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Thoughts that are going through my mind as I watch the IPL

May 28, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The morning hours are the best time of the day to catch me at home. I drop off my wife to work, go in the National Park to exercise, then off to home to type my contribution for page 10 (except Sunday when it appears on page 23) of this newspaper.
I take my breakfast, sit in front of the television and look at the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket that is shown every morning from Monday to Sunday. I don’t really care for the teams except the ones that have West Indian players. Some teams have none so I don’t want them to win.
For more than a month now, I go home in the morning and look at cricket. And so many things fly through my mind, most of all about how the world has changed since my boyhood days and the world of cricket as I knew it back then is gone, maybe forever.
Watching the IPL is an exercise in philosophical reflections. First, the local sponsors tell a daring tale of what Guyana is. When you look at the sponsors of the matches every day, you see where the business class of this country comes from.  But no one is screaming for ethnic balance in the world of business in Guyana. It lacerates my psyche, makes me want to run across the road where I live, and skip across the highway to the Atlantic Ocean and scream to the skies.
Often you can read in the print media and see on television the constant calls for ethnic balancing in the police force and army. Look at IPL cricket and see if there isn’t the need for ethnic balancing in entrepreneurship in this country. But the guns fall silent once IPL cricket is playing.
No one shouts about ethnic balancing in the private sector. But those who are bent on having ethnic balance in the security forces will not be deterred by what they see playing out on the television screen during IPL.
There is a most fascinating thing taking place during those cricket matches. Only one advertisement features dark-skinned actors. It is a white rum named “Wray and Nephew.” In fact, the bottlers of this liquid are among the sponsors of the entire season. All the actors in the commercial are dark-skinned, with one pretty young lady that is sapodilla brown. All the other commercials for the entire day’s play have actors who are white, lily white or snow white.
Guyana has certainly changed beyond recognition when I was a boy growing up in Wortmanville in Georgetown. A changing world has caught up with Test cricket. It was the only type of cricket I knew as a boy. But after more than a hundred years the world has changed so fundamentally that test cricket’s future is in doubt.  For many observers all around the world, it is dying or should die.
Surely the transformation of the world is so dynamic that the zeitgeist that prevailed a hundred years ago may never return.
Fifty years ago while Test cricket was in its prime, the world would have raised up in anger at the thought of homosexual marriage. Some of the great minds of this world perished because of legal prosecution of homosexuals. Oscar Wilde will always remain one of my favourite authors. He died a broken man after he came out of jail. Even sadder was the case of a virtual genius, Alan Turing, the father of computer science who broke the Enigma code for the British during World War 2. Because of his homosexuality, he was legally castrated. He committed suicide.
Today, some of the most powerful countries in the world have legalized homosexual marriage. Fifty years ago, the people of the world would have called you a madman if you had said to them that at the turn of the 21st century, an African-American would be the US President. The US was involved in two world wars against Germany and became an ally of Russia in World War 2. That was about sixty-five years ago.
Today, the US and Germany are extremely close allies, while the US and Russia look destined to be forever suspicious of each other.
These are just tiny examples of the way the world has changed and Test cricket may have become a victim of changing times. Can people accept the nature of Test cricket as it was fifty years ago? Can a person in the 21st century enjoy a game that is played for five days? Can you sit down in the 21st century and watch a batsman make ten runs accumulated after six overs?

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