Jitni Abadi Utna Haq – How To Fix CSK’s Woes. And IPL’s…

While I used to look forward to the IPL circus every year, recently I have been dreading the approach of the month of April. Though, despite my trepidation, in a display of sporting masochism I end up putting myself through the torture of watching CSK’s erratic march with the fragile hope that this year things will be different. The first match will be blamed on losing too many wickets in the powerplay, the next on poor death overs bowling, the third on “still working on the right combination” and so on. For enthusiastic CSK fans like me, this excruciating journey will continue till the points table renders qualification mathematically impossible. At which point we will all console ourselves with the fact that CSK has been one of the most successful franchises in IPL and we have to allow our team a bad year. Or two. Or even three… 

I remember those heady days when I used to heap scorn on RCB, DC, RR, PK and the other less fortunate teams. It has been a telling commentary on the state of affairs that CSK is quite consistently bringing up the rear these days. That MI, DC and LSG fight very hard to dislodge us from the bottom of the table brings scant comfort… 

 

Clearly, once the auctions are done, there is little difference that tactics and strategies are going to make. Much as the coaching staff try to look grim and engaged in the dugouts, furiously chewing gum while looking like they are thinking deep thoughts, they are secretly smirking and chuckling at their accumulating bank balances, all for doing work that is about as much use as the cheerleader squad. Fact is the results are going to be rather predictable till the next round of auctions. Ever since CSK made some audacious auction choices probably on account of being on some high quality weed, I have been addressing myself to this question with some vigour. How can the IPL maintain its interest across franchises, not just the winning ones? 

 

And I’m happy to announce that I’ve hit on a viable, uniquely Indian solution. Reservation quota. The top two qualifying teams should be the teams that top the IPL table, while the next two qualifying teams should be picked from those franchises that have not made it to the play offs in the last 2 years. 

 

Is it fair on the 3^rd and 4^th teams on the IPL table, you may ask. But I would urge you to pause, put on your social equity hat and think for a bit. We live in a secular and socialist republic. The downtrodden need to be given a hand. And something more downtrodden than CSK or MI at the end of the last few IPL seasons, you would be hard pressed to identify.

 

We can work more nuance into the reservation formula. Maybe the social media followers of these franchises can be a weighting factor. Perhaps the population of the city the franchise is attached to – “Jitni Abadi Utna Haq!”. I would even suggest accommodating the attendance record of the franchise owners at matches. I would surely like to see Preity Zinta receive some benefit for being the most indefatigable cheerleader in the history of the world. Anything as long as it’s not the actual performance and the rank in the IPL table. That’ll defeat the very purpose of the quota… 

 

I leave this for the wise men in the IPL committee to ponder on. I heard that the TRPs of IPL were lower this year. The reservation quota system could potentially be the greatest innovation in cricket since Duckworth-Lewis. In fact the algorithm for deciding the qualifiers through the quota system could be created such that its complexity and opaqueness matches that of the D-L system. We can really have some solid fun then! Interest levels will not wane till the end of the tournament, guaranteeing solid TRPs…

 

From my vantage point, CSK have attained a level of performance that cannot get any worse. And auctions are due in 2027 or 2028. So we CSK and MI fans may have to suffer for another year. But other franchises who, during the next round of auctions, make the kind of inspired choices that CSK made last time may take succor from this reservation formula, so I suggest this solution in a purely altruistic spirit.

 

Unless of course, CSK carries its mysterious bidding strategy into the next round of auctions as well, in which case, if my reservation formula is adopted, given Chennai’s population and CSK’s social media popularity, chances are high that we will qualify each year much like we used to in the good old days…

 

Let’s make the world a more equitable place…

 

***

Seniority is a double edged sword

Over a life spent chasing career growth, the word “senior” has always had very positive connotations. Becoming a Senior Account Executive 30 years back was a day of celebration. While my work was no different from that of the Junior Account Executive’s, my daily allowance during travel had now increased by Rs 25. Also that was the day that Sultan, the office assistant, finally made eye contact and acknowledged my existence, no doubt impressed at the “senior” in my designation. 

 

As life went on and I huffed and puffed up the corporate ladder, I was completely brainwashed to accept that achieving seniority was the path to bigger cars, larger pay checks and so on. When introduced as a senior colleague, one could notice the general feeling of respect that pervaded the room. Attaining “senior management” status was the holy quest for many of us. The word had acquired synonymity with capability, experience and corporate stature.

 

I now find myself at the portal of seniority again – strangely, one that I have not consciously worked towards. From being a plain vanilla citizen, today I become a senior citizen! 

