So, another season of IPL ended successfully with its share of excitement, joy, sorrow, disappointment and of course controversies. IPL is probably the latest episode of India’s longest running soap opera which is cricket. Cricket has got everything that you want in a normal soap opera; it has got love, joy, happiness, sadness, tears, laughter, lots of deceit, intrigue and like all good soaps it jumps twenty years when the audiences’ interests change. And that’s exactly what cricket has done; jumped twenty years into a 20 over game.
But cricket wasn’t always like this speed driven generation’s game. There was a time when people used to play timeless test matches. You played on till the game got over. There was that game on March 1939 that started on the 3rd of March and ended on the 14th of March. And it only ended because the English cricketers had to go from Durban to Cape Town which is a two hour train journey to catch the ship that was on the 17th because next ship wasn’t around for a long time. So the match ended in between and one of the English batsmen said, ”you know what, another haaaalf an hour and we would have won ”. ANOTHER HALF AN HOUR AFTER TWELVE DAYS!!!!! But this is probably the reason why India fell in love with cricket because we had about the same pace of life. The MAHABHARAT was like that as well. You fought by day and then it was sunset so everyone went back home. And then you worked out your strategies and you came and fought and then went back home again. The only difference between the MAHABHARAT and our cricket was that in cricket everybody was alive to come back and fight the next day. There was one other reason why India fell in love with cricket: all you need is a plank of wood and rubber ball and any number of people could play at anywhere. Take a look...
You could play on the backyard of a monastery (Monks playing cricket on their day off at Sera Mey.... )
Or on the road...
Or on the banks of the Ganga...
Or you could play many games in a small patch of land even if you don’t which game you are in...
But slowly the game moved on and we started playing 50 over cricket. And then an enormous accident took place. In Indian sports we don’t make things happen, accidents happen and we are at the right place at right time, sometimes. After winning the 1983 World Cup, we suddenly fell in love with the 50 over game and started playing it virtually every day (India played most no. of matches during that period). Another big incident took place during 1991-92. We found a Prime-Minister and a Finance Minister willing to let the world look at India from a whole new perspective by cutting the customs duty, reducing the imports duty. As a result we got all the multi-nationals who got very excited about India and the business opportunity lying here. Pepsi was one such company that came up with a big revolution as they started taking cricket all over the world. So cricket started becoming big, bringing riches in and most importantly televisions started covering cricket which were till that point reluctant to cover cricket unless the board or the sponsors paid them (apparently Sony Entertainment got the telecast rights of the IPL for a whopping $ 1.63 billion, a bit of an exponential rise).
And just when everything was going smooth a big accident occurred, AGAIN. England invented 20 over cricket and thankfully for all of us, the English are very good at inventing things and the gracious people they are, they let the world be very good at it. Finally a T20 WC was arranged which India didn’t want to play and was forced to play by an 8-1 margin. Dramatically India went to the finals and this happened...
Suddenly India discovered the power of the 20 over cricket and realized they could be good at this game. England invented T20and allowed India to hijack it and it wasn’t like re-engineering, we just took it straight away. And the six week, city based glitzy league happened. And all of a sudden the organised Indian cricket was promoted which was never done before. It was a new India that was buying Corus, buying Jaguars, adding more mobile users than New-Zealand’s population twice over. It was a different India but also a slightly orthodox India that was happy to be modern but didn’t want to say that and so they were aghast when the cheerleaders arrived. Everyone secretly watched them but everybody claimed not to.
IPL had $2.3 billion before a ball was bowled and that has to one of the most stupid investments made in the history. And the people who invested were some who ran serious companies; they started promoting cricket big time and also themselves.
We will see how IPL changed the way we looked at cricket in the next episode...stay tuned....
Sneak preview of next episode: India finally started thinking BIG, Dollar is quite powerful, A hug for playing well...
ps: I started writing this on 27th April and posting today. I wonder what I'm doing these days!!!
