To happen upon a piece of news like this ~ India gives the green light for cricket to bid for inclusion in the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics ~ is to realise, all over again, that today’s truth could be tomorrow’s trash.

In 1998, of course, Indian cricket, then led by legrndary power titans like Jagmohan Dalmiya and IS Bindra, didn’t want the national team, their presence announced by the Tricolour, to play in the Kuala Lumpur edition of the Commonwealth Games, if only to drive the message home that Suresh Kalmadi, chief of the Indian Olympic Association, wasn’t an inch above them in terms of an absolutist administrative control of anything.

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Kalmadi, playing the patriotism card, had said India should send their best team to Kuala Lumpur. He wanted to get cricket into the rings of Olympic sport. That, Dalmiya knew, implied not only kowtowing to the blokes on the International Olympic Committee and the high-ups of the Olympic Council of Asia, quite apart from the pipsqueaks of the IOA ~ with everything left unsaid about revenue-sharing ~ but also the gradual but inevitable loss of contol over his primary constituency, which was cricket.

It was a see-saw bout. Dalmiya had what he thought was the clinching argument, that the Commonwealth Games were coinciding with a series of One-Day Internationals in Canada against Pakistan, which was a blockbuster. But Kalmadi who knew, among other things, how to pull strings, tasted a triumph of sorts when India decided on sending one team to Toronto and another to the Malaysian capital city.

Well might he also have cocked a snook at the Board of Control for Cricket in India when it fell to Sachin Tendulkar, the box-office star, to go to the steamy south-east Asian city and not to the other, balmy destination. You can’t really read cricket’s revenge into a pretty strong Indian cricket contingent’s subsequent failure even to get as far as the quarter-finals in Malaysia as their brethren on the other tour came to be walloped rather badly by Pakistan.

Those compatriots of Kalmadi who didn’t share his enthusiasm about shepherding Indian cricket into the Olympics ~ and they were in an overwhelming majority ~ frothed at the mouth, with unparliamentary language finding popular expression here, there and everywhere.

After that, it was as-easy-as-ABC for India to bypass the cricket in the Asian Games, when they put it in. It didn’t matter what Bangladesh or Nepal said in righteous indignation.

The Indian cricket board did have to swallow its pride and accept the IOC’s chieftaincy when it came to dope tests, and the whereabouts clause ruffled feathers galore but there was, frankly, no getting away from it. The game had changed.

And now, having acceeded to the International Cricket Council appealing for cricket to be allowed into the Los Angeles Olympics, well might the board be congratulating itself on accepting reality ~ lump it if you don’t like it ~ instead of passing up a chance to scrape up a little more money in a world ravaged by a pandemic.

Kalmadi could be laughing and Dalmiya, wherever he’s, peeved. But it’s a new deal, and India’s neighbours tend to think it’s Jay Shah, secretary, who’s ushered in a new age for Sourav Ganguly, Dalmiya’s protege and BCCI chief.