Come on, be honest. You really enjoyed that group match victory over India, didn’t you? It’s been three weeks but you’re still savouring it, aren’t you? In fact, given the choice, you would rather have beaten India than won the trophy.

Don’t worry, you are not alone. Stick your neck out and smell the prevailing mood. Yes, there have been one or two crackpots making nonsensical allegations of match-fixing, and Younis Khan has impulsively resigned the captaincy in protest, but it’s nothing to fret about. Younis is learning he needs a thick skin, and once his anger cools off, he’ll be back. Apart from this distraction, the mood in the fan base is relatively sated and serene. The rancour and resentment typically seen after a semi-final loss is absent.

There is no need to feel guilty about this. Preferring victory against India over the trophy itself may seem like a petty and feral urge. It may seem like you’re cutting your nose to spite your face. But the situation is more complicated than that. Sometimes, the pleasure of winning a battle but losing the war will persist even after the dust settles and emotions riled up in the heat of combat cool off. You analyse things with a calm mind in the light of day, and still conclude that winning the skirmish was worth it, even if it came at the cost of losing the larger tactical contest.

Context is everything. Times are tough, and India is making threatening gestures towards Islamabad. It is hell bent on marginalising Pakistan wherever it gets the opportunity. In these circumstances, the importance of defeating India in a hyped-up, highly visible ODI contest cannot be underestimated.

This is about more than just nationalism or jingoism. It is about challenging a mean-spirited attitude that helps no one, and that is looking farcical and out of place in the increasingly transparent world of the 21st century. Pakistan cricket has suffered from India’s ceaseless efforts to paint Pakistan as a pariah nation. India is an emerging superpower, so this is a hugely unequal fight. Pakistan’s only realistic option is to try and do well in the cricket field — no easy task given that top-level cricket is as much mental as physical, and peace of mind in the Pakistan camp is in scant supply.

Analysts on both sides of the border are struggling to define the contours of the India-Pakistan cricket relationship. It is tempting to lapse into passionate diatribes and martial overtones. Mihir Bose, India’s pre-eminent cricket historian has described India-Pakistan cricket being suffused with a ‘wave of emotion’. Abdul Hafeez Kardar, Pakistan’s famed inaugural captain who rarely dropped his patrician reserve, has written unashamedly of ‘how sweet it is’ to contemplate victory over India. And Imran Khan noted in a 1988 memoir that cricket between India and Pakistan strains communal relations.

On the other hand, there are seasoned diplomats such as Shashi Tharoor and Shaharyar Khan who in a pleasant new book decry that the tendency to see India-Pakistan matches as ‘warfare by proxy’ is unfortunate. Their well-meaning efforts notwithstanding, cricket relations between India and Pakistan cannot be divorced from the psychology of the subcontinent. In the modern geopolitical reality, with India fulfilling its potential and more, and Pakistan beset with difficulties aplenty, military metaphors may well be passé. Yet it is naïve and utterly ostrich-like to think that India-Pakistan matches are just another cricket encounter. Subcontinental symbolism has irreversibly elevated these games to something far bigger than mere sport.

For better or worse, cricket has become a profoundly emblematic language in which India and Pakistan speak to each other in expressive ways.

This reality holds both on and off the field. Even when India refuses to play Pakistan, it is expressing a particular national posture that, conveyed through the language of cricket, is understood loud and clear on both sides of the border.

India is like the boy from the moneyed family with the big house; Pakistan is the destitute street urchin. Both adore cricket and derive from it their self-esteem, as boys often do. Life hums along merrily so long as the rich kid has his way. But every once in a while, the street urchin will manage to get the ball in his hand and his talent will shine through. What happens then is what is happening in the subcontinental cricket world today.

Proper appraisal of India-Pakistan cricket requires an appreciation of what cricket means to the two nations. India has acquired a famously brittle cricket ego. Excelling in virtually every other endeavour of life, the Indian nation is loath to experience any hiccups in its enjoyment of this beloved pastime. With extravaganzas such as the Indian Premier League and the Champions League, and influence-peddling in the International Cricket Council, India is finding new avenues to channel its surging self-confidence.

Pakistan, too, has a cricket ego, but it is kept tightly in check by self-criticism pouring out from the national fan base.

Pakistanis dream of cricket victories, too. But where India yells its cricket dreams from rooftops, Pakistanis do so in secret. To a beleaguered nation that is hardly winning at anything else, winning at cricket is a rare and exquisite pleasure, and that too against an archrival feels nothing less than an affirmation of faith. Such are the contorted circumstances we live in today, and such are the circumstances of our foreseeable future.

In this complex scenario, a Pakistan victory over India helps India as much as it helps Pakistan. It serves the crucial purpose of shoring up the fragile Indian cricket ego by helping it absorb sensitive disappointments in stride. It also helps keep India’s feet to the ground. Many international observers, including Indian ones, have pointed out that fulfilment of India’s superpower aspirations requires a fresh policy approach towards Pakistan. Losing cricket contests to Pakistan will help India understand that it is unduly obsessed with Pakistan, that it has far bigger fish to fry. India is on the threshold of a magnificent destiny. But in order to get there, it must first appreciate that losing to Pakistan is not the end of the world.