In the mental crawlspaces of the rich

I watch the IPL. Hell, I enjoy watching the IPL. 'Tis probably a testament to how much time I've spent trawling through the muck that poses as the Internet over the past two years that I actually feel guilty saying that. The IPL is the Root of All Evil, right? Right, sure. I'm not arguing against that, honest. But it's fun, and it gives me something to look forward to every evening for two months of a year. Like the only reality TV show that's worth watching. Plus, it has a team that represents Chennai and a whole host of players I adore and admire, and given how much of my investment in this sport is purely emotional, I find a lot to get behind.

So this time when I heard they were televising the player auction for 2011 (did they do that the first time? I don't remember), I watched it with much anticipation.

Aaand, uh. Okay. I spent most of the first hour with my mandible stuck firmly to the ground. Because, holy shit, it was mindblowing, in the most perverse way possible. After a while, I got into the rhythm of the whole thing. It was easy to forget, after some time, that they were dealing with actual players; it was like watching a gigantic Fantasy-Team game - can you fit in your dream team within your budget before your opponents do? Play and find out! - and I was getting behind the CSK contingent, praying that we managed to buy back the likes of Ashwin, Murali, Dougie and the rest. It may have gotten a little out of hand (my mother informs me I was raving put that paddle down, crazy Kochi lady! at the TV while the bidding war for Muralitharan was going on between CSK and Kochi, but hey) but it was fun, you know? It was only when the second day came about, and even the team owners looked like they were fooling around and treating the whole thing as a game, that I began to feel queasy. To their credit, though, I thought the CSK contingent remained serious throughout, hardly cracked a smile, and mostly left during the so-called "reauction" at the very end, when they were pretty sure that they'd finished what they'd started out to do. (but then again, the owners barely grinned even when we won the trophy last year, so maybe they're just naturally sourpusses).

People think that this is shocking and demeaning to cricket. I mean, sure, okay. I've always thought that the IPL is just more of a flamboyant circus that doesn't hesitate to show its garishly-painted butt while the rest of cricket is a circus that pretends it's not and covers itself in mouldy trappings in the name of heritage.

I was wondering just how surreal it must've been to sit in that auction room, as part of one of the contingents. Or maybe that's just me, and the owners were perfectly grounded even as astronomical sums of money were splashed about on people they couldn't tell from Adam (give me one person from the team that bought him who can even pronounce "Francois du Plessis"). I don't know. My belief is that everybody who signed up for this circus - franchise owners and players both - knew what they were getting into. They knew what lay ahead, what was likely to happen. And apparently, 353 of them were perfectly fine with it.

Is there a sense of wrongness to all of this, especially given the corruption that's rampant in the IPL's short history, and all the malingering and power-plays in the administration? That the IPL as an incentive is skewing the priorities of whole generations of young cricketers? Certainly.

Can I bring myself to care? Not really. My one explanation would be that cricket seems to be perennially caught in crisis; so much so that I think it's the only way the sport survives. Australian cricket is in crisis after being walloped by the English; Mumbai cricket is in crisis after failing to reach the Ranji semis for the first time in a billion years; cricketing administration is in crisis because Australia and England aren't calling the shots anymore the BCCI is throwing its money-bloated, corrupt stinking weight around; the inundation of Twenty20 is bringing out the basest instincts out of a generation of cricketing innocents, and will nobody think of the children?! But to be completely honest, I don't care about this the same way a lot of don't really care about the stuff that's happening in the rest of the world. If we were to judge ourselves hypocrites by watching the IPL, then there is not one person in the whole world who is not a hypocrite, in some walk of life or the other. Mind you, this is not an attempt at justification. I'm just calling it as I see it. A spade a spade - and maybe occasionally, a shovel.

Every generation has its own demons to grapple; the greatest enemy of our generation is our apathy.

Who's awesome?

Why, Badri, of course.

And Vijay... is the captain? Tamil Nadu obviously now follows the last-person-to-have-played-for-the-national-team captaincy policy.

