In the mental crawlspaces of the rich

I watch the IPL. Hell, I enjoy watching the IPL. 'Tis probably a testament to how much time I've spent trawling through the muck that poses as the Internet over the past two years that I actually feel guilty saying that. The IPL is the Root of All Evil, right? Right, sure. I'm not arguing against that, honest. But it's fun, and it gives me something to look forward to every evening for two months of a year. Like the only reality TV show that's worth watching. Plus, it has a team that represents Chennai and a whole host of players I adore and admire, and given how much of my investment in this sport is purely emotional, I find a lot to get behind.

So this time when I heard they were televising the player auction for 2011 (did they do that the first time? I don't remember), I watched it with much anticipation.

Aaand, uh. Okay. I spent most of the first hour with my mandible stuck firmly to the ground. Because, holy shit, it was mindblowing, in the most perverse way possible. After a while, I got into the rhythm of the whole thing. It was easy to forget, after some time, that they were dealing with actual players; it was like watching a gigantic Fantasy-Team game - can you fit in your dream team within your budget before your opponents do? Play and find out! - and I was getting behind the CSK contingent, praying that we managed to buy back the likes of Ashwin, Murali, Dougie and the rest. It may have gotten a little out of hand (my mother informs me I was raving put that paddle down, crazy Kochi lady! at the TV while the bidding war for Muralitharan was going on between CSK and Kochi, but hey) but it was fun, you know? It was only when the second day came about, and even the team owners looked like they were fooling around and treating the whole thing as a game, that I began to feel queasy. To their credit, though, I thought the CSK contingent remained serious throughout, hardly cracked a smile, and mostly left during the so-called "reauction" at the very end, when they were pretty sure that they'd finished what they'd started out to do. (but then again, the owners barely grinned even when we won the trophy last year, so maybe they're just naturally sourpusses).

People think that this is shocking and demeaning to cricket. I mean, sure, okay. I've always thought that the IPL is just more of a flamboyant circus that doesn't hesitate to show its garishly-painted butt while the rest of cricket is a circus that pretends it's not and covers itself in mouldy trappings in the name of heritage.

I was wondering just how surreal it must've been to sit in that auction room, as part of one of the contingents. Or maybe that's just me, and the owners were perfectly grounded even as astronomical sums of money were splashed about on people they couldn't tell from Adam (give me one person from the team that bought him who can even pronounce "Francois du Plessis"). I don't know. My belief is that everybody who signed up for this circus - franchise owners and players both - knew what they were getting into. They knew what lay ahead, what was likely to happen. And apparently, 353 of them were perfectly fine with it.

Is there a sense of wrongness to all of this, especially given the corruption that's rampant in the IPL's short history, and all the malingering and power-plays in the administration? That the IPL as an incentive is skewing the priorities of whole generations of young cricketers? Certainly.

Can I bring myself to care? Not really. My one explanation would be that cricket seems to be perennially caught in crisis; so much so that I think it's the only way the sport survives. Australian cricket is in crisis after being walloped by the English; Mumbai cricket is in crisis after failing to reach the Ranji semis for the first time in a billion years; cricketing administration is in crisis because Australia and England aren't calling the shots anymore the BCCI is throwing its money-bloated, corrupt stinking weight around; the inundation of Twenty20 is bringing out the basest instincts out of a generation of cricketing innocents, and will nobody think of the children?! But to be completely honest, I don't care about this the same way a lot of don't really care about the stuff that's happening in the rest of the world. If we were to judge ourselves hypocrites by watching the IPL, then there is not one person in the whole world who is not a hypocrite, in some walk of life or the other. Mind you, this is not an attempt at justification. I'm just calling it as I see it. A spade a spade - and maybe occasionally, a shovel.

Every generation has its own demons to grapple; the greatest enemy of our generation is our apathy.