 

I ought to be thrilled at this new level of seniority that I’ve achieved, right? Extrapolating from past experience, I would think a senior citizen will be deemed to be a superior being versus a normal citizen, one whom sundry citizens would flock to for wisdom on how to be a better citizen, how to resolve various knotty problems that an average citizen faces, etc., much as the junior management used to gather around and listen to me pontificate once I crossed over into senior management-dom. However, I’m realizing I’m off the mark by a mile…

 

This new seniority comes with very dubious attachments. Rather than better perks, larger cabins and increased respect, things are rapidly disintegrating. Most activities that were a normal part of life are subject to intense scrutiny by the family. I love driving but now my ability to drive to Pondy without falling asleep at the wheel is a matter of much debate. Changing the 25 kg water can, a job that I used to do with the air of a nonchalant Bahubali till sometime back is now pusillanimously outsourced by my wife to the building security. My son was even putting his foot down on a roller coaster ride recently until I threatened to go on a flash hunger strike. Anything that sounds remotely like fun in my life is a matter for deliberation by an expert committee chaired by my wife with my very hawkish son and my daughter, who, truth be told, while being more inclined towards leniency, is under constant pressure from the brute majority to vote for the veto.

 

The government is complicit too! My driving license expires on a day that is supposed to be a celebratory milestone. I have to go and demonstrate to some random RTO officer that I’ve still got it! And further, I have to prove my driving prowess every five years from hereon. This Machiavellian rule is patronizingly offset by the fact that on my fixed deposits the interest rate I will now get is increased from peanuts to peanuts plus 0.5%!

 

Protests against this sudden and ruthless erosion of one’s rights are not dealt with kindly. My son, post the hunger strike episode, pulled me aside and gave vent to his frustrations. In his view, I was in the worst quadrant of the BCG matrix (X-axis : physical age, Y-axis : mental age). Meaning, I was in reality a senior citizen who was exhibiting petulant, childlike behaviour. 

 

Which has me stumped. The internet, self help books and Milind Soman clearly tell you that you should rebel against accepting limitations. It’s all in the mind, I am being informed. On the other hand, if I violate my boundaries and indulge in anything that is on the exclusion list I have to face the committee and explain my actions. And if I so much as scratch my little finger in the process, consequences are immediate – a growing exclusion list, stricter monitoring protocols and other similar discomfiting steps. 

 

My friends of equivalent vintage appear equally confused. Some of them put on a brave a face and  proclaim that age is just a number. By evening that same fellow is sitting in the bar with his foot in a cast maintaining that you have to listen to your body. I’m sure he would have listened to an earful at home about the sequence of events that led to the cast. 

 

So forgive me if I respond a little lukewarmly to birthday wishes. I am in petulant mood. How does one keep up the quality of life when the world has decided that you need to be under constant CCTV monitoring? Now that our children are grownups, I’m getting the uncomfortable feeling that my wife is rather beginning to warm up to the role of a helicopter spouse. Many of her calls with my son seem to start with the phrase “Do you know what your dad did today????”. And I’m right there in the room…

 

So how am I coping, you ask? Post a phase of life through which I have been a fine and upstanding citizen, the transition from normal to senior citizenship has paradoxically rebooted dormant tactics from my teenage days. Namely, being economical with the truth. The number of pegs I’ve consumed, the number of times I ate out last week, the time I got back last night – there is a correct answer and there is the truth. And if the cost of hanging on to the freedom to indulge in some harmless activities is uttering a few inconsequential lies, so be it. For those who feel squeamish about subterfuge in the land of the Mahatma, let me point out that protecting freedom through nonviolent means is the best tribute we can pay to his legacy…

 

****

Omad, 2mad, nomad and other forms of madness

Through my life, I recall someone or the other pestering me to eat healthy, starting with my mother, then my vigilant wife. Now of course, there is Youtube…

But through this journey, the crux was always about what to consume. The “when?” question was never considered worthy of scientific enquiry. In fact “more the healthier” used to be the conventional wisdom in my younger days. Eat 4 - 5 moderate meals a day, snacking now and then is OK. Those were the good old days when hunger was a sensation you could swiftly and mercilessly act upon. And given the very elastic interpretation of what moderation meant to different people, it was pretty much the dietary utopia.

 

Alas, a happy equilibrium is not meant to last in the internet age. Into this garden of Eden, a bunch of nutrition experts started intruding nastily. Having exhausted all permutations of what one can eat, they now came in with a new trajectory of attack. Namely, when you eat and how often you eat! Evolution had not built man, they proclaimed, for so many meals a day. In their jaundiced view, breakfast-lunch-high tea-dinner (with a bunch of snack breaks thrown in) was an artificial construct, brought about by modern living. So what? Would these blokes shut down their Youtube channel and use cave paintings to get their message across?

