BCCI recently felicitated all members of the ’83 Prudential World Cup winning squad in a colorful function. Along with that all players of that squad was given a cheque of Rs. 25 Lakhs each!
While Kapil’s devils really did a good job in fetching the World Cup to India, I thought, probably it’s time Indian fans and BCCI put that story behind and started thinking of something else. Also, as we all see, most of the members of that squad are well settled (financially) in life after taking up lucrative careers as coaches, commentators and administrators and making good enough money! They don’t have to earn so much of retirement bonus right now for something that was done 25 years back.
Forget about the history! It’s high time the pay packages of our current cricketers are brought down big time as this ‘one sport country’ is not getting anywhere with respect to other sports. We are in a pathetic shape when it comes to international events…in fact, so pathetic that even a silver medalist in an Olympic event is treated like a national hero (or even at par with the father of the nation) and became a display piece all around India – thanks to the sponsors, may be. If BCCI is cash rich and made a few millions out of the IPL event and sponsorship, let them not forget the CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) part of life. Instead of making our rich cricketers even richer, they should concentrate on such social aspects too.
In a country where inflation is touching 13 year high and the industrial/agricultural growth is tipped to be slowing down, let us not waste our human resources and valuable time over too many Twenty 20 tournaments and then sharing this huge income (generated out of common man) with cricketers and their team owners alone.
With all this money coming in I think even the cricketers are putting their financial needs ahead of national interests. Soon, the cricket will become only an entertainment factor rather than a national pride. Let our cricketers fight hard for every thousand rupee they are making and let other games be treated at par with cricket! Will that ever happen in India?
Non-cricket story: Recently, I was chatting with a friend about the Software professionals’ salaries. They (includes yours truly) are a pampered lot like our cricketers as well. Engineers in other industries do a lot of hardwork and get paid probably one fifth of what a Software Engineer gets…