The towel code of cricket in India

The Indian Premier League has lead to a premier allegation against three Rajasthan Royals players that they took money to fix matches. The allegation is of spot fixing whereby certain overs or balls were fixed to bring about a certain result. Gone are the days when an entire match was fixed. These are the days when bets are placed on single balls, multiple balls and overs, number of fours and sixes, instead of the entire match.

There have been allegations and counter allegations that match fixing and spot fixing have been a part of Indian cricket for a long time. Former cricketers have been punished and apart from players from different countries there was always a doubt over players from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka from where the bookies and betters also happened to be. This continues even now as the fresh charges show.

S. Sreesanth, the player with international cricket credentials along with Ajit Chandila and Ankeet Chavan have been charged by the Delhi police of wrong doing. They also showed visual evidence of fixed matches during the press conference yesterday. The visual evidence has also lead to television channels being abuzz with how the betting gangs told the players that they had to show codes or signs that they were going to give certain runs in an over. Among the codes being talked of are a towel, tucking out the t shirt, and taking time while doing the run up to the delivery.

The study of signs and codes is called semiotics and it is a very interesting field of study in communication studies. Not everyone can understand the signs and codes. Proximity is not what matters but sharing of a culture whereby the signs and codes can be understood. Prefixed understanding of a particular code could also lead to understanding a particular sign. “Semiotics sees communication as the generation of meaning in messages- whether by the encoder or the decoder. Meaning is not an absolute, static concept to be found neatly parcelled up in the message. Meaning is an active process: semioticians use verbs like create, generate, or negotiate to refer to the process. Negotiation is perhaps the most useful in that it implies the to-and-fro, the give-and-take between person and message. Meaning is the result of the dynamic interaction between sign, interpretant, and object; it is historically located and may well change with time.”(John Fiske, Introduction to Communication Studies, Routledge: New York, 1990, p.46)

The use of codes in the IPL matches by players and bookies cannot be denied. If they did take money and bet, they might have used codes. The codes were also pre-determined and therefore likely to be understood by both parties. What does not go well with the entire episode for me is that everyone associated with the IPL is saying that they were not aware that this was happening. This, despite allegations already coming up in the previous IPL editions, and the BCCI having a special arrangement in place for this very thing. This refusal to accept that the system is flawed is the problem.

My effort may appear to be defending the three players. It could at least appear that I am trying to defend Sreesanth, since we are from the same state. My intention is neither. One can also ask other people from Kerala whether Sreesanth is actually a popular cricket player there anyway to dispel doubts that I would take this as a personal fight.

My point is the point of sign, code and meaning. The guilt of the players will be investigated and we will be informed. My questions in the mean time include aren’t any others apart from the three involved, didn’t anyone along with the team owners, BCCI officials and other players know about this or even doubt that this was happening, didn’t the audience know about this? If the three players in question and the bookies had a secret code, weren’t there other codes which owners, officials and other players understood? What do you say when an under performing player is picked for a match again? What is the rationale of giving a critical over to a player who has already gone for runs? While the bowler bowls is he in complete control of the number of runs he is going to give away. If the bowlers in question said that they would give not less than 13- 14 runs, what would happen if a batsman did not connect? How is it that this perfection of spot fixing is attained? It suggests that the code is also being understood by others including us. How many times have we felt that matches are getting too close and matches that should have been completed in the 17th over are still on in the final few balls? Could it be that entire matches are being arranged (I would not say fixed) in a particular manner to increase the entertainment quotient?

Subhash Chandra, chairman of Essel group and Zee was the pioneer of 20-20 cricket in India. His ICL was a bit more open and I would say that the league would have openly admitted that matches would be made interesting for spectators. BCCI understood the lucrative business of 20-20 and took over. What now occurs in several editions is one of the richest league competitions in the world. Players are paid huge sums and other perks are included. This is entertainment and we are all being entertained. Can we now say that we did not know that we were being entertained?

The police is well within its limits to crack down on betting. But Delhi was always in the news for violence against women and the lack of safety for women in the last six months. I would have liked to see a crack down on how women are used as mere objects in the IPL. There may even be many cases of violence and misuse of women. None of this has come out and instead betting is made to look like a grave offence that is being committed by the underworld and three cricket players!

We the audience, team owners, players and even the BCCI can say that we understood the codes and knew that something was wrong but did not say anything because we feared someone. That in all probability is true. But then what does it make the accused three? Wrestling has been popularized by the WWE. Wrestlers fight in what appears to be a pre-determined thought out fight. The audience also knows that it is so. Yet, many people watch it and enjoy it and appreciate the athleticism showed by the wrestlers. Cricket also has to play to the crowd, it has to entertain and even titillate to bring in the money. How can we now collectively say that “we didn’t know”? There has been no special code and no code has been broken. The codes were also there in front of us. Everything happened right in front of us. More than the spectators, the others involved are professionals. If anyone was underperforming it would appear so to many. The coaches, ground staff, commentators,and others who know so much about the game are likely to know if something were happening.

