Bollywood, Late 80s; IPL, anytime now

Wow, the Indian Premier League stands at exactly the same place where the Hindi film industry stood in the late 1980s. In Bollywood, the old stars had started fading (think Amitabh, Dharmendra and Shatrughan), the big cat producers had started losing their touch (think Manmohan Desai, Yash Chopra and Subhash Ghai) and music composers had gone out of tune (think Laxmikant Pyarelal and RD Burman).
Something was about to give. Films were such a passion that everybody knew it was not going to die out anytime soon. But as the traditional financiers started telling the Chopras and the Ghais and the Kapoors that they genuinely didn’t have money (genuinely they didn’t because think of it would any financier today tell a Karan Johar or Rajkumar Hirani he doesn’t have money for their films with Aamir Khan?), a new phenomenon had started unravelling.
Suddenly a spate of films got announced by producers who no one had ever heard of before. The money was good. The Bollywood buzz was ‘full cash’. These new producers never worked in terms of cheques or banks. They paid in cash. A whole set of new actors were making their way into tinseltown as well.
These producers also came with the promise that when they sunk a bit of money in a film, everything better fall in place like clockwork or else there is something called a telephone, there is something called Dubai and Karachi, there is something called a bhai- a wonderful word that jumped out of the world of relationships from being one that we wanted to one absolutely unwanted- and there is something called ‘thok daalna’.

The cops never realised when the industry got taken over by the cronies of Dawood and when stars went from being regal people to those who danced at the don’s daughter’s wedding.

We have two religions in India. I described one in the paragraphs above. The other is cricket. Then came the IPL. Now IPL is bigger than cricket, the ICC and all the cricketers put together. And probably why some papers have said going by current growth rates, the IPL could soon overtake even the English Premier League.
The problem as in filmdom remains the same. Any place where there is passion and money but no rules, it doesn’t take long for crime to step into the room.

The IPL is a place where there are massive amounts of money, humungous amounts of passion but sadly no rules. Remember how Lalit Modi and Co cancelled the first round of the bidding for the two new IPL teams without assigning any reason?

That is where crime steps in. Can you believe that a team that paid a whopping 400 million dollars for an IPL team from Kochi did not reveal who held 25 percent of its shares? Which world are we living in? That money could have been anybody’s? The Underworld? Arms dealers? Drug peddlers?

Of course Modi has blown the lid on what is going on and Congress poster boy and bogus Malu Shashi Tharoor is caught with his pants down. But it is a close shave. Tomorrow when the big stars exit IPL- the Sachins, Kumbles, Dravids, Gangulys- when the gigglers like Preity and Shilpa move out, when more teams come in, when IPL becomes bigger than all of ICC combined, like in the late 80s, as it happened in the film industry- far more sinister people might barge into the world of IPL. And some small time cricketers -as it happened in the film industry- would play ball with these sinister forces. And the cops like in the late 80s would be too late to realise when the term underworld and cricket became synonymous.