The Great Tamasha

by James Astill

  Ranbir said he was an exception: ‘I’ve always been very good at Hindi. I made sure I had a Hindi diction coach when I was young because I wanted to be a Hindi film actor.’ That was a reasonable ambition for Ranbir, given his lineage. ‘I grew up in musical settings, story settings, with musicians and directors passing through,’ he said. Most of them spoke in English too. ‘So who did you practise your Hindi with?’ I asked Ranbir. ‘The maid,’ he said.

  Until a couple of months previously Ranbir’s co-star, Nargis Fakhri, had spoken no Hindi at all. She was a Bollywood debutante, a gorgeous American model with long brown hair and big brown eyes. She was mesmerisingly lovely.

  During a lunch break, I spotted Nargis, dressed in the elaborate costume of a Kashmiri bride. She was having mutton curry spooned into her mouth by an assistant so as not to smudge the henna patterns painted on her hands. Rather diffidently, I asked how she had come to be here. ‘It was an accident, I really don’t know, I’m the wrong person to ask,’ Nargis blurted out between mouthfuls of curry. ‘Look, I’m 100 per cent American. I’m from Queens, New York. How did I get here? I mean, who are all these people talking funny?’

  Until a few months beforehand, Nargis said, she had known almost nothing about India. Then, while modelling in Copenhagen, she had received an email asking her to go to Prague to meet Imtiaz. He had spotted her picture in Vijay Mallya’s Kingfisher swimwear calendar, one of India’s raunchiest licit publications. He had assumed she was Pakistani and would know Urdu. Indeed, Nargis’s father was Pakistani. But she had barely known him and had grown up in America with her Czech mother. She didn’t know any Urdu. Her only experience of the subcontinent had been a brief visit to Mumbai, and she hadn’t been impressed by it. ‘I mean, have you been to Bombay?’ she asked me. ‘Dude, it’s gross. I was, like, standing looking out my hotel window thinking, “You know what? This is gross.”’

  But Mumbai is where Nargis ended up, taking crash courses in Hindi and acting. ‘I had five hours of Hindi in the morning, then five hours with Imtiaz in the afternoon, doing crazy things, staring at the wall, that kind of stuff. It was awful and I cried every day,’ she said, while the assistant hovered with the loaded spoon.

  ‘Then we started shooting and I cried again. I thought, “What am I doing in this crazy, fucked-up job?” I mean, it’s exhausting mentally and physically, and it’s lonely. I only have my mum and my sister, and I mean they’re not going to come over here. It’s 16 hours away.’

  ‘Cheer up,’ I said. ‘You’re going to be rich and famous. Isn’t that great?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Not really,’ said Nargis. ‘I don’t care what I do really.’ Then Imtiaz politely suggested it was time to start filming again, and, with a heartbreaking smile, she returned to being a Bollywood star.

  The ICL, Subhash Chandra’s rebel creation, was meanwhile limping along. It was launched on a misty evening in November 2007 at a small municipal cricket ground outside Chandigarh. Kareena Kapoor – cousin of Ranbir, girlfriend of Tiger Pataudi’s son – did a dance routine. Then there was some crash-bash T20, in front of a chilly looking crowd, for which Tony Greig, a paid-up ICL cheerleader, provided exuberant commentary. The Chandigarh Lions beat the Delhi Jets that night.

  I watched the ICL on television now and again. But I can’t remember much more about it than that: north Indian mist, small crowds, Greig shouting, and the garish pink shirts of the Chennai Superstars, which strangely reminded me of Rwandan prison uniforms. Himanshu Mody, Zee’s business chief and the rebel league’s architect, winced to recall them. ‘Awful,’ he agreed, sitting in Zee’s Mumbai headquarters. ‘They were painful to look at.’

  Over the next few months, Zee managed to secure a few more venues for the ICL: in Gurgaon, Chennai and Ahmedabad. But the stadiums were small, most of the ICL’s players were old or third-rate and the cricket was even worse than in the IPL. The ICL’s television ratings were much worse, roughly a quarter of the IPL’s. The tournament that had inspired the IPL now looked like a pathetically poor imitation of it.

