What's in a name - Part II

The Super Eights are finally here. The grand circus that goes by the name of "Cricket World Cup" has come alive now that the clowns (read as India and Pakistan) have finished their act and the tightrope walkers have taken over.
Somebody had the bright(pun unintended) idea of staging six matches in Guyana, popularly known as the "Chennai of the West Indies" - It never stops raining here when a cricket match is scheduled. Of course, the matches in Guyana and Antigua are to be played at brand-new stadia. The aptly named "Providence Stadium" in Guyana, as I hear, is not even 100% complete. So you'll probably have the Lankans and South Africans wearing hard-hats on the field - "Safety First, Sports Next". The other stadium is the majestic Sir Vivian Richards Stadium in North Sound, Antigua. Ah!...finally, the King gets his due. I remember during my school days, when West Indies had toured India after the 1987 World Cup, we used to dread seeing this guy bat, demolishing everything that came his way. Unfortunately, the kids of today have never seen anything of his like (Sachin Tendulkar and Ricky Ponting please excuse). By the time, the World Cup comes back to the West Indies, I hope they have stadia named after Sir Gary, Joel Garner, Andy Roberts, Michael Holding etc.

The master-blaster now has a World Cup stadium named after him! Now how many guys can boast of that? We have the MCG, SCG, the Wanderers, Newlands, Eden Park, Basin Reserve, Headingley, Edgbaston and all those. Thomas Lord (after whom Lords is named) is the great exception...unless you are in the Indian subcontinent!! Over here, every other stadium is named after somebody! Have a look:

Bangladesh: Bangabandhu Stadium
Srilanka: R. Premadasa Stadium, P. Saravanamuttu Stadium
Pakistan: Gaddafi Stadium (that's the height!), Faisal Stadium

...and how many international centuries or wickets do these guys have on their name?

Oops! Did I forget India? Perhaps Mr. S.K. Wankhede, Mr. MA Chidambaram and Mr. M Chinnaswami are the greatest international cricketeres this country hs ever produced. And the biggest irony is that every other frigging city has a cricket stadium named after the biggest idiot of all - Mister Jawaharlal Nehru!

Rahul Gandhi might disagree:

"If the Nehru-Gandhi family had been running the BCCI, India would have won all the World Cups so far"

Someone should send him that e-mail which is doing its rounds nowadays about how his grandmom was responsible for India's defeat in the 2o07 World Cup - after all, it was she who created Bangladesh :)

Perhaps they can take a leaf out of the West Indian book, and name some stadia after Kapil Dev or Sunil Gavaskar - never mind how big a prick he is. But strangely, I feel that future events might get slotted to the Sharad Pawar Stadium or the Lalu Prasad Yadav Stadium

The boy who asked for more...

"Please Sir, I want some more"

Who can forget those immortal lines? The little orphan boy requesting for more soup in Charles Dickens's evergreen classic, Oliver Twist... and that is exactly the feeling I had after watching Roman Polanski's version of this classic on TV yesterday...

No. It was not because, I was so impressed that I was left wanting for more. But Polanski could have done a little more justice to the final product that he has presented before us.

Polanski has taken up one of the finest classics and churned it out into an impressive movie. Perhaps he found inspiration in his own childhood to detail the story of the little orphan boy on celluloid. As a child he spent the years during World War II wandering around Europe, after his parents' imprisonment in the German concentration camps.

Technically the film is impressive. The art design and cinematography are excellent in the way Polanslki has managed to recreate 19th century London. Barney Clark does a fine job as little Oliver. There is a certain sadness in his face that endears him to the audience. But it is Ben Kingsley who steals the show in the role of the roguish, but immensely lovable character of Fagin. He simply walks away with all the laurels.

As the movie progresses, Polanski digresses from the classic and has completely erased out the characters of Rose Mailey - Oliver's Aunt and Monks - Oliver's stepbrother. For a two-hour long movie, Polanski has deliverd! It is definitely a must watch for movie lovers. But for ardent lovers of the Dickens classic, it falls short as a representation of the little boy's travails on the silver screen

Of Bridesmaids and Miracles

It was perhaps the second biggest match of the World Cup - the bridesmaid in all sense: Australia v South Africa. This was the clash between the top two teams in the World - their first World Cup meeting ever since THAT semi-final at Edgbaston.

