Ajith Nair

It was worth the 47 day wait. As barmy army, swami army and the mystery around Bob Woolmer’s demise faded into the background, one man rose, literally after the Ashes. It’s been a long time since one saw massacre on the cricket field. There’s been enough talk around it when the practitioners of the art, or the scythe if I may call it that, walked out to bat. But few delivered, and even if they did it was against minnows and bowlers who wouldn’t qualify to bowl at the Aussie nets mostly. One man waited, accumulating all his aggressive instincts only to unleash it at the biggest spectacle of all modern day cricket. He picked the big occasion, as had his skipper in the earlier edition, to create an indelible aura around himself. And how. As the big man Viv said, at one stage it looked like a benefit match. A word or two on the Lankan obituary. Making Hayden look like a spectator, Gilly sent the Lankans on a leather hunt of their lifetime. Starting off with Vaas, Gilly had the Lankans guar...

I grew up in a Govt. colony in Mumbai. This meant that I had the luxury of a lot of things that were absent in the city outside campus. One of these was the footpath. Right since I was a toddler, I was instructed to keep to the footpath, lest I get in the path of a ‘speeding’ Fiat (that’s an oxymoron). That might sound funny, but the inherent message was clear, steer clear of the motorist. In a city where cars outnumber themselves everyday, it’s become a challenge to find a footpath. Most of you might have noticed this but its worth reiterating. 1. Footpaths do exist. Just that above them also exist a layer called hawkers. This layer is more permanent than pedestrian aspirations and difficult to remove. 2. Footpaths do exist. Just that above them frequently is a mosaic of human excreta, with some dog poo thrown in between. Nearby slums can’t do their bit on the highway can they and there’s nowhere else to go. 3. Footpaths do exist. Just that often the BMC or MTNL or MMRDA or such body ...

Arjuna (Rahul) looked at the Kauravas (BCCI members) standing in front of him on the battlefield and said “ Oh Krishna! how will I fight my own bosses ” Krishna (Chappell), his charioteer, assumed his Vishwarupa and exclaimed “ It is all about The Process Arjuna ” Saying this he removed his laptop and made a 10 min PowerPoint presentation on The Process. Bheema (Sachin), wielding his MRF mace and standing next to the chariot exclaimed “ Chaila Krishna ….I don’t like the animation …and moreover this doesn’t not have an exclusive section devoted to me ” Krishna looked at him benignly and said “ O great wielder of the MRF Mace willow…your days of being invincible are numbered…there stands between you and your destiny nothing but the hand of god ” Bheema, started biting his nail and staring away into the distance…he ignored his cell phone as a couple of sponsors tried contacting him Enter Yudishtira (Saurav), eldest of the lot, who looked at the PowerPoint presentation through his glasses....

As a child I harboured dreams about playing for India, I soon realized that playing for the building team was much easier and less pressured. All arguments about the perks of the job apart, I think it’s a tough life. Sad that it took a foreign coach’s death to nail that one home, for now at least. As a youngster when one hits the International cricket scene, the curtains in your bedroom are drawn wide open and a thousand cameras start following you like the Truman Show. Your privacy exists only when other cricketers or issues become more important, else its a day night game. Everything that you don’t do is also news, people would pay to have your shadow pass them by. You sign on big endorsements like Nike the smaller ones will keep queueing up... You’ll cut many ribbons and even lanes, no one will stop you. Every morning the papers will have you reading things that happened to you while you were sleeping, or while you were looking the other way. At award functions, you’ll sit next to p...

muezzin calls for the aft prayer a solitary shirt hangs to dry an expectant crow peeps from the window a still life afternoon slowly goes by The summers not hot yet but its stillness is here to stay the stuble on my cheek feel full remains of a lazy sunday soon the sun will laze too and the shadows will dominate the dogs will remain idle and the cows will ruminate The muezzin will call again and the sun might relent by then a small breeze might twirl the solitary shirt a summer day shall pass by then

Ah the budget, gets blockbuster status even though the guy in the lead role has remained the same for the last four years…he wears a loin cloth that inspired India when wrapped around some other thinner legs half a century ago but now is a symbol of a conservative south….PC wears a Harvard accent on a Chidambaram surname. He wears a progressive veil on a Pandi bandwagon. After that rather controversial beginning (sorry that one didn’t end in the previous paragraph), let me begin. My biggest problem with the budget, well a big problem that I have with the budget, or let me just say…well should I just not say. What the hell!!!! It’s the jargon, men! (as my petite East Indian receptionist might tell you). What’s a fiscal deficit, is it what we generally call being kangaal. Imagine the street corner beggar go “Sir can you contribute to reducing my fiscal deficit” (A certain World Bank does hear that from us, maybe used to). Or for that matter what the hell is capital ACOUNT CONVERTIBILITY....

The BEST has introduced a SMART card. The first part is fiction, the second part is plastic. For 1200 bucks a month, the BEST lets you get onto any bus anywhere, any time. Now if they came up with movie tickets like that I know that there would be takers. Nonetheless, the economists of the BEST who also double up as conductors seem to have seen something that most consumers haven’t. Hence the only people who have bought the cards are these people and their kith and kin. At a more serious level, 1200 or even the 800 bucks a month option is simply a big loser to the other 12 rake mammoth that easily picks up 5000 people at a time and deposits them the other side of town in half the time. So what if you get badly crushed and start smelling like sardines….the BEST is not aroma-therapeutic either. And on bad days you could end up having two meals on the bus if not three, given traffic and more traffic. The card is hardly SMART. The conductor has a contraption which still needs to do a steth...

