Date: March 14, 2010

Location: MAC, Chepauk (Chennai)

Occasion: Chennai Super Kings home opener Vs Deccan Chargers.

Task: Dry run.

Strategy:
Smuggle a small P&S via my friend Niranjana’s not-so-small handbag.

Results: http://j.mp/IPL3CSKDC

Lesson: IT CAN BE DONE!

And then, D-Day arrived…

Date: April 6, 2010.

Location: MAC, Chepauk (Chennai)

Occasion: Chennai Super Kings home game Vs Mumbai Indians

Task: To shoot as many pictures of God, as possible.

Strategy:
Having scouted out the various security/bag check contact points through the dry run, a two pronged strategy was decided on. Smuggled the same P&S via Aditya Shrikrishna’s cargo pants. But even he did not know about the redundancy I had in mind – my 6MP, 12x optical zoom Sony DscH2. Using my supreme powers of persuasion and evasive answering, I managed to take said camera inside the A-stand.

Result:
http://j.mp/d0z6Y9

Lesson:
GOD IS GREAT!

Mission:
ACCOMPLISHED!

The Sun sets over Chennai (17/10/2009)

I was thinking for a few minutes on something clever to start this post with, but as you can see, I am unable to do so. But if you have been loitering here for the past few years, you will know that I am not prone to clever poetry or wordplay. Verbosity passes for wordplay here and so I will just go ahead and say what I want to say.

Right. So, most of you know I have been in Chennai for the past 6 months. Some of you (3 of u, really) have wondered why I am not blogging. Let’s just say that now I have a life. Actually no. I don’t. I am just joking with you. My laptop’s been under the weather and my PC is senile. No really. That’s the truth.

So I landed in Chennai in August and I spent the next month helping the parents prep for the sister’s marriage. Once that happened and the clamor for my plans started increasing in volume with more than one person suggesting that I abandon the US for India.

You see, when I landed, only my sister (amongst my family) & her (then) fiance knew that I had come back for good. So, a week after the wedding the parents were informed of my plans and rather surprisingly, they took it well. Of course the true circumstances and the happenings of the preceding 9 months were not divulged 100%, but luckily they chose to concentrate on the fact that I was now here rather than the circumstances behind the movie. Good for me, I guess.

And then the job hunt started. I had come back to India here without even a hint of a interview opportunity. But I knew I could do something. But the initial responses were rather disheartening with “unconventional resume” being the most common feedback. And about responses from the job-hunt sites, lesser said than better. I got a zillion interview calls for technical writing positions because of the phrase appearing ONCE on my resume with no supporting evidence. On top of it all, the hiring processes seemed slow. It was almost like the openings were really there, but no one was prepared to fill them.

Then a networking opportunity yielded fruit. Two personal interviews and two months after starting to search, I started working in mid November.

Professionally this has been a good 3 months. My commute is exactly 7 mins (door to door) and I have flexible timings. Title-wise, it’s a step down from my project manager position, but visibility wise it is still up there. But more importantly the possibilities for me are endless. While this might sound like one of the spiels of the brainwashed, I can assure you that this is not. After spending the better part of 2009 in an uncertain frame of mind, I have seen enough to know that I am in a good place right now.

Personally though, this has been challenging. The move to India has not been without its struggles mostly domestic in nature. After spending the majority of the past 14 years outside home (barring 2000-2001), it has been a challenge to alleviate the worries that my constantly worrying parents go through. The fact that I am still single gives them additional reasons, though if you ask me, my single status is mostly because of their own insistence/belief structures. That is something I am still coming to terms with. But I try to be patient and understanding. Sometimes I am firm and have to take a stand, but I mostly understand and try to work my way through. But it is still challenging.

Apart from that, I REALLY miss the gang in Jersey, New York and Delaware! I am handicapped by the lack of real life friends that I can just call and hang out with, without having to coordinate over hazaar emails. The friendships I have made in the past few months have been mostly online (you know who you are) and they are all in a fledgling state. My past (over the last year) experience with such friendships has left me a little cynical and so it is going to take some time before I can breathe easy about those. I know some of you think that I am obsessing a little too much about this, but if you had the kind of rocking real life friends I had, I am sure you will appreciate my feeling a little off color.

