If you stood in the centre of a small by-lane in India, picked up a megaphone or just yelled, Anyone for cricket! (obviously in the appropriate language), I can bet that you could rustle up a game in five minutes flat.

This dare probably sums up how the madness we call cricket has voodooed itself into the psyche and bloodstream of the Indian population. The game courses through our veins like a drug that we can never get enough of.

As I write this in the monsoon month of July, on a rainy, rainy Sunday, high-octane cricket matches are going on, in playgrounds, alongside railway tracks, on the beach and in just about any terrain that is reasonably flat. Where I am wandering, with my camera as secure as it can be under my umbrella, the ground is like a quagmire: the ball cannot find a true bounce, the batsmen just about hang on to a slippery cricket bat and getting a decent foothold is all but impossible. Teams crisscross each other’s playing areas and resemble bad traffic snarls, but the fervour and intensity, the gusto and abandon have me spell-bound.

This is the game and these are the players. This is what cricket is all about. Unadorned, distilled to its purest form, played with anything that resembles a bat and a ball. It is this love for the game that I have documented.

Any one of these lads could be the next big name. After all, that’s how the previous skipper M. S. Dhoni was discovered, playing for the West Bengal Railways, where he worked as a humble ticket collector.

But my search has not been for the star. My search has been for that pure, unadulterated moment, when the game is the truth and the meaning, the beginning and the end. 

I hope my images move you to put aside whatever you are doing and yell out for the sheer joy of it, “Anyone for cricket!”