What say?

 Yet again the nation is down with the cricket fever. Cricket-itis a dangerous disease. This virus is worse than the dreaded corona. It is dreadfully contagious. Once in the thrall of this virus, you are forever this dis-ease borne. The cricket bug badly catches an entire nation for hours and days together. The worst problem with this national malady is that no panacea is its medicine!

In a cricket crazy country like ours, cricket is religion, it seems. And, well, this religion is for sure above the Constitution! Is not that rather funny, quite loony? Well, what exactly does a cricketer do for the larger whole? Forget the often rude and crude behaviour of these bratty worthies, but we cannot overlook the fact that most all matches are fixed.

So it is hardly "entertainment, entertainment, entertainment" either. It is a criminalised mover and shaker energised by the m-tonic! And we waste hours in a futile way, chasing fixed matches. The bookies must be laughing their way to a fat bank balance. What else!

Circa mid-eighties, when the LPG started making inroads across the world, finally arriving at our doorstep in the natty nineties, the game of cricket had already started losing the delicate beauty of the feather touch strokes artistry of a Gundappa Vishwanath. Now it is a 'hit hard' free for all! Real power play every which way!

Such a commercialised game, moreover, becomes more and more personality driven/ oriented. A team game is reduced to individual glory often. In other words, not only is the game now a consumer good, it is, moreover, rabid in its exclusivities.

Cry, indeed, the beloved country, when a foaming at the mouth cricketeer, and/or a brash actor become the teenage idols as if the saas-bahu saga, eternally done to death, or the mushy  melodrama of multiple "reality shows"  is not enough as distractions.

With the fourth industrial revolution at the doorstep, the Ukraine factor,  the Chinese dilemma complicating  the narratives, should not the civil, as well as the  general, society, wake up,  and address such and other grave issues dismantling realities the world over!?! That would be the much needed the test best stroke! What say?

Pratima@ Tough contexts require thought through solutions, and surely not the morphine of the masses such as films and cricket.