Anthem

It was my very first guitar class in February this year and my teacher walked in, dazzled us with a couple of minutes of freestyling on the fretboard and got going with the compulsory "To start off, tell me why you want to learn the guitar" session. My answer was a rather unimaginative and plain Jane "I love the sound of the guitar!" (Straight out of the 'Cliched Answer 101') but the guy who sat next to me and who now is much more higher on the guitar learning curve (It figures...) came up with "I want to perfectly play the slow lead section of Led Zep's 'Stairway to Heaven' at least once in my life!" My teacher was suitably impressed with his focus and so was I, and I got thinking.

What would be the one song that I'd learn to play if there were only that one song that I could learn? After much soul searching, leaving the divine creations of the likes of U2, Dire Straits and other classic rock favourites behind, I settled for what on the face seems to be an extremely crude song - "BC Sutta" by the Pakistani band Zeest. There were a lot of college band-ish songs which followed that classic, using coarser swear words, more intellectual lyrics, finer musical arrangements etc and gained immense popularity on the hostel MP3 lists but to me they were horrible, just playing on the sensationalism gained by an overdose of swear words yet somehow lacking in depth and class if I may say so.

The strums of "BC Sutta" have that essential rawness that is in complete sync with its bare-to-bones perfect lyrics, perfect because the lyricist knew exactly where the intensity of the song picked up and where exactly the swear words needed to be used & where not. The heart and soul of the song are right where a rock song's should be, in a very rough and tough place. A few girls from my college recorded a version of the very same song, a version which got frequent play on some boy's hostel PCs who were moronic enough to be taken aback by the fact that girls can swear too. What next? Surprise at the fact that girls breathe too? Some of us guys need to grow up or at least wake up to find that is the 21st century... really!

But that said, girls singing that song sounded so pathetic that it became even more evident why this was really a guy's song. A fair counterpoint to girls singing "BC Sutta" would be to imagine (Oh dear Devil, forgive me for this blasphemy) Metallica singing Shania Twain's "That don't be impress me much". Ha! Now you get the idea! True, that women can do everything that men can but just like some men who find dressing like a drag queen irresistible and are deservedly laughed at, so too should we laugh at women who try something ridiculous and unnecessary like this. Women's lib hopefully has bigger battles to fight than to beat men at their evolution enhanced crudeness, which is something they eventually may be able to but to what end?

The need and craving for a cigarette at the moment when it is most inaccessible, the relief when the first drag hits home, the sense of brotherhood that prevails as smoke fills the hostel room while the lone ciggie does the rounds and the essential ruggedness of being a member of the male species - all put together in 4 minutes 18 seconds in this gem of a song. Ideal scenario - a single room maybe 10 years down the line at Boy's Hostel No. 5 (Chatrawaas No. 5) of REC(NIT??) Kurukshetra, the mattress folded over so as to avoid the Royal Stag spilling onto it, all buddies resting on whatever little real estate they can find in between strewn clothes, fluttering newspapers and similar clutter, guitar in my hands, cigarettes in our lips, smoke clouding the roof of the room and everyone going "Doston mein baithaa, main sutta pi rahaa..." Ah yes! Heaven!

My name is not Khan

[The image above is quite apt for my angry tirade to follow :P. Thanks to the J4Jokes.com guys for reading my mind and capturing it in this image even before I could read it myself!]

Just before the Knight Riders' match with Kings XI Punjab at Mohali, I wandered into the Reebok showroom at the South City mall in Kolkata. A sudden desire to possess an 'original' purple team jersey of the Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) had seized me, fostered by a vague hunch that this was the key to help boost my struggling team's fortunes. I stared at the long row of the team T-shirts on display looking for at least one T-shirt which did not have “12 KHAN” emblazoned across it and there were none! Muttering aloud and rather indiscreetly, I asked a sales guy to get me one without Khan written on it (I'll be explaining why very soon) and wonder of wonders, there was actually one piece which did not have any name written on it, just that one single piece in the huge showroom. Then just as I was about to buy it, I found that the only T-shirt in the house which did not have Khan written on it also had a big giant tear in the stitching below the right armpit. Mission KKR Team Jersey was called off right then & there and I watched the match a broken man. KKR did win that match though but my grievances of that moment are still worth venting out here.

