Hard-hitting verse

Verse rarely works for me (my inadequacy, I am sure).

This does, and then some.  Hard-hitting without being maudlin. Bitterly clever without being cute.

Sreesanth, the Infuriator

This is the problem with Sreesanth. He comes back after a year and a half, during which time he’s made a regular ass of himself in so many ways, and then takes 5 wickets.  At first, reading commentary on cricinfo, it looked like it was all down to luck – two ‘played on’ dismissals, etc.  But I caught his post lunch spell where he grabbed two more wickets and he was bowling some interesting magic there. Swinging the ball both ways and with good control and at a healthy pace. Obviously, there’s talent there – more, perhaps, than any bowler in India today. Can he sustain this?

That’s the fine-to-pay-for-slapping-Sreesanth question.

Masturbatory

Back when I was fifteen, Svengal, Mohammed and I used to scamper up to the roof of our sixteen story apartment building and use it as our Masturbatory. We called it that because it served as a sort of observatory where we could diligently perform our recently discovered self-pleasuring act. Svengal was fourteen and a half when I turned fifteen, and I remember that because our birthdays always fell in the centres of the opposite halves of the years. Mohammad was sixteen, but he was the smallest of us, barely four and half feet tall even when he wore thick-heeled boots.

From the roof, a big chunk of the city sprawled out in front of us, but we were not really interested in it because the spectacular view had been rendered boring due to repeated use. Besides, at that age, there were other things that held our interest. The apartment at the top floor of the building across the street for instance. Every morning, just as the dawn-sun grumbled its way up the sky, lighting up the slums at the eastern rim of the city, the three of us would line up near the four feet high wall that skirted the roof. From there, we would watch the sole object of our interest in that apartment.

Kurbaan: The unpaid (unseen) review of the paid preview

Given that Kurbaan is being released ahead of Friday through that innovative stratagem called the paid preview, (like Day (-1) during IIM Placements; a trick to fool companies into thinking they are special) it’s only fitting that I am allowed to do an unpaid review of the movie without having seen it. So, here goes.

Directed by Rensil Di’Silva and ghost directed by Karan Johar (who uses these movies to polish his skills for his upcoming family melodramas, while remaing distant enough not to take responsibility for their likely failures), the move stars the poor man’s Brangelina as the leading couple. Kareena Kapoor is Avantika, who the synopsis from the official website of the movie tells me is a teacher in Univsersity in delhi, who has returned from New York where she teaches. This is obviously the movie’s most important suspension-of-disbelief part – the fact that Kareena Kapoor can teach. The title refers to her giving up her life in New York (where she was also a doctor and a model, by the way, just in case you forgot) and coming back to poor old Delhi.

My Baby

The nightmares started in the seventh month. I have always been a deep sleeper and one of the things that comes with that facility is an inability to extricate oneself from nightmares. I was often trapped in horrible dreams and would writhe and struggle against the barbed wire of uncomfortable visions. But this was extreme even by my standards. The first nightmare displayed my soon to be born baby being born dead, but with her eyes ghoulishly open, staring at me.

I was never married to her mother. We had a relationship of convenience. We enjoyed the little delicacies of life that were the prerogative of a couple that was committed but unattached. Freshness; sometimes, a little suspense, a bit of an edge. Teeth, I called it – a relationship with teeth.

A satisfying meal

After a surfeit of ODIs and t20 matches, it was a novel experience to sit down to watch a day of test cricket. Watching test matches being played in India has its own unique atmosphere – irritating commentary, ordinary grounds (except the Eden Gardens perhaps) and of late, telecasts on the worst of the advertising channels masquerading as sports channels. Despite all that, it’s wonderful to watch test cricket in India.

In the morning session, when two rookies ran through the top order, it looked like a bad day for India. Which is not unusual for the first test match of a series for India in any case. Just a little bit of nip off the pitch and in the air, and two interesting prospects looked like world-beaters. It’s only later – once Dravid had stabilized the innings – that the bowlers were showed up for what they were; honest triers. Murali looked very ordinary, as he does in India and Herath posed no terrors.

A good sports day, a bad sports day

One of the many semi-supertitious beliefs that I have about (watching) sport is that when there are multiple matches across multiple sports on the same day, if any one team / player that I support loses, all the teams / players that I support that day would lose. For example, if Chelsea, Federer and India (cricket) have a game on Sunday and if India lose the match, both Chelsea and Federer are going to lose too. Not only that, other related results would also not go my way – so Manchester United and Arsenal would win, for example. And given my confirmation bias, I find that this rule applies very frequently.  

A short, nonsense story about colours, sounds and Big Mo

When the pink cushion whooshed by his window, he decided that there was something odd going on. A few moments back, when the maroon baboon had plonked itself down on the hood of his car and run his thumbs squeakily against his car’s windscreen, he had been slightly surprised. Big Mo was, as usual, driving his souped up Cadillac (in which he had gouged out the horn and replaced it with a small brown cardboard carton to store peanuts in, which he could munch on while driving) and thinking big thoughts. And as he looked at the departing pink cushion in his rear-view mirror (shaped like a canoe without the paddles), the latest big question popped into his mind like a hot slice of buttered brown bread from his shiny, metallic stainless steel toaster – ‘When is a pink cushion like a maroon baboon?’

Man, Ending

The man had decided that this was going to be his last day. He’d find out one final thing and he’d be done. He had spent the last few years of his life unwinding things that had been wound and untying knots that had been tied. He had started doing this the moment he realised that there was no point to doing anything, because once you started with something, it just twisted and turned till every little bit of it was covered with thorns and needles, and he could do nothing to prevent being pricked by them, and when he would bleed the thing would still be there, incomplete and undone, staring balefully at him till he collapsed back with exhaustion, and still the thing would just sit there, unmoving, a pile of unsteady stones that he had to set right, but he just did not know how, and when he went on to another thing, every other thing left undone would follow him with merciless intensity, shouting into his ear in their strange whining language which had no soft vowels. So one by one, he took apart everything that he did – his education, his career, his love, his marriage till his life was empty of its ungrateful furniture and he could just jump out of its window.

Holiday

Shivani, eight and a half years old, particularly hates the morning assembly. She finds it dreary and unnecessary and believes it starts the school day off on the wrong foot. This is the time when every student from classes I to IV, classified as primary school students, are gathered in the dull-blue-tiled elevated platform situated on the ground floor of the school, and made to recite one regional language prayer (a different one for each week-day like a rotating lunch menu), an over-wrought, scarcely understandable pledge, the national anthem and a customized school prayer. Lately, the Bengali prayer has been substituted by an English one, which is something Shivani doesn’t agree with; given English is not a regional language. Her own regional language, her mother-tongue, is Gujarati. Her father-tongue, as far as she can make out is Hindi, but nobody has ever asked her what her father-tongue is.