When Lata kept the shame of BCCI
Recently, a news came on social media about Lata Mangeshkar, in which it was told that the BCCI i.e. Board of Control for Cricket in India did not even have money to give awards to the Indian cricket team that returned after winning the 1983 World Cup. The then board president NKP Salve told this to his friend Raj Singh Dungarpur. These men were from the Dungarpur royal family, used to do cricket commentary in those days and were friends of Lata Mangeshkar. Raj Singh Dungarpur spoke to Lata and then the way was to organize a program at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in Delhi in which Lata would perform her singing and the world winning team would be on stage with her. The program accumulated such an amount that the BCCI was able to pay one lakh rupees to each member of the world-winning team, which had already been announced.
Don’t know how true this is, but if you look at Kabir Khan’s film ’83’, it is in a sense the story of the BCCI’s pauper at that time. In this, we hear the then captain Kapil Dev saying that after winning the World Cup final, the people of the team were opening champagne on champagne and I was wondering who would give their money.
It is true that then our cricket players used to get so little money, they used to save money by cutting down on food and drink at times. Let go of Mansoor Ali Khan i.e. Nawab Pataudi, but after all, how would Chandu Borde, Hanumant Singh, Ramakant Desai, Budhi Kundaran, Jaisimha etc., who played for the country for years, run their homes? All these were not from the Nawab families and were playing in the Indian team twenty years before 1983. Then you would not get more than two-and-a-half hundred rupees for a test match.
The correct answer is probably that even after independence, two-three generations have passed in the country in which most of the people were engaged in their work diligently despite low income. Money was not the main driving force for most of them. Think about it, what was the condition of the cricketers of that time as compared to the crores earned by the cricketers of today.
