Twenty Twenty - New kid on the block!

The World Cup win by India was too big an occasion to pass by without a post from my side. So here goes.

Twenty twenty has hovered around the cricket scene for some time but had failed to grab international attention. It’s a known fact that no phenomenon in cricket can hope to find its place in the sun unless and until it has the blessings of the Asian viewer and fanatic. So, having said that the T20 World Cup was a great step by the ICC to push the concept forward, an India – Pakistan final was an absolutely God-sent opportunity for the sport to burst into international spotlight. The format definitely has its plus points. The shortened duration and innovative rule book brings the game of cricket, traditionally seen as a dour game of the classes, almost on an even keel with facts-paced games like football and basketball. The fact that you can get over within three hours with so much excitement appeals to the present populace to whom the busy daily schedule doesn’t accord much free time. Many people were unaware of the bowl-out rule before the Indo-Pak match, and there were many animated discussions later on as to how a cricket match was won 3-0. The 270 odd sixers hit during the tournament were an ultimate treat and the info bars displayed entirely new types of statistics about players like the longest six hit and time since the last six. Statistics like number of fours and economy rate were in a state akin to Ustad Bismillah Khan, once jewels in the crown but now pushed into ignominy. The Yuvi scorchers would ever remain etched in everybody’s, particularly Flintoff’s mind. And last but definitely not the least, the cheerleaders……. what a treat they were! They really added a dash of colour to the game that sees dada-style shirt twirling as indecent ungentlemanly behaviour.

On the flip side, there are some points to ponder. Just because a Hero No. 1 becomes a hit at the box office doesn’t mean that a Maachis has lost its sheen. The fifty overs format still is the better test of skill and talent. The T20 format requires big hitters much in the baseball mould, and deft strokeplayers somehow aren’t stars in the shorter format. Also, the 50 overs game allows you to stage a fightback even after initial reversals, which is very difficult in T20. Australia has been losing ealy wickets in both formats, but they somehow tasted dust in T20 because there was almost no time for rearguard action, the same rearguard action that sucked the wind out of Team India’s sails in the home series. The art of building and pacing an innings cannot be perfected in T20.

These are some off-the-block musings. I am open to comments and criticisms.

Chak de... a feel-good experience

I must admit the initial teasers of Chak de India didn’t catch my fancy. One probable reason for this was that I’ve always associated Shah Rukh Khan with loud over-the-top animations that may have moved many a female movie-goer to tears but have always moved me out of the movie hall. The only SRK movie I liked was Swades because SRK was delightfully restrained al through the movie and gave full justice to the character that was, I concede, tailor-made for him. Therefore, though the concept of CDI sounded interesting to me, I suspected CDI would be a movie in the Main Hoon Na mould, portraying a superhuman SRK with expansive and superlative dialogues and minimal substance.

But the reviews that CDI received pushed me to the movie hall, and my suspicions were happily proved wrong. The movie is a lovely attempt to enthuse the average Indian with love & respect both for the country and its national sport. I have always been a supporter and follower of hockey, and have often thought & commented on the beleaguered state of the game has been pushed to. Cinema is a powerful medium to make a statement & I’m delighted to see that someone has had the thoughtfulness to bring Indian hockey into focus. On that count, full marks to Pradeep Sahni & Shamit Amin. Exquisite care has been taken to make the movie as realistic as possible, and it shows on screen. Ace hockey stalwart & hockey crusader Dhanraj Pillay and the goalkeeping coach of Team India, M.R.Negi, have trained the actors in the movie and that is why the game scenes look like they were footage from actual hockey games. The acclivity of the team’s performance in the movie has also been kept realistically punctuated with fallibility & fluctuation. They lose to the men’s hockey team but gain respect & acclaim from all & sundry for their guts, talent and spirit. That was, for me, a very special moment in the film. They also lose their opening WC fixture disastrously but come back to win the WC, so typical of our team performances in cricket & even hockey. The execution & cinematography of the penalty corners and the penalty shootout is amazingly life-like. The climax of the final match is also extremely nail-biting & realistic. Having briefly played hockey as a goalkeeper, I was glad to see that the goalkeeper is portrayed as the captain of the team & its eventual saviour and hero. Frictions between the team members for various reasons have also been treated with maturity & restraint. Last, but not the least, SRK, as a former national center-forward and an inspirational coach of the women’s hockey team, turns in a refreshing performance & is immensely convincing in his portrayal of Kabir Khan. One of his landmark performance this!

