Adios Amigos Sachin! (Yawn! Yawn! yet another Sachin farewell blog it is!!!)

We remember not the scores and the results in after years; it is the men who remain in our minds, in our imagination. – Nevile Cardus

The boy, the man, the master, the legend and finally THE GOD (notice that I have used definite article ‘THE’ for God too) was how he was addressed all along over the last 2 decades. If there was a tradition of beatification in cricket no one better would qualify to be conferred the sainthood other than SACHIN RAMESH TENDULKAR.

I never wanted to write a tribute on him ever since he had overstayed his welcome over the last few years, but then, why not, he has taken the liberty to do so in the last couple of years after we took the liberty to venerate him for 2 decades prior to that. Fair enough I thought.

Writing a piece on a cricketer is a tall ask and greatly depends on, the on and off field personality of the particular individual. For example a piece on Rahul Dravid will evoke Poetry, while the one on Laxman will be tailored Prose and the one on Dada Saurav Ganguly might be in the lines of a Bollywood blockbuster screenplay. Mind you, all the above people and the associated emotions were part of the Sachin saga for a considerable period of those 24 years, just that you had to write an epic and epics don’t sell in this era of messaging, tweeting, poking and posting.

While a piece on Sachin is any day a number crunching statistician’s delight, I don’t intend to take that route going by what the great Sir Nevile Cardus said , It is the man that should remain in our minds and imaginations not his scores or the results. I can assure you that no one better than the ones belonging to the same peer group can do justice to this quote. Yours truly is also from the same period as all the above legendary cricketers, the only difference being I wished too like them to retire at 40 but that never was to be, for obvious reasons.

We grew up together if I can take the liberty to say so. Just that he grew and grew while we grew. I was 17 when Sachin made his debut in the winter of ’89, to be precise this day the 15th of November circa 1989, and you can imagine the dilemma of a passionate cricket loving fan in the erstwhile Madras at the age of 17 just 4 months away from that one all important exam in life that determined whether you made it to an A grade or a B grade Engineering college and nothing else. There comes along a boy just about your age making a statement that he has arrived on the world scene. Can be intimidating when, after work sheet after work sheet of solving calculus or deciphering the bonding in Organic Chemistry you still didn’t know what lies ahead of you in the next 6 months.

His stay at the crease over the last 24 years has caused many a marital discord at home, mother-son conflicts were plenty, production efficiencies were affected across companies, folks missed trains or flights, candidates arrived late for interviews that changed careers. So these could be blemishes when it comes to considering his credentials before ordaining sainthood on him. There were times he not only controlled the emotions of a billion plus people but also controlled their bowel movements and their bladder functioning. There were days when you were hesitant to take time off when he was playing to relieve yourself for the fear of missing out on an exquisite cover drive.

One thing that sets him apart from the many greats, some even more talented than him, was his self-discipline at his chosen profession and in his personal life. It wasn’t the technique, it wasn’t skill it was sheer discipline coupled with some in born talent that got him to where he reached. Talking about discipline I would like to go back to the much written about series in which he abstained from playing the fatal cover drive that had accounted for his downfall many a times just prior to that particular one. This abstinence by Sachin from cover drives even when a half volley was bowled outside the off stump put him on an orbit above sage Vishwamitra who faltered in his attempt at asceticism at the sight of Menaka. Probably that’s when I guess people started calling him God.

Being served brickbats and bouquets at regular intervals are the order of the day for any sportsperson in India more so for a cricketer, the blame should be squarely on us, the fans. As I am writing this I get a viral tweet that Sachin’s total test runs prior to the 200th test match were 15,847 which happened to be India’s Independence Day. Wonder how much more fanatic can a fan get! The same fans would have thought twice before mentioning this esoteric statistic had he fallen exactly 1000 runs short. We are not a sporting nation nor are we a sportive nation. We create them, we deify them and we banish them almost at ease. Sachin’s experience has not been any different from the rest before him nor is it going to be any better for those who are going to come after him, but the man had his head pretty square and rose above it all like a colossus ending his career blemish less.

Well recently when asked what cricket meant to him he said it was like oxygen to him, sure it was, he came at a time when Indian cricket was almost in an ICU and he kept supplying oxygen cylinders ever since. Thank you Sachin for the lovely moments and sorry for baying for your blood the last two years, after all we are just mortal Indian cricket fans. We are like that only!!!

Iconic Emotions!

There were times in life when you really wanted to express yourself with emotions and these emotions where manifested physically like stimulating the lachrymal glands to secrete tears or follow a complicated physiological process involving the cerebellum and the frontal lobe of the brain to stimulate laughter or simply a warm tight hug that felt good. In college we used to give each other a high five if any 2 of us had flunked the same number of papers those were emotions that showed sorrow, joy and the sharing of both.

