Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Cricket in India has found a reason for its recent malaise. It is, apparently, greed. The Board of Control for Cricket in India BCCI has limited the number of products a player may endorse, and presumably all the ills associated with the star system in the game will thereby be addressed. Why does this not come as a surprise? Because, in a neat pattern, as it is in life so it is in cricket. We have been for a while lurching back for the old socialist comforts of ceilings. We want a ceiling on GDP growth, because we don8217;t want the exertion of building infrastructure to avert overheating. We are now officially accepting of SEZs, but we are so apprehensive of allowing even an entrepreneurial ambition-limiting 5,000 hectares, that our Central government has gently put political pressure on states to make the ceiling more limiting. And we are so outraged that cricketers make so many crores of rupees and then lose, that we have over the weekend devised rules to curtail their earnings. Loss will presumably be easier to live with now.
This surrender by the BCCI to the reigning nostalgia for old socialist limits on individual prosperity is surprising 8212; and, thereby, all the more scary for its larger implications. The board had, especially since the late 1990s, embraced the free market. For an entity in the early 8217;90s had been asked by Doordarshan for payment for telecasting India8217;s matches, it was quick to leverage its unique selling product for commercial return. This profit was to have been partly ploughed back into the game, domestic and international. Greed, it was agreed, could be good for the game.
