Footage

for the quiz I referred to in the previous post. It was on Vijay Times. I am hidden behind Skimpy, the guy sitting in the right most in the pic. But our team is referred to as belonging to GS. Small consolation.

It was a pleasant surprise that Vijay Times has an e-paper. Strong stuff.

Arbit Hills and Strong Comebacks

I had been to Nandi Hills last in the summer of 97, and had come back with an opinion that there was nothing worthwhile there. Then the crib was that one had to walk a lot to reach the top, but once you go there the only things there are one temple and some places which Tipu is said to have used to throw down people he did not like. The biggest crib then was that we could not play cricket.

So had absolutely no expectations when I went this Saturday and unsurprisingly the place also lived up to expectations. But thanks to the awesome bike ride, the trip was also awesome. Nandi Hills is still a pretty useless place only, now jotted with lots of couples behind bushes. Don't understand why these junta put so much fight to get their hands on each other, when there are places like Lalbagh and Cubbon Park in Bangalore itself.

The bike ride was on an entirely different plane altogether. It did take time to reach Hebbal, but after that it was just exhilarating. Cruising peacefully at not less than 80 kmph and touching the high 90s (Josh puts a 100, something that I will surely do with time) consistently. The six lane NH 7 also helped us quite a bit. But the final 22kms stretch from the highway to Nandi Hills is in bad condition, so we had to temper ourselves. From the top of Nandi Hills, this road for some reason reminded me of the path to Isengard in LOTR. (the movie)

On top of Nandi Hills is also a bungalow where the 1986 SAARC summit was held. As Josh remarked, it just showed the utter disregard the Indian Government has had for SAARC. And despite the pain in the ass thanks to the pillion-riding, it was a very fair way to spend the Jewish Sabbath.

The Christian weekly holiday started off slow, but that also ended up pretty well. First it was a power cut at home, the power went sometime in the morning before I woke and was restored only at 9:30 in the night. BESCOM sucks. Lunch was at Bhimas with Skimpy, standard Gult meal, but for some reason could not thulp to the usual quantity. We both then went to attend a mixed corporate quiz conducted by RVCE. Monkee, a junior from IIMB was the third member.

We peacefully qualified for the finals, but the start there was worse than Zaheer's at the Wanderers in 2003. Everything was going wrong. The questions the answers to which we knew ended up going to other teams, we missed one in which we narrowed down the answer to two choices and then ended up choosing the wrong one. After a couple of rounds we were positioned last out of the six teams in the quiz.

Then started the comeback. We slowly started answering a few questions, there was a buzzer round where we answered 2 out of the 6 questions and most of the others were unanswered. It helped to know that in a mangalavadhyam, there is a guy who puts jing chak with a pair of finger cymbals, educated guesses based on facts like the Ramayana happened in Lanka turned out right, Monkee's trip to Rome helped, even the fact that I owned a Royal Enfield Thunderbird finally turned out to be useful. At the end of the quiz, we had managed to finish joint first.

But it did not turn out to be a fairy tale ending. We lost out in sudden death to Swami the Commie's team, so near yet so far again. But no cribs, for I did come back richer by a couple of Ks.

Books, headphones and the mind

In my pre-comp days (read as engineering), times when I used to buy audio cassettes (what are they?) and listen to them on my Walkman, the same cassette again and again, a movie's songs invariably got linked to the book that I would be reading then. Like when I was reading Crichton's Congo, I was listening to Zubeidaa and when I was reading Grisham's give up Testament, I was listening to Kannathil Muthamittal.

As a result, these days whenever I listen to any Zubeidaa song, I automatically start having images of Central Africa where Congo is set and when I listen to any Kannathil song, I am transported to a boat ride in the Amazon (or some such South/Latin American area). This despite the fact that I had seen Kannathil on the big screen.

Fast forward to the present. After a long time, thanks to my cell phone, I have started doing something similar, listening to the same songs again and again on a head phone, and this time the object of my attention is Pachaikkili Muthucharam. Totally catchy songs, the violin bit in "Unakkul Naane" is now my ring tone. Harris Jeyaraj has come up with a winner here. Well this is not the object of the post, let me come to the point.

