Are the cameras more important than the spectators? © Hampshire Cricket

There's more: the Hindustan Times reports that the Zee deal with the BCCI is dead and the first casualty is the lunatic 'home' series of ODIs that India was going to play with South Africa in Ireland. Ireland! Apparently the BCCI's idea of home means a series where the BCCI's chosen telecast partner gets to keep the ad revenues. This is Lalit Modi's definition of a home away from home.

It's all part of the BCCI's plan to replace spectators with television cameras. I can see it now: portable pitches (held together with glue), third-country venues, empty stadiums, and cross-eyed players wondering if it's Tuesday and Tangiers or Wednesday and consequently Riyadh?

But unfortunately for this excellent scheme Doordarshan kept taking its mandatory pound of flesh or share of feed and Zee couldn't bear it any more, specially after losing boatloads of money telecasting the epic India-West Indies-Australia tri-series staged in that well known nursery of cricket, Kuala Lumpur. Anyone remember who won or what happened? Thought not. But here's the good part: HT claims that Zee lost fifty crores! Isn't that wonderful? It couldn't have happened to a nicer company: people who hope to make their money by getting Dravid and Co. to play Mickey Mouse matches in Malaysia, deserve all the grief they get.

Perhaps all the cruddy ODIs that had attached themselves to the venerable hull of Indian cricket like barnacles will drop off now. Rahul Dravid and his team mates have been begging for a let up in their schedules for years now: maybe they'll get a break now. It's the only way that this cash-cow milking Board was ever going to provide relief: via a massive commercial cock-up.

In its greed and its contempt for the game and its players, the BCCI merely follows the lead of the ICC, the game's apex organization, which invented the Super Test to fill its coffers and, en passant, to devalue the most precious currency of the game, Test cricket. Luckily everyone hated it and it is unlikely to be repeated, (though its statistics need to be expunged from Test records for the damage to be undone).

The Hindustan Times also reports a rumour that ESPN-Star's new channel might step in to telecast the Afro-Asia Cup if Zee pulls out. I hope they do: the more money our sports channels lose by telecasting ersatz farce, the faster they'll learn the lesson of this morning's news—that the game will be purged of dross by a cricketing inversion of Gresham's law: "When there is a legal tender currency, good money drives bad money out of circulation."

	'How can there be a Test series being played that features the Indian team with no television coverage and no radio commentary?' © Getty Images

At the time I felt sorry for my hosts but not especially worried because I assumed that this was a provincial problem. Once I got home to Delhi, a proper metropolis, the capital of this great republic, normal service would be restored. Except it wasn't, because the dispute between Neo Sports and Doordarshan on the one hand and Neo Sports and cable and satellite operators on the other, made sure that the only Indians watching were the Tamil-speaking audiences of Raj TV.

How has it come to this? How can there be a Test series being played that features the Indian team with no television coverage and no radio commentary? You might say that a contest with Bangladesh is unlikely to make pulses race, but you'd be wrong. Bangladesh helped boot India out of the World Cup, they nearly got the better of a Test match against a full-strength Australian touring side recently, so they're worthy opponents. I think there's a substantial audience for Indo-Bangla Test cricket; not as large as the audience for one-day cricket, of course, but large enough.

What's happening here is that Doordarshan isn't willing to settle for the modest profits that a low-profile Test series with Bangladesh might have brought in. It telecast the one-day matches because the ad revenues are higher for those, but refused to agree terms with Nimbus (which has bought the television rights from the Bangladesh Board) for the Test series. Amazingly Doordarshan was telecasting the one-day series being played between Sri Lanka and Pakistan at the same time as it was conspicuously not doing live coverage of the Indian Test match. This wouldn't be amazing if Doordarshan was a private television station. ESPN/Star as private channels are responsible to their shareholders. If they find that there's more money to be made telecasting ODIs played between Sri Lanka and Pakistan than Test matches featuring India, that's their business.

But Doordarshan, as it never tires of telling us when it suits its purpose, is the 'national broadcaster'. It's paid for by the tax-payer's money. It's happy to use its special relationship with the state to strong-arm other television channels into sharing the cricket that it wants to telecast. When the BCCI sells the rights to international matches played in India, it makes it clear to the purchaser that the live feed and the revenues accruing from the telecast will have to be shared with Doordarshan. So private broadcasters pay vast sums of money for television rights and when Doordarshan thinks there's enough money to be made, it piggy-backs on them to get its snout into the trough.

