Even as the nation struggles to come to terms with sordid revelations of rampant spot-fixing in the IPL, an unlikely super-hero, the proverbial knight in shining armour, the chosen one, has emerged from the gloom and debris of shattered dreams and promises to rescue Indian cricket: Ashok Bhimchandra Dinda. The PWI pacer has single-handedly bankrupted the betting industry by having inked a hyper mega giga deal worth lakhs of thousands of crores with bookies to bowl maiden overs and even take wickets at regular intervals during the course of this year’s IPL.
As per the terms of the deal, Dinda’s leap in his delivery stride would be the signal for bookies to start placing bets. Bookies readily agreed to this stratagem given that the time taken for him to land on his feet to complete his follow through would give them sufficient time to place their bets. A string of bookies foolishly entered into this high stakes, high risk contract with catastrophic consequences, given the flood of runs the pacer subsequently leaked.
The betting industry is now in the throes of an acute liquidity crisis with a number of bookies having declared bankruptcy while many others in the red because of contagion. The betting industry may take years if not decades to recover from this disaster, opines an industry insider. “Dinda was to us what sub-prime mortgage based securities and credit default swaps were to the financial sector, an unmitigated disaster of gargantuan proportions,” wailed Gulab Chand, President of the Betting Association of India (BAI), an umbrella grouping of spot fixers, go-betweens, signal spotters, and assorted low life forms. “In hindsight, betting on Dinda was a reckless move and we paid the price for it,” he trailed off.
Dinda has earned plaudits from not just cricket fans, BCCI mandarins and law enforcement agencies but hedge fund managers as well for his ingenious ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ deal. “Dinda wasn’t the out and out loser we all thought him to be,” raved Peter Steinbaum, exotic derivates trader at a New York based hedge fund. “If he had actually pulled off the incredible feat of bowling maidens, he would have not only won matches for his franchise but also reaped handsome returns from the satta market. On the other hand, by bowling his normal pedestrian fare, he ensured that he took not only his team, PWI, down with him but the entire betting industry. Bloody genius.”
(Also read this post by Saud Ahmad)