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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.

The last few weeks, I have been getting, on an average, one invite a day to join Shelfari. While some of them are from people that I know on a personal basis, a lot of them are from casual acquaintances (friends of friends and the types). And I asked one friend if she had sent me an invite, she said she had. But the same day she sent me an invite, I got two more invites from people who she had introduced to me and who I haven’t talked in about a year or more. And not only that, I am also getting “friendly reminders” a few days after the original invite. (more…)

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.

Enna kodumai sir, idhu?

…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!

… in what was then the land of opportunity, it seems now that I am not so sure if this IS the land of opportunity. Sure, an eternity has seemed to have passed me by. But as they say, the grass is definitely greener on the other side.

August 17th also holds another significance. It’s three years since I defended my master’s thesis on machine scheduling, which is certainly an achievement of personal importance.

As always, Arun has his post up already about August 17 and our Sabena flight via Brussels.

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…)