I am on to a new essay. Woolf now. On whether or not gender is a fantasy. I think it is. Thoughts?

The cricket was great. I even understand what an 'over' is now. Ben spent the entire match explaining everything that was happening to Amanda, Saloni and I, so we now vaguely understand what is going on when the men hit the ball and it goes out the park and that is a 'Sixer' and all that what not. Most educational. The match was between Delhi Daredevils and Mumbai Indians (surely a little too obvious?) and I have to say, even with my limited cricket experience, Mumbai were easily the better team. They beat delhi resoundingly by a margin of 100 runs or so I think. What was nice though was that the crowd really didn't seem to care about which team won or lost. They cheered everyone's successes equally, winced with every mistake, went wild whoever hit a 'sixer' (check me with the lingo). What was also a pleasant change to my only other experiences of major sports events (read: rugby with everyone hating everyone else/football with everyone hating everyone else AND drunk men throwing unnamed warm yellow liquid down on you) was that every time there was a good hit or a catch or whatever, all the guys would go completely crazy, stand up on their chairs yelling and singing and break out into Punjabi dance. I swear, any opportunity for the Punjabi dance is taken here. I will miss the breaking out into dance as soon as a drum beat (internal or not) is heard regardless of where or who you are. There were whole families out together, and the atmosphere was really nice and exciting, but not at all in a threatening way. The only off-putting aspect of the whole thing was the teams of white girls at the side of the pitch in hot pants who were the 'cheer leaders'. My friend Egle (being tall and blonde) has been asked to be a cheer leader before, but she turned it down despite the money. And I can see why. These girls didn't do much cheer leading as far as I could see. They spent their time on a podium and every time someone from their team scored a good number or something they would gyrate and shake their hair for five minutes or so, at which point all the younger guys would be pressed up against the fence filming them with their phone cameras. Not entirely brilliant for the cause of women everywhere and all that. It was actually really not nice to watch. But then if these girls wanted to be used as sex objects for four hours then I guess it is their choice. Even Egle, while refusing to be a cheer leader, has agreed to be paid 3000 rs to sit in the front row of a game and be in some of the film of the match in a 'look white girls come watch our players' kind of way. I think she might just be angling to meet Shahrukh Khan though, as he owns the Kolkata Knight Riders. 

In other news, my friend Emma is here! It is most exciting, though she is leaving tonight. In fact the reason I haven't written anything here for a little while is because I have been too distracted running about with her. It has been amazing and I will be sad to see her go. I will give a fuller update on that one tomorrow I think. So until then.