For the past 3 decades atleast, there has been only one uniting force in India and that has been the sport of Cricket. Now why that is so is a matter of another sociological discussion, but lets just say that it is so. It is the ONLY thing that ALL of India loves and would be willing to forgive for across all political parties. So naturally, cricketers are revered, adored, respected, loved, and sought out.

Having had the pleasure of spending my growing up years staying in a colony that has respected, adored cricket and has had people older than me, who have intelligently discussed the game, I am definitely privileged to have got a jumpstart at understanding the game. Plus the fact that Sachin Tendulkar is a product of the same colony and, in-fact, we shared the same building for a good 25 years. So, there is this overwhelming influence of cricket that has existed and probably always will (hopefully the new-found popularity of the damn Premier League and the La Liga wont diminish that) in the air where I live.

So for the past 6-7 years, I, a self-confessed cricket lover, enthusiast, follower, below-average player and (I daresay) someone who possesses above-average knowledge and understanding about the sport, have been trying to figure out what the nature of the beast called ‘The IPL’ is and why has it gathered so much hysteria and become the 4th largest league in the world financially in just 5-6 years. After refusing to watch it as i thought it was all fixed (a-la WWE), i figured out that the Cricket played is actually not bad and pretty skillful and gritty. So I’ve ended up seeing many IPL games on TV and after going for a few live IPL games, the last of which was yesterday, I think things are kind-of starting to get clearer. Here I would like to qualify that I have seen hundreds of hours of live cricket of Tests, ODIs & IPL so its not like live cricket holds any new-ness for me.

So, why is the IPL so popular that TRPs of daily-soaps drop during these 2 months and big-budget films avoid this period for their release? If you had to crystallise it down to a single sentence – its is because ‘IPL is Entertainment that looks a little bit like Cricket’. Over the years, the ‘cricketers are loved, adored, by the general populace of India’ stuff I spoke of earlier has reached new heights. Maybe, for most of the country which has a very limited knowledge and understanding of Cricket, the cricketers are some kind of magical gods who create magic just by playing cricket at the highest level. So today, everyone wants a piece of them, wants to hang out with them, touch them and, lastly, just be able to see them in real life. And that is what the IPL provides them numerous opportunities to do – see the cricketers live. Based on the experiences of the past few IPL games I’ve been to, those who come for these games think they’ve actually come to the Zoo… except that the roles are reversed and they are the animals and are the ones actually doing the watching.

The IPL, for a price of a few thousand rupees, feeds the voyeuristic gluttony of the general public of India (the public of who, as Justice Markandey Katju commented – 90% are idiots) to see cricketers in the flesh. It gives them the opportunity to throw plastic bottles at them, and scream out something, anything, platitudes, abuses, or sometimes just their name at them. It allows them more opportunities to try to get onto TV and then do the stupidest un-fan-like things on camera once the camera has caught them behaving like a normal live-sport-viewer-fan and stuck their mug up on the in-stadium screen. The IPL is basically one big party where one of the things to entertain the attendees is Cricket. There are the cheerleaders, there is the music, the DJ, the lights, the pathetic attempts at trying to do the mexican wave, the glamour of the corporate / filmy ‘team-owners’ who hang out with a bevy of male ‘hunks’ & female ‘model & actress-types’. All it costs the public is a few thousand rupees, which today many un-deserving people have the ability to spare.

Some gems from the people sitting around me in yesterday’s IPL game:

1. Guy sitting next to me, wearing 4 gold rings with various gems on them, who kept wiping his oiled hair with his hand and then wiping it on his Tshirt, kept shouting out Andrew Symonds’ name and yelling out loudly ‘Arre monkey Symonds ko batting do’ (in a gujju accent). He also explained to whoever he had come with that strike rate and run rate are the same thing and that CSK has won all the IPLs that have happened so far because of their very high run rate. ROTFL!!!

2. The guy next to me had his teenage daughter with him, who applied nail polish (on her nails) twice during the match. She managed to sneak a bottle of nail polish into the ground by hiding it in her socks and was very proud of it. At one point in time though she spilled an entire glass of coke on herself and kept cribbing for the rest of the match that her “‘dress’ pe daag lag gaya” (she was actually wearing jeans and tshirt)

3. Standing right between guy and the teenage daughter, and behaving like she was her younger sister, was….. wait for it….. her mother. During the 3-4 hours of the match, she ate 4 pizzas, had 3 cokes and in-between was continually waving a Mumbai Indians flag right in front of her (and sometimes my) face. I really do not know how much of the cricket she saw but i am sure that atleast 50 times she must have yelled at the broadcast camera operator standing right below us “arre camera idhar ghuma na”.

Oh also, all 3 of them were wearing identical Mumbai Indians Tshirts with Tendulkar and the No 10 on the back. It wasn’t an original, for sure as one of them had ‘Tendulkar’ misspelt with the ‘n’ missing.

They also tried to take atleast 1 photo during the break at the end of each over of themselves on the guy’s blackberry but i doubt if they ever managed to get one with all 3 of them in it…

4. A group of 4 guys (I think they may have been drunk before the game started at 4pm) sitting in the row behind me. 2 of them kept yelling out ‘Ae Bhajji’ every few minutes forgetting the fact that we were atleast 150 feet away from the ground, sitting in Garware upper (which are actually pretty good seats) and that there is no way in hell that Bhajji would ever hear them scream. One of these guys, at one point, yelled out ‘Ae Pollard, chal out ho ja aur Bhajji ko batting de’. I think this was when there were 3 balls left to be played in the innings… These 3 guys also kept flinging popkorn at some girls sitting in the row in front of them, poured a coke down the inside of the tshirt of a kid. When the kid’s dad showed up, they vamoosed and when they re-surfaced, they kept yelling at the Pune Warriors cheerleaders (who are dressed in traditional Indian outfits from different regions and do traditional dances) “Ae thode jhatke matke dikha na… Kya poore kapde pehenke aayi hai”

And all this was happening in one of the more expensive stands in the stadium. There are a few more but I’m tired of writing now.

I have been to Tests, ODIs and the IPL games and the people who attend these are very very different. My opinion is that the understanding of the sport among the attendees is directly proportionate to the duration of the game. Most people go to test matches to watch cricket. Most people go to IPL games to ‘party’ and just be there so they can tell their friends that they were there, see the cricketers and behave like the ‘quality of cricket’ is a unicorn – a mythical thing that does not exist.

So, given all the above, the IPL is here to stay, will remain popular and the only way the quality of the entire package will shift towards being more classy, is when the Indian populace moves that way!!! Till then – Zoos, daily soaps and bad hindi films – beware! You have competition!