“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” says Clark Gable in Gone with the wind. It’s been voted the No. 1 movie quote of all time by AFI and works for me when I see that no Pakistani has been picked by the IPL franchise owners now marketing completely to the anti-Pakistan market.

It’s much better than Portia’s grumble: “You taught me first to beg, and now methinks you teach me how a beggar should be answered.”

By now you must have realized I am quite into books and movies with inspirational concepts. The reason is that words often shake us and take us into a real world and yank us out of the rut we have gone into simply because we have decided to go with the flow.

By drumming up a near war-mongering fuss over the omission of our cricketers from the IPL supermarket brands, we are admitting we need India, despite all we say about not giving a damn.

And I am sure that when the dust settles down we’ll realise that we made too much of a commotion.

I really can’t understand what all the fuss is about if some of our cricketers were not sold like slaves. I have never really agreed with the thought that sportsmen who have reached the pinnacle should watch themselves being humiliated by having a price tag attached on themselves publicly.

European football clubs do it with grace and respect by talking of player ‘transfers’ in the privacy of their boardrooms. To think that it was cricket that was called a gentleman’s game and football was for the ruffians. I speak this for cricket in the past tense because the Sotheby’s style of auctioneering is not for the human soul. It is for artefacts made by the humans.

So they don’t want us. Big deal. They can have their party to themselves. We can throw a party too. It may not be full of wine, women and dance but that’s not the only way to have fun. Why are we allowing others to define how we want to live?

I understand it is humiliating to be invited to someone’s home and then be sent back from the door. But let’s take a breadth here and break the code to find out what really happened here. That requires a different take, however, and I’ll take it up in my next blog.

Why did they invite us? Well because we chased them to do so. No one was really desperate to have the Pakistani players around last December and there were only cold enquiries to ask if the players were available. Then our very own PCB and government took a long time to process NOCs and the IPL shut the door once the deadline had passed.

Then the players said they wanted to be let in again. We worked the phones, the faxes and the emails and grudgingly Modi allowed our players to stand up for sale.

Please note PCB, players and politicians: The invitations, if they had formally existed at all, had been cancelled on December 9 as the extended deadline for NOCs from Pakistan had come and gone. It had been made clear to us that Modi & Co did not want our players.

The franchisees had prepared themselves to play without them. It was the players who were chasing them.

The franchises had already replaced Pakistan players with other foreign recruits.

In the meantime we kept calling the Indians swindlers for having taken our World Cup away from us. On the political front, the men who matter started blaming the Indians for the bomb blasts and insurgency in Balochistan. Meanwhile Ajmal Kasab claimed he had been kidnapped by RAW and made a patsy for the Mumbai attacks. So why would the franchises take a risk knowing anything could happen before the event begins in spring?

I love Pakistan and want us to be proud of our identity. I want to spend all my energy improving where we live and lift the values of my community and society and fellow Pakistanis. I especially want our cricket to become the benchmark of the world. We should seek self respect, not money avenues.

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.