Business, the endgame

IN the long stream of life’s river, some memories have an everlasting impact that redefine your past and shape the way you confront the future. In the cacophony generated by an India-Pakistan cricket match and the symbolism of a blood-letting war associated with it, I am reminded of an incident that took place in the deserts of Sharjah three and a half decades back.

In the Eighties and early Nineties, India and Pakistan, world cricket’s biggest rivals, were politically at each other’s throats — that meant no matches to be played on either’s home soil. Where there is a will, there is a way, as nothing spurs the human mind more than the lure of making money and milking sports’ potential to generate mind-boggling profits. Even dead bodies are no hindrance to this universally- accepted business model where the pull of money can blind even men of honour.

Live television was still in its nascent stage though it was making rapid inroads into our drawing rooms. A cricket match could be played anywhere in the world, even in places where men in whites hurling a red ball at a great speed from 22 yards could be mistaken as aliens having invaded human space. The target population of this “neutral” space was the vast number of fans in India and Pakistan. They would be glued to their television sets, consuming every second of this rivalry as if what was at stake were their lives and the identity of their nations.

By today’s advertisement standards of a bombardment of products into our private spaces, which includes the use of human emotion, you could call that age primitive in comparison. Even then, it was generating stunning TRP ratings by inciting primeval instincts among millions of cricket fans and creating an unquenched thirst that craved for more. Live television was not only changing the economy of sport, it was creating new ground rules where the endgame was not sport, but the business of it. In this long preamble I have created, let me not forget to narrate the incident that surfaces in times like these, when we have lost all sense of proportion and are sacrificing our sanity for huge financial benefits of a select few.

Sharjah 1990. India and Pakistan play out their rivalry in a stadium packed with expats from both countries screaming at each other in a show of unbridled loyalty for their respective nations. It is drama made for television. I am on my first foreign visit, savouring the new sounds, sights and smells my senses are being introduced to. I am oblivious to what now appears was laying of the foundation stones of a new world order, a business model which benefits more in war than in peace.

Sharjah, half an hour’s drive from Dubai, the venue for the present Asia Cup, was then full of India-Pakistan expats doing sundry jobs, many of them operating as taxi drivers, especially from Pakistan. After the end of every match, some of us journalists would rush to the nearest post office to wire our stories so that we didn’t miss our deadlines. The taxi driver had to make his way through hundreds of spectators leaving the ground and that hampered his speed. On one such short journey, I urged the driver to go a bit faster, as we were getting late.

The driver was puzzled at the sight of huge crowds and wanted to know the reason. On being told that these people had come to watch a cricket match and we had come from India on professional duty, he got a bit confused. His next question was: who was paying for our visit and stay in Sharjah? On being told that our offices were paying the money and there were newspaper readers who were keen to know the details of the match and related stories, he burst into uncontrolled laughter and muttered: “Wakeyi, duniya main aisa bhi hota hai kya?” (Really! Do such things really happen in this world?)

The driver, from an unknown village in Pakistan, was working hard to make a living in a foreign country to sustain his family back home, like most expats from India and Pakistan in Sharjah. He couldn’t believe that people got paid and made a living out of sporting contests, even when they were not the real participants.

That taxi driver would collapse with disbelief today if he were to be told that the economy of cricket and India-Pakistan encounters now has a face that is filled with billions of dollars. According to one estimate, it has generated revenues of Rs 10,000 crore in the last 20 years alone. Or perhaps, today, he himself may be a beneficiary of this rivalry where the more bitter and hate-driven the relationship, the greater the opportunity to multiply revenue streams and generate profits.

While news channels scream why we are playing them, the boycott calls are for the gullible citizens. The dead bodies are like fodder for the hungry, who look at the world like a money-making factory where any human emotion can be manipulated to serve any end, be it peace or war.

In this world of money wire transfers, who cares for a handshake!

— The writer is the author of ‘Not Quite Cricket’ and ‘Not Just Cricket’