  Financially, the ICL was disastrous. By November 2008, when a series of ICL ‘internationals’ – pitting teams designated as Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and the ‘World’ against each other – opened in Ahmedabad, Zee was $40 million down on its investment. It still hoped to recover that money. Indeed, a recently concluded ICL T20 tournament, won by the Lahore Badshahs, had gone well. But that hope was ended, on 26 November, by the amphibious assault on Mumbai by Pakistani terrorists. As the bullets flew, Inzamam-ul-Haq, captain of the ICL’s Pakistani contingent, demanded that Zee send him and his team home. There would be no more ICL matches after that. The rest of the league’s players were also laid off, some with their wages unpaid. The league was a failure, which left its creator, Himanshu Mody, rueing his involvement in it. ‘I always liked Test cricket, to be honest,’ he told me. ‘I also don’t mind one-day cricket. But T20, I don’t know, it’s more like entertainment than cricket. It’s just a tamasha.’

  But the IPL appeared to be unstoppable. In March 2009 the BCCI cancelled the IPL’s television contract, claiming Multi Screen Media had broken its terms, including by carrying too much advertising. After a complicated renegotiation, it then resold the rights to the same broadcaster for almost twice the money, $1.6 billion over nine years. The values of the franchises were rising at a similar clip. Around the same time Raj Kundra, the British husband of Shilpa Shetty, a former Bollywood actress, bought an 11.7 per cent stake in Rajasthan Royals for $15.4 million. That implied the team’s value had doubled in a year.

  Yet the tournament was also causing increasing concern. Foreign cricket boards had long since reconciled themselves to India’s ability to control the international calendar. But they were now confronted with a possibility that India could, in effect, control their contracted cricketers. Symonds, who had warned of this danger, now seemed to illustrate it. A hard-drinking larrikin, he had often been in trouble with the Australian board, and his IPL windfall coincided with a worsening of his indiscipline. Within a few months of the first IPL season ending, he was censured for skipping an Australia team meeting to go fishing, getting into a pub brawl and getting drunk. His troubles may have had nothing to do with the IPL. But for those who worried about the effects of showering cricketers with money, they were discouraging. By 2009 Symonds’ international career was finished and a new career as a freelance T20 specialist beckoned.

  Shrewdly, the foreign boards sought to avoid forbidding their players from getting their share of IPL gravy. But this was not always possible. The English board was finding it especially difficult to accommodate the IPL in its schedule, because it clashed with the beginning of the English county season. Instead, disastrously, it set out to compete with it.

  In June 2008 a helicopter landed on the turf at Lord’s and disgorged a moustachioed Texan financier, Allen Stanford, and crates of $100 bills. This marked the launch of one of the most bizarre entanglements in any sport. It was a deal between Stanford, England and the West Indies, to hold five Twenty20 matches between England and the West Indies a year, each of which would be played for a winner-takes-all jackpot of $20 million. But within a year Stanford had been arrested and charged with running a $7-billion Ponzi scheme. He was convicted and sentenced to 110 years in prison. For anyone tempted to consider that the BCCI had a monopoly on greed and recklessness among cricket administrators, this tie-up was a forceful counter-blast.

  The IPL had a more serious rival at home – India’s democracy. In March 2008, the government called a general election that was set to clash with the forthcoming IPL season. With the police unable to cover both events, India’s irascible home minister (and former finance minister), Palaniappan Chidambaram, demanded that the tournament be postponed. Modi refused. Denouncing the government, he declared that he would instead stage it, at only a fortnight’s notice, in South Africa.

  This was an act of chutzpah that caused great offence, fatefully for Modi, to India’s rulers. Ye
t at the time it seemed an act of brilliance. Despite the disruption, IPL2 was another great success. South African crowds packed the stadiums; Indian fans seemed unabashed by the IPL’s banishment. An estimated 122 million – nearly 25 per cent more than the previous year – watched the tournament at home on television. ‘You have to hand it to Lalit Modi all right,’ commented the perspicacious Australian cricket writer Gideon Haigh. ‘One wonders how soon people will get sick of doing that.’

  The IPL returned the following year to a bullish country. After a brief blip occasioned by the meltdown in global finance, by 2010 India’s economy was again growing fast, at almost 9 per cent a year. And India’s entertainment industry, driven by exuberant advertising, was growing much faster. ‘If you talk about an industry poised for huge growth, it’s this one,’ Multi Screen Media’s Manjit Singh would later tell me. ‘The demographics are right, incomes are going up, ad revenues are going up, cable subscriptions are going up.’ History suggests that when a country’s average annual disposable income per capita reaches $800, television advertising revenues swiftly double. India’s was around $650. ‘We’ve got the demographics and the incomes that say “entertainment!”’ said Singh. ‘It makes for what we could call a compelling money case,’ he chortled, while miming throwing wads of money at me across his desk.

