#ThankYouSachin yaa #EmotionalQtiyapaa?

Sudhir Kumar Chaudhary, an ardent fan of Tendulkar who earned the privilege of tickets to all of India's home games (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Weren't most Indians being too sentimental about Sachin's retirement? Well... we once made a super-hit movie out of a plot which involves a rockstar's mom sacrificing/electrocuting herself on a rigged electric guitar to save her son, who will then avenge her death by winning a disco dancing championship (Mithun's "Disco Dancer" is the movie... before you lose my respect forever by asking). Yes, the bar for sentimentality is set kinda high for us Indians. So... no, we are like this only!
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Why did he think himself to be bigger than the team, bigger than cricket, bigger than his country? After close to 25 years on the international stage under the full glare of media hawks, spent with generations of team-mates and opponents on and off the field, let's total the number of complaints that players or ex-players have made about Sachin Tendulkar's unbearable ego-mania. Zero. Sorry, but votes from armchair based mind readers don't count. 
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What kind of a legend is he, failing like he did in the World Cup finals of 2003 or 2011? Isn't the greatness of a player defined by his performances on the greatest of stages? Let's start by completely ignoring the fact that India was in those two finals only because of his performances in the preceding matches. That would require just too much logic. His centuries against Australia, England, Pakistan, West Indies and South Africa don't count for anything because *derisive chuckle* he scored centuries against Bangladesh, Kenya and Zimbabwe too. Apparently the 'true' greats have a golden "Don't score centuries against minnows" rule which was violated by our ordinary Sachin.
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Still, isn't the non-stop hero worship and the tiring over-use of God in every fan quote about him nausea inducing? Consider this... Sachin did not bribe the fans who first carried the famous "Cricket is my religion, Sachin is my God" banner to do so. Here was a batsman who really meant that much to his fans - from the neighbourhood panwallah to Virat Kohli. Yes, it is somewhat unfortunate that the majority of his fan base has struggled to come up with any original compliment since but hey, that's not Sachin's fault. He has never run around demanding to be called God. If anything, it's the opposite. If anyone has anything to learn about respect for the game and fellow players, it's from Sachin.
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All well and good but any Ram, Deepak and Hari would agree that he had lost his touch. Why the struggle to play on? Wasn't this all about him being record-hungry trying to play his 200th test somehow, just like the sorry drama around his 100th hundred? India lost *so many* matches because of his *greed* for hundreds. Why yes, it's obvious that having 100 runs less on the board would have helped India win the match! *Sarcasm*
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Quitting the only life he has known, adored by hundreds of millions and playing a game he loves, should be the easiest thing. The extraordinary self-belief that he has used to keep out the madness of expectations and design the monument that is his cricketing career can be turned off like a power switch. Easy peasy. Wonder why he seemed to find it so difficult? Must be because he is self-obsessed. Can't be because he is only human. No. Just can't be. 
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I must at this point confess to being a very rabid Sachin fan though I may have dropped some hints in the paragraphs above. My first clear memory of Sachin is of seeing him walk back forlorn to the pavilion after one of his brave but futile efforts as part of the reliably unreliable early 90s Indian cricket team on a television set which was about 10 years older than me at that point of time. My mom was talking to him through the television, consoling him "Shonaar cheley! Shonaar cheley!" ("Golden boy! Golden boy!" A Bengali mom's way of telling her son to keep up the good work)
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From that day on, Sachin, about the same age as my elder brother became part of my family. As I am sure, he was adopted by millions of Indians as their son, grandson, brother or friend in similar circumstances through the decades. In our country which had just opened its doors to the wild and somewhat scary international market, Sachin was our world class export.  In his niceness and humility, we saw our perceived Indian character retained and in his unquestionable talent, we found confidence that we had more than enough skill to stand strong in the big boys league.
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More than 3 months have passed since Sachin retired and I have spent all this time trying to zero in on the perfect words to describe what his presence on a cricket pitch meant. I had wanted this piece of writing to bring unfiltered feelings of joy to Sachin fans and reduce his critics to crying crumpled balls of shame. In the end, I have realized that for better or for worse, most people who know about Sachin have already formed their opinions about him and there is not too much I can do to change them. I can only speak for myself.
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I will miss the unmistakable roar of the crowds no matter which Indian stadium he walked out into bat. I will miss the compact distinctive guard he took at the crease indicative of the perfection to come. I will miss the solid crack of the bat as the perfect straight drive, flick or cover drive was executed, never to be seen in a competitive cricket match again. I will miss the look to the heavens as yet another milestone is reached and the joy that his time at the crease brought his fans, a heady dose of artistry in otherwise ordinary lives. 
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I did not watch his farewell speech live. Being an old school guy, that stinging feeling behind the eyes would have been mightily embarrassing. I did watch him make his last walk to the Wankhede pavilion after his dismissal for 74, on a television set in a far off country whose unpardonable crime is that it does not understand or appreciate cricket and therefore the true beauty of life. After due diligence and intensive racking of me brains, I have decided to plagiarize Sunil Gavaskar's words on commentary.
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Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