The last few days I was hooked onto the new kid on the social networking block Whatsapp and got together with friends who parted ways 25 years back to form a group. We exchanged pleasantries, jokes, life and philosophy but I realised most of our conversations was ‘punctuated’ with funny looking shapes and it was the most intimidating part of the virtual reunion at least for a not so text savvy person like me. I’m not naïve and I know what a smiley is and incidentally that is the only emoticon that I know, the cute yellow chubby smiling stuff that you find everywhere. But what got me writing this piece is that after I cracked a wit in the group I get a smiley with an open mouth and tears and boy sure was I disappointed! I figured out later that it was a representation of laughing to the extent that causes tears!!!

Wiki defines an emoticon (/ɨˈmoʊtɨkɒn/) as a metacommunicative pictorial representation of a facial expression which in the absence of body language and prosody serves to draw a receiver's attention to the tenor or temper of a sender's nominal verbal communication, changing and improving its interpretation.

In short the two dimensional funny looking images that trace their roots to the humble punctuation marks that could make the likes of Shakespeare and co which includes my English teachers in school to turn in their graves at its fate. Emoticons were more an illegal off springs of English and Math in my opinion. How else do you think a colon that denotes a pause, separated from a parenthesis by a hyphen can end up representing a smiling face? Well I can live with simple stuff like that. There are some emotions that are ‘metacommunicatively’ communicated with complex special characters which I might not be able to express in flesh and blood. Do you know that an emotion as complex as ‘disappointed but relieved face’ can be expressed using an emoticon, give me a break, as a small experiment, all those who are reading this, please run to the nearest mirror and show the facial expression that denotes a disappointed but relieved face!!!!If it is anywhere close to this 😥 I will quit this blog of mine. I’m sure most of you will say that it looks exactly the same to save you the ordeals of having to read this time and again. There are even more complicated ones that denote an open mouth with cold sweat 😰, Open mouth I can understand but cold sweat? Well there are many more and I don’t want to look ignorant.

As though the metacomuunicative pictorial was not enough there were these set of abbreviated expressions to express emotions LOL, ROFL, ROFLMAO, LMAO. Growing up I have read the best of Wodehouse and other quality humour never have I rolled on the floor and laughed my ass off, had I done that I would have had a sore ass by now.

It’s ironic that I write this on the day Twitter went public with their IPO at NYSE and did fairly well. Though the emoticons and the abbreviated forms of expression where in use much earlier, thanks to Yahoo and Microsoft via their messengers that popularised it, Twitter was the one that created an entry barrier to expression of emotions via long prose by restricting the characters to 140. But why not, if a colon, a hyphen and a parenthesis which in all consists of just 3 characters can bring a smile to your face then you need not type the boring SMILE that uses up a precious 5 characters.

I’m on the lookout for a Rapidex guide to learn Emoticons in 30 day. Even if I lay my hands on one of them and master it, I would still prefer a warm hug or a palm reddening high five to the ROFLS, the LOLS and the confused cocktail of characters that mean nothing to me.

Emotions are to be expressed not represented.

Pot Philosophy

This is neither about raising a stink nor about being on a high. I was on a sabbatical from all forms of electronic media for the last few weeks as it was getting a little out of hand since the Barkhas and the Arnobs were competing with each other to drill their opinion down my head. So much so that a nervous breakdown was inevitable as a result of breaking news overdose. Thought it best to seek solace with an old friend, the print media.

Picked up the latest copy of the Outlook and walked into the most peaceful part of my house and the place where I get all inspirations from. Settled myself on the throne and started to read the cover story. It was about India's no 2 problem. We are not talking about a deputy to the Indian Prime Minister; even if that was the case it would have been a number 3 problem. It was nice to read that the who's who in Indian politics was vying with each other to stand up to the cause. All along they were at each other's throat as sitting MP's and occasional taking a hit at each other, no, I spelt both words right if you are wondering about a missing 'h' and a ‘s’.

Sanctity and sanitation were no longer at crossroads but the sanctity of sanitation certainly was. The debate over the old saying Cleanliness is next to Godliness was undergoing an image makeover. Political parties across right, left and center were challenging each other to rephrase it, and cutting across party lines and ideologies they settled on a rearranged version. They showed the courage to say Godliness was next to Cleanliness. It might be a small step but certainly will make a huge difference in our efforts to be a sanitation friendly state.

Parryware the legendary sanitary ware manufacturers were the first to position washrooms as Glamour-rooms. It showed the most sought after models endorsing candle lit glamour-rooms when a majority of Indian women had to walk miles to relieve themselves. The kind of evolution that is taking place in the design of cisterns is phenomenal. They have motorcycle shaped designs for the young and the adventurous heart shaped ones for the romantically inclined wonder why you would want to do it through the heart.

