Soft drinks and hard battles

Even as I am sitting here in distant Washington,I have heard disturbing stories about the Indian cricket team, now preparing for the World Cup in England with one-day games against Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Over the past few months, there has been plenty of bazaar gossip filtering over the Internet about the influence of corporate sponsors in team selection. Apparently, there are the quot;Pepsiquot; boys, players who owe allegiance to Pepsi Cola. And there are the quot;Cokequot; players, who endorse the rival Coca Cola. The latest buzz has it that in the Jaipur one-dayer, there was inordinate pressure on the selectors to play a couple of Pepsi players, including an unfit captain Mohamed Azharuddin and an out-of-sorts opener Ajay Jadeja. I hope to God it is not true. As a sometime cricket writer and a die-hard fan despite years of absence from India, it would break my heart to see the game corroded by the odious corporations of the West, although the bookies of Bombay seem to be working at it too.

Corporate battles in the United States have now reached epidemicproportions. Corporate influence in sports is at an all-time high. When the national basketball season locked out early this season following a players strike, the stock prices of several sports gear and apparel manufacturers dropped off sharply, recovering only when the dispute was resolved. Nike suffered a setback in the market when Michael Jordan, who endorsed the product, announced his retirement. These are familiar stories. The wars are now taking an egregious turn. For instance, you cannot buy tickets now to certain events unless you use a particular credit card.

Worse, US corporations have now begun to infiltrate American schools. Mc-Graw-Hill Inc. recently published an elementary-school math textbook full of brand names like Sony, Nike and Gatorade using the specious excuse that students found it more engaging to solve problems that involved familiar names. Large corporations like Exxon and McDonald8217;s now sponsor a variety of in-school marketing projects. According to one recent report, Coca-Colaand Pepsi have turned some schools into virtual sales agents for their products, signing contracts which give them exclusive rights to distribute its products in schools 8212; and even in the classrooms.

Could we get to a stage where we would see an Indian team split into Pepsi boys and Coke boys? And where would it stop? Imagine an Indian innings of 250 divided into 132 Coke runs and 118 Pepsi runs. Imagine Rahul Dravid8217;s Coke century and Saurav Ganguly8217;s Pepsi hundred. I hope that remains a nightmare. No one who has seen Sachin Tendulkar8217;s steely singlemindedness or Rahul Dravid8217;s gutsy determination can believe they are playing for anything other the love of their country and the game. But there are lesser mortals in the business including lubricous cricket administrators and players whose actions do injustice to their professed integrity and professionalism. They ought to can it. They ought to know that should even an iota of this nigthmare come true, the Indian crowds are capable of putting the bottles ofthe products that own them to a different use.