Beggars are as much a part of Mumbai as the Gateway of India. Over the last 10 years of actively roaming around the city, the no of cars have increased and so have the no of beggars. What has also changed is the kind of beggars in the city. The first kind of beggar that I encountered was the simple woebegone face kinds who would sit by the roadside and keep uttering monosyllables the year round. There was no strategy of any kind in place, and the adage beggars can’t be choosers used to get played out. Most of them seemed fatalistic. As the economy evolved and liberalized, so did beggars. For one, I think even the beggar economy opened up. There were a lot many more beggars because there was a lot many more economic activity (and hence money to be handed out) and a lot many more people. The quality of begging also changed. Some beggars, in order to differentiate their pitch, started to exhibit their skills. So you had harmonium totting kids and adults causing disharmony in trains. Strat...

Today is the 26th Jan. And it’s a Friday. Thank god for that, cos no Indian would ever have their long awaited, most cherished long weekend otherwise. Thank God that our revered leaders chose this date to turn republic else what if they’d chosen 25th? How many would have had to sacrifice a Casual Leave in the name of the nation in order to get a long weekend! Flag hoisting in residential complexes, done by the ones who are not away sun tanning on beaches ‘this’ long weekend, is usually a hilarious affair. There is a statutory notice, full of typo that goes up in the society notice board every January. It speaks about the glory of India, in two lines and then the schedule of ‘cultural’ programs in the next four. Flag hoisting will be at a convenient, 10am when all and sundry including the mongrel dog have had a late lazing morning wake up, farted in peace, yawned at will, consumed two cups of tea and browsed through two newspapers. The flag pole, is rusted, browned and orphaned until t...

A movie whose time has come had to be made. Guru is the story of entrepreneurial success and the man who defined it for all of us. It legitimizes using any and every mean to get what one wants. This might not have been acceptable about fifteen years ago, when India was still third world and middle class values were still bordering on un-materialistic. Today when we’re fighting global battles in business and wanting to make money is a legitimate thing to say in class, this movie tries to play to a now popular sentiment by saying that here’s a man who did it first. And how. Alas it falls flat. For one the narrative is linear, it struggles to find enough ‘big’ episodes in the life of man who always thought big. Sometimes threatening to be a documentary, it makes desperate attempts at injecting commercial value. The songs are a glaring example. Except the main theme, all others stick out like bad share scrip. One senses that the crew knew what it wanted to say but didn’t quite manage to ar...

I was privy to a decking up ceremony. Before you get ideas, it happened to be a truck. A goods carrier. I have never seen a new truck, a brand new one, not even in pictures. For me trucks have always been pesky, irritating occupiers of road space without whom travel would have been so much smoother. They are dirty, spew a lot of smoke, and are all noise and no speed and perpetually breakdown and cause traffic snarls. Finding a new truck was special. I’ve never stared long enough at the front face of a truck. You don’t want to see the face of most things you don’t like right. Truck posteriors with Horn Ok Please messages have inundated my vision, more by default cos one is usually tailing a truck that refuses to give right of way. Coming back to how the ‘new’ truck looked. At the forehead, was a salutation to a certain Goddess, written in bright saffron. Right below, the forehead, much like a human face, was a wide eyed windscreen which gives the driver a large view of the smaller piece...

Recently newspapers have been full of people who’ve died while on flights. Condolences. Having experienced most domestic airlines and what’s offered along with, I’m not surprised. Some examples of the agents of death as one travels 1. Food on Indian Airlines 2. Airhostesses on Indian Airlines- if their looks don’t kill you their glares will 3. Delays on Air Deccan- I just about celebrated two birthdays waiting for one to take off 4.The ‘suraksha niyam’ routine on all airlines- especially that phrase “agar kisi karanvash vimaan ko paani mein utarna pade” (now that’s what you call watering down the worst) 5. The endless wait at conveyor belts to collect one’s luggage even as everyone else seems to be getting theirs faster. 6. Security check and what goes with it- stashing everything into an already overloaded hand baggage and the latest one at Lucknow was about getting the laptop screened separately, not under the guise of a leather cover. The next thing you know they might ask you to pe...

I was in small town North India, Lucknow to be precise, today. This blog has nothing to do with Lucknow exclusively but since the stimulus happened there, I thought the city deserved a mention. I noticed how we seem to have various ways of using our Gods and Goddesses in our day to day lives. The stimulus in question was a wall tile with God’s picture on it. This tile, for the ignorant, was placed so that passers by refrain from painting the town ‘red’ with their paan and other products. So I passed a beaming Goddess Lakshmi, a meditating Lord Shiva and an ever enthusiastic Lord Ganesha all playing divine guards to cheap walls. It seemed to work, for I saw the walls around them spotlessly clean. The tiles were small ones, occupying just one tile space in huge walls. But they seemed to hold enough power to thwart any miscreant. The casualty of course was the atheist wall, which was multicolored and looked like a poor man’s Hussain. God appeared in a different avatar in a cheap rundown h...

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 ...

If you think this is about the futile attempts to find Osama, sorry, have better things to write about. Alternately if you thought this is about the attempt to find vegetated faces then read on, you might just find something worthwhile. My first encounter with beards occurred at the age of three. The first feared person, someone who my parents used to scare me into obeying things, had a beard. He used to stay in the vicinity and looked like he could gobble up anybody with his thick beard. As fear gave way to adolescent curiosity, the need for a moustache was prime but the fascination with the beard only grew. Especially at saloons when hirsute uncles around with thick moustaches and dense beards used to look much more in control that a meek me sitting in a corner. My admiration for the genuine care that went into the beard only grew with each visit. There was an art attached to it and sadly enough I didn’t even have the raw material. After a lot of prayer and puberty, a thin moustache ...