Now that India is out of the World Cup, watching the games has become a pleasurable, anxiety-free, almost aesthetic exercise. My nails are beginning to grow back; I have stopped giving the sofa a hammering every three minutes; and my daughter, I hope, will sooner rather than later begin to forget the swear words she picked up by being in my presence during the India games.
It’s great fun, unadulterated fun, watching the cricket now. (In fact, it’s a little like the football World Cup: No India, great games.)

And there is so much to watch, so much worth staying up for: Shane Bond’s bursts of pure speed and control (it must be one of the most beautiful sights in the world, a genuinely quick bowler in full throttle); Matthew Hayden’s successive hundreds (the first one reminded me of the choreographed carnage at the end of Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather. Hayden was ruthless and bloodied the opposition but there was such precision, such beauty in the violence); Malinga’s unforgettable four-ball devastation; and the brave manner in which South Africa began its (eventually unsuccessful) reply to the Australian total. It’s all riveting stuff, and there is so much of it around.

But there is this thing: Is it ever possible to watch any sport without actually supporting one of the two sides? (Or players if it happens to be an individual sport.) I think not. The 2005 Ashes series was the greatest ever and I enjoyed watching it more than many, many series in which India played but I was supporting a team: England, in that case. (The reasons are complicated, and I shan’t go into them here.)

While watching England play Australia (or X plays Y when neither is India) I am not as tortured as I would be if India plays, but I am very engaged with the fortunes of a particular side. The game itself gives great pleasure; but we need to identify with one of the two teams to give the experience of watching that extra frisson.

So it is with this World Cup too. I always know which of the two teams on the day I support.

But I am yet to decide which side I really want to go all the way. (In football, it’s always an easy choice. Ever since Diego Maradona arrived, I have been an Argentina supporter.) But I shall have to make up my mind soon.

Have you made up yours?

“Cool first, write afterwards. Morality is hot but art is icy,” Henry James had once said. A pieces like this isn’t quite art and the response to India being walloped by Sri Lanka has little to do with morality but I know what the master meant when he said that. Put another way, he meant take your time, and do not yield to the temptation of the knee-jerk reaction.

Which is what I have been doing over the weekend. Taking my time and keeping both my knees tightly strapped lest they react.

But there is no running away from the question: How exactly did India manage to come undone? How did a side that former cricketer Vic Marks (among others) was tipping as one of the favourites of the tournament manage to so comprehensively mess things up, ending their campaign before the stage when one had supposed it would begin in earnest?

Various theories are floating around, not all of them to do with the quality of cricket the side played. In Monday’s edition of the Hindustan Times, Rahul Bhattacharya (an old cricinfo hand) writes about the “lack of chemistry” in this team. Things like chemistry are intangible, they are hard to communicate unless you have seen the team but one knows when it’s there – just as much as one knows when it’s not. (I remember watching the Indians play volleyball before the start of play every morning during the terrific tour of Australia in 2003-04 and remember thinking, “These guys have something special between them.” And they did. It showed in the results.)

“There was no open rebellion,” Bhattacharya writes, “but the insecurity had seeped in too deep. The only hope for it galvanizing lay in the bonding that comes from special triumphs. It was not to be.”

As much as 1966 is for English football fans, for followers of Indian cricket 1983 has acquired a status of mythic proportions, and its mythology grows and grows as every Indian World Cup team since that one tries to match that triumph and falls short.

How was that victory achieved? I have wondered about this so many times over the past 24 years. And why has it never happened again? India was certainly not the most talented side in the 1983 tournament. (We’ve had several better teams since.) No one picked it as a dark horse. It did not have a decent track record. It had had far less practice in one-day cricket than teams like, say, England or Australia.

So how did they do it?

We had great players like Kapil and brave, committed ones like Amarnath. They were lucky. They were plucky. (Remember, India beat the defending world champions not once, but twice in the tournament.) But more than anything else, everything came together for India that summer in a way that things sometimes do in team sport: when all the units in a side weld together, when one player inspires the others, when the cliché of one for all and all for one becomes a demonstrable reality and the whole of the team become greater than a sum of its parts.

You need that for success in sport. And in the West Indies at this World Cup, that was found sadly wanting.

Staying up all night watching and then dragging oneself to work the next day, bleary, bedraggled, hungover with lack of sleep: I really thought I wouldn’t have to do this before the Super 8 stage. But then, we all know what happens if India loses tonight, don’t we?

So here we go. My five tips on how to stay up late for the big game. Or rather – given my experience – how to try to stay up and then fall asleep on the sofa. I shall be watching in India. But if any of you (anywhere in the world) have more tips (How to skive off work and catch the cricket; how to lie in late and watch a game), please keep them coming in. Who knows who’ll need which ones when?

Don’t go to a bar to watch the game: You’ll be too far away from the screen. The commentary will be drowned by the cries of angry waiters asking people to wait, they’re getting the next drink, and shrieks of inebriated laughter from people who find Lasith Malinga’s hairstyle funny. Besides, by the time you get in (or at least every time I have gone to a bar and got in), there will be a bloke twice as tall and four times as wide as you are right in front. Oh, and he’d be there just because some of his friends are and he couldn’t give two hoots about the game.

