In India, it is not very difficult to spot a fake Manchester United or Chelsea fan who, once in 4 years, chooses Brazil as his favourite soccer team (my apologies to the genuine followers out there but you know the truth about many Indian ‘pretending’ soccer fans, don’t you?). Such people, who for some reason as disgusting as to sound ‘cool,’ pretend to be the fan of their chosen idol(s) without genuinely understanding, believing and admiring he/she/it/them.

A genuine fan doesn’t select whom he wants to be a fan of but he inadvertently ‘becomes’ a fan by the immeasurable pleasure he gets from watching, listening or following his object of interest.

But this phenomenon of ‘becoming’ a fan makes some of us so deeply emotional and ardent that fan-ism unrealizingly turns into fanaticism. And this fanaticism turns ugly (something which happened among my friends last Sunday) when a fan is aroused or displeased by disrespecting opponents.

Like many Indians, I am a fan of cricket as a game and Rahul Dravid as a player. Observably, I am in a minority in the world of omnipresent Sachin Tendulkar fan(atics), but that doesn’t mean that I do not like the-little-master whose game a chump like me cannot even dare to describe.

CL T20 finals, last Sunday was the final time when the cricketing world watched both the legends playing together in the field against each other. While the Feroz Shah Kotla Stadium in Delhi stadium witnessed the farewell of Dravid and Sachin from T20 cricket, six of us watched the game in the boring comfort of air conditioner and bed in Mumbai.

Apparently, we had an equal number of RR and MI supporters watching the game. The problem started when one of my friends said something disparaging against Rahul Dravid. Knowing what would hurt him as much as I was by his comments, I impulsively passed some words against Sachin Tendulkar which got another one involved against ‘the master technician’ and then another one against ‘the little master’.

In a few minutes, the level of comparison between the two players increased while the level of criticizing words used for both of them decreased; and like a spiral, it continued to drop. Fanaticism had taken over the respect that the two maestros deserved. By the end of the match, Rajasthan Royals had lost the tournament, we had lost our sanity and challenged the two gentlemen’s integrity.

Nobody cares about what we say about these superheroes, but such extreme fanatic tendencies which when reach their peak in the presence of opposing frenzied phalanx, make frightening headlines and videos showing the disruption of violence in the stadia.

As I write, I feel sorry for what I said in the heat of the argument about the two most reverend gentlemen and former Indian skippers, and about their immaculate ethical game which is an inspiration for the new generation and a blissful satisfaction for the old one.

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