February 20, 2006	Monday	Muharram 21, 1427

KARACHI, Feb 19: India’s most-celebrated living artist, Maqbool Fida Husain, sat on the boundary line seeking to capture the moments in a cricket match that could symbolise peace between India and Pakistan.

Shielded from the hot sun by a umbrella, Husain spoke of the joy of sport as he watched a raucous Karachi crowd cheer almost every ball in the final match in India’s tour of Pakistan on Sunday.

“Looking at the way people are involved in the game, it is a soul-searching and moving experience for me. I see cricket as a unifying force between the people of countries,” said the youthful 91-year-old, surrounded by his canvasses, colours and brushes in Karachi’s National Stadium.

“It has played a big role in pushing the peace process forward and allowing people to interact with each other,” said Husain, stroking his white beard while referring to India’s earlier tour in 2004.

Back then an outpouring of warmth between people of nations that have fought three wars since independence in 1947 fired hopes that their governments could finally settle their differences, though two years on the peace process appears to be stuttering.

Husain, who sold a canvas titled ‘The Last Supper’ for $2 million in September, plans to be hard at work through England’s forthcoming tour of India, plans to create a collection of about 40 sketches and paintings to be exhibited later this year.

Dressed in a black sleeveless tunic with a Nehru collar over a cream shirt, Husain showed a couple of works-in-progress — one of India and Pakistan’s captains shaking hands under a single flag held aloft by woman borrowed from a famous painting of the French Revolution, and another of a fielder chasing a ball.

Husain has frequently courted controversy in the past, including painting Indian deities nude, but he seems on safer ground with cricket, where matches are watched religiously by hundreds of millions of people across the Indian subcontinent.

Husain, one of India’s large Muslim minority, said the appeal of cricket, a game spread round the world by Britain’s 19th century Empire builders, had grown in the last decade.

“I don’t think the English, when they invented the game of cricket, could have imagined just what an important role it would go on to play in building bridges between countries in the 21st century,” said Husain, who studied in the same school as former Indian greats Mushtaq Ali and C.S. Nayudu.

“I also attended the World Cup final in Lahore in 1996. But this is something different.

I feel cricket today, like the Olympics, is a great unifier of people of different countries.”

— Reuters