Dear reader, first of all let me take this opportunity to wish you all a very happy new year. If 2024 was a good year for you then I hope 2025 is even better. And if perchance 2024 was a regrettable experience, then I hope 2025 will more than compensate for that shortfall. Onwards and upwards et cetera.

Reader, if there is one thing we know about the great country that is India, it is this: religion is a Sachin, and god is cricket. Wait. Sorry. Sachin is a cricket and god is a religion. No wait. Sacket is a… okay look, you know what I mean. Do I have to explain everything? What is this? IAS exam?

Back in the good old days, cricket was a simple religion. In fact, let me tell you a true story. Sometime in the late 1960s, this writer’s father went on a college tour from St. Thomas College, Thrissur, to some prestigious college in Thiruvananthapuram.

There at this prestigious college, he saw a sight he had never seen before: some dozens of young men wearing white clothing, wearing hats, and just standing around a football field doing absolutely nothing.

“What are these fellows doing?” my father asked his friend.

“I don’t know. Maybe some type of agriculture?” his friend replied after some reflection.

So my father went and asked the nearest man in white. Who explained that he was, in fact, indulging in Test cricket.

But then in the 80s, the average Indian person’s knowledge of cricket changed radically after India won the World Cup in England. Suddenly we knew the name of most of the players in the Indian team: Kapil Dev, Sunil Gavaskar, Roger Bannister, Feroz Shah Kotla et cetera.

This information was already too much.

Then in the 90s, things started spiralling out of control. By this point, the average Indian schoolchild not only knew the name of every Indian cricketer, she also knew the name of every player in every other team in the world. (Notwithstanding the fact that there were four Waughs, two Crowes, six Flowers and 17 Khans.)

Things should have paused there. But, much like a season of the Royal Challengers Bangalore, things kept on getting worse and worse.

By the early 2000s, you could not attend college, work in an office, or go to a family function without somebody accosting you and demanding to discuss cricket in irritating minutiae.

“Did you enjoy the India-Sri Lanka match?” they will ask.

“Oh, it was good. Nice innings by V.V.S. Laxman,” you will reply, totally unprepared for the absolute shenanigans that will follow.

“I thought there was too much grass leading to variable bounce, thankfully the dew factor played in our favour, otherwise things could have gotten very tricky given the number of left-handers.”

At this point what option do you have but to clutch at your chest, and fall over pretending to have a heart attack, so that this idiot will go and harass someone else.

Until very recently, I thought that the virus that is the Indian cricket-obsessive had reached its ultimate form.

Dear readers, I was deeply mistaken. Things have gone from bad to even worse.

According to my calculations, somewhere around the year 2020, the virus mutated into something even worse. In fact, the Indian cricket-obsessive is no longer obsessed with cricket, they are obsessed with cricketers.

Friends, the new Indian cricket-obsessive is deeply concerned not with cricket, but with Virat Kohli’s wife, Rohit Sharma’s girlfriend, Ravichandran Ashwin’s Instagram, Yuzvendra Chahal’s sunglasses, and so on and so forth.

If you try and discuss some cricket match, these rapscallions will immediately hijack the conversation with inane gossip nonsense.

“Machaan, what a cracking session after tea, no?”

“Nobody cares. Did you see what Harbhajan tweeted about Dhruv Jurel when Washington Sundar got run out across the Delaware? Dude it was fire!!!”

Dude, please. Just die. The shame cherry on this sadness cake is that this cancer has metastasised into the sports media as well.

And the garbage glitter on the above mentioned shame cherry on the sadness cake is that it is January 2025, and the English language still does not have a word to describe ruffians like this.

That travesty ends today. Henceforth, these fellows will be known as inningstigators.

Example sentence: “I tried discussing Bumrah’s brilliant spell with Nitin Sundar, but the inningstigator immediately launched into a 20-minute analysis of why the third slip wasn’t invited to the fourth slip’s daughter’s wedding.”

Are there any readers with political connections? Can we please pass some law in the Lok Sabha to ban inningstigation?

The writer is head of talent at Clarisights. He lives in London and is currently working on a new novel.