Floundering in hyperbole

... not to mention crashing through stacks of meaningless rhetoric, tangling up in a bunch of sticky metaphors, eventually to fall into a roiling adjective soup, breathless descriptions cloying on my skin and rolling onto my laptop in great lumps... pretty much the kind of situation I find myself in when Virender Sehwag decides to play yet another of those innings.

It is usually prudent to give oneself sometime to regain lost breath, lest one starts giving into that sticky tangle of hilarious exaggeration (the Neandrathal comparsion's my favourite. Somewhere, Charles Darwin is rolling over in his grave... again). There's something about watching Viru Sehwag (and I don't think it an exaggeration when I say that it was indeed a Divine Intervention that the only full day of Test cricket I managed to catch all year was day 2 of the Mumbai Test) play that provokes intense emotion out of you. He nonchalantly spanks all and sundry on his way to 100, 200, 300... and you think, here's an epiphany. Even with the commentators regurgigating their usual staple of "No footwork, it's all exquisite hand-eye co-ordination" you think, you are obligated to say something about this. Because Sehwag sure ain't. It is brilliant, it is brutal, it's a million Thesauri meshed together into a savage beast of Biblical proportions as you search for -- and fail at finding -- words to fit in everything you wanted to say about Sehwag's innings. You are only more intent on celebrating this "simple, yet brilliant" mind when he comes out later with things like "I see ball, I hit ball."

He still says that, now with a smug matter-of-factness, probably amused at how people are fascinated by that statement of his. He probably still means it, but I'd like to believe that a lot of care, a lot of careful thought and construction go into each of his big innings. But even the cynic in me is defeated when he goes, "I was hitting only the bad balls, but in the dressing room they were telling me I was hitting some good balls too", or something to that effect.

In short, Virender Sehwag = all that's awesome about the Indian team right now. When he fires, he really fires; when he fails, it's not in half-measures, either.

And what can I say about Murali Vijay, other than he was really unfortunate to miss out on a well-deserved maiden ton? He looked delightfully assured and competent at the crease, and not for a moment was Gambhir missed. I loved how he kept the tempo up in the beginning as Viru settled at the other end. He is just so much awesome right now I can't even.

And Dhoni got his second century of the series. Wow. When it rains, it pours, huh?

And what a difference the return of Zaheer Khan has made to the team. Even though he didn't really start pulling his weight until toward the end of the series, just his presence, I believe, could rejuvenate our suddenly-floundering pace attack. It might be the most important plus point EVAH.

The Sri Lankans stuck around, and, uh, that's about it, really. There've been renewed murmurings about the presence/absence of the Umpire Decision Review System (or what the hell ever it's called), with Sanga going as far as to say that a couple of bad decisions cost them as much as 500 runs and possibly a victory or two.

Maybe, but the argument is moot when strong protestations against the newfangled thing are sounding with the backing of rock-hard evidence from the Aus v Windies series going on right now.

Either way, it's like stirring an old pile of stale shit, so.

The other big thing going right now is India's supposed ascension to the top of the ICC Test rankings with the 2-0 win against Sri Lanka. Lot of congratulations and chest-beating going on, tempered, of course, by some well-founded cynicism from other quarters of the cricketing fraternity. I agree, India haven't won enough overseas, the no 1 position is very fluid right now and can change hands frequently, India definitely is not the all-conquering champion side that West Indies or Australia once were. Check, check, check. But for now? That little rankings table reads like the way every Indian cricket fan has always dreamt it would read, for the first time ever. It's a nice moment, and the team and its supporters deserve to savour it while it lasts (except, of course, oh noes! The largely-accepted-for-the-past-eight-years ranking system is suddenly all WRONG because INDIA is no 1! Isn't that all kinds of unnatural? I mean, it's okay when the table shows Aus or SA at the top, cos that's how it'a meant to be, but India? Nah. And, oh, the Evil IPL is Evil. Just in case you'd forgotten.)

