India, April 24 -- The first murmurs of the trend began about 18 years ago as a funny anecdote. Batting coaches I knew in Delhi and Mumbai started talking about how they were facing a strange conundrum: fathers and mothers protesting that too much time was being spent teaching their children how to play defence instead of how to hit fours and sixes. "That's like wanting to run before you can walk," the coaches would laugh, as they narrated these conversations.

This was when the Indian Premier League (IPL) was two or three years old, and the gavel at the auction was turning more heads than the fireworks on the ground. As young second-string Indian players started getting snapped up for tens of lakhs of rupees - something unheard of in dom...