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[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2014/02/thankyousachin-yaa-emotionalqtiyapaa.html]

In black and white

Angry Penguin (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Don't sweat the small stuff. In the overall grand scheme of the eye-in-the-sky, most of our issues with it are small stuff indeed. Oft repeated advice but seldom applied especially in the professional sphere of life. 

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It's only natural that when a group of dramatically varied humans get together (let's repeat the obvious, no two people are alike and even the minor differences between them total to the hundreds) to work on a common task linked to a deadline and to their month end compensations, there will be disagreement. The nature of that disagreement ranges from polite "It would be better if..." to the thermo-nuclear "I think you are wrong..." despite both arguments making the same points.

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Presentation and tact matter but there are times when the pitchfork carrying guy with the horns and the tail gets his act together and drags the storms of confrontation along with him purely for his entertainment. Most office arguments may actually be fun to watch from an objective observer's perspective as they are about petty matters indeed.

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Personally speaking, having been in some not-so-peace-love-and-flowers situations at the workplace over the years, I have always seen things settle down eventually. Much like a married couple who surf over the occasional tiff, the teams at almost every workplace have figured their own paths to return to the routine. I remember the incidents but more as a remote event that happened to someone else in some other life. In that I have been lucky, because both parties (I hope) share the mutual feeling of "Well, we disagreed... strongly, but we still need to get the job done."

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In this quest to let bygones be bygones, I have recently discovered a major enemy. Archived e-mails. Yes, the angry words which flew through cyberspace to land in your colleague's inbox or vice versa. The other day I was digging through my virtual communications from the past for some project worked on back in the day and I chanced upon a few of these terse exchanges of words. Location vs location sometimes and team member versus team member at other times.

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Reading them now that I chanced upon them made the situations come alive again. The brain is a softie applying the varnish of nostalgia to every memory but if for any strange God forsaken reason you feel the urge to relive the bitterness in real time, read them old e-mails. The content is all professional but of course, behind the precise choice of words, the true intent of the stressed out individual writing them gleams through.

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Do I now want to take up cudgels against the same individuals or teams now that my mind has re-entered battle mode? Not really. It was nothing but foolishness on my behalf to read those old e-mails and much as I'd like to blame the others for what happened, I was as much to blame for the escalating argument as reading my end of the communications revealed. Let's just say I was lot less tactful and a lot more aggravated than the situation called for.

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After a healthy bout of exercise using the Delete button on my keyboard, I did come away with an insight that my less-than-sharp nature had previously failed to note. Words matter, their timing matters and the method used to convey them matters. Speak or listen to a person face to face or even duke it out over the phone - it all disappears into the toy chest of stuff-that-happened-in-my-life fitting into little corners and spaces often obscured by other stuff that keeps piling on. 

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Misunderstanding and frustration are occasional byproducts of our workdays but they are best resolved person to person if a resolution is to be found. There is really no sense in giving them an electronic afterlife. Those words on the screen with their perfectly formed fonts, they like to hang around and will always stare the recipient in the face in a cold, unemotional way like only a computer can while also transporting a wave of the sender's anger & splatting the recipient in the face.

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No more anger, at least not on cyberspace. When angry, count to ten. If still angry, count to one hundred.

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[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2014/02/in-black-and-white.html]

Filmy chess

An example of early-style Staunton Chess Set (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Chess was invented in India. Study the characters involved on the 64 square battlefield, and it becomes even more clear that it could have only come from the land which gave us B. R. Chopra's "Mahabhaaaarat".

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First there are the soldiers ('pawns' just doesn't have the right ring to it), the sipahis who will happily become sword fodder for the glory of their maharajah. "Jo hukum (As you wish), Maharaj!" is what would be expected of these little guys who move only one square at a time and make up half of the respective leader's troops, 8 each on the black and white sides.

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Next in the line of "I can afford to let this piece get captured" is the Bishop, whose behaviour makes much more sense when called by his Indian name, the ooth (the camel). For anyone who's seen a camel in real life knows that they look like big sturdy beasts built to go for days without water with a load on their back. What the animals can't be accused of is looking too intelligent. Hence their crazy diagonal only moves on the chessboard do match up to their projected mental capabilities.

