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Yours Truly
Name: Dileepan Lampoon me at: panvista@gmail.comOn the Stands Stunned Watching pool in Vegas A calypso for the master Spilt tea Willows and Whites Observations on Sachin Tendulkar "Fifty-Five" Poetry A Morning... A Nameless Poem Sheaves on the Shelf Buy my Book |
Sunday, January 16, 2005
A Small, Anonymous Room ... It is a small, near-anonymous room. There is little that is aesthetic or impressive about it. A few rays of morning light make a zillion dust particles pirouette in excitement. When the lady residing directly above us hangs red sarees on the clotheslines that are pegged on wooden frames outside her balcony, the red sarees curtain the windows of the room from the light, and tint the room with a red hue. And green sarees tint the room green. The tubelight glows white for most part of the day. Then the tangy green Asian Paints distemper on the walls strikes the eye a shade more piquant. The hutments behind Sagar Apartments, my home, tremble as a lady with a croaked high-pitched voice bawls out the latest gaana paatu on the new Tamil FM channel. The ventilation is adequate, but barely. It is my room. My Paatti (grandmother) tells me that it is Kali Yugam. And that the world is getting deluged with the dissolute. She is aghast at the racket the radios in the huts are creating. She is even more aghast that music has been desecrated to this level of carnality. I tell her that the world has moved on. And that people are more open these days and less fettered by antediluvian and hackneyed customs. She sits on the cot by a corner of the room all day. I find it strange that it has been months since she saw the living room of our home. And years since she saw the compound of our building. She reads the newspapers everyday. And she talks about the world. The huge piles of books and notebooks of the past five years, retained for few reasons other than sentimental, lend the room a musty smell. They lie, carefully preserved, and not so carefully stacked. Just as they were when I left for BITS, Pilani four years ago. They are my IIT tuition notebooks; a huge chunk of my learning. Thin films of dust have settled on them reflecting the elapsed time. There are also small oval marks of fingers that have disrupted the smoothness of the dust films. Marks that were probably left when I felt the surface to check for dust. There are five such at different places. One for every passing year? I do not know. I open my mathematics notebook (the one on the top) flip through random pages of Quadratic Equations, Combinatorics and Coordinate Geometry. I can still feel KSR’s words echoing in my mind. I shut the book and replace it on the pile. A couple more of disruptive ‘fingerprints’ have formed. In a corner lie in a heap nearly a dozen cricket bats. Most of them are broken. A couple of size 6 bats and the rest, full size. They remind me that I, like any other schoolboy, once earnestly dreamed of playing for India. Besides them stands my Paatti's Godrej almirah on which are a few wooden and brass effigies of the Goddesses Lakshmi and Saraswathi. My Paatti asks me for the newspaper. "If nobody else is reading it," she is cautious to add. I promise to pass it on to her once I am done with my work on the computer, for my chat conversations on the Yahoo Messenger have taken an interesting turn. I then realise that I haven’t myself read the newspaper yet; I tell her that I have to go out in an hour, and that I will just flip through the pages quickly and pass it on to her. I read the news with a bovine indifference and flip it towards her. After nearly an hour. It is four o’ clock and it is time for my tea. I call out to my mother and she announces from the kitchen that it will be ready in five minutes. And, in five minutes, her tea is as good as her word. In some time some interesting television programme will begin and I will gravitate from the computer in my room to the TV in the living room. Or, the evening will be spent in the beach with my friends. It will not be until the night when I will get back to the computer in my room to chat, despite threatening protests from my father...
It is hard to believe that I will never find the room the same again. It is hard to believe that my grandmother will not be there to ask me for the newspaper, one more afternoon. - posted by Dileepan @ 6:06:00 pm 
Sunday, January 09, 2005
Accepting the Master's change I reproduce the following article from Cricinfo which puts, rather beautifully, the metamorphosis in Sachin Tendulkar's batsmanship into perspective:
- posted by Dileepan @ 11:25:00 am
Let's see Sachin with a new eye Sambit Bal December 16, 2004 "The entertainer has become an accumulator but Sachin Tendulkar still retains an aura about him" In 1992, after Sachin Tendulkar had followed up his stunning first-innings hundred at Perth with an airy-fairy dismissal in the second, Allan Border, the hard-nosed captain of Australia and a grizzled veteran of 130 Tests, came to his defence with words to this effect: "He is only 18. I am 37 and even I lose my head once in a while." It has never been easy to equate Tendulkar's cricket with his age. Such was his brilliance in 1992 that it was easy to forget that he was only 18 then. Now, when he is 31, we marvel at the achievements of a man so young, and speculate about the number of years he has still left, often overlooking his cricket age. Tendulkar has now played more than 15 years of international cricket, that's a little more than Border's entire career. Sunil Gavaskar played for 16, and Viv Richards for 17. He has played his cricket in 14 countries and 95 grounds and scored more runs and more hundreds than anyone else in the history of the international game. Yet, we refuse him the allowance of ageing, of maturing, of slowing down. He has moved, as he must. But we are stuck with the idea of his carefree youth. We continue to expect the fizz and abandon of someone of 19 from a 31-year-old man with a wife and two children. We refuse to acknowledge that the body can slow