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Journalism of Courage
It’s been two weeks since the end of the IPL, but somehow everything else that has transpired after the Rajasthan Royals victory is too mundane to talk about.
Chief selector Dilip Vengsarkar has been offered a Rs 1-crore job by the league, Sunil Gavaskar and Ravi Shastri reportedly make as much off it already, and there are talks that the $5million salary cap for teams may have enough riders in it next season to allow market forces to take over.
Some critics have pointed out that IPL commentators talk like hyperbolic salesmen, and that the media-projected silver lining has no dark cloud. But no one wants to hear such strange theories. And now a Champions League is set to roll out involving T20 champions from all around the world. Who cares if Tests and one-dayers suffer in the relentless pursuit of hard-selling what is highly marketable in the short-term?
This is the summer of contentment for world cricket, the season when everything turned into gold. It’s a time about which we’ll tell our grandchildren we-were-there stories — like the 40s in India and the 60s in America.
When there is such mass frenzy, can a cultural revolution be far behind. There are hush-hush talks that a film is being planned around the Royals (Chuk diya, Jaipur?). Fashion designers and architects should be asked if clothes and buildings will change — like World War I led to the Flapper Movement and the Machine Age led to Art-deco.
Football’s Euro 2008 seems to be slinking away slowly into oblivion after just a week, and the Olympics, which have never really moved India after the hockey team’s demise three decades ago, won’t stand a chance when the torch is lit in Beijing two months from now. India is living in its own T20 bubble. Everyone is welcome, whether they are from England, Australia or South Africa. Only critics and ‘ICL rebels’ are not allowed.
Lalit Modi — like the boy who owns the football in a colony match — is making up his own rules as he goes along. So, after formulating base prices for all players and deciding on who the ‘icons’ are, he starts issuing coloured passes to owners for visiting the dressing-rooms, suspends umpires, hands out fines at will, and then decrees that any player associated with the ICL won’t be allowed to play in the Champions League, or he will “disqualify that team” and mind you, “no exceptions will be made under any circumstances”.
Of the 18 English counties, only Essex, Middlesex and Somerset don’t have ICL players in their line-ups. The teams are taking strong exception to Modi’s edict, threatening to get into a legal battle, but the ECB and, incredibly, the ICC, is lending them no support — what will they play with if Modi decides to take his football home?
Then, if more than one team that a player belongs to makes it to the Champions League, he will be forced to play for his IPL franchise rather than the state team that has scouted him, groomed him, helped him learn everything he knows. The Chennai Super Kings walked up to Michael Hussey with a few million bucks a couple of months ago, so he will now have to play against Western Australia. Why? Because Lalit Modi said so.
IPL officials can rest assured that any conflict with teams from abroad will again be seen as a race debate back home. Like with so many other things in Indian cricket, the slam-the-foreigner card has become the easiest one to play. Right from the Tendulkar ball-tampering row in South Africa to the Harbhajan racism debate in Australia to Gavaskar’s ‘conflict of interest’ with the ICC, the Indian media and public fall in line to attack those of fairer skin — not always with good reason.
In cricket’s age of transformation, there is no stopping the new power-brokers. So what if some of their decisions go against the principles of natural justice.
