India-Pakistan cricket tensions are back in focus after Pakistan’s announcement of a boycott of the February 15 clash, raising fresh questions about the future of cricket diplomacy and global governance in the sport.

To discuss this and more we spoke to Senior Journalist Chander Shekhar Luthra who has been covering the sport for over 30 years and long time friend of the pod, Behram Qazi.

There are a ton of tangents but that's how it is, isn't it?

We had a freewheeling chat with Sushant Singh about Bangladesh’s omission from the T20 World Cup, ICC as the BCCI’s Dubai office, Hindutva and its reflections on how Indian cricket functions, sport’s culpability at letting oligarchs trample through the field, and lots of cricket memories.

Sushant Singh is a journalist, author, and lecturer in South Asian Studies at Yale University. He is the Consulting Editor at The Caravan, a columnist with The Telegraph and The Morning Context, and his work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Financial Times, and The New Yorker. Cricket fans have more recently seen him on videos of The Caravan and read his writing on Cricket Et Al.

His piece on Mustafizur Rahman's exit from the IPL here

You can follow him on Twitter

Sushant's Recommendations

Free by Leah Ypi

Assembling India's Constitution: A New Democratic HistoryBook by Ornit Shani and Rohit De

Osman Samiuddin's seminal piece - The Haal of Pakistan

Mohammed Hanif’s vlogs on BBC - Here

Links to Books, Pieces discussed on the Pod

Ehsan Mani's moving tribute to IS Bindra

Pundits from Pakistan (yes, again)

War Minus The Shooting (yes, again)

H-Pop : The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars by Kunal Purohit

Corner of a Foreign Field by Ramachandra Guha

Valkyrie

The PCCI pod brings on a cricket fan who goes by the name @vibeyseagull on twitter to talk through the allegations against Yash Dayal and the wider implications of how this case has been handled by the organisations that employ and are affiliated with him.

We talk through other such cases in sport, how they have been handled, and the impact on women’s safety and participation in sport at all levels.

Books mentioned on the pod

The Day I Became a Runner by Sohini Chattopadhyay

Whole Numbers and Half Truths: What Data Can and Cannot Tell Us about Modern India by Rukmini S