A few years ago, Sunil Gavaskar had expressed his concern at the fact that Indian players were handing out their jerseys and caps to their fans after matches. The legendary opener had pointed out that these clothes had been earned by the players and could not (and should not) be handed out at random. I wonder how Sunny would have felt about the new “first ball ka captain” ad from Pepsi which shows a person who has made some random collection of Pepsi bottle caps replacing MS Dhoni as Indian captain and leading out the team? We do have a sense of humour and yes, the ad does have a certain “cute” factor to it, but a part of us cannot help but be appalled at the very notion that all you need to do to lead the Indian team out into the field of play is collect some bottle tops!  One does feel that the Indian cricket and its administrators are letting advertisers get away with far too many things – can you imagine someone running an ad campaign saying that you can be the Prime Minster of India for a day – or even a minute – provided you have collected a certain number of bottle caps? Is the position of the Indian cricket captain any less important?

Some things have to be earned. Leading the Indian team out into a playing field is one of them. Or so we think!