Dr. Puri to Ms. Bedi

Do you recognize the person on the right; I am sure most of you do. For those who do not… he is Dr. Narottam Puri, a doctor by profession, a sports analyst par excellence. He was best known as the anchor of the ‘World of Sports’ – a weekly programme on sports that would come on Doordarshan every Sunday. I am talking about the late 80’s when we did not have the luxury of watching cable TV and plethora of sports channels. Though I was too young at that time to know his name or profile, but the very face and his legendary commentary had made him to be a very familiar person to me.

Then there were few gentlemen who have been instrumental in redefining the spoken English of generation-X through their classy cricket commentaries. Yes, I am talking about Jeffery Boycott, Sunil Gavaskar, Allan Wilkins, Ravi Shastri and the likes who took the cricket commentaries to the next level. With their wit and sense of humour, people like Harsha Bhogle and Navjot Singh Sidhu further helped developing cricket commentary as an art and howsoever good or bad English I know today, to a large extent I owe it to these gentlemen and their legendary cricket commentaries.

But all good things come to an end… and probably we as a cricket crazy nation have matured so much that we don’t need an expert any more to talk cricket, rather the centre stage is being offered to pretty faces from showbiz and glamour world.

Thanks to the brilliant idea coined by Sony Entertainment Television when they thought of breaking the rule and introduced the utterly irritating television personality Mandira Bedi to host the Extra Innings during the IIC World Cup 2003. And that was the beginning of the end of quality cricket commentary which is now about to reach its culminating point any time.

It is indeed disheartening to see expert pitch analysts like Ravi Shastri being replaced by Mandira Bedi - a perfect fashion disaster, who remains in news more for wrong reasons like wearing Indian tricolour imprinted saree. Somebody recently termed her as the first lady of Indian Cricket… probably Anjum Chopra, Jhulan Goswami were fools to have wasted their time sweating in the field.

I guess the ‘Gentlemen’s Game’ is taking its last few breaths before getting perished in a world where cricket has been reduced to a mere money spinning game for Film stars and liquor barons; or it may just manage to survive being a part of the corporate world’s seasonal outing.

#####################################################