The Hindu Business Line : Faster, higher… flashier

I really wish they would redesign the IPL trophy. With the current trophy in their hands the Deccan Chargers looked like they had gone shopping at a particularly opulent jeweller’s ahead of some big fat Indian wedding in South Africa. Looking up some old news reports to see the trophy’s origin, one found its birth had indeed taken place at a leading jeweller’s.

“A total of 2554 round and baguette diamonds weighing 68.77 carats, 4500 yellow sapphires weighing 218.55 carats, blue sapphires weighing 986 carats and eight rubies weighing 248.70 carats have been used. The gold weight of the statue is 691.15 grams.” The report from May 2008 when the prize was unveiled, quipped that the description wasn’t about designer jewellery in Milan, Paris or a prestigious auction house; it was about the handcrafted trophy that would be awarded to the winners of IPL.

The winning team would get a replica.

Five simple interlocking circles, well preserved over the decades, have efficiently represented the ethos of the world’s greatest sporting spectacle. India does the same for its most sought after game with diamonds, gold, rubies and sapphires — surely something is amiss in an Indian design sensibility for trophies?

As it turned out, I wasn’t alone in seeing crass glitter in a trophy that every passing comment on television was hyping as beautiful. Into the tournament’s second season there was at least one post on the Internet citing a structural flaw — the right-handed batsman in the IPL trophy wielded the bat as a left-hander would.

The author mused that perhaps such flaw in a famous trophy would add to its overall value. I then did a Google search for the world’s ugliest trophy. Mentions of ugly dogs and cars dominated the first couple of pages.

In the subsequent lot, a few trophies from the world of sport turned up, including our own diamond studded contribution. While people watching cricket had minds honest enough to deplore the trophy, those making a living from the game were in abject praise of it. I believe the IPL trophy should have aspired for one of the two options — depict a cricketer realistically in a powerful Auguste Rodin way or be gracefully abstract.

Whenever I think of trophies, the best sculpture that comes to mind is Constantin Brancusi’s unforgettable piece — Bird in Space. In a masterstroke, the sculptor has reduced the bird to its core competence and represented it in a language so simple and elegant that it is difficult to find the right words to furnish a description.

Is cricket a game utterly devoid of similar motifs for a keen artistic eye to delineate the basics and freeze them in a memorable trophy?

If you wanted that to happen, then the place to go would be a sculptor’s workshop, not a jewellery showroom. You would also have to latch on to the word ‘premier’ in IPL and interpret it in the correct fashion.

It appears that any such interpretation in the present trophy — assuming an effort for insight was made in the first place — would have been premier in the context of India, resulting in a pathetic throwback to an India of maharajas with a trophy of precious stones or an India of the 21st century confined in repute to its shining economy.

Either way, it is money, not cricket that this trophy lauds.

Incidentally, as a country we have consistently shown an astonishing inability to get under the skin of sports and understand what it feels to be alive in mind and body. The longest-running documentary of this incompetence is the Indian Olympic squad which periodically parades like merchants in turbans or a wedding group from a Hindi film made for an NRI audience.

When will they abandon those turbans and wedding dresses and march by for what they actually are — the few athletically oriented ones in a nation of mostly sedentary people?

Unfortunately, instead of letting them fly free we seek to imprison them in the extended talons of our feudal, mercantile background. They end up looking like courtiers from a royal durbar; colourful merchants from colonial literature or members of a wedding party — anything but sportspersons.

It can only be such a mentality that allowed the IPL trophy to be crafted at a jeweller’s and not a sculptor’s workshop, where at least a mind professionally trained to profile a subject would have sculpted an unbiased trophy and not reduced it to a repository of precious stones.

The real tragedy in the IPL trophy is that its design is despite the tournament being a 21st century creation.

We actually had an opportunity to think afresh, free of the baggage of the past and all we did was squander it yet again for our mercantile roots. Which brings us to the real problem — even if the sculptor made a magnificent piece, final approval would have to come from the wedding party.