Films vs Cricket:

India has two passions. Films and cricket. The two markets were distinctly different. So were the icons. The cricket gods were Sachin and Sehwag. The film gods were the Khans (Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan etc). That was when cricket was fundamentally test cricket or at best 50-over cricket. Then came the Indian Premier League and the two markets collapsed into one. IPL brought cricket down to 20 overs, reducing the game to the length of a three-hour movie. Cricket became a competitor to film. Desperate multiplex owners requisitioned the rights for screening IPL matches at movie halls to hang on to the audience. If the IPL were to become the mainstay of cricket, films would have to sequence their releases so as to not clash with IPL matches. As far as the audience is concerned, both are a three-hour "tamasha" (entertainment). Cricket season might push films out of the market.


Look at the products that vanished from India in the last 20 years. When did you last see a black and white movie? When did you last use a fountain pen? When did you last type on a typewriter? The answer for all the above is "I don't remember!"


One final illustration:

Some 20 years ago, what were Indians using to wake them up in the morning? An alarm clock, that monster of mechanical springs. It had to be physically wound up every day. It made so much noise that it woke you -- and the rest of the colony. What do we use today? Cellphones. An entire category of clocks practically disappeared without warning. The boss of an IT company once said something interesting about the animal called competition. He said "Have breakfast …or…. be breakfast"! That sums it up rather neatly.

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