I don’t get it. Maybe you are smarter, you do. But didn’t India send its army with its tanks into Sri Lanka to quell the Tamil rebels and get a bloody nose in the bargain? At one stage weren’t we on the side of the Colombo government and knocking Prabhakaran and his legions? Didn’t Rajiv Gandhi pay for it with his life after a Tamil suicide bomber blew herself up next to him? So, by that argument, seeing as how the Indian government fought the Tamils at a certain stage shouldn’t all Indian IPL players be banned from playing in Chennai?

After all, we are banning all the Lankan cricket players including Lankan Tamilians who were probably school kids at the time of the civil war on the same pretext. Right, sauce for the goose… how does putting these bought-and-paid-for sportsmen under the cosh show solidarity with the Tamil issue, that also is something beyond my grasp.

By all means hold your vote of support in the UN and do what you have to do by way of condemnation of human rights abuse on the political platform of your choice but leave the game out of it. Any game. By no stretch of imagination is this sort of dog-in-the-manger attitude a solution to anything. Not only are you ruining six weeks of good cricket but you are grandstanding through the prism of prejudice and allowing one woman to hold a whole nation at ransom for a transparent political act of gamesmanship. 

And if this is the road India wants to take let’s go the whole nine yards. Freeze out Pakistan because, hey, we actually have a rocky history. Remember Mumbai and the AK 47s. The Aussies can go because they occasionally beat up Indians, the English still play dot bashing outside pubs and petrol stations, so let’s knock them off. The Windies call us ‘coolies’ so that is insulting and reason enough to ban them, besides which, half of them are Indians anyway so it is pretty much like India playing India. No one cares about the Kiwis anyway and no one likes Indians in South Africa, not the blacks not the whites, so scratch them off. The Bangladeshis have never forgiven us for the 1971 ‘good deed’ so let’s reject them too.

If I sound facetious it is because you cannot get angry with rank stupidity. That is giving it too much importance. It is sad, just downright sad that such things happen and there is not enough backbone in the nation or in the BCCI to say, stop this nonsense. Frankly, move all the matches to another venue and see how quickly the deprived fans from Chennai say, hold it right there, we love you guys across the pond but hey, can we put all that brethren stuff on hold and sort of get the ten matches back after which ,whatever…but not now.

Either that or every single player in every single IPL team should say, you take us all or you take none of us, call it off. Do they have the gravel in the gut or does greed win the day?