Good Morning Karthik ‘SIR’

Just another lazy Sunday? Actually, no!

A call the previous night had me turning up as substitute COACH today at the ABDUL JABBAR CRICKET ACADEMY at the CLRI grounds, Adyar. The instructions were pretty simple, I just had to look after a group of 10 year olds while they went about their net sessions. Considering I knew both Mr.P who made that call and Jabbar sir quite well, I thought why not.

Now there are certain things that I am bad at, sticking to time for example. It is not that I am always late, it is just that I am not always on time. So when Mr.P said I had to be there at 6, I decided to go there a bit early because you know, coaches=professionalism.

Only after reaching there did I realize that the camp was supposed to start only at 6.30 am. And what time was it when I reached the ground? 5 frigging 40! Yes, I had just reached a net session 50 mins ahead of scheduled time!

As the crowds started trickling in, I managed to make small talk with a bunch of trainees, and eventually with the coaches and Jabbar sir. I was assigned a group of overtly enthusiastic 10 year olds who were more interested in knowing about me than getting into their training session. And thus began one of the most unforgettable days of my life.

The three hours I spent there were super fun, be it handling the kids and organizing an impromptu match for them or getting them to agree over the captain and eventually, the batting order! But there were certain moments that are definitely unforgettable; some, lessons in life, others just over the top comical. I’d like to list the top 3 here.

At number 3, MANO’S TAKE ON MATCH FIXING

That cricket is the most influential medium in India, even more than cinema is quite well known. But just how influential is it? Take a look at this conversation between a bunch of 10 year olds.

Mano: Sir, my friend is in that team. I’ll ask him to bowl slowly sir.

Anirudh: dai no chance! sir how is that possible sir!

 Mano: ya da, he’ll do it. Its like match fixing only. Cricketers do match fixing, correct no sir?

Me: huh :S

So this is the opinion 10 year olds have of cricket on the whole?! Tch tch. About time cricket got back to being the gentleman’s game!

Number 2, and this is funny. Presenting STUMPED BY TEARS

Here’s the situation. Team Karthik 87 in 15 overs.

Team Kumar 81 for 3 in 9 overs. Their team’s best batsman is at the crease having brought down the target to 7 needed off 6 overs and 6 wickets in hand. Wide down the leg side and in a moment of quick thinking and sheer brilliance, rishi whips off the bails and appeals for a stumping. Both me and kumar are caught off guard because a stumping was the last thing we expected in a freaking impromptu match played with a soft ball and no pads on. The entire team is upon me and kumar (the coach happens to be the umpire in these games) and in a moment of chaos induced panic we declare the batsman OUT. What followed was probably the best reaction EVER. Clearly annoyed, the batsman throws off his bat and walks off shaking his head vigorously, pushes kumar away and breaks down in tears! Amused looks exchanged between me and kumar, we give him a second chance to bat. 3 wickets fall in the space of 8 deliveries and it is eventually he who scores the winning runs! Phew, those kids would have killed us had they lost!

And at number one, LAXMAN’S BLOODY TOOTH

What do you do when an adorable 10 year old walks up to you with a bloody mouth and his goddamn tooth in his hand in the middle of cricket practise? Panic? Naturally. But the guy laughed it off and even thanked rishi (again!) for helping to knock off the tooth that had been troubling him for the past three days! God, I didn’t really know what to say! :D

I dont normally ask for group photos but these kids just blew me away. This definitely is one for the album.

In hindsight, today wasn’t really what I had planned for. I didn’t get my 8 hrs of unadulterated sleep that I normally associate with an OFF day but what I got was even better. The whole hearted way in which the kids asked me to come back next week was something that really touched me. sad though that I will not be seeing them again. On the whole though, it was truly time well spent!

Until next time,

Adios!

EMPTY SEATS, TASTELESS POPCORN AND DOUBLE-O-7

I am not going to beat around the bush here, this movie was bad, hopelessly bad.

Spoiler alert: I could very well be putting out everything about the movie except the climax (which is non-existent by the way) so if you are planning to watch the movie in theatres any time soon, pls stay away.

For the others out there who’ve already read the reviews and are smart enough to wait for the official dvd *cough, torrent.. cough* to come out, read on!

The movie starts off in true Bond style with a stylish chase sequence, Daniel Craig in pursuit of the hard disk containing the secret identities of all MI6 agents which is currently in the villain’s possession. Only, what starts off as brilliantly captivating catapults into something that leaves little to the imagination. In true kollywood style, cars are driven through narrow market lanes and there’s an impromptu fruit salad in mid air as the cars go crashing through them. The cars are later abandoned for bikes as the chase is taken to the rooftops.

