IPL Yes Me Too

This is a considerably short ;) comment on Saurabh's blog. I did not want to pollute his comments section by writing a comment as long as an article.

Let me for the sake of fun and argument take the other side. Why does an artist have to be a ‘wonderful enough entertainer’? We don’t go to our offices to entertain people. We sometimes work out of necessity, sometimes for satisfaction and pleasure. Why can’t an artist do something which he or she likes? Does he wish that everyone in the world would understand and appreciate his contributions? Did Einstein think that his theory should be appreciated by Taliban? And why do we, as consumers, have to be able to pick the best? Are we rational? If we were, rather than talking about IPL, we would perhaps be talking about much more pertinent issues, or masses’ issues. Issues of a billion people, rather than a few million.

Coming specifically to IPL: Why is cricket not included in Olympics? What has IPL really done? Why is as popular as it is? I like to play Cricket, but honestly it is a painfully long and time taking game. Often times we would just watch India’s batting, isn’t it? Are Aussies or Pakis not good dancers (read players)? Yes they are, but given limited time, we would prefer seeing Sachin batting, rather than Zahir bowling. T20 worked on these and now the long match has been reduced to a short one. And to favor batsman, which we anyway prefer to see, IPL further reduced the boundary. People argue that this is the consumerism of cricket. But wasn’t it the same thing when One-day was introduced? I argue that it is just evolution. May be something even better or appropriate will evolve.

That was for the consumers, what about the Yosuf Pathans? Perhaps many of us wonder why India (a billion+ people country) can’t produce a team that is best in the world. After all, we roughly produce an Australia worth of people every year. Let’s not get started here, this is perhaps a whole new debate in itself. If you want to become a better player, play with people who are better than you. What IPL, I think, very crucially has done is that it brought these Yosufs and the Sachins together. Yes agreed, there are dropped catches, there are small boundaries (well Sachin and Kallis have just hit 1 six, I wonder why they can’t take a stock of the shorter boundaries). But I would like to believe that IPL, the platform will enable future Sachins.