Move over the designer ware cisterns. This is the era of innovative Smart Potties. The crown amongst the throne is the one that can be controlled with your smart phone. I mean the smart phone can only trigger the lifting of the toilet seat and the flushing of the cistern and bidet not the urge itself. It doesn’t matter how smart you are or what app you may develop when you got to go you got to go!!! You can flush with, not flush down your android or your ios enabled phones. It can maintain a diary of the music you want to listen to and play it from an in built speaker, depending on the situation you are in it can play a Beethoven or a Metallica.

The sad part is all these developments are aimed at improving your comfort during your stay in there. These days with the foray of international sanitary ware manufacturers making a beeline to tap into the potential real estate market in India, I feel it should be made mandatory as part of their corporate social responsibility to offer at least 1 pot along with a shelter from their basic model for every 50 they sell.

So all of you out there, as you sit in there like androids or monks in deep thought trying to hit upon that game changing idea and run out like Archimedes, spare a thought for the millions of less fortunate who have to walk miles or stand in long queues for the same.

We all know **it happens….but I believe that we as a community can make it happen in a more pleasant way for the less fortunate around us.

The back to school market mania.

The last week saw the reopening of schools after the summer break in the part of the world I live and was surprised at the back to school offers. Newspapers carried entire supplements screaming offers on all the wares a school kid needs.

There were sections dedicated to Pens, Pencils, sharpeners, erasers (rubbers for less initiated ones like me), style statements and gadgets. Why was there a back to school offer on cars by a leading car maker I wonder.

A leading writing instrument manufacturer was promoting a pencil and promising you ‘unbreakable creativity’ with an ABS on their pencils. They call it Anti Break System. I was given to believe that their lead breaking was controlled thanks to a protective coating. Pencils were made out of wood from PEFC certified sustainably managed forests. God knows what it means. The only time I felt a pencil was more complicated than rocket science. Pens were competing with each other on low friction and the meters of writing it produced. One even compensated the flow of ink for the rapid changes in air around, which was some fluid dynamics I thought. They came in shades, sporty, casual, bright and pop style. After analysing a few, the clear winner was a Xylene and toluene free pen that did a cool 1200M of writing and also came in even cooler colours. Whattay design!!!

Another was selling a pen that was fade proof, fraud proof, and time proof. I wonder why they did not think about all these when I was younger but I almost got the answer immediately. Our passions never faded, we were too innocent to indulge in fraudulent activities and some of our memories were timeless.

The correction pens entered the fray as the saviour, after all the low friction, air adjusting smooth writing pens and more importantly your grey cells had failed you. Even these were competing with each other on their inbuilt evaporation system efficiencies.

Now the lead might not break but it sure does abrade away. So don’t we need a sharpener? The sharpener for me was my dad who never let me touch the blade when I was a kid. Well my kids are fortunate because my dad did not teach me how to sharpen a pencil with a blade so I had to buy my kids a sharpener. A sharpener with a built in option to adjust the degree of sharpness and point angle was on offer too.

Well there were offers for designer bags, school wear with ink resistant pocket, anti-bacterial socks and here I sense a small inter industry rivalry. When the pen makers are busy making anti leak pens the shirt makers are designing anti stain and ink resistant fabrics.

We as kids carried nice little bags made of khaki coloured ruck sack material and our back to school wares consisted of a black coloured fountain pen though the more fortunate ones carried a ‘HERO’ pen which had those nice shiny golden caps that sported a built-in filler. The lesser mortals carried the above mentioned fountain pens filled with ink from Bril ink bottles using a filler at home and exactly knew the quantity of ink required for a Maths, Science, English or a History paper. We also had a standby pen in case of any force majeure event. Additionally we carried a Nataraj pencil for all our drawings and a Red pencil that was our highlighter along with an eraser that could only erase pencils markings. So you actually had a small tolerance for error when using your pen and that was the perfection we were in pursuit of. There were shops that could replace nibs, clean feeders and other components of our pen and refurbish the same.

In the same back to school week, I had the privilege of attending a seminar by Mr Anand Kumar of the famed Super 30 Training institute of Bihar which churns out IITians year after year from the lower strata of the society. After his speech and his methodologies I realised, all that a child needed was a good teacher and not the best of infrastructure or instruments.

I wish to conclude by drawing your attention to a reply by a kid when asked what he considered his best talent was that I came across recently. The reply went thus ‘I’m trying to master the art of being good with people’ he said. I’m not sure if he was taught this by his parents which in my opinion was a bad piece of mentoring. But sad to see the world reach a state when 11 year olds think being good with people has become an art that needs to be mastered.