Re: Indian Crowd / How Indians have ruined cricket
While there are many things about the generalizations in this thread on Indian crowd behavior that I don’t agree with (and that others have rebutted), I think there is a lot of truth to this comment on the rise in nationalistic fervour in India over the last decade, and particularly over the last five years. I think as a country, we are still feeling our way through that adjustment in self-perception, and there is tendency to over-react and go overboard with the “superpower” thing. But in many ways, this kind of reaction is not unexpected, when you think of the relative shortness of the transition. 10 years is a small timeframe in a country’s history, and the magnitude of economic change that has happened in India over that time is huge. It hasnt been a gradual process where people could gradually get used to the changes in how the country was doing and reflect that in their perceptions of themselves and their country. This takes more time. But I am confident it will happen - people will become more secure and willing to leave the superlatives for others to bestow.
There have, however, been some positives, too, to come out all of this recent rise in “nationalistic” feeling. Many of the divisive factors that a lot of us grew up with in earlier decades (regionalism, stateism, religious divides, etc) are taking more and more of a back seat. (Now the dividing factor is more who has and who hasnt - between the haves and have nots.)