IPL mess : Why so surprised? - Gideon Haigh

[Gunner_Mania]

Right then, Modi is still pretty right now, except that how it represents India is assuredly rather different. In the heady days of that first tournament, it stood for India's vitality, imagination and economic heft; if even a tenth of the allegations aired in last few weeks are true, it shows the country at its corrupt and dysfunctional worst.

http://www.cricinfo.com/magazine/content/current/story/457451.html What a load of Tosh. Just because there are allegations that one guy was corrupt in the IPL, suddenly the whole of India is corrupt and dysfunctional.

[someone]

Not good but you cannot fault him as its human psychology, when people blame one, they blame the whole group And we ourselves are in fault as well , as we ourselves are making it worse by having constant breaking news, how bad an impression will it go to these foreigners

[Sachinism]

Gideon is a ****. Someone on here mentioned he's a good writer, since then whenever I've come across his articles I've read them, but so far all anti-India. Dude's a hater

[zubinpepsi]

so Gunner_Mania, are you saying that Modi is the only guy who is corrupt in the whole of India and India is not corrupt ?

[Gunner_Mania]

so Gunner_Mania' date=' are you saying that Modi is the only guy who is corrupt in the whole of India and India is not corrupt ?[/quote'] so are you saying Modi is corrupt ergo you as an Indian are corrupt?

[zubinpepsi]

so are you saying Modi is corrupt ergo you as an Indian are corrupt?

India is a corrupt country.. wats so surprising abt that? :hmmmm:

[Zelig]

India is a corrupt country.. wats so surprising abt that? :hmmmm:

++:((

[Gunner_Mania]

India is a corrupt country.. wats so surprising abt that? :hmmmm:

Corruption is rampant in India, that does not make India a corrupt country.

[Gunner_Mania]

India is a corrupt country.. wats so surprising abt that? :hmmmm:

++:((

what he said is true.. we iz

May be that is the general consensus then I am looking at my country with rose tinted glasses. So be it.

[Tapioca]

Corruption is rampant in India' date=' that does not make India a corrupt country.[/quote'] What is a corrupt country ?

[The Outsider]

He makes a good point with a touch of irony - when IPL was flying high it was taken as a symbol of India shining and growing. If the good points of IPL are going to be used to generalize about the Indian society, be prepared for it's negatives to be used as a generalization as well. It's only fair.

[vvvslaxman]

Atleast we are not idiots like ECB who were conned by Stanford :cantstop:

[Gunner_Mania]

What is a corrupt country ?

Some place where nothing moves without corruption which I don't believe is India. I still believe that there are a lot of folks who are not corrupt in and that the whole country is not corrupt. Sections of it are corrupt, but not the whole country. It is just the same way as some sections of India has benefited by the Economic boom, but not the whole of India.

[Gunner_Mania]

He makes a good point with a touch of irony - when IPL was flying high it was taken as a symbol of India shining and growing. If the good points of IPL are going to be used to generalize about the Indian society' date=' be prepared for it's negatives to be used as a generalization as well. It's only fair.[/quote'] Precisely, I don't believe IPL is a fair reflection of India - the country's growth or it's shining story and same way I don't believe that it's corruption is a fair reflection of India.

[Roshanrocks]

Some place where nothing moves without corruption which I don't believe is India. I still believe that there are a lot of folks who are not corrupt in and that the whole country is not corrupt. Sections of it are corrupt, but not the whole country. It is just the same way as some sections of India has benefited by the Economic boom, but not the whole of India.

i am sorry to say this.... but i have encountered corruption in all walks of life in india... every where man... work, college, police, government, everywhere... even security personnel such as CRPF are horribly corrupted,,, even indians in my company here in dubai are corrupted, :(( corruption is a way of life in india.... we may not be the most corrupt... but we must be somewhere in the top 20 countries i reckon

[thevortex]

http://www.cricinfo.com/magazine/content/current/story/457451.html What a load of Tosh. Just because there are allegations that one guy was corrupt in the IPL, suddenly the whole of India is corrupt and dysfunctional.

Gunner - I think Haigh was just making a point there. Many here and elsewhere did not hesitate one bit to say that IPL signified the new, rising, burgeoning, enterprising and creative India. The same way, this fall, the author says, equates it with the relevant things Indian. I dont have a problem with the article. In fact I asked the same question within my friends' circles (Why so surprised?:)) when all these scandals broke out.

[thevortex]

Precisely' date=' I don't believe IPL is a fair reflection of India - the country's growth or it's shining story and same way I don't believe that it's corruption is a fair reflection of India.[/quote'] From what I have seen you must be among the minority on this aspect :).