If you leave aside the content of his sub-standard movies – most of his movies are (Personal opinion of course. He is indeed the King of Bollywood as far as popularity goes, no questions asked), Shah Rukh Khan seems to be a very good guy in real life. Being an exceptionally gifted speaker, exemplary non-controversial family man and honest income tax payer are three characteristics more than enough to place him on a pedestal which everyone else (both common and 'filmi' men) should aspire to. Success is a breeding house for big egos and very very few saintly over-achievers manage to avoid that fate. Shah Rukh Khan (SRK) is obviously not one of those few and no one can deny that he has been successful, immensely successful, starting his film career, sprinting all the way from the bottom to the very top. An unhealthy amount of megalomania in a man of such immense popularity is very forgivable and to his credit he does try to tone it down by referring to himself as a “performing monkey”, “just another entertainer”, “really really lucky” in his interviews once in a while. All in all definitely a man who commands huge respect, flawed like every other human being though he may be. But this was all about what works in his favour. Here is what doesn't!

Sports is not a scripted story. There are no retakes, there is no flattering camera angle to make a 45 year old face look picture perfect, there is no editing room where the inglorious parts of the story can be quietly snipped away, there is no well contrived happy ending worked into the plot even though you may have trained day in and day out for the past 45 years for that one moment out on the field in front of millions of pairs of eyes, some supportive, most just eager to witness it fall all apart and then pass their cruel judgements. Yes, there are “miles to go” and “promises to keep” for the Kolkata Knight Riders (Horrors of horrors, SRK quoting Robert Frost in the recent KKR ads on TV, my sentiments on which would be the content of a completely separate long long post), but no one knows it better than the captain of SRK's team, the same man on whose head rested the responsibility of a nation's cricket team once and now in charge of a city's cricketing aspirations. The same man who retains his stubbornness in the face of adversity, both his gift and his curse, as his reflexes struggle out on the batting crease and frequently fail to match the strength of his mind & the same man who stands in the background as SRK hogs the billboard ads of the KKR team as if he is somehow the guiding light to all the batsmen, bowlers and fielders in his team. In doing so, SRK makes a mockery of everything a sportsperson represents.

People watch any sport team or individual for the unique display of mental and physical co-ordination unsurpassed in real intensity and dedication by anything else, let alone a Bollywood movie. They tune in to watch stories of unsung heroes rising to their brief but brilliant moment of glory; to see legends display their mythological prowess & legends fail to live up to their claim to fame; wayward genius flash an occasional hint of what could have been; teams come together as one in an all mighty push for glory & teams fall apart in shell shocked disarray when that final outstretched leg or that sweeping swing of the bat determines who won a date with fickle Lady Luck. All this effort by sports-persons who surrender their entire lives to training and extreme discipline, all for that big stage and victory that they know can be granted to only one player or team while the others languish in pain. To have that kind of courage and a will to succeed is what inspires us, the ordinary to go on with the bits and pieces of our remarkably stress free (relatively speaking) ordinary lives.

We are talking real high stakes blood, guts and glory here, not painted-on versions here and about the minimum respect that any professional sports-person deserves. Yes, I will wear a KKR T-shirt which says “Abdulla”...“Mortaza”... “Dinda”... “Sharma”... “Agarkar”... “Bond”... “Matthews”... “Hussey”...“Gayle”... “McCullum”... “Ganguly” etc at a moment's notice because in the end they are the team that is putting themselves out there on the ground, whatever might be the outcome, subjecting themselves to the cheers or to the booes. But my name is not Khan and I'll never ever wear a team T-shirt which sports SRK's name no matter what heightened illusions he might harbour about his role in an actual professional cricketing team.

Old fashioned

If I could have added long Elvis style sideburns to my blog, I would have but since Blogger.com hasn't introduced that feature yet I must be content with fiddling around with some of the default templates which are available. Why after nearly 4 years of reasonably simple existence with a green and white spiral notebook look did my blog feel the need for this makeover, you might ask. Well, in keeping with my post before this one, I was starting to feel a lot more behind the times, even much more than I usually am.

