It’s a land of azure blue water and off-white sand, of a journey to find India that ended with the discovery of the new world, where Bob Marley lingers subtly in the air in one part and the social tension between the Indian and the Black communities hangs lightly in the background in another.

A tour of the West Indies, where they love cricket even more than reggae and soca, is always a learning experience for a travelling Indian — not just because of its rich cricketing history but because it’s an opportunity to see a totally new dimension of a sport that we’re told is our religion.

Trust the Indian cricket board, however, to reduce the Indian team’s latest trip — being undertaken on the back of the World T20, which was on the back of the IPL in South Africa, which in turn came almost immediately after the New Zealand tour — into such a futile exercise that, the romance of cricket in the Caribbean notwithstanding, it seems this will be the last straw that breaks the donkey’s back.

There has been so much said over the last few days about too much cricket, about injuries and how they must not be hidden. The arguments on all sides have been re-read and re-examined; the need for rest acknowledged, the how-much-is-too-much question asked. But to send the team all the way to the West Indies for four one-day internationals — no Test match, no tri-series — shows a level of pointlessness that far surpasses anything the board has been able to conjure up in recent memory.

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