[Chandan]

Actually I agree with the article entirely, apart from its tone which gives the impression as if Haigh was waiting for something like this to happen to say "I told you so". Gunner_mania, where can you disagree with him? He is very right when he says:

Yet here was a story that everyone should have seen coming. On the eve of the first tournament, I prophesised on the ABC's Offsiders that the IPL would be rocked within five years by a corruption scandal that would "knock Hansie Cronje into a cocked helmet". But that's not to claim great foresight. It simply stood to reason. Opaque finances, negligible regulation, a host of related party transactions, asset valuations plucked from thin air, an over-mighty chief executive, supine non-executive directors, politicians already with their hooks in - here, surely, was an Indian Enron in the making. To fail to grasp that you needed to be either ignorant or implicated - alas rather too many kiss-ass commentators and columnists were both. Now, of course, they're all feigning outrage, like Captain Renault in Casablanca: "I am shocked, shocked, to find gambling going on this establishment."

or this:

The magic word is now transparency - transparency will apparently set us free. But transparency where? The owners are only one constituency. Will the commentators be forced to declare their interests? Will the journalists have to reveal their connections? Will the various state governments be compelled to divulge the extent of their subsidies to the IPL in the form of grounds, facilities and taxation relief? Will the state associations that compose the BCCI be required to lay open their finances to public scrutiny? Will the BCCI make its elections genuinely democratic? The truth is that genuine transparency in the IPL has been impossible from the inception because of its adoption of a private ownership model. You know why they call it "private ownership"? Because it's private. In fact, as Shashank Manohar reminded Modi when Modi tweeted the night away about the equity holders in the new Kochi franchise, conditions of confidentiality are integral to commercial transactions. You might not like it, but it is the way of business. And if business has imposed its values on IPL, that's only because it was invited, even entreated, to do so, in order that the maximum sums be extracted from the sale of franchises. Face it: the money changers aren't in the temple, they were sold the keys to the temple; and since then they have changed the locks.

I think so many of us were wondering how come every media person, from news channels to news papers, from commentators to columnists had turned into the cheerleaders of IPL instead of pointing out the flaws there in the tournament. If Haigh is putting it in so many words which so many of us felt, where is he wrong?

Why? This, perhaps, is the most intriguing question of all. The IPL exercised strict controls over its coverage, suborning some, excluding others, demanding an atmosphere of constant celebration, deriding doubters as rheumy-eyed romantics. Modi moved fast - faster, sometimes, than the eye could see. He was the chairman of the IPL's 14-member governing council, but came to be called the "IPL commissioner", in imitation of that role in American professional sport. The distinction was more than semantic. A chairman implies consultation; "commissioner" implies… well… committing, which Modi clearly did, to a fault. Courtiers as considerable as Ravi Shastri and Sunil Gavaskar competed to praise him. Possible party poopers, like the ICC Anti-Corruption Unit, were held at arm's length. No wonder Modi operated in an atmosphere of impunity. And no wonder rumour and innuendo accumulated around the IPL when it showed so little interest in giving a proper account of itself. Modi's modus operandi was to keep doubling the bets in his own charisma, and indeed, the story of his triumph enjoyed widespread appeal. Here was the personification of India Shining, bringing moolah and market forces to a game that, so the story went, had previously languished in the dead hands of Anglo-Australian overlords. In fact, India has been the most significant force in global cricket for a decade, but until the IPL, may have kept that fact from itself; the league became an annual celebration of that development for Modi's countrymen and a few well-paid guests. About its second- and third-order effects on cricket, the impact on other countries... well, who cared? They were having fun. And how could all those DLF Maximums and Citi Moments of Success be wrong?

Very very true! I could not get hold of this when I followed the first season of IPL but from second season, from the beginning itself, it became clear and went on becoming clearer that something very fishy was going on and hence I gave a complete miss to the IPL III.

Sambit Bal may be right that this is a scandal the IPL needed. It certainly brings fans face-to-face with the tangled reality of their amusement, based as it is on a self-seeking, self-perpetuating commercial oligarchy issued licenses to exploit cricket as they please. Whether the fans care is another matter: one of the reasons Indians have embraced economic liberalisation so fervently is a shoulder-shrugging resignation about the efficiency and integrity of their institutions. Given the choice between Lalit Modi, with his snappy suits and his soi-disant "Indian People's League", and the BCCI, stuffed with grandstanding politicians and crony capitalists, where would your loyalties lie?

Don't think the IPL fans are even bothered by all this and it was clear by 50K= crowd in the final of this IPL. They wouldn't mind even if it is proved that IPL is fixed. They don't follow cricket, but something else, which as a cricket fan I'm unable to see. Perhaps an IPL fan help us understand that "something".

And if Modi is toast, it will in one sense be a tremendous pity. In his way, he represents a third generation in cricket's governance. For a hundred years and more, cricket was run by administrators, who essentially maintained the game without going out of their way to develop it. More recently it has been run by managers, with just an ounce or two of strategic thought. Modi was neither; he was instead a genuine entrepreneur. He has as much feeling for cricket as Madonna has for madrigals, but perhaps, because he came from outside cricket's traditional bureaucratic circles, he brought a vision and a common touch unexampled since Kerry Packer. It's arguable, in fact, that the more culpable in this affair are the likes of Sharad Pawar and Inderjit Bindra, allegedly wise heads who pandered to Modi's ego and ambition because it suited their particular purposes. The clock is now ticking for the fourth IPL. It may look quite different to the third - indeed, it had better.

One can only give an ironical smile to the above. If the choice is between BCCI and Modi, that hardly makes a difference. BCCI is a bigger crook or a bunch of crooks than what Modi is!

[IKnowU]

If everybody was corrupt and ill minded. Modi's *****ing about Tharoor wouldnt have blown out this far. Corruption would have kept its silence rather then being heard.

[achilles]

If everybody was corrupt and ill minded. Modi's *****ing about Tharoor wouldnt have blown out this far. Corruption would have kept its silence rather then being heard.

Quote of the day :hatsoff: