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