Apart from that, Chennai has been an awesome experience so far. I’ve been driving a Kinetic Honda borrowed from my cousins all over the place. It’s falling apart and yet keeps up with my need for speed. QFI keeps me occupied every other weekend, and the parents are back to their pre-2001 refrain of “enna quiz quiz nu alayara”. And if I can get to play a sport, anything, cricket, badminton or tennis, I’ll be able to fill up the little empty spaces in my weekly calendar.

So what next?

Now that I am gainfully employed, there are so many things I want to do again. 1. Get a life. 2. READ 3. Revive Blog

The first is a state of mind. I am slow getting there. The second is critical. I was once known as a voracious reader and for the most part of the past 2 years, mostly unread items on my feed reader caught my attention. I am working toward changing that. I have bought more than a few books and am slowly getting through them. Blog revival is happening.

Someone added an item 5 which I wont mention here, but my alternate item 5 would be that I should start taking photographs once again. But, I feel a little more self conscious in Chennai than I used to feel in New York (which was my previous muse, if I may) where every other person is a tourist with a point and shoot.

So that, in a not so small nutshell, has been my life of the past few months. In the future, now that I am back in India, I am going to watch a lot more cricket (just bought tickets for 3 CSK games) and hopefully lot more movies. And hopefully I will read a lot more too. All this means that there will regular posts here. Just you wait.

However while the introduction to the game started early enough, I don’t have any memories of watching actual games then. While I don’t remember watching the World Cup win of ’83 or the WCC win of ’85, I do remember watching the now famous Audi driven around the MCG with every member of the squad in or on it in the TV news clippings.

My first memories of watching an actual game (on TV) is quite fittingly a gripping test match played in Chennai – The Tied Test. I think the excitement of watching the final day’s play with all its turning points, along with a bunch of rabid and yet intelligent fans from the extended family, cemented my interest in the game. Soon I even started having rather vivid cricket dreams – of playing cricket with the likes of Kapil Dev bowling to me on our apartment terrace, with a crocodile infested nook where the forward short leg would normally be (Don’t ask!).

I started reading about cricket voraciously too. I devoured my cousin’s collection of Sportstars repeatedly every evening. I literally believed every word that was written there about Viv Richards’ murderous 110 at St. Johns during England’s ill-fated ’85-86 tour and got into fights after telling people that 12 runs each were given for at least 2 of the 7 sixes that Richards hit that day. I also found my cousin’s hidden copy of a 1983 English season yearbook (including the World Cup) released by Wills, hidden behind his Sportstars. The book interestingly gave me my first look at a nudie pic – a topless woman waving to the cameras from top of a chimney, from where she was watching a county (or was it a World Cup) game.

Around this time I started watching cricket on TV like a maniac. The West Indies tour of India in 1987-88 and the battering India took from the hands of the likes of Pat Patterson and Ian Bishop is fresh, and the heartbreak that was the ’87 World Cup. After Star TV and Prime Sports entered our house around the same time as the ’92 World Cup, there was an hour to be spent every day watching re-runs of the World Cup games, most of which I had seen on live TV too. In the midst of all this, I never once watched a game live at the stadium, at least not until much much later – the 2001 Chennai Test against the Australia!

Since my initiation, I have grown up to be this guy whose first thought, on seeing open spaces, is to plan where the stumps and the boundaries would be. While she hasn’t verbalized it, my mom probably blames herself for it. All my years in school, barring a few months between my 9^th and the 10^th standards (when I was grudgingly allowed to join a coaching program, she relentlessly made efforts to correct her “mistake”. She tried to put one impediment after the other – taking me to work with her during vacations, arranging for violin lessons thrice a week at home in the evening when the other kids were playing. But in spite of all this, I have stayed in love with the game. Not an hour passes without cricket being on my mind, even if it is a fleeting thought.

As most readers know, digression and verbosity are inbuilt features on this blog, but not today. Lunch beckons now. Nevertheless, while I am gone, you can tell us all how your cricket story began. Comments are open. So, will you?

I know I have been awfully silent these past few months. But to quote that BSNL employee who managed to infuriate even the unflappable me last week, past is past. I intend to start regular service on this blog in the next few days once I get past the small task of upgrading WordPress. While there is the small matter of securing gainful employment, I will keep that issue and the related activities in the background like it has been for the most part on this blog.

