Cricket weds Entertainment

Can a WOMAN marry a MAMMAL? There is a generic problem here. A woman can marry a man, or may be in sometime another woman! But one of a species cannot marry a family of the animal kind. Therefore, how is it possible that Cricket can wed Entertainment. Following the norms of marriage it should either be Cricket weds Movies, or Sports weds Entertainment. But who cares for the English Language or for Sociology? cerainly not Sony Entertainment Television as long as millions of rupees are raked in in revenues.

But nit-picking is not tonight's focus.

I am bothered about why such cross-species hybridity was necessary. In a panel discussion on NDTV various reasons were sighted - a large number of people objected at players like Virendra Shewag performing for Ads and not in the cricket field. Some others exhibited caution on the fact that it is alright as an advertisement but such arrangements whould not affect the game - that is, cricket should continue to be a sport and not take the shape of entertainment; and the game of cricket should not be adversely altered to soot the needs of the entertainment industry. Sony on its part - and really Mandira Bedi - argued that all that Sony was doing was packaging the show for greater publicity.

But I think that all this debate is actually missing a certain point. Sony has taken on this kind of 'packaging' not in order to experiment on a new advertising stretegy. Sony is doing so to resolve a certain crisis of identity it has. It is a channel which is otherwise a movie channel but shows cricket matches. And that too only live matches which may have high TRPs, and nothing else in sport other than live one day internationals, not even cricket. Sony does not want to invest in a full fledged sports channel. It wants to make a quick and clean profit. It has no committment to cricket. All such talk is only for the ears of people like Barkha Dutt.

Thats all!

If goat is to mutton, man is to .... ?

I had a most horrible nightmare last night.

I visited the market to buy meat. But the price of meat was too high. I could not afford to pay that much. Nor did I have that kind of money. But buying meat was very important for some reason.

So I started negotiating with the meat-stall owners if they could cut me up and dress me as cookable meat. The man at the first stall said that he did not have such facility and suggested I check at the adjacent shop. The next shop did have the facility, but quoted a charge for cutting me up which I could not afford to pay. In fact, he explained to me the various ways in which I could be cut up, and each method would cost a different amount.

Then I went from shop to shop, negotiating the amount they would charge to cut me up.

Thankfully I woke up at that point.

I am not poor. In fact, I am well paid and can afford more than two well-balanced meals in a day.

There are milions in my country who are straving, and farmers are committing suicide everyday.

What could their dreams be?

There are some things that money can't buy. For everything else there is Mastercard

Many of you must have come across the Mastercard advertisements on television. There are several versions of them. There is one which talks of a senior-aged couple visiting the Udaipur Lake Palace. It mentions the price of the air tickets, the hotel rooms and the dinner. Then mentions that the cost of a long lasting relationship is 'priceless'. There is another one which deescribes a family get-together for Christmas. This one mentions the cost of the Christmas tree, the presents, a digital camera etc., but asserts that the cost of a photograph in which four generations of a family appear together is 'priceless'. My personal favourite is, of course, the one in which the man jumps to a hit-of-six while listening to cricket commentary during to his anniversary dinner.

Though each of these advertisements seemingly stress that money can't buy everything, that there is a severe limitation to the power of money - the actual asumptions behind the concept is one that stresses the overwhelming power of money. The attainment of the 'priceless' moments of human relationships has been made possible in each of these ads by the mediation of money - lots of it. In fact, the sentiment being argued by the ads is precisely that, because the occassion is 'priceless', there can be no limit to the amount of expenditure that could be incurred in attaining it. The expenditure can be so huge that the people participating in the 'priceless' occassion must enter into debt by borrowing money from Mastercard and its associates at an astronomical lending rate of over 33% per anum!! That is, the more 'priceless' the occassion, the more it costs. 'Spend more, spend more ...'

My point in analysing these advertisements is not to suggest the level of corruption of the corporate taste creation machinery exhorting people to become consumers and enter into tons of wasteful expenditure. Instead I am trying to suggest that the mighty rhetoric of capitalism which universalizes the consumerist assumption that all things in this world are 'products' with 'price tags', it cannot ignore that this assumption is not correct. It has to grapple with the reality that there are things in the world which 'money can't buy'; and the fact that these things are valuable to those people it wants to be its consumers. In this fissure of the logic lies a possibility. I would like to use one more example to illustrate this idea.

In India we are experiencing a Real Estate boom. That is, some people are utilizing the scarcity of housing, and the refusal of governments to take up the responsibility of providing housing to the people, to make pots of money. More over, the government has now allowed foreign investment in Real Estate, a move which has meant that more and more deals in Real Estate are for purely speculative purposes - a huge fraction of newly built apartments and houses actually lie vacant for their prices to appreciate. The morning newspapers and billboards are overflowing with advertisement of luxury condomiumns and enclaves with swinmming pools, clubs, shopping complexes, and 70% green cover - "In heart of the concrete jungle, live amidst nature". Of course, this sort of concept is a resultant of the neo-liberal reforms in India and the class divides that it is bringing about. The emerging uppper middle-classes create enclaves of the first world and remove from their surroundings the squalor and the poverty that their enrichment is causing. But, once again, I don't want to talk about the injustice being meeted out to the working people of this country.

Instead I would like to point out the inherent contradiction involved in the conceptualisation, construction and consumption of these enclaves. These are private spaces, which themselves rely on the ideology of private property - most the owners make their money through privately owned businesses or non-governmental corporations; they the most vocifarous advocates of privatisation and look upon the government or other forms of public control as a social evil. Yet a large part of these enclaves or apartment complexes are made of shared spaces and facilities which cannot be owned by any particular apartment owner. So these enclaves of 'private spaces' can be viable only through the existence of these 'public spaces'.

Again within the logic of capitalism and private property is located a fissure which questions it.

Feel Evil Factor: 1

As I stood and waited for a bus on a crowded road there was a man beside me wearing a lungi, and nothing on top. He squatted on the road rummaging through rubbish. No he was not a rag picker. Several street-side food stalls lined the bus-stop. The rubbish heap primarily consisted of leftovers and vegetable scrap and from these stalls. The man found a few green chillies, dried in the dust. He picked up and wiped them on his lungi and ate them one by one.

Rich Country, Poor People

The vegetable store near my home, the one I use most often is run by a a young couple - their children - two of them, aged between 5 and 8 - are also there with them in the store when not at school. Yesterday when I visited this store the mother was at the cash counter while the
father sat beside with the children teaching them English. It was a lesson through translation. As I selected my vegetables I heard the phrases - 'India is a great country'; 'India is a rich country. But its people are poor'. The younger boy retorted back, after translating the sentence to his father's satisfaction, 'How can a country be rich, when its people are poor?'

The father started explaining to the kid about the great cultural values of India.The first lesson in cultural hegmony.