Domain Maximus

After yesterday’s fantastic win against Pakistan there is a new-found optimism in the Indian camp especially with our younger players coming of age and beginning to complement the senior players nicely. When asked of his feelings about the current Indian team Rahul Dravid stated that there was a new-found optimism in the Indian camp especially with our… you get the drift yeah?

So it is but natural that several young Indians of today, drunk with current glory, lose touch with the glittering past of Indian cricket. India has had a history of outstanding cricketers many of whom have been instrumental in the achievement of a large number of cricketing records by countries like Australia, Pakistan, England, Scotland, Vidharbha etc.

This negligence has to stop and the movement to relive our cricketing past starts with this blog right now. So today we celebrate some of the luminaries who have taken Indian cricket to where it is today in the cricketing record books (i.e. in the “vs.” column). This list is by no means exhaustive, authoritative or even authentic, and the author strongly expresses the opinion that you do not try this at home.

List of luminaries with brief biographies, often true. (Part 1)

Ranjit Singhji: One of the first great Indian cricketing heroes. Singhji was “The cricketer formally known as “Prince”". His most famous exploits include obtaining a UK visa and work permit and inventing the Leg Glance, a move whereby when friends’ sisters walks by in a short skirts you make a sweeping cricket shot action imitation thereby looking at their legs but not getting caught. Famously, Ranjit Singhji once fell ill after a mixing some bad milk in his cup of Darjeeling and could only bowl a single over. In spite of this he got 3 wickets through judicious use of line and length. This is immortalized today in the famous “Corridor of Uncertain Tea”. He names lives on to this day in the form of the tournament named after him, the “Coca-Cola Cup”.

Gundappa Viswanath: Widely considered the greatest left-handed batsmen from Andhra with a moustache to play in the 60s, in Indian History. Played several crucial test innings for India, many times pulling India back from the brink of complete disaster, taking them to mere comprehensive defeats. He was a daring, brave batsman who stood fearless in the face of the quickest bowlers, primarily because he was blinded by his moustache. Renowned for his deft footwork, he once, after being bowled for duck, moonwalked all the way back to the pavilion. His first name means “Fat Papa” in Tamil and this ensured constant victory for India against the Sri Lankans who could not bowl at him with a straight face.

Sunil Gavaskar: The first big international Indian cricket star. Scored thousands upon thousands of runs in a career that spanned several millions of balls left outside off-stump. He was affectionately known as Sunny, the Little Master and that little Prick though the first two were rarely used. He was a tireless team player and inspiring captain who often shouldered a lot of the batting burden and most of the match fees single-handedly. Gavaskar was a cricketer who patiently waited for the loose ball and once did so for three whole days in a limited overs match before stadium security politely asked him to leave. Gavaskar became the captain of India in 1982 taking on the mantle from Srinivasaraghavan Venkataraghavan, an accomplished cricketer himself, who retired from cricket in protest after it became mandatory to wear kits with one’s full name on the back.

Ravi Shashtri: Holds the record for maximum sixes hit in one over with 6 against Tilak Raj in Bombay. Shastri would have hit more but little Tilak had maths homework and a Social Studies test the next day and we all know how bad 7th standard CBSE is. Shastri was one of our first great all-rounders and once, in a remarkable game in the 1987 tour of Ooty and Coimbatore, Shastri bowled himself around the legs. Ravi Shastri was the heartthrob of millions of women in the late 80s and early 90s and was considered a great looker. This has now been found to be an error due to primitive TV broadcasting technology. He is now a well-known and respected cricket commentator. Fiercely patriotic, he recently pegged India to win all the one-days in the South African tour of Sri Lanka.

