Let me get this mixed metaphor out of the way first: the team of commentators for the Indian Premier League did a grand job of sweeping the elephant in the room under the carpet.
Now that is a mighty improbable task to achieve - hiding an elephant. Especially when the only word on every Indian's lips for days was "match management". On the news networks, you heard an unending procession of animated, agitated people analysing, moralising, psychologising and chastising. It was incongruous, to say the least, for on the spanking clear HD channel broadcasting the IPL matches, you saw these placid, unruffled, colourfully attired worthies cheerfully chattering as if it was just another day on the village green. As if their world was not the same planet as the one on which the news TV networks were located. As if the topic of heated discussion on news TV had nothing to do with what the Board of Control for Cricket in India had contracted them to talk of.
They described everything -from the curvature of the parabola that Darren Sammy's bat described while dispatching the ball into the stands to the depth in millimeters that the corners of Rahul Dravid's lips sank when his team fell short of the winning target.
But there was nary a word about late-night calls affecting the trajectory of balls bowled by bowlers the following day nor of suddenly overgrown feet slipping over the restricting white of the bowling crease nor even of the innovative use of towels embedded with semaphoric codes that inspired winning whoops in dank, anonymous dens. No, there was English in Hindi grammar and Hindi in English syntax, there were inanities and self-indulgent lapses into horrible poetry, there were drum rolls and cellulite-free gyrations, everything. But the dumb men of Cricketstan made no attempt to stretch out their hand at the elephant in the room and describe what they felt.
And yet there they were, the talkative men, with more cricket matches under their belt than three generations of Zimbabweans, Bangladeshis and Ryan ten Doeschate put together. Followers hoped they would provide some insight, utter that one wise word that would put the entire episode in the right perspective, provide that one break in the dismal grey after the midnight swoop on a trio indulging in an ungentleman's game.
Regale they did, with their sparkling teeth and freshly dyed hair, but there was no anticipated jhampak jhampak in their conversations. It seemed that like a team of robots under the control of a despotic comic-book villain called Super Cement Man, their brains had been hardwired to immediately pick up any references to off-field cricket and deftly steer all conversation away from it.
It reminds one of a test that police often use, called the word association test, in which an accused is confronted with a series of words and is made to respond immediately with a counter word. Criminal psychologists say that anyone guilty would respond with replies that scurry from the incriminating words like some Pakistani umpires do. So if you said, say, "fix", a guilt-ridden conscience would respond with, perhaps, "maximum" or "towering", but never possibly with "khokha" or "over" or "no-ball". Not even with "son-in-law".
Would it have been such a shame for the organisers of the IPL to have loosened the bit on these chosen few to accept the reality of what had happened and discuss the issue for the benefit of TV viewers? To many minds, possibly also to the channel that hosted the show but did not pay their contract fees, it would have been far better hearing these men dissect the problem than those screechy fellows on news TV. Having themselves once been the men trotting out into the field, they were best placed to tell us of the pressures - or the lures - that can make rupee figures more important than centuries, strike rates or five-fors.
Like them, in this piece of writing, I have consciously avoided any reference to incriminating words or names. I've got nothing to show for it, the commentators got a bounty almost equal to the runners-up booty. And nice designer kurtas too. If I had got paid for this, I would have tasted a BCCI dollar note. I believe it numbs the tongue.
