The Taliban Cricket Club

The improbable plot of The Taliban Cricket Club is based on the Afghan government's decision to seek entrance into the international cricket community to demonstrate their liberalism.  They invite an international observer to a tournament to be held in a couple of weeks and advertise for people to form teams to compete.  The prize is an all-expenses-paid trip to Pakistan for professional coaching.

Rukhsana, a courageous journalist who played university cricket ends up coaching a team.  They are desperate to win because they want out of the country and they see that trip to Pakistan as their ticket.


What makes the book enjoyable despite the thin plot is the portrayal of life inside Afghanistan in the year 2000 under Taliban rule.  The book's epigraph quotes from the laws of cricket:

"There is no place for any act of violence on the field of play."
Preamble No. 6 in the Laws of Cricket

So we have the juxtaposition of a savagely repressive society rife with brutality and violence in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and the ideal of a violence-free game.  It's a society where families build secret rooms to view banned movies, where women cannot walk with streets without their male mahram escort, where they cannot speak to men and where they must be covered head to foot with a burka.

Rukhsana rebels against these strictures, even to the point of risking her life.  The arrival of cricket in Afghanistan reignites her love of the game that "promotes individual excellence and depends on the actions and the confidence of each player":

"Cricket is theater, it's dance, it's an opera.  It's dramatic.  It's about individual conflict that takes place on a huge stage. But the two warriors also represent the ten other players; it's a relationship between the one and the many.  The individual and the social, the leader and the follower, the individual and the universal."

Cricket epitomizes the individual struggle against the regime.  The regime is trying to control not only behaviour, but everyone's very thoughts.  Rukhsana recalls the sense of freedom out on the cricket field, a "huge space with only the sky watching us", a place where your thoughts can roam free.  A curious choice for the Taliban's only approved sport.

Timeri Murari, the author, is a male Indian and his depiction of the life of a woman under the Taliban is based on extensive research, yet it rings very true.  His depiction of cricket is based on personal experience and he clearly loves the game.

Which Way is the Front Line from Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington

Tim Hetherington was a tall, lanky man with a craggy handsome face, a winning smile and an uncanny capacity for connecting with people.  A photojournalist who covered conflict zones, his main goal was to connect with people he was photographing.  He felt you had to be more than a photographer, you had to be a participant.

His initial foray was covering the revolution in Liberia, capturing in action the young men whose sole uniform consisted of rust-coloured T-shirts with their cause identified on the front.  And he was hooked - not so much on the process of shooting pictures of the weapons and the gore - but on trying to understand the young men involved.

Although his sympathies tended to lie with underdog rebels, he spent a year with an American platoon deployed in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan.  This period solidified his conviction that war created a common bond among men unmatched in the rest of their lives.  His friend and colleague Jim Brabazon remarked in the Q&A following the film that as long as there are young men yearning for such a bond, there will always be the raw material for creating wars.

Hetherington and his colleague Sebastian Junger's film Restrepo was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2010.  Hetherington traded in his combat gear for a tux and walked through a surreal Hollywood with his fantastically beautiful girlfriend.

Despite making a decision to give up the risky life of the conflict journalist, he was irresistibly drawn to Libya to cover the revolution there.  In footage taken in a jeep with other journalist comrades, Tim is heard to ask "Which way is the front line from here?", and this becomes the title of the elegy Junger films in honour of his friend. but sadly lost his life after a piece of shrapnel pierced his femoral artery.  Tim's life could have been saved if one of the journalists of rebels with him had been trained how to deal with such trauma, and in his memory, Junger has started a not-for-profit called RISC - Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues.

In the Q&A, there was discussion about the increase of young untrained freelancers going to conflict zones, and a reference to the fact that major media companies are not buying photos from freelancers.  Brabazon bristled at the idea that this might be because of ethical values of the media.  He pointed out that they'd always buy a great photo after the fact, but didn't want to 'commission' it beforehand, in order to avoid any issues of liability, or the cost of insuring the photojournalist.

This was a very good film indeed and I highly recommend it.  And Restrepo is now very high on my list of 'must see' films too.