Kapil Dev: Explosive with the ball, dynamic with the bat and ridiculous with the English language, Kapil Dev was the life of many humorous post-match press conferences. Dev often stood alone in the face of adversity and dragged India out of tight spots. His 175 run innings in Tunbridge Wells is a classic and some of his shots continue to orbit the Earth to this day bouncing off space stations and interfering with TV broadcasts (see Ravi Shastri above.) Kapil Dev was also one of the first few cricketers to make it big in the world of advertising and synonymous with the caption: “Boost is the secret of my enema. Our enema. (Smile)” Nowadays he is a successful entrepreneur and often appears on TV when he roots for India from his heart saying: “India needs to play the games with the heart and the tactics is nice if then the whole together comes… err… boost is the secret of my enema…”

Krishnamachari Srikkanth: A dynamic one-day player who pioneered the technique of repeated letters in one’s name for good luck. Srikkanth was an explosive opening batsman who often stepped out of his crease and swung his bat with great gusto only to be stumped down leg side. He holds the record for maximum consecutives world cups without a haircut (4). Kris Srikkanth was the quintessential South Indian in the team who rapidly learned Hindi while playing for India, leading to an average of well over 4 run outs per match in the process. Today Kris is a passionate cricket commentator who can say “Oh shit, sorry” in over 14 north Indian languages.

Venkatesh Prasad: If Akthar is the “Rawalpindi Express” then for many years Venkatesh Prasad, a key part of the bowling attack, was affectionately called “The Slow Bangalore Passenger That Is Currently Broken Down At Palakkad Station. Passengers approach ticket counter for refund please.” Despite several key wickets, Prasad was not a pacey bowler but instead used a bewildering array of slow, slower and slowest balls to vex batsmen. In the 1992 World Cup he bowled a slow one to Wasim Akram that has not reached the batsman to this day. He was a pioneer of the “Intimidation” school of fielding whereby you do not run for the ball but merely try to stop it by looking at it gravely.

Anil Kumble: Named after the Anil Kumble Circle in Bangalore, where he grew up learning to bowl, Kumble continues to be one of the spinning maestros in the country. However he is not a big mover of the ball but instead unleashes a repertoire of balls so complicated even he does not know what he is doing. He holds the record for having captured 10 wickets in a single test innings but honestly cannot explain how. The author has a particular grouse with Mr. Kumble for having released a shitty cricket video game that the author’s brother forced him to buy. The game has graphics reminiscent of a Rohrschach Test and game play marginally more engaging than digging one’s nose. Kumble is frequently a useful all-rounder and was the first Indian to achieve the “supreme” double of 400 wickets taken and 4000 misfields.

Sachin Tendulkar: No one makes fun of Sachin. Not even me.

Sanjay Manrekar: Manjrekar is an exciting top order batsman with an amazing repertoire of shots. If you play him in that stupid Anil Kumble game that is. In real life he was often called a text-book cricketer, in the sense that watching him bat was like reading a macro-economics text book. Sanjay Manjrekar was full of technique and single-handedly developed 2567 ways of padding upto an off-spinner. His moment of glory was during the Ashes Test of 1994 when Imran Khan approached him and accepted defeat as several of the Pakistani players were collapsing from brain inactivity. Manjrekar valiantly declined and went on to score an astounding century in just under a fortnight.

Venkatpathy Raju: With tremendous movement off the pitch especially in windy gusty weather, Venkatpathy Raju is one of the lightest players to have ever played the game. His bowling, on the other hand, was tricky especially because of a complete lack of speed. Raju bowled with such little pace and his ball took so long to come that batsmen often practiced facing him by getting friends and relatives to courier cricket balls overnight to them through local courier companies.

That was the first edition of this special blog series on Indian cricket greats. Hope you enjoyed these brief character profiles and you often burst out, like Azhar, with the words: “Wow!! This I will do for free…” More exciting profiles of Indian cricketing heroes coming soon. Stay tuned.

(p.s. Before anyone gets worked up I know they were all brilliant cricketers and all this is just a joke. Except of course in case of Venkatesh Prasad. So please relax. And dont send hate mail please…)

Pardon me for the delay. I swear I have been trying to write all day. If only my computer would not shut down every fifteen minutes. But I am sure it has a very good reason. Just a few minutes ago, for instance, it shut down a few nanoseconds after a sad, sober announcement. A pop-up window mentioned solemnly that “Machi there is a romba serious error in location E12333:34. Very sorry da.” (After a brief sojourn in a Chennai netcafe my laptop has never been the same again.) My CD drive made a little whirring sound. And then there was complete silence. This is, of course, is not a common occurrence. Most days when I power up it makes 7 beeps on working days, 9 beeps on weekends (except second saturday which, everyone knows, is holiday) and 11 beeps on bank holidays and shuts down instantly. But this silent demise was not a good sign.

