The fallen heroes of lies and videotape

Last week, at the dinner in honour of Prince Edward hosted by Star TV, I had point blank questioned Sunil Gavaskar about the match fixing scandal, tearing the fabric of the cricketing world and whether he believed the stories doing the media circus. He roundly denied the involvement of Indian cricketers and having known Sunil for years, I went along with his line of thinking. When Manoj Prabhakar took his allegations to the `lies and videotape' stage, most of our ace cricket heroes had mud on their faces. To be honest, I really don't care that the `men in white' make so much money, but it does bother me that most of them put self before country and would even throw a match against our pet peeves, since time immemorial Pakistan.

I distinctly remember the pride I felt when I went to the Wills launch of Shankar Mahadevan's `Come on India' pre-World Cup last year. The Indian team was on stage being spoilt with gold ID bracelets and other goodies; they seemed to enjoy the attention, the media was spotlighting them with, they looked a well-scrubbed, clean as a whistle bunch of sportsmen.

Yet, witnessing the same World Cup finals between Australia and Pakistan at Lords, one could almost feel the disbelief and dejection that the Indian win was greeted with. The Pakistanis had just given the game away and used as we are to a virtual fight to the finish, when the two Titans of cricket, Indian and Pakistan clash, there was no fire, let alone brimstone in the Australia-Pakistan match. In the light of the match fixing allegations, that match alone could have wiped out the bookies, if indeed the favourites Pakistan had won. That they made it back to Pakistan at all, even after months, spoke of a certain complicity amongst the `powers that be' as none of the team was pasted with rotten egg, let alone lynched. Surprising? No, it was the harbinger of this scandal in more ways than one. As our cricket heroes are resident Indians, and the period that covered, the now unravelling `filthy lucre' scandal, was pre-FERA, they should, by law, be tried under the draconian FERA and perhaps even for treason against the Nation, if indeed they sold the nation down the tubes, to mobsters and terrorists manipulating them from Dubai or Karachi with drug money. What I fail to understand is that, despite the near `coma inevitia' that even the word `cricket' evokes today, why are sponsors still promoting advertising via the media, and worse, trivialising the scandal and abusing our intelligence and sensitively by assailing our senses with yet another `fallen star' selling some inane product.

Again, the fact that a particular fallen angel hailed from Hyderabad suddenly seemed to suggest that if `He' was exposed, our New Age Cyber CM Chandrababu Naidu would pull the virtual reality rug, from under the Vajpayee Government's feet. Poppy cock! What else will they think of next? Though I don't approve of Prabhakar and his dotcom co's hidden video camera stunt, his back was to the wall and if he had waited for our famed investigating agencies to take their own cool time to sweep the whole incident under the carpet, he would have lost all. Under the circumstances, he took the law into his own hands and despite being cowed earlier, refused to bow under pressure and became a cricket vigellante instead. Kapil Dev and Sunil Gavaskar I know personally to be gentlemen, in that they are well- bred and charming when in polite society, but honour is at stake here and they have to use their tremendous experience, knowledge and the goodwill they enjoy to help this ugly chapter in cricket's white flannel past to be addressed and dealt with lawfully. Manoj, in turn, has to stop this witchhunt and allow the investigation to progress without under bias and prejudice. The media has to be as fair and balanced as possible as this scandal has the latent potential to destroy the dreams of a whole generation of young Indians and what are we without our dreams and our heroes anyway?

Let us tread carefully down this volatile expose path as the skeletons that tremble out of this cupboard, could be the graveyard of many an innocent bystander, perhaps wrongfully indicted. It is my own personal experience that the slow legal juggernaut ensures the guilty a free reign of terror and the innocent loses all, while trying to prove his innocence. For all purposes, he is guilty till proved innocent in the pre-trial that he's been put through by the media. In the balance, only the truth will suffice and sure if brought out in the open it will prevail, even a superficial enquiry will weed out the rot and revive our hopes for an India team which wins, because it has a collective will that is based on patriotism and national pride, not the bookies' dirty green backs.