Column

I must unashamedly confess to thoroughly enjoying the Indian Premier League. It’s got Ishant Sharma running like Krrish on the field, Shah Rukh Khan striking poses like Don in the stands, an uninterrupted flow of item numbers by blonde bombshells as a sideshow, action, emotion, nail biting suspense and a cliffhanger climax — all this in a duration less than the running time of Salaam-e-Ishq!

It’s got all the standard ingredients of a potential Bollywood blockbuster. After all, like our movies, IPL matches draw crowds on the strength of their casting — by which I mean the array of cricketing star power in the teams.

Again, like our movie stars, these sport stars come with a high price tag. It’s got the duration of a feature film and comes in two halves with a short interval for popcorn and Pepsi.

Only if we could pump more Bollywood into the format, IPL would be the ultimate entertainment experience.Imagine Virender Sehwag making a grand Akshay Kumar like entry on the field and hollering, Maa kasam! Ek ek ko chunn chunn ke maroonga! Yuvraj Singh and Dhoni hitting sixes and blowing kisses at the same woman in the stands, Deepika Padukone, who walks away with a third hero who doesn’t play cricket — Ranbir Kapoor!

Or when Ishant Sharma is hit for consecutive sixes in an over, the lights go off at Eden Gardens and his favourite heroine, Katrina Kaif, appears on field to perform an item number to boost his morale!

And Sourav Ganguly taking off his shirt and showing off the six-pack abs he’s sculpted with tips from Shah Rukh. Cricket has come a long way since the days of Gavaskar and Ravi Shastri.

While it’s become technically sophisticated with stump visions and microphones, the game’s technique has gone back to our prehistoric era where brute strength was the key to survival.

Plus today’s batsmen and bowlers also need various other skills on the field — like hurling racist abuses at their opponents on field and adjusting their private parts on national television.

IPL is hoping to woo female audiences by replacing Mandira Bedi with hunky male TV presenters. But I doubt women will ever take to cricket like the guys, who may never give a damn about their mother-in-law’s arthritis but express anguish over the hamstring injury of a total stranger on the cricket field.