CDI is somewhat in the Lagaan mould due to the fact that it’s a sports based movie. But the similarities end there. While Lagaan cashed in on the country’s craze for cricket to weave a tale of grit, patriotism and triumph, CDI has attempted to bring back a forgotten game with a splendid past back into focus, seeking assistance from the buoyant patriotic spirits of the nation close to august 15, and probably from an X-factor arising out of the portrayal of eves hockey and not men’s hockey. The film has whipped up a sudden national interest in hockey and reportedly boosted hockey sales in the country. The nation has been forced to look beyond the glitz and glamour of cricket and cast more than a glance at the game that has given us as many as seven Olympic gold medals (compare it to the solitary cricket WC triumph and you’ll know the sheer gravity of this statistic). I had sadly mourned a decision elsewhere on my blog when Indian hockey had been unceremoniously pushed off the status of a priority sport by the India government. I hope the leaders would reconsider that decision now. CDI is an honest attempt to foment a new beginning and I sincerely hope it yields the desired results.

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....

This is the Bekaar TV Network... and you're watching Andhakaar News!!

A very accurate viewpoint, according to me, was pinpointed by someone recently, “We don’t want the luxury of 24X7 reporting, we can to with a 6X7 class of quality news coverage.” Since the advent of 24 hour news channels, a different kind of news reporting has taken over the Indian scene. The very definition of news has undergone a sea change. In a bid to keep their 24X7 ventures alive, the news channels have started reporting events like the birth of the seventh child of the ninth son of the oldest village sarpanch in India as ‘exclusives’ and as ‘breaking news’. The euphoria that was whipped up by the media during the ‘Prince’ episode was an apt indicator of the state of journalism in India today. And to top it all, the amount of economic help and general response that was elicited out of the public left me flabbergasted. I have personally seen entire families sitting glued to their idiot boxes watching the rescue operation as if a watching reports of 9-11. Some newspapers have been almost completely converted from intellectual information dissipaters to glamorous P3P centric tabloids and multicoloured in-your-face advertisement collections. Maybe the business aspect of journalism has something (or everything!!) to do with this, but then there’s a certain elegance and respectability associated with journalism and that shouldn’t be compromised beyond a certain limit. The Supreme Court was absolutely spot on to observe that sting operations, so much the craze among news channels these days, were acceptable by themselves but only as long as they were not utilized by the ‘stingers’ for making a quick buck.
Real journalism is taking a big hit in this era of bland consumerism and gossip mongers are increasingly replacing journalists. The pen, it is said, is mightier than the sword. But if the pen is preoccupied perennially busy jotting down the vital stats of the richest porn queen in the world, it is weaker even weaker than Dubya’s hold on his vote bank!!!

The filmy part of me...

I am basically an impulsive blogger….man me aaya bak diya!! This is written when all of a sudden I felt like blogging… and couldn’t think of any other topic.

This thing called love…it is the queen of all paradoxes. So much is written about it, so many mellifluous melodies are made out of it, almost everybody claims he/she has experienced it in some form or the other, and yet it’s such an enigmatic entity. (for more details, listen to the song ishq bina from Taal!) In fact, there is no single unambiguous definition of love in this world.

