Harsha Bhogle: The rise of cricket, the rise of India

480,690 views ・ 2010-03-02

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:15
So, what I'm going to do is
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just give you the latest episode of India's --
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maybe the world's -- longest running soap opera,
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which is cricket.
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And may it run forever, because it gives people like me a living.
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It's got everything that you'd want a normal soap opera to want:
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It's got love, joy, happiness,
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sadness, tears, laughter,
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lots of deceit, intrigue.
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And like all good soaps, it jumps 20 years
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when the audience interest changes.
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And that's exactly what cricket has done.
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It's jumped 20 years
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into 20-over game.
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And that's what I'm going to talk about,
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how a small change
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leads to a very big revolution.
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But it wasn't always like that.
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Cricket wasn't always this
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speed-driven generations game.
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There was a time when you played cricket,
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you played timeless test matches,
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when you played on till the game got over.
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And there was this game in March 1939
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that started on the third of March
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and ended on the 14th of March.
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And it only ended because the English cricketers
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had to go from Durban to Cape Town,
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which is a two-hour train journey,
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to catch the ship that left on the 17th,
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because the next ship wasn't around for a long time.
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So, the match was ended in between.
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And one of the English batsmen said, "You know what?
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Another half an hour and we would have won."
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(Laughter)
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Another half an hour after 12 days.
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There were two Sundays in between. But of course, Sundays are church days,
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so you don't play on Sundays. And one day it rained,
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so they all sat around making friends with each other.
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But there is a reason why India fell in love with cricket:
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because we had about the same pace of life.
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(Laughter)
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The Mahabharata was like that as well, wasn't it?
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You fought by day, then it was sunset,
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so everyone went back home.
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And then you worked out your strategy,
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and you came and fought the next day, and you went back home again.
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The only difference between the Mahabharata and our cricket was
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that in cricket, everybody was alive to come back and fight the next day.
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Princes patronize the game,
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not because they love the game,
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but because it was a means of ingratiating themselves
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to the British rulers.
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But there is one other reason why India fell in love with cricket,
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which was, all you needed was a plank of wood
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and a rubber ball, and any number of people
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could play it anywhere.
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Take a look:
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You could play it in the dump
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with some rocks over there,
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you could play it in a little alley --
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you couldn't hit square anywhere, because the bat hit the wall;
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don't forget the air conditioning and the cable wires.
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(Laughter)
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You could play it on the banks of the Ganges --
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that's as clean as the Ganges has been for a long time.
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Or you could play many games in one small patch of land,
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even if you didn't know which game you were actually in.
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(Laughter)
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As you can see, you can play anywhere.
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But slowly the game moved on,
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you know, finally.
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You don't always have five days. So, we moved on,
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and we started playing 50-over cricket.
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And then an enormous accident took place.
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In Indian sport we don't make things happen,
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accidents happen and we're in the right place at the right time, sometimes.
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And we won this World Cup in 1983.
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And suddenly we fell in love with the 50-over game,
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and we played it virtually every day.
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There was more 50-over cricket than anywhere.
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But there was another big date.
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1983 was when we won the World Cup.
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1991,'92, we found a finance minister
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and a prime minister
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willing to let the world look at India,
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rather than be this great country of intrigue
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and mystery in this closed country.
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And so we allowed multinationals into India.
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We cut customs duties, we reduced import duties,
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and we got all the multinationals coming in,
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with multinational budgets,
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who looked at per-capita income
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and got very excited about the possibilities in India,
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and were looking for a vehicle to reach every Indian.
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And there are only two vehicles in India -- one real, one scripted.
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The scripted one is what you see in the movies,
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the real one was cricket.
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And so one of my friends sitting right here in front of me,
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Ravi Dhariwal from Pepsi, decided he's going to take it
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all over the world.
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And Pepsi was this big revolution, because they started taking cricket all over.
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And so cricket started becoming big;
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cricket started bringing riches in.
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Television started covering cricket. For a long time
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television said, "We won't cover cricket
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unless you pay us to cover it."
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Then they said, "OK,
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the next rights are sold for 55 million dollars.
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The next rights are sold for 612 million dollars."
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So, it's a bit of a curve, that.
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And then another big accident happened in our cricket.
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England invented 20 overs cricket,
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and said, "The world must play 20 overs cricket."
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Just as England invented cricket, and made the rest of the world play it.
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Thank God for them.
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(Laughter)
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And so, India had to go and play the T20 World Cup, you see.
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India didn't want to play the T20 World Cup.
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But we were forced to play it by an 8-1 margin.
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And then something very dramatic happened.
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We got to the final, and then this moment,
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that will remain enshrined forever,
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for everybody, take a look.
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(Crowd cheering)
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The Pakistani batsman trying to clear the fielder.