 

It’s terrifying to see the rapidity with which the absurd gets mainstreamed in the digital world with sundry influencers perennially hunting for the next new thing coupled with the relentless pressure their followers are under to conform to what their role model suggests.

 

I was rudely sucked into this vortex when my wife, having chanced upon one such reel, issued some clear directives. No more snacking between meals. Further, dinner will henceforth be treated as the last meal of the day in letter and spirit, she ruled. 

 

While that was a constraint, I consoled myself that I could live with it and in fact, over time, was able to accept a snackless existence as some kind of a new and a healthy norm. This kind of living, I told myself, would extend my life. OK, the extended life will exclude snacking but the trade off, while dubious, felt like I was at least doing the right thing. My body is my temple, I kept reminding myself, while trying to keep away intruding images of laddoos and similar prasadam items that the metaphor spawned…

 

Cut to a recent reunion of my batchmates. Inevitably matters turned to how someone was so fit and someone else still possessed that full mop of hair and the like. Many were touting something called “intermittent fasting”. I was not initially impressed. The thing sounded suspiciously like the fast of our Tamil Nadu politicians on the Sri Lanka issue or the Cauvery water issue. The modus operandi is that our noble lawmakers have a heavy breakfast and proceed to Marina beach at 930 am. There, a Shamiana will be set up to shield their sensitive skins from heat exposure. Some half hearted sloganeering will follow and by about 130 pm the ritualistic consumption of a glass of OJ will signal the end of the fast, to be followed by a sumptuous lunch. Sheer genius, ticks off so many boxes. 

 

Intermittent fasting though, as I subsequently learnt, was designed to be a little more intense – essentially, two meals a day. 2mad. In one fell swoop, the number of meals is halved, accompanied by a liberal dose of science to suppress voices of alarm and dissent. Autophagy. Fewer Glucose spikes. Lower Insulin resistance. Plus, one evidently has to give one’s gut microbiome some rest and downtime. Seriously? Who would have known that these gut bacteria chaps were also agitating for work life balance! What next? A four day work week or something?

 

I should have steered clear. But making grand pronouncements is a universal frailty and in an unguarded moment, I announced to my family that I was moving to a 2mad plan. I was temporarily gratified by the admiring looks from my family members, but with time, I sobered down and realized I was stuck. I had to make 2mad work for me. Or risk my family’s derision.

 

As I peeled the specifics of this transition from 4mad to 2mad, I realized with a sinking stomach that it comes with very rigid rules. You have to go all in. The slightest transgression will qualify as a meal rendering my 2mad regime null and void. No biscuits, slice of bread, nothing in between the two meals. Not even coffee, unless it is black, no sugar. You see the slippery slope? I observe the growing list of sacrifices with despair. Snacks, coffee, cookies… With each denial, I can feel my life getting robustly extended but without any accompanying sensation of achievement. In fact, the only physiological sensation I feel mostly is that of a growling stomach. And emotionally? They say the gut is connected to the brain, which is probably why my mind feels empty most days as I move around like a zombie counting the hours till the next of my two meals. OK, I lie. Far from being empty, my mind is actually full of thoughts of onion pakodas and jilebis… 

 

Things hit a peak when my son recently announced over the phone that he is toying with going omad. One meal a day. It is incomprehensible to me, but it is apparently a thing with his generation. Where is the world going? From omad to nomad is a short step. But I’m willing to bet that’s going to happen. Nomad is too cool an acronym to let go! Surely it  will be interpreted in a workable manner into our diets! 

 

Many of us were puzzled when India was ranked 102 out of 123 countries in the World Hunger Index. Below even Burkina Faso! Now you know the answer. In fact, I would postulate that in interpreting this index, availability of food to consume is a distant second factor to the degree of traction this number of meals a day scam has achieved in that country…

 

Anyway, adaptation and survival being second nature to man, I have been able to overcome my initial dismay at 2mad and its cruel limitations. Following a short period of crankiness that naturally accompanies unwarranted abstinence, I have now resorted to underhand methods. My house is of modest size, but it has its nooks and crannies where I can create secret spaces safe from my family’s gaze, all capable of storing cookies and murukkus and the like. Plus I have started maximizing official breakfast and lunch meetings. The trick is to ensure no single individual is around for all your meals of the day, so that nobody knows exactly how many meals you’ve consumed. That way, you can maintain the illusion of 2mad to the world, while the true score is known only to yourself. The net upshot is that I’m eating and snacking like before, sometimes achieving 5mad and even 6mad on a good day…

 

I’m not really sure if this is all good or bad, but I’m strangely unperturbed. I have absolute certainty on one thing. They say the world is circular. Food science is even more so! Something that induces cholesterol yesterday is a superfood today. Just ask the much maligned ghee. Bread has been ill-treated too, albeit in the reverse direction. Coffee, chocolate and wine are good or bad depending on the study being quoted. I am positive that someday in the future 4mad will again attain its erstwhile status as the gold standard diet norm. It’s not a question of “if”, just “when”. That day I’ll come out of the closet. Till then I’m prepared to live a life of subterfuge. OK, gotta go. Feeling snacky…

