Not me, not you either, I hope

I hope I am not the one they were speaking about when they said, “Build it and they will come.”
It implies I am part of a herd, with no discernment. A slave to the prevailing ethic.
I feel the same way as an Indian cricket fan. The attitude that how the IPL is held, built, played and structured does not matter. As long as there is cricket for two months, “they will watch.”
The great Indian (upper) middle class has long been lulled into a herd blinded by materialism, hurtling towards chaos, driven by media frenzy. Not me.

Fixed!

Pritish Nandy wrote in his column for the Times of India city supplement, quoting Deep Throat – Follow the money.
A cousin of mine who is a big better and I did this for the Deccan versus Chennai semifinal. Follow the money in cricket always, always leads to the bookies. At the break, with Chennai scoring 142, the odds for Deccan were still 40 paise. And Chennai was 2-1. That is off. Way off. Deccan should have been 20 paise at most and Chennai at least 4-1. Then there is Deccan dropping Chaminda Vaas and ten catches. It stinks man.

Negating Messi

I have now watched two teams contain Lionel Messi. Espanyol and Inter Milan. So it is possible.
How I curse Michael Carrick for costing Manchester United a semifinal spot. Alas this also exposes Arsenal for the team they really are – technically-gifted kids. They will always be a team of kids if they don’t learn that the aim of football is to win. It is the only thing that matters.
It seems strange watching the Champions League semifinals without Man Utd in it. They’ve been there so often recently. Perhaps this year is all about reality checks. Oh, dear.

Political speak

Can’t escape the Tharoor-Modi controversy. In a true coup de grace, Tharoor delivered his statement in Parliament with all the style, panache and sincerity of a seasoned diplomat. Problem is, not many in Parliament would have understood the words he used. Of course, it was not for them that he spoke, but for the millions of middle-class admirers he (and NDTV) claims to have.
I enjoyed Supriya Sule’s statement much more. She spoke in clean, clear English, without the shwazz, but will all the intent that someone who really has power (and knows it) brings to the table.

Can you feel it coming...

Don’t tell me that you cannot sense the earth cranking up for one major, species-altering disaster. Just look at the global natural chaos. A quake almost every other day. And how terrorists would love to get their hands on an active volcano!?
I am about to go to my banks and tell them I am too big to fail, so they can stop bothering me with payments until someone comes and bails me out. They will probably jail me. But, that pales in comparison to the global natural disaster that is knocking at our doorstep. I mean, Jaysus!

Cringe with me

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at Shashi Tharoor’s resignation. To make matters worse I took the past week off and was tortured in minute detail by the whole Modi-Tharoor-Sunanda saga, as I made my way from bed to dinner table to couch to bed, the TV forever on in the background.
Politics as farce, cricket as politics and carpetbaggers are backed by overlords. A truly cringe-worthy affair almost making me wish I was not an Indian. And believe me that takes a lot.
But I’m back, none the wiser, a few pounds heavier and slowly dying.

Get over it!

What do you do when your team loses in the quarterfinal of the Champions League?
Do you go get a life? Do you drown your sorrows? Do you stalk the opposing team’s star player, rape his mother and wife, then cut his penis and make them eat it? No? Then what?
Perhaps, you try to let it go. You try to learn to live with the pain and disappointment and hope for a better result the next time. It’s been three days, and it still feels like shit. So I’m headed for UFC 112, ‘live’. Maybe that’ll do it.

Go crazy! Genius at play

If you didn’t watch Lionel Messi last night then you missed something akin to, I dunno, Haley’s Comet? Not quite, because Messi will play again. In fact, he will play a lot between now and August, when the World Cup ends.
But, catch his display, and catch every kid you can, and let them watch what is surely the crowning glory for us homospaiens – genius at play. Genius - for whom the word exists. Genius – who lifts your spirits and leave you awestruck. Genius - of the caliber of Mozart and Van Gogh. Sheer, pure, magical, genius.

Save the church

I am a Catholic and I am embarrassed by the way the Vatican is handling these allegations of child sex abuse by priests.
I can only shudder to think the kind of cover-up that may, and I say this completely hypothetically, have been enforced in other parts of the world, especially in third-world countries.
I have been reasonably closely involved with the Catholic Church in India to see first-hand how a belief becomes an institution and then that institution becomes the belief. It’s no one’s fault, it’s just evolution.
Only the church – us - can save the church.

Spectacular, spectacular

To get it spectacularly wrong, you must get it spectacularly right enough of times.
Once that adjective is your prerogative, there is no such thing as a minor goof-up. All one’s frailties are played in major keys by an orchestra of gleeful naysayers. The word really is schadenfraude.
Of course, I speak not entirely of myself, but to an extent of Dubai, and basically about Sir Alex Ferguson grand-god-father to my children (though he doesn’t know it) and the boss of my beloved Manchester United.
The team he picked to play Bayern Munich should have played Chelsea and vice-versa.