Stuff..

* Thierry Henry has gone from football’s elite to football’s cheat. France will be doomed if they don’t replay their match with Ireland.

* Is it just me, or has no one else found it maddeningly ironic that David Headley, the suspect in the Mumbai terror attack, stayed at the Jewish Chabad house in Pune.

* Ali Campbell and UB40 are so simply wonderful that I danced and sang along more for those 60 minutes of watching them live than I have for any other band. Which makes you wonder why reggae is a dead genre. Have ska and hip-hop hijacked it?

Re-Union Jack

Inevitably, it has happened.
I’ve watched for the better part of five years now how the internet (social networking sites in particular), has spawned school reunions.
I have had to suffer old school pictures of friends as ugly bugs, and then the ususal too-smart-for-their-own-good and suffocatingly indulgent captions that accompany the reunion pics as well.
Facebook has finally snaked a whole bunch of school buddies back into my life.
I organised everything in school. From the devious, to the defiant, to the downright disastrous.
They want me to do it again. Bring them all together. I can’t wait.

Who can knock-down the Pacman?

Over the years the more I watched of Ali’s boxing matches the more I was convinced that the secret to his success lay as much in giving a beating as it did in taking one. He could absorb punishment and there is nothing more defeating for a boxing opponent than to see that your punches don’t matter.
Manny Pacquiao is the same. I’ve watched the last four of his fights and nobody hit him as much as Miguel Coutto the other day. And Manny looked as fresh as roses.
Floyd Mayweather Jr do you have the balls? Manny does.

The same Ramakant Achrekar drivel

As the media try to get a collective orgasm going over Sachin Tendulkar’s 20 years in cricket, I am dismayed.
No article on how the man who holds every cricket record failed to propel India to any.
Or, how Hansie Cronje worked out how to get him out inside his first 15 runs.
Or, how Tendulkar is the most boring person to watch when he does not have the bat in his hand.
A tribute is about finding the flaw despite the genius and then using that to flesh out the reality of this person’s private-public existence and contribution.

Abu Dhabi makes Dubai another Sharjah

Back in the day, when Dubai was booming, the whites would mock the Indians for living in Sharjah and working in Dubai, putting up with an hour and a half of traffic, one way. Now as Dubai dusts the effects of the bust off, the money has moved to Abu Dhabi, and so have the goras.
However, Abu Dhabi is now even costlier to live in than Dubai was. So the goras, and whoever else cares to, travel an hour and a half, one way, to work there.
Sum result: Abu Dhabi has made Dubai another Sharjah. Fancy that!

How dare they!?

At Mumbai international airport I nearly dropped dead at the bookstore. The shelves were filled with Indians writing English novels. So intimidated was I, that I nearly fainted.
What were all these Indians doing writing English novels? And who was publishing them? And who would read my first (Booker-winning, no less) book if there was such a crowd out there? Indians were not supposed to be so prolific about writing in English. And publishers were only supposed to pick those that had genius potential (ahem!). I did not buy any of these new writers. I just turned and ran.

Seeking God in money

Two Lords of Mammon have spoken seeking an association with the Lord of Mammals (and pretty much everything else).
Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, believes banks serve a social purpose and are doing "God's work".
Barclays CEO John Varley took it one step further and spoke at the lectern in St. Martin-in-the-Fields. “Profit is not satanic,” he said.
Evidence of the fact that no market or socio-political system is truly ‘free’ of morality.
Of course, any true spiritual seeker knows, the soul and money are mutually exclusive – leave alone wealth.
Make money boys, but don’t spiritualise it.