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The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption And The Turbulent Rise Of Modern IndiaStock informationGeneral Fields
Special Fields
DescriptionOn a Bangalore night in April 2008, cricket and India changed forever. It was the first night of the Indian Premier League - cricket, but not as we knew it. It involved big money, glitz, prancing girls and Bollywood stars. It was not so much sport as tamasha: a great entertainment. The Great Tamasha examines how a game and a country, both regarded as synonymous with infinite patience, managed to produce such an event. James Astill explains how India's economic surge and cricketing obsession made it the dominant power in world cricket, off the field if rarely on it. He tells how cricket has become the central focus of the world's second-biggest nation: the place where power and money and celebrity and corruption all meet, to the rapt attention of a billion eyeballs. Astill crosses the subcontinent and, over endless cups of tea, meets the people who make up modern India - from faded princes to back-street bookmakers, slum kids to squillionaires - and sees how cricket shapes their lives and that of their country. Promotion infoThe Great Tamasha is the story of modern India told through the glitzy, scandalous and mind-blowingly lucrative Twenty20 cricket tournament, the Indian Premier League. The IPL - merging the three forces of politics, business and Bollywood - has transformed cricket and transfixed India like nothing before it. Author descriptionJames Astill is a journalist who has written for a range of publications around the world - from The Guardian to Japan Times. Since 2007 he has been the South Asia Bureau Chief for The Economist, stationed in New Delhi. He has won four major journalism awards including America's Gerald R. Ford Prize for Reporting on National Defence. |