If you care about cricket and take pleasure in reading tour reports, you may like to consider an odd trend. A cricket writer is so much less inhibited in her writing when reporting from outside her country. Never mind that cricket’s universe is made up primarily of eight countries — India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, England and the West Indies. (The Windies, that is the British Caribbean, is paradise for the cricket writer, not just for its music and white sands but also for four-yearly inquiries on how cricket still sustains a political grouping.) Even in this limited itinerary, to report on cricket is to discover other lands and their stadiums.

So, the proposed translocation of the Indian Premier League will presumably make dispatches in our newspapers somewhat livelier. An IPL match, say Delhi Daredevils versus Chennai Super Kings at Lord’s? Joy. Admit it, there’s a pleasant edge of subversion to the idea of bhangra pop blaring at a ground that still reeks of cricket’s racist/ imperialist past. And to the prospect of a South African city adopting Harbhajan Singh as a local hero. The possibility of petty thrills and instant sociology of the spectator stands is immense.

It could even be argued that the spectators — those that are found wherever it is that Lalit Modi may take the IPL — will find the stands more comfortable than those to be had in Indian stadiums. For the rest of us, those of us in India hoping to buy a ticket and take in a game at the nearest stadium, the highest authorities in the BCCI have it all figured out. Akin to Marie Antoinette’s “let them have cake” mythology, they tell us that we will always have TV. Come 4 pm, or 8 pm, on a match day, the visuals will be beamed live to us, just as they would have been if what is said still to be a “domestic tournament” had not been offshored.

... contd.