Cricket is an eventful business, a game for gentlemen, preferably the swaggering ones as the English would have preferred it. It produced characters like Douglas Jardine, Ian Botham, Shane Warne, Chris Gayle and many others. The one thing that unites these aforementioned names is the tendency to get into scrapes and scandals, earning the colorful tag in a jiffy, which makes for entertaining journalism and matches two birds with one stone like the idiom goes.
Capitalizing on these not so dormant tendencies, came up the looming, 6 foot 3 inch figure of Kerry Packer, who with the permanent cigar in the mouth, reinvented cricket in the image of show business like we know it today. India took up the same baton in the shape of the bespectacled Lalit Modi who gave us the IPL and soon it became the biggest thing no one could have possibly imagined, of course came along the funding of billionaires, galas that would rival Bollywood( an ironic remark I realize, for movie stars did participate in this world and still do) but till date it is a sell out event.
Generational gap pervades here as well, another reason as to why we relate with cricket so much and use it in our vernacular language too. Venkatesh Prasad, who has obviously kept up with the latest spells of disappointment on the Indian side, has called the current skipper Hardik Pandya useless, as the captain is to take responsibility. Pandya has done a good job of keeping up with the flamboyant traditions of cricket and earned flak for it as well, but he is still touted as a good player, neverthless.
He has kept his head down in appropriate humility and while nothing can be predicted, this can be called something that is still in the works and not yet a final product one can air views on.