Imagine

Imagine... that you are Sachin Tendulkar, with 20 years of international cricket experience with you walking in to bat. It's early on the windy first day of an India v/s South Africa Test match at the Newlands stadium in Cape Town, South Africa. Two quick Indian wickets have already gone down but the crowds have poured into the stadium for exactly the situation you find yourself in. You absorb the the noise, the atmosphere, the excitement and the expectations of the watching thousands plus the millions watching live on TV; gather a deep breath and take guard.

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Steaming in towards you, without the slightest hint of goodwill in his intentions, is the best fast bowler currently in business in international cricket, Dale Steyn. He can swing the cricket ball like it's on drugs; bowl at speeds that will shatter your stumps before you can blink and also crack your ribs if you are caught unawares by one of his mean short length deliveries. Accuracy and discipline is not something he can be faulted on, not to forget that this is Cape Town where the ball swings, bounces and bites anyway. Any other person in your place would have just raised his hands in surrender and walked away. But not you.

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Because you are Tendulkar. You've been in tight corners like this before. Where there is Steyn running in, there was once a Wasim Akram or an Allan Donald or a Glenn McGrath or a Shoaib Akhtar. If it's short and wide, cut it; if it's full outside off, cream a cover drive; if it's full and straight, punch it back past the bowler; if it's full on the pads, flick it away on the leg side; if it's short and heading towards your body, pull it; if it's really short, hook it or just weave away from it. You have an answer for almost anything. Almost. 20 years in the business of extraordinary batting still haven't helped you prepare for the "corridor". In fact, the thrill of the "corridor" might the only reason that you still revel in the challenge of playing cricket.

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Of all the expressions frequently used by cricket commentators, "Corridor of uncertainty" has to be the most evocative. The good length delivery in the narrow zone on or around the the off stump (the aforementioned corridor), poses multiple questions to the batsman in that brief half a second it takes to get to the batsman. Back foot or front foot? Play it or let it go? Thump it or stonewall it? So many questions, never a definite answer. Uncertainty as defined in the English dictionary assumes the form of a live snarling creature. Being Sachin and the bowler being Steyn, you half expect what's coming. There it is, the perfect good length delivery at blistering pace in that doubt breeding region around the off stump.

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There are three South African slip fielders and a wicketkeeper waiting for a nick which they will gratefully pouch. Your critics will then snigger behind your back ignorant of the reality of two decades of invaluable service to the team, "He is useless in critical situations." Maybe you should let this one go and wait for an easier one. But what if this comes back in towards the stumps? It'll be too late to react then! If you half play it, there is every chance of a thin edge so why not smack it? A crackling boundary to start with works wonders for your confidence. All difficult choices to be facing but the truth is that you love being there, at that position of potential. There may be glory to be hoped for or sheer disappointment to be coped with, but the real incentive is not knowing what will happen, until you make your move.

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Negotiating the bewildering path of life is so much like playing an infinite Test match as a batsman. You need patience and you need judgement; you need anticipation and you need self-belief. Opportunities come and go, like zippy Steyn deliveries. On a bad day, you grit your teeth and try to weather the storm. On a good day, you middle the ones that are clear-cut run making chances, the short balls and the full ones. Yet anything in the corridor of uncertainty is always a mystery, no matter how long you play. 

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That is when you need that rare combination of pluck and luck as you shape up to face the unknown. Rule number 1 is to accept that life is frequently unfair and you shouldn't be complaining about how life handed you a raw deal, especially since you are by far not the first person that something  ridiculously undeserved happened to. It is in the nature of life to slap you in the face for no reason at all, and all those years of hard work in the nets might amount to a big round zero on match day. There might also be wrong choices made, but it's pointless to rue them for long. Of course being dismissed hurts, but the only option you have in this life is to back yourself and live to fight another day. Then, there is the exciting possibility of things going right, of achieving a flow that keeps you at the crease for a long, fulfilling innings. People will say what they say anyway but at the end of the day, it's your life to live and your route to choose. Quoting Liam Thomas Ryder: 

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"Time sets the stage; fate writes the script; but only we may choose our character." 

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Imagine that you are Sachin Tendulkar.

