BCCI Sena

The two agents, or henchmen, or pimps, or the Shiv Sainik archetypes who spread BCCI’s isms are Ravi Shastri and Harsha Bhogle.

Ravi Shastri is an embodiment of the drum-beating villain from the feted blockbuster, Agneepath. Like Kaancha Cheena he brainwashes the impressionable villagers (fans) to lynch Master Dinanath (anyone who opposes BCCI). Like an intolerant Shiv Sainik, he sees every disagreement from an outsider a menace to BCCI Sena. Anyone who stands up to BCCI is insinuated as India’s enemy. Anyone who questions BCCI’s policies is deemed jealous of IPL.

The bespectacled Harsha Bhogle has the semblance of a calm, innocuous geek. But there is something sinister about his aura and his cultic discourses of BCCI. He is like BCCI’s pimp. Sophistry is his strength to endorse BCCI’s views. He uses chicanery to solicit IPL to the gullible fans. He purports that playing less cricket is the way to save Test matches. It is a counter-intuitive idea, considering that in the year 2011 South Africa had played only one Test match until October. Australia and South Africa — the two best teams in the best of rivalries of modern cricket — played a two-Test series instead of the customary three, in one of the most disgraceful scheduling of cricket. Sri Lanka cancelled their tour of England in 2009 to play in IPL. This year they only held a short, two-match Test series against England in order to render themselves to IPL’s behest. And Mr. Bhogle thinks that fewer matches should be played. Is playing one Test in eight–ten months too much? 

He doesn’t have the courage to criticise the mishmash that one-day cricket has become. He doesn’t write a word against the excessive amount of one-day matches played between India and Sri Lanka, which have gone past ridiculous proportions: in the last four years, they have played forty-four ODIs against each other. The man who complains about too much cricket doesn’t have the nerve to say that IPL’s season stretches for too long. He doesn’t find the Champions League an unwanted addition to the jam-packed schedule, which has always been a dud despite the addition of four IPL teams. But Mr. Bhogle touts it as a successful and essential fixture. 

Their near concupiscent cultism of BCCI squirts intolerance. Hitting the day entrenched in IPL porn dungeon, drunk with power, clad in saffron, playing percussion kartal blocks, Bhogle and Shastri continue to chant BCCI’s hymns.