Cricket has always been more than a sport in India, and on the second day of Godrej Literature Live! The Mumbai LitFest 2026 at the NCPA, it got a session of its own. Lines at Length brought together cricket enthusiast Shashi Tharoor and former cricket correspondent turned author Rahul Bhattacharya, with veteran sports journalist Ayaz Memon in the chair, to talk about why writing about the game still holds its own in an age of highlight reels.
“It’s a metaphor”
Explaining the game’s pull, Tharoor said: “There’s something about cricket that really resembles life. You are timing the ball well and hitting it off the middle of the bat, and then the unpredictable, ungaugeable weather, or rainstorm, or a dry pitch comes along. Life does that to you, and it happens in cricket as well. There is so much about cricket that fits into what you can understand about life. It’s a metaphor.”
A team that reflects a changing India
Tharoor also spoke about how the Indian team has changed. Earlier sides drew heavily on urban, affluent backgrounds, while more players now come from smaller towns and modest circumstances, with MS Dhoni’s early years as a railway ticket collector a well-known example. “The sociological transformation of the cricket team also reflected the way in which India’s evolution had gone beyond the big cities, and the possibility of change all over the country,” he said.
Why writers love the game
For Bhattacharya, the drama lies in the tension between the player and the side. “It’s the particular relationship between the individual and the team. It gives you more dramatic struggle than anything else. Growing up, I thought it was everything. I don’t think you need anything else to understand what the outside world is,” he said.
Reflecting on a passage from J. M. Coetzee’s Boyhood, in which a boy faces a cricket ball, he added that failure is something cricketers and writers share: “It really talks about failure. And that’s something cricketers and sportspeople deal with all the time. And writers do too.”
More from the festival: Gulzar reads from Aamchi Mumbai and Javed Akhtar on why AI cannot replace creative writing.
Disclaimer: The images used in this article have been provided to The Daily Brunch by Godrej Literature Live! The Mumbai LitFest.