Outing

Image via Wikipedia

The little zero bulb above the wash-basin came on with an audible click casting ghostly yellow beams on my portion on the bed and my face. It was still dark outside but mom was already up to keep up with ours, the kids' schedule for the day. For a change, I did not mumble or grumble but sat straight up. It was the one school day of the year when waking up early was not a pain. Brushing my teeth, I could hear the pre-dawn trains blow their whistles many kilometres away from the Narmada bridge, a sound which would not make it to our housing society when the traffic grew heavy on the road in front later in the day. Though train travel was rarely a requirement on most of our school trips, the shrill calls of the incoming trains were symbolic of the restlessness and anticipation of the trip to come.

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Done with her duty of packing the snack-boxes for my sister and me, it was time for dad to step up for his role in the early morning ordeal. He was in charge of taking us to the forever fixed starting point for all school trips, the patch of land in front of Maharaja Hotel where the buses were waiting to take in the troops of school children and so were our other excited classmates/schoolmates with their equally tired looking parent escorts through the yet darkened roads of our small town. A quick visual scan done to check for the arrival of any members of our respective buddy groups and then the accompanying parent was suddenly as good as non-existent. As the official time to leave approached, the role calls began and though order was restored as far as the standing in neat rows was concerned, the noise levels were consistently on the rise. The teachers accompanying us on the trip would get an early taste of the headaches in store for them as kids who just about barely heeded them inside the classrooms were now expected to obey in this great long trip outside of school. The teacher shouted for silence, the children chattered on regardless, the teacher shouted again for silence, the children chattered on again regardless, the teacher gave up and sighed - was the usual pattern on display.

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All loaded into the bus, the buses would roll out onto the highway and the usual antics of unreasonably happy schoolkids would begin, spurred on by the mild chill that still hung in the air. Civilized debates transforming into bitter slanging-matches over which audio cassette to play, for example, a choice between "Taal" or "Pyaar Mein Kabhi Kabhi" were a common feature. So was woefully out-of-tune and fearfully enthusiastic Antakshari singing with winks and nudges being passed around of the "He is actually singing for her"/"She is really singing for him" type. Then there were the paper ball throwing face-offs, plastic bottle duels and some random quote from a poor soul which tickled the humour of the entire bus (or at least the entire bus pretended so) which served as the basis for mindless maniacal laughter for the next few minutes. All of this cacophony would last till the sun went up full and strong. Afterwards there would be something of a lull till the destination for the picnic was reached.

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School day trips were mostly to nearby forest areas. The Sagai [wink wink :)] forest and Jambughoda forest trips are names I can recall but there was one every school year and I think I did them all. The destination was not of too much consequence as the behaviour of the trippers was always similarly bizarre. The students would pour out of the buses like busy insects and proceed to do exactly the opposite of everything that the teachers would tell them, behaving much like an ant hill on drugs. "Everyone will stay in a single group" they were instructed and within the first 15 minutes there were as almost as many groups as there were children. Some raced ahead to keep up with the guide, some trailed off into checking some alternate routes confident that the noise of the other hundred stampeding children would prevent them from getting lost and some just hung back to make the most of this golden chance to irritate and worry the teachers at the same time. "Remember... we will stay here only for 15 minutes" said the supervisor at the most wonderful spot of our day long walk with a wild, magnificent jungle waterfall to play around in and so immediately the students decided that 15 minutes meant 2 hours. Only when the PT teacher came down chasing everyone with a cane did the pool at the base of the waterfall rid itself of the splashing, thrashing school children. The impromptu cricket and football sessions were also a constant presence given the availability of any minimum amount of space and time.

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With the arrival of evening, the slow trooping back to the buses would be complete and the final role call before the return journey was the closing of the loop. It's a wonder given the consciously created disorderliness amongst the students that thankfully no one ever got left behind. Someone up above must be keeping an eye out for indisciplined school kids, I guess! The trip back home was a rather morose affair in the yellow lighted interior of the bus with even the most vocally capable of our troops being reduced to a mild murmur given the exertions of the day. Some gloomy soul (Me thinks it was the driver who was fed up with the constant wall of human noise behind him while he was driving around) would put on "So gayaa yeh jahaan, so gayaa aasmaan... [The world has fallen asleep, so has the sky]" in the music system, finally his choice of song, and if you were to raise your head to take a peek around inside the bus in that final leg of the return journey, you would find it tough to disagree. The immediate world around me was indeed asleep but only after revelling in an amount of happiness and fulfillment that'd be increasingly difficult to attain as time carried them forward into the complexities of their futures.

