Shashi Tharoor is not the end of the story...

On the evening of the first IPL semi-final, the news reports were arguably far more interesting than the match. It is only a matter of time before movies come tumbling out of such masala. Look forward to 'Lagaan’ on hormones and 'Sholay’ in designer suits. Kitney paise thhey, Kaalia?

Cynics have called IPL a circus. When you buy a ticket to the circus you get clowns along with lion-tamers, while trapeze artistes inspire the cheerleaders. But it does become a curious extravaganza when you can't tell the difference between who is who.

This much is certain: Shashi Tharoor was not the end of the story. He was the beginning of a serial.
From M. J. Akbar's blog on IPL circus. To read the full article click here.

I hate IPL, because....

I hate IPL, because...

1. The players were made pawns in the hands of the team owners. They were auctioned and guys like Vijay Mallya bought them for peanuts. They lost their self-respect. There is a big difference between playing for one's country than for a greedy billionaire like Mukesh Ambani or Shah Rukh Khan.
2. Mukesh, Mallya and others were into the IPL not because of their love over the game. They were there to mint money and have succeeded instantly, enormously without any big effort. They virtually invested zero money in grooming players. It could have made sense, if they had taken some enthusiastic college kids and trained them and groomed them as players. Instead, they made avail of themselves readymade cricketers for paultry sums. P. Sainath has rightly termed it as Indian Paisa Loot!
3. The presence of cheer girls and gyrations and gestures of these scantily dressed girls is nauseating
4. The party culture promoted by the IPL is disgusting. According to sources there were close to eight varieties of dishes at each party and over all close 1,29,600 bottles of beer and 27,000 bottles of whiskey were consumed; 9,450 songs played at post match parties 27,000 bottles of whisky consumed, 432 dishes served in the buffet spreads, 1,728 garments displayed at 54 fashion galas 39.7444 kms covered by models on the ramp and 810 security personnel on duty.
5. The allegations about match fixing holds water. The scope for betting is enormous. A 32-year-old man  committed suicide in Udhagamandalam town of Tamil Nadu after he lost heavily in betting on a match in the ongoing IPL Twenty20 cricket tournament. It is only a tip of the iceberg.
6. Greed breeds greed. The gory tales of proxy shares, tax evasions, money laundering etc are sickening.

Why I hate IPL?

Shah Alam Khan writes in India and Bharat:

The financial aspects of IPL are not only murky but an eye opener for those who thought that India was a poor nation with more than forty percent population living below the poverty line. The total value of IPL, which even Mr Modi cannot predict with surety, is expected to be around 70000 crores. This unaccounted money is available to the richest people of India. No doubt the rich got richer in the IPL. Compare this to a cumulative expenditure of mere Rs. 27.59 crores in the prestigious National Rural Guarantee Scheme of the Government of India for the state of Orissa in 2008-09. The Orissa example is even more glaring as this is the state where hunger deaths are reported on a regular basis.

The IPL also represents a loot of public funds, my and your money, which doesn’t even get noticed. Each day & night match of the IPL played under flood lights, consumes electricity enough to run 500 average Indian homes for a month. The provision of subsidised electricity doesn’t make things any different. It is believed that the average electricity bill for a single day and night cricket match of the IPL is more than 15000 US Dollars. For those interested in numbers, this is the government’s expenditure on health for ten adult Indians if they live up to an age of 70 years (at the rate of 21 dollars PPP). Water, a deficient resource in cities like Mumbai and Delhi is used to keep the fields green during the IPL. This, in a country which is now at the top of the childhood malnutrition charts of the globe with lack of clean water being the primary cause of a large number of infant and childhood morbidity and mortality.

To read the full article, click here.

God, Cricket, IPL and minting money

T J S George  writes :

We as a people have gifts no other people have.
Italy and New York, for example, are celebrated for their great mafia leaders. But those leaders could only think of routine stuff like kidnapping and smuggling and murder and protection money.
Only an Indian could think up the non-violent idea of making millions from the humble, rarely noticed stamp paper. Telgi never harmed a fly.

Indians have the rare genius to turn everything into an item of trade. Who else has turned God into such profitable commerce? We discovered early that this line of business required the least investment. And the returns are huge.

All it takes is the right kind of uniform—saffron robes or bishop’s cassocks or a neutral white that looks now like a saree, now like a winter shawl—and some kind of marketing mantra. Then you get enough believers around the world to keep you in eternal wealth, not to mention attractive fringe benefits provided by young devotees.

The God industry will remain by far the most widespread and lucrative of all business ventures in India. But ours is a vast and fertile land. There’s plenty of scope for all kinds of growth industries. So we have been busy developing the commercial potential of various other previously innocent ideas.

Cricket, of course, beats all other trading programmes, almost challenging the God business in scope and turnover. So many lakhs of crores of rupees are involved in the cricket business that the IPL presents its numbers in dollars and millions. Confidentiality, another word for secrecy, has been its watchword.
Could such vast sums be clean? Could they include black money, terrorist money, underworld money?
It is amazing that such issues attracted the enforcement directorate’s attention only when Shashi Tharoor and the Kochi franchise got into the picture.

Tharoor is a natural magnet for trouble, as a playboy who wants to be everywhere doing everything. But he is a bumbling Batman before Lalit Modi’s scheming Svengali. How many political VIPs are interlinked with Svengali? Will they ensure that any investigation is yet another eyewash?

