By Bikram Vohra

 I like cricket, don’t get me wrong. But there is one aspect that is visually so gross that I have no idea why TV cameramen or their editors insist on showing far too frequently. The shirtless players in the pavilion is a given and every now and then we are entertained by the sight of these gladiators trotting about with their torsos showing and the camera lingers longingly on them.

 This is probably just about short of icky because it truly is an invasion of privacy but then it deteriorates to someone being given a massage on the table swathed in a towel and I don’t see any redeeming feature in sharing the pummeling with 30 million viewers. In the India-Sri Lanka one dayer the commentator even discussed the issue.

But then we have the feet. It is bad enough catching players with their fingers up their nostrils, their nails being bitten, their hands in their crotches as they adjust stuff and all but the feet shots drive me insane. First you see wiggly toes as players stretch against a railing, then the camera goes in for a close up of the soles of the feet , up the leg and down to the feet after which we have this group shot of several feet and soles and the camera then pans and zooms out, zooms in, zooms out and this does not occur in some rare fashion, it is like every time there is a match we have to see the bare feet.

Evidently, somewhere in TV land’s corridors of power some mandarin has concluded that the cricket lovers per se have foot fetishes or there is something therapeutic about staring at LCD and plasma versions of the underpart of an athlete’s foot but I, for one, haven’t got the message yet. If there is anybody out there who can put me at ease about this issue I will turly appreciate it.