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Cricket, Corruption, and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India
Bloomsbury
July 2013
On Sale: July 9, 2013
304 pages ISBN: 1608199177 EAN: 9781608199174 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
To understand modern India, one must look at the business of
cricket within the country.
When Lalit Modi--an
Indian businessman with a criminal record, a history of
failed business ventures, and a reputation for audacious
deal making--created a Twenty20 cricket league in India in
2008, the odds were stacked against him. International
cricket was still controlled from London, where they played
the long, slow game of Test cricket by the old rules.
Indians had traditionally underperformed in the sport but
the game remained a national passion. Adopting the highly
commercial American model of sporting tournaments, and
throwing scantily clad western cheerleaders into the mix,
Modi gave himself three months to succeed. And succeed he
did--dazzlingly--before he and his league crashed to earth
amid astonishing scandal and corruption.
The
emergence of the IPL is a remarkable tale. Cricket is at the
heart of the miracle that is modern India. As a business, it
represents everything that is most dynamic and
entrepreneurial about the country's economic boom, including
the industrious and aspiring middle-class consumers who are
driving it. The IPL also reveals, perhaps to an
unprecedented degree, the corrupt, back-scratching, and
nepotistic way in which India is run.
A truly
original work by a brilliant journalist, The Great
Tamasha* makes the complexity of modern India--its
aspiration and optimism straining against tradition and
corruption--accessible like no other book
has.
*Tamasha: a Hindi world meaning "a spectacle."
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