 

 

****

Matrimaami.com

My son just got married. A blissful event for us though not quite a typical big fat Indian wedding. It was of average bigness and fatness, maybe marginally overweight in parts, given we got over-enthu now and then, but generally, as I said, a happy occasion. Even as we’re suffused with the warm afterglow, I cannot but help reflect on some key learnings that I want to share for those who sit on the threshold of embarking on a similar endeavour. Actually, make that one key learning…

 

Before I just throw it out there, here’s some context. It was a hybridized arranged marriage in the sense that my wife initially spent some time looking for profiles on a matrimonial site online. You could say this is where the story begins… 

 

When the topic of enrolling in the matrimonial site came up I, as is my wont, did a quick scoot and it fell on my wife to take charge of proceedings, which she did with some initial grumbling. The process seemed quite tedious and the grumbling progressively gathered intensity to the point that on certain days, the entire household was on orange alert. Surprisingly at some point, the decibel levels of the complaints reduced and soon altogether stopped. Very curious. Assuming it was one of life’s harmless mysteries that one should not prod and poke much, I moved on with life.

 

One of the following evenings, when we had a vigorous ideological collision on the subject of disposal of some furniture, I sharply asked her to not raise her voice and in the heat of the moment she retorted that the gentleman she spoke with earlier that evening had just complimented her on her sweet voice, so I apparently needed to get my ears tested…

 

That stopped me in my tracks. Which gentleman? That evening she was home, the doorbell hadn’t rung even once, so if gentlemen were complimenting her it could only have been someone serenading from the balcony or something…

 

The alarm bells were ringing. Promptly and on a suo moto basis, constituting a high powered one-man SIT, I got to work. Turned out that it was some Maama who had called for a potential alliance for his daughter and they had ended up spending half an hour exchanging origin stories of their ancestral villages. And finally, after delivering the “what a sweet voice you have, Madam” compliment, had promised to call again after matching horoscopes.

 

Digging relentlessly further, I started unearthing further case facts. It turned out that there was a veritable truck load of Maamas who had been calling ostensibly for a marriage alliance, but ended up chatting about everything from Chennai weather to the latest Vijay movie. My wife, a conversation junkie, was clearly captivated by the sheer variety of conversations she was having with all kinds of Maamas who, while quite diverse in all respects and backgrounds, seemed to be unanimous about one thing – my wife had a sweet voice and they liked talking to her!

 

It got to a head when one day her phone rang and I attended it as she was otherwise occupied. It was some random Maama on the other end who had called to follow up on a previous conversation with my wife. Despite my constant assertions that I was the potential groom’s father and as such, was duly authorized to speak on his behalf, the Maama was indignant and demanded to speak only to my wife. It felt like one of those days when the client refused to talk to me while asking for my boss to avoid wasting any more time…

 

I further ascertained that my wife had signed up with multiple matrimonial sites over the process. While she steadfastly maintained that it was to cast the bridal net wider, the upshot of it was that she was getting acquainted with a growing number of sundry Maamas. Frequently I would overhear vibrant conversations from “which is the most powerful Hanuman temple” to “the most effective and bio-available form of vitamin D3” to “the likelihood of a cyclone forming over the Bay of Bengal the coming week”. Yes, now and then, also some horoscopes and stuff…

 

It’s always a trifle unsettling when a horde of smooth talking Maamas, equipped with a lot of free time and infinite perseverance keep hitting on your wife. I must admit the green-eyed monster was beginning to rear its ugly head. Nothing very serious, not a vivid, intense green, rather a mild, marginal, you could say a light pastel green eyed one, but still, I was a little torn. Should I intervene actively (empirically a bad choice) or just let things play out in the hope that compliments about her voice and way of speaking will eventually start wearing thin? 

 

Ultimately, lessons learnt during management school were hard to shake and I decided to adopt a wait and watch strategy. The fact is, I was noticing that the process was slowly but surely beginning to tell on my wife’s patience. She’s a busy lady who, when she feels the weight of idle time, would manufacture some pointless work to keep herself occupied. Leisure as a concept, she abhors. It was dawning on her that all these Maamas were generously endowed with free time and possessed excessive knowledge on a wide swathe of topics, which they were keen to share with her. And their inclination to chat interminably was starting to impact her work productivity…

 

During all this while, I found myself ruminating over a puzzling fact. Most men I know would delegate the task of handling this process to their wives. Before you take umbrage, I am not being sexist. We men are just not equal to the rigors and the socialization quotient demanded by this exercise. For instance, my son’s father in law, I subsequently learnt, had delegated this task to his wife with even more alacrity than I! So how is it that so many Maamas were calling? Why didn’t they delegate to their wives? Are they genuinely on the website for a matrimonial alliance or are they just looking to have general chats with random Maamis in the hope that, if they cast the net wide enough, chances are that one thing would lead to another?

