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…)

Update: Thanks for the clarifications, Su. The post’s duly updated to reflect your clarifications.

A couple of years ago, I had ranted (parts 1 and 2) about the disdain shown towards “massy” dappankuthu (and in general non-Hindi/non-Bhangra) type numbers by DJs and the “classy” crowd at dance parties both here in videsh and back home in India. But my personal experiences have mostly been outside Chennai, in fact outside India.

And those who know me will attest that, at times, I can be as “massy” as one can get, mostly in the (few) aforementioned dance parties that I get to go to. And most of the DJs I have seen in these parties, suck. One DJ even went as far as feigning loss of the mix CDs (they magically re-surfaced at the end of the party) that a couple of us had painstakingly created so that he has a mix of Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Marathi numbers to play during the party. But that old post immediately came into mind when I read about the fiasco Radio Mirchi RJ hunt party at Dublin, the disco/night club at the Park Sheraton in Chennai. (more…)

Aakash Chopra, writing on the TMS Blog, writes (via),

In this millennium, India have won more Tests away from home (16) than any other country apart from Australia (26) in the same period.

Interesting. But how many of these have come in series that India has won? I would say (without going to Statsguru for reference) that this number is either 3 or 4. And if I remember right, most of these wins have come either in test no. 1 or 2 of a 3 (or) 4 match series.

Why do we win one and lose the rest? Complacency? That’s the most obvious answer.

While I think that this will be fact of choice for Team India’s ardent supporters for some months to come (incl. me), I’d be happier to quote the number of series wins as my reason to support this Indian team.

As for Aakash Chopra, his dropping continues to irk. Sure, Jaffer has his occasional monster score, but Chopra tended to inspire more confidence. And also the context of a Chopra innings is different. I think even with a test average of 23, he did quite well, considering that the man at the other end was Sehwag playing a swashbuckling innings. So to me, Chopra remains a “what if”.

Is Subhash Chandra trying to do a Packer? Is this what India needs? Let’s wait and watch as more details unfold…

Incidently, another Cricinfo piece by Sambit Bal calls for something similar – A revolution, if you please. Hmm…

For more, head over to my World Cup guest blog at UberDesi….

Our relationship turned three today. One day I read about you and wished I had met you. Then later on that same day, when I finally got to meet you, it was love at first sight. And you have been with me ever since, through thick and thin. So why am I talking about our love affair like it has soured?

Well, you know our relationship HAS soured. No, it is not you, honey. No, darling, I am not breaking up with you with the the “It’s not you, It’s me!” speech. I am not breaking up with you, period. But something has gone wrong. I am sure.

It is not you and it is surely not me either. It is them. All of them. The whole world. Some of them must be dumb if they cannot figure out that our relationship is unique and one in a billion. They don’t seem to understand that just because there are more like me, they can’t have the same relationship that we have. (more…)

Last week, this blogger commented on the “mother of all deals” – the one that the Mumbai police “signed” with Google and went to town about how it is going to stamp out Internet hate.

Google spokeswoman Victoria Grand issued a statement today in relation to this (text via Boing Boing) (more…)

Looks like the mother of all deals has been signed. No, Microsoft and Apple are not merging. Neither are Toyota and Honda. Rather, it is Google and the Mumbai police that have come together. So if you are a member of the “I hate Salman Khan’s hairless chest” community on Orkut and have in the past went off on a rant there that you want to throw acid on Salman for uttering lines like “Hey, I know you.. you are the tellaphone man!”, it is time for you to leave Orkut now, when you can. (more…)