People seem to do the most wonderful things with their blogs. Beautifully colour co-ordinated, strikingly symbolic images stuck onto a carefully selected section of the page, 'Comments' replaced by descriptions like 'Stones chucked into the pool' (The thought pool I assume) and wonderfully evocative names like 'Karmic Soliloquy' - all came together in a cause to make me conscious of the Neanderthal like bareness of my blog. That a handful of them had equally wonderful writing to accompany the visual spectacle of their blogs turned the screw a couple of notches more into my thick caveman hide compelling me to act.

Aesthetic sense is something I have always been hopeless at. Back in the times when we used to write with ink pens at school, I used to compound issues of my squiggly handwriting with my even weirder unique grip on the pen which would ensure that after I finished one line and moved to the next the earlier one would be smudged by my grotesquely twisted hand as I moved forward. The end result was that the white sheet would be half blue in colour by the time I got to the end. Thanks to the keyboard and Google's variety of fonts at least I am saved the trouble of explaining what those blue splashes on the page instead of words meant. I did my best on my blog's new look with the few minutes that I had to spare for this kind of uninteresting activity and indeed that was all the time I was willing to spare.

Being old-fashioned and hard-nosed isn't half as bad in some aspects. When I switch on TV and see Bollywood actors (Guys that is!) flounce about on screen promoting the virtues of spending 1 minute daily in front of the mirror with XYZ beauty cream, I choke back a wave of manly disgust and then laugh like there's no tomorrow. Being crude lends its fair share of hilarious enjoyment even though the laughs might be from the dark confines of a cave hidden away in the forest named "Lack of sophistication". All the same, I think I'll leave the sophistication to the likes of Karan Johar, Shahid Kapoor and SRK!

Hard copy

Last weekend, I went down to my local cyber cafe to have some of the digital pictures I had taken on my Himachal trip at the end of January this year printed out. Ram Singh (of Kasol 'bhoot' bungalow fame) had requested me to send him a photo that we took of him, his grandson and his dog when we had left his place on the 27th of January, and as usual I had slacked off on this until now. I had his address, all I needed was to make the effort to take the print. Handing over the pen-drive to the cyber-cafe's owner, I watched him go to work on his system and within a minute, I had a clear, crisp photograph in my hands. Both Ram Singh and his grandson are prominently visible (see pic above), so they were definitely not ghosts! I was relieved (OK, just kidding about this part) but some other thoughts were on my mind.

The photograph in its physical form felt weird, a blast from the past, when people actually had almirahs full of albums which were flipped through with great enthusiasm by us when we were kids. Albums filled with smiling people, familiar and unfamiliar, in this world or the one beyond; faraway landscapes; totally different looking vistas of a well frequented place from a different era - stories surrounding them enthusiastically being retold for the 100th time with the same practiced set of actions, yet always listened to with a put-on sense of wonder. Now all the space all our recent memories take up are a little laptop the size of one wedding album, and the sharing need not be done in a single, hot, crowded room with the constant threat of kids spilling over to the floor from the overcrowded bed thanks to the blazing fast postman we call the Internet.

Times have changed drastically over the past 10 years and in the age of virtual 'everything' (and I mean EVERY-damn-THING), will people ever miss what it felt like to be talking about their experiences face to face - about that wonderful trip through the forest or that crazy wedding that almost everyone in the known universe attended? Will the people of the future lose out on the feel of leafing through the pages of carefully selected images laughing and pointing fingers, thumb marks all over the place on the more popular pages to be replaced by the plastic feel of keyboard typed comments and the clickety-click of the mouse as they scroll way more photos that anyone really wanted to see? Yes, they will and even more sadly never even realize what they missed out on. For better (at least for our rapidly diminishing trees and over-strained planet) or for worse (At the risk of being labelled an old fogey), the transition is inevitable but still if given a choice between them, I'd pick a hard copy and all its associated mustiness... any day.