So why call it the Bridesmaid? Because of April 15th 2007. The Super Eight schedule read thus:

April 15, Super Eights - B2 v D1 - The Kensington Oval, Barbados

The fact that this match was scheduled at the same venue which would feature the finals, a little after two weeks to this encounter did not escape my attention. It was slated to be the Final before the Final - the biggest attraction of this World Cup:

India (B2) vs Pakistan (D1)

A lot of water has flown under the bridge since then, and now the schedule reads as:

April 15, Super Eights - Bangladesh v Ireland - The Kensington Oval, Barbados

I didn't see Pepsi's "World Cup kola" ad on the telly yesterday. So much for jingoism...

Returning to the bridesmaid, for those of us in the subcontinent who had come to terms with the exit of the self-proclaimed power houses of cricket, this was THE match. South Africa, crowned the current world number one - barely beatable in their own backyard, and barely unbeatable outside it, were up against Australia,from whom they'd wrested the world number one title. People had forgotten when was the last time they had won against a test-playing opposition.

Reaching home from office, I switched on the TV and saw to my surprise something that read 1 0 4 6 6 - oh! they were at it again. But wait a minute! This was no ordinry part time seamer. They were taking Shaun Pollock apart! Fifty overs and umpteen power outages later, I was still watching as the Aussies piled up a whopping 377 for 6 (in between switching channels to see the lone cameo being enacted by Steve Tikolo against the English).

Nathan Bracken ran in for the first ball of the fifth over, and Graeme Smith, like a man possessed, charged out and in a flash, despatched the ball to the long off boundary. It was perhaps the most audacious shot of the day. The old warhorse, Glenn McGrath, trudged in to replace the erratic Shaun Tait, and was greeted by three consecutive fours. The bull had been taken by the horns. Memories of March 12 2006 came flooding back - the last time these two teams met in a One Day International - THAT match at the Wanderers in Johannesburg. The legacy of that match seems to have left an indelible mark on Australia-South Africa clashes. Pitches might never again be prepared to entertain us with the brilliance of a Brett Lee or a Shaun Pollock. Perhaps never again, would we get to see a low-scoring thriller in the likes of Edgbaston. I pray for the bowlers...May their souls rest in peace.

When you are playing in the World Cup, miracles do not happen everyday. Yesterday, it took a miraculous throw from the deep by Shane Watson to stop South Africa in their tracks, and from the Aussie point of view, it might have been divine intervention that prevented Graeme Smith from continuing.

But for the blue billion, miracles and divine interventions may have come a day too early...

Perhaps, God is not Indian

-The Klansman

Future Attractions

Coming soon to this Klavern:

1. What a misconception!!

2. Kalyanam for Dummies: A Beginner's Guide to Iyer Marriages

-The Klansman

Reminiscing Goa

One year ago, four of us - Me, Aravinda, Priyananda and Vinay - set out for Goa. It was a memorable trip in various ways - speeding around the countryside on bikes, splashing aournd the waters of the arabian sea, enhancing our vocabulary, and finding out new uses for coconut oil. A few shots from that trip...

Calangute

Calangute

Baga

Baga

Sinquerim

Palolem

Palolem

Vagator

Vagator

The Dark Side of the Moon - review of "All Quiet on the Western Front"

IMDB title: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0020629/

“This story is neither an accusation, nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shell, were destroyed by the war”…Thus begins one of the most influential war movies of all time – so influential that, years after its release, it was still being banned in countries mobilizing for World War II. Based on Erich Maria Remarque’s book and directed by Lewis Milestone, “All quiet on the Western Front” won two Academy Awards - for the Best Motion Picture and Best Director - in the year 1930.

“All quiet on the Western Front” relates the story of young German recruits in World War I, as they pass from idealism to disillusionment. A classroom lecture inspires the group of young men led by Paul Baumer (Lew Ayres), to enlist in the army, eager to serve the fatherland. As their teacher says, “To be foremost in battle is a virtue not to be despised”. However, their induction into the “2nd Company” at the front is far from cheerful. Stomachs cringe for every morsel of food, whenever it comes by. The fear of death lingers in the trenches as deadly shells whiz past. One by one, they fall by the wayside – Kropp, Behn, Kemmerick, Mueller, Albert – either into the jaws of death or losing their mind in the absolute madness of “the war to end all wars”. As what he expected to be a “short war” stretches on for four years, the passion of fighting for the country turns to frustration, and finally to despair for Baumer, leading to a fatal conclusion.

