Was mindlessly flipping through Sunday Mid-day (Times of India) which is not yet tired of the IPL auctions… but was quite relieved to come across one voice that dared to call a spade a spade, thanks to Victor Banerjee.
An array of Bollywoodians - Mahesh Bhatt, Shekha Kapoor, Arshad Warsi, Hema Malini, Bipasha Basu, Sameera Reddy, Madhavan and the likes - found the Cricket-Bollywood alliance 'perfect' and 'Wow' and 'exciting' and 'fantastic' and 'pleasing' and ‘forward thinking’ and 'wise' and 'super' and 'fun' and of course 'more money'! The predictable Bollywood stuff! Mahesh Bhatt even went to the extent of saying that this ‘ushers in a new brave world’! (I hope Aldous Huxley doesn’t mind!)
Victor Banerjee, who has also 'been there and done that' from Passage to India to Joggers Park, was strikingly different from the other dumb-glamour-studded responses. I tell you, in a nation where cricket has been made (wrongly and forcibly) synonymous to patriotism it takes tremendous guts to say ‘to hell with it’! I love his guts!
Read through the following excerpt as reported by Subhash K. Jha:
Victor Banerjee: Gullidanda was a plebian pastime that the British elevated with the willow into Lords. Cricket in India is largely played by the sportingly incompetent. There's just a handful of tough exceptions. Don't give me a bellyache by stating that we are a 'sporting' nation of 'sportsmen'. We're a nation of businessmen who have destroyed the game with its worldwide corruption centred in India, a nation where politicians fight like animals to be on cricketing and Olympic boards. The reason we love cricket is because it's dependent on the bettable vagaries of fiddling with the ball, rain that determines decisions, ground conditions that can be tweaked and the odd upwardly-mobile player willing to accept a bundle under the table and even on a flight. We were wonderful in hockey and even winners of the gold medal in football in the first Asian games when my father who couldn't play for the team because of his commitment to the Indian Army.
Lo and behold… now comes the clincher!
It's hilarious that we take the Australian Kerry Packer's resurrection of an idiotic colonial game so seriously.
This is what I’d call a stellar performance! Encore, Banerjee, Encore!
Virtually Yours
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