Here's the latest issue of the badminton magazine I do in my spare time.
GUTS started off as a stray thought. We were at a junior badminton tournament and I happened to mention to Thomas, badminton fanatic and Secretary of ECA Club, that we needed a newsletter to cover the local badminton scene. He took the suggestion seriously and we brought out a four-page newsletter within a week. We published 1,000 copies and distributed them free, at tournaments and sports stores.
Since then, GUTS has grown. It now offers an Indian perspective of international badminton. In my first editorial, I'd promised nothing -- not even the possibility that this could survive beyond a few issues. The promise still holds, for we are dependent on several variables. But it has taught us a lot of things so far, and I daresay the latest issue is the best we've done so far. Let's see where it goes...
Saturday, August 09, 2008
Saturday, May 24, 2008
The farmer and the mall
I had the privilege of listening to Akshara's talk yesterday. This is the report I filed:
PLAYWRIGHT KV Akshara lit up what could potentially have been a dull afternoon panel discussion on globalisation and regional theatre, with a brilliant delineation that showed the problem in sharp focus. The discussion was the opening programme of a Bengali theatre festival at Ranga Shankara on May 23. The discussion and theatre festival were organised by mukhOsh, a group of theatre enthusiasts from Indian Institute of Science. Akshara, as director of the non-urban theatre heartland Ninasam, had some sharp insights to offer.
While the topic ‘Globalisation and Regional Indian Theatre – A Camouflaged Threat’ drew standard responses from the other panellists (critic Samik Bandyopadhyay, theatre veterans Jagdish Raja and Sohag Sen), Akshara cut up the topic, and then constructed an argument that was hard to contest. “I would change the subject a little,” he began, “because ‘globalisation’, ‘regional’ and ‘threat’ and words that globalisation itself uses. I would instead like to talk about ‘The challenges that my kind of theatre faces today’. The second thing is – I would avoid falling into this trap of (being) either optimistic or pessimistic. We need to first understand the nature of the problem.
“Globalisation means different things to different people. In Bangalore, it might mean malls; in my village, globalisation means the difficulties of being a farmer. These inequalities are reflected in the body of a community or body of an individual.”
Akshara noted three ‘pathologies’ that derived out of globalisation’s effect on Kannada theatre: the marginalisation of the body; the trivialisation of text, and the commodification of design. The avenue for the influence of global capital over local culture was television, which had affected local culture in insidious ways. He illustrated the first problem by noting that television had so restricted the performer that only his face was of value; his body had lost its full expressive function because the frame was so tight. It had come to such a pass that one of his theatre students, who was doing some TV work, had told him: “TV requires only my face, my body is irrelevant… I carry my body along only because I can’t leave it behind.”
Even those of the stature of Naseeruddin Shah and Girish Karnad, Akshara noted, had been unable to keep the restrictive influence of television out of their work. “Naseeruddin Shah has stopped using his body, he depends on his voice and his facial expressions, obviously due to his on-screen work… Karnad’s Odakalu Bimba begins on an ambitious scale… it begins as a play, but ends up as a serial. If this can happen to such personalities, what about lesser people?”
The ‘trivialisation of text’ had come about with the triumph of soap psychology, with the dominant theme being those shown on TV soaps: marriage, divorce and counselling. “The poignancy of any moment – like the wife leaving the husband -- has been trivialised.” The third pathology was the commodification of design, where theatre sets had become more efficient and incorporated the glitter of TV sets. TV had taken over the aesthetic of theatre design, to the extent that one did not know what one was buying – whether it was the product or the packaging.
Akshara had not just announced the problem, he had shown the various ways in which it worked. There could be no one response to this problem – the very fact that some groups had stuck to theatre instead of going to television indicated that the resistance was on. “The threat that culture faces is the same that agriculture faces,” Akshara said. “So theatre people can look to farmers to see how they are resisting. That doesn’t mean, of course, that they too should start committing suicide.”
That last remark drew a chuckle from the audience, but Akshara himself was dead serious.
**
I kept thinking of what Akshara had said... the language of globalisation. He obviously sees the TV as a medium that propagates it... but then again, as he said: What is 'global'? What is 'regional'? What sort of value do we confer upon something when we say it is global? When we call something 'regional', as in theatre, do we mean it is not 'global' enough?
I include here excerpts from two interviews, one of Al Gore, and another of a theatre practitioner and TV actor named Kishore Acharya. Their views on TV are interesting:
Most senior theatre personalities believe television has hurt theatre. Being a part of both worlds, how would you look at television?
Kishore: I’ve been doing theatre for nine years, and from what I know, you can’t make a sustainable income from theatre. It’s very difficult, it’s at an amateur level. There are a couple of professional groups who’re doing it full time, but even they’re only able to make ends meet. Even if you get full houses, you will just break even. So in order to sustain the passion, you get into a job. For me, I wanted to do something related to this, instead of going into something totally different.
I don’t know if TV has spoiled theatre, but – from my point of view -- it has given something more for theatre actors. I don’t know how many could’ve made ends meet otherwise.
