Watching a sport on TV is like watching pornography. It’s not the real thing. Now come on, I’m not suggesting that watching a sport can ever equal ‘playing it’ (or did you read ‘doing it’!), but I think it’s much better than seeing it on TV. Even though you don’t get such a good view of the ball/players (one can hardly make out who’s who even from VIP seats) and the analysis that you get on TV, still in my opinion nothing beats the live experience for the energy, the madness, the magnanimity and the scale!
Sakshi and I watched the IPL match in Bangalore yesterday. Of course the Royal Challengers lost, but since they were playing Delhi Daredevils it was not all that bad - after all I’m from Delhi and spent almost all my life there! The cheerleaders were really rocking. On TV you miss the real action (cheerleaders dancing) that happens between the overs due to advertisements! And. There was beer and food (for a Rs 2,725 ticket). What else could you have asked for?
In fact Shaan was also performing yesterday, but we missed him by an hour or so it seems. We had booked the tickets online and I had no clue what time he was performing. The match had to start at 8 PM, so I planned to reach by 7, and I did, but Shaan was gone by that time. Parking was of course a pain. And then we had to walk down almost half a kilometer to pickup the tickets (wonder why they couldn’t courier the tickets in advance) and then walk back the same distance to enter our box. It rained between 4 and 6 and we were keeping our fingers crossed. Thankfully the rain stopped just in time, saving the match and our 5.5k!
We had originally planned to take our camera and shoot some, but were told that it’s not allowed. However we saw a lot of people with cameras and wondered how they managed to get their little things in! The match was not so interesting, but we were anyway not expecting any fireworks given Bangalore’s performance in the IPL. Sehwag and Gambhir played really well and so it was some ‘paisa-vasool’!
Net-net great experience.
on May 21st, 2008 at 10:33 am
Hehehe… I knew you will crib about the camera thingie here on your blog… no matter how many times during the match you said “Why should I crib about the camera, we are here to enjoy the match and we are doing that”….LOL
on May 21st, 2008 at 10:46 am
That was hardly a crib!