IPL, Bollywood and Girls

“So how’s life?”
“These days are so boring yaar”
“Kyu? Any problem in the office?”
“Arey nahi, the temperature is rising, there are no good movies coming up and on top of that, all you see everywhere is cricket, cricket and only cricket! I hate IPL and I really hate Shah Rukh Khan!”

Clearly the “Girls” in the title of this blog do not represent the IPL cheer girls 😉

One of my female friends (also an IT engineer) who works in Noida has started hating Shah Rukh Khan. She said SRK is involved in promoting IPL because he owns a team and wondered if that has anything to do with how no good Hindi movies are coming up in the IPL season.

This conversation got me thinking. Most of the girls don’t follow cricket and few of them actually hate it. In fact, it was the overall falling popularity of the ODIs that gave birth to the concept of T-20. Some of my male friends absolutely love T-20. They just cannot afford missing a Mumbai Indians match. Gender disparity, anyone? I remember my childhood days when we played cricket and even the girls would participate. We had 4 girls in our group and it was compulsory for every team to have 2, so that the teams were evenly divided!

But then there is women’s cricket. Nowhere near men’s though as far as viewership is concerned but still we do have a national women’s cricket team. Jhulan Goswami, the captain, has never scored a century. Is that an indication of how cricket is a gentleman’s game? I don’t know.

The IPL matches begin at 4 PM and end around 11 PM, the prime slot of the moviegoers. In the first IPL, season there was only one movie that succeeded enough at the box office to be called a hit. It was Emraan Hashmi’s Jannat. The backdrop of the movie being cricket is a different story altogether. Indian film fraternity realized right from the season 1 that this isn’t the right time for a movie release. That’s the reason of “These days are so boring yaar” in my conversation above.

From fourth IPL season, we have 2 new teams participating – Pune and Kochi. Total number of matches would go up from 60 to 94! I wonder if this would result in a “cricket fatigue”. But let’s give this a thought. What would really happen if a major Bollywood movie was to release during the IPL? Frankly, I think Aamir Khan’s Ghajini would still be Ghajini if it released during the IPL! This year the IPL ends on 25th April and the next Friday has the release of Akshay-Deepika starrer Housefull. A ‘safe’ date for sure.

With the number of matches going up to 94 in the next season and most of the girls not being interested in cricket and find these IPL days boring, there is definitely a niche opportunity here. It would be interesting to see if any other TV channel or a Bollywood movie comes up with something which is ‘girlish’ during the next season and take advantage of the whole situation.