 

If so, I must grudgingly concede that it’s a pretty smart scheme; a very disarming way to reach out to Maamis of all hues with an iron clad alibi. And going by any law of probability, if you have sufficient patience to make an infinite number of phone calls, at the very least you’ll have an impressive digital rolodex of phone pal Maamis…

 

Anyway, finally for us, all is good. My son’s wedding went well. My wife and I stay happily married, I guess none of the Maamas had it in them to create disruption in the nest. 

 

Though, I have to confess that I have silently taken note of this genius strategy.  From my vantage point, my son’s wedding has been a huge missed opportunity. At some point, when it is time for my daughter, assuming she assigns the task of looking for a groom to us, don’t be surprised if I leap at the task and take full ownership of the process...   

***

The Evolutionary Quest for a Slender Finger

No, that was not a typo. I didn’t mean slender figure…

 

Before I clarify further, I need to take you on a minor Darwinian detour to get into the skin of this thing called evolution. Since Man first came to be on earth, he has been continuously evolving in keeping with the times. For instance teeth and jaws have shrunk as vegetarian diets proliferate. Light skin and blue eyes came about in places with less sunlight exposure. Brains enlarged to cope with the increasing complexity of making decisions from a multitude of choices, for example which OTT series to watch next, notwithstanding the fact that you would probably go back in the end to re-bingeing on Brooklyn 99 or The Office…

 

But here’s the nub - most of these changes were forced upon us by nature and were not man made, meaning we could go about the process of evolving at a glacial pace that sometimes spanned millennia. The technology era is however imposing a huge challenge on the need to dramatically speed things up. Will humanity be able to cope? How can we suddenly up our game and dramatically accelerate the the evolutionary process? 

 

You may be a little bemused at my disquiet. Why do we need to evolve rapidly, you may wonder. Is it the AI revolution I’m alluding to? And where do slender fingers enter the equation? Stay with me while I walk you through the precarious situation that you’re already in and probably haven’t quite realized yet. 

 

If you are an “abbreviation person”, phrases like LOL, ROFL, OMW are probably part of your active lexicon. But I find it incomprehensible that the one thing that we need to say most often has not yet been abbreviated by humans. I am talking about DBM. Or its cousin, DBE. Dialled by Mistake. Or by Error. 

 

Think about it. How often, when you finish a call and then casually swipe the screen to close it, has your clumsy finger accidentally triggered another call? Or you want to select a number from a list on the touch screen, but your index finger inadvertently selects the adjacent one and you don’t even realize it sometimes till the strange voice on the phone jolts you into facing up to the fact that you had DBMed…

 

And don’t get me going on how frequently I see a whatsapp group call being initiated by some poor soul whose fingers seem to have a mind of their own? Infact, have you ever seen a bonafide whatsapp group call? It’s almost always a case of DBM. 

 

Lest you run away with the superficial insight that this is about wrong calls, I would urge you to stay and hear the whole of it. I next point to the phenomenon of the 2 second voice note in whatsapp groups! Clearly triggered by some errant finger pressing on the mic button unintentionally. The note, if you’re lucky, will probably be blank, but it could just as easily trigger world war 3 if you were verbally indiscreet during those two seconds when your finger was playing the dirty on you. The worst case scenario here is of course when you suddenly notice on your phone screen that a call is actually in progress for the last 40 seconds, thanks to your errant finger having dialled your boss…

 

In the good old days of the manual typewriter, there was so much space between the keys that I even remember my fingers getting stuck in between keys while typing! In the relentless thrust of miniaturization, the keypad became progressively smaller as we graduated to PCs, then laptops. Now with the mobile phone, we have hit rock bottom, with the keypad being compressed into such a small area that the average button area is 0.5 square cm (source : the omniscient ChatGPT). The same Omniscient One also tells me that the average thumb area which is in contact with a mobile phone button is 1.5 square cm. That’s 3 times the button area!!! So mathematically speaking, there is always a 66% chance you don’t press the right button! 

 

What really drives me up the wall are some of these evil websites that I get directed to. You land on their page unsuspectingly, but soon enough there are a bunch of pop ups containing ads, cookie notifications and the like. To read or see what you primarily wanted to, you have to go through the excruciating step of closing each of these popups by pressing a microscopic “close” button which will typically be 0.01 sq cm in area, with your 1.5 sq cm sized thumb! To make things interesting, this has to be sometimes achieved while the page is loading jerkily, making the already miniscule bulls eye a moving target on top of it! I never get it right, and sure enough, the next thing I know is that I’m being asked to confirm the payment mode for an annual subscription to some random service. 

