Are you tired of the jingoism and ‘badle ka muqabla’ type narratives around India-Pakistan games? If yes, then this one’s for all you cricket lovers. We bring on people from both sides of the border, to hear their perspectives as people who have grown up loving the game and what this fixture has meant to them. This one should warm the heart, enjoy!

We would like to thank Nawab Hassan Hussein Qureshi, Neha Shetty, Akshay, Assad Hasanain, Siva, Samee Siddiqui, Shubha Dutta, Rohail Salman, Saurabh, Raghav B, and Prateek Jha for featuring in this episode.

In what can only be classified as a coup (and as South Asians, we don’t use this term lightly), we have Sharda Ugra, Ahmer Naqvi, and Mohammad Isam to talk through the recent crisis in international cricket.

We often explore these themes through Shah Rukh's movie metaphors, starting with K3G and ending with Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman.

The episode serves as a reminder that we need to keep lines of communication open between the public, and it’s even more important to do this with the current media landscape.

We briefly touch upon the associates at this World Cup and who we are most looking forward to watching.

Our guests are joined by hosts Richa, Nishant, Sarthak, and MV.

We have a star studded line up for this!

Richa is joined by

• Tarutr Malhota from Best of Cricket Stories
• Neha Shetty from Never on the Backfoot Podcast
• Praatibh from Cricket by JB
• Shayan Ahmad Khan from Commbox

We discuss RCB’s win (some of us still can’t believe it), talk about each team and even crown Sophie Devine as Falguni Pathak, worry about UP-W, wonder what went wrong with MI-W and end with some fun awards and a draft of the team of WPL 2026 which includes an uncapped player in this edition.

India-Pakistan cricket tensions are back in focus after Pakistan’s announcement of a boycott of the February 15 clash, raising fresh questions about the future of cricket diplomacy and global governance in the sport.

To discuss this and more we spoke to Senior Journalist Chander Shekhar Luthra who has been covering the sport for over 30 years and long time friend of the pod, Behram Qazi.

There are a ton of tangents but that's how it is, isn't it?

We had a freewheeling chat with Sushant Singh about Bangladesh’s omission from the T20 World Cup, ICC as the BCCI’s Dubai office, Hindutva and its reflections on how Indian cricket functions, sport’s culpability at letting oligarchs trample through the field, and lots of cricket memories.

Sushant Singh is a journalist, author, and lecturer in South Asian Studies at Yale University. He is the Consulting Editor at The Caravan, a columnist with The Telegraph and The Morning Context, and his work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Financial Times, and The New Yorker. Cricket fans have more recently seen him on videos of The Caravan and read his writing on Cricket Et Al.

His piece on Mustafizur Rahman's exit from the IPL here

You can follow him on Twitter

Sushant's Recommendations

Free by Leah Ypi

Assembling India's Constitution: A New Democratic HistoryBook by Ornit Shani and Rohit De

Osman Samiuddin's seminal piece - The Haal of Pakistan

Mohammed Hanif’s vlogs on BBC - Here

Links to Books, Pieces discussed on the Pod

Ehsan Mani's moving tribute to IS Bindra

Pundits from Pakistan (yes, again)

War Minus The Shooting (yes, again)

H-Pop : The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars by Kunal Purohit

Corner of a Foreign Field by Ramachandra Guha

Valkyrie

The PCCI pod brings on a cricket fan who goes by the name @vibeyseagull on twitter to talk through the allegations against Yash Dayal and the wider implications of how this case has been handled by the organisations that employ and are affiliated with him.

We talk through other such cases in sport, how they have been handled, and the impact on women’s safety and participation in sport at all levels.

Books mentioned on the pod

The Day I Became a Runner by Sohini Chattopadhyay

Whole Numbers and Half Truths: What Data Can and Cannot Tell Us about Modern India by Rukmini S

In this pod, we have Nishant, Richa, and MV to discuss the Ashes.

We discuss Noosa, the wad of cash, England's lengths, new ball bowling, Mark Wood's audacious plan to drive to Perth, the death of Bazball, and the continued excellence of the boring Aussies.

We then move to the WPL where we briefly discuss each team on the table and who are we buying, selling and holding.

We try to address the continued hijacking of ICC events by BCCI (and the BJP), how cricket as a sport only serves interests of the Indian nationalistic idea, and against the interests of the sport.