The book I am reading now is Pamuk's My Name is Red (more than half the book done, and so far the verdict still remains good) and simultaneously listening to Pachaikkili Muthucharam songs. As a result, whenever I listen to these songs, even without the book in hand, the streets of Istanbul(as imagined by me) immediately come to mind. Crazy mind.

Visit to home

This is why I don't want to visit home often. The trip turns out to be too short, and before I know, I am sad on the way back. I tried explaining this to my mom, but she still insisted on my being at home for my birthday.

Not that there were major celebrations, actually it was more of no celebration (unless ofcourse if one considers not daily done things like having a head bath, going to the temple, and ofcourse the "KAradaiyAn NOmbu Kozhakattai" (its a special rice ball level thing made for this ladies function known as KAradaiyAn NOmbu) as celebrations). There were quite a few phone calls, sms-es and ofcourse scraps on Orkut (I finally finished replying to all only yesterday night), it does feel nice to be remembered on atleast one day of the year.

Didn't do too much in Hyd. Met up with Vamshi and the deficiencies of my Hyderabadi teenage life caught up with me. Those days I was so caught up with acads, that I didn't do the usual city-roaming stuff. As a result, now I am at a loss for places to hang out. And the city has also changed a lot since the turn of the millenium. We finally ended up on a place on Necklace Road, drank some fruit juices and returned to Sangeet where we were to see Eklavya.

Sangeet Theatre is one of those constants in life. It has been around there for as long as I have been around, and is almost unchanged. The earliest movie I remember watching is Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Since I have watched countless movies there, English, Hindi and Gult. Once upon a time, it was the place to go for English movies in Hyd. Now it has lost that pre-eminent position to the newcomers the Prasad's and the PVRs and it has also stopped showing English movies. As a result not too many English movies these days in Hyd, Vamshi cribbed about this and my dad did too, so must be true.

Despite Sangeet's continued presence, it is sad to see the state of this once great now. There was a plan to do some multiplex level stuff with it, but for some reason that plan has been shelved. As a result, the hall looks pretty old, but is still pretty decent. Tickets are dirt cheap, 35 for balcony and 25 for the upper stall. Being so cheap and the movie having been released only a day before, balcony was sold out. We had no cribs at all, who would crib to watch a movie for 25 bucks these days.

Eklavya is a boring movie. Decent concept, good acting, but bottom line is that it isn't too entertaining, which is the one of the main things I look for in a movie. But worth the 25 bucks.

Appa had berated me on my last birthday about performance at IIM and in course of the scolding had wondered if I would be able to get a job that would ensure that I could afford to travel by AC atleast. Despite the fact that I could have puts AC, I ended up putting 2nd Class only. Probably its one of those situations that can be defined by the term irony.

The best player to never play a WC

A very very special player, one who has at most times dominated the best team in the World, one who engineered arguably the biggest turn around in the history of the sport and in one fell swoop stopped a seemingly unstoppable juggernaut, one who despite all this and much more has never been sure of his place in the team, but has delivered consistently will never play a World Cup.

A travesty, something that does happen often in football, whose World Cup hasn't seen the likes of a di Stefano or a Best or a Giggs display their wares. But it is rare that something similar is happening in cricket. The only other guy who comes even close is Justin Langer, but it can be explained by the fact that the Aussies have always had a comparative abundance of talent during his time.

Look at the players who have represented India at World Cups, lesser talents like Sadagopan Ramesh, Dinesh Mongia, Aashish Kapoor, Parthiv Patel, Chandrakant Pandit, Salil Ankola have been part of World Cup squads but never him. Ofcourse this year was not his best chance, it was the 2003 edition.

He was cruelly dropped after a dismal New Zealand tour, where everyone except Sehwag failed and he ended up with better averages than Kaif, Dada and Mongia. But in his place played Mongia, who apart from a six off Murali, just free-rode throughout the tournament.

