These terrifyingly quiet evenings

Can you hear the crickets chirping? Feel the sudden emptiness cutting through the usual city noise? Well, that's the sudden vacuum left behind by IPL. Since Monday evening, millions of razzmatazz-loving, swashbuckler-admiring IPL- pushers now sit staring at their TV screens like abandoned lovers, betrayed by schedules that once brimmed with sixes, yorkers and last-ball thrillers. The remote control, once a weapon of choice, now lies limp, clicking through some episode of some show.

Dinner conversations have lost their zing. No one's debating whether Washington Sundar should have been promoted up the batting order. Or whether Kohli's cover drive was poetry in motion, or experimental physics. WhatsApp groups that once buzzed like beehives now resemble deserted railway stations. Even RWA uncles, all these days self-proclaimed tactical analysts, have returned to their somnambulant walks. As for IPL fans, they now wander like nomads back and forth from work - their post-office lives now a stadium-sized hole. The evenings stretch on like overs bowled by a rookie spinner with no sense of line or length. Post-IPL is the longest power play of boredom ever devised. This, alas, is the price of passion: the hangover after the carnival. Till next March, we must endure this silence - that only the football World Cup just around the corner may help, for some.