I used to think, at one stage, that the kind of love stories and emotions that are depicted in celluloids and fiction are figments of masala imagination. But I slowly started falling into the trap myself. And the funny thing is, I can’t say when this happened! (so typical!) It just started off as a casual acquaintance… she was my classmate. It was she who made the initial contact. She remembered me from a competition we both had participated in some time back. We started talking to each other and developed a good bonhomie. For some time, the relationship remained completely platonic. But slowly I began to realize that there were strong undercurrents of some unknown emotion that were pushing me towards an unknown realm. I started looking at the relationship differently. I realized I felt very comfortable when I was with her. My imagination started getting monopolized by a single track image that burst into the frame at regular intervals, sometimes at very odd moments, like in the middle of an examination or at a very somber moment. For an inordinately long time, I tried to brush this issue aside as a crush, so common in this age. But that urge to talk to her, the tendency to think about her, the habit of writing the alphabets of her name just didn’t die down. In fact, when I finished my high school and left home to study engineering, the distance magnified my feelings. I knew this wasn’t a run of the mill crush. Once this was established beyond doubt, the next step beckoned me. I had to know if my feeling were reverberating from the other end too. But this was tricky, because if they were not, I would stand the risk of losing a good friend by asking her. So I just waited for my answer to come on its own. But, it didn’t, and I realized she was waiting for the answer to come on its own too!! (so typical again!!) She probably took my silence as a negative and so she moved on…quite the right thing to do.

Right now I can’t comment on the future, or for that matter, even the present of our relationship. I just hope it doesn’t reach an end. But I surely feel the days that we spent together were the best of my life.

The Vandemataram hullabulloo

The Vandemataram episode and all the fracas surrounding must have really been an eyesore for any self-righteous Indian. It clearly exposed, on the one hand, the BJP's desperation to ride on an issue into public attention & the shallowness and insecurity of the self-proclaimed Muslim leadership, and on the other hand, the absolute sad state of affairs of our motherland. If this is an issue which grabs political attention and imagination at a time when farmer suicides are on the rise and foodgrain imports are soaring, we can very well kiss the dream of a developing India goodbye.

The views of eminent writer Javed Akhtar really set the issue in perspective, “If a Deoband maulvi asks me not to recite the song, I’ll recite all the verses. If the BJP says I sing the song, I’ll not recite even a single line.” The self-appointed Muslim leadership is still in the medieval and fundamental mould and can’t in the least claim to be the representatives of the Muslim fraternity. They are just disillusioned personalities who want to push an entire fraternity into an abyss of backwardness and self-ghettoisation. They are hungry for publicity and are basically insecure. It was this fact that was leveraged by the BJP to somehow prove they were still in existence. All they have managed to do is dent their already dismembered amour and stand exposed as a party facing its nemesis. This worries me all the more because such a state of affairs means that there is no competent alternative to the ruling power at the centre and that can be disastrous for the country.

On a personal note, I have a strong query. Just how many Indians know the entire Vandemataram by heart???

Interim phases..........student to professional

Errr.......ummm......just thought of updating my blog.....no particular subject in mind. Its been a while since I posted something and some significant events have happened since then.

To begin with, the end. I was always fearing the phase when my BHU days ended, and when the phase arrived, I reacted just the way I had expected I would. To top it all, I was the last one to leave BHU among my classmates which, I tell you, can drive you crazy.

Then came a phase when I was just out of college and waiting to get on with my professional life. This was the phase when neighbours regularly turned up, armed with enormous volumes of advice, some really helpful and some really……interesting, to be polite!! This was a time when I fell terribly ill, just mounting the tensions on my family members who were already worried about how I would handle my life once I started working, that too as a site engineer in a company known to reward its engineers with even more challenging (read tougher) working environments when they perform well at one site!! This was a time when even I was circumspect about my future. This was a time when all the shopping done was only for me and all my whims were overlooked……I really enjoyed that preeminent status in the household!!

Then came one of the phases that can be termed as one of the punctuating points of my life. This was the time when I joined the company I had dreamt of joining ever since I started my engineering education. But I’ll tell you I wasn’t excited totally because of this reason, in fact this had faded somewhat into the background because of another prospect. The company had arranged our accommodation, during the first week of orientation, in one of the finest hotels in Chennai. For a middle class chap like me, this was like a dream!! Enjoying the facilities that the hotel provided, without having to pay for it gave me, as also most of my fellow joinees, a sense of childish excitement and a vague sense of fulfillment. I also made new friends, which was another wonderful “free gift”!!

That gave way to the time I got my posting and started working. The comforts of “the” hotel have since vanished, but the respect that I elicit out of the staff and the comments of appreciation that I bring out of my seniors more than make up for that. I have now well and truly settled into my pro-life!!

This is all friends……….just ramblings of my mind. Do feel free to add your experience to this piece. Cheers!!