So the other day my laptop, in a fit of entrepreneurial alacrity, decided to start up and shut down all by itself. While initially I found this rather proactive of it, it got tedious after 45 minutes. I was infuriated and gingerly hurled the machine against a particularly roguish part of the wall, from whence it bounced off, landed on my beanbag, slalomed down rapidly, elegantly bounced on the marble floor and landed squarely on the little toe of my right foot. The CD drive gave one last whirr of triumph before falling silent.

I have a history with computers. The first time I saw one in my father’s office I was fascinated. I was particularly impressed by the CAPS LOCK function and the floppy drive. My father sat next to me and taught me to how to use the mouse, type small letters and even how to use a wonderful little program to draw pictures. After a few minutes of incessant clicking and draggin I unveiled a rough, but imaginative profile of a double-humped camel to everyone in Mr. Vadukut’s office. They all nodded their heads in approval and there was wide consensus that, for my age, I had drawn an excellent picture of a sunflower.

Boom! one-nothing to the computer.

My first own computing device was an Atari TV game. I must have spend weeks in front of the TV with my trusty Atari console by my side. Then after two months I finally got the video to work and played a lusty game of basketball against the computer losing by a respectable margin of 240 - 12. I never recovered from that entirely. This relentless inferiority to computing devices often went public with disastrous consequences. Video game arcades were the absolute worst self-esteeming usurping exercise. My friends were all whiz-kids who completed Super Mario and Space Invaders several times between lunch and tea. I was however pathetic at all of them. So much so once, amidst a particularly hideous game of “World Cup Footbal 1990″ my team walked off the pitch and refused to come back till I let someone else take over.

Thankfully I was exposed to little by way of computing in school except for the stray class in BASIC or MSDOS. I was not too bad at that honestly and except once, when I overclocked the computer so much it burst into flames and took down the computer lab and an adjoining indoor stadium, nothing of note hppened. But this meant I was not even remotely prepared for what awaited me in engineering college. Engineering college was the absolute nadir of my stormy relations with computers, scientific calculators, and zippers, though here I wil talk only of the first one.

Now I was one who had deliberately decided to stay away from any degree courses that might remotely be related to computing, electronics or mathematics. Which left only courses like Metallurgy, Civil or Chemical engineering. Now besides UDCT, which I lost by a single mark, there were few chemical engineering seats of high quality. And, as anyone who has been around a large construction site may have noticed, civil engineering isn’t. So metallurgy it was. I loved chemistry and was told by a learned uncle that metallurgy had a lot of chemistry. That turned out to be completely false and taught me to never ask my uncle, a bakery owner and part-time landscaping designer, for educational advice. The only chemistry in four years of engineering was the little bit I had with a buxom little assistant in Basic Chemistry Lab. Boy, she was quite an item and was absolutely wicked when engorossed in titration. (For the non-scientific titration is a chemical process and not, as you might think, wife telling husband “No darling, one today and the other tomorrow…”)

But I digress. The point was in third year, to my considerable chagrin, I notice that we had something tucked away in our syllabus waiting to pounce out unawares. Computer Programming in Fortran and C. The effect this had on my morale was devestating. Metallurgy is otherwise a remarkably simple course to pass. You only had to turn up for class and the degree was yours. But Fortran and C changed everything. This meant we had to learn, remember and even be able to program. And suddenly all the Computer Science guys were looking at us and smirking.

I hated the Computer Science guys. They called themselves the CompScis (pronounced Komskees) and were often seen using computers and engaged in incomprehensible conversation. And within this group was an even more bewildering group called the Coimbscis. They were not just Compscis, but also were all from Coimbatore. I was frendly with many of them, but often they fell into long tirades I could never comprehend. For example a joke would go like this:

“So there is this guy… blah blah blah… Silicon Graphics… Device drivers… blah blah… and… (pause for punchline)

“…he finds that his RAM had actually overflowed 4.3 million schnitzelblimps!!!”

