, even after nearly five decades of cricket mania in the country, our achievements in the game of hockey outweigh those in cricket.
It is because the game of cricket, more than any other game by a huge margin, offers scope for calculation of statistics. And we all know that we Indians are a math-loving country almost to a sickness. Where people from other countries shudder at the thought of algebra and geometry, we love it. Even the calculation of banalities like the mean and mode of a given set of figures excites us more than a shakira concert(okay, not me but most of you). Its not because we love the game that the calculations are made, its because we love the calculations that the game is played.
Of course it helps to have people like Sachin who provide the raw data for the calculations to be made.