In Due Season Kapurusa GONE away to watch a test cricket match, did you say? Those who have not gone away to the match are glued to their doordarshan sets. Yet others are ruminating over yesterday's non- excitements on the cricket pitch. Scan the daily papers, roughly two-thirds of the space is taken up by news of what happened at Kotla or the Eden Gardens or of what is likely to happen at Chepauk, India, January 1977. For God's sake, hold thy tongue, and let me love my cricket. The unreal calls to the unreal. Sitting across the television set, perched on top of the five hundred -rupee seat, running your eyes down the columns of the precious newspaper, you would not imagine that this is a country of the poor. Your imagination belongs to a human frame; it has its limitations; it would never permit you to dare to think that in the grey city where this drama of the test match is being enacted, there could be a million pavement dwellers, there could be roughly half-a-million who go without food every night, there could be nearly a thousand children who die of malnutrition in the course of each twenty- four hours, A new scaffolding of economics is being sought to be put together. There is, as Parson Malthus gloatingly declared one hundred and seventy-five years ago, a 'third' class, who are really the prime class and they are supposed to usher in a new dawn for this economy. Those who flock to the cricket test match are also those who sell the television sets. In case they do not sell the television sets, they sell fancy textiles or cars or radios or luxury footwear or are in the hotel business where they sell whisky or gin or beer or the flesh of young women. They sell mostly to themselves. The rich sell to the rich
