Cheerleaders Hit Indian Cricket for Six

The Indian Premier League started its first season of Twenty20 cricket last week, and it has upset a great many of the people there. Having decided to make this variety of cricket a serious money making venture, the backers have juiced things up by adding American-style cheerleaders. The costumes have shocked the nation, but what one finds genuinely offensive is the threat this poses to real cricket, the 5-day Test Match kind.

To westerners, India has an odd relationship with the human body and romance. Married couples would never think of kissing in public, yet Bollywood movies are full of women in skimpy dresses. By the same token, the government has recently banned dance bars where young women danced on stage to Bollywood music. They appear to be as inconsistent as Americans, or is that diverse?

So, it comes as no surprise when Nitin Gadkari, leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP] in Maharashtra state, home to the Mumbai Indians [Bombay if one is over 50], says things like, “What the cheerleaders are doing during cricket matches is ten times more vulgar than what used to happen in dance bars of Mumbai.” Or “If we could ban dance bars, how can we allow such vulgar dance in a cricket field. I am getting huge complaints and cheerleaders must be banned immediately from entering a cricket field.”

Defending the newly imported practice, Charu Sharma, chief executive of Bangalore Royal Challengers, said, “Let us not play this high-handed moral belief game. It is only small maverick groups that are making a noise.”

What is truly shameful, though, is the idea of making Twenty20 cricket anything more than a bastardized version of the real thing – softball to baseball. Twenty overs a side loses the pace, the defensive batting, and the idea of a draw is gone with the miserable “bowl-out.” One draws hope from the fact that 5-day Test Match cricket never needed cheerleaders to conquer the hearts of millions.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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