2022-23 Chennai Heat
136 · 2026-08-13 · medium
"Tunisian Spotify?!" he queried incredulously, spitting out the syllables as if they were unchewed chunks of a rotting supper. It being 2026 anno domini, when nobody's ever in the same room anymore, this was expressed via a lowercase and misspelled text over WhatsApp: tunisa spotify lol. This other friend – I have several – informed me that Tunisian Spotify is "washed", and Indian Spotify is where it's really at. It's the same kelly-green music discovery app as everywhere else in the world, but at a third the cost of the Tunisian version... which would make it around one-fifteenth of what America and Western Europe pay for it. "Of course!" I exclaimed in all-caps. "Indian Spotify! How quickly and easily I forget!" Way back in the late 2010s, I was living in the hoop frontier of South Korea, where Stephen Curry had recently appeared on one of those "crazy" Saturday night variety shows. NBA Fever was gripping the peninsula, males aged 18-34 simply couldn't get enough NBA, and Seoul's official NBA Store at Gangnam's COEX Mall proved that folks were willing to buy just about anything that came from the NBA. It was only a matter of time before Koreans learned about NBA League Pass – games are on after sunrise there – but many of the new fans balked at the 213,495 KRW price tag. Because information strives to be free, or as close as possible, Naver and Pann message boards became filled with mysterious refrences to 인도패스. That's right: Indian NBA League Pass. One of the key drivers of the Adam Silver globalization push was flooding third-world countries with cheap streams, and the NBA goosed their League Pass subscriber numbers by selling it in India for two thousand rupees a year. That translates to twenty USD, a whopping 87 percent markdown from the regular price. All anyone needed was a friend in Mumbai – the nascent darkweb was making this a lot easier than it had been before – and a reliable VPN to switch on any time you logged dot-in. I was a proud Indopasseu account owner between 2018 and 2020, inclusive, up to and including the day Rudy Gobert put his Covid-cooties all over those microphones. Anyway, basketball. Has a full decade of virtually free access to unlimited study materials improved the state of Indian hoops? You've been reading my writing long enough to know what the answer to a rhetorical like that will be. Back in 2015, there was an eight-team United Basketball Alliance, the country's first-ever pro league. After two years and four "seasons" – or rather, sparsely-attended weeklong tournaments – it was gone. After the pandemic, the Indian National Basketball League was founded (slogan: "Done. Hiding.") with a five-year government mandate. Then, for two years, the INBL used the pandemic as an excuse for not staging any actual games. You can judge for yourself how pro the six-team circuit actually was, once it launched in October 2022. The Chennai Heat overcame the Bengaluru Kings 91-74 for the championship, and then the INBL was past-tensed, buried and forgotten so quickly that a new capital venture is mistaken for and billed as a first venture. The IBL is set to launch in 2027 with teams in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, and Pune... and Vlade Divac is part of it somehow, so there's something. We'll check back in with all of that later on. For now, I'm scrolling through my new Indian Spotify; it has Sandeep Swadia instead of Joe Rogan, and a featured playlist called "Fresh Bollywood Bangers." Let's goooo.
