The IPL is prime-time addiction for sports fans across the country. A spectacle of the very best quality that is consumed and celebrated pan-India for two months. Body clocks are adjusted based on IPL timings. People go to bed past midnight and get up late to work around the IPL schedule. Lifestyles change, work patterns get modified and priorities are altered.
For 74 straight games, players’ performances are celebrated and dissected, criticised and debated and continue to trend across social-media platforms. While we celebrate the IPL kind of unthinkingly, it is important to also spare a thought for the players who are between 18 and 40 and, in the prime of their lives, have to give up on pleasures that we normally take for granted. While they get paid in millions, for years they have to give up on things that we consider normal. Just because they are paid top dollar and live in five-star hotels, they don’t get transformed into robots.
While we can eat and drink and do what we want and go wherever we like, these young men have regimented lives for years. They are literally objects of consumption for prime-time television, who provide us all with our daily dose of entertainment and relaxation. They are like commodities on display each evening, without which cricket’s biggest global extravaganza stands to lose its sheen. And that’s why they need to be celebrated and appreciated that much more.
It is not easy. More than the oppressive heat in April-May, it is the kind of unrealistic pressures these players face that lends them to further appreciation. While a Dewald Brevis will have to live up to being the next AB De Villiers, the young Yash Dhull was equated with Virat Kohli. Watched and consumed by millions, each one of these stars are products of a mediatized consumer economy, which has the IPL as one of its prime attractions.
All-Round Abhishek Helps Hyderabad Hold Off Marsh-Inspired Delhi
The IPL is also the only platform where the best of corporate India take each other on in full public glare. Much rides on winning an IPL title, and at times, the pressures get manifested in people’s behavioural patterns during closely contested games. Team owners, men and women who run big corporations, are not as tense in their business meetings as during IPL games. One team owner clutches a worn-out picture of his family deity for the whole time a match is on, and every wicket falling or boundary scored is greeted by a pranaam. Surrounded by friends and family, an IPL owner’s box best defines the complex Indian modernity of today.
Most people in this box wear expensive clothes and watches, carry fancy phones with powerful cameras, and drive to the stadium in luxury cars. But when it comes to the game itself, they turn into devout god-fearing Indians who pray for the success of their teams. Prashad is passed on to the team members hours before the game, and everything from vaastu to feng shui is tried out. Team names and jersey colours are altered to align better with the stars, and it is fandom of a very different nature that makes the IPL a very different beast in comparison to international cricket.
And may I say that all of this adds to the charm of the IPL, and will continue to do so going forward. It is a mix of all these dynamics that makes the IPL the phenomenon that it is. A brand that has only grown bigger and will stay centre stage in India for the next month. As we celebrate the 1000th IPL game to be played later today, we need to appreciate the actors involved a lot more, for there is a world that is beyond the money and the glamour that remains kind of invisible. And this world is certainly not an easy one to navigate.