Babies, Babas, Bappis, and Bas Karo

Outgoing Kerala CM V.S.Achutanandan called Rahul Gandhi an "Amul Baby" a few days ago, in a desperate attempt to remind us that much of the country is in the midst of assembly elections. Predictably, the Congress and its minions have seen red (ha!) , and dismissed this as being uncivilised and disrespectful.

I don't think there's anything wrong in being called an "Amul Baby". Assuming the usually bombastic VS was referring to the chubby "Amul Girl" and kids who've been reared on butter, Rahul Gandhi (who has previously been described as heading the "babalog") is being compared to an iconic figure says more clever things in a week than many of our politicians manage in years.

Of course, Kerala has lots of Babys of its own - none more prominent than the current Kerala Minister of Education M.A.Baby.

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Apparently, Bappi Lahiri is some sort of an official cheerleader for the Pune Warriors IPL team. That team has the least amount of golden colour on its uniforms, so perhaps Bappi-da has been roped (though no lasso is big enough to...) into lending his auric presence to the proceedings.

Speaking of the Sonar Fella, here's an extract from a recent book about the making and impact of "Disco Dancer". Writer Anuvab Pal goes to Bappi Lahiri's house, where:

Now, during the walk, on either side of me, what I saw could be best described as gnomes. [...] It was a garden gnome, a little sculpture in ceramic.

But not of a random old white man but of Bappi Lahiri himself, wearing tuxedoes of different colours, almost as if fourteen midget marble versions of him, or a series of oversized tiled Bappi Lahiri action figures, we[r]e welcoming you into a room whose central decoration you were manipulated into observing -- a wall with two roman columns on either side. The wall had a huge framed photograph. In the photo were three people -- Mr Lahiri, Sonia Gandhi and Jay Z.

The article is here.

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Speaking of gold and IPL, we're into the fourth year of the annual parade of extreme colour clashing combinations. The addition of the Kochi Tuskers and a revamped Bangalore outfit has taken the discolorations to stratospheric heights. Watching an overhead shot of the players during their match reminded me of some of the worst Powerpoint slides I've seen. And this supreme example of this website of a Japanese children's hospital (who must be undoubtedly, just to spite me, doing great humanitarian service during the current crisis).

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(It has become exceedingly difficult to make pithy observations such as the above at home. As soon as they are made, the reluctant smile on people's faces gives way to grave concern. "You are going to tweet about this, aren't you?")

As the week winds up...

(observation: one can't say 'week winds up' to mean the opposite of 'week winds down')

The rate at which umpires are being suspended in the IPL, the final will probably have to lapse into a convention that informal matches use: asking for the batting side to loan a player as umpire. That could enable the talismanic Shane Warne to add 'umpire' to his list of roles (yes, I'm hoping the Royals will be in the final :-))

Thanks to John Arne Riise, I know which team I'll be supporting for in the final of the 2007-08 Champions League. More specifically, to his almost phantom right leg which in of even lesser use than the phrase "hard luck" is to Harbhajan Singh. Still, it was a fabulous match (as was the Man Utd v Barca game, where Messi purred without gaining any milk or mice), and so my dream football season continues. There's two nervous legs of EPL to go, the FA Cup final without the toffs to spoil it, and the Champions League. Like everyone, let me make the joke about Chelsea playing that final at home. Wonder what The Special One thinks about this late injection of luck in Chelsea fortunes despite his absence.

Description of the year: "Silky Sloth" (Ted Corbett about Inzamam ul-Haq).

Last week's Sportstar reports that the recently concluded Asian Beach Volleyball championships used 'blonde cheerleaders' (sans the outrage, of course). If, like the American Dialect Society, we voted words of the year, 'cheerleader' would be heading the leaderboard for the 2008 contest. (A good indication of the lexical zeitgeist comes from team names at quizzes, and I'm sure 'cheerleaders' will feature in some of them this year).

Bertie, the toothless Beast, and the Raves

Bertie and the Beast
In "The Code of the Woosters" by P.G.Wodehouse, Bertie Wooster encounters an unusually confident and strident Gussie Fink Nottle. The newtophile was traditionally the most diffident male in all recorded history, in whom bravado could only be artificially injected via heavily spiked orange juice. Eventually Bertie wheedles out the secret of Gussie's newly acquired spine, finding a rather brilliant stratagem from Jeeves behind it all: Gussie has been surreptitiously maintaining a notebook filled with bold observations about those who would otherwise have caused his knees to knock and melt. For instance, his father-in-law-to-be's soup-slurping skills remind him of the Scottish Express rushing through a tunnel. This drains the enemy of his villainous aura reducing him to a life lower than a debauched salamander, allowing the fish-faced friend to become the 'bossee', so much so that Gussie could emasculate that black-shorted gorilla Roderick Spode as a perfect perisher in footer bags.

Now, the reason why I invoked the honourable Plum is because I have a sneaking feeling that that once obnoxious trundler Sreesanth may have been similarly Roderick-ed. If you are going to strut about providing code-violating malayaalee-accented snorts at your opposition, you cannot be seen to be sobbing as if someone swapped your multi-coloured flannels for Binny shorts. Sreesanth, poor fellow, has defanged himself for life. Anyone who has seen that sorry sight will never ever be able to take a Sreesanth sledge seriously. Even Andre Nel must have been embarassed.