Auto-pilot

Image via Wikipedia

Having spent year after childhood year wanting to learn never quite translated into action but January 14th was the day when I renewed my yearly oath of "This year I will coax one of my buddies into teaching me how to fly a kite... definitely most definitely!" By the time, the next Uttarayan/Makar Sakranti came around, there was I again holding on the 'charki' (spindle) while some friend or the other engaged in fierce battles with fellow fliers, my involvement being restricted to the level of a loud excited "Kaipochhe (Cut it)!" or to the menial response to the barked order of a defeated fighter of "Abbey lappett (Hey, wind the thread back)!"

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A few charitable souls did try to teach me a thing or two about the magical (at least to me) art of coaxing a glued patch of paper on a stick framework into the air but it wasn't very long before they discovered that they would need extra stocks of kites if I continued with my merry tug-when-the-head-pointing-downwards kite destroying ways. I still looked forward to the kite festival though. The long rows of sunny roofs unmindful of the winter breeze, filled with people, loudspeakers blaring out the latest Bollywood numbers and very liberal amounts of sweet groundnut 'chikki' being spread around offered a great environment to indulge in along with my troop of friends while eying all the girls on the neighbouring terraces (Murphy's Law dictated that there were to be none on the terrace we chose to be on).

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Above all, there was the faint promise of redemption, the chance that the hours of patient 'charki' handling would yield something tangible for however brief a period of time. For when in a freak space of time with the sky was clear of immediate competition, the friend who was flying the kite would feel bored by the inactivity and offer me a chance to be the man-in-command. I would jump at the opportunity, to feel the weight of the long line of string leading up to the messenger in the sky. It's wonderful to be in charge of something that distant, cruising the winds and swimming in the vastness that we as human beings will never have such unrestricted access to. The kite it would seem was living the dream and that very string which ran from its straining ribs to my hands carried to me indistinct whispers of all the wonderful things that it could see but could not fully describe. The few moments of blissful navigation lasted only till an aggressive neighbour started homing in on my aircraft. Then once again, the command would switch and I would rushed back to my critical but unglamourous position in the engine room. I didn't mind. Being a pilot or at least imagining myself to be one was always fun, so what if the plane was in Auto-Pilot mode all the time while I was in the pilot's seat. 

Readjusted estimates

Until as recently as 5 years ago, I was blessed with the gift of a no-trace-of-fat-or-muscle-retained stick thin figure despite an insatiable appetite especially at job treats, electric heater aided room cooking sessions and farewells that lay thick and fast across the duration of the third and final year calendars at engineering college. The most common question put to me tinged with a trace of shock then as the pile of chicken bones grew thick and fast around me (sometimes even the bones were not to be wasted) was "How can you eat so much? Where does it all go?"

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Then came the 4-5 years of lounging around in front of a computer screen at office and it was only on this Thursday that I understood the full social impact of my inactivity based physical transformation. A colleague was in his last week of work before his transfer to another location and he had taken us, his soon-to-be-ex team members out to lunch. I wasn't quite hungry and post college, my appetite had really gone down from an equivalent of 100 to 5 but as the future event will suggest, my appearance may be reflecting an opposite trend. Though it was a buffet, I opted for just a single helping of all the items on the tables. As I was winding up the meal with two scoopfuls of icecream and gulabjamuns, three different people at my table had exactly the same question for me. This question maintained the element of shock in it. Except for the fact that now the question was "Aapkaa ho gayaa?!! [Are you done?!!]". Darn it!

