The internet hates a vacuum. It hates silence even more. So, when Sanjay Manjrekar—a man who has made a second career out of being the pebble in the shoe of Indian cricket fans—decided to call the team’s no-handshake policy "silly," the digital furnace did exactly what it was designed to do. It incinerated him.

The policy itself is straightforward, if a bit clinical. In an era where a single viral load can bench a multi-million dollar asset for two weeks, the Indian team management decided to swap the traditional post-match handshake for something less bio-hazardous. Maybe a fist bump. Maybe a distant nod. It’s a pragmatic move. A boring one.

Manjrekar, however, isn’t paid for pragmatism. He’s paid for the "hot take." During a recent commentary stint, he scoffed at the protocol, suggesting that if players are spending hours sweating on each other in the slip cordon, a five-second palm-to-palm contact at the end of the day isn't going to change the health of the nation. It’s a classic "common sense" argument that ignores the actual science of surface transmission and the sheer optics of professional sports.

The reaction on X—the platform formerly known as Twitter and currently known as a dumpster fire—was instantaneous. "Keep your opinion to yourself," became the rallying cry. It’s a funny thing to say to a professional pundit. His entire job description is "having opinions." But in the hyper-reactive ecosystem of sports social media, logic is an optional plugin that most users haven't bothered to install.

The friction here isn't really about hygiene. It’s about the value of a high-performance athlete's uptime. If a star bowler sits out a Test match because of a preventable respiratory bug, the loss isn't just tactical. It’s financial. We’re talking about broadcasting rights, sponsorship activations, and ticket sales that fluctuate based on who is standing in the middle of the pitch. The no-handshake rule is a low-cost, high-yield insurance policy. Manjrekar calling it "silly" isn’t just an old-school cricket take; it’s an insult to the spreadsheets that actually run the game.

Social media doesn't care about the spreadsheets. It cares about the "vibes." And the vibes on the feed were overwhelmingly hostile. Fans didn't just disagree with Manjrekar; they treated his comment like a personal affront to the team’s discipline. "Does he ever stop talking?" one user asked. Another pointed out the irony of a man who makes his living through a microphone telling others how to manage their physical safety.

This is the cycle we’ve perfected. A commentator says something slightly contrarian. The algorithm catches the scent of blood. It pushes the clip to the people most likely to be offended by it. The outrage generates "engagement," which the platform then sells to advertisers. By the time you read the headline, the actual point—whether handshakes are a viable vector for disease in outdoor sports—has been buried under six layers of personal insults and memes.

Manjrekar is a veteran of this war. He’s been told to "stay in his lane" more times than a distracted driver on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway. He knows that being the villain is just as profitable as being the hero. Maybe more so. Every time a "Keep your opinion to yourself" tweet goes viral, his name trends. His brand stays relevant. The outrage is the product.

The real losers are the rest of us. We’re stuck watching a dull debate about handshakes when we could be talking about the actual cricket. But that’s not how the feed works. The feed needs conflict. It needs a "silly" comment to spark a thousand angry replies. It needs us to care about a five-second interaction between grown men at the end of a game.

We’ve built a digital colosseum where the lions are made of code and the gladiators are retired batsmen with microphones. We pretend we want insightful analysis, but what we really want is something to be mad about between commercials. Manjrekar delivered. The internet responded with its usual level of grace and nuance.

If the goal was to keep the conversation focused on the sport, the no-handshake policy failed the moment someone talked about it. But if the goal was to keep the engagement metrics high, it’s working perfectly.

Is a handshake really that dangerous, or are we just looking for new ways to perform caution in a world that’s moved on?