1) It fortifies the hold of cricket over the Indian public: Just when one would have thought that cricket is taking a breather and letting other sports (read "Olympic sports") come even close to its popularity, here comes the IPL and drills cricket as a shortcut to easy money in the minds of the general public and thus drives out all the little impetus that the other sports found themselves to be gaining.
2) It represents the victory of Lalit Modi and commercialism over the Indian television viewer: Lalit Modi has proven once and for all that he holds the pulse of the Indian public in his hands and can toy with it all he wants. We already had the DLF Maximums (or Maxima), the Citi Moments of Success, the Citi Under-23 Success of the Tournament and advertisements abound. Now we also have the Karbonn Kamaal Katch (or Catch, though Katch goes better - gives it the KKK feel) and advertisements between deliveries. Inspite of all this, the Indian public still watches the IPL like crazy. Worse still, other television programs have learnt a trick - Give the junta what it wants and it won't care for the quality of the coverage. 30 minute runtime episodes now have a taped time of about 12 minutes. Compare it to 21 over in the states and 24 in the land of the queen. Isn't it time someone stands up to these people? Yes, it is. But no one will. Why? Because it's cricket and, more importantly, because it's IPL.
3) It exacerbates the already rotten condition our media is in: IPL sends the Indian media into a frenzy. IPL pre-match, IPL live, IPL post-match, IPL parties, IPL stadia, IPL team owners, IPL chaiwallahs is all there is to news nowadays. And when there's a break in that, the status quo has a re-run and all that the media thinks a nation of 1.1 billion cares about is Sania's marriage with Shoaib. Give me a break.
I know IPL has got its plusses. But sometimes, you just can't look past the minuses.
