Confessions of a drugged mind

“God, it’s killing me”.

Yes, I am under a heavy dose of medication recovering from a 104.4 fever (since records are all everyone cares about these days, let me add that this is my personal best recorded on a thermometer). Yes, I am aware of another Sachin failure today. But these are not my words. They were spoken by Federer after the 2009 Australian Open loss to Nadal. Here was a champion who had never been introduced to failure, suddenly finding himself grounded. He spoke the words and then broke down. The defeat - and the ones preceding that – had rankled him.

In sports, there is probably nothing more beautiful than watching a fallen great trying to regroup – trying to prove his relevance to the world again – despite all the risk to his 'legacy'. Federer did it. It will be fair to say he has justified his extended run – he won Wimbledon 2012, won himself an Olympics Silver, shot back at the numero uno spot – and PRESUMABLY (we can never say what goes inside the heads of great men) has conquered his ghosts – for the time being, at least.

Before Sachin got out today, I was sure he would choose this innings to finally come good - like I was sure in umpteen innings in the past. I was ready to bet my life on it - and more importantly even my faith. A failure promptly brought the retirement question out of the closet AGAIN (the question, of course, has its own keys to the closet – comes out at its own free will – sometimes never goes back). Now, please forgive me, but I can never be a neutral when it comes to Sachin. I’ve changed my stance on this matter with such a high frequency that as Andy Zaltzman had put it that it could be possible to broadcast a radio channel using it. So we won’t even take the path.

But other things have been bothering me. I confess to having ‘unliked’ his official Facebook page, being fed up of the corporate logos and offers being thrown at my face in the form of tees worn by Sachin and/or as captions adorning the bottom of the pictures. He has never given a miss to the IPL or the CL. But it probably doesn't matter. Hell, he is in a position to make money, why would he not do it. It never mattered to me that he was blocking a youngster’s place - was anyone worthy?. It never bothered to me that he is risking his legacy - isn't it HIS legacy after all?. But it matters when you have stories such as these to content with.

Ponting today said that he isn’t sure if he will be selected for Perth. It matters to me if Sachin shares the same fear. It matters to me if it has occurred to Sachin even once that his 100th ton MAY HAVE cost India the match and a shot at the Asia Cup. It matters to me if he later realized that the men on the street might 'not have taught him cricket', but are responsible for what he is today. It matters to me if his 'mortality' rankles him. It matters to me if his failures ‘kill' him.

I dread to know the answers. God, it might kill me.

Tweet This

We're World Champions, bitch!!!

Exactly a year ago, I shared a concern on Facebook. Well, the answer turned out to be an emphatic yes. Sachin did descend at Wankade, and although it wasn’t him who set the stage on fire today, he did have his moment of ascent when he was lifted by his team mates during the victory lap. Kohli was simple in his explanation – they were carrying a man who had carried the burden of the team for 21 years. And yes, Sachin did manage to get what he so badly wanted, the one thing that was missing from his cricketing resume – the World Cup.

This World Cup has been about the 15 players. It makes me shudder to think that Yuvraj had once entertained thoughts of quitting cricket, when he was going through that horrible phase in his career not too long ago. This World Cup has been about his fight back. You could sense the pain he has gone through when he let out the roar after thumping Australia, and the extended hug he gave Dhoni and Sachin post victory today. And people are saying there was no fairy tale ending in the finals.

This World Cup has been about Mahindra Singh Dhoni. The media has always found enough fodder to hang him; today he ensured that they shut up – at least for the next few days.

This World Cup has been India’s support staff led by Gary Kirsten, the unsung heroes. Spare a thought for Praveen Kumar too. He deserved to be there - at the podium - living what would undoubtedly have been the best moments of his life. May be his time will come later.

And last but not the least, this World Cup has been about us, the fans - the “undefined fans”, according to Sharad Pawar, who can safely be ignored while distributing tickets. We are the ones who sit in the same positions so that the momentum of the players who are thousands of miles away is not lost. We are the ones who delay nature’s call just so that any movement does not affect proceedings in any way. We are the ones who miss offices or schools to watch a match because we are lucky for the team. We are the ones who give up watching an important game so that we do not jinx the team. Yes, this is our World Cup.

And for the advocates of the theory that it was fixed - Yes, it was. It is called destiny.

The latest chapter of my trysts with World Cups has a happy ending. I wouldn't care less if the World comes to an end in 2012. For all the romantics, who have been coming up with pieces of trivia to link this victory with the one in 1983, here’s one from my side. If the World comes to an end in 2012, I (and many others who would be reading this) was a World Champion when I was born and will be a World Champion when I die.