Is there something about the TV medium that’s anti-theatre, in terms of dulling the taste of the audience?
Kishore: If over a period of time you watch something that’s not so great, you end up enjoying it. Yeah, TV’s been crucial in that sense. It was bound to happen. But TV is not anti-anything. It is just one form of entertainment which reaches people’s homes. You can’t just blame television… We should concentrate more on protecting theatre than blaming TV for it. What can you do to TV? It’s very quick, it’s amazingly spontaneous. If tomorrow theatre clicks, TV will start recording theatre. The only thing that matters to them is that people should watch it.
**
Beppe Severgnini: Some say television is becoming less important.
Al Gore: In the United States we have gone in two generations from zero television-watching to where the average person watches television for four-and-a-half hours every day. What other activity, apart from sleeping, occupies so many hours a day?
What don't you like about television?
It's mainly made by a small group of people. It does not at present have the democratising effect that the print revolution had. That's why I believe in Current TV. It lets people communicate through the most powerful medium over a network that is the most open. I think that it can breathe new life into the democratic process. Too much American television is driven by the lowest common denominator: to simply command a mass audience without paying sufficient attention to the nature and quality of the programmes.
You said that television channels have a morbid obsession with a drunk-driving pop star who hangs out in fashionable clubs, at a time when the issue is climate change and entire populations are still being tortured. True. But isn't it the public that wants to know everything about drunken pop stars, and not very much about torture?
There's no question that there's a serial obsession in Western culture with celebrity news. In the United States, one of the most grotesque examples was the coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's autopsy. I think it's a system that feeds on itself. The missing ingredient is to open the windows and doors. Let individuals come in and make more interesting material.
What are we going to see on Current TV?
I don't know By definition, I don't know. It will come from them.
Recently, you pointed out that three-quarters of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and this justified the military intervention in Iraq.
The change in information ecology is responsible for this. Where does the information come from? How is it processed? How is it distributed? Who has a hand in the process? How open is the process? When the printing press was introduced, it began a revolution in access to information that had been controlled by elites. With broadcasting that hasn't happened yet. In the United States, 80 per cent of the campaign-spending goes to 30-second commercials. Is that a coincidence?
PLAYWRIGHT KV Akshara lit up what could potentially have been a dull afternoon panel discussion on globalisation and regional theatre, with a brilliant delineation that showed the problem in sharp focus. The discussion was the opening programme of a Bengali theatre festival at Ranga Shankara on May 23. The discussion and theatre festival were organised by mukhOsh, a group of theatre enthusiasts from Indian Institute of Science. Akshara, as director of the non-urban theatre heartland Ninasam, had some sharp insights to offer.
While the topic ‘Globalisation and Regional Indian Theatre – A Camouflaged Threat’ drew standard responses from the other panellists (critic Samik Bandyopadhyay, theatre veterans Jagdish Raja and Sohag Sen), Akshara cut up the topic, and then constructed an argument that was hard to contest. “I would change the subject a little,” he began, “because ‘globalisation’, ‘regional’ and ‘threat’ and words that globalisation itself uses. I would instead like to talk about ‘The challenges that my kind of theatre faces today’. The second thing is – I would avoid falling into this trap of (being) either optimistic or pessimistic. We need to first understand the nature of the problem.
“Globalisation means different things to different people. In Bangalore, it might mean malls; in my village, globalisation means the difficulties of being a farmer. These inequalities are reflected in the body of a community or body of an individual.”
Akshara noted three ‘pathologies’ that derived out of globalisation’s effect on Kannada theatre: the marginalisation of the body; the trivialisation of text, and the commodification of design. The avenue for the influence of global capital over local culture was television, which had affected local culture in insidious ways. He illustrated the first problem by noting that television had so restricted the performer that only his face was of value; his body had lost its full expressive function because the frame was so tight. It had come to such a pass that one of his theatre students, who was doing some TV work, had told him: “TV requires only my face, my body is irrelevant… I carry my body along only because I can’t leave it behind.”
Even those of the stature of Naseeruddin Shah and Girish Karnad, Akshara noted, had been unable to keep the restrictive influence of television out of their work. “Naseeruddin Shah has stopped using his body, he depends on his voice and his facial expressions, obviously due to his on-screen work… Karnad’s Odakalu Bimba begins on an ambitious scale… it begins as a play, but ends up as a serial. If this can happen to such personalities, what about lesser people?”
The ‘trivialisation of text’ had come about with the triumph of soap psychology, with the dominant theme being those shown on TV soaps: marriage, divorce and counselling. “The poignancy of any moment – like the wife leaving the husband -- has been trivialised.” The third pathology was the commodification of design, where theatre sets had become more efficient and incorporated the glitter of TV sets. TV had taken over the aesthetic of theatre design, to the extent that one did not know what one was buying – whether it was the product or the packaging.