 

Make no mistake. Finger obesity is rapidly becoming the next health epidemic. I am sure, over generations, our fingers will slowly adapt and evolve into slim, reed like structures, but this transition is simply not going to keep pace with that of technology’s relentless and rapid march towards miniaturization. 

 

Mankind, having obsessed about hearts, brains, livers and even kidneys, is waking up sheepishly to the fact that it had collectively taken this appendage rather for granted. That the size and shape of our fingers would play any role at all in our lives has been a rude surprise. Take my dad, for instance; slim and dapper for his age, he has an unusual handicap. He has stub-like thumbs, completely out of proportion to his frame. The number of times he DBMs me or my siblings is legendary in family circles. It’s actually a miracle that he has not yet been snared into supporting some large Nigerian family’s lifetime expenses on account of his uncontainable thumb.

 

People of my vintage marvel at how even very young kids are seemingly so adept at the mobile, displaying no discomfiture whatsoever. For simplistic minds, this constitutes a paradox, whereas I present it as living evidence of my theory. Just give them time. Let their tender bodies and thus the fingers grow larger and we’ll then see how they start fumbling…

 

Let’s face it, we are helplessly caught between the mismatch of the rapid speed of technological disruption and the more unhurried and generational evolution of nature. Probably not going to happen in my lifetime. But being an eternal optimist, I googled “exercise for slender fingers”, and was absolutely thrilled to get about 17 million hits! After much tortuous navigation of these websites though, I figured out that the top two suggestions were “avoiding sodium” and “drinking lots of water”. Clearly, not the beginning of the solution that I’d hoped for, more a dead end… 

 

There it is, then. Chances are, till we evolve into lean-fingered versions of the homo sapien species, we are doomed to miscommunicate whenever we set out to type words, that much is clear. The only upside of this is that the wide prevalence of this problem makes it a very credible excuse even when you type exactly what you wanted to, but feel it politically wise to retract. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it – I typed (or dialled, or pressed) by mistake” has the potential to be a very valid get-out-of-jail-free card whenever you want to get out of a tricky spot. I would go as far to say that in the all-time list of undebatable excuses, this one can occupy the top spot, in the process dislodging the latecomer’s legendary “sorry, Mumbai traffic, you know…”.

 

*****

Proof of Life

The whole thing started when my daughter, post a retro music event, remarked that the music piece played at the beginning was kind of catchy in a cute, quaint way… 

 

That’s all the opening I needed. I explained to her that it was the title music of a movie called Sholay that was released almost 50 years ago. With evangelist zeal, I suggested we catch it together on OTT, as it had been almost five years since I had last watched it for the 23^rd time, only to have suggestion summarily scorched…

 

That cut me to the quick. You see, for many of my vintage, responsible parenting comprises inculcating habits like good table manners, making the bed and being respectable to elders; watching Sholay would comfortably qualify to be part of this list. I realized I had been remiss… 

 

That was the mission then, should I choose to accept it. Make her watch Sholay. End to end…

 

Of course, in an endeavour like this, proper planning and foundation laying are essential. Step one was cunningly suggesting to her that we should make it a thing to watch movies on OTT together now and then. This was received with some initial suspicion, but eventually we got the ball rolling. To begin with, I had to yield to her choices to conceal the true purpose of the entire scheme. So I suffered through a ton load of tripe like Beast, Retro and even Pathan. Pure agony! But I soldiered on with nary a protest. 

 

Eventually, after demonstrating adequate commitment to the dad-daughter bonding exercise, it was my turn to pick. I won’t bore you with the details, but I had to really work at getting Sholay into the playlist. A combination of emotional blackmail, sulking and when nothing worked, some ungainly begging got things to the point finally where we settled down to watch Sholay, popcorn in hand. The popcorn was my touch, I was leaving nothing to chance here.

 

It was an excruciatingly hard journey. All the calls that my daughter would ruthlessly ignore during Leo and Retro were suddenly calls of critical import! The first 20 minutes were so stop and start, she kept losing the thread. About half an hour into the movie she just walked off claiming she had work to do and maybe we could watch it the next day…

 

I was a disturbed man that night. Couldn’t sleep. What does this say about my daughter’s character, was the thought running feverishly through my mind as I tossed and turned. Is she the kind of person who would not like Sholay? Where did we go so wrong in her upbringing. I confided in my wife over coffee the next day, but was rather disappointed with her lack of reaction. Her casual remark , “so what if she doesn’t like it”, was a rude reminder to me that she herself had seen Sholay only twice. Sometimes I wish I had popped this question to her early during our courtship, but anyway, that ship has sailed… I realized with a despairing heart that I was alone in this quest. 

