As an Internet meme goes viral, the probability of a Der Untergang/Downfall parody tends to 1, after which the meme dies a natural death.

[Originally postulated here: http://3.ly/AnanthasLaw]

Corollary No. 1 to Anantha’s Law:

A Der Untergang/Downfall parody is always the highpoint for any Internet meme.

[Originally postulated here: http://3.ly/AnanthasLawCorollory01 ]

For those of you that dont really know what i am talking about. Here are some resources – Wired magazine talking about the various Der Untergang parodies & the relevant section from the movie’s Wikipedia page.

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.

During the last few years, I have not missed reading an article about cricket in news-magazines. These magazines do not have anything to do with cricket and I believe that by reading these magazines, one can get other angles to view the game from. However, most of the time I have found that such articles have a common thread. A partisan attitude is evident (barring some good pieces) and it almost seems that a witch-hunt might be on sometimes. And even the best in the team is not left alone. Not surprisingly, these pieces of criticism have come, not from former cricketers, but from writers whose connection to cricket is not evident, at least to the casual reader.

Here, I have tried to put across a coherent reply to one of the common questions raised by such articles – “Is Sachin, an all time great?” A general feeling around the media and some sections of the Indian public, is that Tendulkar, for the greater part of his career, has failed to deliver for his team when they need him the most. And a number of instances have been quoted where we were near and yet so far. These views go as far as indicating that the tag ‘chokers’ that the Indian team has earned in the last few years is because of one man alone.

The one major fact that these people have always overlooked is that there have been many a knock where he has done his bit (rather, almost the whole thing) and India has failed to win because the other ten failed to do their job. I am not a stud with statistics, but what better example to come up than the Chennai Test against Pakistan in 1998-99. Wasim Akram recently said in a TV program that the Chennai test was one of the best Test matches he had ever played. And this match is quoted by one and all as a prime example to illustrate the ‘fact’ that Sachin is not what he seems to be.

At Chennai, hasing 271, India were at one point 82/5 and then Sachin and Mongia put on a stand that got India close, when Nayan Mongia’s irresponsible hoick put the pressure back on Sachin. With just one half decent batsman to follow and back spasms racking him, he had to hit out and go for the finish rather than exposing the other end to Akram & Co. Prior to his dismissal, Tendulkar scored most of the 37 runs in just 5 overs and was the 7th batsman to get out for a score of 136.

Even though only 17 runs were required at that point (“only” is not the word to use when Saqlain and Akram are bowling, but nevertheless) India lost all the 3 remaining wickets, scoring only 6 runs in the process. A good question to ask at this point would be – What happened to the other 10 ??

Ganguly got a bad decision (bad is a word that does not convey the enormity of that umpiring slight) , but you get the sense that Tendulkar’s innings (even though the finishing was not there) was invaluable when u see the scorecard. We would just not be discussing this match if it were not for the scores of the other batsmen in the team. Only Dravid (10) and Mongia (52) got to double figures.

And surprisingly some (like the author of this article) have compared him with Andy Flower at his best. This reveals another basic flaw. While, on the outset, it is probably fair to dismiss the Zimbabweans as a one-batsman team, the team is full of dangerous floaters (as Douglas Marillier and Travis Friend amply demonstrated last week!) all of whom are capable of 30′s and 40s in any given day. And they do get these runs regularly. So the “exceptional average” of 84.5 % (which he had a couple of months ago) would lose some sheen if you look at the scores of the other batsman. I am sure you would find the above-mentioned 30s and 40s supporting the hundreds made by Flower to the maximum. So it’s unfair to use statistics as a tool to evaluate Tendulkar.

Sidhu might be partly right with his “Statistics are like miniskirts…” statement. But sometimes the hidden stuff makes compulsive reading and convinces us that the open stuff is all hogwash. And maybe the question that has been posed is answered by the usual view that these people put across. “Given his prowess, Sachin does not seem to be able to set up a victory as often as he should”. Where are the other batsmen to sometimes finish what he started?

Cricket is just not a one-man game. If you don’t have another batsman to take guard opposite you, then you cannot even bat. This is not street cricket where sometimes all the players get to bat. I hope every Indian fan realizes this and does not get into any conclusion of this kind. Sachin is just the major piece in the jigsaw puzzle that is the Indian team. Only when all the pieces fall into place, will India win.

Accountability is another factor that the Indian public and more importantly, the team and the selector need to understand. They should understand that “no member is bigger than the team” and that includes Tendulkar too. I think he has realized that. His decision to relinquish the captaincy stems from the realization that he cannot cope up with the kind of hassles that a captain has to face and then perform of the field too. But again this has been held against him too. So what more are we going to hold him responsible for? The Babri masjid issue?

So let’s not blame Tendulkar for not making “match-winning” scores. The difference between winning and losing lies in playing as a team and not as a collection of individuals. And if someone says that Tendulkar is responsible for not the team not winning, even though he has had good stints at the crease, then he cannot be more wrong. If one batsman’s score alone would win a match, I am sure India would be the only unbeaten team around, cause from his first Test to the latest, he has done his bit and would continue to do so until he feels he cannot. Then he will gracefully get off the bandwagon and let India rue the day they asked – “Is Sachin an all-time great?”

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!

A half-decent book that is introduced as a collection of wizarding fables (with notes by a Harry Potter character), it soon loses its charm. When JKR buries the voices of the fables’ protagonists under the accompanying notes, the reader starts questioning the book’s length and wonders who the target audience is (definitely not *THIS* Muggle).