  Ahead of the third IPL season, Modi announced that two new franchises would be auctioned off and added to the league. He also had other new innovations to visit on the Indian game. He sold exclusive online rights to the IPL to Google. ‘We are now taking our event truly global for the first time,’ he raved. ‘Google gives us access to 500 million pairs of eyes every single moment of the day.’ Another deal, with Colors, a Hindi entertainment channel owned by the global media giant Viacom, pushed cricketainment to new levels.

  It would involve Colors producing four IPL spin-offs, including a singing competition, ‘IPL Rockstar – Music Ka Tadka’, in which aspiring singers would perform at stadiums before the games, and coverage of after-match parties, known as IPL Nights, which would be attended by cricketers, models and high-paying guests. A third spin-off was an Oscars-style IPL awards show, a lucrative format already well used in Bollywood. But the cricketainment jewel, which was scheduled to follow IPL3, was a version of the American reality stunt show, Fear Factor, starring 13 Indian and foreign cricketers.

  According to Colors’ then-boss, Rajesh Kamat, ‘the crème de la crème of Indian cricketers’ were signed up for the show, to jump off cliffs and retrieve food from barrels of snakes under the eyes of its Bollywood host and former Miss World, Priyanka Chopra. Announcing the Colors deal, Modi declared, ‘Our partnership with Colors takes the IPL cricketainment quotient into an all-new orbit. I have always maintained that the IPL is a cricketing carnival like no other and with this unique partnership that we have entered on behalf of our franchisees, we are delivering on our promise to extend the IPL franchise beyond cricket, beyond the IPL season and quite frankly beyond imagination.’

  For Kamat, the deal looked like TV paydirt. ‘Thirteen cricketers, on Colors, doing stunts? Wow!’ he told me. ‘It would have hit the ball out the park. Absolutely. The image of the channel would have gone through the roof. Thirteen cricketers gets you talked about for three or four months. And that buzz value puts a sheen on the whole channel. That’s important. Because we have soaps that drive our bread and butter. Cricket’s not only about ratings, you know. It’s about image.’

  From outside Kamat’s office window there came a faint throbbing of Bollywood dance beats. In a car park far below, a crowd of Colors employees were playing an inter-departmental cricket match with a plastic bat and tennis ball. Half the players were young women wearing tight jeans, mini-skirts and strappy shoes. Whenever a wicket fell, music thundered from a pair of giant speakers installed in the car park. None of the players looked a day over 20: the Licence Raj had ended before they were even born.

  As I walked down the stairs on my way out of the building, I passed yet another pretty young woman, fashionably dressed, who was pressed against a window watching the game. I asked who was playing, and she shot me a brief glance. ‘They’re playing cricket,’ she said briskly, turning back to the window.

  Approaching its third season, in April 2010, the success of Modi’s baby was phenomenal. But there were warning signs. After only two six-week seasons, the league was reckoned to be worth $4.13 billion. Yet it was run by a secretive volunteer organisation, the BCCI, which did not appear to consider itself bound by the most basic rules of corporate governance. The IPL’s governing body, on which Tiger Pataudi and other grandees sat, was barely functioning. And the tournament was beset with possible conflicts of interest. N. Srinivasan was the BCCI secretary, president of Tamil Nadu’s cricket association and also owner, through his family company, of Chennai Super Kings. Mallya, the Bangalore franchise owner, also ran the BCCI’s marketing committee. His stepdaughter worked for the IPL. The in-laws of Sharad Pawar’s daughter and political successor, Supriya Sule, it emerged, owned a stake in Multi Screen Media, owner of the IPL’s broadcast rights. Modi’s brother-in-law and stepson-in-law owned stakes in the Rajasthan and Punjab franchises.

  Modi himself was a bigger worry. Ensconced in a luxury suite at the Four Seasons hotel in Mumbai, he had assumed the mantle of IPL god-creator. ‘If you really want to see power,’ wrote Bobili Vijay Kumar, sports editor of the Times of India, ‘you need to walk into his IPL headquarters in Mumbai; of course, that is easier said than done. Right at the entrance of the plush five-star hotel, there are close to ten NSG-style commandos, all armed to their teeth. You walk through the gate at your own risk. There is an IPL help-desk next to the reception. When you say you have an appointment with Modi, a call is quickly made; only on confirmation, the hotel staffer reveals the floor number. Another one steps forward and punches in the card that gives you access to the floor. When you step out of the lift, the corridor is eerily silent. In the far corner you can see another bunch of armed guards; nobody is allowed here without valid IDs.’

