Mr. Lalit Modi
Hope you are doing well. Congratulations on the grand success of IPL, your "brainchild”. You have made a great deal of money for the BCCI, sold cricket commercially and won a lot of new fans. You are a great manager and an excellent businessman. You have managed to monopolise cricket and become "the most powerful man in world cricket today" (quoting Chris Cairns). And I definitely should mention that you are very good at the press conferences. Of course you always have Shilpa Shetty, Preity Zinta or some other pretty lady for your support. A good job nevertheless. You have received enough accolades for your effort I am sure.
I however, have a few questions for you. I could not help looking up the word "brainchild" in the dictionary. It means "a product of one's creative work or thought." May I ask you what was so creative about the IPL? You just changed "English" in EPL to "Indian" to make it IPL. Very convenient. Not even the idea of providing opportunities to youngsters was yours. It belonged to Mr. Kapil Dev and crew. You could not even come up with innovative franchise names for crying out loud! All you had to do was go online and browse for the names of baseball and football leagues in USA. Kansas City Royals became Rajasthan Royals, San Diego Chargers became Deccan Chargers and Outer Banks Daredevils became Delhi Daredevils. So Mr. Modi, it is very clear that no part of your work is creative. Please refrain from using the word "brainchild" henceforth.
I forgot to congratulate you on the moving of IPL to South Africa on such a short notice last year. Great job on that. And on your donation to the schools in South Africa, over $890000 if I am not wrong. Very generous indeed. Where were you when our own hockey team needed financial help? A man of your stature and position could have done a lot for a fellow sporting body in the country. It’s after all our national game. Please do something to popularise hockey in India. Only you can do it. You can probably copy the format of NFL and call it NHL(National Hockey League). Go for it Mr. Modi!!
I grew up watching Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Glenn Mcgrath, Shane Warne, Brian Lara and Ricky Ponting, among many others, battling it out for their countries for five days, bowling till the last sinew in their body cracked up and taking blows on their bodies just to survive. That was cricket. They might not have been paid a lot but they sure did give all of theirs for their respective countries. Times may have changed now, but if test cricket has to survive in India, leave alone flourish, IPL is definitely not the way to go. If you are going to offer such large amounts of money even for rookies, no one is ever going to venture close to Test cricket. As the legendary Gary Sobers noted, you can pay the guys such huge sums of money for winning but not for just participating. You are just spoiling the upcoming cricketers.
I was proud when India said it won’t play the inaugural T20 world cup. I was proud that we stood up for something. But now we are just another hypocritical cricketing nation. It’s not very surprising now that we are the only country against the Test Championship Tournament. At this rate, I am sure we won’t produce another Gavaskar, Kapil Dev, Tendulkar or Dravid. We already have players like Flintoff, Lee, Tait and Nannes retiring from the longer format of the game to play the shorter one. Very soon Test cricket is going to have overly aggressive and technically weak batsmen playing against mediocre bowlers with shortened boundaries. Is that what you want? Test cricket is marching towards a decline and you, Mr. Modi, are leading the march. You have the power to stop it. Like Peter Roebuck says, Test matches are like classic movies and T20s are not anything more than sitcoms, each has to be treated with different amounts of respect. Please don’t lure away the cricketers from the glory of test matches by showing them the wealth of IPL. As I said earlier, you have won a lot of new fans for cricket, but please do not take away what we old diehard fans adore - Test Cricket. Please stop the madness
