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The hot hot ladies of the Washington Redskins cheer squad are in India shaking their shapely hips in those short shorts, matching go-go boots and bikini tops. Needless to say male fans were left salivating for more, our culture guardians gasping at the "vulgarity", purists demanding that the "Indian" sport be spared of such cheap thrills, and some fence sitters (me included) wondering and analyzing to no end what this all means and if all this fuss is warranted.
Background:
The American squad is cheering for the Bangalore Royal Challengers, one of the eight cricket teams of the newly-formed , flush-with-funds, Indian Premier League. [The Royal Challengers, incidentally, is owned by Vijay 'King of Good Times' Mallya, the liquor baron who also owns Kingfisher Airlines of the "red skirt" fame that our very own Elana Centor blogged about.]
The IPL is similar to the American NFL or the British (soccer) Premier League, and is backed by the Board of Control for Cricket in India as well as the International Cricket Council.
Players are drawn from across the cricketing world through a bidding process -- a first for international cricket. The teams are owned by just about anyone with big bucks -- from Bollywood superstars to industrialists to media houses. The format follows the new, shorter version of the game, popularly called the Twenty20 or T20, and is packed with entertainment. It has appropriately been nicknamed "cricket on crack" :)
[I'd like to clarify the cliche about the game that repeatedly appears in the media here -- T20 is the shortest of the three popularly played versions of the game -- (i) the Test matches -- which are considered the real test of athleticism and tenacity by players and purists alike -- can run up to five days, (ii) the highly popular one-dayers, where the game wraps up in a six-hour day of play (the traditional World Cup is played in this format), and (iii) the latest fast-paced T20, that takes up half the time. So, cricket is NOT making a direct jump for the five-day format to T20. And for many of us who love the game, it does not put us to sleep, despite its length. Had it been so, cricket, a primarily British game, would have died in India a long time ago.]
And then the cheerleaders arrived.
They came from all over the world, but the American girls -- the first ones to take the field -- got the most press. They are only part of a glitzy, glamorous extravaganza that the tournament has turned out to be. The inauguration was a star-studded affair with performers flown in from all parts of the world, and Bollywood has turned up for the games in full force.
But when a group of glam girls -- showing more skin than most of the young predominantly male audience would've probably seen in their unmarried lives -- can the moral police be far behind?
Many young spectators could barely keep their eyes on the ball when the cheerleaders did their gig. Some even confessed the girls were the only reason they turned up to watch the games. That should please the organizers -- high turnout was absolutely essential for the world's most expensive cricket tournament to take off.
But not all were happy.
First the Indians -- The attack seemed two pronged: from traditional cricket enthusiasts who can't see their favorite sport being turned into a spectacle, and from our culture guardians who are shaken by the onslaught of skin-show on good Indian boys and girls and cricket.
I think the first kind are driven by a traditional idea that most of us have held about cricket (the only game India has a strong international presence in): that sport and entertainment are somehow different. I held that belief, too, as I guess many senior players of the game still do. I find the younger crop of players using the word "entertainment" to describe their jobs far more often now than older or retired players did. Which explains why some are uneasy with the mixing of entertainment and sport (what is sport, if not entertainment?).
Pakistani blogger Ammar headlines his post thus -- "The day Cricket died; IPL":
I am not against Indi masala films, neither I am against 20/20 or new exciting form of cricket for that matter. But people IPL is anything but cricket. I mean