Akshara had not just announced the problem, he had shown the various ways in which it worked. There could be no one response to this problem – the very fact that some groups had stuck to theatre instead of going to television indicated that the resistance was on. “The threat that culture faces is the same that agriculture faces,” Akshara said. “So theatre people can look to farmers to see how they are resisting. That doesn’t mean, of course, that they too should start committing suicide.”
That last remark drew a chuckle from the audience, but Akshara himself was dead serious.
**
I kept thinking of what Akshara had said... the language of globalisation. He obviously sees the TV as a medium that propagates it... but then again, as he said: What is 'global'? What is 'regional'? What sort of value do we confer upon something when we say it is global? When we call something 'regional', as in theatre, do we mean it is not 'global' enough?
I include here excerpts from two interviews, one of Al Gore, and another of a theatre practitioner and TV actor named Kishore Acharya. Their views on TV are interesting:
Most senior theatre personalities believe television has hurt theatre. Being a part of both worlds, how would you look at television?
Kishore: I’ve been doing theatre for nine years, and from what I know, you can’t make a sustainable income from theatre. It’s very difficult, it’s at an amateur level. There are a couple of professional groups who’re doing it full time, but even they’re only able to make ends meet. Even if you get full houses, you will just break even. So in order to sustain the passion, you get into a job. For me, I wanted to do something related to this, instead of going into something totally different.
I don’t know if TV has spoiled theatre, but – from my point of view -- it has given something more for theatre actors. I don’t know how many could’ve made ends meet otherwise.
Is there something about the TV medium that’s anti-theatre, in terms of dulling the taste of the audience?
Kishore: If over a period of time you watch something that’s not so great, you end up enjoying it. Yeah, TV’s been crucial in that sense. It was bound to happen. But TV is not anti-anything. It is just one form of entertainment which reaches people’s homes. You can’t just blame television… We should concentrate more on protecting theatre than blaming TV for it. What can you do to TV? It’s very quick, it’s amazingly spontaneous. If tomorrow theatre clicks, TV will start recording theatre. The only thing that matters to them is that people should watch it.
**
Beppe Severgnini: Some say television is becoming less important.
Al Gore: In the United States we have gone in two generations from zero television-watching to where the average person watches television for four-and-a-half hours every day. What other activity, apart from sleeping, occupies so many hours a day?
What don't you like about television?
It's mainly made by a small group of people. It does not at present have the democratising effect that the print revolution had. That's why I believe in Current TV. It lets people communicate through the most powerful medium over a network that is the most open. I think that it can breathe new life into the democratic process. Too much American television is driven by the lowest common denominator: to simply command a mass audience without paying sufficient attention to the nature and quality of the programmes.
You said that television channels have a morbid obsession with a drunk-driving pop star who hangs out in fashionable clubs, at a time when the issue is climate change and entire populations are still being tortured. True. But isn't it the public that wants to know everything about drunken pop stars, and not very much about torture?
There's no question that there's a serial obsession in Western culture with celebrity news. In the United States, one of the most grotesque examples was the coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's autopsy. I think it's a system that feeds on itself. The missing ingredient is to open the windows and doors. Let individuals come in and make more interesting material.
What are we going to see on Current TV?
I don't know By definition, I don't know. It will come from them.
Recently, you pointed out that three-quarters of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and this justified the military intervention in Iraq.
The change in information ecology is responsible for this. Where does the information come from? How is it processed? How is it distributed? Who has a hand in the process? How open is the process? When the printing press was introduced, it began a revolution in access to information that had been controlled by elites. With broadcasting that hasn't happened yet. In the United States, 80 per cent of the campaign-spending goes to 30-second commercials. Is that a coincidence?
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Bring On the Recession
By George Monbiot
I am about to break the last of the universal taboos. I hope that the recession now being forecast by some economists materialises…
On Sunday I visited the only UN biosphere reserve in Wales: the Dyfi estuary. As is usual at weekends, several hundred people had come to enjoy its beauty and tranquility and, as is usual, two or three people on jet skis were spoiling it for everyone else. Most economists will tell us that human welfare is best served by multiplying the number of jet skis. If there are two in the estuary today, there should be four there by this time next year and eight the year after. Because the estuary’s beauty and tranquility don’t figure in the national accounts (no one pays to watch the sunset) and because the sale and use of jet skis does, this is deemed an improvement in human welfare…
I now live in one of the poorest places in Britain. The teenagers here have expensive haircuts, fashionable clothes and mobile phones. Most of those who are old enough have cars, which they drive incessantly and write off every few weeks. Their fuel and insurance bills must be astronomical. They have been liberated from the horrible poverty their grandparents suffered, and this is something we should celebrate and must never forget. But with one major exception, can anyone argue that the basic needs of everyone in the rich nations cannot now be met?
