Motley masala

Its been a while since I last posted. People have been asking me to post something. I've been having this urge myself. So here goes ..... as usual a collection of thoughts and musings.

My first thoughts reach out towards Indian hockey which has been abused and mishandled for a long time now. Insensitive managements, callous policies, frequent appointments & dismissals and lack of backing from the public and sponsors have reduced Indian hockey to a farcical and threadbare organization. To top it all was the Indian government's decision to pull the sport back from the status of a priority sport. The timing was even more disheartening for player and fan alike, the day we reached the semi finals of the Azlan Shah tourney. No wonder we couldn't make it to the finals. I happened to be at the New Delhi International airport when the team returned from the tourney, and their body language said it all, a sense of achievement mixed with an exasperation of getting a raw deal. The logic that the sport requires a jolt to get its bearing right is, at the least, insensitive and unfair. I would only hint at analogies that could be drawn with Indian cricket and the brazen dissimilarities in status and attitude.

Moving on, Indian cricket itself. Indian cricket is too big to merit a complete omission from my blog, given the time & circumstances. The WC'07 debacle has elicited a knee jerk reaction in Indian cricket like never before. With players taking on coaches and the management taking on players, and players hitting back at the management, it cannot get any baser than this. I agree we performed quite poorly in the Caribbean, but the average Indian cricket follower has a vision that is downright myopic and this has become the nemesis of the regal Indian cricketing star.

Meanwhile, two very close friends of mine have fallen in love and blazed a trail that can be taken as a sound guiding path for anybody looking for a filmy kind of lived-happily-ever-after life. The process is still sporting the "Caution! Men at Work" tag but the most complicated and diifcult stage has been completed sucessfully, that of realizing that both are made-for-each-other and articulating as much to each other.

Otherwise, life moves on. Here and there, the rolling stone of life gets caught in dense undergrowth of worries, tensions and melancholy thoughts, but the sheer inertial force of spirit releases it carries it headlong downstream towards the ocean of fulfilment and happiness, and meanwhile gets moulded into a beautiful form by waves of experience and strokes of achievement.

Waah, kya likha hai......... par kuchch matlab nahi nikla. koi baat nahi, kuchch nahi se thoda bhalaa....