Why I Hate Cricket – Part II

This is an expansion of yesterday’s post “Why I hate cricket.” Again, my apologies to those who are in love with cricket and write odes to Sachin's cover drives and metaphysical drivel on Bhajji's wicket-taking skills. There are some things that make me feel the article isn’t complete, that I haven’t been able to express all I wanted to. I hate cricket for various other reasons too.

For example, why is the Indian team chosen by zones, that too, through a politically motivated selection system? What is the fate of those thousands of boys (and girls) who practise in the hot sun to find a place in the team? It takes five days to give you the result of a game that involves throwing a ball at a man? That too, a man who takes his own time to take a stance and a bowler who rubs the ball (cricket ball, stupid, not his) obscenely and make a long run-up to the wicket.

Why this over-emphasis on one sport when there are many like football, hockey, basket ball, and countless others which will make children even better athletes? Cricket is a huge waste of time, that’s why you will find pot-bellied cricketers, not pot bellied footballers.

Cricket is a grace-less game. Look at how they sledge, how they use obscenities on the field, how they adjust their crotches in full view of the public. If it's a gentlemen's game why is it that gentlemen always finish last in the game, never get past the selectors?

It’s also an uneven game in which some players who are good gets all the action, becomes better, and the others (even if they are good) get sidelined. Look at Sachin and Vinod.

Why is it that a lot is written about cricket and cricketers in the papers and in the electronic media, at the cost of diverting attention from burning issues (pun intended) such as global warming and melting and receding of antarctic glaciers.

Apologies again. This had to be written and, so, I wrote it.

Why I Hate Cricket

I know many people will hate me for writing this. I can't help. For them cricket may be religion, for me its not. On my way across Azad and Cross Maidan, today, I see an abundance of white; white every where, as M F Hussain famously put it. However, the white was from the uniforms of thousands of young cricketers practicing the game of patience and uncertainties. Made me wonder why I hate cricket. I just can't stand it anymore, in spite of being a left-hand bowler who scored a few good wickets and a left-hand batsman who has scored a bit of runs.

It happened thusly: I was captain of the Green House in school and was leading the team in a crucial game. It started off well. I took an amazing diving catch in the slips when I latched on to a ball with one hand, in an act I never thought I was capable of. I then took over the bowling and took some good wickets. Then the sun hit me hard. I became tired. A friend and batsman from the opposite Yellow House team, Abdul (who later became notorious as the gangster Abdul Kunju) began punishing my bowling all over the field.

Now imagine this. A good start, mind you, I am in excellent control of the game when the game starts to slip out of my hand. Abdul hits my bowls all over the fence. Still I persist. Then I change bowling and he does that to the other bowlers too. The heat gets terrible. I am dehydrated. By the time they wrap up, they have a huge total. Then we bat. My top line of batsmen is decimated by some good bowling by Abdul and company. My side is in disarray and batsmen gift catches and walk back. When I go to bat, I have a queasy feeling the game has flown out of my hands altogether. I get out cheaply. That did it. We lost.

Abdul's team, lead by the talented Gangadharan Menon (captain of the Yellow House and their wicket-keeper), won. I started hating cricket. Why did the game slip out of my hands when I was in such good control? Then I decide that all my time, my interest, my analysis of scores and averages aren't worth it for a game of such immense uncertainties (Only Englishmen and Aussies with their outdoorsy physiques can be good at it). The whole nation goes on a state of stasis when there's a match on television. Abdul remained committed to cricket, he played, and he even got killed when watching a cricket match. Abdul Kunju, my childhood friend (he became a gangster much later), rest in peace.

“Sets Shouldn’t Appear Lit.” Bollywood Are You Listening?

"Yeh, kya hai boss?" I ask the corpulent man sitting on a plastic chair outside New Empire. (What is this boss?)

"Yeh, vanity van, hai," he answers. (This is a vanity van, used by actors.)

"Koi shooting chal raha hai?" (Is a shooting going on?)

"Han, Veetee mein shooting chal raha hai." (Yes, a shooting is going on in Veetee.)

So this is a vanity van? I have never been to a shooting except when I walked into a set which was set right in CBD Belapur station, from which I was shooed off. It looked like the opulent resting place of an actor of some high pedigree. It set off a trend of thought.

That trend of thought goes something like this: What is it that makes our movies – meaning Bollywood movies so obvious. As I surf channel, if I come across an over-lit, over-made-up, over-colourful set and characters over-hamming their part without a trace of shadow anywhere, I know it is a Hindi film. Even a sunny garden is lit with tens of reflectors, so that the over-made up heroine is made to look like a doll frying in an oven. (I know there are exceptions; some like "Taare Zamin Par," but exceptions prove the rule, isn't it?)

