Outsourcing in Reverse: Cheerleaders in India

April 21, 2008 -- M. CHINNASWAMY STADIUM, BANGALORE, India — After the rock concert, after the dancers inside inflatable balls and the girls on the three-foot stilts, after the cheerleaders waving their pompoms and after the laser light show, there was cricket.

But this weekend's debut of the Indian Premiere League, the world's most expensive cricket tournament, was not about the route that the Calcutta Knight Riders took to beat the Bangalore Royal Challengers under the Friday night lights.

It was more spectacle than sport, more evidence of a generation of Indians who have never been richer or hungrier for decadence than it was about the newest version of the second most popular game on the planet.

"It's a rockin' evening already!" Ravi Shastri, one of India's cricket heroes, shouted at the crowd during the $1.5 million pre-game show, which infused a little Indian music with a lot of Western extravaganza. It was one of the single most expensive pieces of entertainment in recent Indian history.

"The cricket is serious. But there's entertainment for the crowd and the TV viewers," Venkat Vardhan, the managing director of DNA Networks and the producer of the pre-game show, told ABC News while waiting in the stands before the game. "There are 250 or 300 million who are exposed to the Western world, of the one billion Indians. For the people who have had the exposure," he said, Western entertainment "is now at their doorstep."

In this case the doorstep was a city best known as the world's center of outsourcing. Bangalore is India's Silicon Valley, the hub of the country's $17 billion outsourcing industry, filled with call centers that employ legions of young Indians who often spend their nights talking to Westerners on the phone.

But the entertainment for the IPL, as the league is known here, was imported in both style and substance — from the concert stage at one end of the field to the luxury boxes filled with Bollywood stars, from the crowd doing to the wave to the beer cups lining the aisles of the stands. And most notably, the group of 11 scantily clad women in yellow boy shorts, rhinestone-studded bikini tops and white go-go boots who waved their pompoms and gyrated their hips for the Bangalore Royal Challengers, a team named after a whiskey.