As one turns on the television to savour an IPL match on Sony Six in Telugu, commentators Y. Venugopal Rao and P. Chandrasekhar are busy chatting away in a mix of Telugu and English, describing the on-field actions. The mix is not the healthiest one, especially if one had grown up listening to Hindi and English commentary on the radio and television. And, but for an occasional match of a celebrity league, domestic matches or a rare world cup final, Telugu commentary hasn’t quite reached out to the public as it was expected to.
When the IPL bosses decided to persist with Telugu commentary for the second time in a row, one expected it would get a quality-boost of sorts with a guaranteed reach. However, it looks like sports enthusiasts across the city haven’t quite woken up to its existence.
For a cricket lover like Sriram Madhav who has only occasionally put up with Telugu commentary, he feels the move hasn’t made much of a difference in the way people are consuming cricket. “From the little of what I’ve watched, the quality of the commentary hasn’t been the best. In times where people watch many matches at sports bars, public outlets, not many are in a position to pay notice to it,” he adds.
The presence of Telugu commentary has always been short-lived, given the limited audience it attracts. In that sense, the familiarity to the lingo (sans the sophistication that Hindi commentators have brought about) continues to be an issue.
“It was only for a few minutes that I could hear it. This is also because; we are not used to listening to commentary in a local language as spectators. So the line such as banthi bhale adbutanga pattukunnaadu (he has caught the ball very well) doesn’t register quite easily as Hindi. All thanks to the Hindi commentary, we were fed from the Doordarshan days, I continue to watch IPL matches in Hindi,” words a software engineer and sports-enthusiast M Rag.
Moreover, even if the likes of Richie Benaud, Harsha Bhogle, Sushil Doshi, Jasdev Singh are an authority of their kind in English and Hindi commentary, there have not been many such role models in the case of Telugu commentary.
“Sadly, it has become a case of unintended humour because of the very literal English translations the commentators try to make. They’re not as professional as their other language counterparts,” reveals Raja Satish, who switches between English and Telugu commentary in IPL out of interest. It is high time for the jargon for Telugu cricket commentary gets specific and serious, for it to evince consistent interest from spectators and not relegate to the sidelines.
