“It’s just a bloody game of cricket and we are in a war”

Simon Taufel summed it up so well. Cricket seems so trivial all of a sudden. It was so unreal. I have been wanting to write about the audacious attack on Srilanka for a couple of days but somehow I am not able to get the words to express my emotions at the moment. The following extract of a moving piece written by Sambit Bal in Cricinfo after the Mumbai attack, describes exactly how I am feeling now:

“……men who have purged from their souls every trace of humanity - let's not confer on them the dignity of a religion - and I have felt the blood drain out of me. I have felt a sense of paralysis and rage. My family and I are safe at home, none of my friends were in the hotels or at the other attack sites; but I am numb, not with fear or personal loss, but something far deeper: a sense of overpowering bleakness"

http://content-ind.cricinfo.com/magazine/content/current/story/379988.html

Even though the context is different between the Mumbai attack and this one, there’s a sense of déjà vu about it. If anything the Lahore attack is all the more audacious given the scale of security measures expected to be in place for such an important cricket series. Given the ease with which the terrorists were able to attack and flee the place, serious questions ought to be asked.

Already Murali has raised some critical questions and so have Simon Taufel & Chris Broad. Surely it can’t be so easy. I can’t ride my bike in the surrounding lanes of Chepauk during any international match as part of the security measures, but for a series with so much at stake, whatever the PCB assured as presidential level security was woefully short. Was there some internal help for the terrorists or was it just negligence of the highest order? Hopefully we’ll get an answer soon.