Foggy parathas

[Tonight is a cold night in Calcutta, cold by Calcutta standards that is, but just the right kind of cold if you ask me. The motorcycle ride back home through deserted late night roads is faster by 20 kmph as your shoulders stiffen up to brave the chill in the air. Your twitchy on-the-verge-of-sneezing nose & numb fingertips feel like they belong to somebody else. Your eyelids are cold, like they have just been dug out of snow. Just the right kind of cold that a man can take... and robustly enjoy! Makes me think back to the four winters spent in the heart of Haryana, last experienced only 4 years ago but already seems like 4 decades ago.]

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07:30 AM

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I have always been a creature of the light, never a creature of the night even through the routine murdering lifestyle of an engineering college hostel. When the sun is up, I have to be up too no matter how late I sleep or no matter how much of a biology v/s fermented liquids challenge last night's party was. So all too frequently on a winter's morning on a weekend, I would find myself blinking like a deer caught in the headlights and grumbling my way out of the sensational comforts of a thick blanket. It didn't matter that I would be taken down by another wave of extreme sleepiness at around 11:00 AM, but for the moment, I was hopelessly awake.

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A hostel bears an uncanny resemblance to a graveyard in those hours of the morning, so deathly quiet is the surroundings. Every party worth its salt has already ended in tearful emotional moments of the "You are a real friend!" nature and the chorus of puking heads out of the verandahs of decadence has long gone silent. It's a surreal world, especially in contrast to the mayhem and the noise and the loud music that inhabited the same space just a few hours ago. Then there's the all pervading morning fog rolling in from the sunflower fields in front of Hostel Number 5, almost looking responsible for putting all the party revellers to a much needed but vehemently-fought-against slumber.

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I lumber down the stairs after pulling on my worn-down-to-the-last thread blue jacket as the cold stings my ears. The few odd inmates (Yes, we have had some notices which referred to us as "Inmates of Hostel No. 5"!) who were also in wait for breakfast to begin also come shuffling down, a mini army of zombies staggering through the fog in search of the one thing they craved, the only thing that could justify being awake at that  - hot paranthas! Methi, aloo, gobi whatever may be the stuffing - all welcomed onto the cold steel of the railway catering style steel plates, topped off with a cube of butter and then another cube of butter to serve as the 'subzi' component of the meal. 

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The warmth of the first morsels of food awaken the other senses and I can hear the sound of the carrom board striker whacking into the sides. Somebody has already got down to business in the common room neighbouring the hostel mess and I am sure by the time I leave the table, none of the newspapers pinned to the boards would be free for a read. Nonetheless, I wander into the common room out of sheer habit and check out what's on TV. Wonders of wonders, it's not ETC with its endless stream of Bollywood movie trailers but a West Indies v/s Australia Test match live. Lara is hitting the hide off the Aussies and it seems that the word has got around already. A few familiar faces, cricket-fans as they are, rush in and take up the first row. I too find my nook, in the second row with an empty chair in front to prop my legs up on to half doze, half dream my way through the wizardry on display on TV. Another blissful day of anarchy thus progresses in REC Kurukshetra, in the land of foggy parathas.

1.1.11

Image by randihausken via Flickr

It's very strange how the number 1 is indicative of a beginning and also of closure. '1' is the all important first step in a journey to success and '1' is the place where the ladder of success ends. So on a day when the calendar is bursting over with '1's, I find myself horribly confused. Is this post my first step towards achieving perfection in writing increasingly meaningless pseudo-philosophical babble or my crowning achievement in my attempts to waste the time of people who bother to read me. Happy New Year 2011 anyway. And sorry... insufficient sleep trying to catch up and an extreme will to post on the first day of a new year often combine to achieve randomly inexplicable results like the content of the post above.

The question

December 8th, 2009

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"So how do you feel? [About returning to India]", asked a friend from the seat row ahead of me as the British Airways flight from Boston to London circled above the bright night lights of England's capital. This was the half-way mark on my return to India after one and a half years in the USA but I lacked the gung-ho optimism which had been my constant companion till the second I had boarded this flight. I replied rather circumspectly "I don't know!" I felt uneasy; like one would feel if every invitee gifted him a deodorant on his birthday. 

