Why is IPL still on, Mr. Jay Shah/ Amit Shah?

As India burnt and helpless Indians reached out to Facebook friends and strangers on Twitter for a hospital bed, oxygen, ambulance and medicine, Indian cricketers and of course most of the film stars are silent. No outraged or mocking tweets from them. No message of sympathy or solidarity. No appeal to the Prime Minister to take urgent steps. Nothing. But this season of IPL continues under the patronage of India’s Home Minister Amit Shah and his son Jay Shah. And indeed the PM.

“20 people die overnight due to oxygen crisis at Delhi hospital” reads the headline of today’s newspaper. This single incident should be sufficient for a day of national mourning you would reckon? 20 precious lives, hopes and dreams…extinguished in a totally avoidable catastrophe.

Amid all the cries for help and distressed tweets of my fellow citizens on Twitter, however, popped up this tweet: “Say ‘Roar Macha’; can you please pose for @imIshant?” along with the hashtag #YehhaiNayiDilli. The tweet was complete with 3 IPL cricketers posing and looking as far removed from reality as our Solicitor General did while famously proclaiming last year in the Supreme Court that there were no migrants on the road while millions were walking on the highways.

I’ll get to the crassness and obscenity of the various IPL franchise twitter feeds in just a moment, but I want you to picture this: imagine seeing live updates of a cricket match on your social media feed while 26/11 was still going on? It wasn’t another lifetime ago. It was just 13 years ago. Just one different government ago.

Imaging being the relative of a loved one trapped inside the Taj or Oberoi and you switch on the tv for updates, and they’re covering the day’s IPL matches. Hold onto that feeling and tell me, what’s changed? how is this time different? is this indeed “Nayi Dilli”? New India? Are people not dying? Is the country not reeling? Are all vital resources not required to be focused on the emergency that faces us? The then Home Minister had to resign for changing his clothes in between press conferences, and here we are changing channels like THAT’s the change we need to be demanding.

I used to be proud of being part of a sport that didn’t just teach you passive sportsmanship, but ACTIVE sportsmanship. They still looked down upon anyone claiming a catch they weren’t sure of. You were encouraged to walk if you’d edged it. The sledging “win at all costs” culture of the Aussies was hated by everyone, across national boundaries. The gentleman’ game.

Today’s Indian cricketers are all gentlemen, no doubt about that. The term that denotes “a man of a good family (especially one entitled to a coat of arms) but not of the nobility”. They’re entitled to our coat of resources for sure, but don’t expect noble gestures from them. There are some who might argue that I’m romanticizing a bygone era and that cricket hasn’t been the same in a long time. I’ve always believed that our sports teams are a microcosm of India, so when I look at the silence of the innocent lambs trapped in their bio bubbles, I do wonder, is this the country now?

There are those who argue that the IPL and sports provides much needed distraction from all the doom and gloom. Let me entertain this “festival” as a possible distraction, I still wonder, is this appropriate? is this needed? I could watch the archers vying for national glory in Guatemala if I wanted a distraction. I could watch videos of actual “achhe din” on tv or OTT platforms for a distraction.

When the lockdown was imposed, Star Sports showed reruns of our world cup 2011 wins and it sure did help. Do all of those activities require the divergence of resources like security personnel, health, hospitality and infrastructure that can otherwise be utilised to aid the efforts to tide over this calamity? Didn’t we turn hotels into quarantine centres for healthcare personnel? Didn’t we convert stadia into covid care centres? wouldn’t giant buildings designed to house lakhs of people be perfect for this dire time? what do I know though. I’m just a common citizen.

So, I’ll talk about what I DO know. I do know that if I were a “proud Indian” who had famously declared ‘I am an Indian first and a Maharashtrian second’, and who was TERRIBLY concerned about the image of India abroad, I’d be talking like a parrot right now.

Are you not aware Sir ji, that many foreign delegates and world leaders are showing their solidarity with India at this time of need? How dare they? Shouldn’t you be at least giving them a talking to for implying that India needs anybody’s help? aren’t we atmanirbhar? While on the subject of silence of cricketers, I wish to urge people not to hound our great leader, part time economist and elephant rights activist, to speak up. He is emblematic of the New India, we only do our talking on the field. With the bat but mostly without.

I’ve long struggled with my failure to make it in cricket. Today I found closure. This isn’t the sport I grew up loving. And these aren’t the values it has imbibed in me. Maybe it is helping people, but when I see updates of the IPL on my feed, tweets of IPL commentators live tweeting the game while the country burns, I feel anger. I feel rage.

This was the sport that stood up against apartheid SA, this was the sport of the great 70s West Indies team, “Calypso cricketers” who made the England team “grovel”. The Indian cricketers have disgraced the sport by staying silent and partaking in an obscene “festival” of blatant consumerism that has nothing to do with national pride and unity. They’ve disgraced MY sport.

I’ll leave you with an excerpt from one of my favourite sports journalists Wright Thompson’s article some years ago:

“Commercialism is a new mistress in sports. The creation of the IPL is India’s Dodgers-leave-Brooklyn moment. Money is changing the sport. The change is seen by most as good. Any achievement by an Indian is good, something to be admired in the light. For many Indians, especially those who speak English and are trying to navigate the brave new world of economic revolution, the issue of identity is an important one. Excellence is tied up in that search. Indian writers are judged by the size of the advance, not the magic of their words…”

“…Indian artists are judged by the price fetched at auction, not the feelings they create in someone who stands before their canvas. Open the paper any random day to find an example. When famous Bollywood actress Aishwarya Rai met Dustin Hoffman at a Lakers game, the tabloids report, she talked to him about “new market-tapping agendas and global trends”. Not acting. Not his construction of Benjamin Braddock or Ted Kramer. They didn’t talk craft. They talked money.”

I’d be chuffed if they even talked money today- the price of lives lost. The price of vaccines, oxygen cylinders, hospitals or…how much money it would take for them to speak up?

I was angry enough to tweet this morning: “Seeing the silence of the Indian cricketers in this hour of national catastrophe & pain, while churning out crass social media content through their franchise handles, I've never been more ashamed to have been associated with this sport…also never been more glad to have been a failed cricketer. To the man who famously stood up against a right wing state party to reiterate he was an Indian before anything else, who started a twitter wide trend of "proud Indian" bios, are you proud today sir?”

But does anyone care?

(The writer is a former cricketer and an active blogger. Views are personal)