When cricket goes from sport to spectacle
Does cricket-crazy India celebrate the sport or the victory of glamour and money, asks Ashoak Upadhyay, writing in Business Line
Nikita Bastian
25-Feb-2013
Does cricket-crazy India celebrate the sport or the victory of glamour and money, asks Ashoak Upadhyay, writing in Business Line. The IPL, he says, is an amplified form of sport-as-spectacle.
Who, or what, are we celebrating? Our appreciation of Dhoni and his team's victory [in the World Cup] springs from our immersion in a spectacle created for our gratification. We were and are celebrating the idea of victory as filtered through the print [media] but most of all through television. And television trains its spotlight on the individual.
The fourth edition of IPL is a Bollywood fantasy, a carousel of music and lights and glamour moderated by “talking hairdos” in Neil Postman's memorable phrase who shall fill the numbed mind with useless “chatter”. What the IPL audiences will experience is one long commercial meant to reaffirm their self-estimation as Glamorous Indians.
Meanwhile, Richard Lord, writing in the Wall Street Journal asks if the IPL will lose some of the glitz and glamour that has made it so distinctive in an otherwise conservative cricketing world in the absence of the flamboyant Lalit Modi.
More than the star players, more than the quick-fire format, more even than the money, what defined the first three editions of the Indian Premier League was the razzmatazz: the hype, the music, the cheerleaders—all the sound and fury. This year, the lucrative domestic Twenty20 league that revolutionized cricket still has the blasting rock music and incongruous-looking young women dancing on platforms, but behind the scenes, there's a new atmosphere of sobriety.
Nikita Bastian is a sub-editor at ESPNcricinfo