India 2: Germany 0

Yesterday riding back to work after running a lunchtime errand through one of the hopelessly identical roads of Salt Lake, I saw something like the above picture zoom up in the rear view mirror of my Bajaj Pulsar. Many a time in the past 2 years on my drive up Route 24N to Boston, I had had a similar sighting of a powerful Beemer, or a Porsche or an exotic Merc while I was doodling away on the same road with my trusty Toyota Corolla. A mere hint from them that they were looking to pass me and I'd slink off to the right of the road showing respect and giving room where it was due. But that was Boston in well-to-do capitalist Massachusetts, and this was Calcutta, the heartland of stagnating Communism! More used to the sight of a rusty yellow Amby cab falling away into the distance in my rear view, I was shaken and stirred. For someone who knows their cars spotting a BMW 6-series convertible (650i to be precise) on a Calcutta road is somewhat like spotting Katrina Kaif shopping at my local fish market. Hell! I hadn't seen one of these beauties in even the 1.5 years of driving down America's freeways. Just when my moony eyes were regaining focus, the peaceful aura of the moment was shattered... into a thousand painful shards all thanks to the incredible boorishness of the idiot who was driving that beautiful machine.

He accelerated the car to within a couple of inches of my Pulsar's tail light and started honking the horn like crazy. There are a lot of things I can tolerate in this world but overbearing bullies are not on the lucky list. That the car deserved a better, saner, classier driver went without saying and in the few seconds that it took me to move my motorcycle out of his way, I had made up my mind. In a crowded city like Calcutta, even in 'planned' areas like Salt Lake, there is one challenge you should not be throwing out and that is of a point A to point B race with a motorcycle unless of course you are riding a motorcycle too. And if your two wheeled rival be a Pulsar 180 or one of its bigger brothers, then the game is as good as lost. Cycle rickshaws, potholes, randomly located semi-filled or over-filled manhole covers, swerving buses will all form an obstacle course that only a motorized two wheeler can negotiate with ease while everyone else must gnash their teeth and wait for the crowds to clear up. The race was on and on my Pulsar's home turf, in the madness and chaos of a Calcutta road.

This the BMW driver seemed to have realized from the moment he overtook me and he made a desperate dash to leave me trailing. On a road with unpredictable traffic and an even more unpredictable surface, he could only go so fast. Just as foolish as I'd have seemed if I had showed up honking behind a BMW on the German Autobahn riding my Pulsar 180, a similar wave of stupidity might have engulfed my competitor's brain when he decided to give my Pulsar a good dose of his horn on yesterday's warm Salt Lake afternoon. I was easily keeping up with him making full use of my home ground advantage and giving him his own back in terms of honks (with the incredibly loud factory fitted horns that the Pulsars come with), hovering just a few inches behind his multi-lakh rear bumper and the few quiet sections of the road where he tried to gain on me by accelerating hard were handled without breaking a sweat by my trusty two wheeled powerhouse (I mean by Indian mobike standards... of course). The guy was getting really mean by now cutting me off rather dangerously whenever I tried to overtake him. It seemed like very soon I was to be famous for being a victim of another BMW hit-and-run case. He knew and I knew that he was only delaying the inevitable, but misplaced pride at being at the wheels of a BMW kept him going.

Then I found an ally in the form of another Pulsar, this one carrying three guys and subjected to the same shock-and-awe tactics by my rival in his mad rush to get away from me. Except that, like me, they too were not shocked-and-awed and joined me in my bumper to bumper pursuit of the amazing car with its no-longer-amused driver. Now there were two Pulsars on the BMW's tail, honking away and pushing ahead for right of way.

Being rich and driving a BMW doesn't add an iota of courage to the person concerned - is what I confirmed yesterday. A chicken remains a chicken. Within a minute of being pressured by two Indian bikes, the German car braked hard to a standstill on the right of the road at a cut in the road divider and began indicating that he was turning right. His game was up and he turned tail going back in the opposite direction. By this time, both the mobikes had zoomed past him, and I exchanged an approving farewell nod with my BMW afflicted Pulsar teammates, a mutual salute for tackling fire with fire and for not bowing down to that bit of exploitative and extraordinary rudeness. At full time, the scores read Bajaj Pulsar 2: BMW 650i 1, or better still, India 2: Germany 0!
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[Do not be foolish enough to consider everything stated above as an incentive to speed. Drive and ride safe. Reach home. Alive. With all limbs in their respective places. Let others on the road do so too. Please.]

Keep the faith

If I were a practical and smart guy, I'd quietly take a few steps back and fade into the jeering crowds at round about this time. Step back from the sharp jibes and ridicule that is the sour reward for not introducing some sort of a reality check into a long cherished dream (OK, maybe not that long... a dream 2 years old) and a punch on the nose for foolish blind support. Yes, the Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) are on a losing streak (yet again...) and I am once again taking their defeats a bit too personally. Yes, I am not practical and smart. Here's why.