Everyone would burst out laughing with cries of “sooper” “ayyo” and “too much da machi…” I would laugh along whole heartedly as well but mostly at my own ignorance. So when JKR walked into class for our first Fortran lecture I was fairly tense.

But JKR was even more tense. JKR is the sort of prof who really knows his stuff well but cant speak to an audience if his life depended on it. Which meant JKR would completely go to bits in front of a classroom. First his palms would shiver, then his whole arm and before long his torso and limbs would have decided that it was better for everyone if they went their separate ways and saw other people. Once JKR walked into class and began a session on nested fruity loops when suddenly he stopped mid-sentence and started to slowly, yet with steady determination, topple to one side. Thankfully for him LKT was seated at the front bench that eventful day.
LKT was a monument of a man. He was huge and built like a tank. And he was scary. For example:

LKT: Hey guys lets go for lunch da
Me: Yup. I am damn hungry. I could eat a horse.
LKT: Ah then you must have it cooked in a cashew gravy with a roomali rotis. You don’t get good horse nowadays though.
Me: Gulp. Correct.

LKT jumped from his seat, walked through his table and swept the wilting JKR in his arms and off his feet. JKR was out of service for a week or so. LKT was teased a bit for a few days till he picked up a classmate and flung him over the compound wall to Dindigul, a place near Pondicherry.

I still cannot fathom why we were asked to do some of he things we did. For example we were asked to write a program that made prime numbers appear in the form of a symmetrical triangle. (Man even now I can never find out why we did that…) In another instant I sat in the computer facility for 47 hours straight, 3 of which awake, trying to write a program that took 2 numbers as input and gave the lowest prime number between them as a result. When JKT walked over to my terminal I was absolutely sure my code was excellent. He entered 4, 28. The code replied with surprising confidence: “glix@”. There was a minute of silence after which JKT confirmed that glix@ was not a prime number and I had to redo the exercise.

Business school was much better though. The extent of computational complexity was limited to making Excel spreadsheets do insane things. Now let me tell you something about spreadsheets. Spreadsheets, with some practice, can do some pretty amazing things. Besides a host of mathematical and statistical functions, spreadsheets can also graph, approximate, manage data, and in one memorable incident, finished a game of solitaire in a mere 34 seconds.

I used spreadsheets for a variety of uses and, in Marketing 2, with a lot of graphs in upto 3 colours, proved that the national demand for motorcars in India in 2008 would be 4.82 cars. (This does not include imports and, you must admit, is much more accurate than glix@)

After two years of using a little excel and a lot of “Web History Sweeper” I came out with a diploma and destiny full of powerpoint. But honestly Powerpoint is an amazing piece of work and makes even the most stupid statements like “Diversification often leads to dilution of equity and shareholder benefit-evaluation mental paradigms” seem like profound observations. Apparently you can also make graphs in Powerpoint, but I think that is a baseless rumour.

(A complete chapter will be dedicated to powerpoint soon…)

So there. Computing and the author have never got along quite well. We keep making jibes at each other every few days. If you are a technology-challenged person like me there is one gospel truth you need to know. This is the bloody crux of this post. Even if you dont take anything else away from this post, remember this: All computers…

WAIT… NO!!… Dammit… Beep Beep Beep. Whirr.

(p.s. Expect a startling revelation about career moves soon…)

This friday I made a startling discovery in the office. It was four pm and as usual I was busy battling with the printer to get a couple of important print-outs. After twenty minutes of pressing all the buttons on the printer and some on the adjoint shredder for good measure I was forced to call in the local IT expert. We gathered around the printer trying to make sense of the teeny two line LCD display and the absurd messages it flashed at two minute intervals. It was a rather newish HP printer that was loaded with the latest in cutting-edge customer friendly software which ensures “thousands of trouble-free printer outs”. The IT expert soon smiled to himself and set to work. ‘It takes a deft hand you know” he said, as he switched the printer off and then on again. After warming up for sometime it flashed “Paper Jam” quickly three times in quick succession, made a gleeful choking sound and then triumphantly went quite. The LCD display said, with a resounding look of self-satisfaction, “Phyrds Uykl 33″. My IT expert confirmed that this was not one of the listed responses in the customer-friendly infomation booklet and may take some more time and effort to repair. I was frustrated, it was already 4:30 and I had to get that print-out or it would be the end of my weekend. In a fit of rage I asked him: “Kya fax machine kaam kar raha hai?…”

