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.