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Run for
Your Money Betting scandals and Indian cricket's other wicked wicket ways. By Ashok Malik NOT QUITE CRICKET
"I had no money but I was determined to start a sports promotion company of my own. As I was walking down the road one day I saw this neon sign glowing in a shop, flashing 'Radiant Shoes'. Then and there I decided to name my company Radiant -- Radiant Management Group. "Next, I decided to open a tennis academy. I approached a business house and told them that I needed finances for starting an academy at the Modern School tennis courts. They agreed. My next step was to approach the Modern School authorities and tell them that a big business house was ready to finance a tennis academy and it would be good publicity for the school if the academy was run on their school courts. They agreed. Thus started the Radiant Tennis Academy." (Aushim) Khetarpal looked at me triumphantly. This entertaining if somewhat unflattering extract from Pradeep Magazine's Not Quite Cricket more or less captures the essence of the author's argument. His interlocutor is a "self-styled sports promoter" who runs a syndication service, organises tournaments, buys and sells advertising rights. To Magazine, he is symptomatic of the conversion of a cherished game into a gigantic grey market enterprise, where all types of professional middlemen, freebooters and robber barons thrive. Magazine's reasoning is honest though not always cogent. The book is split into two sections. The first takes a look at the betting and match-fixing accusations that have been flying thick and fast for some two years now. The second is more ambitiously titled "What Ails Indian Cricket?" Given the people interviewed and examples cited, "What Ails North Indian Cricket?" may have been a more appropriate title. A veteran sports journalist, Magazine begins with the scoop that made him famous. During the Indian tour of the West Indies in 1997, he was approached by a bookmaker and offered vast sums of money for an introduction to Mohammed Azharuddin and Sachin Tendulkar: if senior players were made part of the loop, fixing matches would become that much easier. What followed was chaos at its most comic. The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) both dismissed Magazine's report as being fictional and sent him a letter asking him to reveal the bookie's name. Sadly, apart from recounting what has already appeared in the press, Magazine tells his reader nothing new. His obsession with the money in the game is also inexplicable. That cricketers are well-paid today is not germane to charges of match-fixing. Magazine unecessarily confuses issues, as in this quote from Bishan Singh Bedi: "The day I wore the Indian blazer I had goose pimples all over my body. I don't think today's generation, which wears Reebok caps, Adidas shirts or the Pepsi logo, knows what it means to represent the country ... In my days there was very little money in the game, but then we did not attach much importance to it." This is not harking back to an age of innocence; this is flamboyant piffle. The second part of the book talks of neglect of cricket at the grassroots, the step-motherly treatment of the Ranji Trophy and so on. The analysis suffers as it is based on observations in Haryana and Delhi. A study of cricket in at least Mumbai and Bangalore was necessary for the all-India perspective. To quite an extent, the two sections of the book are unconnected. About the only commonality is that both point to the BCCI's essential incompetence and lack of professional integrity. Though the case against match-fixing is still weak, the BCCI's opaque ways have kept it alive. It is fortunate -- if that be the word -- that this book coincides with India's drubbing in the World Cup. If Azharuddin's team had triumphed, manic cricket fans and officials would have taken recourse to adjectives like "anti-national" and hounded Magazine with the sort of passion Bal Thackeray generally reserves for Dilip Kumar. That is Indian cricket's real tragedy: when the team wins, even if it be a puny tournament in Timbuktu, every awkward issue is swept under the carpet. Some day people will realise that love for cricket and love for India are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive. Till then rumour and innuendo will rule the pitch. Translations that don't quite do justice to Thakazhi. By Sabita Radhakrishna THE BEST OF THAKAZHI This selected collection of 14 short stories from the pen of literary giant Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai was probably brought out as a tribute after his recent death. That it has failed miserably to make non-Malayalee readers aware of the greatness of Thakazhi as a prolific writer in Malayalam is evident in the poor quality of translation in most of the stories. It is the interesting introduction and not the stories that acquaints the "new reader" with Thakazhi, who left a burning trail as a writer-activist and whose pen was a powerful weapon for social reform. Winner of the Sahitya Akademi and Jnanpith awards, among others, Thakazhi was champion of the under-dog and the exploited woman. His writing was not for the elitist intelligentsia alone, he extended it to the classes who could identify with his stories. Some of the better translated stories are From Karachi, about a friendship of boys from opposing communities, a friendship that becomes ragged with the bait of freedom. In A Faithful Wife a pregnant woman in labour surrenders herself to death, weighed down by the guilt of a sexual encounter with a white man. The Handbag see-saws between hidebound tradition and contemporary values creating discord between two generations. The Soldier is set against the background of war and imminent death. The hero's adoption of a family and a wife and his final gesture in being of some use to his "family" even in death is a poignant tale. The Best of Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai certainly does not give Thakazhi the credit he deserves. Non-Malayalee readers will get a taste of the sensitivity of Thakazhi's writing only if better translators are found to keep the writer in national and international focus. NEW RELEASES
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He started off on a
brief history of his exploits. How he had interviewed sportsmen and women and written
about them in newspapers. How one day he had thought of starting his own sports promotion
company.