After they’ve ridden over half the city’s rooftops, the action shifts to a train *who would have guessed* because behold, this movie is clichés galore! In a critical moment where the hard disk is about to be lost forever, a shot is taken on M’s orders and in a moment of unkollywoodism, Bond goes hurtling down the bridge, down a waterfall and is pronounced dead as ADELE’s theme SKYFALL takes over. And as is the case in most masala Indian movies, when Bond is pronounced dead, it starts raining! Tch tch…

Switching to fast forward mode, the MI6 headquarters is bombed, M’s laptop is hacked and the contents of the hard drive are put up on the net. Just when you thought its all over, the camera shifts to a remote island where Daniel Craig is seen in bed with a woman whom we only assume was the one who saved him. So, as was the case in roughly 427 of vijaykanth’s movies, James Bond is back from the dead!

Innumerable mundane scenes later, Bond is back on the field, doing what he does best- traveling to a country on the other side of the globe(in this case, shanghai), taking down super villains and getting into the shower with one of the leading ladies, because fuck logic, this is Bond, James Bond.

In true “ponnunga pinaadi poanaa oooo oooo dhaan!” style, James Bond gets himself arrested but eventually manages to arrest the scheming super villain SILVA.

After various other mundane and a rather stunning train-through-the-subway sequences (visually brilliant), Bond takes M to Skyfall *wink wink*, his residence back when he was 4 and didn’t have rippling muscles and a 6 pack. They try and assemble ammunition but all they have are two hunting rifles, a hand gun, some old dynamite and a knife which the housekeeper delivers with a “sometimes, it’s the old things that work best” dialogue. Yes, you know then and there that the knife is what is gonna take down silva.

What ensues is a typical vijay movie climax as a god damned helicopter is taken down in the gas explosion but the villain survives unscathed. Logic is lost as the villain finally succumbs to a single flick of the knife and M also drops dead in Bond’s hands *mother sentiment, rolls eyes*.

The movie ends with LORD VOLDEMORT taking over as the new M and Daniel Craig being given a new assignment, which I am only assuming is to find a better script/director for his next movie, because for all the expectations surrounding the movie, it sure sucked big time!

P.S. I know I might be a bit harsh here but I think my foul mood had something to do with the theatre we went to. AGS CINEMAS, VILLIVAKAM. How often do you see just 15 people in the entire theatre on the 2^nd day of a Bond movie! That, and the bad food too.

Until next time,

ADIOS!

HOW CRICKET WENT FROM PASSION TO PROFESSION

I’ve been blogging for roughly 3 years now. What started off with a lame post on 10.06.09 has now ended up with 125 (lamer? Your call) posts including this one. 125 posts later, some of my friends still feel that my best piece of work has to be the ‘ABOUT ME’ tab.

It reads like this: 

Thinking about it, this could very well be one of my better pieces.

Getting to the point, in social status savvy India, if you hail from an orthodox family from Chennai, Tamil Nadu, the first thing that is drilled into your head is to study well and get into a good job. (I am skipping the ‘get married, have kids and make us grandparents’ part, just saving it for another post)

Fortunately though, my parents were a little different. For one, they decided on sticking to the government’s policy of ONE FAMILY, ONE CHILD. But more importantly, they let me choose what I wanted to be instead of pushing something down my throat. Point being said, they let me decide who I wanted to be.

But that was the easy part. Finding out what I wanted to become was the real struggle. Now I am not bragging here but I used to be good at a lot of things when I was young, like a LOT.

Sketching was something I was good at when I was a kid. Times have changed now, the society is opening up to alternate career choices so technically speaking, that could have been a good career option but there was one small problem; I couldn’t paint even if my life depended on it! And at that point of time, I didn’t know something called charcoal sketching existed. By the time I did come to know of it, I had stopped sketching.

I joined a cricket coaching camp in Kolkata when I was 8. Cricket runs in the family (Dad was a part of the junior Tamil Nadu side) so taking up cricket came as no surprise. When I was in class 7, I had a medical condition that forced me out of action for one whole year. That must have been 2010-11, the year of A.R.RAHMAN. To keep me from getting bored mom enrolled me in keyboard classes, yes you now know why. But music wasn’t really my thing, so I quit in 2006 when I realized that I just couldn’t juggle cricket, music classes and my 12^th standard board exams!

Plan c was to become a chef (no surprises as to who’s decision that was, yours truly!) but when I started to dwelve deeper into the fundamentals of becoming a chef, I realized that there was one small problem- when you eat up half of the ingredients that are supposed to be part of the recipe, you don’t make a good chef. Considering old habits die hard, I decided to move to plan D.

