Before the reigning champions, Chennai Super Kings, play Royal Challengers Bengaluru in the first game of this year’s Indian Premier League on Friday fans will be treated to an opening ceremony headlined by the composer AR Rahman and featuring the actor Tiger Shroff as well as Sonu Nigam, who describes himself on Instagram as “an entity that translates vibrations of the vacuum into frequencies of music” but can be less confusingly labelled a singer. Tickets went on sale only on Monday but sold out in minutes, so rapidly that Ravichandran Ashwin, a cricketing superstar and Chennai native who played his 100th Test for India against England earlier this month, had to beg on X for help getting his kids in.
A little more than five months have passed since India hosted the opening game of a World Cup for which there was no ceremony, which started in near silence and in front of almost empty stands, and which presents a contrast that emphasises the supremacy of the IPL not just in the imaginations of Indian fans but as the ultimate blockbuster cricketing product. If there is another World Cup on the horizon – this year’s T20 version, which starts in West Indies and the USA in 10 weeks – for players it is a largely unnecessary extra incentive. It is over these two months in India each year that reputations and fortunes are won and lost.
