Intrusive camera-derie

After the IPL final was won by Kolkata Knight Riders, after the cricket had ended, the tamasha began. The camera followed team owners Shah Rukh Khan and Juhi Chawla in the dressing room, and Khan rather than cricketers became the centrepiece of the media coverage.

Old-timers sputtered at this horror, for the player dressing room has long been considered off-limits for TV cameras — and for even still cameras in the past.

But the mores of cricket have changed, and the camera is everywhere — this bothers not just old-timers, even active players think the camera has become a nuisance. And all for eyeballs and money, as India captain Rohit Sharma well knows.

Rohit Sharma, also former Mumbai Indians captain, was enraged after his conversation with a KKR coach, Abhishek Nayar, was recorded and aired despite his objections. “The lives of cricketers have become so intrusive (sic) that cameras are now recording every step and conversation we are having in privacy with our friends and colleagues, at training or on match days,” Rohit posted on Twitter.

“Despite asking Star Sports to not record my conversation, it was and was also then played on air, which is a breach of privacy. The need to get exclusive content and focused only on views and engagement will one day break the trust between the fans, cricketers and cricket. Let better sense prevail,” he added.

Michael Holding, former West Indies fast bowler, supported Rohit Sharma, and lamented that morality in cricket broadcasting matters no more. “Of course, he has a point — definitely. It’s a bit unethical of the broadcaster to do that, especially if he has already asked not to record… What you’re doing is not illegal, but there is something called morality. But I’m not sure if those things matter any longer.”

It’s not just cricket broadcasting — the ethics of cricket as a game, like that of life, have undergone a post-conventional morality churn with disconcerting speed in the last decade or so.

The churn has been caused, as is often the case, by money. IPL’s billions have helped manufacture consensus in favour of T20 cricket, upturning conventional wisdom of cricket. The sport’s most flimsy format is now also the most talked-about one, gushed over by cricket’s legends.

Eleven years back, Tarak Sinha, the great Delhi cricket coach, expressed his love for the IPL thus: “It’s like a cancer.” When this writer pointed out to him that legendary cricketers like Sunil Gavaskar and Ravi Shastri were its most active and enthusiastic promoters — for a large fee, of course — he said: “IPL has people who are hired to speak good of it. It is poison for cricket. Supporting it for money is like selling cocaine for a living.” Harsh words, reflecting the morality of the times he grew up in and learnt to play the game, the 1950s and 1960s.

But morality isn’t absolute — in sport as in life, it evolves; Sinha’s bitterness with the devolution of the sport he loved, in the past 15 years of his life, reflected his inability to change with the times. He railed against the force of T20 cricket, despairing but resolute, to the end; Bishan Singh Bedi, who died last year, did the same.

Gavaskar’s devotion for days’ cricket (First-Class and Test cricket) is the stuff of legend; he had such disdain for One-day cricket that his book on cricket in the year 1983, ‘Runs ’n Ruins’, contains just a few paragraphs on India’s win in the 1983 World Cup.

But Gavaskar, born three years before Sinha, has been more pragmatic, his views more malleable; he’s evolved with the times and now can speak about the primacy of Test cricket and the wonders of T20 cricket/IPL, all in the same breath.

As for Rohit Sharma and his desire for privacy, that’s not a new story, for celebrities have always been chased by cameras, and by crowds before cameras came into being.

His cry for privacy brings to fore the larger issue of the ubiquitousness of the camera — by placing cameras in every hand, mobile phone manufacturers have turned everyone into a chronicler and performer. Every act of life has become a performance, and every phone owner a performer who, unlike Rohit Sharma, craves publicity — and is willing to forsake privacy and lower standards of morality imposed by society — for fame and money.