Fun At Games....Why Not?

The cricket fever is back and India is, once again, a nation possessed!!!

Night after night, people remain glued to their television sets cheering their favourite teams on and devoting great chunks of their time to an analysis of past games and what one can expect in the next. Be it the on-field drama or the emotional histrionics of Sreesanth and Harbajan, the titilating cheerleaders or the glamorous SRK & Zinta shaking a leg to urge their teams to victory..IPL has, with quite a bit of help from Bollywood and the corporate world, glamorised and reinvigorated cricket as never before, seducing even the not so avid fans like me!!

I personally think the IPL is a brilliant concept. And when I say this, I am looking past the glitz, the drama and referring to the idea of mixing nationalities to creating racially diverse, multi-cultural heterogeneous teams.

There comes a time in any entity's growth when, to avoid stagnation, it has to heed the cry for departure from the tried and tested and infuse fresh blood, ideas and energy into its existence. And how better to achieve this, than to wed the known with the relative unknown? Of course, such a marriage can result in utter disaster but then, as long as survival remains a basic tenet of life, there often emerges a new, stronger order. I suspect this will be the case with our cricketers. After all, strength does lie in differences rather than in similarities. Playing as a single team, alongside professionals from all over the world hitherto viewed as opponents, should raise the learning curve of our cricketers.

And it should have taught us, as a country, a little more about the spirit of sportsmanship. While our cricketers hone their skills, it appears that the IPL has done very little to infuse a change in the sportive spirit of our viewing public.

Let's face it. Indians generally make rather fanatic cricket fans, with successes and failures being taken very personally. While these sentiments are understandable to an extent in an inter-nation or an inter-state tournament, I have been struggling to come to terms with the empty stadiums in the wake of a "home team's" loss and the rather fierce expressions of joy and sorrow churned up by the victories and losses of Chennai or Bangalore or Punjab. Surely, all of us know that there is no way that teams like the Deccan Chargers or the Rajasthan Royals which boast of names like Warne, Afridi, Gilchrist,Symonds, Vaas, Smith, etc. can be representative of Indian cities or regions, regardless of the ownership. So how is it that these matches, which are played by mixed medley of players from all over, are internalised by the viewers and metamorphosise into much fiercer battles with regional overtones like Chennai vs. Bangalore and Delhi vs. Mumbai?

To my mind, the IPL matches need to be viewed for what they are: Fun, Games, Glamour,A lot of Noise and almost zilch sentimental baggage. After all, its not the glitz of the uniform that matters, but the spirit that shines within it.