More seriously, I agree almost entirely with Jayaditya Gupta's analysis of the darwaazaa-e-thappaD. This was on the cards and the BCCI is a little lucky that only Indians were involved. Anyone who saw how the under-19 players went about their business a couple of months ago would noted the bad (but condoned) habits of the senior team having rubbed off on them (that some of the juniors were probably seniors themselves is a different but equally disturbing matter).

Shane on you
My IPL viewing depends mainly on whether one person's involved, a certain Shane Warne. On display are the full range of skills - bowling, batting, strategy, and captaincy. It's an absolute treat to watch. I'm sincerely grateful to the IPL for allowing me to watch a little bit of Warne each week. Harish and Aniket would approve.

The shock at the end of the wire
And Aditya Gadre would approve of how much I have followed international club football in the last three months. Each week's EPL has thrown up corkers of matches. Saturday's results were perfect for a neutral. Now, I'd like Man Utd. to go back and claim what is theirs. But for the Champions League (I have dragged myself through part of the night for this as well!), as long as Chelsea lose, I don't care. But a little more of Messi would be nice to see.

Roulette-coaster
And to round off this sports-crazy post, the tennis status quo briefly asserts itself this week, with Federer and Nadal returning for their annual date at the final at Monte Carlo. You know it's been a strange year for Federer when the only title win of the year has been on clay, and it's already April. But he wouldn't quite complain if the topsy-turviness results in wins at Roland Garros and at Beijing - the two most important crowns missing in what must be a massive mantelpiece in his Basel chalet.

Footnote: I was trying to look for some images of the weeping Sreesanth but found it interesting that Google Images turned up nothing. The restrictive media norms by the IPL seem to have resulted in this, so Mr. Modi - your diktat is working!

Nadir Shah-stri

Ravi Shastri during commentary in the IPL match this recent Sunday:

That ball spun and bounced like a spitting cobra!

If a cobra could do that, it should be in the ballet :-)

Gaudy, Gaudy Nights

I am perhaps the person Lalit Modi's mom told him to beware of in life: sceptical to the point of cynicism, immune to his well-coffered slick Bollywoodised charms, perhaps just unreasonably biased against messiahs like him. But shrewd man that he is, he would have realised in a jiffy that the yelps from my kind can be easily disregarded :-). Anyway, we both must do what we must, and I must present the following annoyances about the recently rocket-launched Indian Premier League.

Branding So far, the franchises seem to be a branding fiasco. For an event of this size and depth, most of the team names have shown an appalling lack of creativity, typified by the defaulting of two teams to "Kings". Much of the livery seems straight out of a Warhol-Govinda joint venture and the batsmen of the Kolkata Knightriders in particular look as if King Midas ran amok and couldn't keep his hands to himself. Combine it with a fairly tacky TV production and you sometimes wish the floodlights would go out more often. What is also surprising is the inability of marketers to provide a local identity for the teams, given the putative city associations. Even hockey's PHL managed to do a better job, if only with the team names.

Moderation Though to expect any form of moderation in this event is as naive as expecting Ranjeet-of-the-movies to voluntarily ask the hero's sister to tie him a rakhi. All the investors have pumped in money times-multiple in the hope of making it back over a period of time, so it was inevitable that they'd go over the top wooing the cash home. In particular, this leads to an extremely uncomfortable TV viewing experience, with overs snipped off and virtually no time to see the next batsman trot up or to watch what the captains are trying to do. The ads crowding the screen real estate would embarass the local cablewallahs. Why aren't we ever able to strike an efficient balance between class and crass? The tragedy is that the silent viewing millions can be taken for granted. It's a shocker.

The lack of moderation is also evident in the almost frenzied insistence by all commentators and public figures involved that the event "rocks". Also, I find the relentless nature of the games (almost one each day) to be way too much. I'd have found it easier to whip up enthusiasm for a spaced out schedule leading upto big weekend games. The league, otherwise, is in danger of being one big blur over a duration that came in for criticism in a World Cup only last year.

The English news channels have devoted a large chunk of their daily coverage to covering such breaking news items such as the fall of the eight wicket. Lessons of ratio and proportion were last seen only in the 8th standard arithmetics textbook.

Differentiation If you leave aside the cosmopolitan squads, what's different about the cricket being played? I couldn't tell the difference between any ordinary one dayer or T20 match and these IPL matches. It hasn't quite revolutionised the game by itself - the only attempts at 'innovations' are in the marketing. Therefore, the cricket isn't compelling by itself. In addition to my favourite peeve about the fragmented TV coverage, I find myself drifting off very easily. An engrossing football match in comparison keeps you glued, because the action is seamless and momentum shifts can be engineered in seconds. The 4 minute over is a boon to advertisers, but the speed of the game on the field still does not translate well to the living room, with the content being 'filtered' so poorly.

