Why the IPL scares even a committed capitalist
The sheer presence of the IPL is such that it demands to be watched
Kanishkaa Balachandran
25-Feb-2013
The sheer presence of the IPL is such that it demands to be watched. Private money has poured into the tournament, uncaring of the financial crisis that has coincided neatly with the IPL's lifetime. But the tournament is also a symbol of capitalism gone horrifically wrong, writes Samanth Subramanian in Huffington Post.
The IPL pursues revenues at the expense of other valuable resources: Test cricket, but also domestic cricket, the inevitable breeding grounds for young talent. In its grubbing for money, in fact, the IPL is dismissive of anything old-fashioned, anything aesthetic; even the four seconds between one ball and the next, held sacrosanct through more than a century of cricket, have been sold for inconsequential advertisements. Meanwhile, owners buy teams for staggering quantities of money and with the fuzziest possibilities of recovering their investment; they desire only to dice up the risk and sell it in parts to sponsors and other companies, a practice that should surely sound familiar to us today.
Kanishkaa Balachandran is a senior sub-editor at ESPNcricinfo