Here’s to new beginnings…

Ok, I don’t know why the angle is weird, but a kind birdie sent me this and a few other pics from the Endhiran set. These are probably everywhere by now, but I got them just a few minutes ago. Enjamaaai!

And in between all this, I (re)discovered Twitter. And I tweeted about all these events.

I was introduced to Twitter in April ’07, before Twitter became what it has now become. After acting like a curmudgeon about it for the most part of 2007 and 2008, I was forced by an ultimatum from certain friends (you know who you are ) to ditch my clever G-Talk status updates [random sample: Dodge Ram: The official truck of the Sangh Parivar (post Tata takeover of Chrysler)] and switch to Twitter instead.

Since then, it’s been Twitter and thankfully my mother (I had to explain every single clever GTalk status, killing the joke in the process) is not on it and so it has been good. I have totally warmed up to Twitter and don’t seem to have any time to blog. Actually I do have *lots* of time to blog, but I totally lack the enthu and for a change it is not laziness that is the reason. All I can say here and now is that, while the reasons are rather private, I will be back for good, soon. Hopefully.

But in the meantime, i don’t want this space to be idle. My closest friends have, in the past year, heard me lament about how I don’t read *books* any more. The past year or so, blogs (and other online media) have slowly started dominating my reading time and I want to change this status quo. Besides, my (virtual) book case is overflowing with books that I have picked up and have not read at all.

So when a friend pointed me to a 20 Books in 2009 challenge, I decided to take it up. For a lot of you, it is probably not a challenge at all, but for someone like me who wants to kickstart a reading habit again, it is a worthy challenge, I think. So to start the challenge, I cheated. Yup! Conveniently I picked up the shortest book available closeby to start out the challenge.

One of the rules of this 20in2009 challenge is that I have to track the books I read with a blog post/separate page. That offers me an avenue to update this blog. I am making it interesting planning to add my own challenge too. Since I am tweeting mostly these days, I want to limit these reviews fit the Twitter character limit, i.e. to 140 characters and post them on my Twitter stream too. One second thoughts, I don’t think a 140 character tweet can do justice to a book review. So, what say, I do 55-worders instead?

Look out for the review later tonight. Needless to say, the reviews will be irreverant (which means I’ll sound dumb, actually), so don’t bother using my reviews to feed your (non-existent) reading habit.

Article 152 of the International Sporting Code states that drive-through penalties are “not susceptible to appeal”.

But why the fuck would the F.I.A wait for two weeks, schedule a hearing for an appeal, go ahead with it and THEN rule that the appeal is inadmissible because the original penalty was ineligible for an appeal?

Oh wait. Don’t we all know that the F in FIA stands for a certain competitor’s of McLaren (who shall remain un-named) and A stands for ass-lickers? Now it all makes sense!

Jokes apart, wouldn’t this rule mean that any drive-through penalty that the race stewards hand out cannot be overturned later to adjust final standings? Considering how it affected the final race standings, is this motor racing’s version of the NFL’s inadvertent whistle rule that killed the Chargers against the Broncos last week?

Then in June, I picked up the nerve to call her. I spoke to her and the first thing she told me was how bad she felt that the Woodlands, where we had met in January last year, had closed down. We spoke for a few minute and my prepared script and the PJs that I had rehearsed all evaporated. I think speaking to her that day changed me. I’d like to think that some of her demeanor rubbed off on me and that has helped me through some personal issues that I have had to face since then.

Since that day in June, it has been Kalyan’s emails that kept us all in the loop. So on Sunday night, I was pleasantly surprised to get a couple of text messages from her. I called Kalyan to confirm that it was indeed her and he filled me in. And this morning, I heard from her sister Triveni that she was no more.

Even though it has only been a couple of years since I have known her, it feels like I have lost a lot with her passing. She touched everyone in her own inimitable ways and none of us will ever forget her for that.

In June, when Triveni told me that she was looking for some older movies for Lali to watch, I sent a few older movies from my collection, movies that I knew that she would enjoy.  I hope she got a chance to watch them, because that means that I gave back to her at least a little bit of the joy that her friendship has induced in all our lives.

Rest in peace, Lali. May your larking continue in heaven…