Editorial: Chariots of fire

For more than a decade, eleven men had put their collective heads together, duly assisted by several more who weren't in the public eye as often, striving diligently to find cure for what threatened to be an incurable sporting scourge that endangered the mental well-being of a billion plus populace, besides the multitudes of the Indian diaspora.

And through all those years of painstaking research, there were multiple occasions when they came within a whisker of finding the panacea only for it to elude their grasp repeatedly with the adroitness and alacrity of a dreaded fugitive, while merrily leaving behind the obtrusive scars of a defeat accompanied by peals of demonic laughter. Tears were shed, questions were asked, the personnel kept changing, but exasperatingly, relief obstinately refused to heave into sight. Such was the unending plight and simmering angst of the country that it seemed as if even death had a remedy but not the conundrum of the kind that Sir Winston Churchill had lyrically described the erstwhile USSR as.

Some had even abandoned hope, thinking that this was one long, dark tunnel strewn with a minefield of intense trauma and acute anguish that led you to the edge of a precipice from where there was no coming back. On Saturday, at close to midnight Indian time, a country that had long forgotten what unalloyed bliss felt like, got to experience it at last and after letting that ineffable joy sink in, revelled in it until light obliterated the all-encompassing darkness that was seen as the cause of their utter desolation and misery all these years with the kind of uninhibited gusto that the situation demanded.

The beauty of sport lies in the inherent fact that there is redemption and solace always to be found around the corner after suffering a drastic fall from grace in the not too distant past. Just take Hardik Pandya for instance. He incurred the wrath of his own countrymen and the vile vitriol he was subjected to, in this edition's IPL, wherever he went was as unprecedented as it was deplorable. And now he has literally and metaphorically become the blue-eyed boy again after taking the prized scalps of South Africa's dangermen Heinrich Klaasen and David Miller in the final of the World T20 to decisively swing the match in India's favour.

Others such as the incomparable Jasprit Bumrah and the ever-improving Arshdeep Singh had further enhanced their glorious reputations to stratospheric levels, while the epochal world conquest also brought with it an element of poignancy with the retirements of captain Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli and Ravindra Jadeja from international T20s. It is perhaps fitting that the trio has chosen the most opportune moment to walk into the sunset even as we can take immense delight in the fact that they will continue to enrapture us in the other two formats along with the annually held IPL.

And what about the head coach or perhaps we should add the prefix 'former' to it with the unassuming Rahul Dravid also taking a final bow. And what a perfect swansong it was, masterminding an immaculately-run campaign that saw India become the first team to win a World T20 undefeated.

Just to go back in time, every watershed moment this country has witnessed, with the nation's independence easily topping that list, had its fons et origo in darkness. The next time Team India fans encounter it, they need not swear at it nor embrace it, but be secure in the knowledge that it would someday result in a dazzling array of riches.