GigaOM

Wall Street Journal has a great editorial this morning on the current India-Pakistan cricket series. While it has nothing to do with broadband or technology (except that i watched the damn series in a tiny window on my laptop over a DSL connection), this is about a game which changes the real game in South Asia.

bq. The public mood reflects not merely a weariness with the seemingly unending conflict between the two countries; it reveals, also, a genuine political optimism, the result of the recent rapprochement between Islamabad and Delhi. It was this summit-level warming, of course, that laid the ground for the Indian cricket team to visit. And given the passion for the game on the subcontinent, it was the Indian government’s willingness to let the cricketers tour Pakistan that convinced Pakistanis that Delhi’s apparent conciliatoriness was sincere. No more proof of India’s good faith was needed.

bq. But the Indian cricketers appear to have contracted the verve and self-belief of contemporary India: If India can take on the world on the high-tech front, the thinking seems to be, it can do so on the cricket field as well. The Pakistanis, by contrast — and reflecting, also, their national mood — are uncertain, torn between different ideas, and seemingly in transition to a new order. Their team, like their country, is talented and robust; but it is, like their country, deeply unsettled.