Mar 07, 2008 12:32 PM
4100 Views
No sport is followed with as much fanaticism as cricket here in India. It is very peculiar that a country so vast in geographical size should chase just one sport. If you look at countries like China, Australia, the United States, there is a broad spectrum of sports, each one with a considerable following. Here, in India, however, everybody and everybody's money sits glued to the television only when cricket airs live. Such a singular obsession is unhealthy not just for other sports but for cricket as well. An over-supply of talent and money is naturally a lure for sharks that have vested interests of their own. And nobody reading this can claim that it hasn't already happened in India. The availability of sports opportunities is fast depleting, with only 15 spots to compete for in the national team for cricket and with practically every open space available being leased out to or owned by a cricket club. It has started here in Bombay and in New Delhi as well and the virus of disappearing open spaces will soon infect even some of the smaller cities, which continue to retain their rustic small town splendor. When that happens, only the children of the moneyed lot will have a chance to play on the ground and even as they do that, their appearances will be vitiated by the protective layers of cork pads and fiberglass helmets, their eyes chasing a red ball of synthetic leather darting about on the lawns. Someone somewhere has got to wake up.
The Board of Cricket Control in India is a power-hungry, monopolizing organization in every sense. Even in its name, it proclaims its mandate of grabbing everything there is to grab, being named quite conspiciously the Board of "Cricket Control". The few places where the word "Control" seems relevant otherwise are limited to agencies meant to mantain law and order. An agency for Drugs Trafficking Control is a suitable name but when cricket comes under Control, one is led to believe that either Cricket is an antisocial activity, perhaps like prostitution, that needs to be regulated to prevent it from becoming a widespread social epidemic or that Cricket is capable of churning up or down as much revenue as our banking sector, requiring an agency quite like the RBI to moderate its activities. In either case, the spirit of the game appears nothing but an unsightly tramp sitting by the corner, slouching over a plastic bag full of stale hope.
India, quite as an administrative policy, has always been a place where competition was regarded as an evil thing. And nostalgia has forever been our greatest weakness. The sport left behind by the Raj has therefore become the only way we can celebrate centuries of Indian servility without appearing to be the same submissive race that the world otherwise mocks us for. Indigenous sports have always been starving and frail and as though that wasn't enough, the BCCI comes up with the IPL to jab its thumb on the jugular of India's traditional sports. Even among mainstream sports, there isn't funding enough to support our players, meaning that football and hockey and badminton have been reduced to merely games thuggish boys with too much physical energy play when the monsoon rains muddy playgrounds beyond use for their more sophisticated cricket-playing classmates.
But the discrimination is not just between sports but even within the game of Cricket. Our selection policies have become more responsive towards the need to encourage fresh talent only recently. For a very disturbingly long time, otherwise, the game was dominated by a set of "legends" who had excelled and shone, ironically, only when they were relatively "fresh", barring a few exceptions. What terrible problem there is in making anything a pure meritocracy is something I cannot understand. But our selection policies consider more factors than mere performance and potential while taking decisions. So conspicuous is this peculiarity that one often detects the putrid breath of politics. Oh, wait. I forgot to clear the fog on my spectacles. The Board is headed by that portly survivor of oral cancer, whose only other claim to fame is divisive and opportunistic politics in Maharashtra's legislative assembly!
When the "seniors" won the tri-series in Australia, the most natural reaction should have been an albeit scathing, "About time". Instead, it was the celebration that perhaps returning heros from a long, heroic war deserve. But when the young stallions(I was tempted to say "ponies") of the U-19 team returned victorious in the World Cup, hardly did any national daily feature their photograph on the front page. So in spite of our obscene preoccupation with just one sport, we fail yet again to encourage something or someone new. Most of our energies, mental and physical, are devoted to glorifying further those whose glory is only partly on the field, what with a three-day hangover of "auctions" and repeated media coverage, good or bad, on how our seniors play.
Someone somewhere has got to realize that cricket is not truly a business, although it can spin money, it is not a place where power and influence can be earned, although power and influence might perhaps be byproducts of the game, but a sport, much like table-tennis or hockey, which is to be played on the ground. And what we need is someone whose hands have clasped around the handle of a bat or over the seam of a ball or have sweat inside the confines of wicket-keeping gloves to take charge of the entire drama. Someone's got to go and find where the ball and the bat is.
