I watched an IPL match yesterday.
This is not, in the Kulkarni household, an everyday activity. I count myself among the puritans when it comes to cricket, and would much rather see flannelled fools play the sport for five days rather than have them cavort around for three hours. But there were no good movies on yesterday, and I didn’t feel like spending an hour figuring out which exact movie I wanted to see on Netflix.
And so, while flipping through channels – and isn’t it amazing how 99% of all the channels that we pay for are monumentally useless? – I came across an IPL match, and I decided to watch it.
Now, I may be a puritan, but that’s when it comes to cricket. My standards are pretty low when it comes to entertainment.
I think Dulhe Raja is one of the finest movies ever made, and Mohra is a must-watch whenever it is on TV. I draw the line at Sooryavansham, but as you have no doubt surmised, I don’t set the bar very high.
And so the match was perfectly good timepass. I mean no disrespect to the cricketers themselves, to be clear. The parade of skills that was on display was very impressive indeed, and they kept it up in the heat and humidity of Kolkata, which is in itself a remarkable achievement. But the paraphernalia associated with the cricket made Dulhe Raja look like a Kurosawa movie in comparison.
Proceedings started with a comely young lass offering the umpires an apple as they made their way out on the field (this is quite true. I am not exaggerating this).
The umpire then wagged a priggish finger in the girl’s face, and suitably rebuked, she offered him a white ball, which he accepted. This was the start of a cricket match, and it went downhill from there. Cheerleaders determinedly flung up their limbs every time an event of note happened and issued plastic smiles at nobody in particular. Commentators experienced moments of pure and prolonged ecstasy at seemingly random moments and managed to keep doing so for three hours straight. As a middle aged man, it was hard not to admire their stamina.
The audience had come to the stadium to play an increasingly popular sport called Catch Yourself on Camera and seemed to notice the cricket being played out in front of them as if by accident.
All in all, it was a mishmash of wild and weird things that seemed to happen around a game of cricket – and that, I suddenly realised, was the point.
The IPL has been designed with entertainment in mind. It is a mistake to think of it, as I have for so many years, as a sporting event. The IPL considers television soaps as its toughest competition, not other sports. In fact, everything that is on TV at that particular time slot – dinner time and a little after, loosely speaking – is to be thought of by us, the audience, as a substitute for everything else.
And that, I suggest to you, ladies and gentlemen, ought to be considered our most remarkable achievement of the 21st century. We have managed to put cricket and Arnab Goswami on the same spectrum, and not all that far away from each other. It is a feat of social engineering that no other civilisation will come close to achieving, I guarantee you.
Now whether it is an achievement we ought to be proud of is another story altogether. Perhaps Mr Goswami could discuss it, if that’s the verb I’m looking for, now that he’s back on air. Or maybe not. This is one of those things that the nation would probably not want to know.
He doesn't expect the paradox to be resolved in his lifetime
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