Silence settled on the office suddenly yet quietly, briefly reminding me of several occasions when the Non-veg Kebab platter was brought to the table at Tomatoes in Ahmedabad. But soon that memory faded when the IT expert turned to me and said. “Kar rahi hai…, Fax machine kaam kar rahi hai…” I was curtly reminded of the fact that in the Hindi language the Fax Machine, that block of pastic, electronics, and heavily miniaturised cd-changer full of assorted beeping noises, was indeed a female. I apologised and just to show that I had caught on, I sashayed over to her, the fax machine, and picked up one of the many pieces of paper in her inbox. I stood ramrod straight, looked out over the office full of expectant eyes and said “Yeh fax bahut acchi hai…” The ensuing rush of Tangdi Kebab memories meant I had goofed up again. Damn it!! I can never get Hindi…

It all begins many years ago. Back when i was just a kid with all the good looks, snappy wit and dreamy eyes I have today but a little less facial hair. Overhearing what my dad told the cabbie everyday I quickly picked up my first words of Hindi. “Doosre Parking sign se right lena”. When I turned old enough to travel in a Cab on my own I confidently mouthed those words just after the cab went past the roundabout. Of course I never knew what they meant exactly. But having seen many Hindi movies I worked it out to mean, roughly of course, “please take me to that red building with the grocery shop on the front near the parking.”. One friday evening coming back from a friend’s birthday party the cabbie went the other way around the colony and I was put in a spot. I tried saying ‘doosre parking se right lena’ a couple of times in succession, but I was soon very lost and was subject to interesting Hindi from the cabby some of which I continue to decipher to this day. (An interesting usage involving “stupid kid”, “large piece of wood’, and “back side” haunts me in sleep sometimes…)

Ironically this did not mean I was bad in Hindi at school. Oh no no. On the other hand I did pretty good in the subject. My mother, quickly noted that I was languishing in the low “F”s in Hindi while even in Physical Education I was scoring commendable “middle-D”s. I was quickly put on a regime of daily one hour sessions of Hindi which involved committing to memory large tracts of Hindi poetry and prose, not even leaving out the merest of punctuation marks. It would go:yadda yadda yadda full stop, yadda, comma, yadda yadda exclamation mark. I was soon regurgitating my way into the statospheric high-Bs in Hindi. All this without understanding a word of what I was committing to memory. (Students out there should not try this yourself. Especially if your learning neurosurgery, nuclear detonation and stuff like that.) There were rude shocks to this strategy of course. Once, in a fit of uncalled for spontaneity, my Hindi teacher slipped in a short essay question into the half-yearly exam. To be written in, shudder, your own words.

For half an hour I watched, with loathing in my eyes, my hindi-speaking classmates hunched over whipping up paeans on the “Weather of your home state”, or “The importance of science” depending on which one they chose. Finally I picked up my pencil and went for it. For the next two weeks, every Hindi class, I held my breath as the Hindi teacher walked in, hoping that she was not carrying a pile of thin pink test notebooks. One of those notebooks had a brief description of the rains of kerala in a language that was a melange of bad hindi, english and malayalam. All in devanagri script of course. Then one day she walked in with those books and there was much laughing, roaring of rips and loss of self esteem after that.

But there was no respite. I tried picking up bits and pieces from the weekly Hindi movie on TV but then how many 7th standard essays can you write with an assorted vocabulary of haraam zaades, khoon pee jaoonga and rishte me mein tere baap something something. (Though I did manage to once start an essay on domestic animals with the words “Duniya mein do tarah ke pashu hote hain, domestic and wild…”)

And as the years went by things were getting difficult. In class 9th I begged my dad to let me shift to french. Everyone else in the school did, bar 10 or so people. And I was one of them. While the french guys gallivanted with their foreign textbooks and 95+ percent class averages we struggled with Subhadrakumari Chauhan and Harivanshrai Bacchan. Mind you I am sure the poetry was immaculate and the prose was stirring. The native hindi-speakers often rose in raptures when our teacher explained some of the finer points of some of the poems. I did understand some of the couplets by Kabeer and Tulsidas. Alas the inevitable happened, I flunked in Hindi. Out of a maximum possible 100 marks I had scored 16 in total. 8 marks came from some fill in the blank type question set and some true-or-false type questions.

