I’ve spent most of the past week in Hubli, a small city in northern Karnataka that has been, in a strange way, an IPL eye-opener for me. Every evening, as the work machine shut down, the Indian Premier League was about the only entertainment available or accessible to the strangers in town. As such, I spent the week watching T20 games almost uninterrupted.

As I soon discovered, the rest of Hubli wasn’t doing very much different. IPL had captured the imagination. As a friend pointed out, nothing else was selling. IPL and Set Max had crowded out advertising from other channels and soap operas. Few big Hindi/Indian films were being released in the IPL period, because no film-maker was certain he or she could match the frenzy of abbreviated cricket. Thanks to IPL, lean season corporate advertising – summer is usually a dull time to roll out heavy-duty promotional campaigns – had been rendered an oxymoron.

Not all of this was predicted. A number of well-meaning cricket fans from England and Australia and even within India were genuinely surprised at projections of IPL’s success, wondering if there was enough money to back the idea. In sum, what IPL may have done is created a new, complementary cricket market for the summer months. It will not necessarily take away from the traditional cricket season that runs from October/November to March.

It is best to see T20 and traditional cricket as two separate sports or, perhaps, separate enterprises. In the United States, basketball, American football, baseball, golf and a few other sports are all sustainable. The Indian economy isn’t as big as the American one but it’s grown large enough to support more than one sport.

Unfortunately, for a complex mix of reasons, India is essentially a single-sport society. There is only game in India that has mass following, engages a critical consumer population and invites corporate support. Thus far the sport was (traditional, Test/ODI) cricket. With IPL, the cricket business has multiplied and created another product to vacuum the money that remains.

Whatever the sceptics may say, the fact is IPL is working. It’s carved a new audience for cricket. True, some of the T20 fans may not be around to watch the Test matches when Australia tours India later this year, but never mind. As along as there is enough for each segment, each type of cricket fan – and as long as there’re no moronic two-match Test series – nobody will complain.

Before the IPL season began, I had my doubts whether it would have any implications on the selection of the Indian Test team. Over the past week or two, I’ve had to re-edit that thought.

Having seen Rohit Sharma bat in the T20 World Cup, the ODI series in Australia and now the IPL has been a pleasure. As soon as there’s place in the Indian middle order – which means, when either Tendulkar, Laxman, Ganguly or Dravid walks back to the pavilion for the final time – Sharma should be playing Test cricket. He looks more capable for the longer game than, for instance, Yuvraj Singh.

Next, Gautam Gambhir has now batted with enough fluency in all types of cricket to merit selection over Wasim Jaffer. He should be opening for India in Test cricket.

Three cricketers I hadn’t seen much of before the IPL have also left an impression. S. Badrinath (Chennai Super Kings) is ready for India. Ashok Dinda (Kolkata Knight Riders) and Manpreet Singh Gony (Chennai) could add to India’s fast bowling options in Tests/ODIs. David Hussey will be 31 in two months and it’s difficult to believe he’s never been selected for Australia in an ODI.

There’re names I’ve missed, of course, given the many new stars IPL has thrown up. Whichever way you look at it, it hasn’t been a bad deal for what was meant to be an off-seasonal gimmick. Let’s give IPL its due.

For what it’s worth, here’re my thoughts on the Indian Premier League.

The format: It’s exciting but repetitive, and after the first two or three games the cheerleaders became a distraction, even a chore, getting in the way of the game. To be fair, these are points others have made as well and I can only nod in agreement. Perhaps more judicious use of Indian music and cultural products would make more sense to Indian crowds over the longer term. Somebody in Mumbai has suggested a bhangra troupe; film songs specific to players or descriptive of the situation (a six or a dismissal, as the case may be) could be other, equally corny ideas.

In the vintage years of Test cricket, boundaries were occasional. One-day cricket (F50 if you prefer) made fours and sixes common. T20 threatens to make them commonplace. If a six is hit every other over it is going to cease to be exciting. T20/IPL will need to devise new benchmarks. Perhaps vertical targets will be set: “Hit the red line near the clubhouse balcony and score eight; hit that black line on the floodlight tower and score a 12.”

Agreed, both those sound ridiculous, but so much about T20 is out of the ordinary and the conventional that it will soon have separate rules and scoring patterns being institutionalised for it. You can’t play it as if it were a compressed version of an ODI or a Test; it’s not. You don’t write text messages in accordance with Wren and Martin rules of grammar, do you?

The teams: After the player auction, I remember telling a friend that Mumbai and Jaipur were the weakest teams. Mumbai was a “Dad’s Army”, and Jaipur seemed to have lost the plot. Shane Warne has proved me spectacularly wrong by inspiring and leading the Jaipur team into close to the top of the table, at this juncture.

Even so, I’m still betting on Chennai, Delhi and Kolkata making the semi-finals. Jaipur and Mohali are my current favourites for the fourth slot. Nevertheless, given that one top-order innings can decide the match (McCullum, Sehwag, Hayden and Gilchrist have all provided examples), any prediction is the equivalent of planning a leisurely stroll on a minefield. That aside, the departure of Hayden, Hussey and Oram is going to have other teams fancying their chances against Chennai.

One question that was raised before the IPL was how the old guard would take to the newest format. Dravid and Laxman have looked completely out of sorts, and need not be first XI sure-shots in IPL 2009. Given his ODI history, Ganguly was expected to relish T20 but even he’s disappointmed. Tendulkar’s been kept away by injury, of course; but the larger message is obvious: the IPL has played out generational change before Indian crowds.

To go back to the mobile phone metaphor, epic novelists cannot, should not be asked to write text messages. In a perfect world, they should fade away with memories of their skills intact.

One classicist who’s shone in the IPL, however, is Glen McGrath, who gave up playing for Australia a year ago. He’s been the bowler of the tournament so far and still looks good for another two years of international cricket. His spell against Bangalore on Wednesday (April 30) night was exceptional by any standards – Test, ODI, whatever. It takes rare courage to quit sport – or anything – when your powers are still with you. McGrath is in that league; he’s done IPL an honour by signing up for it.

The brands: One of the challenges for the eight franchises is to build loyalty to the club, beyond loyalty to an individual player. Those who were Manchester United fans in Bryan Robson’s time, remained United followers in Cantona’s era and are gladly cheering Rooney today. That template is the IPL franchisee’s dream.

It’s unfair to be asking this question in year one, month one, but how have the IPL teams fared in terms of building brand loyalty? There is, of course, a degree of local following – Delhiites back the Delhi Daredevils, Mumbaikars want the Mumbai Indians to win. The real test is how much support a team has garnered outside its base station.

Here, individuals are proving magnets rather than corporate or collective identities. Dhoni’s fans are rooting for Chennai, Sehwag’s adherents for Delhi and so on. Among the owners, Reliance/Mukesh Ambani and Kingfisher-UB/Vijay Mallya could have made a cross-country impact but have been let down by underperforming teams.

To my mind, the biggest success has been Kolkata’s. Knight Riders is seen as Shah Rukh Khan’s team rather than Saurav Ganguly’s. The Shah Rukh tag has brought in incremental sponsorship and following. It’s a wise move. Saurav will be gone in two years or so, Shah Rukh will still be around, and still be iconic. To have a non-player who won’t retire as your “key man” makes good business sense.