I will end with a quote by the late Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter (Literature, 2005), “I tend to think that cricket is the greatest thing that God ever created on earth – certainly greater than sex, although sex isn’t too bad either”.

Tweet This

End of T10

Thought would sign off the year with one last blog. A look-back (early one at that) at some of the things in 2010 - the first year of this decade or the last one, depending on which algorithm you follow to define decades – and what a year it has been. It was a year when Ravindra Jadeja scored 130 more ODI runs than someone who goes by the name of Sachin Tendulkar - and still people go gaga over Sachin and call for Jadeja’s head. Well, life is never fair, is it? (Now don’t you dare point out that Jadeja played in 19 more matches than Sachin did – this is the only time I’ll write something ‘positive’ about Jadeja, please let me do it.)

It was not the fairest of years if you are a Yuvraj, or A Raja or have anything to do with the movie Prince - all these were ‘royally’ screwed in the year. The Chennai Super Kings were an exception though, winning the IPL and Champions League. (Even Larry King chose this year to retire).

This year was also a year of shameful scams and controversies. Towards the end of the year, JPC replaced IPL as the most abused three letters. As Cyrus Broacha put it in TWTW, "When our leaders don’t work in Parliament, the nation loses ` 250 crore; and when they do, we lose ` 17000 crore”. And, given the way, our chosen leaders behave in Assembly; the time has come to start a swearing-at ceremony instead of a swearing-in ceremony.

Talking about money, the rupee also got a new symbol this year, and a cool one at that. Am I the only one who gets reminded of the Roger Federer logo, after looking at the rupee symbol? Perhaps Mr Udaya Kumar was also a fan of the great man.

I won’t end without a word about Swami Nityananda, someone we all secretly admire and wish to be. Now, this was one of the rare controversies this year which was not exposed by WikiLeaks. I was actually wondering why didn’t Julian Assange expose Swami Nityananda. You got to watch HIMYM to get the answer. It’s called “Bro Code”.

Enough said for now. Wish you all a Merry Christmas, an entertaining Boxing Day and A Happy New Year. Enjoy Maadi.

PS – As the countdown to the new year began, the world waited for two milestones to be knocked off – Sachin getting his 50th test ton and Anshat getting 2000 Facebook friends. Sheer genius Sachin is, whaddaplayya. Now I know why the world will end in 2012 - Sachin might just announce his retirement then. Coming back to the two milestones, The God has done it today, now it’s your turn Prabhuji.

Tweet This

And the winner is...

The news is out everywhere. I’ve topped the IPL Cricinfo fantasy league among my college folks. And as expected, the media is after me. Instead of giving multiple interviews I just thought I’d post excerpts of the interview taken by a leading daily (name withheld due to copyright reasons)

Interviewer (I); Rahul (R)

I: So Rahul, you’ve done it. Is there something you’d like to say to our readers?

R: Oh yes. I attribute this success to a lot of people. First of all, I would like to thank my parents for having me. Without them, I would have been nothing - trust me on that.

Next, I’d like to thank all the losers for being more worthless than I could ever be. What's a winner without the losers.

And yes, a word for my fans. Whatever Rahul Saraf is today is because of all you people out there. Without your continued support I could easily have been just one of the 13 losers in the league. It’s a scary thought.

And last but not the least, I would like to thank God. He was in my team and gave me 1867 points. The message to take from here is “Do not lose faith in God. Ever.”.

I: Ok so if you would want to pick one turning point in your league, what would it be?

R: Dropping Gilchrist after two matches. Not an easy choice when you consider he had given me 408 points in those two matches and gave a whole lot of points in the last edition. I was 9th in my league at that stage and was faced with a situation similar to what Sam Worthington was in Avatar.

“Loser. Laggard. Outcast. To ever face them again, I was gonna have to change the rules. Sometimes your whole life boils down to one insane move. The way I had it figured, Gilly is the most explosive batsman in the IPL. Nothing stops him. So why would he ever fail? But that was just a theory.“

I dropped Gilchrist to accommodate some of the other expensive buys. The rest, as they say, is history.

I: The tournament saw Sachin rise as a T20 player. Any comments on that?

R: It was wonderful to watch him bat the way he did, and hardly a surprise actually. I was, of course, disheartened because he could not win it for Mumbai. Just to further show what mettle he is made of, I’ll take the example of Gilchrist and Hayden. Now most people would select them over Sachin in the shortest avatar of the game, and you can’t blame them for doing so. But both of them were woefully out of form in this tournament and the only thing they did was try to hit their way out of trouble. They kept repeating the same mistakes time and again in the hope that it would come off. Contrast this to someone named Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar. In the series against Australia in 2003-04, he kept getting out caught in the slip cordon while trying play the drive. He turns up in Sydney and what does he do? He scores an unbeaten 241 at a strike rate of 55 without a single shot through covers or mid-off.