Tragically cricket is no longer a sport. It too has become an item of trade, flourishing in a fish-market culture. May all the money-makers burn in hellfire in due course for destroying the decencies that made cricket cricket and the values that made India India.

To read the full article click here.

IPL, greed, big money and an icon from Mumbai..!

Sachin Tendulkar

SHANTANU GUHA RAY writes in Tehelka:

IT’S THE open secret no one wants to acknowledge: the IPL is not about cricket. The ugly controversy surrounding Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor and IPL chief Lalit Modi — over Tharoor’s friend Sunanda Pushkar owning 4.9 percent free sweat equity in the Kochi team that Tharoor helped put together — is merely a warning sign pointing to a much deeper dirt pit that comprises in equal parts big money, politics, glamour, greed, sex, drugs and intense backroom jostling.
 
The further irony is that, according to highly reliable sources in the cricketing management fraternity, the 4.9 percent free sweat equity Sunanda Pushkar is being pilloried for does not even belong to her. A mere .5 percent is reserved for Pushkar. Disturbingly, the rest belongs — off paper and on trust — to two iconic cricketing giants, one of who is still playing for the Mumbai IPL team. This free equity is the quid pro quo they demanded for helping put the Kochi team and its promoters together — not a rank corruption perhaps in the larger scheme of things, but certainly an impropriety.

Who is that iconic cricketing giant still playing for the Mumbai team?


Read the full article here. 
and Lalit Modi charged with 'Betting & Laundering'

IPL = Indian Paisa Loot!!

P Sainath

P. Sainath has nailed it on its head. He writes in The Hindu:

Who stand to gain from the public wet-nursing of the IPL? 

Among others, four gentlemen who make the Forbes Billionaires List of 2010. Three of them are team owners and one is a title sponsor. 

All dollar billionaires and long-time residents on the Forbes List. 

Then there are the mere millionaires in the shape of Bollywood stars. For all these and other worthy people, governments bend over backwards to make concessions. Even as they slash food subsidies in a period of rising hunger. Big time partying is an integral part of the IPL show. 

Only look who is paying for that. Street argot has already begun to brand the IPL as Indian Paisa League or, more directly, India Paisa Loot.

To read the full article, click here.

IPL, corrupt crorepatis and hunger!

Shashi Tharoor - Lalit Modi 

Do you know the cost of a ticket to watch a IPL match? It ranges from Rs. 1000 to Rs 40,000. The exorbidant rates have not dithered the audience who throng in thousands match after match. The economics of  IPL is mind baffling. With the Shashi Tharoor - Lalit Modi saga going murkier and murkier the IPL has been named as Indian Paisa League by a குறும்புக்கார TV channel.
Here is the other side of the story. You would not stop your tears when you read it. Harsh Mander writes in The Hindu:

 ‘Half the week we are able to eat roti or rice with either vegetable or dal. The other half, it is just roti, or rice boiled with salt and turmeric. But there are four or five days in a month when there is no food, and we have little option except to fast. If there is any food, we give it to our children, adding a lot of water to fill their stomachs. Any additional food goes to our men folk, because we women are used to staying hungry'.

But the children's bellies are still empty, and they are restless and clamour for more food. ‘It is difficult for us to bear their weeping', the women continue. ‘When the wailing of infants gets too much, we lace our fingertips in tobacco or wild intoxicants and give the fingers to the babies to suck. It helps them sleep even with nothing in their stomachs. If they are small, we beat them until they sleep, but as they grow older, we try to teach them how to live with hunger. It is a lesson that will equip them for a lifetime. Because we know that hunger will be with us the rest of our lives.'

To read the full article click here.

IPL = League of Priviliged Indians!!

IPL is not Indian Primier League. It is League of Priviliged Indians. Veteran writer, scholar and historian Ramachandra Guha writes in The Telegraph.

The promoters of the IPL claim to be speaking on behalf of Indian cricket. However, the polarizing instincts of their tournament run counter to — and threaten to defeat —the inclusive and democratizing trends that were inaugurated by the victory of the Indian cricket team in the 1983 World Cup and the boom in satellite television that followed. 

From the 1950s to the 1970s, Indian cricket was dominated by a handful of large cities — such as Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Calcutta and Bangalore. But from the 1980s onwards, smaller and previously more obscure centres started sending players to the national side.

Cricketers from towns in Bihar, Orissa, UP, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, from Vadodara, even Jharkhand, began winning India caps. Simultaneously, international matches, once held only in the big metros, now began being hosted by Guwahati, Cuttack, Gwalior, Jamshedpur, and the like.

The Indian Premier League may be more appropriately renamed the League of Privileged Indians. For this tournament both reflects and further intensifies a deep divide between the India of wealth and entitlement and the India — or Bharat — of poverty and disenfranchisement. 

Writing about the dangerous growth of inequality in India, the economist, Amartya Sen, warned some years ago that if present trends continued, half of India would look like the American state of California, the other half like sub-Saharan Africa. Since he made this comment, California has been beset with an acute — and apparently irreversible — fiscal crisis. Perhaps we might then substitute the state of Massachusetts for it. 

But the point remains; there are indeed two Indias, the one which is awarded IPL franchises, and the other which is not.

To read the full article click here.