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Season of rebellious renaissance

Posted on the August 30th, 2007 under Uncategorized by premub

    Update 1

  

This is the season of flavours. Of unexpected hits and weary misses that is.
It is nothing intriguing that the coachless-wonder christened Team India is struggling,  but it is surprising that it beat English conditions and a better cohesive unit to bag the Test series. It went back to the cocoon of injuries and ailments to gift the lead in ODIs to the Englishmen.

This is actually no mean fete.No one among the billion pundits of the game back home would have expected a better show from a battered side, other than those clamouring on juxtaposing national pride with a game which would have been long back made the national game.

Sad, that hockey still carries the burden of hope, after being swept away by the challenges thrown up by astroturf — the need to keep fit and to change the skillsets.Hockey’s waning clout and cricket’s emergence from the Mumbai’s cramped bylanes to international spotlight happened almost simultaneously.

India’s last major tournament win was the Moscow Olympics in 1980, five years after astroturf was rolled in to topple the skilled fortunes of players from the subcontinent. Indian cricketers poured champagne on the World Cup in 1983 and the media pyrotechnics associated with the euphoria unleashed a fiery rage which strangled all other sport in the bud and buried hockey alive in the years to come.

No tears were left to script a requiem for a hockey as a sport, since a rout from centre-stage wasn’t digestible to the self-proclaimed sports lovers.Benefit of doubt was always a cricketing term which never found a place in hockey parlance.

(Update 1)   

But if you thought a celluloid-inspired revival of hockey is on the cards, good luck. But reel magic seldom translates to turf glory. It can ignite only the box office.  When martyrs were being readied after the world cup shocker, the ghosts of Kerry Packer returned in a desi avatar – the Essel group promoted Indian Cricket League. ICL is spot on in timing. How it unfolds is for time to tell.

But though the BCCI’s coffers as well as odds are stacked in favour of the established frailties of Indian cricket, ICL offers a scent of rebellious renaissance.   It is difficult for hockey to pass the test of Indian television viewers’ appeal, simply because it fails to ignite frenzy. No hockey-playing nations have witnessed frenzy associated with football or cricket.

The Board of Control for Cricket in India, or lack of it, erred in its knee-jerk responses and half-baked pay hikes as a counter measure to the ICL. It wasn’t leading, but following on. That gave ICL an initial lee-way. Converting that into goodwill, eyeballs, sponsorship rights and mass appeal is the job of marketing mavens. Worthy rebels always get a sympathetic and patient hearing.

That is why an emotional Hayanvi jat named Kapil Dev Ram Lal Nikhanj would easily beat the shrewd Sunil Manohar Gavaskar as the most popular cricketer in any poll. Popularity matters. Sharadraoji Pawar would not have to summon his zombie BCCI colleagues to Baramati to tell that tale. 
premub@gmail.com
How we lost the turf war 

Lingering radio waves from the Caribbean

Posted on the August 28th, 2007 under Uncategorized by premub

In the beginning there was All India Radio.

 In the late eighties, after Kapil’s Devils catapulted cricket to every household in pre-liberalisation India, the country was not familiar with crystal-clear televised images, a household feature now.  The Caribbean sounded like some godforsaken place in Mars, but aficionados who began to develop a fondness for cricket were putting to test their finetuning skills to spot the right band from which All India Radio was broadcasting the running commentary of the India-West Indies series. Some fortunate souls were lucky enough, after many attempts, to make a foray into AIR’s hitherto unheard of virtual sound waves from the lucid din of forbidden islands.  No attempts could be made to contact even the next door cricket buff to figure out where exactly to tune in that ragged structure which we affectionately now call a collector’s item – The humble radio. Landline usage was a luxury, mobile phones were yet to make an imprint in this vast nation and it was too dark to jump the small building wall with a bizarre query of that sort to the cricket fan in the making next door. Imaginary situations, though highly probable, did the rounds of the minds – Marshall and Holding unleashing the demon of their elegant pace on our hapless men… But pride would burst through when the little master intercepts the chain of thoughts with his helmet-less stride towards the mine-fields of pace – Bravo, here’s our Robinhood, who can mock at your sheer pace with the gumption of technique, the resoluteness of the lone warrior in a Calypso crowd.
By then dinner would be served, like an unwanted guest who had come to spoil a family party, the irritant of a life time. 

 The noise of the radio would have to make way for the silence of the night – The whole world has ganged up against the little joys this English game has gifted to this small town connoisseur of cricket. At dawn, after overcoming the sleepless anxieties caused by the mutiny of Caribbean pace battery in the virgin landscape of a young mind, disappointment greets you. The local newspaper only has half the story about the battle between the ball and the bat, which is the case now as well. Only from the humble showpiece called radio would you get a sketchy two-line comment, probably a filler those days, on the drama unfolding in the Caribbean — The News, read by X, Y or Z. Yesterday’s drama would unfurl only in the next day’s broadsheet.  It was still fun and the next day was eagerly awaited, though the tuning skills would be put to baptism by fire later in the day without fail. Cricket then was a lullaby played out in gentle minds with a willow. Now, it is a hyperlink in the debris of the world wide web, just a vision from the stump and a simulated caricature of a brand. A sad commentary that is. 
premub@gmail.com