FakeIPLPlayer

For the uninitiated I would reccommend to go through the ingenuous blog located at http://fakeiplplayer.blogspot.com/ .

This entity has been a find for the second season of IPL. I call it the entity as its identity is left to anyones imagination. Whether its a male, a female, a group of people or for the more imaginative, an extraterrestrial or an autobot?!!

It gives a statutory disclaimer to be a fictitious character, which to conspiracy theorists make it a more real and an inside person kind of thing. In its avatar as a fictitious member of the KKR (Kolkata Knight Riders, or Knight Riders) team and posting under the name of IPL Anonymous (henceforth referred to as IPLA in this blog), it posts on the inside life of the IPL players and other staff in the camp in South Africa, especially of the KKR camp. What has caught the people's imagination is its ingenuous and hillarious nomenclature of the key persons in IPL. I do appreciate its sense of humour and the lucid account of events going on in S. Africa which appear quite credible for an outsider.

People have likened it to the Deep Throat of Watergate scandal providing inside information to Bob Woodward of The Washington Post but I feel it is more like the Big Brother show of more recent times. Each of his post is like an episode of the Big Brother show. It contains gossip, humour, controversies and masala making it an instant hit among the spice loving Indians. People are waiting with baited breath for the next episode. They are fed with what happens before a match and what goes on after the match and then they can relate it to what they see during the match (like the rising hemlines of Sandy Baddy Babe in the most recent post) and so it sort of completes the story for them. Its like entertainment without limit. They are getting more of IPL albeit not from BCCI or Multi Screen Media. Whats more, unlike the broadcasting media, the online blog has given the pseudo Big Brother show a two way relationship. People are expressing their feelings, comments, appreciation, theories about IPLA real time. The target audience has been given a voice.

One interesting issue which has come to my notice is the cropping up of related blogs from the IPLA's post. People are posting their views and analysis about IPLA, IPL in general and the related members. Due to the incognito state of IPLA's blog, the popularity of it and the potential of turning it into a revenue generating blog, the more ambitious blogger(s) have started posting as IPLA in other networking sites like Orkut, Twitter forcing IPLA to issue a public release on its blog that the Real FakeIPLPlayer exists only in his blog and nowhere else. The others are Fake FakeIPLPlayers. Some disgruntled readers have voiced their opinion about the correctness of the posting of the blog itself and the motives of IPLA.

As far as I am concerned, I am lapping it all up and considering the posts of IPLA as a humorous creation of a skillful blogger. I am loving it!