Another reason why the IPL seems all too familiar is because the same band of bumbling commentators can be heard on the air. From Rameez Raja to Ranjit Fernando, it's the same pack of tired cliches and retired insights. The best of the lot seems to be the Zimbabwean Pommie Mbangwa who though mundane, can at least generate some zeal periodically.

What I've also realised that the game desperately needs to maintain its bag of contrasts: the true worth of an Andrew Symonds' muscular hitting can be realised only when set against a Katich driving down the ground; one can appreciate a fighting innings from Dravid only when Sehwag has been unable to stay alive on that spiteful pitch. For everything to disappear over long stop is to paint a picture only in greyscale.

Independent Voices And then there are the likes of the omnipresent Gavaskar and Shastri who seem to be doing everything in the IPL baaraat from organising to commentary to firefighting. The fact that almost everyone we hear opinions from is associated in some way or the other with the IPL hasn't been highlighted very prominently (read this cogent article by Ashok Malik on the topic). That many of these commentators now work directly for the BCCI can be seen to seriously compromise any objectivity they need to bring to their coverage. This may be selective memory, but I couldn't not recall hearing any expressions of shock about that beach of an Eden Gardens pitch by any of the commentators during the match.

It also doesn't augur well that over the last couple of years, Hindi and English news channels have completed some kind of self-identification exercise with cricket: witness the liberal use of "we" and "us" in referring to the Indian team. Granted that the IPL indeed is an event of gargantuan proportions, but what causes unease is a lack of all-round objective scepticism. (As an aside, I have been watching Marathi news channels these days to get my daily dose of news, and would heartily recommend them for old-fashioned current affairs).

All this said, in all fairness, there have been several good points so far: seeing McGrath land his very first ball on the spot, Shane Warne today, the chance to hear about and see the likes of Ojha, Saha, Dinda as well as some of the lesser-known Aussies, to name a few. I do not know if the razzmatazz has at least made proceedings interesting to the spectators at the grounds (perhaps some of these fellows will be able to tell me next week). Perhaps if you could simmer in those three hours without having to repeatedly watch a dog lick stamps every six balls, you might have a different view. The very nature of the form of the game is that teams can also be shut out of the match too easily if the sweet spot (from the audience's pov) of 150-180 runs isn't reached in the first innings. However, from an economic and sociological point of view, the IPL is immensely interesting.

And finally, ever notice how this is turning out to be quite a decade for Modis? You can't guarantee anything in sport or politics, but so far their brand of heavily engineered change, fuelled by self-importance, is on the ascendancy.

Shortness of breadth

Of narrow interests at home.

Green with disgust

Perhaps they couldn't wait any longer for the IPL. Perhaps they just wanted to get the hell out of Kanpur. Whatever the reasons, the Kanpur pitch allowed India and South Africa to finish their final Test of their recently concluded Test Series in a hurry. However, it wasn't a blink-and-miss affair, and surprisingly turned out to be an interesting match. What I'm not sure is that if anyone really cared about it.

Blame it on the looming spectre of the IPL, whose bosses are firefighting the colossally idiotic decision in restricting how the media can cover the event (more on that later). I did not get NEO (the sports channel which currently owns rights to domestic Test Series) for a while and realised that Doordarshan was not carrying the series. It is a little scary if even the local (not to mention lazily avaricious) dinosaur decides that Test cricket and its ad revenues was not worth the effort. After several years of claiming rights by 'national interest' fatwa, is this a sign of Test cricket dropping down the gutter in a country that claims to now be the biggest shareholder in the game?

As a result, personally, the series seemed to be akin to an umpteenth lunar landing: distant, with enthusiasm having waned, and all the fuss about the surface. Though no memorable (or printable) words must have come out of Graeme Smith's mouth on visiting the middle on the opening day. That said, he must have been relieved not to have sunk in the dust.

The problem is not quite that we shouldn't be having such pitches to play on. It's that each time India trails in a Test series, it has to pull out the powdery nasties from the backshelf, or so it seems. Add to it this completely inappropriate gesture of the debutant home captain sending greetings and money to the pitch curator. Collusion or not, this habit (for I have heard of such 'rewards' in the past) completely undermines the excellent survivorship exhibited by the likes of Ganguly. One is left with a reeking smell of distaste emanating from an already sullied set of team whites.

Why the IPL exists

This blog must admit to a similar distate to IPL Czar Lalit Modi and his methods. At a time when he should be doing all that he can to get everyone (except perhaps Subhash Chandra) on his side, he comes up with these ridiculous media terms. Non-print websites seem to be the hardest hit (see Sambit Bal's latest). It's a pity that some of these agencies are merely protesting when a coordinated boycott would have been sweeter. It's a battle of competing clouts and eventually they will get into the same bed (it would be bad business if they didn't) - it's just a question of how much protection they can agree to.

Nothing the IPL has done so far has pointed out to having any regard for the common paying audience member, and seems to have been born only to further inflate the BCCI's ever-deepening coffers and hubris. Hopefully stadia will at least be friendlier to the bums-on-seats than traditionally seen in India, but with the emphasis being on squeezing each pound out of the game's flesh, it's hard to be optimistic.