An act of the great tamasha comes to an end. Thankfully!

"How come they are playing only two tests this time?" my mother asked me about the two match series between India and the West Indies.  "It is a Sachin special" I told her.  "To make his retirement happen."

Sachin Tendulka finally getting off the stage is consistent with the tamasha in all aspects of life in India--the principal actors just never quit!

Tamasha is a wonderfully unique word.  At one level it means entertainment. But, it is also more than entertainment.  It is a grand show. It is a spectacle. It is commotion.  It is noise.  It is tamasha.

During my growing up years in India, the awesome tamasha in politics was wonderful entertainment for me.  Of course, it was nothing but heartache when I started identifying with any single actor.  But, I learnt to set aside any affinity for any individual and enjoy the spectacle, the entertainment, the commotion, the noise, the grand show.  It was the best possible theatre from across the street--literally--to what I could get from the radio and newspaper and the magazines and from the grownups' arguments.

Cricket was a lot more sober and sedate those days.  It became a tamasha only after I lost interest in the game, and certainly only in the last few years.  I was, thankfully, spared all that.

My mother, on the other hand, is thankful that cricket became a tamasha.  When I was a kid and passionately followed cricket, she had no choice but to listen to the commentary and report the scores to me when I returned from school.  And even send updates along with the lunch that the maid brought to school during our much younger days.

But, she found the five days of test playing to be a bore.  The tamasha that cricket is now she is very excited about.  "In the tests, they play a lot of 'dokku'" she complained once.  This tamasha engages her way more than movies or television shows do.

My guess is that my mother is not alone in this.  Ashis Nandy famously commented that cricket is an Indian game that was accidentally invented in England, and combine this with the Indian tamasha and you have hundreds of millions addicted to this cricket tamasha which is beyond the fascination for any other tamashas.  Compared to this, even the fabulous epics of Mahabharata and Ramayana are as slow and boring as War and Peace can be!

Of course, I am borrowing the tamasha description for cricket--from James Astill's The Great Tamasha.  In an interview with NPR, he commented:

When the IPL, the Indian Premier League, India's most popular domestic cricket tournament — it's worth several billion dollars, it's estimated — when that tournament runs for seven weeks in April and May each year, Bollywood stops releasing movies, because Indians just don't go to the cinema. They stay at home and they watch cricket on television.

When Bollywood stops being a tamasha, well, does one need a better metric!

In successful Indian tamashas the best actors hang on for a long time.  At Bollywood, everywhere you look, there is Amitabh Bhachchan, wearing his 1970s-style toupee.  You change the settings, and it is Rajinikanth.

In politics too.  One of the best in the tamasha business is Karunanidhi, whose gifted way of speaking was wonderful entertainment for the young me.  The fact that he is pushing 90 does not seem to affect the tamasha even one bit--in fact, it seems to make it all the more exciting!

It is against such a backdrop of tamasha and the actors hanging on for a very long time comes the retirement of Sachin.

 My mother, along with hundreds of millions of Indians, will watch this test match, however boring they might think the format is, only because one small aspect of the tamasha is coming to an end.  But, they know that the tamasha itself will continue on for a very, very long time to come.