Cricket is broken. Again. Not the game itself—though the T20 format is increasingly looking like a dopamine-chasing mobile game designed by a committee of frantic accountants—but the basic human firmware that runs it. The latest bug in the system comes courtesy of the BCCI, a governing body that wields power with the subtlety of a DDoS attack.

We’ve reached a point where the simple act of touching palms after a match has been flagged as a security vulnerability. Sanjay Manjrekar, a man who has made a career out of being the most polarizing voice in the commentary box, has finally found a hill worth dying on. He’s calling out the board and captain Suryakumar Yadav for a "no-handshake" policy against Pakistan. His verdict? It’s "unbecoming of a nation like ours."

He’s right, of course. But being right in the middle of a geopolitical pissing match is like bringing a logic board to a knife fight.

The optics are predictably grim. In any other industry, refusing a handshake after a high-stakes negotiation would be seen as a total breakdown in corporate protocol. In the tech world, even Apple and Samsung executives can manage a stiff nod in a courtroom while they sue each other into the dirt. But the BCCI has decided that the "gentleman’s game" needs a firewall. A hard, cold, anti-social barrier that treats a sports match like a quarantined server.

Manjrekar’s frustration isn’t just about sportsmanship. It’s about the sheer, performative pettiness of it all. We’re watching a multi-billion dollar industry operate with the emotional maturity of a sub-Reddit moderator. The BCCI manages these players like expensive, proprietary hardware. They don’t want them interacting with "unauthorized" third parties. They don’t want the "brand" diluted by a moment of genuine human connection.

Suryakumar Yadav, meanwhile, is stuck in the middle. He’s the lead dev forced to push a buggy update he knows will crash the system’s reputation. SKY is a man who plays the game with a degree of creative freedom that borders on the chaotic. He’s the guy who finds angles in a cricket field that shouldn’t exist. Seeing him forced to follow a script that forbids a basic gesture of respect is like watching a high-end GPU being used to run Minesweeper. It’s a waste of talent and a degradation of the platform.

The trade-off here is obvious. The BCCI thinks this stance projects "strength." It’s a signal to the domestic audience that they are tough, unyielding, and totally in control. But the cost is the very thing they claim to be protecting: India’s standing. When you’re a global superpower—or at least, when you spend every waking moment insisting you are one—acting like you’re afraid of a handshake is a bad look. It screams insecurity. It’s the diplomatic equivalent of blocking someone on social media because they liked a post you didn’t like.

It’s not like there isn't money on the line. The India-Pakistan rivalry is the only "product" in cricket that actually scales. It’s the Super Bowl, the World Cup final, and a high-stakes tech IPO all rolled into one. The broadcasters want the drama. The advertisers want the eyeballs. But the BCCI is trying to have it both ways. They want the revenue from the conflict without any of the resolution. They want the "ping" without the "pong."

The logic behind the policy is as opaque as a proprietary EULA. If the players can spend four hours in the same vicinity, breathing the same air, and occasionally colliding in the outfield, what exactly is a handshake going to do? Is sportsmanship a communicable disease? Or is the board worried that if the players look too much like human beings, the narrative of eternal enmity might start to fray at the edges?

Manjrekar’s outburst is a rare moment of clarity in a sport that usually drowns in its own hype. He’s pointing out the glitch in the matrix. You can’t claim to be a world-class institution while behaving like a jilted teenager. The "unbecoming" part isn’t just about the handshake. It’s about the fact that we’ve institutionalized pettiness and called it "policy."

We’ve seen this movie before in the tech space. A giant company gets too big, loses its way, and starts prioritizing "brand protection" over the actual user experience. The BCCI is currently the Intel of the 2010s—arrogant, dominant, and seemingly unaware that the world is moving on. They think they can dictate the terms of human interaction because they hold the purse strings.

But culture isn't a line of code you can just rewrite when it suits the quarterly earnings. If you strip the dignity out of the game, you’re left with nothing but a very expensive spreadsheet. Manjrekar knows it. The fans, deep down, know it too.

How long can you keep a game alive when you’ve successfully deleted its soul?