'Yeh haath lagaam pakad kar ghode ko bhi bitha sakte hain' ...That was Thakur Baldev Singh's bravado after being tricked into the den of Gabbar, whose fear and fables of ruthlessness travelled as far as 'pachas pachas kos dur'. Thakur Baldev Singh lets out the fiercest cry of helplessness and unforeseen fear as Gabbar chops off the Thakur's limbs from his shoulders. Leave out the physicality and gore of this high-voltage Sippyian drama, and you have an encore playing out on the cricketing fields of the Indian Premier League.

The horses are aplenty. It's not Ramgarh's prestige at stake that can be safeguarded by Gabbar's goons for two sacks of wheat and corn. Here the stakes are in crores. You can start counting the currency and you will not be through with counting it even after having reached the moon. This Gabbar is more suave -- educated, glamorous, chased by the paparazzi and flanked by the high-profile who's who of India who sport Armani jackets and Versace sun glasses. And flashes a Close-Up smile worth millions, far removed from the tobacco-stained set of fangs that Gabbar bares in the 1975 drama. They chose their own horses. They build their own stud farms. Each grander than the rest. The horses are picked up from across the globe. And just not Derby. Each horse is available for the highest bidder. You just have to fix his price. In the last bid, two derby horses were auctioned off for 7.5 crore rupees each. Some say the two are sure money-spinners in the T-20 format.

The game of cricket has metamorphosed from the days of 'Bodyline' to dollarline. They took the seam on their body then. They are busy cavorting in seamless corporate moolah today. When Sunny Gavaskar retired from international cricket more than two decades ago, he grossed an annual income that never exceeded ten lakhs. Today, an R P Singh, a Chawla, a Munaf, a Yusuf Pathan, a Shikhar Dhawan (all minnows debuting recently in international cricket) log an income of more than Rs 50 lakhs for one IPL season. I am not counting the money earned on account of a playing 15 in a Test match or a playing 11 in One-Day formats of the game.

There are stories galore of how Gavaskar manipulated team selection in his heyday. A fable goes that Gavaskar had a complete say in chosing his team. He used to come to the BCCI selecting committee meetings with a chit in his pocket which had the playing 11 neatly handwritten on it. And he got away with that almost all the time. Such was the aura of Sunny Gavaskar. He earned respect on the field by his never-say-die attitude, his chic cover drives, his faultless straight drives and the scores and scores of run he had piled over the years as an opening bat. A Dhoni today may lack that suaveness and style that so marked Gavaskar's genius but he is credited to be the most daring captain who loves to innovate and strategise each game to win it. In Gavaskar's time, a T-20 format of the game was unthinkable. But a Dhoni does not have the liberty to dictate his team to his masters. The same stands true for Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly who not so long ago revolutionised Indian cricket by instilling a winning streak in his team.

And yet Sourav remains the most fitting example of how a Sippyian drama dovetails into cricket as seen in the T-20 format. He is Thakur Baldev Singh incarnate of the IPL. He will keep playing but his limbs have been chopped off. The multi-captain drama that started from India culminated in Sourav being axed from captaincy when his plane touched Cape Town. Thakur Baldev Singh had to spend years taking his revenge on Gabbar. But Sourav, unfortunately, does not have age by his side to take revenge on his coach and master. He is simply a horse who has been picked up at a price. The only recourse available to him is to keep playing with amputated spirits as long as he can. If he chose to quit, he stands also to lose the Rs 5crore-something he earned on account of being categoriesed as 'iconic player' along with Sachin, Dravid, Laxman and Yuvraj.

Rahul Dravid did just that to score a point in Cape Town against Vijay Mallya. He was unceremoniously removed from captaincy after Royal Challengers (RC) bowed out ignominiously in season 1 of the IPL. But his scorching 66 off 48 balls led the Royal Challengers to victory against the Rajasthan Royals in their debut match of IPL 2 much to the cheers of Vijay Mallya.

A decade ago when money had just started to trickle in into this game, it was hard to dream that players will cease to be their masters. The advent of the IPL has pawned the entire cricketing generation to the dictats of their moneyed masters. All the fun of watching a player hook a six over the square leg or innovating a 'Marillier' shot evokes little sighs from an avid cricket fan who realises the shot has been paid for in advance.

Therefore, when Dhoni and Bhajji do not turn up to receive their Padma awards at the hand of the President of India, it hardly surprises someone following cricket in the times of the IPL. What is more important: IPL with crores of moolah littered all over the cricketing field or a mere scroll of paper that will never impress the 'masters'? So nationalism, whatever it's worth, is hooked out of the stadium.

Yet one cannot envy the near icon-like status of cricket players. Small-town players have it in them. They too can dream big and go for high stakes. And therefore cannot be denied the fruits of their labour. Wish this trend could have caught on with other sports like hockey, boxing, wrestling or athletics -sports where only small-time players throng.

But who knows if the purity of these sports would have remained the same had a Dileep Tirkey or a Vijender Singh or a Sushil Kumar been won over by the kind of money Indian cricketers are wallowing in. Who knows if Sushil Kumar would have preferred to enjoy Shah Rukh Khan's latest on his home theatre system to hiring an auto-rickshaw to reach the Rashtrapati Bhawan. Thankfully, no 'Gabbar' has walked into their lives. So they can be saved from meeting the same fate as Thakur Baldev Singh or a 'Kalia'.

So, until the end of season 2 and till the start of the 3rd season of IPL, keep watching Shah Rukh Khan, Mukesh Ambani, Neeta Ambani, Preity Zinta and Shilpa Shetty cheering for their derby from the pavilion box. Long Live Gabbar. Long Live Thakur Baldev Singh with his amputated limb. Thanks for turning the IPL 'Sholay' into a runaway hit.