I would reject the headline of a “billion Indians cheated”. If anything we have cheated ourselves by ignoring all codes and signs while watching cricket matches.

Cricket is not about being perfect

A majority of people in India are counting minutes and seconds as they continue to hope that their cricket team will win the final of the cricket world cup between India and Sri Lanka. The media have whipped up a frenzy in India with all English news channels having full length pre and post analysis of the match that is yet to be played. Prayers are being said in different languages and in different ways, all seeking divine intervention for the team. Will India win another world cup after its maiden and only triumph 28 years ago? That is the question on everyone’s lips. The expectation is so big and one wonders what the fuss is all about.

In a cricket mad nation there are other voices too. Those who say that after all cricket is but a sport like any other, that spending a whole day in front of the television is a waste of time, what is special in cricket when the national game in India is hockey and other sports and games are neglected by the government?, what has the cash rich Indian cricket board done for other cash strapped associations and the poor in this country?, and aren’t cricketers pampered brats who by and large enjoy life and play with the emotions of a billion people?

On the other hand cricket has become close to what is a religion in India which brings people together, gives hope for a people who otherwise don’t have much to hope for, gives a sense of purpose and confidence seeing India beat top teams in at least one game, and is very lucrative and attractive as youngsters see it as a way to become successful even if you are from a small time town.

The very supporters who are completely behind their famous players are the same ones who have attacked the houses of cricketers when they made early exists from earlier world cups and lost to Pakistan. The over the top belief in the players brings about extreme reactions on winning and losing. From promising to go nude to not eating food during the entire match, people have different ways of parting with something to make their team win. More than the players, it is the supporters who are trying almost everything to ensure a win.

But cricket is not about perfection and neither are cricketers perfect. This obsession we have brings about impractical and unbelievable acts. But the cricket world cup final is after all just a match like any other. The thrill of having India play is of course there but it should not make one crazy. Some points we could consider while watching the game are

1. Cricket is part of an industry. This includes different brands, merchandising, advertisement, and lots of money at stake. An industry always has its own compulsions and wants. Cricket then becomes a part of these and the game goes into the back ground.
2. Cricketers are human beings. The usage cricket God is only a usage. Cricketers are as vulnerable and susceptible to failure as any other human being. Putting someone on a pedestal puts unwarranted pressure on him/her.
3. A sport or game should not have nationalist overtures. The greatness of sport is that it can bring people together and break boundaries. When it is used to further nationalist ambitions, it loses the very purpose for which it exists.
4. Cricket means money and betting. A sport like cricket means a lot of money in a place like the subcontinent. Money brings in the possibility of betting and betting brings in the pressure of fixing matches. There have been a lot of allegations and no team is free from such allegations.
5. Cricket is entertainment. When we are able to detach cricket from nationalism, patriotism, diplomacy and pride, we end up with cricket as entertainment. Cricketers are entertainers. And we see cricket to relax and entertain ourselves. The IPL itself is a concept which has caught on to entertainment as its unique selling proposition (USP). When we see it this way we will be entertained thoroughly.
6. Cricket should give back what it receives. The cricket governing body the BCCI (The Board of Control for cricket in India) is a cash rich body which spends under 10% of its revenues on development of cricket. Then what does it spend its money on? As spectators we should pressurise the BCCI to give back what it receives from the people of this country. The pay back could be in the way of scholarships for youngsters from poor backgrounds, building housing for the poor, adopting whole villages and offering its money for building facilities there, providing health care to poor cricketers and their family and so on.

So, let the match begin. No pressure, no dreams. Only entertainment!!!

Thiruvalla Premier League and the festival of St. George

The battle lines have been drawn and the daggers and spears are out. The BCCI is waiting to see what Lalit Modi will do with its show cause notice. Lalit Modi meanwhile is in a huddle with his lawyers and friends, waiting to make the next move. May 11 and following could restart the IPL debate on national television in India. Those who were friends with Modi have now turned foes and new friends have emerged to save his skin. What is the fuss many may ask? Modi has brought entertainment to India and in the process has got thousands of youngsters to get interested in the game and make a living out of it.

I learnt to play cricket in 1985. My introduction into Thiruvalla, a small town in Central Kerala known for its middle east millions, and cricket was a side by side act of fate. The decision of my parents to come to live in Thiruvalla was largely taken to make sure that their three children would get a sniff of the Mallu morals and grow up to be fine individuals. Whether they were successful in this is a totally different matter! The mind of the ten year old boy wandered and stopped at a near by field where young boys were playing a game that was alien to him. His instinct to crash into the cultural setting there made him learn the game. He realised the boys who were from different communities were playing a game with a coconut branch, wonderfully crafted into a cricket bat, or atleast sort of. The ball too was a make shift one made of a small base of a premature coconut seed, covered with newspaper and tied with a thin rope which one got from the recycled ration shop supplies.