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By this point in the write-up, it would be easy to guess that yours truly likes to call the Knight ghodaa (the horse) and the Rook haathi (the elephant) as they deserve to be called. Why go for boring things like humans and chariots when some really cool animal avatars are up for grabs?

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The horse is a noble beast with or without a knight in charge of it. Powerful, athletic and quite able to jump over a scared sipahi or two. There we have the basis for the nothing's-gonna-stop-us-now moves of the horses, the only pieces on the chessboard capable of ignoring obstacles in their way.

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According to this writer, elephants are quite possibly the most fascinating animals for a variety of reasons. They are intelligent, long lived and with great memories but again the one thing they can't be accused of is being steering friendly. Once they start moving, they keep charging and in that same direction. Thus the ninety degree or straight line moves that they bust out on the chess squares is quite realistic in my humble studied-no-biology-beyond-12th-grade opinion.

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The royal couple are the final twist to this cast of characters begging to let free on the checkered board of life. A few thousand years old this game may be but the most powerful, vicious, kick-ass presence on the entire board is that of two women. The respective Queen is a terror in every sense of the word to the opposing side. She can attack in any direction she wants to and speed as far as there is a clear straight path. Diagonals don't hold her, she can be as crazy as a camel and she can be as angry as an elephant too. Though the primary objective of the game is to protect the lame duck King who moves only one square at a time, there is no doubt on who wears the pants at home.

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Put all of those together and every game of chess is a epic war movie in the making. Heroic soldiers, little men put into history changing moments by planning and circumstances one measly step at a time. Horses guarding camels; camels guarding horses; horses and camels guarding soldiers; queens and elephants guarding those horses and camels - you get the idea. There is death (capture), there is sacrifice, there are traps and there's fighting like a cornered rat, there's great escapes and moments of mind numbing stupidity. All within the confines of a 8x8 universe.

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Yours truly is always looking for excuses to justify his obvious lack of talent in chess playing. This is as close to the truth as excuses can get. Yours truly is a day dreamer. He dreams of one day beating his smartphone at level 12 and how gloriously his troops shall march before cornering that opposing king in a position of no escape. He hears the cheering of his kingdom's common folk as the match begins, meticulously plans for the lives of each of his team soldier level upward. Every soul is precious and every loss must be paid for in blood.

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Then the opposition arrives on the battlefield, better planned and better prepared, trying to do the exact same thing. They almost always invariably win. Usually a soldier goes first... unavenged, as payback means the death of one of my horses. Soon things start to turn from bad to worse. My team is trapped, sometimes behind their own team-mates as the opposition master-plans kick into place. The real moment of heartbreak comes when one of my elephants is trapped. I see it in my mind, falling to a thousand pesky little arrows, trumpeting its defiance even as it bravely makes its final stand as moving means exposing his king to a fatal situation. 

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The death of an elephant is something very difficult to overcome. If things were going downhill so far, they go absolutely haywire from here on in. Attack, attack, attack with flashes of red revenge and the clashing of justice delivering swords. Blind anger was never a friend of the successful army and so it comes to pass that soon my king is out there in the open with nowhere to hide. Bitter as it feels, surrender one must and promises to never put oneself through this trauma again are made.

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Soon enough though, sometime in a day's time, sometime in a week's and sometimes even in a month depending on how bad the previous defeat was, the game is on again. There are plans renewed, mistakes recognized and dignity half restored. The kingdom must fight, the kingdom must live and the kingdom must win. Defeat is very likely to say hello again but even a tragedy makes for beautiful viewing if the story is grand and it plays in the mind's real 3D.

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[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2014/02/filmy-chess.html]

Appropriate

Scale is what first hits you when you enter Zion National Park. There is nothing in view as far as you can see which will make you feel confident that your human height and weight and lifespan is sufficient. Nothing will make you feel that OK, I think I compare favourably against that natural feature. Nothing will drive away the feeling that you'd imagine that the Lilliputians first felt when they saw Gulliver lying asleep on their beach. Nothing.

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Then there are the names, given by very recent Western settlers, displacing the ancient Native American names which I am sure were even more impressive knowing their beautiful relationship with nature. Angels Landing, Cathedral Mountain, the Three Patriachs - all names with an undertone of power and once you have seen those places, you'll feel even more belittled.

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It was still quite early in the morning but I was already running late. I had promised to meet someone at the Angels Landing trail head the past evening and I was in a rush to make my time. I looked around, desperately wanting to stop to take pictures but given my limited time kept driving on through the Park. But then I had to stop. Yes, I ended up missing my appointment and did the murderous Angels Landing trail alone but I was compelled to.

