A revival of sorts.
The process of evolution of human thought is a daunting subject to deal with. Thoughts are furthered (without judging them to be good or bad) at an extremely slow pace over the timeline. Significant progress occurs by focussed, locally untainted thought processes - put in action. There is usually considerable attenuation that occurs before these thoughts take form into actions/events. The priorities and the motives of these furthering thoughts are affected by regional & cultural phenomena in various occassions. The number of factors that play their role in affecting a human thought is mindboggling. Hence,a little bit of mental acumen or maturity is required to think through these motives. It becomes enormously significant to choose, well not exactly the 'right' motives - because good/bad, right/wrong have become the plague of judgemntal values, but progressive motives - one that contributes to the higher purpose of furthering human thought. There's also a bit of problem here - In most, if not all cases , one does not intentionally choose his motives before every thought of his. These motives have been shaped over a very long period of time - through rigorous processes of conditioning, learning, unlearning & experiencing infinite amount of - well, things. Evading the ridiculous proposition of judging a thought in these limited & simplistic terms, lets one free to experience freshness out of these thoughts in motion.
I am forced to think of the above stated things, as i was about to put myself to write a letter to the editor - a complaint to the editor, rather - about the plight of an average indian's cricket viewing experience. (And please believe me when i tell you that, human evolution is not a pet subject of mine.) Both at the stadia and on the television, actually. However, I wanted to explore the possibility of changing the sport viewing on television in India. How boring, pointless, simplistic and sad an experience it presently is and how much better it could be.
Let me start with stating what one of my friends stated - there's no end to how much could be seen, written and thought about sport. Every sport is based on theory, offers techniques, requires skill and does not limit the dynamics to be goverened purely by the book. In other words, every sport has a lot of space where the battle ground is in the minds, the skirmish is in the thought. I love the sport - make no mistake of it - and i would be obviously delighted to learn new things about the sport. Yet i've got a sense of sameness about what i have known about the game of cricket from my childhood. I have grown up watching club cricket in the local corporate tournaments - where there will always be a wise/ sprightly chappie in the audience who knew that a bowler X will retaliate with a slower delivery to the off stump when he's hit for a boundary straight down the ground the previous delivery; where there's the captain who knows that the opponent's ego has to be attacked first before bringing on the spinner. And so on. Where do these connoisseurs of sport go away? All that i have heard in the cricket commentary / read in the sport writing over one and a half decade is the Dr.Obvious observations, lavish new ways to praise a particular shot/ball and "inside" stories in the politics of running the "show". The "eclectic" ones who are closer to the sport too seemed to come down to "our" level. The biographies and the auto biographies often turn out to be sour readings filled with bromides - because it is not fair to expect a bowler who has not done his matriculation english to articulate his thoughts effectively. Effectively, sport becomes a sort of addiction that one clings on to with nothing new to know about it.
The sponsors who are supposed to be instrumental in bringing the game to our living rooms, actually take the fizz out of sport viewing. The disgusting ads which eat up the intersting period of between-the-overs have grown morbid. They are not the same necessary evil that one could live with anymore when every ball break is also utilized for advertisements and the game reduced to a picture-in-picture mode. I am sure not many people are relishing any of the Appy Fizz facts either. "MS Dhoni owns a couple of racer bikes; Kevin Peterson was spotted going around with a supermodel; Shane warne flouted a contract for a nicotine chewing gum" and the likes. I do not want the commentator to tell me "Bring on the Girls! Thats an extra ordinary boundary" for fifty times in the course of a match. It is appaling. And it gets worse. It plagues the way the commentators and even the players communicate over the television. "Media Savvy sportsman" Now what the hell is that?!
I am already paying for these pricey pay channels and my money does reach the televising company. Has the technology changed radically of televising the sport? No, It is the same camera and the microphone. Okay better ones - but come on! - What are the mind numbing figures we come across in the reports about telecast deals? Is doordarshan exempted from this simply because they're a national service-minded agent? I do not think so. It is our taxes which reach their coffers. They should atleast show me the entire over! Is pay-per-view the way to go? I am not sure. The same experts might jump on to the scene and dish out the same and more of the same platitudes. I am skeptical. An unapologetic comment often doing the rounds in the media is "India is where the money is in cricket". See? Now the crucial point is - Economic benefits is the motive. Greed for more of that is the fuel. "Milking the indian audience" - can be said without any cringe in the face. This is not sport viewing experience. Simply not at all.
I would like to take a detour here and attempt to better explain my perspective towards this subject, by drawing a parallel to the concept of touring. This is very incidental, in that - there could be millions of other parallels that could be drawn and possibly better exhibit the point that i'm making - but i'm inclined towards touring and have experienced the freedom and joy that comes along with it. I have grown up as a kid to whom the concept of tours for many years was something like a trip to the local botanical gardens, zoos and the other usual suspects. The idea had gotten so stale at a point that a tour seemed like an ordeal to me, after a while. An inescapable suffering. In the process I failed to understand all these joys that were usually associated with touring (all these Reader's Digest accounts). Naturally, i had to break free of it after i realized i've had enough. Long trips were no different - You'd have to go to the temples, parks, monuments and all of that crap.