Factually speaking, plan D was neither my parents’ nor my own idea. Remember that part where I said I was good at a lot of things, well that included studies too. So engineering I was pushed into. Given a choice, I would have preferred architecture but unfortunately, I didn’t have one back then. 6 yrs of engineering later, I can confidently say that I will NEVER become an actual engineer, the reason? I’ve missed more classes than I have attended.

Doing the math, I guess that leaves me with just one choice. Become a cricketer! But then, that is not why I chose cricket as my bread earner, it was because I truly loved the game. It was because every time I stepped onto the field, I knew that was what I was meant to be doing. Cricket as a profession, truth be told, I am still a long, long way from getting there but then life’s battles don’t always go to the stronger or faster man, more often than not the man who wins is the man who thinks he can!

Until next time,

ADIOS!

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY

Of late, my life has been dominated by shades of gray. No, not the hugely popular( but how?) book of almost the same name but actual shades of gray.

Why you ask? Well the past few weeks, I’ve seen it all; the good, the bad and the worst! I’ve seen happiness, I’ve seen dejection. On the field, I’ve taken blinders and I’ve dropped sitters.

When success comes it gives you a high. But when failure comes, however small, you go plummeting deep down into the ground. Normally, I am a person who gives a shit about failures; mainly because I’ve seen it all but this time it was different. It might have been because of the expectations the management had on me or the faith they showed even when I kept under performing, I just don’t know. But what it did was keep pulling me down when all I had to do was just stand up and keep going.

One and a half months, 24 match days and 8 matches later, I finally seem to have done what I should have in those 40 odd days- shift my focus to something else!

So here I am now, watching movies, texting friends (though with the current rule of 5 smses per day, that became just a little bit more difficult ;D) and occasionally getting into fights with daddy dearest. The perfect way to relax, hell ya! :D

Things are settling down now but when I look back, all I see is a scared young adult under the helmet whose only wish was for all this pain to end as soon as possible. Robert frost once said “The best way out is always through.” I’ve loved this quote and I’ve always yearned to live by it. But that’s the funny thing about fear. When you are afraid, you stop listening to your greatest ally- your sub conscious mind. And this is what starts the downward spiral.

Looking back, I guess that was what did me in. I just couldn’t muster the energy to fight back the fear.

But I guess that is the way of life. “Why do we fall Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves up. BATMAN BEGINS” And I guess that IS the truth. We fail only so we improve. The catches I dropped, the opportunities I missed have only made me hungrier for success. And THAT is a good thing.

As I end this post with a smile on my lips and a new found strength in my heart, here’s a little gem I picked up from the LION KING UNIVERSE.

"The past can hurt. You can either run from it or learn from it." Rafiki

THE BLUES AND THE YELLOWS

*Final year finally* read my facebook status a couple of weeks back. Now it isn’t really something to brag about but then the things I’ve had to go through for the past 5 years to actually get into final year are really something. The 40 odd likes I got for the status bear testimony to that fact. Agreed, 40 likes when you’ve got 800 friends is really a miniscule percentage but then, I am MALE. And on fb, if you are male, 40 is the equivalent of 400 likes! ;D

But I’ve already been whining enough of this so I’ll move on.

The ipl is finally coming to a close, what with only the playoffs left. Though Danny ‘MAD’ Morrison keeps pointing out every now and then how this year’s IPL has been the best of the IPLs thus far with so many nail biting finishes and last ball miracles, on a personal note I feel the ipl has lost its charm.

72 matches, 72 close matches yes but still, SEVENTY TWO is quite a large number. And having to put up with Danny Morrison and Navjot Singh Siddhu every other day does push you to the brink of insanity, attempts at mass murder even.

But then, this blog post isn’t about the duration of the qualifiers or the douche baggery that they call EXTRAA INNINGS (this doesn’t include you, Mr.Harsha Bhogle #RESPECT), hell it isn’t even about archana vijaya (IPL’s version of mandira bedi; only, slightly more taller and definitely more stupider). This blogpost is actually dedicated to self confessed soccer (or golf perhaps?) fans who jumpat every opportunity to say the IPL is fixed!

Just because CSK got extremely lucky ( they don’t call M.S.DHONI the man with the MIDAS touch for nothing) to have 3 results going their way and eventually qualifying for the playoffs doesn’t mean the matches were fixed. This isn’t WWE for heaven’s sake!

