The Midas (do not) touch

OK, so if an IPL player (or BCCI, or ICC) was to be sitting in an aircraft, and notices an ICL player across the aisle, what does he do?

He can:

A. Jump off (given that the plane is flying)

B. Throw ICL off (given ICL is cooperative)

C. Call Niranjan Shah, asking for 'advice'; decipher what he says, and then do accordingly.

Not once, but several times over nearly 20 years, I've said "Now I've heard it all", about the Board of Control for Cricket in India, and every time, I have heard something new. But all things considered, this would take the proverbial cake.

There was a time in India (still is, at many places) when people of a certain castes or communities were not allowed to sit on the same platform with those of different feathers. We as a society vocally kept criticising and internally encouraging this phenomenon, so much so that it became everything from a reason to hold up traffic to holding the nation to ransom.

But one place where this was largely kept out of the equation (apart from in movies about hockey) was sports. Here, for all the cynicism we garner and cherish, even the most negative of people believe that finally, talent is the only consideration. Till we heard the BCCI diktat.

Asking Piyush Chawla not to play for a certain county side, simply because it has some ICL players on its rolls, is akin to any communal or racial or social slur cast on anyone anywhere in the world. This goes way beyond business; this tries to make outcasts out of the ICL players, and treating them like lepers, and those who stick with them are also condemned like they were mass murderers.

There is a lot of undercurrent about how things are between the BCCI and the England and Wales Cricket Board. With Lalit Modi and the Indian Premier League flexing its muscle and financial strength, the ECB is in a quandary, since most of its 'loyal' players are ready to jump the gun and come to India, tails wagging, as soon as the greenbacks are waved. Modi endeared himself further by saying that county sides with ICL players won't be invited for the lucrative Champions League.

At the same time, the eternally superior English cannot deal with the fact that the natives are now ruling.

Also, the ECB has, or has recently developed, some financial muscle of its own, and cannot have the colonials rule the roost, so they are contemplating an English Premier League of their own.

That is the professional angle. But what the BCCI is telling Chawla to do, or even VVS Laxman, as we understand, is to treat the counties and the ICL players like untouchables, variants of the plague which is out to destroy the fabric of BCCI domination. They cannot afford to have any virus filtering down into the BCCI, or the IPL, through Chawla or anyone else, can they?

At the same time, no one is quite trying to figure out how Chawla feels about it. Dumped from the Test squad, he would certainly be thinking of making some money ('experience', as people are saying) in England. Till BCCI released their bloodhound, Niranjan Shah, to deliver their 'request'. Don't follow it, and be damned.

British Raj, Swaraj, Cricket Raj, Mafia Raj. I guess this is the progression of the history of the sport in India, as the game becomes a business, and then is ruled by people who will use this financial clout to try and grind others into oblivion.

Now, I have really heard it all. Till next time, that is...