Folks almost everyone is writing about the IPL fiasco so I thought it was time that I put my 2 bits in.

First of all, lets look at the whole concept of dividing India into bits. as we all know the idea was to form 8 teams to compete against each other but god alone knows which joker came up with the idea of dividing India into bits.

Its nuts, here we are with the world uniting itself and we are dividing India into bits. I have already written about how a politician the moment she comes into power talks about dividing the state into 3 just to make sure she is elected at the next election. bout how a pimple of a state like Pondicherry is separated to appease some petty politician, now we have these jokers doing it in the name of sports.

We have ads which now show that a young man on a bus refuses to give a seat to an elderly gentleman just because he's supporting a team from another part of the country. Is this what our exulted Indian culture has come to ? Where are the hypocritical self appointed guardians of Indian Culture ?

No wonder no one today remembers that we were once a great united nation called Hindoostan and our borders extended from Persia to Thailand. All we see is a peninsula with a crown which is continuously being divided into smaller and smaller bits and fiefdoms.

  When I talk to people about the IPl teams, almost everyone I know is supporting one team or another because of the owner. So we have one section voting for Preity Zinta's team while another is voting for Shahrukh Khan's team.

Wouldn't it be better to have called them Shahruk's 11 or Mallya's 11. Of course then it wouldn't follow the good old adage left behind by the British of " divide and conquer" which is pulled out by every tin pot Dictator to capture his territory

(Its important to note Mr. Modi has called himself Commissar of IPL -- the word Commissar in Russia is popularly known for Head Enforcer of unpopular laws).

I had someone counter my point of thought the other day using an argument that if I wasn't against the Football leagues which has been doing the partition on basis of areas for ages, how could I be against the division of India on lines of areas ?

All I say was that the leagues have been around for ages and are not creating any new divides. In this day and age with jokers going around talking of North India, South India, Vidharbas and regionalism which is creating hatred in the minds of the newer generation which is seething with resentment and frustration as the divide between the haves and havenots grows wider. (for example, the farmers in Vidharba are committing suicide for 20 rupees a day and a call centre employee blows up 2000 a night at a bar)

The last thing we need is partitions of this kind. Its akin to a dangerous Molotov cocktail we are allowing our children to play with.

If we wish to create divides I would rather it be done on basis of owners names etc rather than areas so that the bomb is diffused. ( By the way I don't know how much its true but someone just told me that the last two matches had just the teams names with the areas issue dropped so Kolkatta Knight Riders was referred to throughout the game as Knight riders, etc so perhaps someone somewhere is coming to his senses)

You know what the ironical part of the whole thing is which is reflected by the IPL rules. It is that a minimum of 4 local players be included in the team. Now remember that the team consists of 16 players plus physio plus coach. ( check rules here)

This means that by rules only 25% of a team has to be LOCAL to an area to which they are identified. So all you need to do is pick 3 jokers (1 seat is reserved for an icon) and backbench them and you're laughing. All the other players can be from anywhere in the world (except a minor reservation against Australians for some reason)

Now lets look at the word LOCAL.

Harbajan is considered local.......Hmmmm wonder if anyone told Raj Thakeray that.  Why do I not see him protesting that Mumbai team should have only Maharashtrian cricketers. ???? Doesn't Mumbai as in Mumbai Indians belong to Maharashtra ????

All those jokers who wrote in screaming at me for talking against Raj Thakeray in my previous articles seem to have missed out this point. Perhaps one of them should get up off their backsides and go tell him something instead of writing nasty emails to me.

Then of course we have the famous cheerleaders and Mr. RR Patil in a quandary. Here we have him screaming hoarse against so called obscenity and on the other hand his Boss Mr. Sharad Pawar runs BCCI and ergo IPl and there you have scantly dressed cheerleaders shaking their booty. What is the poor man to do. He did what any normal hypocritical politico does, he backed off.

He allowed cheerleaders as long as they were "decently dressed". Dear Mr. Patil, would you now please allow bar girls to come back if they are "DECENTLY DRESSED."

Talking about the hoopla around the IPL I notice that we have things like Akshay Kumar coming in on a trapeze to do an opening and Shakrukh doing a jig on stage. All thats missing is an pair of Bollywood actors and actresses running around wickets lip syncing the songs from next movie to be released that week ( a la dance and song reality shows).

I wouldn't be surprised if we now start getting the lead pair from the latest bollywood movie to be released doing item numbers on the pitch at halftime or if the week Bhootnath releases, you have Amitabh appearing on the pitch with posters one each side of him in full blown makeup promoting the movie.

Talking about the IPL, another thing that comes to mind is that I am ashamed of how stupid and saleable our government machinery is. Here we have then doing a little song and dance every few months on surrogate advertising and there we have Vijay Mallya naming his whole team on the brand of a famous MINERAL WATER ( we all know what the mineral water is surogatley named for).

So now you have the team dressed in the colours of the "mineral water" with the logo emblazoned across their chests, and Mr. Mallya gets millions of publicity for a fraction of what it would cost him normally that too legally.  Our health minister Mr. Ramadoss ( must give him credit for having some integrity) raised a stink about it but as usual when a person as powerful as Mr. Mallya is involved the whole thing got tossed to a bottomless pit.

I think if he gets away with it, next year methinks all the teams will sport the names of "mineral waters or CDs". Which may not be a bad thing after all.

There is of course the confusion of which team to vote for on which day. If on Monday we vote for Mumbai Indians against some Chennai Super Kings. What happens if on Friday that team plays against Rajasthan Royals. Do we then do a 180 degree about turn and support  Chennai Super Kings ? 

This kind of confusion may have one of two effects , either the target audience will get divided into bits each of which supports only one team like it happens in football or the audience for these matches will consist of just a bunch of jokers who will watch anything which happens on the idiot box no matter how non-sensical or banal it is. Either way the commercial aspects and eyeballs attraction of the game will decline with the novelty wearing off.

Lastly, one good thing I see coming out of this, with the teams being limited to 8, there are a lot of mee toos out there, sitting on a lot of hot money.

They will see Sharukh and Priety and imagine themselves as being team owners too. Now that they can't own a cricket team, we may see money spill over into football, hockey and other such sports. If even one other sport starts getting organized the way IPL is, that to me is worth this whole fiasco.