Rather surreal

As the big day approaches, the claims made on behalf of the IPL grow more fabulous. Admittedly most of them come from the mouth of the ubiquitous - and apparently tireless - Lalit Modi, although Shah Rukh Khan is rarely far behind, and today Preity Zinta and Shilpa Shetty arrived at the official pre-tournament press Conference, just in case we got bored. But it is Modi - a man who could calculate his way out of a straitjacket - who keeps feeding us the awesome numbers.

According to him, the IPL will generate between 1.5 and 2 billion rand for the South African economy, although how he knows this is anyone's guess. Last year, we had already learned, three billion "sets of eyeballs" watched the IPL. The 700 IPL employees currently in South Africa have generated 40,000 hotel-room bookings, and goodness knows how many domestic flights. A record 1.2m rand has been spent on advertising the tournament here. And an unprecedented 68 journalists - a number believed never before to have been in the same room - lapped it all up. I invented that last figure, but, well, it felt like a day for juggling with numbers.

Maybe it's the fact that the "I" bit of the IPL no longer applies, but Modi seems compelled to make grander statements this year than last. It could be the need to create an impression on foreign soil, the way some people act up when they are introduced to a friend of a friend for the first time. It could all be true down to the three-billionth set of eyeballs. But what is for sure is that surrealism is in the air.

This suspicion was not quelled by the bus parade through the streets of Cape Town by the players, franchise owners and assorted hangers-on. It certainly didn't help that, for the first time in a while, the skies on the Western Cape were grey and occasionally wet, but it would be an exaggeration to say the crowds were more than one person deep. The players, perhaps sensing an undercurrent of bemusement, decided against the royal wave, while the Rajasthan Royals team sported comedy big black moustaches.

These, it turns out, were in homage to their moustachioed team mascot, Moochu Singh, who according to a press release is "an urbane lion, who believes in the values of strength, dignity and pride much the same as his fellow teammates the Rajasthan Royals". Whether Shane Watson looked strong, dignified or proud with what looked like a small rodent attached to his upper lip, however, is another matter altogether.