Cricket One of the most Popular and not to term anymore eloborate to the unknown person in the sub- continent of Asia. Cricket is more than our national pastime. It claims a higher loss of social time than strikes and lockouts do in industry. Someone has just calculated that if India were to reach the World Cup final, the sport’s fans in our 81 million television homes would have ‘lost’ (spent) 106.5 million man-days in front of the Idiot Box. This is more than 3.5 times the number of man-days lost to strikes and lockouts (30 million) in a year!
This cricket obsession isn’t natural or spontaneous. It has been systematically cultivated or manufactured through multi-billion dollar marketing, sales promotion and advertising. Our cricket stars aren’t visible on the playground alone. They are omnipresent — in advertising for colas, processed foods, shampoos, cars, ayurvedic remedies, and eggs — on Page 3, and in lifestyle and glamour stories churned out daily by hundreds of channels and thousands of newspapers.
The Board of Control for Cricket in India has annual revenues of Rs 500 crores. Last year, it sold telecasting rights for a humongous Rs 2,750 crores! The International Cricket Council sold broadcasting rights for the current and the next World Cup for an even higher $1.1 billion (Rs 4,950 crores). Sony Entertainment Television sold advertising at Rs 5 lakhs for each 10-second spot, raking in an estimated Rs 350 crores to Rs 400 crores. Doordarshan made another Rs 160 crores. Dwarfing this is the money invested in betting, estimated at Rs 4,000 crores.
Now take the star players. Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid make Rs 12 crores to 20 crores a year for endorsing products ranging from shoes and cosmetics to life insurance. Ganguly charges an annual fee of close to Rs 1.5 crore per endorsement. Even newcomers like Mahendra Singh Dhoni become multimillionaires overnight.
But the National Game Hockey, seems to be invisible as compared to Cricket. Recently a Hockey player expresses his aggression that why he not be a Cricketer as he get only 2000 bugs for a game.
Corporates now invest in everything, from cricket-related ground events, trophy tours, consumer promotion and glamour shows. The all-pervasive, predatory and manipulative influence of corporations in cricket wouldn’t have become possible without ICC, BCCI and even city- and state-level boards being turned into commercialised and mercenary entities.
In Hindustani classical music, only a handful of performers — like Amjad Ali Khan, Pandit Jasraj, Kishori Amonkar, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Shivkumar Shama and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt — get top-level sponsors, irrespective of quality or integrity. Others get left out — not because they are less virtuous, but largely because they don’t know how to play the sponsorship-publicity game, or lack a glittering Big Star profile. The only exceptions are long-established Sabhas and 3-to-5-day Sammelans, with multiple performances each day.
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