On the morning of every New Years’ Day, as India wakes up hungover from the previous night’s partying, many reach out for their phones to check out the calendar. There is broadly one agenda in mind for this curious activity — examine the dates for all the festivals. On the first day after a holiday, we start our countdowns to the next one.
Unlike in the west, we don’t have a festive season. Ours is a festive land. There is a commonly used phrase in Bengali — “baaro maashe, taero parbon” — which directly translates to thirteen festivals in twelve months. If this phrase was coined any time after April 2008, the author would’ve mentioned fourteen. The Indian Premier League, since the day Ravi Shastri walked out to do the pitch report at Bangalore’s Chinnaswamy Stadium, decked in a glittering sherwani and dupatta, has been a six-week-long annual festival.
You can hear and feel the IPL approaching. The air moves different, cricketers start showing up unannounced in television advertisements, and you find yourself micromanaging your day to free up all commitments by 8 pm. As the bowler stands upright at the top of his run-up, fingers wrapped tightly around the seam of the glistening white SG ball, and the digital timer on the giant screen at the stadium starts the count-back from ten, an entire country gets drawn into an LED-lit cocoon.
The IPL was designed as a carnival where two of India’s biggest cultural obsessions — cricket and Bollywood — met. In the first couple of seasons, the tournament, at least in coverage, was one part cricket super league and another part Bollywood reality show. After every boundary or a wicket, cameras would cut to a bunch of celebrities in the VVIP box, dancing and waving the flag of their teams, almost as if they have been programmed. Oftentimes, in between two innings, the host broadcaster would get a couple of actors to talk about cricket; and more often than not, it would be someone without much interest in the sport. “I hope Dhawan scores a lot of runs today,” said one such budding entrant into IPL and Bollywood consciousness. Dhawan had already batted and scored very little if not nothing.
Like Siddhartha Basu and Amitabh Bacchan’s Kaun Banega Crorepati all those years back, the IPL became India’s great social unifier. Families huddled up with fried snacks and buckets of popcorn to watch Chris Gayle tonk the ball with the air of someone swatting a fly. We watched with jaws agape when Dwayne Bravo and Kieron Pollard shimmied on the pitch and Shah Rukh Khan danced in the lawns outside the Eden Gardens dressing rooms. Sport and entertainment had rarely been served in a more potent cocktail.
But the cricket, oh the cricket, it was from a different planet.
Beginnings don’t come as brilliant as Brendon McCullum’s innings against Royal Challengers Bangalore. The bowlers, commentators, and the fans — no one quite knew what hit them. That evening, on my way to a Calcutta pub, grinning in relief because the central engineering entrance exam in West Bengal had just been postponed due to leaked question papers, I just wanted to see what cricket would be like with fantasy teams of assorted superstars playing against each other in a perceivably slam-bang format. McCullum made those fantasies sound trivial.
Every evening, as the world’s best took on the world’s best, cricket was intense and exhilarating. Flintoff snaked the ball past Pietersen's bat; and Sachin and Sanath walked out in tandem in the Mumbai Indians blue, as if this was a dream played out of our boyhood book-cricket scorecards. This one time, the ICC got so excited about T20, they organised two World Cups nine months apart.
When the first T20 World Cup was played back in 2007, the speed of the format was such, it was immediately deemed a young man’s game. Warne, Tendulkar, Hussey, and Gilchrist soon increased the maximum permissible age for this party, making a mockery of all the dad jokes cast on them. Pravin Tambe, a leg spinner from Mumbai with a first-class career spanning two matches, took a hat-trick aged 42.
Chris Gayle and AB de Villiers took aggressive batting to newer dimensions. Against this generation’s greatest fast bowler, de Villiers once flicked and hoicked 23 runs in an over. A few years later, Virat Kohli started the 18th over of one innings on 50 and added 59 more by the time he got out in the 20th. Shoaib, Starc, and Malinga made batting look less appealing at other times. Ponting jumped around and caught everything in his eyesight.
Heroes and international careers were made out of unlikely cricketers; and many great craftsmen built their last sculptures dressed in jerseys that looked like advertisement hoardings. Young hopefuls rubbed shoulders with the greats and became greats themselves. Rashid Khan, Mohammed Nabi, and Mujeeb ur Rahman came as exotic curiosities and became pillars for their teams. Dhoni told us about the comeback and returned to Ranchi that summer with the winner’s medal in his yellow suitcase. This tournament is a conveyor belt of great stories.
The IPL is back tonight. Although it may lack many things that make it a spectacle, it will not lack on its core promise and sales pitch — the cricket is going to be premier. All these years, camera cuts, and after-parties later, there should be little doubt in anyone’s mind about the quality of cricket that’s on display in this tournament. And that cricket, when played like this, is potent enough as entertainment.
Cue: the bugle. Let’s do this.