On F1 in India

(I wrote all this down the Sunday before the F1. The last few lines I added today)
The whole debate on F1 being sport, entertainment or elitist pastime is so ridiculous it unfunny. But maybe its unfunny because there is too much funny money thats at stake. By the same standards that IPL is a sport, this one is too. There are a fixed teams of people who play according to a set of rules, to maximise a particular result. The winners get prizes; there are people who pay to watch, and the result, at least technically, is dependent on one team outperforming the others.

Of course, like IPL, there are too many businessmen who are “passionate about the sport” and have put in a lot of money. Of course, everyone who has access to a TV channel microphone or newspaper blog/columns has an opinion. (any spacefiller set of words will do. Orinigality ore relevance be damned). The TV rights and the marketign rights are a killer, and there are pretty blonde women in skimpy clothes who will be involved with the whole circus.

But does that meet Indian standards of sport?

For one, there is no committee under the Ministry of Sport (or is it HR ministry?..well.. whatever), you don’t get grace marks in standard 10 exams for motorsport, and there is no reservation in the Indian Railways or other sarkari bodies for racing excellence. And from what I heard, Suresh Kalmadi’s family members have a stake in all the Indian F1 circuit and promotions and everything. Did they ever put in their money into hockey teams or firms that make boxing gloves or anything? Not that I know of. And the Indian junta actually watch F1 on TV. They recognise the faces of Vettel and Button and even Eccleston. Outside of Cricket, they only sportsperson that most people can recognise is Sania Mirza. Speaking of cricket, in India, its not a sport. Its a religion. So the criteria listed above need not apply.

Maybe, like Cricket, not being a sport is a good thing here. In cricket, like it should be in F1, the interests of all the parties concerned are transparent: Money. Megamoney. In millions of US$. Managing a team, getting star players and gettign good playing facilities needs money. But if there is megabuck in crores to be earned from a well organised, well played event, investing the lakhs that are needed for proper facilities and decent player fees is sound business sense. Else, you have to float tenders and buy treadmills at ten times the cost, to get a decent ROI and effort. Or you need to be bribed into selecting incompetents with ministerial recommendations. But where the money is big, you invest. And expect that the investment function efficiently for returns. Else, whatever money and effort you put in is not investment, its an expense. And expenses are what you either avoid, or inflate, or leverage for personal gain. In India, sport is an expense.

And of course, F1, unlike even cricket, is totally unaccessible. Any five year old can play cricket in any convenient street corner. And enough five year olds actually play well enough to make their way from poverty and no facilities to the Indian test cap. This happens in other sports also, albeit to different levels of access. Sports like football and hockey, which require very little equipment, are easier to get into. Somethign as costly as shooting requires an industrialist father. But you get the point. Not so in F1. Even getting into the lesser leagues of motorsport is extremely expensive. So is watching the race. Tickets are coveted, prices are high, and will continue to be high. And since the price is high, there are a lot of add ons like the boxes and the food and the hostessess and access to team meetings that make it all the more coveted. The aam janta will have to be content with watching IPL, regular cricket and F1 on TV. The middle class junta can, with a bit of luck, actually afford to buy cricket match tickets. Tickets to F1 cost as much as a 2D/3N family vacation to Munnar. Moreover, F1 will always have a slightly elitis following, since a major part of the enjoyment comes from reading about the teams, strategies, races, technology and a lot more on a continuous basis. This bit of dedicated followup is an elitist pastime. The cricket elitist debate, discuss and ponder over everything from Bradman to moisture on the pitch to the exact muscle that is strained by Rotator Cuff injuries. The rest of the worshippers of cricket dont generally go beyond “arre Yuvraj ne kyaa mast six maara…seedha stadium ke baahar gaya!!”. They just might find noisy cars going round and round a tad boring.

Speaking of the elite, can India afford to host such a huge track on so much of real estate for such a small period of active utilization? And all this for the entertainment of the elite? Important questions that require a lot of debate. But they all arise from having skewed policy and too much corruption in the first place. Any projec that requires land, be it an airport, racetrack, IIT campus or housing complex, has to buy the land from someone. That somones are usually a bunch of farmers. They, like most rational human beings, are ready to sell if the price is right. But the price is never right because everyone is trying to scam them. Not anyone’s fault. As for utilization, there will invariably be uses found for this piece of land. There will be political gatherings, award ceremonies, rock concerts, film shoots and motor races. At least, an F1 track will be more useful than shopping malls around the Taj Mahal.

And as if to settle the matter conclusively, the Sports Minster was not invited to the inaguration. Befittingly, he was inagurating a new track at P.T. Usha’s athletics school. Poetic, eh?

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