Crime and punishment catch up with seven-year-old

Dear IPL,
Sharjah means haar-ja. Now did you or did you not know that? What did you think: Abu Dhabi is bouncier than Adelaide? One night last week I saw Rameez Raza standing between two bimbos looking like a cocaine cowboy; night before that I sat through a pre-match conversation between Ajay Jadeja and Shoaib Akhtar who looked like two ex convicts competing for credibility. What's going on? And have you seen the sets? I hear Ekta Kapoor wants to shoot her next horror film there. You might be in it: Indian Premier MMS. Doubtless, it sucks.

When he heard I was going to write to you, Pappu Bhaiya, my neighbourhood paanwala, declined credit until I promised to put in a word on his behalf. He wants to congratulate you on what he thinks is an excellent choice of venue for your seventh incarnation. Don't be shocked. He thinks of you as a deity: a goddess with golden mammaries. He doesn't know you wake up feeling like Amitabh Bachchan in Amar Akbar Anthony, or that two team owners are in jail, or that MS Dhoni has suddenly discovered the Manmohan Singh side of his personality. Even if he knew he wouldn't care: Pappu Bhaiya is a bookie. He takes bets on matches. After your second incarnation he bought a Honda City, a plot of land in Nerul after your fourth. Then last year Pappu Bhaiya got screwed for no fault. One of the players arrested in the match fixing case had text-messages from Pappu Bhaiya. The cops wiretapped his phone and sorted him out to the tune of two-and-a-half crore. Although no case was made out against him, the police released his name in the media. Overnight, Pappu Bhaiya lost all his clients. Except people like me who bought cigarettes and paan. When he heard you were going to the Gulf, he felt blessed. "I will fix my life now," he told me. Pappu Bhaiya loves you, IPL. But he doesn't care.

Are you bored with your banal existence? If it's true, then I have cause to worry: you are barely seven. Agreed, you have always been precocious, but boredom? Now that's not what I call a healthy mind in a healthy body. Or are you secretly angry? I don't blame you. I too would be angry if every five years I had to vacate the centre stage for a sport as vulgar and as openly corrupt as the general elections. But I know you're better than that. You don't mind an outing every now and then. The first time it happened you were too young to know what was going on. Thankfully, acting on instructions received in a dream, your father, Lalit Modi whisked you away to South Africa before the trauma could touch you. Cricket in South Africa, as you found out, is a different ball bitch. Doesn't make you homesick and the coke shines in the sun. But West Asia? Who the... wants to go play cricket in West Asia? How stepfatherly of the BCCI. Perhaps you're being punished for your father's crimes. Or are you the crime?

IPL, my love, I smell a conspiracy to ruin you by prostitution: your reward for turning the gentleman's game into a gentleman's club. When it comes to you why must the future resemble the past? Why can't you invent your own future? Now that's me taking it a bit too far. I forget you are only seven. Forgive me, I overreact. That's cricket. That's life. That's you, IPL. Deal with it.