Best Sporting Event

As well as sharing qualities common to the region's other great sports meets—virtuoso displays of talent, nail-biting finishes, mass outpourings of national pride—a cricket match between India and Pakistan has the added plus of making a nuclear war in Asia significantly less likely. For decades, the two cricket-crazy neighbors have used the sport as a safety valve with which to defuse tensions over Kashmir (India has the military edge; the Pakistanis tend to be stronger on the pitch). A terrorist attack on India's Parliament in December 2001 raised tensions and temporarily froze cricketing ties between the two nations—but with the recent...