Cricket,cinema,current affairs

IPL 3 combined everything Indian TV loves. No wonder we watched it

IPL 3 combined everything Indian TV loves. No wonder we watched it
Okay,its quiz time,folks. Who said,Music washes away from the soul the cares (or was it,dirt?) of every day life? It cant be Lalit Modi; its too flowery for the straight-talking suspended IPL chief. It could have been Shashi Tharoor but it was on TV,not on Twitter. And for those who think it is Shakespeare,Lord,what fools these mortals be,to quote the Bard.
In fact,it was Sherry Navjot Singh Sidhu partying on the musical extravaganza during Extraaa Innings before the IPL final (Sony Max). He was in a poetic mood Sunday,and some of his eloquence became infectious: An act of joy, recited host Gaurav,to feel like a boy. This rhyming couplet had been inspired by,who else,Sachin Tendulkar.

The showbiz prelude to the actual business on hand,namely to play a game of cricket,was way,way beyond the event. Or may be not. If this was a party,what better way to celebrate than with A.R. Rahman,Bipasha Basu and Shahid Kapoor performing,with lights streaking across the sky like meteors,and the entire stadium filled with music and dance? Jai Ho. Wonder how we will celebrate the Commonwealth Games and then the cricket World Cup,both to be hosted in India.

The match itself went down to the wire,more than what happened in the semi-finals. But it was all that glittered that was gold,and that was not gold,which quite outshone the game. There were those TV commercials between balls. How well they served the advertisers is debatable because the ad breaks had nuisance value; they were irritants,like a rash that just wont go away. Overs took so long to complete,you thought the bowlers had been told to walk slowly back to their run ups in order to accommodate the ads. Then,there were the interviews on the sidelines (oh yeah,we are playing like a well-oiled unit and hope we dont need to visit the gas station variety) which added nothing to our knowledge of the game or the state of play.

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And finally,there were the constant references to parties and not of the political kind. As soon as the match ended,the string of interviews with Chennai Super Kings players,heard constant questions like,So you will be partying hard tonight? Matthew Hayden smiled all teeth and agreed. So,you will be partying hard tonight? Doug Bollinger who was already sweating hard,just looked tired. And so on and so forth.
The IPL acronym has lent itself to many sly interpretations but ever since Shashi Tharoor and Lalit Modi went to town on it,Incessant Partying League hasnt been one of them. Still,when MTV decided to telecast IPL specials late at night featuring cricket stars and film stars and sundry other luminaries (whom you often did not recognise as bright sparks) at the post-game parties,you knew that if some cricketers exclaimed that they were having a ball,they would not be talking about cricket,and any bouncers you may see would be human beings.

IPL-3 will be better remembered for all the wrong reasons,none of them cricketing. That it has been on air to the exclusion of almost everything else in the last fortnight until Lalu Yadav & Co. took the party back to the Lok Sabha on the cut motions Tuesday only confirms what many of us have long known. The four Cs are unbeatable on TV and IPL-3 has all them all: cricket,cinema,current affairs and crime. Together these make up the staple on news and general entertainment channels but no single event has so successfully managed to combine them as IPL-3 did this year.
The heady mix of human excellence and human frailty was unbeatable. So while the Super Kings may have been crowned in Mumbai Sunday night,the four Cs cocktail was the real winner.