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Announcer: And Zishan takes it! India wins!
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What a match for a Twenty20 final.
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India, the world champions.
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(Cheering)
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India, T20 champions.
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But what a game we had, M. S. Dhoni
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got it right in the air, but Misbah-ul-Haq, what a player.
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A massive, massive success:
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India, the world TT champions.
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Harsha Bhogle: Suddenly India discovered this power of 20-overs cricket.
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The accident, of course, there, was that the batsman
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thought the bowler was bowling fast.
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(Laughter)
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If he had bowled fast, the ball would have gone where it was meant to go,
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but it didn't go. And we suddenly discovered
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that we could be good at this game.
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And what it also did was
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it led to a certain pride in the fact that India could be the best in the world.
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It was at a time when investment was coming in,
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India was feeling a little more confident about itself.
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And so there was a feeling that there was great pride
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in what we can do.
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And thankfully for all of us,
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the English are very good at inventing things,
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and then the gracious people that they are,
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they let the world become very good at it.
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(Laughter)
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And so England invented T20 cricket,
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and allowed India to hijack it.
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It was not like reengineering that we do in medicine,
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we just took it straight away, as is.
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(Laughter)
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And so, we launched our own T20 league.
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Six weeks, city versus city.
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It was a new thing for us. We had only ever supported our country --
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the only two areas in which India was very proud about
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their country, representing itself on the field.
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One was war, the Indian army, which we don't like to happen very often.
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The other was Indian cricket.
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Now, suddenly we had to support city leagues.
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But the people getting into these city leagues
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were people who were taking their cues from the West.
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America is a home of leagues. And they said,
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"Right, we'll build some glitzy leagues here in India."
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But was India ready for it?
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Because cricket, for a long time in India was always organized.
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It was never promoted, it was never sold -- it was organized.
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And look what they did with our beautiful, nice,
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simple family game.
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All of a sudden, you had that happening.
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(Music)
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An opening ceremony to match every other.
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This was an India that was buying Corvettes. This was an India that was buying Jaguar.
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This was an India that was adding more mobile phones per month
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than New Zealand's population twice over.
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So, it was a different India.
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But it was also a slightly more orthodox India
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that was very happy to be modern,
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but didn't want to say that to people.
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And so, they were aghast when the cheerleaders arrived.
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Everyone secretly watched them, but everyone claimed not to.
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(Music)
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(Laughter)
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The new owners of Indian cricket were not the old princes.
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They were not bureaucrats who were forced
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into sport because they didn't actually love it;
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these were people who ran serious companies.
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And so they started promoting cricket big time,
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started promoting clubs big time.
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And they've started promoting them with huge money behind it.
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I mean the IPL had 2.3 billion dollars
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before a ball was bowled,
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1.6 billion dollars for television revenue over 10 years,
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and another 70 million dollars plus from all these franchises
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that were putting in money. And then they had to appeal to their cities,
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but they had to do it like the West, right? Because we are setting up leagues.
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But what they were very good at doing
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was making it very localized.
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So, just to give you an example of how they did it --
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not Manchester United style promotion,
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but very Mumbai style promotion. Take a look.
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(Music)
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Of course, a lot of people said, "Maybe they dance better than they play."
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(Laughter)
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But that's all right. What it did also is it changed the way we looked at cricket.
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All along, if you wanted a young cricketer,
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you picked him up from the bylanes of your own little locality,
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your own city, and you were very proud
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of the system that produced those cricketers.
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Now, all of the sudden, if you were to bowl a shot --
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if Mumbai were to bowl a shot, for example,
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they needn't go to Kalbadevi
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or Shivaji Park or somewhere to source them,
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they could go to Trinidad.
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This was the new India, wasn't it? This was the new world,
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where you can source from anywhere
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as long as you get the best product at the best price.
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And all of a sudden, Indian sport had awakened to the reality
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that you can source the best product for the best price
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anywhere in the world.
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So, the Mumbai Indians flew in Dwayne Bravo from Trinidad and Tobago,
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overnight. And when he had to go back to represent
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the West Indies, they asked him, "When do you have to reach?"
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He said, "I have to be there by a certain time, so I have to leave today."
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We said, "No, no, no. It's not about when you have to leave;
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it's about when do you have to reach there?"
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And so he said, "I've got to reach on date X."
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And they said, "Fine, you play to date X, minus one."
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So, he played in Hyderabad, went, straight after the game,
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went from the stadium to Hyderabad airport,
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sat in a private corporate jet -- first refueling in Portugal,
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second refueling in Brazil; he was in West Indies in time.
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(Laughter)
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Never would India have thought on this scale before.
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Never would India have said, "I want a player to play
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one game for me, and I will use a corporate jet
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to send him all the way back to Kingston, Jamaica
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to play a game."