 

Not the kind to give up easily, I confronted my daughter over dinner the next day on her abrupt walk-out. After some tenacious pushing and prodding I got to the root of the issue. Apparently, she found the film very patriarchal. She couldn’t understand why Jaya Bhaduri had to be such a sad character dressed in all white just because her husband had died. That Basanti had to be a stereotypical female chatterbox was deeply offensive to her gender sensibilities. Ironically, all through her diatribe, I’m sitting there unable to get in a word sideways…

 

Out of sheer despair, I decided to go all in. A weekend trip to Pondy if we watched it to the end. I know, shameless bribing, and I’m not proud of the example I was setting, but sometimes, the means are a distant second to the end, especially when the end is so noble…

 

So off we went again. In about 30 – 40 minutes of watching another of her important calls came up. Apparently it was going to be a long call so she called close of play. But by this time, Gabbar had had a chance to show up on screen, more Sholay things had happened. I was not certain, but something seemed to suggest that the filmmaking was beginning to make a dent on her defenses. 

 

That night, I was still disturbed, but for the first time since I undertook the mission, I detected a glimmer of hope. Not wanting to get lulled into a sense of false security, I lay awake into the wee hours of the morning, meticulously formulating my further course of action. 

 

The next few days, I didn’t explicitly mention the movie, but kept dropping some hints of about beaches and sunsets. Unfortunately, it seemed like it was falling on deaf ears. Or was I being too subtle? My heart was sinking again. How did this happen? I found myself critically examining her early childhood to figure out how this situation had come about. Was it that time when she, at the tender age of two, fell off the cot head first on the floor? Was it in her seventh year, when she was chased by a bunch of stray dogs and was so traumatized that she became a lifelong cynophobe? 

 

In the meantime, we had gone back to binge watching Brooklyn 99 and The Office. Hope had died a tragic death. And then one day, magically, she mentioned that we might as well finish watching Sholay. Moving like greased lightning, I booted up the movie and we settled down again. 

 

By now, Gabbar was doing his thing, Amitabh was being all tall and sardonic, Thakur’s grippingly tragic back story was laid bare for all to see. Mehbooba landed with a thunderous impact. As is my wont whenever I watch Sholay, I do a parallel delivery of every dialogue of every character. While earlier, she had tolerated this with a roll of her eyes, now she was actually shushing me. Bliss!

 

The rest of the way to the end was super smooth but it was her glowing closing comments that were sending me into raptures. I compiled a brief mental checklist and ran through it.

 

Did she cry when Jai died? Check.

Did she start randomly saying “arre o samba”, for instance when she wanted a second helping of sambhar during breakfast? Check.

Did she ask indignantly why there was no Sholay 2? Check.

Did she talk about wanting to visit Ramnagara near Bangalore sometime in life? Check.

 

Her reaction to each element of the movie was all that a parent could have asked for, leaving me quite mortified at my needless self flagellation. She liked Sholay! Her heart is in the right place. The sun shone through. Surely now she would go on to become a fine and upstanding adult who would contribute her bit to the world. 

 

In fact, expanding the boundaries of this point a bit, I would suggest we make this the ultimate test of proof of character, nay, of life itself. Seriously, corporates should do away with expensive psychometric tests like Myers-Briggs and just ask the question that matters : “Did you like Sholay?”. If the answer is “No”, you know you need to delve deeper into the darkness that lurks somewhere deep within the unfortunate soul. 

 

Or take the case of the overrated captcha. Recently, I was finding a particular captcha so indecipherable that I had to, in what could be called the supreme irony, take ChatGPT’s help to decode it. Maybe the way forward is to replace captcha with the same eternal question – “Do you like Sholay?”. And if the answer is negative, block, block, block. It’s almost certainly a robot. Or a warm body with a black heart. Either way it doesn’t deserve access…

 

India vs England : The true man of the series

OK, the hysteria behind Siraj is probably justified. Shortly, as the intoxication wears off, the pundits will hasten to claim that this is a team game and that this victory belongs to the whole team. Hell, some of them would even rush to credit the people who worked behind the scenes like the team masseur, the backup coaching staff and so on. True, they do deserve some credit. But the real casualty in all this euphoria is that the one person who worked tirelessly for the victory will continue to be unrecognized and hence, unsung. Who, you ask? Well, not to crow about it, but with all the humility at my disposal, I put up my hand as the unsung one.