…
Is there anything which could sensibly be described as welfare that the rich can now gain? A month ago the Financial Times ran a feature on how department stores are trying to cater for “the consumer who has Arrived”. But the unspoken theme of the article is that no one arrives - the destination keeps shifting. The problem, an executive from Chanel explained, is that luxury has been “over-democratised.” The rich are having to spend more and more to distinguish themselves from the herd: in the US the market in goods and services designed for this purpose is worth £720bn a year. To ensure that you cannot be mistaken for a lesser being, you can now buy gold and diamond saucepans from Harrods. Without conscious irony, the article was illustrated with a photograph of a coffin. It turns out to be a replica of Lord Nelson’s coffin, carved from wood taken from the ship on which he died, and yours for a fortune in a new, hyper-luxury department of Selfridges. Sacrificing your health and happiness to earn the money to buy this junk looks like a sign of advanced mental illness.
Full story: http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/10/09/bring-on-the-recession/
I am about to break the last of the universal taboos. I hope that the recession now being forecast by some economists materialises…
On Sunday I visited the only UN biosphere reserve in Wales: the Dyfi estuary. As is usual at weekends, several hundred people had come to enjoy its beauty and tranquility and, as is usual, two or three people on jet skis were spoiling it for everyone else. Most economists will tell us that human welfare is best served by multiplying the number of jet skis. If there are two in the estuary today, there should be four there by this time next year and eight the year after. Because the estuary’s beauty and tranquility don’t figure in the national accounts (no one pays to watch the sunset) and because the sale and use of jet skis does, this is deemed an improvement in human welfare…
I now live in one of the poorest places in Britain. The teenagers here have expensive haircuts, fashionable clothes and mobile phones. Most of those who are old enough have cars, which they drive incessantly and write off every few weeks. Their fuel and insurance bills must be astronomical. They have been liberated from the horrible poverty their grandparents suffered, and this is something we should celebrate and must never forget. But with one major exception, can anyone argue that the basic needs of everyone in the rich nations cannot now be met?
…
Is there anything which could sensibly be described as welfare that the rich can now gain? A month ago the Financial Times ran a feature on how department stores are trying to cater for “the consumer who has Arrived”. But the unspoken theme of the article is that no one arrives - the destination keeps shifting. The problem, an executive from Chanel explained, is that luxury has been “over-democratised.” The rich are having to spend more and more to distinguish themselves from the herd: in the US the market in goods and services designed for this purpose is worth £720bn a year. To ensure that you cannot be mistaken for a lesser being, you can now buy gold and diamond saucepans from Harrods. Without conscious irony, the article was illustrated with a photograph of a coffin. It turns out to be a replica of Lord Nelson’s coffin, carved from wood taken from the ship on which he died, and yours for a fortune in a new, hyper-luxury department of Selfridges. Sacrificing your health and happiness to earn the money to buy this junk looks like a sign of advanced mental illness.
Full story: http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/10/09/bring-on-the-recession/
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Pavlov’s dogs
My remaining thoughts on the IPL – which has invaded our space so much that it’s impossible to ignore. I hope to avoid further comment on this distasteful subject
SOME of my friends were surprised at my dismissal of the IPL. “But it’s entertaining,” one said.
I’m known to be a spoilsport, a loser and a party-pooper. Yet my disdain for the IPL is not so much because I’m a spoilsport, as that I’m wary of anything that the mass unequivocally endorses.
Doubtless that the IPL is a revolution in cricket history; doubtless too that the sport will never be the same again. I don’t think it will kill Test cricket. I don’t have a problem with the league, or with the players earning lots of money, or even with the cheerleaders.
Speaking from a purely cricketing point of view, I don’t think Twenty20 qualifies to be cricket. It has none of the subtler elements of the sport that are unique to it. Cricket is possibly the one game that can be called a microcosm of life – and that’s because the five-day game carries within it so many elements and possibilities that are absent in most other sports. Time is a Test cricketer.
Where in the Twenty20 game is there any relevance for Time?
When I was in college, a friend invented a game called anti-chess. It was a crazy game – the rule was that the pieces would move like in the traditional game, but instead of plotting to kill, you had to offer yourself for the kill. Meaning that, my goal would be to place every piece in such a position that it was open to attack – and the opponent is not allowed to refuse the offer. The player with the lesser number of pieces on the board would be the winner.
The game resembled a massacre, with each player desperate to offer as many of his pieces for the kill, and would get over in about 10 minutes.
Twenty20 reminds me of that. It is the equivalent of having a football World Cup on penalties only; or a boxing contest between a lightweight and a heavyweight (“It’s entertaining!”). The comparison is not misplaced, for the bowler in a T20 match is much like the lightweight who runs into the heavyweight, with all the doors locked.
But coming to my earlier complaint, about the mass. “People love it!” is another declamation I heard in the IPL’s defence. As if the people, to speak of the mass, have been known to have any intelligent taste.
The problem I have with the IPL is that TV and commercial viability are allowed to decide what’s good and what’s bad; it was almost as if the slick marketing had hypnotized people into believing it was good.
But what’s so good about an IPL match? The conditions are heavily in favour of the batsman – the boundaries are so close that every lofted shot becomes a six. When Brendon McCullum played a savage innings in the first match, everybody hailed it as a masterpiece – but then, within the next fortnight, at least six batsmen had played similar innings. Someone like Yusuf Pathan, who isn’t good enough to be in the ODI team, had scored his 50 in 23 balls. It was absurd – but that’s what the format did – making the batsmen look better than they were.
