IPL’s Bollywood Cricket

IPL’s Bollywood Cricket

by Remigius de Souza


CINEMA and TV among other options is a powerful media. Bollywood, here, in particular, is quite influential in the areas of personal attire – hairstyle, costumes and gestures – to house decoration by the masses. It has gone further to produce Bollywood politics, Bollywood planning, Bollywood architecture, Bollywood landscape design etc. at local, regional and national levels. No. we are not talking about the Bollywood stars – heroes and hoaxes – in the legislature.

IPL is a similar idea religiously copied in the sports i.e. cricket, from Bollywood extravaganza by the brilliant brains in Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI). Just as Bollywood does add foreign locations in their films, so does IPL adds foreign players and half-naked cheerleaders, to blow up surplus money BCCI has earned from cricket frenzy of desi fans (as they don’t know how to use it creatively) that goes into smoke: whosoever few are profited. This is a smoke screen to hide BCCI’s failure to bring quality to its cricket game. It reminds us the recent (2008) Bollywood Budget by P. Chidambaram, our Fin-Min of India.

Any number of movies such as Chak De India, Iqbal, and Lagan etc Bollywood may produce, it is not going to change and better the play-life of 200-300 million children in cities, towns and villages that they rightfully deserve.

The children (those not reached puberty), however, are not so much interested in watching cricket on TV screen as playing it themselves. They play cricket. They make a ball out of newspaper sheets, tie it up with a thread that comes from a grocery pack, and invent their own rules of the game. They play in the corridors in the building, gullies, by-lanes, and on holidays on the streets; they don’t have enough playgrounds in their neighbourhoods: that happens in Mumbai as well as elsewhere. The children anywhere in the world invent their own games, rather than look for external aids to keep themselves excited all the time. The children anywhere in the world invent their own games. They also love to sing, dance, paint and play and to tell stories: the adults don’t. Children are not interested in passive entertainment as the urbanite do.

I have failed to convince this one point even to one person. He was undergraduate student of architecture, and I was his dissertation/ thesis guide, while I was teaching architecture. His subject was stadiums – devoutly dedicated to cricket. I suggested working on smaller sports stadiums, which could facilitate several different games, sports and athletics besides cricket. His argument was (as if he was know-all): ‘nobody is interested in other games, because there is money in cricket.’

Remigius de Souza
© Remigius de Souza, all rights reserved.