Age of Nano Pornography!

Indian Premier League is the latest lesson for understanding post modern economics and politics. Oxford University has a course called PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) , but now I would like to institute a course called CPE , replacing Philosophy with Cricket theory. Philosophy is too time consuming and boring for understanding the nature of reality, we need a metaphor, a language that can be more relevant in the context of life as it is lived now.

Five day cricket belonged to a time when institutions lived for a long time, you lived and died in the same company or organisation and had ideologies that you clung onto for your whole life. Then came one day cricket, when you had the coming of frequent divorces and you needed to shift companies to grow your career and hype was getting more important than function. We talked about instant coffee and instant cricket. From timelessness we had reached the age of the instant. With the coming of the internet even a day was filled with too many nano-seconds, with a click you changed what you wanted, even an instant seemed too long. We have divided the moment too, along with our day into various slots. Serial monogamy feels dated, now we want the freedom of multiple choices in every instant. T20 belongs to this age. And IPL is the chapter which Indians have written.

Not that it is an origonal invention but as a great painter said , art is about making it your own, so Indians have taken T20 to a combination of play, colours, sexuality with their own "tadka" and made it international. They have learnt the great ecological activist's lesson "Think Global,Act Local". Some might call it "pornographic" cricket, the origin of the word meant "depiction of prostitutes", today all, each and everyone of us are available for a price to the right bidder. Our jobs our talents are part of the market. Market has replaced society, we value ourselves as much as our net wealth (not including the value of our residence , "Fortune" magazine says so).So we live in the Age of Nano Pornography.

Also nationalism is a decaying concept, whether we like it or not. It’s either extreme localisation. We belong (if we are modern and careerists) to Infosys, Google, Microsoft or if vernacular to Tamils, Baluch, Bosnians, Zulus etc. etc.. So obviously a format in which some belong to the city, some to the nation and some international is like a coalition of interests like our political coalitions. From regional parties, to national parties with international players like Sonia Gandhi we in India now are looking to a democracy like T20. Day is not far when governments will last for few months only, we already had a 13 day government once. Our companies are local and have expats too, same with Silicon valley where H1B visas flood ventures of the software kind. So the Age of Nano Pornography is about some being auctioned off every year and some stuck to their local geographies.

There might be purists and moralists who hate this age and want like various fundamentalists to go back to the haloed past, but I believe that is not possible. I believe that this is the coming of the boundary-less world, which mirrors Facebook. You can choose your Groups, and leave them when you want. So also with your fluid personal identities which are a combination of local, national and global. No one will kill you for being a traitor or apostate. It will be a seamless exchange society.

All we need to care about is about Climate Change. If we all get our kicks from playing games that are carbon neutral and have passion and flavour, we will obviously use less material resources.

T20 and IPL are signposts to a better world, believe me you, its another page in the evolution of humankind to a harmonious society. It was not predicted in the Bible, Koran or Gita but that is the whole big excitement of true adventure. We can never predict till the last bowl is bowled.

by Sunny Narang