You Must Like Cricket? : Memoirs Of An Indian Cricket Fan

The great C L R James once asked: What do they know of cricket who only cricket know? For some of us, the question should be: What do they know who only cricket know? Answering that can keep you awake at night.

Soumya Bhattacharya knows this: he has a steady job, a loving wife, a daughter he dotes on. But most of all he has cricket. Or perhaps more accurately: cricket has him. Ever since he can remember, hes loved the game. From his first knockabouts on the living-room carpet ? with his mothers paper bats and balls ? he progressed to Test Match Special on short-wave, then to the whole panoply of obsession: one-dayers, Test matches, TV highlights, re-runs of TV highlights, always following one team ? India. When you come from a country where the game is more than a religion, you must like cricket, right?

In this sparkling memoir of a lifetime spent in the company of eleven men, a green field and a billion other worshippers, Soumya Bhattacharya gives us a guided tour of the soul of a cricket obsessive. Part reportage, part travelogue, part cultural politics, You Must Like Cricket? takes us from Bhattacharyas home in Kolkata to Lords and back again as he explores the joys and the lows (mostly the lows) of a thirty-year love affair, how one game has become so closely tied to a nations identity, and the troubling hold cricket has over him. But if your home ground was called Eden Gardens, where else would you rather be?

About The Author:

Soumya Bhattacharya grew up in London and Kolkata. His criticism and essays have been published in the New York Times, the Sydney Morning Herald, Wisden, New Statesman, the Guardian and the Observer. He is currently an editor on the Hindustan Times. This is his first book. He lives in Mumbai.