'Meekened' Pakistan still waiting to prick India's bubble

I'll admit I snickered when I first watched the Star Sports promo for the India-Pakistan game on Sunday. Google it now if you've missed it, and if you can't be bothered, here's a brief recap:

Pakistani boy, on day of first ever World Cup match with India, in Sydney in 1992, gets ready to celebrate a win with fireworks. Pakistan loses, boy despondent, stashes unused fireworks away. Repeat for every World Cup meeting since, with boy growing into man, into husband and father and the fireworks remaining unlit. It ends with Mohali in 2011, the protagonist asking "Kab phorenge?", a smart catchphrase with dual intent: when will we set off our firecrackers, when will we blow India away?

I was in Pakistan when it first appeared and was taken with its ability to both needle and empathise with the Pakistani fan. It had precisely the effect I imagine was the intention. It riled people up to respond: Pakistan have more ODI wins against India overall, so the ad was misrepresentative. It was pointed out that there was disingenuousness - in an ad! Shocking! - at play: the boy would have used the fireworks in celebrating Pakistan's 1992 World Cup win, or even reaching the final in 1999, or maybe even when India lost the final in 2003.

I'm no Don Draper, but if an ad heightens anticipation for a product and is lauded for being well-made, then its work is done. Given the general excellence of Indian advertising, be sure they have versions ready as updates after the game, for both results. Pakistani advertisers and brands probably have something ready as well. One channel took the bait, though the response is full of such predictable bluster you don't even need to Google it to know Javed Miandad's six begins it or that it is narrated by a man trying to sound martial ("Do you remember Miandad's last-ball six..." it begins, ending with some Nasir Jamshed shots even Nasir Jamshed doesn't remember).

Most likeable, though, is that the promo gives the rivalry a lightness it has rarely had. It has made a deeply complex, often troubling contest less fraught, even if only fleetingly. Here, laugh about it, and if you're a little offended, then that's bearable collateral. It's much better on the health of nations, after all, to poke fun at each other rather than launch missiles.

Some cricketing education can be gleaned as well, though. The brief match clips the boy is shown watching are as follows: Javed Miandad bowled by Javagal Srinath in Sydney; Aamer Sohail bowled by Venkatesh Prasad in Bangalore; Wasim Akram caught by Anil Kumble off Prasad at Old Trafford; finally, Indian fielders walking off Mohali in the triumphant glow of as egalitarian a bowling performance as there can be (five bowlers, ten wickets, equally shared).

Read through and recall those games again, because from them emerges one significant and contrary truth. It isn't that India have won every single World Cup encounter in defiance or support of prevailing form or permanent class. It is that all but one of India's wins has emerged from an inverted logic, reversing the traditional strengths that have defined them. The separate stories of India and Pakistan, and the shared one of matches between them, is of the former's batting and the latter's bowling. That is how it is decided. Yet, except Centurion and maybe Bangalore, India have won because of their bowling. To most Pakistanis, at some subconscious plane below the overarching level at which any defeat to India is galling, that must be the most galling thing ever.

One day a Pakistani advertiser will make a witty ad about the condescension with which Pakistan looks at Indian pace bowling. (Shoaib Akhtar, for one, is never more a comedian than when he's talking about Indian pace). Maybe it will involve thin men, vegetables and bad taste. Or digs at the MRF Pace Academy. But until then, it is the salt on a fresh wound that at World Cups it is Indian bowling which has undone Pakistan. And to have Venkatesh Prasad taking all these wickets, Venkatesh Prasad who is the the punchline to all generic Pakistani jokes about Indian fast bowling, Venkatesh Prasad, the exact antithesis of all Pakistani fast bowling? That's some burn.

Those clips tell a bigger story too. When Miandad was bowled, or Sohail, they felt like little hurtful pricks to the great big balloon of ego and bluster on which Pakistan cricket - and indeed Pakistan - had ridden high for years and years over India. Pakistan may have always had wonky governance, but the country was once seen, not least in its own eyes, as more vibrant than the slower behemoth that was India, which was still an idea waiting for its time to come.

Pakistan's cricketers of that time held a peculiar fascination for many Indians - their bravado and chutzpah, their abrasiveness and establishment-overturning ways and outrageous skill. Moreover they were ahead of the curve. Mushtaq Mohammad gave Pakistan their own Sourav Ganguly moment over two decades before India did.

Eventually those little pricks began not only to deflate Pakistan but to inflate India. By the time Mohali came round, the existing order was overturned. Now it is India riding high over Pakistan - its economy, democracy, the IPL, Bollywood, its cricketers. Sometimes you look at Virat Kohli and wonder whether all the bluster that hissed out of Pakistan didn't blow into his wiry body alone. Look also at the others: R Ashwin, Rohit Sharma, Suresh Raina, Shikhar Dhawan and Ravindra Jadeja, in whom there can often be glimpsed the impudence of that eternal badtameez (loosely translated as "rascal"), Ijaz Ahmed. Look at recent vintage: Gautam Gambhir, Virender Sehwag, Harbhajan Singh or Yuvraj Singh, all types Pakistan can probably identify with - angsty spinners, abrasive openers, gutsy and persistent middle-order men, outrageously gifted but frustrating batters, rascals the lot of them but rascals who brought them so much glory.

Leading them is MS Dhoni, who lives in his own little world, aloof and unknowable, as Imran Khan once did, yet with the connectedness of Miandad. In his delicate calculations about the ends of chases, Dhoni is more Miandad than any Pakistani batsman. The only consolation for Pakistanis - and boy, don't they make sure Indians know it - is that India have yet to taste the true and exquisite poison of the crazy-diamond fast bowler.

Star Sports may not have knowingly communicated these greater meanings, but it is what it is. Pakistan are the ones trying to prick the great Indian bubble, a Pakistan not weakened as much as "meekened". It probably riles them more than anything that in all its glitter and grime, this new India is not dissimilar to old Pakistan.