Which brings me to the UEFA Champions league finals between CHELSEA and BAYERN MUNICH. Bayern played brilliant football easily overshadowing Chelsea in the ‘corners won’ and ‘ball possession %’ columns, but then they forgot that a game is won only if you score god damned goals! The way robben and ribery were going, the match definitely looked fixed! (ha, take that soccer loving, cricket hating fother muckers!) but then, everyone knows that such a thing is bull shit. *I am a Chelsea fan myself!* B)


Which brings me to my point; just because a couple of fools decided to earn some extra cash by bowling a no ball doesn’t mean that every single person who does play cricket is a cheater too. This is an amazing game. Agreed,there are a few weeds to be pulled but then just because you have a set top box and an internet connection doesn’t mean you can say whatever you want about the game! You might say I am doing this just because I am a cricketer, more so a lover of the game. But no, my actions have a broader perspective. Remember kapil sibal, the chap who decided to have a censor board give U, U/A and A certificates for your tweets and fb statuses? Well, the rate at which the country is progressing at the moment, he could very well be owning an IPL team next season and considering the nature of some of the comments on ipl fixing that have been doing the rounds, well all I’ve got to say is “I wouldn’t be doing that if I were you.” B) :P

kapil sibal, if you didnt already know :P

So yes, be it soccer or cricket or even WWE, watch it just for the love of the game. Don’t put too much thought into it though, you aren’t really qualified for that yet.

Until next time,

ADIOS!

ESCAPING THE RAT RACE

Its been quite a while I know. It is just that life has become hectic, in a good sort of way. I am loving it but somewhere down the line I get this doubt that I am pulling myself away, getting detached from friends and the society in general. Turning a little psychotic even.

That is when I happened to come across this story.

A gem, a truly sweet lesson on patience.

A NYC Taxi driver wrote:

I arrived at the address and honked the horn. After waiting a few minutes I honked again. Since this was going to be my last ride of my shift I thought about just driving away, but instead I put the car in park and walked up to the door and knocked.. 'Just a minute', answered a frail, elderly voice. I could hear something being dragged across the floor.

After a long pause, the door opened. A small woman in her 90's stood before me. She was wearing a print dress and a pillbox hat with a veil pinned on it, like somebody out of a 1940's movie.

By her side was a small nylon suitcase. The apartment looked as if no one had lived in it for years. All the furniture was covered with sheets.

There were no clocks on the walls, no knickknacks or utensils on the counters. In the corner was a cardboard
box filled with photos and glassware.

'Would you carry my bag out to the car?' she said. I took the suitcase to the cab, then returned to assist the woman.

She took my arm and we walked slowly toward the curb.

She kept thanking me for my kindness. 'It's nothing', I told her.. 'I just try to treat my passengers the way I would want my mother to be treated.'

'Oh, you're such a good boy, she said. When we got in the cab, she gave me an address and then asked, 'Could you drive
through downtown?'

'It's not the shortest way,' I answered quickly..

'Oh, I don't mind,' she said. 'I'm in no hurry. I'm on my way to a hospice.

I looked in the rear-view mirror. Her eyes were glistening. 'I don't have any family left,' she continued in a soft voice..'The doctor says I don't have very long.' I quietly reached over and shut off the meter.

'What route would you like me to take?' I asked.

For the next two hours, we drove through the city. She showed me the building where she had once worked as an elevator operator.

We drove through the neighborhood where she and her husband had lived when they were newlyweds She had me pull up in front of a furniture warehouse that had once been a ballroom where she had gone dancing as a girl.

Sometimes she'd ask me to slow in front of a particular building or corner and would sit staring into the darkness, saying nothing.

As the first hint of sun was creasing the horizon, she suddenly said, 'I'm tired. Let's go now'.
We drove in silence to the address she had given me. It was a low building, like a small convalescent home, with a driveway that passed under a portico.

Two orderlies came out to the cab as soon as we pulled up. They were solicitous and intent, watching her every move.
They must have been expecting her.

I opened the trunk and took the small suitcase to the door. The woman was already seated in a wheelchair.

'How much do I owe you?' She asked, reaching into her purse.

'Nothing,' I said

'You have to make a living,' she answered.

'There are other passengers,' I responded.

Almost without thinking, I bent and gave her a hug. She held onto me tightly.

'You gave an old woman a little moment of joy,' she said. 'Thank you.'

I squeezed her hand, and then walked into the dim morning light.. Behind me, a door shut. It was the sound of the closing of a life.

I didn't pick up any more passengers that shift. I drove aimlessly lost in thought. For the rest of that day, I could hardly talk. What if that woman had gotten an angry driver, or one who was impatient to end his shift? What if I had refused to take the run, or had honked once, then driven away?

On a quick review, I don't think that I have done anything more important in my life.

We're conditioned to think that our lives revolve around great moments.

But great moments often catch us unaware- beautifully wrapped in what others may consider a small one.

And that is when I realized that irrespective of who you are, what you do, irrespective of the pace at which the world is moving around you, as long as you dont spare a second to stop and admire the beauty of things around you, life will always be incomplete!

Until next time,

Keep smiling

ADIOS!