I watched a prominent south Indian cinematographer's interview on television. He had won several awards, and what he said struck me as very important: "A set should not look lit." Meaning – for our Bollywood folks – a set shouldn't appear over-lit as they are prone to do. I am a student of cinema - and an avid cinema watcher - and I enjoy a well-made film and all the good films I have watched do not appear lit at all.

Anthonybhai is also a film aficionado. "Men, what, what, films I see no, I like when films are subtle-vubtle, men, I tell you, like this only."

 

This Blog Has a Technorati Authority of 123

I think a pat on the back, even if it happens on ones own back, is not a bad thing. Really. It's nice to know that this blog has a Technorati authority of 123 (the authority of all things in blogging) and is ranked 37466^th in world rankings. Not bad. But there's a lot more to to go. Amit Varma's Indiauncut.com has an authority of 536. I am getting there, slowly. This blog also has an Indiblogger rating of 80 upon 100. Newspapers such as New York Times increasingly refer to bloggers on their news pages. I guess, that day is not far when Indian newspapers also will follow.

I use technology to pull my blog post (through syndication (RSS) ) to my Facebook and Twitter pages. That's how you see latest posts on my Facebook wall, Facebook fan page and profile page.

President Obama’s Path-breaking Health Care Policy – Need Something Similar in India

Just stumbled across this website of the White House showing Barack Obama presiding over a meeting. I also viewed a summary of Obama's famed Health Care Policy, salient points of which appear below.

But before I go into that, let me detail my personal encounter with health-care in India. I remember falling ill with a stomach infection last year. I was admitted. The bill came to Rs 28,000 for a 3 or 4 day residency in the local hospital. When it came to settling my insurer cut down the amount to half what was due. This, despite paying my premiums on time and going holiday-less for months. Hmm. We need an Obama here to upgrade our health-care system. Fast!

"Ends discrimination against people with pre-existing conditions.

"Over the last three years, 12 million people were denied coverage directly or indirectly through high premiums due to a pre-existing condition. Under the President's plan, it will be against the law for insurance companies to deny coverage for health reasons or risks.

"Limits premium discrimination based on gender and age.

"The President's plan will end insurers' practice of charging different premiums or denying coverage based on gender, and will limit premium variation based on age.

"Prevents insurance companies from dropping coverage when people are sick and need it most.

"The President's plan prohibits insurance companies from rescinding coverage that has already been purchased except in cases of fraud. In most states, insurance companies can cancel a policy if any medical condition was not listed on the application – even one not related to a current illness or one the patient didn't even know about. A recent Congressional investigation found that over five years, three large insurance companies cancelled coverage for 20,000 people, saving them from paying $300 million in medical claims - $300 million that became either an obligation for the patient's family or bad debt for doctors and hospitals." So on….

In India medical insurance stops at age 75, after that you are on your own. What do I do when I turn 75? It's cruel, very cruel. Growing old is cruel in India, they don't care; they take you for granted and will you to die.

Fairness Creams – An Invention of the Indian Mind

Okay, okay, you are bored of my review of 2009. What has changed and what hasn't changed is subjective, really. Everyone will have an opinion on it in this opinionated nation. Just look at the contestants of Big Boss and you will know what I mean. So I am moving on. So this post is about my favorite whipping boy – advertising.

Television is really spreading the butter thin through their content. The The same ads repeat over and over again. Taste this for example, "Babur ka beta Humayun, Humayun ka Akbar…," etc. Is it some history lesson? Then it is followed by, "You are worth it." Are we? It's misleading. What is really worth is the money we spend for your products. Then "daag ache hain" (stains are good), "have a happy period" about which I have written here. As an advertising practitioner and former Executive Secretary of the ASCI I find a lot wrong with these ads, but I don't have the time to point out what. When I sit through the barrage I wonder why every model in these ads are fair-skinned, has thin lips, almost Western in looks. Come on, no one looks even Indian, the sort you meet on the streets. Do we hate ourselves, and encourage our people to hate themselves? I don't know if such a bias exists in a country other than India. In the only country I lived for a year other than India, the ads were really representative. Even dark models were used.

Well, that could be an existential question, but television is a powerful medium and there are millions who sit through the ads thinking that what is shown is the gospel truth. Almost every brand today has a fairness cream in the market: Garnier, Ponds, Emami, Fair and Lovely, and now even Vaseline and, countless others. I am sure fairness creams are an invention of the Indian mind. Nowhere else would people spend huge amounts of money just to look fairer for a few weeks, at the most. How do I know? Well, I am ashamed to say, I used it, and gave it up. Mea Culpa!

