The epilogue

So my first article is finally out (my grammar teacher would definitely argue that this was my fourth article considering that she had already taught me ‘a’, ‘an’ and ‘the’). In 22 hours it already has 324 views which I deem quite an achievement because I personally refreshed the page just 311 times. It means 13 of them were actually genuine readers (now atleast my mathematics teacher is going to be very proud of me for this flawless computation).

There is one mistake in the article which I realized only after submitting the piece. Saurabh Tiwari has been picked for the squad which will tour Sri Lanka, and not Bangladesh. The site hasn’t bothered to correct it as yet despite me contacting them. So if any body of you have booked tickets for Bangladesh after reading the story, please change it immediately. I offer my apologies (it is as unconditional as Ravindra Jadeja’s).


Another joke on the same lines, just for this blogger page:

Once Yuvraj used to lift weights, now he is the weight.



All said and done, I think we all know what Yuvraj is capable of doing when he is on song. So here's a prayer for him - Yuvraj, sing!!

Thanks once again to whoever read the article. It does feel good. :) Will try and come up with more.

Enjoy maadi!!!

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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.

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Three Idiots? Not quite

Hello World!! (All right, I know just a few people will be reading this, but just wanted to prove that my readers mean the world to me.)

Just saw the first match of IPL 3.0 between a team which won the trophy last year, and another which won the wooden spoon. Sounds like a mismatch but it turned out to be anything but that (unless you consider the four 10-over slabs in isolation). Now close matches always thrill you but this one provided all the more excitement because the man in the commentary box was Harsha Bhogle. Don’t know how many noticed but he was at his best, even by his own standards. He truly is a genius and you can’t miss him when he adds punches like “Shah Rukh will be tweeting every two seconds” or like “Wasim Akram would have learnt to swear in Bengali” in moments when tension is at its peak. Real gems, these are; and a real gem he is.

One of my priciest possessions in the small library which I have developed, is this book ‘Out of the Box’ which is a collection of the best articles he’s written over the course of 5 years. And just for the records I had obtained a copy the day it hit the stands. :) Truly India’s (in fact the world’s) first cricketing icon among people who haven’t played the game. (Lalit Modi could well be considered second). Now, one of the best ways to make your blog interesting is by quoting Harsha Bhogle and I’m going to do just that. This one is the opening paragraph of today’s edition of Indian Express. (For the ignorant, he writes for them every Friday). Read it and be awed by it, just as I was.

Pakistan hand out bans like toffees, those handing out the ban pretend they are pristine; Australia’s vice-captain leaves his team behind to offer solace to his girl suffering the after-effects of a dubious relationship; another South African storms his way into world cricket — for England; the world’s most hyped tournament slithers, rather than storms, in. That’s a lot of unusual things for a sport played by so few!

Coming back to the match, I was actually supporting the chargers (the team representing the city of Ashish Garg and N.D. Tiwari :P)- and the only reason was to irritate my sister who is a die-hard fan of SRK and hence KKR. Now any argument involving SRK generally leads to a comparison between him and Aamir Khan. I would’t want to jump into the debate here, but I did mention to my sister that three of Aamir’s last four movies (not counting Luck By Chance where he had a role as small as Dada’s stay in the crease today) – RDB, TZP and 3 Idiots – were probably better than any of Shah Rukh’s; and even she looked convinced about it. But then there is no denying who a better showman is between the two. Just to gauge what being witty means you just need to watch the show when Shah Rukh won the NDTV entertainer of the year in 2007 - the way he handled the barrage of seemingly tricky questions that were doled out to him. But sorry Di, Aamir is the better actor for me.

But again, Aamir is not a complete perfectionist that he claims to be – he didn’t undergo a sex change operation for his role in Baazi, did he?

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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.

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IronY!

“Zindagi bhi hamare saath kabhi kabar ajeeb o’ garib khel khelti hai”. This is perhaps Bollywood’s oldest clichés. Even to me, it was no more than a cliché; until a few hours ago.

Let me take you to flashback mode (which happens to be Bollywood’s favourite tool). The year was 2008 - the year when India thrashed Australia in Perth, the year when IPL made its debut and the year when Love Story 2050 was allowed to release. The story is about two great friends – Rohit Chawla and Rahul Saraf (who by the way is me) – both of different shapes and sizes, but both world famous (or rather infamous) college-wide for their well-earned reputation of being PJ stalwarts. The former, the teacher and the latter, a disciple. The former was known for being very slow and the latter just for being ‘low’. Both had to choose between a job offer and an admission offer (in the same B-school). What choice they made is history now. Both lived on with their without reflecting too much on their decisions, for approximately 20 months.

Cut to the present: The fateful day of 4th February 2010 arrived. Rohit Chawla gets a dream campus offer from KPMG – one of the Big Four in auditing (which makes him a direct rival of my sister, and - I have this sinking feeling - of the Shiv Sena too, who off late have a problem with everything). But destiny chooses the same date for the announcement of Monster’s acquisition of Yahoo! HotJobs (which by the way is the property I work for) – subject to approval by the regulatory bodies, which does not include the Shiv Sena.

Now this reminds me of another famous Bollywood dialog which goes as follows (after omitting the lisp defects): “Zindagi mein watt isse nahi lagti ki humne kaunsa rasta chuna, balki isse ki humne kaunsa rasta chchora”

And before the curtains roll, the disclaimers: “Aal izz well”. I’m so happy for Rohit who deserves every bit of his success. And mind you, things are not as bad from my end as have been projected here. I still have the job. And I did misuse some of the literary license to dramaticize the whole affair. And by the way, another story to share – another of zindagi’s ajeeb o’ garib games: Just a couple of days ago, Tanushree (who is one of the very few readers (which includes Google’s crawlers) of this blog) asked me when would the next blog come. I confessed that my life was drab and I have nothing to write about. Well, I had no idea that Destiny so desperately wanted me to write that it would go to this extent.

And just for the records, I don’t have many regrets about the decision made two years ago. As Bollywood would have said “Woh kehte hain na ki jo bhi hota hai achche ke liye hota hai… sahi kehte hain”

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