People had decided the IPL was good because they were told so by Shah Rukh Khan, Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid. Essentially, that means that they bought into the hype; they found the IPL interesting not because the cricket was good, but because, after a decade and a half of buying things that Shah Rukh Khan and Tendulkar have been peddling, they found their hard-sell impossible to resist. The comparison with Pavlov’s dog is not out of place. Everybody was talking of how the IPL was good – for the players, for the sponsors, for TV. But this ‘goodness’ is just TRP.
My problem is that this nonsense has become inescapable; it’s on every TV show and on the front page of every paper. Again, commerce has been allowed to determine what’s ‘good’. I have no problem with treating the IPL as just another event, and to leave it at that, but of course then it will not be ‘good’ enough. Its ‘goodness’ accrues from the fact that it’s sellable, and it’s sellable because Bollywood and industry have decided to hitch their wagons to it.
And when they do that, they try to squeeze every drop out of it. Asianet, for instance, has a hit show called ‘Idea Star Singer’, which is a local version of American Idol, the difference being that the judges are musicians/ accomplished singers and can dissect a performer on his musical merit. The show was good enough, and was making plenty of money, but then Asianet got into this vulgar habit of getting the participants to invite their parents on stage and bawling into each other’s shoulders when they lost the contest, etc. They were behaving as if they were diagnosed with cancer or something – and all they had lost was a chance to progress into the next stage. The cameras would show us close-ups of tears in their eyes. It was hideous. The show was sellable on its own terms, but the producers wanted more – they wanted to turn viewers into voyeurs. The Malayalee viewer, who has degraded in his tastes ever since television came into his living room, behaved exactly as the producers wanted him to behave.
The show has become a money-spinner for Asianet. Any marketing chap will look at me strangely if I speak my mind about it… but that’s what’s become of television. The position that “it gives the people what they want” or that “the show is good because it makes money” doesn’t cut it with me. That’s your worldview. I don’t subscribe to it, and I think anyone who subscribes to it is morally sick.
Lalit Modi, the BCCI chap who conceived the IPL, said in an interview that, despite all the peripheral attractions, it was still cricket – that the cricket had not been encroached upon.
He couldn’t have been more wrong.
Cricket has been encroached upon. There are so many ads in between each over that you wonder if you’re watching a cricket match or a series of ads with some cricket in between.
We keep comparing the IPL to the English Premier League, but we cannot even hope to match the class with which they telecast EPL matches. Ads don’t come up every time the ball goes over the sideline, or when a goal is scored. If it were left to us Indians, that’s how we’d have marketed it And yet the EPL is one of the richest sports leagues in the world. Can’t we conduct the IPL similarly – have the ads, but don’t make them harangue you endlessly?
It’s this relentless bludgeoning of ads, on the back of the IPL, that’s disconcerting. The sport side of IPL, the Twenty20, is nothing to be alarmed by – it’s an extension of the sport we used to play as kids. All of us played Sixteen16.
The IPL is 20 parts cricket and 80 parts pimping -- or ‘advertising’, as they like to call it. And to those who say: “But it’s entertaining”, I can only say: “That’s what the hookers say, too.”
SOME of my friends were surprised at my dismissal of the IPL. “But it’s entertaining,” one said.
I’m known to be a spoilsport, a loser and a party-pooper. Yet my disdain for the IPL is not so much because I’m a spoilsport, as that I’m wary of anything that the mass unequivocally endorses.
Doubtless that the IPL is a revolution in cricket history; doubtless too that the sport will never be the same again. I don’t think it will kill Test cricket. I don’t have a problem with the league, or with the players earning lots of money, or even with the cheerleaders.
Speaking from a purely cricketing point of view, I don’t think Twenty20 qualifies to be cricket. It has none of the subtler elements of the sport that are unique to it. Cricket is possibly the one game that can be called a microcosm of life – and that’s because the five-day game carries within it so many elements and possibilities that are absent in most other sports. Time is a Test cricketer.
Where in the Twenty20 game is there any relevance for Time?
When I was in college, a friend invented a game called anti-chess. It was a crazy game – the rule was that the pieces would move like in the traditional game, but instead of plotting to kill, you had to offer yourself for the kill. Meaning that, my goal would be to place every piece in such a position that it was open to attack – and the opponent is not allowed to refuse the offer. The player with the lesser number of pieces on the board would be the winner.
The game resembled a massacre, with each player desperate to offer as many of his pieces for the kill, and would get over in about 10 minutes.
Twenty20 reminds me of that. It is the equivalent of having a football World Cup on penalties only; or a boxing contest between a lightweight and a heavyweight (“It’s entertaining!”). The comparison is not misplaced, for the bowler in a T20 match is much like the lightweight who runs into the heavyweight, with all the doors locked.
But coming to my earlier complaint, about the mass. “People love it!” is another declamation I heard in the IPL’s defence. As if the people, to speak of the mass, have been known to have any intelligent taste.