 

Here’s Looking at You, 2009 – Part III

The saga continues…. I don't know what 2009 had done to me to be so nostalgic, not wanting to let it go, not ominous, because I am not a superstitious type. Nah! So here goes my list of things that have changed, very droll, very self-serving cud-chewing type of thing, really. In a world of calloused sentiments that have turned into extremists warts, sour grapes of the un-fermentable variety, I am a softy with a core that refuses to develop a hard exterior, the hard kernel that I talked about in my first post, the one that started this "Here's looking at 2009" stuff. (Actually "here's looking at you kid" was spoken by Bogart's character Rick to Ingrid Bergman in "Casablanca", a film I loved and consider a classic.)

What Has Changed

The markets aren't stable anymore, we can expect more shocks, wild swings (Disclosure: I was earlier in financial journalism). The huge financial bubbles that hung over the markets haven't been deflated, not yet, they are still full of hot air waiting to be blown, one day, soon.

The job situation has changed. No longer are companies hiring for the heck of it and putting recruits "on the bench" but they are making do with the downsized, dwarfed drones who helped them pull through the recession.

The mall culture has failed in India. Most mall projects are finding it hard to sustain, even, take off. Long live the street corner kirana store. They combine hard business acumen that malls can't replicate, however much they try.

Outsourcing is on the way out. Outsourcing means greed and it was meant to destroy young men's/women's careers. Most of the young people I know who took to outsourcing are out of it and learning things like underwater welding (yeah!) as a solid way to make a living.

What Hasn't Changed

People continue to be callous about global warming. "Yeh global warming kya hai," asks Marxist thinker Kuriachen Kuriakose. "Another publicity stunt by the imperialists hegemonies of the west? They need a firm whack on their behinds for spreading canards such as this."

Slums continue to grow in Bombay in spite of the slum re-development program of the government. These new slums are situated just outside the high-rise free-flats created by the government for the poor in exchange for their tin hovels. Take a train from Vashi to Victoria Terminus and look to your right before Mankhurd station and you can see the steady progress of slums – another Dharavi in the making.

The rich are growing richer and the poor, well, poorer. In the US the number of millionaires doubled between the nineteen nineties and two thousand, while in China the number of dollar millionaires is about to double. In India I am sure it is set to triple.

Enough griping for the day. More anon!

Here’s Looking at You 2009 – Part II

Yes, yesterday I nearly collapsed on my laptop writing the post that appears somewhere, ah, just below this one. It was about change and how it happens unannounced, how things change, how we grow old and how things change but they remain the same. I promised to expand this theme and here it is:

Things that Changed

In 2009 Bombay entered the terror map. Everywhere I turn there are armed policemen, their eyes alert, fearful, on edge. Will they fire on me, a crazy burst? One feels a bit insecure, a bit on the edge and wants to leave the city as soon as one can after finishing work; don't know if the Toyota Qualis coming from the opposite directions would contain the deadly barrel of a Kalashnikov pointed at one by "external terrorists". These agents of death are funny, they kill without reason, quite randomly at that. So, it's just a throw of dice or a game of Russian roulette. Bomb blasts, grenade blasts, AK47 fire, in a laidback trading town, which has never been conquered, pillaged, or desecrated, sounds odd, and for this suburban boy from the somnolent suburb of Chembur - a bit ingenuous at that - it is a difficult thing to digest.

It is also the year when the government thought about aerially attacking its own people in tribal areas it suspects are hideouts of what I call "internal terrorists". No, terror isn't good. It's the worst thing that happened to ever since the Afgan hoards invaded India. And to attack one's own people using bombs and firepower from the skies is like declaring war on its own people. Has anyone heard of discussing it with them sitting across the table? Has anyone found out why tribals in the hinterlands are taking to extremism? Anyone? We have a responsibility to be compassionate to our own citizens before dropping bombs on them, which only tinpot regimes contemplate doing.

It is also the year of two reality shows called "Rekha Sawant Ki Swayamvar" and "Flawless Bride" both of which touched nadirs in television content programming in India. Can you call these reality shows when everything is gaudily made up, and just about everything appears artificial and crassly vulgar? Give me a break. The "Tamashas" and "Lavnis" are more real in this respect.

Things that Haven't Changed

India continues to be bad to writers and their ilk. I am still unpublished, despite trying my best. Yes, I will go on being like this only, just to see where it leads. I am the eternal hopeful. What was hoped to be the great middle-class reading public is no longer extent. People listen to music while commuting, they don't even buy pirated low-cost books, forget the fancy priced ones. Homes don't feature book shelves they feature plasma television sets and home theatre.