Andy Flower summed it up when he once said, “There are two kinds of batsmen in this world - Sachin Tendulkar and all the others”

I: What about the controversy surrounding the IPL? Any thoughts on that?

R: For a moment forget about what the officials have done and are doing. If Dhoni can hit a six with one hand; if Sachin can score a solid 48 with a split webbing between the fingers of his hand; then you know that Indian cricket is in safe hands.

Tweet This

The God of all things

Sachin became the first man on the planet to score a double ton in a limited overs international. I could not share my thoughts through the medium of a blog because of two primary reasons - A) I was traveling and hence did not have easy access to the internet and, B) I had no words to match his feat. The first is now taken care of, but the second is still an issue. But I've always been taught in my workplace that there is a workaround for everything. So here I am - after all a picture is worth a thousand words.


Repeating what I had said in an earlier post:
It is difficult to imagine what life would have been without cricket and it is impossible to imagine what cricket would have been without Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar.

Tweet This

2 Decades of Power Play

“In a gentle way you can shake the world”

-- Mahatma Gandhi

“Main khelega” said a squeaky voice from under the helmet covering the blood smeared face of a 5’ 6”body lying near the pitch. We’ve heard the story a hundred times from Sidhu (in an unmatched charismatic way that only he can manage), of how a 16 year old kid - who had no business being out of the comforts of school, leave alone facing the likes of Imran Khan, Waqar Younis and Wasim Akram at their fiercest bests in a cricket pitch – had refused to leave the ground despite being hit on the face by a Waqar Younis special. “Main khalega” – these are perhaps the two words which best sum up the hunger, sum up the attitude of the great man towards the game, during and even after 20 years from the incident. The world knew that the 16 year old had come of age.

Enough is already been written about him as he knocks off another milestone in his career. There are not enough superlatives to describe what he has done in these 20 years, so I will not even attempt to tread the path. But what amuses me, is, that despite all this, he could never please the critics enough. If the critics had had their way, he would never have made his debut at such a tender age. If the critics had had their way, he would have hung his boot by now. The world would not have known what they would have missed. For some time, he let the numbers do the talking on his behalf - 10K runs, 30 odd centuries. But after a certain point, perhaps even the numbers became so huge and unfathomable (and as meaningless as the age of “Baa” in the Indian television soap industry). Perhaps they should stop keeping track of his records and just employ the symbol for infinity and make the life of the statisticians easier. And by the way, the 20 years haven’t always been about the runs alone; but the manner, the precision, the style, the honesty and the simplicity with which he’s got them. It’s been about his flawless image; the fact that never once has he been involved in any tussle with the media or a team-mate or the opposition, any drunken escapade, any incriminating incident or any other spat that usually accompanies super stardom at a young age.

Margaret Thatcher once remarked that if her critics saw her walking on a river, they would say it was because she could not swim. The legend too, brought some changes to his batting style, at times adopting a more cautious, a more mature approach – cutting down on some of the aerial shots, cutting down on some of the flair. And people came up with theories of his reflexes betraying him. Mind you it was more out of choice than anything else; and one thing he did not cut down on, was class. Yet, as a reminder to his critics, he produced one of those innings time and again, as if taking it out from a shelf and placing it back there again. Aren’t we fortunate to have seen so many avtaars of the legend, each one special in its own realm, each one with genius written all over?

“ENDulkar?” screamed the headlines of the TOI after the Mumbai test against England in 2006. Well I hope whoever came up with this phrase has a good enough sense of humour to laugh at himself each time the man goes out to bat and comes up with something special, else life would have become miserable for him. But this has been the legend’s story all his life - some people have kept throwing stones at him and he has kept converting them into milestones, craftily and gently.

In the gentlest possible way, he has made billions celebrate and cheer, he’s given them a reason to rejoice, and to cry - a reason to live; in the gentlest possible way he has made a mockery of bowling attacks, slaughtered their confidence, given opponents sleepless nights; in the gentlest possible way he has shaken the world. It is difficult to imagine what life would have been without cricket and it is impossible to imagine what cricket would have been without Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar.

P.S. – The quote by Gandhiji was used by the man himself to describe Harsha Bhogle, another legend in his own rights; but if anything, it fits seamlessly with Sachin.

Tweet This