The season of IPL is back again. And its the time of the year, which has started coming too often, when some one will come walking down the corridor, with an ear to ear smile, as if the country was given a seat on UN permanent council.When people will start a chat with me, proclaim a 15 years old kid who just started batting, the new messiah of Indian cricket, and i will be like.. who?? what??.. aahhh.. u.. r talking cricket...
I speak two languages. Hindi and English. I understand majority of the north Indian Languages. But Cricket is not one of the languages that i understand or speak. The entire Language beats me. The enthusiasm Nauseates me.If the game really had anything to do with national pride, i would have understood.But i also failed to understand that how can a being better at hitting a ball with a bat, and being best at it, get my country a seat at the UN council.And anyways, why do it 300 days a year under this garb or that.
I understand that the players are getting paid.the stadium owners are getting paid, the tv networks are getting paid. but why am i supposed to watch it? For national pride? for entertainment value?If the game itself had so much entertainment value, why do they have cheerleaders? ahh... to motivate the players of course... who are so demotivated that they are just getting a few crores, when the price of everything is soaring so high.
Its all phony. and i feel used. My emotions and happiness the product of a few people who are no better than circus performers in their appeal to amuse me with their talent with a bat and a ball.Had it just been the emotional involvement, then too it would have been okay, but somewhere some one is trying to tie this game up with my national pride and my patriotism.And trying to make money out of it. I know this for sure because hero hinda tried to make a cricket out of hockey in front of my own eyes and failed.I know for sure that i am being taken for a ride and so are millions of indians. Because the game is being played for money, but the screams from the stalls are real.and i feel cheated. the toil of these players as false as the love on the silverscreen. But there we have to suspend our disbelief, here we believe everything. we are like kids who really believe that there is a huge wrestler called undertaker who has this really technical move and he is the best wrestler around, when the scripts have already been written.
This wasn't always the way.The game used to be a game played by our opressors. the game of nawabs and the englishmen.I know this because sports in india would be any of the martial arts or the gymnasium[akhara] or the shatranj[chess].I also am sure that if our culture valued sports, there would have been a caste based on it by now.But there is none. Even government never loved it. We made Hockey our national game, because we were supposed to have one, and the only game we were any good was hockey . that too just because of one single man by the name Major Dhyanchand.
Cricket never got any funding during any of the congress rule. neither nehru, nor indira gandhi. even in 1980's the indian team had to find private sponsors to go and play the world cup. And it is this world cup that made people sit up and take notice of the game.Because it was a time, when every national figure we had in our hearts as a hero had lost credibility. Indira after emergency, bachchan after rekha, Sports over all after ASIAD in delhi, this game went ahead and got us a world cup.
The cup in itself was not that impressive, but during the 80's anything with the name 'world' in front of it was good. So I know that there is nothing so attractively inherent in THIS game. People who follow this will tell you all sorts of stories. But the real reason was the world cup. Then came sunil gavaskar and then sachin.The cable had made it in india by that time, and image of sachin batting on TV was one of the first things that people saw.
And i hate the game, because i know that a lot of money has changed people's perceptions and made their heads turn, and lose their memory. a certain pressure on people's part to have the culture of beer and sofa and a match is indeed over powering. Even the game looks a bit like baseball.So we ape the west. Well why not? We already have in so many things. Why not the lifestyle too. work from monday to friday. hit a pub. watch a match. go home.
This wasn't always the way.I too had forgotten where we all come from.May be all of us remember, and so the pressure to get away from it all and grab a new identity is too strong.May be its not the lure of the lifestyle of the west thats so over powering, may be its the pressure to get away from our own identity thats making us into this plastic. where we feel a lot about 1411 tigers left ...overnight.
We talk about it as if we would personally go into the jungle and hug each one of them to protect them if we could. A few million rupees nicely placed.the sad part is that we have become so gullible.
where we feel about the women issues and gender issues, love splitsvilla and watch rahul ka swayamwar.Mocking them in the public of course.Change is inevitable. but change in a few years from the casual follower of the game to die hard fanatic of the game. that is something that reeks of falsehoods and superficiality.A change in belief, so fast tells me of original beliefs which were not thought out, and hence could be turned over easily.
This tells me that a few crore rupees nicely placed can buy opinion. We have lost our capacity to judge things for ourselves. When we do our bit of the thing for the country by shouting hoarse for it in front of the TV, pay our taxes and Proclaim some one who makes 200 runs as God.
Which tells me of unexamined lives. which tells me of people who have stopped thinking. stopped caring. but still a show of care and prosperity is a must. because that is what we want to be. not the country which has one of the lowest literacy rates. where we are fine with bad roads and bribes and poverty. where nothing has worked in 60 years.
When we wait for the next terrorist attacks and look for the appropriate and fashionable response. Candle lighting at monument seems to be the thing of the day. But hundreds of villagers dying of hunger in orissa get no candles.
but again i too am a part of you. I know that 'what can we do" is very apt here. We have done our share and we have voted. After all we too have lives to live.
