And the vote goes to...

When a 24-hour news channel like Star News reveals that its Top Four programmes are all about cricket, you can be sure that India has caught the cricket fever — and caught it badly. It simply confirms the fact that India as a nation follows Virender Sehwag''s hits more closely than politicians'' misses.
There''s more data to prove the pull of cricket over the push of other programmes on TV.Tam data for the period March 21-27 shows that Ten Sports and Doordarshan''s coverage took the number one and number two positions respectively. This temporarily ended Star Plus'' domination which had been continuing since the glory days of Kaun Banega Crorepati. While Ten Sports got a rating of 12.1, DD''s rating was only slightly behind (12) during the evening session from 6.39 pm to 10.27 pm.
"Cricket is the most popular segment on news channels today, despite elections being round the corner," says a Star News spokesperson. "It attracts maximum ads. I guess that''s because cricket is much more than a sport today. The current Indo-Pak series, for instance, has so many facets. It''s seen as a peace process, as two countries coming together. We''ve gone all out this time, and sent four reporters to Pakistan — something never done for a sport before."
It isn''t only television. Media planners for radio too are convinced that cricket on radio sells, and sells well. "While travelling, people are anxious to know the score. Our research has shown no such urgency on the part of our listeners in the case of election updates," says a marketing personnel of an FM radio station. "The interest of the audiences in the game is proved by the huge volumes of response we get to the live contests on cricket that we run through the day. All our phone lines get jammed within a couple of minutes after the announcement of each cricket-based contest."
In contrast, media planners feel there''s a huge segment of people who are simply fed up of elections and don''t want a surfeit of news about it. "Absolutely," says 22-year-old computer professional Vrinda Punjabi. "There''s nothing new to know about elections anymore. It''s the same old fogeys doing the same old routine. I follow cricket on TV because it has more elements of uncertainty and excitement. Polls are mundane." Where TV and radio become obtrusive, the internet serves as the medium for cricket updates, with the nu-mber of hits touching lakhs during matches. Check out The Times of India''s website for the most read articles in the last 24 hours: on Saturday, a no-match day, 19 out of 30 top reads related to cricket.
And lately the means of connecting the masses to cricket has become even more ‘handy''. "We''ve migrated our ideas from the internet to the mobile phone," says Alok Kejriwal, director of mobile2win. "Since there are about 33 million mobile phone users in India, of which a large segment consists of the urban youth, cellphone cricket games are very successful. Our cellphone games have been downloaded by more than 10,000 people, and there have been several lakh responses to our cricket quizzes via SMS."
What about election-related contests? Kejriwal reiterates the general consensus among media planners when he says, "No way. Elections aren''t as inspiring as cricket."