The brutal Indian cricket fan and media

[SachDan]

Coverage of this series was refreshingly good though. Faisal Sharif' date=' Ian Chappell and Mohinder Amarnath were decent in their pre and in between match discussions. [b']But less said about the 'experts' on the various news channels the better. The only one worth watching is Jadeja with Sonali Chander on NDTV.

The one I hate most is Siddharth Sharma of Star News.Whole day he's seen reading out those 'masala' news and when it comes to analysing the day's play,he waves his tongue more than Sandeep Patil or Saba Karim would!

[Lurker]

It's weird' date=' through the 90's I used to look at stadia in Calcutta or Bangalore or wherever, packed to the rafters with an [b']intelligent audience watching their team under-perform (paid or unpaid underperformance) and I often used to think that the team was not worthy of it's supporters.

You are quite correct about Intelligent Audience, and the decline in numbers. My thinking is this has coincided with the growth of National jingoism in the past decade and more whereby a compliment towards an opposition is automatically perceived by the brain deads(and alarmingly their number continues to grow) as Anti-National and what have you. I am reminded of the Hrishikesh Mukherjee's classic Golmaal(I beleive most of the Indian movie janta would have seen it). Towards the beginning Amol Palekar bunks his office to go watch a Indo-Pak hockey match. You can see the respect a common Indian had for Pakistan hockey greats in the way Amol Palekar talks about Kalimullah and Hasan Sardar. Personally I can vouch for that. My Dad being a big hockey fan always rooted for India, but was also more than fair in his praise for Pakistani greats who many a time, heck most of the times, were better than their Indian counterpart in 80s. Compare this with the recent Ind-Aussie series and I would be very interested if even a single Aussie player receieved any praise from Indians.

I must say that the respect for the achievements of a lot of greats from the India side is appalling. Not that it's any different with a lot of posters on ICF, but listening to people call in on live shows and offer half baked nonsense bringing down a lot of cricket and cricketers of the past decade is disappointing

Good to see you post Shwetabh. My question to you would be - Do you see a decline in cricket coverage(by media and Indian fans) or do you see an all around decline in media itself? I suspect your answer would be an all around decline in media itself and the series coverage is just a fall out of that. These days half of the TV hosts make me wonder as to how they ended up there in the first place. This is partially explained by the sheer number of channels but surely in a vast country like India we should be able to throw better set of people out there. What personally bothers me is how the media is increasingly becoming partisan and doesnt do what it is supposed to be doing - cover the game impartially. As an example, in the last test Ponting was caught doing something "funny" with the ball. Here is what the headline would have been sometime back. Australiyai captain sandeh ke ghere mein (Australian captain under a cloud of suspicion). The headline today is - Camere ne kaid ki Ponting ki naapak harkatein. Kya kuch karega ICC? ( Camera captures Ponting's nefarious activitiies, will ICC do anything?) :hehe::hehe: As always the question becomes, does media affect public opinion or is it the other way around? I beleive it is a combination of both at play here. xxx

[triam]

I think as a society, we are quick to criticize and clamor for "our" theory to be heard, and with the spate of all the channels and the excessive 24-7 coverage we have this outpour of emotions. Unfortunately, cricket, is the only sport we excel at globally which makes everyone to focus on cricket and cricketers. Media is just catering to the public, atleast the majority.