A dream isn't a dream if it does not border on the improbable. If success were pre-guaranteed, it wouldn't be a dream at all but just a yawn inducing plan. At the centre of this dream falling apart drama lies a brave young-at-heart cricketer looking for a final glorious hurrah to end his cricketing days and it is evident that he is trying his utmost, the terrible results notwithstanding. As you might know Sourav Ganguly is not my favourite cricketer (that title being reserved for two gentlemen whose names can be shortened to SRT and BCL), but on Monday when he walked out to open the innings against the Mumbai Indians, I had to doff my hat to his "Bring it on" attitude. With his extremely limited range of shots, at a time when everyone was hollering at him to hide himself down the order considering his acute lack of form, to instead push himself to the top was a testimony to this man's extreme self-belief and to the only way Ganguly knows how to play his cricket - taking the challenges head on. True, it did not work out well that night but finding the spunk to even try that plan out and then that freakily awesome catch which he took to dismiss Saurabh Tiwary were nothing but extraordinary. A lot of other little luck factors went totally against his team as in the past 3 games of this season, putting the Knights in the lowly position that they are in. Personally though, I do find a lot of things of a positive nature in KKR's IPL season this year but I don't blame critics for not noticing them as they are not that evident... yet.

No, I am not finding excuses or preparing my resignation letter in advance. Taking the fate of KKR personally is in many ways similar to taking the fate of India as a country seriously. Nothing makes my blood boil quicker than when an Indian says "What is good about this country? Nothing like XYZ (insert an appropriate developed nation name in there) is ever possible here." Sometimes the statement is actually true but that still doesn't stop the steam from blowing out of my ears. Rife with problems like extremism (Muslim, Hindu, Maoists - the list is endless), corruption, casteism, regionalism, over-population, vote-bank politics, it has always seemed destined for disaster over the past 63 odd years. At the mindbendingly same time, it has always seem poised for success and brimming over with tremendous potential too with its healthy mix of successful democracy implementation, unparalleled levels of tolerance despite the mind boggling cultural differences and a poise & grace that only a wise ancient land can possess. KKR is a fresh spring chicken as compared to the magic promise that India has held to the world for all these years, but my appeal to Indians as a whole and KKR fans in particular is quite simple and similar. Fate has a role to play in all that we do (sometimes very minor, sometimes very major) but do not ever abandon your team/country for what is just the flavour of the season. Our time will come. Keep the faith.

Breathe easy

The picture above, meant for ignoramuses like me is of Vijender Singh from Bhiwani, Haryana of whose existence I did not know until I read the papers yesterday. He won the Commonwealth Boxing Championships gold in the 75 kg category on Wednesday and was already the world no.1 when he added this, another very shiny feather to his cap. Incidentally he had also won bronze at the 2008 Beijing Olympics thereby adding another feather to my ignoramus cap earned by achieving the feat of never having heard his name. In a country ridiculously short on sporting heroes, it's a matter of shame that everyone does not know about this world champion in our ranks. No, we'd (or more appropriately - I'd) rather watch Shilpa Shetty and Preity Zinta cheer their rather mediocre IPL teams from the stands than know about a guy who actually has won something and must have been doing so for quite some time!

Here's an anecdote from Wednesday's gold medal match that'll shed some light on why Vijender is at the top. First round of the final and Vijender takes a blow above his eyes which opens up a cut. Blood starts seeping out, not a great sign as boxing referees will very likely stop a match right then and there if the cut starts bleeding significantly. So what does our Vijender do? He in his post match interview says that he controlled his breath, breathing long and deep so that his heart does not get hyperactive and start pumping blood out out of his eye cut. Not only that he eventually manages to stem the blood flow simply by this 'breathing technique' if you will, and goes on to defeat his British opponent comprehensively. Imagine that! Getting beaten to pulp by an opponent, only occasionally managing to dodge his jabs, upper cuts and haymakers, all the while thinking "Breathe easy!... Breathe easy!... Breathe easy!"

Ha! And you thought your day time job was tough. Welcome to the real world.