What does the world’s largest cricket-crazy country, India, look and feel like when it hosts a World Cup? Especially during an edition that saw the very best of the Indian team, yet ended in heartbreak?
Published by Penguin Random House India,Gully Gully: Travels Around India during the 2023 World Cup, written by Aditya Iyer, reveals not only what cricket means to India, but also what billions of Indians mean to cricket by capturing the best and the worst of us, along with the grit and the grime of the land.
For all but the final day of six electric weeks during the winter of 2023, India’s campaign at a home World Cup blazed and sparkled, warming the soul of a cricket-crazed nation. As Rohit Sharma’s dominant side took their show on the road, from delirious city to hysterical town, stretching from the sunburnt coast of Chennai to the frozen mountains of Dharamshala, the greatest cricket team to not win a World Cup edition unified a vast and diverse country in their shade of blue.
Apart from the cricket and the travel, Aditya offers exclusive previews into India’s cricket-verse in his debut book, featuring interviews and conversations with those who live and breathe the game in each city, such as Virat Kohli’s coach, Rajkumar Sharma, in Delhi; the yellow-painted Dhoni fanatic, Saravanan Hari, in Chennai; the only cricketer from the state of Himachal Pradesh to make it to the Indian team, Rishi Dhawan, in Dharamshala; the first-ever television commentator, Fredun DeVitre, in Mumbai; or even a failed cricketer turned IIM professor in Ahmedabad. The list goes on.
Gully Gully: Travels Around India during the 2023 World Cup is far from a book on just cricket. It takes you on a journey through India, introducing you to flower sellers hooked to radio commentary in Tamil Nadu, a taxi driver experiencing heroin withdrawal in Punjab, or even to an alcohol bootlegger in a dimly-lit alley in Gujarat.
This book is as much about a fabulous team brimming with legends as it is about the game’s other, often forgotten heroes: nameless and faceless Indian fans, emerging from all those gullies.
It is currently available on e-commerce platforms and in bookstores across the country.