This breaking away from the tradition - where i was in the state of denial - allowed me to hunt for new perspectives towards touring, as the one that i had to live with was nothing more than an insurmountable, mechanical trap. A little jaunt to the local hill top to steal mangoes from the grove and the thrill of cutting classes to take a trip down to the closest lake or stream slowly matured into a bigger perspective towards freedom. Freedom to experience what i thought was worthier of my time. The exposure to the odd travelogue in the indian magazines (pre-internet days, i'm talking about), then the advent of the Discovery and National Geographic channels brought in a sense of excitement towards touring spots in "foreign nations". That narrow opinion of mine ("foreign" nations??!) took a little beating here and bludgeoning there before i could look at touring in an even more Zoomed-out (or zoomed-in) paradigm. The hatred towards these organized tour-operators who will take you to your hotel and to the eiffel towers and the big bens started growing down. The joy of realizing the freedom and the number of possibilities (and the pointlessness of hating the organized tours) begun to grow immensely. I'm only happy now, to realize there are a lot of people who are subscribing to the ideas of couch-surfing, back-packing and hitch-hiking.
The point here is - while there are millions of people still signing up for "all the sight seeing spots in europe for 10 days/9 nights - XYZ Tours & Travels", there are also a considerable amount of people who are looking to back pack and hitch hike. Going by the number of people the former could be called "mainstream" while the latter could be called the "sub-culture". Very loosely speaking, for every 100 or so mainstream tour operators - there is one backpacker who is willing to share his experiences at a particular place that he's toured. The former tours are driven by economic motives of the operators and the limited perspectives of the tourists. The latter ones are fuelled by the sense of excitement and adventure in the tourists ( i hate to call this bunch "tourists") and a sense of sharing from the other experienced..well, (aaargh!) "tourists". [Okay let me not idealize the whole scene, there are of course people like the Lonely Planet who make money out of selling such advice & tips to backpackers too. But that is okay, because they offer you freedom at that cost - NOT the pick up taxi from airport, lodging at this suite in this hotel where this soap is present in this style of bathroom. I think you get my drift.]
And this sub culture exists to share fresh thoughts you never thought existed and offer the ground for total freedom of choice and learning. And this sub culture is what is totally lacking when it comes to televised sport followers. This is the paradigm shift that we discerning followers of the sport (in this cae, the game of cricket) should try to bring in and create the sub-culture. After all, it is a collective effort of such people who claim to have had enough that will bring the change. Who remembers a name (if at all there was ONE such person!!) who brought in back-packing/couch-surfing as a sub culture or a key to your freedom?
Televised sport offers much more bandwidth to be exploited. And i sure believe there are enough and more discerning audience for the sport. There's space for various services to co-exist - Let Mandira Bedi come on an expert pannel for the entertainment starved sport-viewer. Also let Ravi Shastri to be his natural reading-into-the-game self for the benefit of people who want to know the game better. Do not taint him with this "catering to Indian Sports Entertainment audience" crap and make him go through "shaz & Wazz" and other such unhumorous jokes. Sunil Manohar Gavaskar who handled the fearsome four with much adept back then, could do much much better than - "All you youngsters watching this .. look at his head being still and the foot getting to the pitch of the ball" for a 1000 times. The Tony greg that speaks on Channel nine uses a totally different sport language (English, of course) as compared othe same Tony who sounds more like an expert on a paid holiday who goes through his motions when he comes to sub-continent. "Oh, ho ho! A glorious cover drive from 'sashin' who's on fire today". It makes an entertaining view for once - not for every cover drive that 'sashin' plays. A downward spiral of dumbing down is happening here - with both the audience as well as the commentators creating a self damaging ecology. I could be going on a rant here - but the point of this rant is - for us to realize how much of space and time is criminally wasted in the televised sport and could be better utilized! We - the discerning audience - could do something about it. And we should. We're not here for the Eiffel Towers and the Red Forts - Rather we're here for the experience and the sense of learning and adventure.
I believe sport is a way of life (And Mr.Rahul Dravid, do not refer to it as Entertainment industry anymore. Please.) that is very essential in cultivating that hunger for perfection, excellence, innovation, a fuel for self-belief and hope. Investing our thoughts and time (some money too) in pursuit of creating such a culture will be worth more than it. We - the ardent followers of the sport - could create the 'scene' or the 'story' (or whatever your lingo says it is).
This is where i run out of steam for my natural expression and the thought that "this thesis has to be a well thought out and well articulated one" sets in. I shall stop here. And resume some other time.
Labels: Thought
posted by Govind at 6:33 PM
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