Bollywood + Cricket = Big Business

The two things that unite the rich and the poor, the educated elite and the illiterate, the city-dwellers and the villagers in India are undoubtedly – Bollywood and Cricket! Both have their own share of success and star factor – Shah Rukh Khan has a big fan following in Germany, while Sachin Tendulkar was gifted a Ferrari by Michael Schumacher. Both are big businesses – the Bollywood stars as do the cricketers appear regularly on TV to endorse everything from under-garments to life insurance to passenger cars. How about bringing them together – and that’s what happened in 2008 when the Indian Premier League (IPL) was inaugurated. Cricket, in its traditional form, usually being a day-long or a five-day game, because of the the duration of the game, was always seen by the Europeans and Americans as something boring that only cricket-crazy Indians could watch. How about making it shorter, spicing it up with some Bollywood masala adding a huge entertainment and star factor to it – and this in short is the definition of IPL. This format of the game has many similarities with both the traditional game of cricket as well as Bollywood. First, the duration – this format of the game, more popularly dubbed T20 (for Twenty-20 as it has 20 overs (1 over = 6 balls) a side), runs for around 3 hours – the same duration of a typical Bollywood movie. And the heroes are both on and off the field. The on-field heroes are the cricket stars from around the world who entertain the audience with their cricket skills. While the teams with fancy names like Delhi-Dare-Devils, Chennai-Super-Kings, etc., have a mix of Indian and international players are mostly owned by Bollywood stars or big Indian business houses. The off-the-field heroes are thus the Bollywood stars and other page-3 regulars (the ‘socialites’) who add to the star quotient. The only thing that is left from a typical Bollywood movie are the ‘item numbers’. These are substituted for by the grooving cheer-leaders with skimpy