In the name of God, go!

Is it the beginning of the end we are witnessing? Even when Judas betrayed Christ for a few pieces of silver there was hope left behind. Hope for a better humanity for a better world where there would be light one day… But does this tainted trio, who betrayed a billion for some quick money, leave any ray of light behind? It was more often than not that many watching cricket in India in the new millennium said the matches were fixed. Whenever India beat a tough opponent some cried ‘it is fixed’! As if fixing matches was easier than playing them.

Slowly though we overcame that. We learnt to believe in what we wanted to believe- that we were good, we were better and we were strong. As a generation growing up in the early 2000s we dared to take the world in its stride and it was not just the BCCI’s enviable financial might that gave an ordinary Indian his strength, but the stalwarts respected worldwide who made up that team. Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, VVS Laxman, Anil Kumble, Javagal Srinath and the leader of the pack Sourav Ganguly- these were the people who gave us hope. As a generation that never had any colonial baggage whatsoever, we really loved to play cricket our way because they showed us the way. We were immensely proud of what we had as seldom did we believe in any yardstick, in any Arnoldian touchstone. The adage that the white is always right was false for us because we loved to grow up that way and cricket was one of those forces in an emerging India which could render the nation shining. Didn’t we say here is a sport that unites us besides a border tension with Pakistan? Didn’t sociologists infer how small-town cricket changed the entire economic cartography of India? And look where we are today!

Shanthakumaran Sreesanth! Wasn’t this the man who took that famous catch that won us the T20 World Cup? I cried, didn’t sleep that entire night. He was one of my heroes immediately. I still remember how he gave away 21 runs in the first over he had bowled only to follow it up with a maiden next. It all seems so false today. Sreesanth you have betrayed us and also our beautiful game. You have given once again teeth to those sitting beyond the seas who would now nibble at us at will. You have done a disservice to India, to us Asians who play and love cricket.

In my IPL assignments so far, I have spent more time in the galleries adjoining the media box. I have seen waves of young people, kids barely 10 years old chanting wildly. Some of them might have been watching their first cricket match too. How would they feel today? The kid who went to watch Sreesanth would now remember the match not as his first but as being fixed! Will he then trust in the game? Will he then believe that what he saw was cricket and not anything else? After 2000 it took many men to build up that trust, the trust between the fan and the game. Today we are standing at that same unwelcome crossroads and who do we look up to then? Luckily for us, however, Sreesanth did not fix in India colours and that’s the faint ray of hope he is leaving behind.

Dear Sreesanths of Indian cricket if any now, “You’ve sat too long for any good you’ve been doing lately. Depart, I say; and let’s have done with you. In the name of God, go!”

C’mon man!

So the government and the media have done it again! Once again the skeletons tumbled out of the closet but somewhere in the store that rat had nibbled out the cork leaving the red wine flow unappreciated and hence the whole household, with that nonexistent cat, is running after it.

Congratulations to the giants of the game for taking away all the focus from a nation-wide cross generational endemic, affectionately called corruption, by talking intellectual nonsense about petro prices and FDI in retail. Thank you my enlightened brethren who have made the white world their home, my dear formidable NRI role models, all graduates from posh B-schools whose fees my hardworking and honest father could not afford, for talking absolute ‘sense’ about the degraded Indian economy which indeed is like the famished African refusing to sell oil for food. Thanks for reiterating ‘enough is enough, let’s not talk of corruption and the coal scam because the Indian economy is in dire straits’ so as to debate the new-generation Big Bang that would conjure a new world where some of my privileged, and intellectually blessed, friends would rule.

Now somewhere in all this formidable discussion figuring jargons and graphs and numbers and dollar bills and debt crisis and crude prices and what not, I – the average ‘common man’ who earns say just over 20,000 per month and follows all these matters of grave interest with great enthusiasm with the honest intention to understand, if not participate, the process of running an economy- am getting lost.

Can anyone tell me how would the Indian economy post this Big Bang benefit me? You see I am a ‘common man’ – a term that the Indian political ‘class’ and the media at its service have coined.

If at all words can depict social psychology through binary, then this term – ‘common man’ or ‘aam aadmi’- says a lot about how our politicians think. We are ‘common’, we are the ordinary. Hence, we should have to bear the burden of unemployment, of the ravaged economy, of inflation, of a quarterly rise in petro prices, of crammed rail coaches, of bribery to get a passport processed, of power cuts, of traffic jams while a convoy is passing. Vis-à-vis are the people who don’t come under this definition ‘common man’. I mean the politicians, the business houses that run governments and the well-paid national media.

Let me elaborate. All our netas would say this would harm the common man, that was a betrayal of the common man’s trust, these are what the common man does not want… Have they ever made a statement where they are a part of this common man’s class? They are special. Aren’t they? So MPs get free diesel, ride imported cars, own mines and businesses yet get subsidized delicacies at the parliament canteen, have free homes in the national capital where there is uninterrupted power supply, travel free with no queues for tickets and many more. Please don’t forfeit these. After all we have voted you to and for privilege/s. Take them, but don’t talk such rubbish about the economy because you very well know that the money lost in these innumerable and shameless scams and those dollars deposited overseas could have done turned all your promises and planning to reality.

But why aren’t there any efforts netaji?

Ah c’mon man! Try to understand.