The movie digresses from the proverbial “good v bad” theme. There are no stereotype “enemies” out here. Rather, it paints the picture of a war that nobody wanted. Trapped in a crater with the enemy soldier he has killed, Baumer echoes these very sentiments: “You’re just a man like me. We only wanted to live! If we threw away this uniform, we can be like brothers!” For those of us brought up on the steady diet of the technically brilliant present day war movies, “All quiet…” has all the drawbacks of black & white movies of a bygone era – over-dramatization of emotional sequences, the editing that sometimes tends to make the scenes a bit too long, and not to mention the least, the complete absence of a background score (a deliberate ploy by Milestone).

Lew Ayres gives a convincing performance as the young protagonist, Paul Baumer, though at times he goes overboard with the portrayal. This was his stepping stone into an illustrated career that would stretch well into the late nineteen eighties. However, it is Louis Wolheim as the cynical Corporal “Kat” Katczinsky – the 2nd Company’s ‘canteen’ – who holds the movie together. His sardonic wit lights up the whole film. His prophetic statement – “the war won’t be over until they get me” – ironically comes true when he is felled by a shell during the last days of the Great War.

“All Quiet on the Western Front” is a collection of now-famous cinematic moments: The first meeting of the young recruits and the veteran soldiers, Baumer’s anguish as he lies in the crater with the soldier he has killed, his pacifist speech to his astonished schoolmates, and that final moment, when the enemy soldier fixes Baumer in the crosshairs of the rifle, as he reaches his hand out for that fatal butterfly…

Far away in the hills of Kohima, in an immaculate cemetery, lie the graves of the Indian Army soldiers who fought in the Burma campaign of World War II. On a monument at the foot of the cemetery, one can find the poem:

When you go home
Tell them of us and say
For your tomorrow
We gave our today

This is a story of a lost generation – of young men, who gave their today for no tomorrow. There is rarely any glory in war…only the stark reality of death! As Paul Baumer says, “We live in the trenches out there. We fight. We try not to be killed. Sometimes we are…that’s all!”

-The Klansman

Babies' Day Out

It was the usually dull Saturday evening. When all of India (or at least half of it) was heading towards Palace Grounds for the Iron Maiden concert, here i was, sitting before the telly, with nothing else to do, but catch the action from the World Cup.

"JUST IN - Kumble, Karthik, Pathan and Sreesanth rested" - screamed NDTV and CNN-IBN. Huh? Is this a World Cup encounter, or a practice game? "I expect a clinical performance from the team", mused the captain, and I guess, the team took his words literally - they just laid themselves down on the operating table for the Bangladeshis to dissect. Virender Sehwag seems to be the most innovative of the lot - trying to discover new ways of getting run out.

However, two hours of ennui was alleviated by an SMS from my friend: "Forget India. Watch the Pakistan match". I switched channels - there was a match being played on some ground, where you couldn't distinguish which was the pitch and which was the outfield - everything looked green ("The Irish are coming out in green" screamed Aamer Sohail, and then corrected himself: "Their version of the green"), and the pakistanis hopping around like the proverbial cat on the tin roof (where the heck did they find a fossil like Azhar Mahmood? Dug him out of some archeological site?). And just when things were etting interesting, my cable guy pulled the plug!

It sure was the Babies' Day Out. But not necessarily mine. Spare my cable operator's indiscretion in cutting off the cable and going to sleep, but the world cup is yet to inspire me to stay awake till 3:30 in the morning and watch the action. I've had to rely on cricinfo the next day, to catch up on most of the action.

Talking about cricinfo, ever since last Tuesday, the guys take you automatically to what they call their World Cup Page. The first thing you see when the page opens is Hrithik Roshan calling out "Oye Pappe". Makes you think whether they've got the right topic, before you realize that it is an ad for some satellite television network. Following him would be ads from Reebok, Airtel, LIC, monster.com et al. The whole place is also filled with blogs. Now that the World Cup is here, every Tom, Dick and Ravi have taken it upon themselves to be cricket writers. And the players themselves are not far behind - Sangakkara, Sarwan and Gayle, to name a few. Enterprising chaps. At least they have a fallback option, if they don't click on field.

-The Klansman

The Colour of Spring

A Hard Day's Work