As a PR exercise and as a way to get some talent in the door, this has worked wonders.   Perhaps worth a try for an Indian conglomerate to try this out in reverse i.e. have a few Americans play cricket and take them to Bangalore for training! 

J.B. Bernstein was on to something!  ''India has a billion people, sports fanatics, with no big American entry into pro sports,'' says Bernstein, the managing director of Seven Figures Management. ''But all they really played was cricket. You have 200 million men under the age of 25 playing cricket. Surely, some of those guys can throw a baseball.

''So we said, 'Why don't we find the guy who can throw the fastest in India, and we'll bring him to the US, train him and turn him into a pitcher?' In 2007, we started a reality TV contest called The Million Dollar Arm. We'd go from city to city, village to village, park to park, school to school, set up our little machine, and kids would come and throw.''

Rinku Singh had never picked up a baseball to that point. Cricket was his passion as a kid. His coach suggested he try out for the contest.  "The first time I'd picked up a baseball I threw it 88mph, and won the final in Mumbai throwing a 91mph strike.''

Singh had beaten more than 37,000 hopefuls and, in the process, changed the course of his life forever.  Singh won $US100,000 ($101,300) and a trial in the US for throwing the most strikes over 85mph. The roller-coaster journey had begun.  Click here for the full story  [Courtesy - Sydney Morning Herald]