Ajith Nair

Continuing my series of what happens to me in relation to airplanes, I have a gem to share. The wrestle of the arm rest can be quite irritating especially when both adversaries want it equally badly. The war of course is lost right at the beginning if one of the adversaries has an arm that's armrest size! My Chennai to Mumbai flight was spent in half a seat, with me folded up around an imaginary vertical axis, actually measuring kilometers to Mumbai and counting down time. I thought I was lucky to get a window seat, my luck ended the moment the middle seat next to me and half of my seat got occupied by a gargantuan who was impersonating a human being. Arm rest was the first casualty, I gave it up in the first 5 secs; my midriff also was being molested constantly by the elbow of the beast. Am not slightly built either but I know how to mark my territory out and contain my body within. Land grabbing was being rendered a new meaning by my sizable neigbour and I felt a bit like Papua N...

TV has played a huge (and largely unacknowledged) role in making the legend called Warne or for that matter any sportsperson of this generation. There is no bigger joy than watching the camera capture and replay the revolutions on a Warney delivery and the magic being executed as it roughs up soil and dishes venom to take the outside edge or the stumps of a flummoxed batter. Right since the ball of the century, every delivery that Warne has sent down has been mesmerizing to one and all, the cameras of course adding to all the effect. I can’t imagine how boring it would have been to watch Warne bowl just using the run of the mill cameras which would never have been able to capture positioning of the seam and the rip off the wicket. Mc Grath too with his consistent seam position and the subtle variations that could unnerve the best, was unraveled by some great camera work. On the players side, videos of Warne have been studied to death by opposition teams, not with too much success thoug...

Both have been doubted . One was dropped unceremoniously the other was never picked cos his coach felt that turbaned sardars made good taxi drivers and that’s all. This is not about how both went on to prove their critics wrong. It’s about what makes them special. There are only two 'characters' in the English cricket team- one’s a huge name already the other is a public favorite at least. Kevin ‘colored hair’ Pietersen wears his personality on his sleeve and his heart in the willow. The joys of watching him on the field are comparable to the joys of watching him bat. As Mark Nicholas pointed out recently, the art of being Pietersen is about forgetting the catch that you just spilled and shouting out the next ball “get him boys”. Monty is an apprentice in this school but a promising one at that. He has Muralitharan like eyes which light up whenever he sees the ball, even when he’s not bowling. He resembles a yokel when he chases the ball to the boundary and frequently messes it...

There is voyeur’s delight stuff on Sony every night. It’s called Big Boss. I happen to belong to the set who doesn’t watch this one. Set might be an ambitious term considering that everyone around seems to watch. Lunch time conversations in office are around who got knocked off, who cried, who’s dating whom and so on. I managed to see parts of it last Friday at a friend’s place. Based on his description of the plot and my observations of the sham, I figured out that the whole idea sounds a bit like what happens to Indian cricket all the time. Like In both, everyone’s in perpetual fear of getting knocked off/ dropped. (Especially when we go on tours to places like SA) There is a lot of popular sentiment around who should get knocked off and why. There is hardly consensus. There is gamesmanship in both. Cricketers are forever nominating who in their team deserves to be dropped. The one who gets dropped always gets to know who wanted him dropped (leaked email landing on national daily’s d...

As the title suggests this one is about finding a commonality to what’s transpired in their lives. Both have had ‘happening’ lives, both have played to the public gallery and both got booked for crimes and got away cheap. Sanju was always the spoilt kid one who was stupid but never a criminal. Public perception saw him as one whose reel and real lives were inexplicably intertwined and he seemed to lead a happier life on screen. Flanked by an idealist father and a darling of the nation mother there was no way that our ‘emotional’ nation could ever look at anything that Sanju did objectively. “Oh he’s has a bad childhood which is why, “oh he’s just naïve” are frequent arguments in his favor. So when he decided that he wanted to see how AK 47s looked, people said that he was just inquisitive. His march from doing Rocky to Gandhigiri was always etched in people’s minds like a fairy tale about the spoilt son who returned home cleansed and virtuous. “Dil ka saaf to har sazaa maaf” seemed to ...

It’s the most underrated profession. Behind every successful man is a good teacher. A lot of you might want to argue this out and you must. We need a lot of argument around the roles of teaching and learning. Only then will we rediscover the concept of teacher. What prompts this piece, is a newspaper item today that says that a teacher broke the knuckles of a pupil simply because he couldn’t solve a ‘surprise’ test. No surprise really. This kind of news and a lot even worse percolate everyday. Sadly, the role of the teacher is synonymous now with the role of the beater. I know that it’s a broad brush that am using but very few teachers are exceptions. If there’s any profession in this world that can’t be taught, it’s teaching. The love of teaching shows up clearly in those who inherently do. For a lot of the others it’s either a default option or a nice soft occupation. So the whole factory that churns out teachers through BEd training or whatever probably creates a lot of instructors ...