Each and every space was a cricket pitch. The backyard, someone's uncultivated paddy field, or a small stretch of road. We would play till someone came and shooed us off our makeshift pitch. We would start when the natural sunlight came on and stop when it went off. Everything was gleaned off what we could find and there was a style in our lack of training. Each one would put a hand over the other shoulder and care nothing about caste permutations and class divisions. Everyone was welcome to play.

The raw cricketer in me turned into the semi professional cricketer after 1991, showing up for team selection for the Pathanamthitta district team, of which Thiruvalla was a part. What little leg spin bowling I knew was put on test and I was expected to be decent with the bat as well. I was picked for the under 19 and under 23 squads and there started my cricket journeys going to Trivandrum and Alleppy to play the district level cricket tournaments. Lets face it. I was not a brilliant cricketer, but I enjoyed being part of a then poor team which went on to ruffle a few feathers here and there. My short cricket career came to an end with a totally different innings of studying to become a priest.

I was in Thiruvalla recently for the St. George festival. It is a vibrant festival celebrated by church members of mainly the Jacobite and Orthodox churches in Kerala. St. George happens to be the patron saint of many countries. His appeal stretches beyond cultures. The picture of the soldier slaying the dragon is what many of us remember from our childhood days. At the time I thought that St. George was a dragon slayer. Today I realise that he is much more than that. For those who suffer injustice, he is a symbol of a fight against such injustice. This makes people feel that he is their protector and that he intercedes for them in times of trouble.

Thiruvalla has changed. My parents and several others would never let their kids out to play cricket. Today I have come to notice that parents drive their children to cricket grounds to attend expensive cricket training camps. Earlier we never had a cricket kit but would rather make do with what we found. Kids had fun. Today 8 year olds have to carry around huge cricket kits which are bigger than them. The look on their face is the look of an office goer. Not at all enthusiastic. Its as if cricket is a job for them.

With all the goings on of the IPL now, St.George makes a triumphal entry for me. Obviously he is not carrying a cricket bat. (It would be quite a picture though!) But he still has something to say. 'Stand for what you believe in no matter what'. Its even worth dying for! Cricket today has lost its innocence. It has become a career and a job. It has become big money. But times like this should make us think that cricket after all is also just a game. But its a game which can teach us lots. Its something that makes us women and men learn that life in India is stuck in caste equations and unjust structures. But that does not mean that we remain in it. We learn that coming together makes us better than staying away. Earlier cricket made us fight these injustices and run from our homes to be with our friends from all communities. Today we are taken to glorified stadiums but have forgotten the true learning that we should have from this great game.

I am not going to come on a horse with a spear, ready to annihilate the wrong doer of the IPL. I am just saying that the IPL has robbed me of my innocence (what little of it that is left!). So I hope that we can all look up to someone like St. George. Someone who will stand up for what is right. I am not looking for the BCCI to punish some scapegoat. I am rather hoping that they see the essence of cricket and hand it down to future generations.

The IPL and the media have put me in a fix.

The Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) initiated by the World Association for Christian Communication brought together people all around the world to find out how the media covered various groups of people. In this instance it sought to find how women were covered in the media. The media has its inverted pyramid style way of looking at the world in which the rich, famous, powerful and beautiful are given maximum space. The bizarre, untoward, adventurous and unnatural are then given the next bits of space while the poor, women and children often have to fight to find a fleeting mention. The findings of the GMMP strengthened the argument that less than 20% of stories focus solely on women.

These days the English news channels in India are in frenzy over the IPL. After Tharoor and Sunanda setting the air waves on fire, the Modi fire is becoming too hot to handle. Stories of fund embezzlements, hastily patched up front companies, shady real estate deals and income tax department raids are all coming out by the minute and second. So much that the viewer who misses an hour misses myriad twists in the story. Soon we will be exposed to the private life of Lalit Modi, his extravagant life style and how he build his IPL castle. So much IPL that anything else has almost gone into oblivion. Everyone is found asking, “Did you watch the IPL match?” It sounds like I might be labelled unnatural if I don’t watch the IPL and hope for an IPL team for my state.

The frenzy over the IPL is so much that everyone in one way or the other is involved with it. Some by going to the stadiums, some by watching matches on T.V., few by supporting Tharoor, and others by following the IPL related news. The IPL is stirring the imagination of the media audience. But it also shows that the IPL has changed cricket in India and it has used the media to this effect. It has changed cricket which had ‘use value’ to cricket which now has ‘exchange value’. This is why the IPL is gobbling up all that print space and invading the air waves. The exchange has been made! We the audience have thus been ‘commodified’ and given a price tag. The critique of religion as the opium for the masses has now undergone a change to IPL as the opium for the masses.

