Tales from Gzbd - Vol III

There was a time during early nineties when I used to watch all international cricket matches, including those of India. I used to admire the West Indies team the most. I was familiar with the bowling style of all the bowlers and could mimic them all including the likes of Paul Adams. You see, it was the nineties and I don’t know about others but I found cricket interesting mostly because of bowlers #.

Hero cup changed it all; the pure love for the game was tinged by nationalism. Not only would I root for the Indian team fanatically but gradually stopped watching neutral matches. This was not all, because the prime motive for watching cricket was to see India win the match, I would promptly switch off the TV as soon as I was reasonably convinced the match was beyond India (the strategy worked perfectly well for me except for the India -Pakistan quarter finals in 96). This for all practical purposes meant switching off the TV whenever Tendulkar got out.

The naive sense of patriotism was shattered in 2000 when Azharuddin and Co. were implicated in the match fixing scandal and I more or less stopped taking any interest in the sport. A year later I moved out of home and the next 6 years were spent without much exposure to the box.

IPL revived my interest to a great extent. I guess part of the reason was the flexibility it afforded, I could cheer Rajasthan (home team)/Delhi (home team)/ Bangalore (home team)/ Mumbai (Tendulkar). Modigate and the apparent match fixing in the 2010 season final have tainted the game but I don’t mind. I don’t find match fixing repulsive; in fact I have already accepted it as an integral part of the game – as long as the matches are close and hard fought. So much so that I secretly wish there would two different groups of match fixers in every match, bribing their respective sides. That would be a real test of losership, not to mention acting skills as well.

# And Tendulkar. I find it annoying that no one calls him Tendulkar anymore.

Some more on cricket and childhood memories.

Although I wasn’t a big fan of Prabhakar and in fact hated his bowling action (I still maintain he used to chuck) I secretly thanked him every time I used his example to refute the alleged cricket rule that one can’t open the batting as well as bowling in a match.

In ‘The Adventure of the illustrious client’, one of the characters says “….and that the opinion of all of the world is no more to me than the twitter of those birds outside….” What a remarkable anachronic coincidence, describing the opinion of the world in terms of tweets!

Did you ever notice how significantly different a choreographed dance you watch in a movie appears from the video of the exact same dance at the time of shooting. They look quite different; let me assure you that in case you haven’t had the opportunity of watching one of those movie previews where the director mostly only discusses song choreography and the exotic locations where the songs were shot.

Nothing scandalous there, the problem really is as follows. Remember how the enlightened (is that the right description?) Neo all of a sudden could ‘see’ the matrix in its real form – rows and rows of binary digits, that’s exactly how I feel now. Every time I see a touched up dance video in a movie I ‘see’ the crude live shooting of the dance on the sets. Stupid excess knowledge.

When I write my first novel#, I will either keep the last few pages of the book blank or keep a short story at the end of the novel. I wouldn’t like my readers to see the climax coming.

As an aside, there is no sadistic pleasure like the pleasure in reading out aloud the climax of novels others are reading. I like to believe that it’s this sinister temptation and not incompetence which is the reason why Indian reviewers do little more than spew out spoilers.

# No, it will not be a campus or corporate life novel. I guess it is the facebook syndrome – people honestly believe their life is interesting and others will be interested to know about the finer details.

Who would have ever guessed that the corporate department invented to improve employee productivity would evolve into the least productive of all departments? I wonder if there is any research which studies the productivity of hr department. More specifically if someone has enquired whether it’s the right aptitude for the profession which results in a certain personality types going for this career or is it the work and the work ethos of the hr department which moulds the personality of those who choose this career.

The not so recent SachinisGod trending topic set me thinking - I can not revere anyone, let alone worship. If Tendulkar (the doer type) doesn’t play the right shot it’s incompetence and if he does...…well that was the way he should have played it, so what’s the big deal.

Applies as much to the thinker types. If they are wrong (in my assessment, of course) they are idiots and if they say something new and true…well how difficult was that to figure out? In case you are wondering - what if they say something which I don’t understand? Well I ignore them; if they can’t express it in a manner intelligible to me they are not lucid and therefore must be wrong.

I am not a secretive person, in fact I am quite the opposite. However, I do treasure the luxury of dialoguing with myself (not aloud), sometimes even when I am in the company of others. I know its not considered civil, but does it give others the right to ask outrageously personal questions like ‘what are you thinking?’ or insinuate telepathic abilities by uttering axiomatic statements – ‘I know you are thinking about something’.

So last week turned out to be the detective week, reread ‘The casebook of Sherlock Holmes’ and Poe’s August e Dupin stories and started watching ‘Monk’. That’s when the series of coincidences (just coincidences, ‘there are no small coincidences and big coincidences’ ;)) started.

After I watched Monk for the first time, the next two movies I saw were ‘Searching for Bobby Fischer’ and ‘A life less ordinary’ respectively and both of them have cameo appearances by Tony Shalhoub (Guy who plays Monk’s). A few days later I watch ‘The Mom and Pop Store’ (Seinfeld Season 6) where the whole episode revolves around George buying a used car previously owned by Jon Voight (except that its not the actor Jon Voight but some dentist John Voight) and guess what, the next movie I watch is ‘Heat’ starring Jon Voight.

So keeping in mind an extreme version of Rava’s maxim – there are no coincidences, this is my interpretation of the events – the frequency of a person observing an obscure thing (obscurely placed in the later encounters) is inversely proportional to the exponent of time elapsed after the first encounter with the said thing.

Default food preparations

Milk – Hot

Roti – Buttered

Cooked vegetables – With gravy

Sandwich - Has lettuce and onions

Lime water – Sweet

Gol gappe - With sweet chatni

I hate all these preparations. And that’s all I have to say about that.