Post the World Cup saw him in his best form, saving a test match against the Kiwis at home before unfolding in totally majestic glory down under. The Aussies had no answer for him. They won a test only when he failed. The ODIs saw even more majesty, three centuries in a week.

Now that the Indian team has been announced, all I hope for is a good performances from our boys. At the same time, a repeat of his performance in the tours to England and Australia that are lined up would be even sweeter. VVS Laxman its upto you now to prove the selectors wrong.

P.S.Also posted at sportsnob.

Enlightenment reigns

However long a weekend and however much I sleep over the weekend, it is difficult to wake up on the morning of office.

Afternoon naps rock.

Never go even in the vicinity of MG Road on your own vehicle on weekends. Finding a parking place is even tougher. (grains of wheat in bushels of chaff types)

I cook ok, but never get everything right on the first try. I'll keep trying.

Continental food is totally Floyd and is so not value for money. Management education is to blame for visits to such places.

One day cricket can be heartbreakingly predictable (when India plays) and joyfully unpredictable (like England playing the Aussies) on the same day.

The English Premier League is totally predictable when I am watching. (Liverpool, Man City lose, Man U, Chelski, Arse, win )

I just can't blog when its a holiday and I have a lot of time on hand.

Slowly tending towards voraciousness

Its not about my eating habits, that still remain as good as ever. In one of my earliest resumes at IIMB, in order to fill up a line, I had written that I was a voracious reader. Well, that was before the advent of the 24X7 net. Slowly my reading habits degenerated and I was taking longer and longer time to finish books. Ofcourse there were flashes in the pan like the Half Blood Prince, but it was inconsistent at best like Sehwag's batting.

The corporate world also bought along with it the ability to buy books, lots of them, but this somehow did not translate into reading them immediately. My reading was still very intermittent, but it was an improvement over the MBA times. Sometime in early December, I took a resolution (one of those many cases to prove the unnecessariness of a new year to make a resolution) to read for atleast half an hour before sleeping.

So far on most days I have been able to keep up this resolution. The results being evident in the number of books completed since that date-forgotten day. Two by William Dalrymple, his debut "In Search of Xanadu" and the 500 page "White Mughals", Mihir Bose's "A Maidan View" and the last and the least Partab Ramchand's give up "India's greatest Batsmen". Not bad for a 2 month period, but yes it can be improved.

In Xanadu, Dalrymple tries to retrace the path of Marco Polo from the Temple of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem to the famed Xanadu of Kublai Khan. A good travelogue, at times resembled the style I use in my blog, but much much better and deeper in content and a lot of architectural descriptions,a Dalrymple speciality. Till they (he has two female companions, one for each half of the trip) reach Pakistan, the book's pace is pretty measured, but after that it seemed like he sort of sped through. A pretty engrossing book overall, which made me go in for another 495 buck investment in the White Mughals.

White Mughals in general is about early Englishmen in India who married Indian women and had become very Indianized. In particular, it tells the story of James Achilles Kirkpatrick and his love for the Hyderabadi Sayyid, Khair-un-Nisa, their marriage and their life through the letters and documents written around the time at times by James himself and by other people around him. One paragraph is not enough to review the book, but despite the number of footnotes and quotes from other sources, it is a very readable history book. Sad that the British who were initially so open minded, ended up being cruel masters.

One thing that captured my attention was the Hyderabadi love for Brinjal that seems to be pretty old. James is shown writing to someone in Madras asking for potatoes as he had gotten bored of brinjals, the only time I did not appreciate the protagonist.

Maidan View is an attempt by Mihir Bose to give cricket in India a social history. He starts off well, trying to explain how and why the Englishmen and their rule affected India and cricket in India. But he loses the plot when he comes to the later parts of the book, which are very ordinary compared to the initial parts. An okay-ish book.

Currently I have just started My Name is Red, by the Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk, my first attempt at a Nobel Prize winner. Hopefully the experience will be better than my only attempt at a Booker Prize winner, Rushdie's Midnight's Children that I gave up after some 150 odd pages.

