Bled blue into quiet World Cup excitement

There's been a bit of a worry in India over the last few weeks - that India is not really that into the World Cup. That there's no buzz in the air, there's no frisson on the streets. Compared to the news coming in from Bangladesh of crowds singing and dancing past midnight outside the stadium and lining the streets from Dhaka to Mirpur as the team buses go past, there certainly isn't.

But there is a certain surge around India too. Call it the World Cup media tsunami. To begin with, it's hard to miss the monster-sized posters of snarling cricketers - so far identified as Praveen Kumar, Virat Kohli, Sreesanth and someone who looks a cross between Zaheer Khan and Cheteshwar Pujara - ordering the public to "Bleed Blue".

A few weeks ago they were wearing shirts. With the event now upon us, they have all ripped their shirts off, and shown us what blue blood really looks like: a Nike logo on the right pectoral and the BCCI logo, closer to their hearts, on the left.

This should have stirred every basic nationalistic instinct left to be stirred and led to men tearing off their shirts en masse and women marvelling at the torsos (surely not CGI, no?). Folks walk around them, though, mostly like there's a good giggle coming on.

Then, there's the shock and awe (not) of Cup carpet-bombing by experts on television. Every channel has been in bitter competition with each other to set up at least half a dozen experts from all over the world. A rush of ghosted columns in newspapers (thus reducing column inches for any kind of news) is surrounded by players urging us all to buy colas, television sets, housing complexes, insurance policies, shoes, socks and fans. Not human fans, but the ones on ceilings.

Of course India's excited by the Cup. All sorts of people are watching. When the first match between India and Bangladesh began to a deafening reception in Mirpur, the reaction here was one that could best be described as muted but keen. You've heard that 'quiet confidence' stuff, no? Well, that's what it's like. Quiet when India's not playing but overall moving around with a superior kind of confidence.

In a New Delhi coffee shop on Saturday afternoon, a cleaner leant on his mop, in front of the TV screen at the time of the toss. When Virender Sehwag began to wade in, the number of bystanders deciding to stand by the windows outside, grew from two to ten in about thirty seconds. The most quietly confident group were sitting near the TV screen. Two men who had been there for longer than two hours. They hardly drank any coffee or talked much, some pieces of paper on their table, one of them looking into a laptop which had a data card stuck into its USB ear.

Just before the start of the match two more walked in, with cheerful greetings and sat at an opposite table. They were a disparate group, as if a well-dressed art impresario was hanging out with a car salesman and an old-money senior citizen was friends with the guy who ran a paan stall. The democracy of cricket, surely.

When the match began, the art impresario with the laptop looked more into his computer than at Sehwag shredding the bowling. When a customer - this Nosey One - walked over to the cashier behind him to make a payment, he pulled off the Quick-Step-Finger: the thing we do to switch computer screen to disguise chatting or surfing Facebook at work. By the time Nosey had made the payment, the art impresario was playing Solitaire. When Nosey walked out and tried to take photos of bystanders outside the coffee shop watching cricket through plate glass, the paan-stall owner popped up his head to see just what was happening.

The World Cup is here and a lot of Indians are excited about it. It's just that some of them don't want to make it too public.