Soft Power: The Indian Way

The Lord’s cricket ground, with its manicured green fields and the faint echo of polite applause, is very British.

- Debashis Chatterjee

This was where I found myself, standing on the same balcony where Sourav Ganguly, years ago, had made a spectacle of himself, baring his torso and whirling his shirt like some tribal war flag. That shirt now rests, preserved, in the Lord’s Museum—a relic of some shared colonial nostalgia. I was tempted to do something dramatic like a full Ganguly, but it was England, and the sky was grey, the air damp—so I settled for waving my muffler. It was my polite, understated way of expressing that cricket, politics, and management form the triumvirate of India’s soft power.

A member of the Indian Parliament confessed to me over a cup of masala