Brainless

They block all Tam channels but the major Kannada channels are owned by a Tam. (infact there does not seem a single Kannada channel owned by a Kannadiga, the other two channels are ETV, owned by a Gult and Zee Kannada, owned by Subash Chandra)

Given that such channel blocking has become so common in Bangalore, DTH surely seems a good option. Hopefully TRAI will be more sensible and force Sun TV to share their feed with the other DTH providers.

Stylish Tag

Have been tagged by Venki. Have to write about ten things that define my style.

As an aside, I was curious as to where the tag started and how it reached me. The path is one -> two -> three -> four -> five -> six -> seven -> eight and now me.

A slightly vague/tough tag in my opinion.

1) A happy go lucky attitude of taking life as it comes - something that has characterised my college life and made it really enjoyable, albeit with a few scares along the way.

2) Food - the most important thing in the World to me. Specific mentions can be made of brinjal, ladies finger and aaloo.

3) Football - I think I am a proper armchair expert on the game. My playing days are over, so now its time for following the maximum number of games to the best of my ability. Cricket too - more armchair analysis, and following of games worldwide live on cricbuzz/cricinfo/guardian.

5) Laziness

6) My distinct giggle

7) My cycle and my bike

8) Random arrangement of things at home and workplace, such that no one except me can find the thing they are looking for. (a euphemism for unclean)

9) Kollywood, its products, the movies, songs and TV channels and ofcourse the heros and heroines.

10) This used to be my most famous identity at IITM, pink shorts (which I no longer possess) and a military T-shirt.

Update on the Kaveri issue

The result is out, TN will get 419 Tmc ft and Karnataka 270 Tmc ft. The common mistake that all news reports have done is compare this 419 with the earlier 205, when the number to be compared with is 192. 419 is from the total (including rain and tributaries in TN). Karnataka has to give 192 Tmc ft every year, lesser than the interim award of 205.

But no provision has been made for times of not enough rain, the times when the issue keeps flaring up. Probably a percentage distribution of water might have been a better solution to the issue. Even if this verdict is final, the issue is not yet solved as there will surely be problems in times of insufficient rain.

The verdict is thus an incomplete solution to the Kaveri issue.

Ofcourse Karnataka is dissatisfied with this (it is not possible to satisfy both the parties) and as a result Bangalore has started taking precautionary steps. TN buses are not plying in Bangalore, schools being closed, even some offices shutting down (including my dad's) and ofcourse the brainless blockade of Tam channels.

But no untoward incidents confirmed so far in Bangalore.

Could be problems again

Today the Cauvery Tribunal (instituted sometime around 1990) will be giving its final verdict. When they gave an interim verdict in 1991 awarding 205 Tmc ft water to TN, there were riots against Tamilians in Bangalore.

15 years on, not much seems to have changed. More riots can be expected. When you have problems when Saddam dies, surely something closer to home will raise tensions further.

God save Bangalore, as surely the Government and the administration is useless as has been proved so many times in the recent past.

Strange

When there is not much work, I end up staying in office longer.
When there is work, I leave in 10 hours.

Black or white is surely better than grey.

Vecha kudumi Saracha mottai

Translates to, either a ponytail or clean shaven, no half measures at all. Describes the average Indian cricket fan (even the average journalist). One day Sachin scores a duck and he is asked to retire, the next day, he hits a century and is again elevated to Godhood. The truth, in my opinion is somewhere in the middle.

Anyways a decent performance by the Indian team against an experimenting Windies side. Yesterday's 11 is probably the team with which we will start the WC, with Sreesanth, Powar, Karthick for sure on the bench and my choice for the 15th spot will be Sehwag. Pathan did not exactly bowl too well yesterday and on the slow Windies pitches, Sehwag's off spin will surely be more than a handful. And Sehwag was also the highest run scorer in ODIs in WI last year.

My team for the WC:
Uthappa
Dada
Dravid
Sachin
Yuvraj
Dhoni
Pathan/Sehwag
Zaheer
Agarkar
Kumble
Bhajji

Subs: Powar, Sreesanth and Karthick

If we can't win the WC with this team, we can't win with any other team.