Now I happen to think that the fan's urge to watch cricket matches live and for free doesn't amount to a fundamental right. I'm devoted to cricket and I think anything that helps reach the game to Indian fans is a good thing, but that doesn't mean that free-to-air telecasts of live cricket on state television should be mandatory. Cricket for its audiences is a form of entertainment: covering it doesn't qualify as public-service broadcasting. There's no large public good being served here: telecast cricket is a commodity and there's no reason for the state to intervene to make sure that it's available for free. If Doordarshan wants to subsidize its consumption by the general public, it should be willing to buy the rights or pay top dollar for sharing the feed.

But Doordarshan, supported by the Indian state, argues that telecasting international cricket featuring India is a form of public service broadcasting. The only justification for its claim that it has a mandatory right to 'share' live pictures is its invocation of the Indian poor who love the game but can't afford to watch it on cable. Given the fact that more and more people receive Doordarshan not directly through their aerials but via cable this isn't, even on its own terms, a watertight argument. But let us, for the sake of argument, allow that Doordarshan has a legitimate case, that DD National is a unique vehicle for carrying the exploits of the Indian cricket team to the plebeian fan. In which case, how is this purpose served by covering Sri Lanka's matches with Pakistan when India is playing Bangladesh?

If the 'public good', defined as the Indian fan's right to watch his heroes play, trumps private profit when it comes to the World Cup or a Test series between India and Australia played in India, how come this logic doesn't apply to the India-Bangladesh series? By Doordarshan's own logic its willingness to telecast ODIs featuring two foreign nations while ignoring India's champions as they labour in the heat of Chittagong, besides being inconsistent, amounts to a kind of treachery. If DD's invocation of the straitened Indian fan helps it muscle its way into vast revenues, surely it should use those revenues to subsidize the telecast of series that might be less profitable. If it doesn't (as it hasn't with the Bangladesh series) it should forfeit its right to share telecast rights to matches featuring India that have been bought at huge cost by others.

Doordarshan's greed and callousness apart, the blackout of the Bangladesh Tests is a symptom not so much of Test cricket's decline in the sub-continent as the BCCI's deliberate orphaning of Test cricket. The Board's greed for ODI revenues has led to the overloading of the Indian team's calendar with standalone ODI contests. This has gone hand-in-hand with the Board's unwillingness to build a cricket season around a major Test series (as the Australian Board has done with its end-of-year Test matches), its failure to make tickets for Test matches available in advance and the failure of provincial boards to build decent facilities in their stadiums. Stadiums like Chepauk and Mohali that have attended to these things have large Test match attendances. Television revenues from ODIs have so debauched the BCCI and the its affiliated boards that they have no interest in the hard work necessary to keep Test cricket viable and popular in the modern media marketplace. Despite the amount the amount of Test cricket played the world over, between the BCCI and Doordarshan it won't be long before live Test cricket on Indian television becomes an occasional treat, not a constant pleasure.

This post is adapted from an article that appeared in The Telegraph, Kolkata, which can be read here.

	A news channel was guilty of jumping to conclusions on the cause of Bob Woolmer's death © Getty Images

The idea that the news that's fit to broadcast is an editorially responsible view of signficant recent events is quite dead. Consider the treatment (on Indian television's news channels) of the two big news stories to emerge from the World Cup: the violence that followed India's loss to Bangladesh and the death of Bob Woolmer the day after Pakistan lost to Ireland.

I was a talking head on a news show that was trying to examine the attack on Dhoni's house as a symptom of the unhealthy obssession of Indians with cricket. The anchor prefaced his question to me by observing that given the fact that cricketers enjoyed being in the news through the good times, that they liked being pictured on Page 3, given their willingness to milk cricket for celebrity, wasn't extreme public hostility after defeat part of the game?

I'm certain that the anchor didn't for a moment believe what he was suggesting. He was rhetorically framing a popular view of the Indian cricket team as a bunch of pampered, indulged, overpaid underperformers. He was being the modern news professional: if there was popular resentment raging without, it was his job to air it. I notice that when anchors channel the 'public mood', when they ventriloquize, they leer in a knowing way, as if to suggest to their sophisticated peers that the vulgarity of the popular view they are voicing has nothing to do with their own opinions.

