The futility of being sports writers manifests itself from time to time on my vain fraternity — like when we’re being harassed by cops in the middle of the night, and our visiting card doesn’t do the trick. But never has the helplessness become as apparent as it is these days, when we’re busy filling pages with centuries, wickets, titles and goals that seem meaningless when compared with larger issues that we’d ignored until now only because they hadn’t hit closer to home.

Now that Mumbai has been struck, and not just any part of Mumbai but a region that was the home of the wealthy, liberal elite — we either lost friends, or people who were at places where we’ve spent time — we now want to express our anger through boycotts and daily reality checks.

But when 70 in Jaipur, largely from the lower middle-class, had died in a blast earlier this year, I had had no such qualms. The Indian Premier League match in the city four days later had not been cancelled, and no one had felt it should’ve been. In fact it was marketed with extra fervour as a symbol of India’s resurgent spirit.

The hypocrisy of sport is that we change its relevance at our convenience. On certain days, cricket in India is “just a game” — like when the media wants to guard our players from fanatical, jingoistic effigy-burners after a big defeat — and on certain other days, it’s “more than just a game” — like when a match against Pakistan raises easy comparisons with ping-pong diplomacy, and when a World Cup win is likened to global domination in a burst of nationalistic pride.

There are articles and books to advocate both theories, neither of which is wrong. For example, British politician Lord Mancroft, in Bees in Some Bonnets, dismissed cricket simply as a “game which the English, not being spiritual people, have invented in order to give themselves some conception of eternity”.

While, conversely, “what do they know of cricket who only cricket know” asked CLR James in his path-breaking Beyond a Boundary — an extremely valid question in the backdrop of the social environment of the Caribbean islands from the late 19th to middle 20th century.

So what, then, is the purpose of sport, especially in violently changing times? The Olympics were suspended in the World War years, and cricket tours of Pakistan and Sri Lanka have been called off far too often in the recent past. What is the relevance of the English cricket team’s return to India for the Test series? In terms of the so-called larger impact of sport on life, can there be any hidden significance in a century by Andrew Strauss or another single-digit failure by Rahul Dravid?

Every sport pretends to be literature, lending itself to glorious, sweeping comparisons across sectors and ages. But I wasn’t able to find the motivation to spout them while the negotiations with the English cricket team were going on, and while confidence-building assurances were being offered to save the series. I felt the rhetoric, and the lofty associations, had little meaning.