The bidding had become interesting: Rs 300 crore,Rs 350 crore,Rs 420 crore. To and fro,a man and a woman on a money seesaw. Finally,Rs 550 crore,once,twice,thrice. Sold to the man in a grey suit. No,his name was not Mallya or Ambani but I.M. (I am?) Virani and no,he wasnt buying a juicy morsel of human cricketing talent but a piece of Mumbai at a grossly inflated rate.
This was a scene from the new serial Mukti Bandhan (Colors),loosely based,we are told,on the life of the Ambanis. Odd that it should come a day after The Great Indian Tamasha as NDTV 24×7 called the IPL auction: 10 team owners,349 players on the waiting list and one Mr Richard Madley as the umpire. Cricket ka Big Bazaar (IBN-7) was so gargantuan there was no other news for two days. Breaking News was Dada and Brian Lara UNSOLD at the IPL auction not alleged Hindu terror,corruption,inflation,an assassination in Pakistan or even a freezing north India.
And then there was the chatter. Men and at least one woman (on CNN-IBN) gathered around a TV studio table and talked incessantly. They tried to outguess the bidders: the way Anil Kumble is reacting,what Vijay Mallya is saying, someone called Kochi and told it to bid.
Former cricketers Sanjay Manjrekar and Ajay Jadeja,and experts like Boria Majumdar and Harsha Bhogle analysed each bid,the strengths and weaknesses of Rip Van Winkle,sorry,Johan van der Wath,whom none of us knows nor cares about at least not yet. And so it went on: Im guessing Mumbai will bid for Dwayne Bravo,I think the Hussey brothers will be hot picks,I believe…. The grand Indian cricket auction had become another talking bazaar.
This was primarily because news channels were not allowed into the den of money in Bangalore where the bidding was in progress. That right belonged to Sony Max. Deprived of live footage,IBN-7 did the next best thing,a blow-by-blow commentary: now Vijay Mallya is talking to Kumble… Kumble is hiding his mouth behind his hand so we cannot read his lips (!). Preity Zinta is upping the bidding,Siddharth Mallya is giving her a darkling look that says,see you outside or some such. What with keeping an eye on the TV monitor,analysing the players,tracking the bids and the composition of each team,it was chaos: the Great Indian Tamasha indeed.
And when cricket is a tamasha,can Navjot Singh Sidhu be far behind? He was on Sony Max alongside Ayaz Memon and Samir Kochhar,the channels man for all cricket. Words flowed off his tongue like runs off Sachin Tendulkars bat. His eyes were dollar signs: Its the money,my friend,its the money… always marry for money…. By turns eloquent and obscure,you wondered what hed been reading recently: [The IPL is cricket in a Ferrari (nice) … This is like Aladdins lamps,you can do anything with it. Huh? Poor Memon and Arun Lal (at the auction with a visibly overawed Gaurav Kapur) didnt know what had hit them.
The most striking part of the IPL auction telecast was how bad it was. A good telecast would have done the following: clearly identified team owners at each table instead of making us squint to read the ID cards on the table; given us the names of the bidders with the amount being bid,the winning bid,the team composition after a successful bid,and told us how much money a team was left with to spend and who was left in the kitty. Graphics with all the teams and their buys should have been periodically shown. As it was,at no stage did we get the big picture. It was like watching a cricket match between teams you had never heard of and that too without a scorecard.