  Unhindered by the BCCI, Modi made almost every important decision in the IPL, involving billions or merely thousands of dollars. Colors’ boss, Kamat, gave me an illustration of this. ‘Everyone had said no to Fear Factor,’ he told me. ‘But then I got to see Lalit. I sat with him, started telling him the idea, and he just said, “OK, wait.” Then he made five phone calls, including with Shane Warne, and started speaking values, then and there. He was able to take decisions. That was his clout.’

  In his way, Modi was brilliant. He was feverishly industrious. ‘I’ve never seen anyone work as hard,’ Pataudi told me, wonderingly. He was obsessed with excellence, refusing to accept India’s usual shoddy standards. ‘Whatever anyone says about him, Lalit made sure the organisation of the IPL was world class,’ one of the team managers told me, and then illustrated this with a story of how, after returning from another visit to Wimbledon, Modi had upgraded the lanyards used for IPL passes with a better sort he had seen there. Yet it seems amazing in retrospect – no, it seemed amazing at the time – that India’s cricket board had given so much power to this Icarus of corporate India.

  Brilliant as Modi was at making deals, he was equally good at making enemies. He paid no attention to the first rule of Indian public life: Indians can forgive almost any indiscretion by their leaders in return for a show of grovelling humility, however implausible it might be. But Modi was no groveller. ‘You want tickets for the game?’ he told a government minister, ‘Fine, go buy them.’ Though gracious to those he approved of, he could be astonishingly rude. He had little respect for anyone’s authority but his own. He seemed genuinely to believe that the IPL was the biggest thing in India, and that he alone ruled it. Manically driven by his desire for power, excellence and self-validation, he offended almost everyone he had dealings with, from the government to the lowliest hack reporter. The IPL could not have happened without him, at least not as it did. But Modi was far from indispensable. And even tho
se who had profited most from him were tiring of the IPL’s chairman and commissioner.

  The Rajasthan Cricket Association had got rid of him in early 2009, shortly after his mentor Scindia was voted out of office. The BCCI, under new leadership, was also losing patience with Modi. Pawar, now installed at the ICC, had been succeeded as president by a dour Maharashtrian lawyer called Shashank Manohar. And he and his ally Srinivasan were becoming uneasy about how the league was run. After IPL2 they had demanded, over Modi’s head, a renegotiation of terms with IMG, which had been paid nearly $10 million for its work in 2008. This looked bad for Modi, who had negotiated IMG’s terms, and he made matters worse by rallying the franchise owners against changing them. Manohar and Srinivasan were furious.

  They were also concerned by the almost daily controversies that attended the league: endless rows with journalists over access to stadiums, with Hindu nationalists over the cheerleaders’ scanty dress, and so on. No one at the BCCI was shy of an argument. But Modi seemed to go out of his way to create them. ‘Controversy was always something I wanted in the IPL,’ he told me. ‘You look at England and football – players having girlfriends all over the place, having affairs. People are interested, some people find it aspirational. Some may disapprove of it, but it still gets their attention, they’re still reading about it.’ That was all very well, but the endless controversy was becoming compromising. Ahead of the third IPL season India’s tax authorities declared they were reviewing the BCCI’s charitable status. They had the temerity to suggest that the cricket board was, in fact, a commercial operation.

  By the time IPL3 began in March 2010, Modi was running out of friends. He was also engulfed in a new scandal, which grew bigger by the day. It started at an auction of the two new franchises, in Mumbai, just a few days before the season began. As the deadline for bidding passed, the sale appeared to have been completed: only two bids had been lodged. Yet Manohar suddenly cancelled the auction. He would later suggest it had been rigged. Modi denied it. Yet some queried the unusually stringent conditions he had imposed on the bidding process: including a stipulation that any bidder must have collateral of a billion dollars. That had put paid to a lot of other potential bidders – leaving only two in the running: a consortium led by Videocon, a Pune-based electronic company, in which Pawar was alleged to have an interest, and a Gujarati conglomerate, the Adani Group, which was linked to Pawar’s sidekick, Praful Patel. (Both politicians denied having had any involvement in the bids.)