The problem I have with the IPL is that TV and commercial viability are allowed to decide what’s good and what’s bad; it was almost as if the slick marketing had hypnotized people into believing it was good.
But what’s so good about an IPL match? The conditions are heavily in favour of the batsman – the boundaries are so close that every lofted shot becomes a six. When Brendon McCullum played a savage innings in the first match, everybody hailed it as a masterpiece – but then, within the next fortnight, at least six batsmen had played similar innings. Someone like Yusuf Pathan, who isn’t good enough to be in the ODI team, had scored his 50 in 23 balls. It was absurd – but that’s what the format did – making the batsmen look better than they were.
People had decided the IPL was good because they were told so by Shah Rukh Khan, Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid. Essentially, that means that they bought into the hype; they found the IPL interesting not because the cricket was good, but because, after a decade and a half of buying things that Shah Rukh Khan and Tendulkar have been peddling, they found their hard-sell impossible to resist. The comparison with Pavlov’s dog is not out of place. Everybody was talking of how the IPL was good – for the players, for the sponsors, for TV. But this ‘goodness’ is just TRP.
My problem is that this nonsense has become inescapable; it’s on every TV show and on the front page of every paper. Again, commerce has been allowed to determine what’s ‘good’. I have no problem with treating the IPL as just another event, and to leave it at that, but of course then it will not be ‘good’ enough. Its ‘goodness’ accrues from the fact that it’s sellable, and it’s sellable because Bollywood and industry have decided to hitch their wagons to it.
And when they do that, they try to squeeze every drop out of it. Asianet, for instance, has a hit show called ‘Idea Star Singer’, which is a local version of American Idol, the difference being that the judges are musicians/ accomplished singers and can dissect a performer on his musical merit. The show was good enough, and was making plenty of money, but then Asianet got into this vulgar habit of getting the participants to invite their parents on stage and bawling into each other’s shoulders when they lost the contest, etc. They were behaving as if they were diagnosed with cancer or something – and all they had lost was a chance to progress into the next stage. The cameras would show us close-ups of tears in their eyes. It was hideous. The show was sellable on its own terms, but the producers wanted more – they wanted to turn viewers into voyeurs. The Malayalee viewer, who has degraded in his tastes ever since television came into his living room, behaved exactly as the producers wanted him to behave.
The show has become a money-spinner for Asianet. Any marketing chap will look at me strangely if I speak my mind about it… but that’s what’s become of television. The position that “it gives the people what they want” or that “the show is good because it makes money” doesn’t cut it with me. That’s your worldview. I don’t subscribe to it, and I think anyone who subscribes to it is morally sick.
Lalit Modi, the BCCI chap who conceived the IPL, said in an interview that, despite all the peripheral attractions, it was still cricket – that the cricket had not been encroached upon.
He couldn’t have been more wrong.
Cricket has been encroached upon. There are so many ads in between each over that you wonder if you’re watching a cricket match or a series of ads with some cricket in between.
We keep comparing the IPL to the English Premier League, but we cannot even hope to match the class with which they telecast EPL matches. Ads don’t come up every time the ball goes over the sideline, or when a goal is scored. If it were left to us Indians, that’s how we’d have marketed it And yet the EPL is one of the richest sports leagues in the world. Can’t we conduct the IPL similarly – have the ads, but don’t make them harangue you endlessly?
It’s this relentless bludgeoning of ads, on the back of the IPL, that’s disconcerting. The sport side of IPL, the Twenty20, is nothing to be alarmed by – it’s an extension of the sport we used to play as kids. All of us played Sixteen16.
The IPL is 20 parts cricket and 80 parts pimping -- or ‘advertising’, as they like to call it. And to those who say: “But it’s entertaining”, I can only say: “That’s what the hookers say, too.”
Saturday, April 19, 2008
T20 and the prostitution of cricket
I watched the first Indian Premier League (IPL) match in Bangalore yesterday – a match supposed to be a ‘historic’ event in Indian sport.
The madness has been on for a while. The IPL has created an industry around it, with publications, ad agencies, agents, TV people, and just about everybody getting on the wagon. Yesterday I picked up the Times of India and there it was – a half-page ad neatly butting into the two lead stories.
I wondered whether it was the ad riding piggyback on the lead, or the other way round. It left me with a vague feeling of uneasiness…
I’m not one of those who dismissed the IPL. So many sports in India suffer from a lack of enterprise, and you wonder if they could do with a dose of cricket-style marketing. Nor has cricket been pristine. The prostitution of cricket began with the One Day Internationals, and the T20 is just an extension of that. But something else was playing on my mind…
I missed the glitzy opening ceremony but made it in time for the first ball. The match made absolutely no impression on me… There were plenty of sixes and fours and wickets, and undoubtedly there was skill in each, but the uneasiness was about something else…
It was hollow. That’s what I felt. They were just selling a big lemon to everybody. All this talk about ‘karmayudh’, and all the music videos and TV debates and profound columns later, you wondered… is this all?
