Bollywood glams up cricket

IPL has rewritten the rules of the game with American-style cheerleaders and movie mavens doing a song-and-dance before every match.

POLITICS and sports do not mix. Or should not mix. Right? How about sports and cinema? Well, sports and cinema have come together to serve up a heady cocktail for a cricket-crazy nation.

Without the presence of leading film stars, it is doubtful if the on-going cricket razzmatazz that is the Indian Premier League would have grabbed Indians.

So enduring is India’s love affair with cricket, that a relatively unknown television channel which successfully bid for the exclusive rights to what is easily the biggest sporting event in the history of this country has seen its viewership zoom sky high.

Commercials during the match telecasts have helped the channel recover a good part of the huge fees it paid to win the telecast rights.

IPL is also a huge success mainly due to its high off-field entertainment quotient.

Mahendra Singh Dhoni dispatching South African quickie Shaun Pollock for a huge six or Rahul Dravid having his woodwork scattered by Harbhajan Singh will always thrill cricket fans.

But now, it is the added bonus of the American-style cheerleaders doing their eye-catching jigs at the IPL matches, and Bollywood stars performing box-office hits, that has made the IPL a not-to-be-missed event.

For never before had Indian sports fans been offered such a wide variety of celebrity-driven entertainment. IPL has re-written the rules of the game. The bidding amount for individual players paid by rival teams in an open auction had set the tone for the IPL.

In roadside eateries and at village wells throughout the country, Indians marvelled open-mouthed at the astronomical sums that were paid to cricketers. Dhoni fetching 4 crore rupees (RM3.13mil) had the entire nation’s tongues wagging.

Quite cleverly the IPL format focuses as much on cricket as it does on the tamasha (entertainment events) that precede each match. The opener at Bangalore on April 18, for instance, was a star-studded affair.

The master showman and liquor king Vijay Mallaya, who owns the local team Royal Challengers laid out a veritable feast for the eyes.

Young foreign women appeared inside glass-like bubbles hung astride the stadium on hardly visible wires, cheerleaders from the Washington Red Skins performed alongside stiltwalkers and Bollywood biggies like Shah Rukh Khan and Preity Zinta worked the capacity crowd which had crammed the stadium several hours before the start of the match. Zinta, incidentally, owns the IPL team, Kings IX Punjab, while Khan is co-owner of the Kolkata Knight Riders.

Captains and owners of all the eight IPL teams appeared on the platform. All this while, eye-catching fireworks lent the sky a million hues.

In short, Day One of IPL, which, incidentally, saw Mallaya’s Royal Challengers going down tamely to the Riders, presaged a great future for the new form of city-based club cricket in India.

A strong note of dissent, however, was sounded by well-known cricket historian Ramchandra Guha.

Criticising the introduction of cheerleaders, Guha said: “All the organisers are doing by making scantily-clad white women dance in front of huge crowds is to stoke the base, voyeuristic and sexual insecurities of the Indian male ? it is revolting and shows the game in poor light.”

Echoing similar objections, an opposition leader in the Maharashtra legislature sought a ban on cheerleaders appearing in IPL matches in Mumbai.

Admittedly, cricket has taken a backseat to off-field entertainment but in time, hopefully, IPL will come to focus on the game.

Already, the IPL experiment is beginning to pay off insofar as hitherto talented but unknown regional players have received national exposure. This should undoubtedly enrich the national pool of cricketers for the selection of the Indian Eleven.

Weeks before the start of the IPL, television ads sought to whip up regional passions with fans of individual teams disdainfully spurning rival teams.

In a typical TV ad, a dentist, for instance, is shown maltreating a patient upon noticing that the latter supports a rival team.

In other words, IPL is a major brand-building project. Each team has roped in a high-octane brand ambassador. Kolkata Knight Riders is fortunate that it has its biggest brand ambassador in its owner Shah Rukh Khan.

The numero uno film hero along with wife Gauri and a whole contingent of his Bollywood friends occupy a part of the VIP stands in all matches featuring the Riders.

And, what is more entertaining for the crowds is that led by Khan the entire Bollywood crowd claps and dances to celebrate every little success of their team on the field. Similarly, Zinta is seen enthusiastically rooting for her Punjab Kings.

The Chennai Super Kings, owned by a local cement company, has roped in the current heartthrobs of the Tamil cinema for promotion.

Vijay and Nayantara appeared at the pre-launch promotional party for the Chennai team and if you did not know that it was for an IPL team you would have mistaken it for the premiere of a Tamil film.

Meanwhile, the Riders are leading the league table with Delhi and Chennai coming a close second and third, respectively.

However, it is still early days and team fortunes could change dramatically, given the glorious uncertainties of cricket.