We have always been aware that people of Delhi are cricket fanatics, but the recently held test match between India and Pakistan completely immersed the city in cricket fever. The entire city sported a carnival atmosphere and even the inevitable commercial interventions could not disturb the all-pervading excitement. The fervour was bursting at the seams and was more than clearly visible in popular media, where even the city sections of the newspapers could not resist cricket stories, as the sports pages ran out of space.

Forget about the social networking sites for a few days, there was some real life networking happening at the Ferozeshah Kotla stadium, where plenty of very well known names of the Delhi party circuit soaked in the fun with the rest of the city’s cricket fans. The test match also provided ample opportunities to large corporations to connect with their consumers in a fun environment. The corporate boxes in the stadium were the real places where even a serious business deal might be initiated while the batsmen hit the ball for a six.

The fourth day of the test match, being a Sunday, drew the highest number of spectators for obvious reasons. The renovated Kotla grounds, with a capacity of 45,000, boasts a result-oriented pitch now and the last three games played at the venue ended with results that made the sport here even more popular. Companies, in general, and sponsors, in particular, are smiling all the way to the bank and we are not mentioning the BCCI cash collections because that is, of course, well understood. You might as well realize that the sports venues are the places where you can easily find out who is among the social, political and business chart toppers and who is out of it. The high-end ticket price of an India-Pakistan cricket match is higher than that of a Delhi-London flight but that does not seem to affect the demand for these tickets.