'Kabhi khushi kabhie gham'

As the IPL draws to a close, piffling objections about cheerleaders and other paraphernalia have thankfully been submerged in the high-voltage action. That said, I must confess to missing the biggest cheerleader of them all — Shah Rukh Khan. His raw energy and unabashed support of his team from the stands, the dug-out, in the ads — everywhere — was infectious and I lament his decision to stay away from his team’s future matches.

It would be fair to say that Shah Rukh’s superstar status raised the ante of the IPL manifold. His involvement accentuated the profile of the tournament, making it mega from massive, not because of the money he brought to the table, but because of the eyeballs he guaranteed across the world.

All things considered, Shah Rukh was also an unusual owner. He may be the reigning deity of Bollywood; even so $ 300 million is not loose change for him as it may be for the others. Obviously he saw a business op in buying a team, but he also knew that to make it work, he would have to put in as much toil as the players, which he did.

Unfortunately, a terrific start could not quite be sustained and Shah Rukh appears to have signed off his engagement with the IPL with a poignant sms to his team members that suggests heartache and  disappointment. Unconfirmed rumours hint of a possible sale of the team before the next season.

Incidentally, this is not the only story of a team on sale doing the rounds, which tells me that while T-20 leagues may have become a big hit in the country, how these will develop as a conglomerate of individual enterprises is still in its infancy. For, it is not just the players who have to adapt to the demands of the new game; even owners have to come to terms with the vicissitudes of fortune in sport. Doubtless there will be large-scale and radical changes in team compositions and player contracts, but new team management practices — which relate to sports and sportspersons — will also have to come into play.

I would like to believe that Shah Rukh Khan will be around next year too, even if the ICC rules decree not in the dug-out (Incidentally, why was this known only after seven or eight games had been played?). As for how the first season has gone, he could seek some solace from the title of one of his blockbusters, as so many of us do in life: Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham.

***

“Television has brought murder back into the home -- where it belongs,” Alfred Hitchcock is quoted as saying in the Observer newspaper in 1965. For contemporary India, the truth value of this observation was brought home tellingly last week when two gory murders, one in Delhi the other in Mumbai, were played out relentlessly on the idiot box.

The master of suspense and murder mysteries was never one to disguise his cynicism about the delinquent and debase aspects of the human race, but even Hitchcock might have been forced to admit that he could have hardly scripted such macabre stories. The horrific nature of the two murders under purview makes Jack the Ripper seem like an under-12 player, as it were.

In the capital, a doctor couple is allegedly involved in slitting the throat of their 14-year-old daughter with clinical precision — apart from bumping off a domestic servant too — punctuated by a drinks break in which the father knocks back a couple of whiskies to soothe his nerves. In Mumbai, a young, ambitious starlet teams up with her ‘original’ boyfriend to chop her newfound lover into 300 pieces, then has consensual sex before cleaning up the mess in the flat and dumping the 300 pieces of flesh just outside the city. Shucks!

The argument that in the land of Buddha, Gandhi and ahimsa, the crime rate would never match that of the West is obviously flawed. It is not only that contemporary India is subject to such gruesome crimes because of urban alienation. That may be true, but cannot obfuscate the fact that child sacrifice, female infanticide etc have abounded for hundreds of years.

Because of a hypercompetitive media, such stories are being played out more extensively, but the fact that we are a crime-ridden people, I’m afraid, is an open and shut case.

Email: ayaz@dnaindia.net