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| Graphic: M Iqbal Shaik |
Your place or mine?” No, this is not that old ‘come-on’ line. It’s an invitation from one gambler to another to watch a World Cup match. And it’s not just about enjoying the finer nuances of cricket — but about making, or losing, money.
It’s 6 pm and Rajesh Shah, 40, a dentist in Mumbai, calls up his buddies to fix a place to watch and bet on the next day’s match. Shah, like his group of about a dozen young businessmen friends, is an avid punter. And, while dreaming of hitting the elusive jackpot, he has lost about Rs 4-5 lakh in the last eight years in gambling. But Shah is lucky — his friend, Rajiv Mehra, a 34-year-old Mumbai-based garment exporter, has over the last decade lost Rs 20 lakh.
But it’s not just the wallet that bears the brunt of a gambler’s addiction. Families of betters have been reeling under its effects too. As Shah battles the temptation to lay the next bet, his wife, Pinky, who is two months pregnant, fervently prays that he’ll quit gambling.
“I’ll be walking on egg shells for the 10 hours or so of the match, while he screams, drinks, smokes and abuses me — verbally, emotionally and even physically,” she says. Once he even sat betting through a match while Pinky underwent a miscarriage at a clinic. Earlier this year, Shah decided to seek professional help to rein in his drinking and anxiety issues — but only after losing Rs 7 lakh while playing cards around last Diwali.
Mumbai psychiatrist Anjali Chabria says she deals with, at any given time, at least three punters in their mid-twenties and thirties, struggling with alcoholism, panic attacks and other overwhelming personality disorders. “These are people who bet as much as Rs 3-4 lakh a day on cricket matches. They suffer from manic depression and bi-polar disorders,” she says.
Tapan kundu, a businessman and long-time punter in Calcutta, tries to snuff out depression with sleeping pills. “Betting on cricket matches is so painful since one is engaged for so long. It’s better to buy a lottery ticket,” he reasons.
The pain doesn’t end there. Shah used to find himself hallucinating or flogging himself over a lost bet, or clutching at tiny straws. “I would feel happy if I won even as little as Rs 500 and get depressed if I lost as little as Rs 1,000,” he says.
Rahul Verma, a restaurateur in Mumbai who gave up a decade-old innings of betting last November, says he never misses punters betting before the plasma TV in his swish resto-bar in an upmarket Mumbai suburb. “They watch the match feverishly and are constantly on the phone.” The real tell-tale sign to watch for is the switching of loyalties for teams. If things don’t go as per plan for the team a punter has betted on, all he has to do is to call the bookie and say, in gamblers’ lingo, that he has ‘eaten’ the side, and switch over. But when the match is over, “an emptiness follows,” says Shah. So the next step for many would be to go out and drink.
“Gambling, alcoholism, womanising all go together,” says Shah. The rationale being: “A gambler who wins doesn’t think he owns the money he wins, so he goes and spends it — on nightclubs or shopping. It doesn’t stay with him.” Those laughing their way to the bank with the money of gamblers such as Kundu are bullish brokers with 10x12 ft offices in Barrabazar or Howrah or cruising along the highway recording bets on cellphones and laptops. Shah’s 35-year-old bookie, for instance, has a Rs 8-crore house in Mumbai and imported cars. For the rest, though, gambling is hell on earth. And what is of concern is that while most gamblers are on the wrong side of 50, more and more young people have joined the betting game. Aged 25, or more, they include professionals such as call centre employees with new-found money to splurge.
And, clearly, it is no longer the domain of men. In Verma’s neighbourhood, glued to her LCD, through almost every ball of the match, is Anita Chaddha, a punter in her late fifties who learnt the game of cricket through betting on matches. With her is her club of 20 women members. Chaddha, who used to be a physiotherapist till she took to gambling — which led her to put on weight and suffer a heart attack — has lost up to Rs 20 lakh over a decade. Like many of her counterparts in Calcutta who borrow from Afghan moneylenders at five to six per cent interest, she and her gambler friends have to borrow money, or pawn valuables, to tide over losses. For the few thousand rupees that she wins in a year over matches, her husband has to pay her bookie over Rs 1 lakh.
If punters succeed in keeping the extent of their losses secret, they can hardly camouflage the emotions associated with winning or losing. Kundu won’t reveal his diary to his wife, Sushmita, but she can certainly tell he’s losing by the tension on his face and his snappy tone. A win, on the other hand, means a five-star meal.
Kundu lost Rs 5 lakh in a single match in 2004-2005. His dark horses are the West Indies and Sri Lanka, who fetched him up to Rs 50,000 in a single match and Rs 1.25 lakh in a series. Like Shah, Team India, he says, is a punter’s nightmare, with their ability to “snatch defeat from the jaws of victory”. Want to bet on that?