Gaurav Bhalla's Novel The Curse And the Cup Asks "Can Karmic Debt Explain South Africa's World Cup Cricket Failures?"

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Gaurav Bhalla

03 Dec, 2014, 15:15 GMT

RESTON, Virginia, Dec. 3, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- On an ill-fated day in 1991, Vuyisa Lingani and his son Manga, legendary left-arm spinners who were unable to play international cricket for South Africa's Proteas team due to their race, died within hours of each other in a bizarre tragedy.

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Gaurav Bhalla's debut historical fiction novel, The Curse and the Cup, tells the story of a curse cast by Vuyisa's wife that ties the consequences of South Africa's apartheid legacy to the Proteas' failure to win the ICC World Cup.

Vuyisa's wife, Mama Nonkosi, blames the white cricket establishment and places a curse on the South African cricket team to avenge their deaths. The curse has prevented the Proteas from winning a single World Cup championship since.

With the 2015 World Cup less than 100 days away, the South African team is once again under scrutiny.  Will the Proteas live up to their high ranking and win cricket's biggest prize? Or will they lose, as they have the previous six times since their readmission to international cricket in 1991 after serving a 20+ year ban due to South Africa's suffocating apartheid policies? 

In The Curse and the Cup, only one person can reverse the curse: Themba, the sole-surviving Lingani male and heir to the left-arm spin dynasty.

Will he uphold the family's tradition of hate and revenge, or will he pursue his own destiny and choose forgiveness? Will South Africa win the ICC 2015 World Cup, or will the curse continue its unbroken run?

"The Curse and the Cup is essentially a novel about the human condition," says Bhalla. "How people resolve their feelings of love, hate, envy, jealousy and anger, and how they permit or prevent their feelings from finding their way to words and actions; this is what moves me and compels me to write. I find the human condition a fertile ground for stories, because it is what makes life and people interesting and attractive, and, at the same time, frustrating and repulsive."

The Curse and the Cup is available on in the US and Canada on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and in the United Kingdom on Amazon.  For more information about the book and its author, visit:

Bhalla is a business educator and consultant, having previously published Collaboration and Co-Creation: New Platforms for Marketing and Innovation.  Passionate about stories of the human condition, he was inspired to write The Curse and the Cup after researching the Proteas and South Africa's political past.

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http://thecurseandthecup.com