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And I just thought to myself,
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"Wow, we've arrived somewhere in the world, you know?
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We have arrived somewhere. We are thinking big."
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But what this also did was it started
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marrying the two most important things in Indian cricket,
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which is cricket and the movies in Indian entertainment.
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There is cricket and the movies.
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And they came together because people in the movies
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now started owning clubs.
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And so, people started going to the cricket to watch Preity Zinta.
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They started going to the cricket to watch Shah Rukh Khan.
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And something very interesting happened.
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We started getting song and dance in Indian cricket.
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And so it started resembling the Indian movies more and more.
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And of course, if you were on Preity Zinta's team --
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as you will see on the clip that follows -- if you did well,
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you got a hug from Preity Zinta.
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So that was the ultimate reason to do well. Take a look --
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everyone's watching Preity Zinta.
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(Music)
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And then of course there was Shah Rukh playing the Kolkata crowd.
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We'd all seen matches in Kolkata,
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but we'd never seen anything like this:
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Shah Rukh, with the Bengali song, getting the audiences all worked up
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for Kolkata -- not for India, but for Kolkata.
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But take a look at this.
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(Music)
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An Indian film star hugging a Pakistani cricketer
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because they'd won in Kolkata.
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Can you imagine?
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And do you know what the Pakistani cricketer said?
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(Applause)
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"I wish I was playing for Preity Zinta's team."
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(Laughter)
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But I thought I'd take this opportunity --
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there's a few people from Pakistan in here.
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I'm so happy that you're here
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because I think we can show that we can both be together and be friends, right?
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We can play cricket together, we can be friends.
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So thank you very much for coming, all of you from Pakistan.
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(Applause)
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There was criticism too because they said,
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"Players are being bought and sold?
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Are they grain?
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Are they cattle?"
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Because we had this auction, you see.
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How do you fix a price for a player?
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And so the auction that followed
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literally had people saying,
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"Bang! so many million dollars for so-and-so player."
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There it is.
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(Music)
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Auctioneer: Going at 1,500,000 dollars. Chennai.
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Shane Warne sold for 450,000 dollars.
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HB: Suddenly, a game which earned its players 50 rupees a day --
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so 250 rupees for a test match,
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but if you finish in four days you only got 200.
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The best Indian players who played every test match --
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every one of the internationals, the top of the line players --
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standard contracts are 220,000 dollars in a whole year.
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Now they were getting 500,000 for six days' work.
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Then Andrew Flintoff came by from England,
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he got one and a half million dollars, and he went back and said,
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"For four weeks, I'm earning more than Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard,
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and I'm earning more than the footballers, wow."
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And where was he earning it from? From a little club in India.
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Could you have imagined that day would come?
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One and a half million dollars for six weeks' work.
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That's not bad, is it?
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So, at 2.3 billion dollars before the first ball was bowled.
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What India was doing, though, was benchmarking
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itself against the best in the world,
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and it became a huge brand.
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Lalit Modi was on the cover of Business Today.
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IPL became the biggest brand in India
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and, because our elections, had to be moved to South Africa,
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and we had to start the tournament in three weeks.
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Move a whole tournament to South Africa in three weeks.
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But we did it. You know why?
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Because no country works as slowly as we do
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till three weeks before an event,
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and nobody works fast as we do in the last three weeks.
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(Applause)
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Our population, which for a long time we thought was a problem,
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suddenly became our biggest asset
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because there were more people watching --
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the huge consuming class --
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everybody came to watch the cricket.
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We'd also made cricket the only sport in India,
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which is a pity, but in India every other sport
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pushes cricket to become big,
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which is a bit of a tragedy of our times.
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Now, this last minute before I go --
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there's a couple of side effects of all this.
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For a long time, India was this country of poverty,
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dust, beggars,
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snake charmers, filth,
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Delhi belly -- people heard Delhi belly stories before they came.
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And, all of a sudden, India was this land of opportunity.
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Cricketers all over the world said,
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"You know, we love India. We love to play in India."
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And that felt good, you know?
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We said, "The dollar's quite powerful actually."
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Can you imagine, you've got the dollar on view
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and there's no Delhi belly in there anymore.
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There's no filth, there's no beggars, all the snake charmers have vanished,
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everybody's gone. This tells you how the capitalist world rules.
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Right so, finally,
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an English game that India usurped a little bit,
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but T20 is going to be the next missionary in the world.
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If you want to take the game around the world,
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it's got to be the shortest form of the game.
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You can't take a timeless test to China and sit through 14 days with no result in the end,
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or you can't take it all over the world.
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So that's what T20 is doing.
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Hopefully, it'll make everyone richer, hopefully it'll make the game bigger
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and hopefully it'll give cricket commentators more time in the business.
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Thank you very much. Thank you.
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(Applause)
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About this website

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