 

Any lay cricket enthusiast will only know that Siraj bowled a good yorker and got Atkinson. Most Indian fans, in their utter naivety, will probably attribute it to various factors like Siraj’s fighting qualities, his never say die spirit and the like. Little do they know…

 

Seasoned sports writers will dissect the match, every session and indeed, the whole series. The sad thing is my contribution in the whole episode is not going to be recognized by anyone – not even my near and dear ones.

 

Take the critical first session of day 5. For the first over, I sat cross legged on my bed, not moving an inch, forcing myself to have an ever so small sip of water almost metronomically after every delivery by Prasidh, with my mobile phone face down to my left and at a right angle to my A/C remote and generally did all the other things that I knew would send the right energy to the Oval. But it didn’t quite work with England scoring 8 runs off the over. It was going to end very soon unless I nimbly changed my approach. For the next over, I moved to the living room and watched the match with the A/C at a setting of 24^oC and the fan at medium speed. Bingo! Siraj struck right away! Jamie Smith was history. 3 more to go…

 

Gratifyingly, a couple more overs down, the 8^th wicket went. And then, a slight drizzle. That was not good. I had to ensure that the rain didn’t pick up to the point where the match had to be suspended, even while guiding the course of the match. Much like Spiderman (the Toby one) who had to hold the cable with a hand to prevent MJ from falling down while fighting the Green Goblin with the other. 

 

This clearly called for another quick shift in strategy, leading me to watch the rest of the match on my mobile sitting in the balcony, facing the direction of the Oval (roughly 32^o North of East from where I sat). And shortly thereafter, and quite inevitably, the fat lady had sung! 

 

But before you run away with some simplistic take-out, let me expand a little. The “sitting on the balcony chair” thing channelized the Chi only for that point in time. Sometimes, results improve when I watch the match on the move, sometimes I have to completely refrain from watching the match to bring home the bacon. I must confess that in my enthusiasm to provide tailwind to our team, I sometimes tend to go overboard. On the first day of the last test, I watched sitting in a Padmasana pose on the floor in my study with all the lights off (a tactic I use only in extreme cases), resulting in a nasty shoulder injury to Woakes. OK, that was testing the boundary of fair play but cricket is a tough sport and I believe in competing hard. 

 

It is not just about the room or the position, sometimes even random things like working on a presentation during the match helps in generating positive outcomes. Word and Excel though, I avoid. Empirically I’ve found them to be quite disruptive and harbingers of bad energy. You’ll never believe this one - through sheer trial and error, I have established that I can unfailingly change the course of the match when I use this contraption that I have for inhaling steam. I just switch it on, inhale the steam for a few minutes, all the while watching the match from above the rim. It delivered solid results on day 5 of test 4, when I held firm like a wall between the Englishmen and the Jadeja – WaSu partnership.

 

I serendipitiously discovered this faculty of mine during IPL 2010. When I realized that my leaning on the cupboard in my son’s room while balanced on one leg had led to that over where Dhoni hit Irfan Pathan for 18 runs in the last over at Dharmasala, I knew I had the gift. I have since become somewhat of a specialist in reading the signs and doing the needful for CSK. That CSK are one of the most successful franchises in IPL is a matter of utmost pride and gratification for me.

 

By now you would have gleaned that the approach has to account for the tournament, the opponent and so on – multiple and complex factors to contend with and I confess I do sometimes get it wrong. Like with CSK over the last two years. I have just been unable to  find the right combination of device, room, chair, posture, diet and all the other small things that would have ensured victory for CSK. I try to take solace in the fact that everyone goes a bad patch, but one can’t help feeling miserable, especially when an entire franchise and all its fans are hoping for good results and one is just not able to do enough to bring it home…

 

I realize, at this stage, some of you may be a little incredulous. To the sceptics, I’ll point to chaos theory which postulates that when a butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo, it could lead to a tornado in Tennessee. In all humility, I’ll not claim to be the only one who can pull this off. The story goes that when India won the famous Eden Gardens test match against Australia in 2001, nobody moved in the Indian dressing room when Dravid and Laxman were at the crease. Though, as an expert practitioner I must say that simply not moving sounds like beginner level stuff. 

 

Anyway come September, we have the Asia cup in the UAE. I’ll be a little tired from seeing Sinner through to the finish line in the US Open just before that, but hopefully will have enough juice to ensure a good outing for team India as well. I only hope Gill and Gambhir adopt a bit of strategic continuity. This constant chop and change of tactics has me, in turn, moving tack continuously and frankly It becomes a little tiresome. Especially when I am destined to go through my lifetime without any sort of reward or recognition for the favourable outcomes I engender…

 

 

Dedicated to all the ardent Indian fans who refuse to see their role as mere spectators of a sport and instead consider themselves as an integral part of the team, venting their angst through social media posts, breaking things in the room or, from a more utilitarian standpoint like me, doing all they can to channel the right energy to our boys…