Actually, stay off the booze altogether: Yes, even at home. I know it’s tempting, especially since you’ve already had dinner and will be giving your metabolism a good chance to work but really, you should know better. If I do it, I begin to nod off ten overs into the second innings. Worse, if you’re smoking along with your drink, you risk falling asleep with your hand curled around your glass and the cigarette burning dangerously down to a stub. I know it’s only me but I once came close to setting fire to the house doing this.

Keep in touch with like-minded, fanatical friends: Text messages are the best. Try and not abbreviate but type the way you would on a computer screen. It keeps you occupied between overs. The witty response requires concentration. (That helps keep you awake.) It’s the only way to watch a match with friends who aren’t in the same city.

Keep the ads on mute: Programme your TV in such a way that the ads, when they come on, go mute. If you can’t do that, press the mute button. Every time. It is acutely disconcerting to hear ‘Oooh, aaah, India, Rah-rah India’ when the team is 64 for 4. Or something. I can barely blink back my tears. Or wish away the sense of the absurd.

Have your defence mechanism on default: We all have ours, don’t we? Being in denial won’t help (I am told that that is the first stage of depression), so have your defence mechanism ready. Here are mine: ‘There’s always next time.’ ‘It’s only a game.’ ‘They tried, you see.’ ‘It happens to the best of us.’

What works for you?

Oh, the agony of that game against Bangladesh. It’s now the day after the day after and I am still slapping my forehead and saying, ‘Oh dear, oh dear, just did we manage to get beaten?’

And the next game against Bermuda is merely hours away. I shudder at the thought.

The fact of the loss against Bangladesh isn’t the worst thing. Watching the pasting India got was a vile experience but even that isn’t the worst thing. The worst thing is this: We’ll all stay up and watch the game against Bermuda tonight. We shan’t be able to bring ourselves to turn away.

The pact between a fan and his team is sacrosanct. It cannot be broken. It is not like the colas or the cars or the credit cards the players endorse. Don’t like it? Sell it off. Flush it down the toilet. Get something better.

All through Sunday, protests erupted all over India. Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s new house, still being built, was attacked. Effigies were burnt. Sound bites on TV and chat rooms on the web were incandescent with anger.

It was the same in 2003 after India had squeezed through against the Netherlands in the opening game and got slaughtered by Australia in the next one. It is the same every time.

Advertisers are getting worried. The reported on Monday that “40 per cent of the Rs 12,000 crore (estimated by senior officials across firms like Samsung, LG and Coca-Cola) that rides on the Men in Blue can get wiped out if they make an early exit. That is about Rs 5,000 crore at stake.”

The fans’ anger with failure is genuine. (I can’t condone the ways in which it is expressed but I don’t for a moment doubt its genuineness.) As is their passion for the game and the hunger for success at it. But however disappointed we are, we simply cannot turn away when our players walk out on to the field. If we could, that Rs 12,000 crore would not have been at stake in the first place. The fact that it is – and will continue to be even if India go out before the next stage of the World Cup – suggests that there are millions out there like me: dejected, dispirited but waiting to reach for the remote before the first ball is bowled tonight. Sometimes, it feels like a brotherhood of misery.

Every fan realizes this: feeling miserable is part of the deal. But riding the misery and sticking with it the deal. You can’t support another team. You can’t suddenly become just as passionate about another sport.

It’s only this or nothing. And nothing is so much worse.

The World Cup, coming as it does every four years, offers an occasion for stock taking. I reference my life with each World Cup, reflect on how things were with me when the last one was played and reassess how they are now. Do you do that? If you are a true fan, I think you would. It’s just one of those intersections between sport and life that is so much part of being a fan.

I missed watching the most pivotal moments of the 1983 World Cup final: I was waiting for a takeaway in a Kolkata restaurant, and remember how, as the radio relayed that Richards was out, I ran around the deserted restaurant, along with the waiters, head steady, arms outstretched, body tilting from side to side. I was 13.

In 1987, I was for the final, at the Eden Gardens as Border held aloft the trophy. In 1992… well, never mind.

What I associate most with the World Cup final of 2003 is this: lying with my daughter on my chest, trying to get her to sleep after India got slaughtered by Ponting and Co. I remember the clink of ice in the glass of vodka by my side. I remember some fireworks going off; they sounded a little desultory, a little jaded. People had bought them just in case India won. They were letting them off anyway. No shame in losing to the best side in the world, I recall thinking. I remember thinking about the book I was then writing… about India and cricket and being a fan.

This time around, my girl is five years old. She recognizes the Indian players. She can tell a Steely Dan song from its opening riff. And so boundless is her energy that it’s impossible to get her to sleep before very late. We live in Mumbai these days. My book has been published. (You can’t call yourself a writer because you’ve written a book. You have to have a of work to be able to do that. A writer is all I’ve ever wanted to be. Now I can at least say I have written a book. A start.)

But the thing I most notice this time is the creeping up of middle age. This is the first World Cup that we in India will be able to watch only if we stay up all night for days on end. I find that I can’t do that any longer. (Coming up soon: Tips on how to stay up – or try to stay up and fall asleep on the sofa.) My eyes burn if I haven’t slept well. My legs feel heavy. The day job, all nine or ten hours of it, takes too much out of me. And the cricket, so central to life once (the rest of life was what happened between overs), is having to be accommodated into the rhythms of the soon-to-be-middle-aged, salaried, hardworking parent’s life.

It’s quite a realization. Have you had that recently? And how has your life changed over the World Cups, since World Cup since everything in Indian cricket changed for ever, in 1983? I look forward to hearing that. Keep the comments coming in.