Documentary Pitch: World Cup of Cricket

In the spring of 2011, the World Cup of Cricket will take place on the Indian subcontinent (India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh). Much like the World Cup of Soccer, it is a quadrennial tournament with over a billion fans worldwide. The competing nations include England, Pakistan, South Africa, Australia, Canada, and the host nations, among others.

For six weeks, cricket fever will sweep the nation. We believe that this is a great time to shoot a documentary about the unique status of this colonial sport in modern India and its relationship with a rapidly changing national identity. The film would take a ground-up approach, following the personal stories of cricket fans across India belonging to different regions, religions and socio-economic classes.

In India, cricket is far more than just a sport and its fans outnumber those of all other sports combined. The national cricket team's players enjoy a status rivaled only by the country's biggest movie stars.

The last time India hosted the World Cup of Cricket was 16 years ago but a lot has changed in the country since then. The past decade and a half have seen India emerge as a fast-growing global economic presence, an image that is increasingly touted by its elites. The world's best cricketers now play in the Indian Premier League for Indian city teams and command NBA-like salaries. What used to be a game that the English had brought to the world has transformed into an Indian sport.

Additionally, the current Indian cricket team is widely considered one of the two favorites going in to the tournament. But the last time India won the World Cup was in 1983 and the country is starved for cricket glory at this level.

Meanwhile, despite the new national image, the gap between India's reality and its often-self-flattering rhetoric can come as a great shock to a visitor. Even as the country's GDP grows, economic inequality gets worse by the day. The modern Indian cities, flooded with people who have fled the rural heartland, are home to extremes of wealth and poverty.

Cricket, however, breaks all boundaries with children in urban slums being just as excited about the sport as their middle and upper-class English-speaking counterparts. When the game is on, whether it's a Mumbai commuter train, a street-side tea stall, or a five-star hotel lobby, people are talking about it or watching it. During the six weeks of the World Cup, cricket will provide us with a unique lens through which to view a society in the throes of change.

The documentary would pursue a few questions:

• What is cricket? The rules, the players, the stakes.
• How did this 18th century English gentleman's game come to capture the hearts of the Indian people?
• How is cricket able to bring together a people that are otherwise pulled apart by their vast differences in language, religion, caste and class?
• Why is India's cricket team a contender in that sport, while in the Olympics, the second most populated country in the world wins fewer than five medals?
• In what way does cricket fulfill the hopes and aspirations of a billion people, most of whom live on less than $5 a day?
• Finally, but perhaps most interestingly, what are the personal stories of the fans of this game -- from a boy living in a slum to the upper-class kid headed to Harvard, to the small town mother of eight who can't read?

The plan for the documentary would be to interview people from all classes of society, and get them to talk about what cricket means to them, while trying to get a glimpse into their lives.

India is the main host of the 2011 Cup with 29 of the 49 matches to be played in eight Indian cities. Stadiums with the capacity to pack 80,000 and upwards are already sold out. Our camera teams would travel the country and capture the scene at various cricket matches and at viewing parties at homes, restaurants and tea stalls across the country.

We plan to interview current and former Indian cricketers to get a sense for what it means to play for a billion fans. We will follow the progress of the Indian team and the response to it over the course of the tournament to see if India will finally lift the World Cup after 28 years.

We believe that this will be much more than a sports documentary. It will be a glimpse into a country going through a dramatic socio-economic flux. The visuals of the film would be rich with the drama of modern life in India's cities and small towns. We're confident that the stories of the individuals will be very compelling, as they will reveal a striking diversity of a vibrant people. But like a good sports film, it would present high-quality footage of the sporting action itself, which, as anyone who watches cricket knows, is particularly picturesque.

We believe there has been no other film like the one we are about to make.

I was born and raised in Mumbai, India and grew up playing cricket. My mother, an avid cricket fan to this day, handed me a plastic toy bat soon after I had learned to walk.

I came to the United States to pursue a bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Economics at Ohio Wesleyan University. I went on to pursue graduate studies, getting a Master's degree in Economics from Stanford University. I worked for a few years as an economist in San Francisco.

However, I found myself drawn to storytelling and eventually quit my job to pursue an MFA in Film Production at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts.

In 2008, I wrote and directed a short film titled "Andheri" (Darkness) -- a realist drama set on the streets of Mumbai. The film went on to play at several major film festivals around the world including Clermont-Ferrand (France), Edinburgh (Scotland), Palm Springs Shortsfest, Nashville, San Francisco Asian American, Expression en Corto (Mexico), the Kerala Film Festival (India) and others. The film also won several awards at these festivals.

I want to return to India to make a thrilling film structured around the World Cup of Cricket but extending beyond that to social commentary and personal narratives. I believe my filmmaking experience in Indian conditions, my love for cricket, and my understanding of Indian and Western cultures, position me uniquely to make an interesting film.