Apart from a few print newspapers and magazines who ply their craft with diligence, the rest of the print media has been bought by business interests. It's the age of Rupert Murdoch, who I am not quite sure if he will be another Robert Maxwell, notice the similarity in names.

I have to go. More anon. Watch this space.

Here’s Looking at You 2009

A colleague remarked how the month had gone so fast, I said, month? I don’t remember how the year went, nay, how a quarter century went. Actually time passes at its own speed, the clock ticks quite smoothly and evenly, it’s our anxieties that make us feel time has passed quickly. The reason: we weren’t stopping and enjoying our moments. 1984 was the year I got married (we celebrated 25 years recently), that was also the year of the Union Carbide tragedy in Bhopal, a tragedy that has still not been resolved, its victims compensated. A quarter century has passed since then, some have died, some have moved away, some have given up on getting whatever they were promised, some have lost the fight to bring the guilty to book.

Likewise some of my close relations have died, some have moved to foreign countries, some have given up, retired and have sought to live in friendlier environs. It makes me think that getting justice for the poor and deprived is too Herculean a task in India. They are easily intimidated, ostracised, marginalised, terrorised. The company responsible for so many deaths (20,000 dead and 5.7 lakh affected) still operates in India without any seeming compunction or guilt. It will go as one of the worst industrial disasters in the world. (Compared to it Chernobyl only affected 3,36,000 people.) We have become calloused and inured like a coconut kernel, like the hard exterior of a cashew nut, nature’s protection against hurt and dissipation. We don’t know who will dispense justice. Justice, ah, nice word, but not much of justice exists for the poor, does it?

That was 25 years ago, when I was full of expectations for the future, laid a lot of groundwork, wanting to do a lot of things, all at the same time. Now I am more restrained, but my life is still as hectic, the commute is still harrowing, the pain, all over, more evident. My friend Ganga is retiring after an illustrious career in advertising. He wants to devote his time to writing from now own. I am jealous of him. So he tells me a story narrated by Osho in his (Ganga’s) typical style: A man wants to retire; so he calls his accountant and asks him how much money and property he owns. The accountant adds up his assets, deducts his liabilities – as good accountants are wont to – and tells him that what he has will last for five generations. “Aila, then what will happen to my sixth generation?” and he again goes back to work.

Soon I will be in 2010, can you imagine? I can’t. I think it comes with age, we become so busy that seasons pass, winters come and go, children grow old (a small guy [my son] I had to look down upon, who used to hold my hand while crossing the road, now, I really have to crane my neck to look up to him), localities change (there’s an airport coming in the sleepy village where I was born), trains get crowded, there are more people everywhere, there aren’t the familiar Mallu faces on D.N. Road any more, they have been cleaned up by another Mallu (Johnny Joseph), revolutionaries have become prosperous bourgeoisies, so on and so forth.

There are things that haven’t changed. Among them: Bollywood scripts haven’t stopped meandering, Dev Anand hasn’t given up making movies, Asrani hasn’t stopped acting, Amitabh is still our greatest star, books and book writers continue to be ignored by the mainstream media, television continues to meander through its reportage, and policemen still round up suspects and give them the third degree (which they couldn’t do to Kasab, because he is a high-profile guy, you see).

Enough meandering, my eyelids are heavy, I will reserve the rest of this rant for another day and another blogpost.

The Poet and His Poetry; Excuse the Pretentiousness

 

Borrowed this from Aditi Machado's Blog. Since poetry is the soul of literature, just as the mind (or, whatever is in the centre of the body) is the soul of the human consciousness, the following definition of poetry fits well into the vast amounts of drivel poets (and pretenders, like me) have to sift through to arrive at the few lines which pass off as poetry.

Poets on Poetry: Han Dong

" The direction of poetry goes from bottom to top. Poetry is something dimly discernible in the sky which descends to the human world thanks to the productive force of the writer's waiting and yearning. Poetry is not an excavation down into the depths; it is not coal. Writers are not labourers — they must set aside the attitude that writing poetry requires some form of exertion."

That said, I can't, just can't write poetry to a deadline. I tried it recently for a Poetry Slam and came a cropper. That may be the reason I don't participate in writing exercises which state a theme and encourages you to work hard. If I did that, not only would it turn out bad, I will be like a shirking schoolboy, hating his homework. Because poetry as Han Dong says, cannot be dug out by hard work, it has to descend from the sky, shape into a few pithy words, transcend obstacles (bad grammar, bad figures of speech, worse pretentiousness), and then sit on the poet's finger tips burning to be put on paper or into pixels.