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For there I saw a mountain, of which I had already read on my research about Utah. A tourist magnet and a cliched photo opportunity for anyone visiting Zion this was. Guide books suggested going to this location on weekdays and very early in the morning because it was normally packed elbow to elbow with photographers jostling for space. As luck would have it, at that exact point in time and space, the causeway overlooking the mountain was empty. Zero people. I couldn't just let this opportunity get by, my own personal moment with the mountain.

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The sky was murky with wandering clouds, hiding the first as yet feeble rays of the sun. A bluish-silver river cut across the desert landscape bringing a peculiarly vibrant shade of green to the areas that it touched in a landscape otherwise dominated by red rock and towering cliffs. Even among the giants, this mountain stood tall with a gravity that demanded attention. It looked over everything with a sense of responsibility and grim duty. If I hadn't already known its name, I would still guess that I was looking at the Watchman. 

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His general demeanour seemed to be "I was here long before you came, and I'll be here long after you're gone."

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[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2014/02/appropriate.html]

My little blue roadster

Why do we dream? It is one of the many unresolved questions that brain researchers spend endless hours theorizing on and I assume chug endless beers over too. When it comes to the brain, an almost astounding lack of knowledge on its functioning exists even in this age of modern science. Yes, it is the super-specialized organ that made us humans reach the top of the evolutionary chain, yet dumb as we are, we are yet to figure exactly how.

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One of the popular theories is that when the brain is archiving away memories to the back of our minds (if there is such a place), it uses random associations to weave them all into a nonsensical little story we call a dream. To make this popular theory even more popular, I shall now provide you a very specific example, very fresh as of now, only 7-8 hours old. Grab another beer, brain researchers and rejoice in the archiving theory's irrefutable proof.

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I woke up at 9:00 in the morning today, to realize that it was a Sunday morning. So I woke up again at 09:30 in the morning. I would have happily woken up next at 11:30 on the same morning but for the events that transpired in between 9:00 and 9:30. I had dreamed a dream whose details I could very precisely map onto my life over the past couple of weeks.

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Location: 

An office parking lot in Warsaw, Indiana. 

Reality check: 

Not very surprising and quite plausible. For the past week, I was indeed out in that mid-west location of my office for some work which required me to leave my usual Raynham, Massachusetts office.

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Vehicle: 

A beautiful blue British roadster whose make, hard as I tried, I could not make out.

Reality check: 

The car was the exact same shade of blue as the Hyundai Elantra I had rented out of Chicago airport to get to Warsaw. The model my Elantra had transformed into was my colleague's dream car as displayed in a Google Image search at the end of a very long day. Suddenly his dream car had a starring role in my dream and as in real life, I couldn't recall its name.

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A dream is nothing if not absurd: 

It feels like it's like the beginning of the workweek, around 8:00 in the morning, yet I hop into my roadster, gun its engines and start by doing donuts in the parking lot. Just like that. Folks are still pulling into the parking lot and calmly walking by with a Monday sort of expression on their faces as I scream in excitement, swishing and swerving past them, wowing over the extremely great handling of my roadster and feeling a secret pride (within the dream) at my extraordinary driving skills. The parking lot is getting packed by the minute, yet I drive around it with an expertise which defies belief. No casualties at all in my picture perfect mad dash in my little blue roadster except for a clutch of sunflowers. They get taken out by one of my awesome skids. Dream ends with me finally bringing my car to a halt in the middle of the lot, and a feeling of overwhelming happiness at my achievements.

Reality check:

A couple of weeks ago, a couple of friends and me were waiting in a grocery store parking lot in a powerful sedan owned by one of my friends. The better halves of my friends were inside the store shopping for some essentials and I had made a casual suggestion of doing donuts in the parking lot to kill time. Naturally, the suggestion remained a suggestion but I did feel a twinge of regret at not being allowed to. Also, there was my Saturday evening drive from Chicago through a snowstorm as it took me 4.5 hours to get to Warsaw instead of the usual 3 due to the abominable driving conditions on Indiana's snowy highways. By the time, I got to my hotel, I was indeed feeling a little cocky about how I handled a couple of scary slip-and-slide situations with deft touches to the steering and throttle. The sunflowers were on the desktop wallpaper of another one of my colleagues I was chatting to frequently over the past week and they featured in my dream only for a couple of seconds before my roadster sent them to sunflower heaven.

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There it is, a wealth of accurately compiled side-by-side comparison of dreams and realities. You are welcome, scientists! I was surprised by the details of the dreams I retained after waking up and why something like somebody's desktop wallpaper was being filed away in my memory. 

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Maybe there is a method to this madness. Maybe we never ever completely forget anything at all. All we have ever known is all in there in that 1300 cc engine inside our heads. In the mad hatter plots of our dreams are where they live happily ever after. 

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[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2014/02/my-little-blue-roadster.html]