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I was planning to live blog this test match, but one hour into the day’s play, a sense of déjà vu crept in. And then I realized that my time could be better off doing some long overdue cleaning with an eye on the TV.The opening bowlers actually did their part, exploiting what turned out to be, IMHO, a perfect first day pitch. Early on, the pacemen had something to bend their backs and for quite some time, Hayden and Jacques had their work cut out. Both Zaheer and RP Singh bowled their heart out and were quite unlucky. But soon it turned out to be a familiar Indian story. (more…)

… in half an hour soon and here i am, sitting in a dark living room. Nothing dramatic follows though. I am just lazy to go and put on the light.

So, the official start of the Australian summer is just a fifteen minutes away and there is some concrete news of the team composition. First, the toss, though! Looks like Dravid will have to wait to put on his pads since as Ponting seems to have won the toss and has chosen to have a bat first. (more…)

Is this India’s answer to “The God’s Must Be Crazy“? Either way, one’s hoping to see Senthil get back with a bang!

Asok, the world’s most famous desi intern and telekinetic IIT alum, died today. His age is unknown.

More here…

Everybody has a secret they fight to keep – a secret so dark that it makes their skin crawl and feel like numerous caterpillars have deigned to walk on it. For some, it is inappropriate thoughts. For others it is a petty crime. For yet others, it could be political affiliations, Nazi party memberships even, things that will make them outcasts in the current social fabric.

My dirty secret is something that will probably earn condemnation from most of my friends. Some will smile and make polite public noises about how it is all fine and yet privately swear off any association with me in the future. Maybe my inbox will be flooded with emails with “WTF” on their subjects. Maybe people that I haven’t spoke to in years will call and pray to get my voice mail because they don’t want nothing to do with me and yet are forced by social pressures to commiserate with my less than perfect life now. (more…)

Everyone (i.e. my two regular readers, one of whom is me) knows by now that I read movie reviews religiously. And what a lot of people would not know is that one of my prized possessions is a compilation of all of Roger Ebert’s reviews. I read reviews (I don’t base my movie choices on them, though) because sometimes, I think I need that extra help to understand what is being represented on screen. Yes, I have a simple mind that cannot (sometimes) comprehend a layered viewpoint. (more…)

It’s not always that just the title of an article would invoke a sense of dark foreboding. When a post from Prem Panicker’s blog popped up on one’s feed reader, a mild curiosity was aroused. And a few minutes ago now, the retching started.

The circus, my dear friends, has begun. Go and read. And make sure your stomach is empty. I haven’t even started reading and I probably will not have the time to read for the next 12 hours or so, butI have a faint idea that by the time you finish reading, your contents of your stomach would have disappeared in a stream of retching coughs.

I got this picture as an email forward yesterday. This is one of the VERY few cricket related email forwards that actually made me laugh. For those of you who are not in the know, the conversation is actually from this movie. Non-Tams, please excuse. The point of the joke’s lost upon explanation.

…Shanthakumaran Sreesanth!

Ask Dhoni if you want..

Asked what advice he gave Sreesanth before the last ball of the match, Dhoni said, “I told him to be free, and control his mind. He’s like a computer, he just has to bowl one ball but he might be thinking of bowling 100 different deliveries.”

Heh!

Five years ago, in my first ever guest post on Cricinfo (other posts here and here) , I wrote,

But why have most of us chosen to turn a blind eye towards a player with all the prerequisite skills and caliber required of him? Just because he seems laid back, or is this another case of the “regional bias” that has plagued Indian cricket over the ages? The second excuse seems a bit far-fetched, considering that many players from the same zone have won places in the team in the last few years; I must stress, incidentally, that the quality of such players is never in doubt.

Although I do not know the reason, Sadagoppan Ramesh seems to the black sheep that nobody wants in the team. Is his footwork, or rather the absence of it, the cause? Admitted that this aspect is quite alarming, but his flowing strokes and awesome timing still catch the eye.

A online survey to pick the 16-member squad for the West Indies reveals the flawed and perhaps mistaken opinions largely prevalent in the minds of the average Indian cricket fan. At the time of penning this piece, Ramesh’s replacement Deep Dasgupta gets twice as many votes as Ramesh (913), while Shiv Sunder Das gets more than four times as many. I attribute this more to ignorance than to clarity of thought. Ramesh’s career stats should be a eye-opener to anyone who thinks that he does not merit a place in the team. (more…)