apparently, India’s cricket board, its approved commentators, and its approved mediamen. We’ve been given breathlessness, sheer hyperbolic wall-to-wall gushing. We’re shown endless corporate tie-ins, reminders every few seconds that this isn’t to be sport so much as a money-making carnival. And we’re required to believe that the IPL’s every moment is epochal for the sport, and indeed for Indian nationhood itself.

It is impossible, apparently, to expect the Board of Control for Cricket in India to have the slightest sense of proportion about such issues. Anything run by the board and the establishment it so adorns is, indeed, of national importance in their eyes. That’s the narrative that they will want you to believe too, through their extraordinary, Beijing-like attempts to control media coverage and commentary. If nothing else, the IPL has brought home to viewers the degree of institutional arrogance of this board — complacent in its web of interlinked interests, both political and business; uncaring of the consequences of its ill-considered adolescent sulkiness for other sports, and for the professional cricketer.

The stars of the IPL, they’d have us believe, are the strutting team owners and the IPL’s “owner” himself, Lalit Modi. Certainly, Modi (or, as Rajasthan Royals star Shilpa Shetty recently called him, “the brainchild behind the IPL”) is signing autographs like he’s the main attraction. Well-trained cameras follow him adoringly across the stadium, as he waves magisterially to the people his minions have summoned to gawk at the wonders of his IPL. You would be forgiven for thinking that you were watching one of Kim Jong-Il’s giant propaganda games from North Korea; since we aren’t allowed to see the relatively thin crowds, the resemblance is even more marked. And, in all this, the cricketers that actually prop up the system are forgotten — it doesn’t give a damn for them. Don’t think of praising the BCCI’s half-hearted, delayed rethink about players “tainted” by association with the rebel Indian Cricket League. That deserves fresh condemnation:

imposing a further one-year exile on these men, many of them unpaid by their employers, is plain vindictive. In international sports, a year might even be a fifth of your earning career. But that’s something grown-ups care about, not brainchildren.