In their coverage of Bob Woolmer's death, news channels went one better by trying to second-guess popular prejudice before it had the chance to form. By Wednesday morning the Jamaican police had indicated that since the autopsy hadn't confirmed death by natural causes, Woolmer's death would be, by default, treated as death in suspicious circumstances. Samples had been sent to pathology labs to test for toxins and other things and the reports hadn't yet come in. By noon I saw that Times Now was leading with the headline: Bob Woolmer Murdered. I watched horrified, waiting for new revelations. There were no revelations. The rest of the bulletin was a grudging retreat from that headline. The first qualification came when the anchor announced that there was a 'strong murder angle' to the story, whatever that meant. The channel's claim that Jamaican police sources had indicated murder was flatly contradicted by the statement of the Jamaican police commissioner who merely repeated that Woolmer had died in suspicious circumstances and that it would be inappropriate to speculate till the pathology reports came in. Despite the headline, I realized that the story was exactly where it had been earlier in the morning.

Undaunted, the news channels turned their cameras on Sarfraz Nawaz who said that Woolmer had probably been killed by bookies who were scared he would blow the whistle on them in his forthcoming book. Now it's reasonable for a news channel to speculate on the reasons for a murder, but equally a responsible news editor should have found a discreet way of indicating that Sarfraz Nawaz has been making headline-seeking accusations for decades. Finger as always on the public pulse, our modern newsmongers had decided that the People wanted murder (without pausing to consider that even if the reports confirmed the presence of poison, suicide was at least a possible alternative explanation) and it was murder they served up.

This post is extracted from a longer article in The Telegraph, Kolkata, that can be read here

	Shah Rukh Khan and Priyanka Chopra: cricket fans or simply Pepsi models? © AFP

Midweek this week, NDTV 24/7 carried an item about the Indian team on the eve of its departure to the West Indies. Viewers were shown Shahrukh Khan spraying fizzy drink about with a selection of Indian players in blue uniforms watching. To start with I thought that this was some manner of farewell bash that Shahrukh had hosted for the team which NDTV was running as a celebrity news segment. (Aside: Shahrukh looked little in a shot with Yuvraj Singh looming behind him. Small and sort of unsparky.)

Then Priyanka Chopra turned up on screen and declared that she wanted the team to win the World Cup. After voicing this unexceptionable sentiment, she pumped her fist and went: “Rah, Rah, India etc.” in a canned way and I thought, hey, that sounds familiar. My children clarified: the cheer-leading lines were from Pepsi’s cricket commercials. The fizz being hosed about wasn’t sparkling wine but a new drink called Pepsi Gold. Pepsi, the sponsor of the Indian team, was cannily launching a product and milking its cricket cow at the same time. I understand why Pepsi would want to do this, but what was NDTV thinking? Why would a news channel, specially one that sees sobriety and a sense of proportion as its USP, be running a promotional event as news?

There’s a general problem here. I called a friend in NDTV who explained that it was getting harder, while covering entertainment and sport, to draw a line between news manufactured by sponsors and ‘real’ news because nearly every event in these areas was stage-managed or underwritten by some company or the other. It’s certainly getting harder for the viewer (or reader) of news. The Times of India acknowledges that it sells editorial space, only it doesn’t tell the reader which parts of the ‘news’ that he’s reading have been paid for. I’m not suggesting that NDTV or any other channel gets paid for coverage: what I am saying is that in a cutthroat environment, the fear of being left out has television news rooms aiming cameras at trashy non-events.

Much better to watch cricket footage that you know has been paid for. There’s a glorious Nike commercial playing on Indian television channels, set in a crowded Indian street. The traffic’s stilled by a snarl-up; boys swarm up buses and trucks to play on their roofs. Sreesanth gets out of a car to watch, an elephant fields, a truck-top batsmen is hit by a rising ball where his box would have been, the traffic starts to move but an intrepid, fired-up lad runs in and, heedless of the pitch that moves beneath his feet, launches himself into his pre-delivery leap. The frame freezes mid-leap, leaving the boy suspended in air: Just Do It.

It's a terrific little film. Currently, the cricket in the commercials feels more real than the cricket in the news.