This of course meant I needed to get private tuition. In hindsight Mr. Tripathi looked exactly like Amitabh Bhachchan in Bunty and Babli. He always wore Ray-bans, had that rustic charm around him and spoke English like a true Hindi teacher. “Next month fool reeveezun okay?” The first day he came he spoke to me non-stop about how he was trying to get a driving license and had been at it for years. In chaste Hindi. It was not a gentle baptism. By the end of the year I had learnt well. My hindi was ok, but my real skill was at listening to people and nodding my head at the just the right spots without understanding a single word. Tripathi sir got his license on the seventh attempt or so.

Of course its not all my fault you know. Hindi is a terrible language if your not tuned in well enough. There’s that gender problem of course. Every bloody thing has to be male or female. Hindi-speakers do not enjoy the comfort of an ambiguous “it”. Ask them how they know whats a “he” and whats not and they will just smile. Yes we mallus might speak like the babbling of a brook, but we know better than to make a coconut palm a he. Or a she. Dammit. (No but it has nuts jokes please.)

Then there is the merciless use of emphasis to add a little twist into an already infuriating language. How many mallus have been laughed at for downing a few drinks, raising there arms and singing out loud “Khajra Re” instead of “Kajra Re”. Oh yes and we can never get enough of the “Hahahah he said KANA instead of KHANA…” little witticism. That pronounciation will be the end of me. I have often made my maid at home think she is a close male relation. She burns the dal when I do that.

But I think its all a huge conspiracy. A conspiracy to poke fun at non-natives. Otherwise why would have a perfect ek, do, teen, char, sade char, sade paanch system. And then screw it all up with dhed, dhai, savva and other hideous fractions. Only so that around lunch time in the office they can ask you the time and then grin and titter when you say saade ek. Those fractions can have no other purpose. Once I went all around Wadala market trying to flaunt my knowledge of dhed, savva, dhai and so forth. I was out buying vegetables but very soon it all fell apart. By the time I was done shopping I had enough provisions to cook a small bowl or two of rice, several tons of karela sabji with a kilo or two of salt thrown in. It was a disaster. But whenever I go back there is a sparkle in the eyes of them vendors. Especially the karela guy.

But according to me the greatest conspiracy of all is expressly meant to prevent mallus, tams, gults and the like from marrying into Hindi-speaking families. It is a move of ethnic-purity maintenance par excellence. In a flash of brilliance they have ensured that no sanity-loving young boy will ever woo a hindi-speaking maiden if he did not know the language himself. To ensure you never fit in, the Hindi language has created a puzzling array of terms for every possible relationship in the family. So by the time you are done meeting the Chacha, chachi, bhabhi, jija, nana, nani, kaka, dada, dadi, lala, mama, mami, potha, pothi, tau and of course the didi of devar fame, you no longer know who is married to whom and who fathered whom. Soon you are frothing at the mouth, your head is spinning and in a fit of confusion request your girlfriend for her second cousin’s hand in marriage… master stroke I tell you… I once even called someone at a very hindi dominated wedding a “bhajji” by mistake. Thankfully they were not from Chennai and did not realize I was calling them deep fried vegetable in gram flour dough.

Aha. But try we must. The other day a Taxi driver incessantly harangued me for an hour from Bandra to Wadala in the purest, most passionate marathi. I nodded, sombrely hmmed and once, just past the Don Bosco church, laughed with him heartily at a particularly lewd joke. I never understood a single word of what he said. Tripathi had taught me well indeed. Anyways it is a working day and I must go now. As I once heartily proclaimed while leaving a friend’s house in delhi, “Chalo mein ja rahi hoon…” Yes you can laugh now, haraam zaade… zaadi… zaada…Crap.

p.s. I have just been told my a close confidante that lala is not actually a bonafide Hindi relation. In place of that please read phoopha. No I am serious.