It is this that the poor, the helpless women and the powerless children of this country don’t have: ‘exchange value.’ They have use value but that is not enough for the main stream media and for us. We therefore neglect them by not speaking about them, not writing about them and not reading about them. They don’t give us the ‘fix’ we need. That is provided by the cheer leaders, bright lights, colour and entertainment. As a country we are living in a fix. We expect religion, movies and sports to be our opium. Therefore the politicians, religious leaders, earning middle and upper middle class, business community and different media are all responsible for the IPL dirty linen that is now being washed in public. I don’t know whether we will be able to come out of this perpetual fix! Maybe we don’t want to?

IPL: The Indian Phony League

The history of every country is measured by what it has attained as a people in terms of something. This something is different in varying situations. India is no different from others. We have non-violence and ahimsa as a measuring stick to observe what we have attained. Then we have violence and protest to attain equal grounds to play in a level playing field. A third form is the middle path which uses both of the above. Now India is experiencing the fourth wave. This is crude greed for wealth and power through any and all means. This fourth wave is the IPL (Indian Premier League). While we lowly ones sit on the edge of our seats watching minnows beating the giants and excitement in every ball and second, matches are fixed and money is exchanged under the table.

The IPL has claimed its first major casualty in the form of Shashi Tharoor, the by now former minister of state of the Ministry of External Affairs in India. It is reported that the former minister’s alleged friend Ms. Sunanda Pushkar was helped by him to get an equity worth 70 crore rupees in the newly formed Kochi IPL team. Tharoor has maintained all along that he has not done anything wrong and that Ms. Pushkar is a professional who has been given a stake as part of the services she will offer to the Kochi IPL team over a period of ten years.

The media went all out to get pictures and stories of the couple. Ms. Pushkar came out with a statement that the media did not have the right to harass her like this and the stake (sweat money) that she was offered was taking into account the services she had to offer as a professional. But who cared? Sunanda has been placed by the media in the middle of Lalit Modi and Shashi Tharoor, as if to suggest that the two are fighting over her. One almost got the idea of Ms. Sunanda being portrayed by the media as a pin up cheer leader who was cheering for a high profile minister who was trying his best to get an IPL team for his home state Kerala. Sunanda has been treated with disrespect in a fight between two men who think the IPL is the bench mark in India.

Shashi Tharoor need not bring in the Kerala factor and the importance of what he was trying to do by bringing such a team to Kerala. In his first interview after winning the Trivandrum Lok Sabha seat he said that his priority was to his voters and not being a minister in the government. The people of Kerala do not benefit by getting an IPL team. Their needs are rather cheap drinking water, electricity, jobs and roads, just to name a few. By thinking that the IPL is more important he has betrayed the trust of the people in him. All is not lost yet though as he can use his resignation as a time to get back to what matters. Twiterring is good but only when it is matched with work at the grass roots!

The Indian Premier League is a blow below the belt to the Indian Poverty League. What does it benefit the ordinary people of India when companies can invest in a sport and make money out of it? Why should our children pay exorbitant amounts of money to sit on a seat and watch a game when they should have free public parks and grounds to run without reservations and break free? Why should I support Chennai and curse Bangalore and Calcutta when I love all three? Will cheer girls, music and booze eradicate poverty in my country? I feel sorry for Sunanda because she has got a hard deal from the media. I feel sorry for Shashi because he has got carried away with he, him and himself. I feel sorry for Lalit because he has stamped on himself by stamping on the poor of this country.

You have been sold!

The second auction of the Indian Premier League cricket league was held last week. With the second edition of the league coming close, this was a time for teams to snap up a few players who were not available for auction the first time round. A record amount was bid for two players from England, Kevin Peterson and Andrew Flintoff, with each going for 1.55 million dollars each. As in any auction, the ‘item’ for auction was ‘sold’ to the highest bidder. The rich and the powerful and company honcho’s sat at their respective tables, sipping their respective drinks and eyeing the wares on show.

I cant help drawing comparisons to the slave trade which refuses to go away from the collective psyche of the rich and powerful. The thought that one can buy anything one wants and use it for whatever one wants, re-surfaces in different forms, well disguised to hoodwink the otherwise reasonably alert public consciousness. Has cricket become a gladiator sport, whereby all that happens in the country is forgotten and heroes rise in shallow heights and take the spectators along with them? Has sport become an extension of the commercial plans of corporations and companies?

The commodification of the public space, whereby stadiums let people with longer and deeper pockets to go in and enjoy while the ordinary ones have to struggle to manage a ‘ticket’, as if it is the pass to heaven, is now replacing the concept of open public spaces and parks. So, everything is sold. The players are sold, the tickets are sold, the spectators are sold, we are sold...