Indian Premier League: The Great Indian Tamasha

Cricket is worshipped in India and millions of Indians wear their heart on the sleeve when it comes to cricket. Every citizen of India has a unique opinion on every aspect of this game ranging from suggesting improvements in Dhoni’s batting style to the brands which Vinod Kambli should endorse.

Cricket, which has unified many and few proudly even declare that it is their religion, celebrates a festival annually called the Indian Premier League (IPL). This festival is organised by the BCCI who are the proud priests responsible for spreading this religion across the country.

The IPL festival is held for two months approximately all over the country in many urban temples….oops stadiums where T-20 cricket is played with great fervour. The glamour quotient of the IPL can even put the supermodels of Paris to shame.

Last year,there was a huge brouhaha surrounding this festival as a few players were embroiled in a spot-fixing controversy. Religious sections of the cricketing world rubbished this controversy claiming it to be a conspiracy of agnostics and skeptics who hated the IPL festival.

IPL, since its inception, has had its fair share of attention owing to the players participating in the league, the presence of Bollywood (which again is a religion for a small section), the skilled marketing and advertising campaigns,et al.

Basically, it provided entertainment to the masses through the paradigm of cricket. It changed the concept of television viewing to the society. In India, most of the people live on a staple diet of saas-bahu soaps at prime-time and IPL forced the public to change it.

The viewership of cricket increased manifold in a country which was already obsessed with it as it attracted a large amount of the fairer sex who were earlier averse to cricket viewing. The primary reason for this certainly was the entertainment quotient attached to IPL.

For football enthusiasts who loathed cricket, it became a refreshing change as it had an uncanny resemblance to the football leagues across the world. Bollywood movies started postponing the release dates of their films so that the business wont be affected due to the IPL. But is IPL slowly loosing its shine due to the numerous controversies it has attracted?

IPL has been in the news for positive reasons like increasing revenue of BCCI through merchandising, sales of tickets at stadiums, increased revenue for the Indian Government through taxes, etc. It also showcased the ability that India is capable of organising an event of such a large magnitude with alluring enthusiasm and sparkling chutzpah.

There have been numerous controversies surrounding the IPL like the recent spot-fixing controversy, spat between senior players of rival teams which play for the same country (slapgate,Virat-Gambhir), lack of commitment of players due to injury or exhaustion in IPL, cheerleaders, etc.

IPL has always been been more of entertainment than cricket. But it should certainly improve the entertainment quotient in a few areas. Few cricket experts and critics of the IPL claimed that the spot fixing controversy was just a tip of the iceberg and a much large racket existed in the quagmire of IPL. Some even claimed that the entire IPL is scripted.

If the IPL was a scripted spectacle,then it is rather poorly scripted. IPL committee must take note of that and immediately hire an expert scripting consultant probably someone from Hollywood. The urban Indian class which throngs the stadiums loves its dish of Hollywood and we would love to see some exciting twists and turns occurring in the game, something out-of-the-box, rather than slog-hitting or exceptional bowling.

Commentary is another aspect in the IPL which needs serious improvement. Gone are the days when the likes of Tony Greig and Harsha Bhogle used to discuss cricket, the tactics, the team strategy, the pitch report, the crucial nature of the toss and the nature of play expected. The exquisite metaphors used by them to describe the bowling brilliance or the batting elegance were also pleasing to the ear.

Now, it’s just reduced to the brands dominating the commentary and players expressing their feeling from the ground. Even worse would be listening to some Bollywood actor/actress describing her new found love for the game.

Cricket was and will continue to be celebrated across the nation and so will the festival. But in this amazing carnival,somewhere the aura, the grandiose and the regal elegance of the gentleman’s game has been reduced to massy single-screen cheap entertainment just to create more money and revenue.

There are many pivotal questions that still go unanswered as we will welcome the seventh edition of the IPL along with its share of controversies. Is this show of wealth and extravagance more important than retention of the game’s essence? Don’t we as cricket lovers have a moral responsibility to shun this tamasha?