This IPL madness is getting a little annoying. Not to mention extremely hard to avoid. And I no longer mean just driving past Wankhede two hours after a match and still being stuck in a jam for thirty minutes. I mean going out anywhere with a TV for dinner and being unable to hear anything over a room full of random strangers busy cheering god knows which player from god knows what team doing god knows what. Except of course when Bhajji slaps whatsisname. In which case even I can no longer avoid knowing what is going on with the damn thing. Anyways, though I still resolutely refuse to get involved with the whole thing, there is one interesting thing that struck me about the whole charade. Unsurprisingly, its to do with entertainment.
Even less surprisingly, considering what a horny country we are, the entertainment has to do with titillation.
I'm talking about the cheerleaders. The dubiously titled "cheerleaders". I mean, c'mon, who the hell is even going to try and pretend you need someone to get Indians excited about the cricket they're watching. Though no one can logically explain it, even less can anyone deny that they're all crazy about the damn thing. Inexplicably, and against all reason, but still. Bet you can't even hear them at all over the roar of those crazed crowds.
But my point is not the validity of their existence or lack thereof. I'm no one to run down a little raunchy entertainment just because it doesn't entertain me. And I'm sure they're easier on the eye than our , let's face it, pudgy players with invariably bad hair.
No, my point is that they're all foreign. And I'm guessing fairly expensive. And there was, not too long ago, the very infamous Dance-Bar ban in maharashtra that resulted in thousands of people losing their livelihoods. So while there are thousands of unemployed, possibly destitute, female dancers roaming the streets in a confused daze of hunger and implied shame, we are now importing women from abroad to come and entertain us in pretty much the same way, only much more public. Is that one of the by-laws of morality: as long as the participants exceed a thousand it is alright. Any act, once public enough, becomes tolerable?
Reading back, this sounds, funnily enough, like one of those conservative arguments doing the rounds in the US against outsourcing and immigrants and the mass unemployment they are causing. But that isn't the point here either. These jobs weren't lost to competition (fair or otherwise); they were lost to huge stinking piles of politically motivated moral grandstanding. And then conveniently swept under the carpet and forgotten. As usual, a half-assed cure. The usual problem of continuity and coherence that comes in with any primarily verbal culture, I guess. We make our statements and then we forget. No records, no memory.

Incidentally, from repeated prolonged chats with my rather bored old land-lady, from whom there is no escaping, I gather that this flat I live in was previously inhabited by one such dance-bar girl. A Christian, who later got breast cancer but then got alright, and always had a lot of money in her pockets and a lot of plants on her balcony. An unfortunate combination, it turns out, because her greedy – or desperate – mali planned to kill her for the money in her wallet. Fortunately he talked about his plans before-hand and hence was prevented, and the dancer went on to keep watering her own plants for many months to come. Until she left. About the time of the dance-bar ban I would like to think. Anyways, apart from that she was a model tenant, with only one boyfriend who occasionally came over with a couple of bottles of beer and then left at a reasonable hour.
It’s amazing, and a little scary, just how much our landlady knows about the private lives of her previous tenants.
And she goes through our garbage.

There is a line of faded old wind-horses on the rooftop next to ours. (Those colourful rectangles of cloth with Tibetan prayers printed on them that they tie rows of. Everytime the winds touches the flag, it carries the prayer up to heaven.) It is tied to a dish-antenna at one end and a black water-tank at the other. I don’t think any Tibetans live there anymore, though they must have at one time. The wind-horses look very old, but that isn’t saying much for frail pieces of cloth that endure the harsh Delhi weather and sun day in and day out. I like to think though, that they are ownerless, up there for no specific purpose or person, but rather as a general sort of prayer that has lost its specific purpose and now serves us all. A faded, forgotten, fluttering old prayer for humanity.
There is an ingrained aversion in Indians to removing any sort of religious symbols or decorations (notwithstanding the Babri masjid demolition). Or maybe the landlords just never go up to the roof. Whatever the case may be, the wind-horses are still there. I live too far away to be able to tell whether the prayers written on them can still be read or the sun has bleached the ink right off. But as long as there is a breeze, they go right on doing what they were meant to do, regardless of their current condition and situation. They hang there, not defeated by neglect or abandonment, resolute in their purpose, joyful in their daily dance with their free old friend, the wind. By no means on their last prayer yet.