A lot of comparisons are made with the English Premier League, but I don’t think this comes close. The EPL – or any other top football league – is the real deal. Despite all the hype, it is still football. But the IPL is not even about cricket… it is a stupid corrupted version of the real thing.
What everybody was selling was the ad spots. They'd wondered where to put all this money, and then they found they could create this Twenty20 thing, and all of them pitched their money on it. The money came first; the sport later. The players were just bit actors in this spectacle, a bunch of clotheshorses around whom some tag had to be put for a price. I was bored out of my wits and left some time before the end, and then I switched on the TV today and they said the match had “rocked the city”. TV had created its own world, and that was unrecognisable from the world I had experienced.
And then it struck me – this could have happened only in India. Nowhere else can so many people be fooled by so few for so little. Whenever there’s money to be made in this country, all the hideous little hustlers close in on the game. We’ve subverted everything – we’ve taken democracy and subverted it; we’ve taken world music and subverted it; we’ve taken cricket and subverted it.
News is officially gossip; half-wits like Navjot Singh Sindhu are allowed to cackle endlessly at prime time; a neandrathal named Denzel O'Connell, who stumbled out of his Ice Age sleep and walked into a TV channel, is allowed to anchor a show. How did we come to this pass? Sure, news has to be cutting edge, but how have we allowed this garbage to substitute news?
You wonder if news follows an event, or creates it. The IPL is every marketer's dream come true, we will now have news that's no different from an ad campaign. Indeed, now an ad campaign is itself news.
I’d attended an international badminton tournament in Europe recently, a sport that has not yet seen the corruption that cricket has. I was delighted at the dignity with which they conducted everything. That was sport at its best, without all the chest-thumping and ridiculous notions of patriotism that are shouted out here. Nations pale before Sport – what is a petty Nation compared to Sport? Why can’t India be mature about its cricket and its movies and its music?
In an age when Shah Rukh (‘Buy Me! I’m for Sale!’) Khan is made out to be a national icon, it’s not surprising that our national pride comes from winning a phony cricket match.
The madness has been on for a while. The IPL has created an industry around it, with publications, ad agencies, agents, TV people, and just about everybody getting on the wagon. Yesterday I picked up the Times of India and there it was – a half-page ad neatly butting into the two lead stories.
I wondered whether it was the ad riding piggyback on the lead, or the other way round. It left me with a vague feeling of uneasiness…
I’m not one of those who dismissed the IPL. So many sports in India suffer from a lack of enterprise, and you wonder if they could do with a dose of cricket-style marketing. Nor has cricket been pristine. The prostitution of cricket began with the One Day Internationals, and the T20 is just an extension of that. But something else was playing on my mind…
I missed the glitzy opening ceremony but made it in time for the first ball. The match made absolutely no impression on me… There were plenty of sixes and fours and wickets, and undoubtedly there was skill in each, but the uneasiness was about something else…
It was hollow. That’s what I felt. They were just selling a big lemon to everybody. All this talk about ‘karmayudh’, and all the music videos and TV debates and profound columns later, you wondered… is this all?
A lot of comparisons are made with the English Premier League, but I don’t think this comes close. The EPL – or any other top football league – is the real deal. Despite all the hype, it is still football. But the IPL is not even about cricket… it is a stupid corrupted version of the real thing.
What everybody was selling was the ad spots. They'd wondered where to put all this money, and then they found they could create this Twenty20 thing, and all of them pitched their money on it. The money came first; the sport later. The players were just bit actors in this spectacle, a bunch of clotheshorses around whom some tag had to be put for a price. I was bored out of my wits and left some time before the end, and then I switched on the TV today and they said the match had “rocked the city”. TV had created its own world, and that was unrecognisable from the world I had experienced.
And then it struck me – this could have happened only in India. Nowhere else can so many people be fooled by so few for so little. Whenever there’s money to be made in this country, all the hideous little hustlers close in on the game. We’ve subverted everything – we’ve taken democracy and subverted it; we’ve taken world music and subverted it; we’ve taken cricket and subverted it.
News is officially gossip; half-wits like Navjot Singh Sindhu are allowed to cackle endlessly at prime time; a neandrathal named Denzel O'Connell, who stumbled out of his Ice Age sleep and walked into a TV channel, is allowed to anchor a show. How did we come to this pass? Sure, news has to be cutting edge, but how have we allowed this garbage to substitute news?
You wonder if news follows an event, or creates it. The IPL is every marketer's dream come true, we will now have news that's no different from an ad campaign. Indeed, now an ad campaign is itself news.
I’d attended an international badminton tournament in Europe recently, a sport that has not yet seen the corruption that cricket has. I was delighted at the dignity with which they conducted everything. That was sport at its best, without all the chest-thumping and ridiculous notions of patriotism that are shouted out here. Nations pale before Sport – what is a petty Nation compared to Sport? Why can’t India be mature about its cricket and its movies and its music?
In an age when Shah Rukh (‘Buy Me! I’m for Sale!’) Khan is made out to be a national icon, it’s not surprising that our national pride comes from winning a phony cricket match.