down, that the mind can become weary and mindful of pitfalls. Quite simply, we just can't bear the thought of our Sachin growing old. In our desperation to cling on to his past, we have made it difficult for ourselves to accept the reality of his present. Look at him, we sigh, our entertainer has become an accumulator. Viv Richards, we never tire of pointing out, never changed his ways. His reflexes might have slowed down, but the rage never left him; he came out smouldering and either blazed away or perished. Yet we ignore the fact that his last three years fetched Richards only 978 runs from 19 Tests, at 36.22, with only one century. Richards was too proud a man to defend, but he was a lesser player for it during his last years. It is for everyone to see that Tendulkar's game has changed. He is more than willing to admit it himself. If it hadn't, he says illuminatingly, it would have meant that oppositions haven't been using their brains. Bowlers have switched to play the waiting game with him, and he has responded in kind. He has been sensitive to the changes in his body too, and though he wouldn't pinpoint what exactly has changed, he would say this much: "The body will slow down, the question is how much time it takes and how you adjust to the change." It is now up to the rest of the world, particularly his passionate fans in India, to accept those changes. Ten years, or even five years, ago, he looked to get his hundred with a flourish, these days he looks to do it with a nudge. Depending on how you look at it, it is either conservatism or conservationism. Earlier, Tendulkar was prone to throw his wicket away in his fifties and early hundreds. These days, once he gets his eye in, he is almost impossible to remove. His figures this year are revealing. He has seven single-digit scores in 14 innings, yet he has scored 879 runs and is poised to end the year with the highest annual average of his 15-year career - it currently stands at 97.66. He has been dismissed only once after scoring a fifty, and his smallest hundred this year has been 194 not out. His batting this year is perhaps indicative of a high level of self-awareness and a graceful acceptance that bowlers all over the world might have found a chink or two. Tendulkar has the keenest of cricket minds, and more than ever before he is alive to the need to make the good days count, because they might not come as frequently as they did before. Statistically, the previous year was his worst in Tests. He scored only 153 runs from five Tests at 17. He failed in five successive innings in Australia, before turning it around in the first Test of this year with an astounding double-hundred at Sydney, where he denied himself the option of scoring between mid-off and point. It wasn't as breathtaking as his earlier century at the SCG, a magnificent unbeaten 148 that Richie Benaud was moved to describe as the finest he had watched on Australian soil, but it was a triumph in conception and execution. In his latest book, Peter Roebuck says that the new Tendulkar was launched in Sydney. He goes on to write: "No regrets should be held about Tendulkar acknowledging the passing of time and becoming a robust, rather than a dazzling, batsman. He must be allowed to grow. Watching him bat may not be as exciting, but it will be enormously satisfying. Those who love their cricket will be given the opportunity of watching a master at work." To end it with a Roebuckism, nothing more needs to be said.
Saturday, January 01, 2005
By the Countryside Chesterfield lies in the quiet countryside of St. Louis. St. Louis is on a stretch of the undulating plains of Missouri. My uncle’s house, which is on an elevation, overlooks a couple of villas in the shallow to afford a view of the picturesque countryside. The quaint houses, vast stretches of grass and a touch of mist in the morning is just the sort of thing that puffs your lungs with some fresh air and leaves you with cheery disposition. If only you had high tea and hot scones -- the Enid Blyton style -- in the afternoon, it would make you want to ask your mate, a la Jerome K Jerome, "The weather’s a jolly fellow today! It seems that he will remain generous all day long. Old bloke, care to pull yourself up the lakeside for a round of fishing?”
- posted by Dileepan @ 4:33:00 pm
St. Louis has a much larger Indian population than Minnesota. One needn’t be in the Census Bureau to actually figure that out. Global Foods, the local grocery store, will pretty much tell you. You have an alley dedicated to Indian food, where you have everything from biriyani mixes to Coimbatore vethalai and pogaiyal! A couple of days back, I visited an Indian temple here. This one, unlike the one in Minnesota, was no church! It had a well architected Gopuram (the temple tower crowning the sanctum) and a whole range of deities. I must tell you: for half an hour, I felt like I was in one of those towering temples opposite the Mylapore tank! The temple seemed to be very efficiently maintained and run by dedicated NRI trustees. "The priest here," I pondered, "seems to be taking his job very seriously, unlike the ones back in India." My uncle cut my thoughts short, saying that the fellow did not have all his papers in tact, and was trying to sneak in for himself a Green Card through some religious quota, by hook or by crook! I accompanied my uncle and aunt to a kind Indian gentleman’s place for a get-together. There were a lot of Indians I got to meet. I realised that making polite conversation was not my cup of tea. Certainly not, if I had a glass of wine in my hand! But it was the weather that primarily played on my mind. It was as pleasant as Bangalore was and as clean as Bangalore was polluted. Back in Minneapolis, in the warmth of -20 degrees, I was even tempted, forced rather, into chimerical ramblings of how it might have been if the U of M were at St Louis. University of Minnesota at St Louis! It might have done a little better than BITS, Pilani at Goa. Or, actually, it might have not.
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