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Putting it mildly, I was having a blast in the USA. An ever growing circle of friends; a significant number of well settled and welcoming relatives sprinkled around the country; California one weekend; New York City in the other; U2 live; canoeing in the forests of Maine; sailing on the Atlantic; skydiving; driving for hundreds of miles of spectacular open highway in a variety of vehicles yet I would simply laugh off the suggestion if anyone ever mentioned "settling in the US". Life itself was some sort of adventure, the people were friendly and the work culture was awesome yet...

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Not being able to justify "yet" even to myself was frustrating. The long queues and noise at Heathrow airport added to the gnawing doubt that an objective answer to the question posed was not going to be so comfortable. My parents had come visiting in the wonderful last 2 months of my stay there and our collective luggage handling on the return journey was a chore which kept me busy at Heathrow. Finding my seat on the plane to Bombay, I waited till the plane took off and buried myself in the in-flight movie options just to escape my thoughts.

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In the process, I ended up watching the Pixar Studios animated "Up", a movie about Carl Fredrickson, a retired widower who had filled a lifetime with happy dreams of travels to faraway lands with his beloved wife but never got to fulfill them as the pressing needs of a regular life kept them entangled. With his wife now deceased and old age caretakers knocking on his door, he ties thousands of multi-coloured helium balloons to his house making it float away for a highly entertaining and touching journey. To my relief, the story was such that I was completely engrossed.

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Soon we landed in Bombay, a city that I had always adored blindly, at least before I left the country. But now its airport looked in complete and utter chaos. The luggage conveyer belts were mobbed and it was hard to last 10 seconds without having a marauding trolley crush your feet. Completely spoilt by my brief stay in a more orderly nation, I really shouted at an overenthusiastic luggage bearer who only wanted to transport our suitcases and asked him to move on, cruelly ignoring the fact that all he was trying was to ensure his hard-earned daily bread.

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It was past 3:00 AM when we left the airport and headed to my brother's flat down the empty Western Express highway. I noticed more than ever before how much of a work in progress my country was. There were flyovers and buildings coming up everywhere, a screen of dust in the air, barefooted families walking alongside the highway for an early morning arrival at the Siddhi Vinayak temple as the driver of our vehicle speedily ignored one red signal after the other. As expected, not much had changed in my time away and a deep seated dissatisfaction troubled me.

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Suddenly the quiet of the night was invaded by what sounded like countless buzzing bees. We looked to see a dozen odd motorcycles loaded with whooping and joyful youngsters zoom past us. These were not imported super-fast models, but regular Indian motorcycles doing 55 mph at the most yet the look on their faces said that they were having the time of their lives. The driver angrily blamed "Dhoom picture" for misguiding the youngsters; mom was making her clucking sound of disapproval; dad I suspect was, like me, smiling. I smiled because I realized the very personal nature of happiness.

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The place and the environment that one has grown up in are inextricably entwined with what one needs to be happy. I used to think that this idea was solely based on the romanticized ideals of patriotism and gratitude to the homeland, but now understood that this was also cold fact. All things put together, in a life overburdened with personal wishes and desires, without being compelled to, the tricolour with a wheel in between had become my flag, the cricket team in blue was my team and a chunk of land in the south of Asia was my country.

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I remembered being asked by curious foreigners to discuss Diwali, Eid, Royal Bengal tigers, the Mahabharata, Kalaripayattu etc and my limited but enthusiastic explanation of the same because an Indian was expected to know all of these topics and many more. I recalled hating "Slumdog Milllionaire" and the personal sense of guilt at being unable to deny that many people still did live like this in my country when an American friend asked. I was a fool to objectively compare what was irrevocably mine (both great and not-so-great) to foreign standards and crib about situations which were partly my responsibility.

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So we have our problems of brutally real and politically projected inefficiency, injustice and inequality. "We are like this only" is a philosophy that should not be blindly encouraged. There is much to see, learn and implement from the world outside. I could easily give an arm and a leg to continue visiting foreign places and work there for brief periods of time. But all doubts were quelled and I was finally at peace. It was as clear as if Carl Fredrickson had floated the answer using multi-coloured balloons across the grey of the approaching Mumbai dawn. “Home. Heart. India.”

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2010/12/question.html]