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Thoughts…
The dominant colour of Kerala is white-and-gold. You see it everywhere – most prominently in the attire of Mohini Attam dancers. Gold chains shimmer around the sweaty necks of Panchavadyam drummers, contrasting keenly with the spotless white of their mundus. The elderly matriarch, the white of her dress indistinguishable from the white of her hair, lights the lamp each evening, the glow from the flame shimmering off its polished bronze.
I remember a long interview with MF Husain. He was surprisingly chatty, and I asked him to compare his series of paintings in Rajasthan with that of Kerala.
“They’re opposites,” he said. “In Rajasthan, the landscape is so barren, but the people are so fully dressed you can barely make out their features. Their clothes are brilliantly lit up with colour. In Kerala, the landscape is so lush, but the people are all dressed in white, and the men don’t even cover their torsos. Look at the brown of the skin that contrasts so well with the green background.”
This colour scheme was captured brilliantly in Malayalam movies between the mid-Eighties to the mid-Nineties. Dress wasn’t a distinguishable factor for the protagonist. Mohanlal’s best work, for instance, has come as the average next-door bum, dressed as casually and as unremarkably as any unemployed neighbourhood guy. He had no need to dress differently to stand out as the hero. That was accomplished by dialogue, characterisation, etc.
It all changed in the late Nineties. To track Mohanlal is to track the Kerala male of the last 20 years. He suddenly acquired heroic abilities. The clothes became more pan-Indian, the colours louder. From the neighbourhood bum he became the cash-rich don who returns home to seek revenge.
The colours of Kerala had changed.
When I attended my cousin’s wedding last year, I was surprised to see the kind of sarees the women wore. All of us went to the nearby temple in white, but when they got ready to attend the ceremony, they put on their Kanchi silk sarees. Colour has never disappointed me as much.
The attire of the young has changed. I’ve been in football matches where players have all turned up in mundus. One is hardly likely to find that now.
Look at any of the serials on TV, and the mundu is a rare sight, restricted to only exaggerated versions of folk stories or mythologicals. The visuals TV depict could be of any Indian home. There is nothing to suggest that this is Kerala.
For a long time the charm of Kerala was its bareness, its proximity to the historical age. Nature is mostly as uninterrupted now as it must have been. Clothing styles have only just begun to change. No garment can remain as primordial as the mundu – it is just a length of white cloth. That’s why it’s easier to shoot a historical or mythological movie in Kerala than any other part of India.
The nature of the mundu is such that it absolves identity. Consider, for instance, the Arab attire. There is nothing to suggest in the dress, unless it is expensively embroidered, that one man is rich and the other poor. It hides all physical inadequacies. That is the case, to some extent, with the mundu as well. A clean, starched mundu hides your true identity, because there is nothing to measure you by. I suspect that this absolving of identity is why young people don’t wear it any more – it kills style. Style is identity.
But that is also why it is liberating to wear it.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Where I come from
Summer. People talk of the old days and the cool climes of Bangalore, but I was never enamoured of the city. Bangalore meant busywork, the tyranny of school, and I was happy to get out. There was one place always beckoning – we called it ‘native place’, which was where our parents came from. One doesn’t hear the term anymore.
Peruvemba is an obscure place in the district of Palakkad, Kerala. It is a nothing place, really, and nothing ever happens there except an annual temple festival. The summers are searingly hot. The air carries with it the devil’s breath. Everything is still except for the occasional breeze. But we loved it all.
When we were little the place did not even have electricity. I remember the kerosene lanterns; the quietness that stole in after sunset; the winds that rustled among the bamboo groves. It was scary, fascinating. You could step out of the house and look around for miles. There was nothing but fields all around, fields and coconut groves, and a railway track in the distance. Some distance away was an abandoned house, and one always imagined sounds inside.
The days were wet with sweat. Grandpa would narrate stories from the Ramayana or Mahabharata, stories that didn’t seem so fantasy-like because you could relate to them somehow, because you had nothing to do in the afternoons but lie on the verandah and look into the open fields and watch the clouds and imagine there was another world beyond what we saw. Mythology wasn’t mythology; it was the story of the land. The ponds and trees had stories woven around them, and people said even the well in our yard had spirits inside that came out at night.
It was a place we longed to visit each summer.
And then Grandpa died and we moved out.
But I still return as often as I can.
And when I do there’s a strange yearning inside.
And I wonder what kids do these days in summer, because they don’t talk about where they come from anymore. They’ve seen more of the world, more of Bangkok and Pattaya and Singapore, and that’s not a bad thing. But have they felt the same tingle of revisiting a place that they came from; village elders asking you about stories of the city; neighbours ushering you into their homes and treating you to lunch or dinner just because they were once playmates of your folks.
Marking Time by the hoot of the distant train; sleeping on trees; catching fish in towels; feeling the first flush of dawn; long days watching the lone farmer in the field (no teachers, thankfully, to talk of homework); listening to the wind whistle through bamboo groves.
There’s more to a place than the sights.
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