It kind of reminds me of my travails with Hindi in high school. I used to hate the language, and I believe the feeling was mutual. I scraped through the subject, until I came to my tenth Boards - the last time I'd be writing an exam for that subject. I was a jingling pile of nerves the day of the exam, and, despite being the most pathetic Hindi conversationist even this side of the Vindhyas, and getting my tenses mixed up practically every other paragraph, I passed with the highest distinction in the exam. "Pratham Shreni" says the certificate, still, and my mind still boggles at the sight. And how did I do so well? Pure dumb luck in that a lot of the questions I'd memorised the answers to made their appearance in the question paper, the fact that I was taking a less advanced Hindi course, and a little bit of innate ingenuity on my part at the time of writing the paper. I was surprised, more than a little pleased at seeing the high ranking, but I also knew exactly how much work I needed to actually put into my Hindi. Certainly I could blame the system for assigning qualifications to people who don't exactly deserve them, for the way the language is taught in schools with more emphasis on memorisation and rote than on conversation and free reading, but that's the way things are. Hindi and I have a much better relationship now - I hope - and perhaps one day I'll be deserving of the distinction I was awarded all those years back.

So, at the end of it all, what am I trying to say, you ask?

I have no idea.

Addendum: Only two Tests in the next 6 months??

Ridiculous. Can't wait for the South Africa tour -- in a year's time from now, I think -- already.

Zip, Zap, Zoom

... and other such onomatopoeic expressions of 'where the hell did all that time go."

'Cause, really? I could've sworn that the Ill-Fated ODI series against Australia finished just now, and already we're in the final Test of a series against Sri Lanka, Dhoni scored his first Test century since the Stone Age (and it is a little scary when I mean that literally), everybody else is helping themselves to centuries apiece, Sreesanth, frickin' Sreesanth, back in the team and producing match-winning performances (not that, of course, I have anything against him or nothin'), India won its 100th ever Test win, and really, what?

Whatever happened to the deliciously slow build-up to Test matches, all that speculation, all that gathering of momentum. Conidering how much resources and how many brain cells are expended on each Test, you'd want to make each of them actually count, yeah?

Honestly? I can't blame Gambhir putting attending his sister's marriage before playing the third Test. After all, your sister gets married only once (hopefully).

Also, it means Murali Vijay gets to open, which, yay! I'd just spent a lot of time arguing with a friend a couple of days ago about how it was certain that Wasim Jaffer would make it ahead of Vijay -- experience, home ground, whatever -- but I'm super-happy he's gotten another chance at wearing the Test cap for India. Hopefully this time he'll get more than a couple of gritty forties and a Run-Out of Awesome.

Also? R Ashwin and Ashoke Dinda in the Twenty20 and ODI squads, leaving out Ishant Sharma. I heartily approve.

I was going to give some -- ostensibly -- deep insight about the first day of play at Mumbai, but then I came across this:



My first reaction was, "Holy hell, that's unhygienic!"

And then it all sunk in and a small part of me died inside.

Catching up

Before I begin, belated Pongal/Makar Sankranti wishes to everyone!

So I spent my Pongal vacation and then some in a blissfully TV and Internet-free journey deep South, making a round of the Thanjavur temples and reconnecting with my roots (although I did include the fortunes of the Indian team in my prayers... >.> What can I say? You can take the cricket away from the fangirl, but...). I came back, eager and curious to know (among other things) the latest tamasha goings-on in cricket. Luckily, cricinfo and the cricket blogosphere obliged!

And as a tribute to my Anatomy Professor's incessant demands for a "concise presentation with bullet points", I will do so here, sans the long rambling paragraphs! (even if I can't guarantee the absence of Random Capitalisation and the even Randomer Rambling in Parantheses of Doom)

• Mumbai won the Ranji Trophy. Uh, ok. I'm still not entirely sure of my reaction to this one (except, Mumbai again??) but hey, good for them. I could possibly insert some meta about how great this is post 26/11, but that's too pretentious, even for me, and I'm not even a Mumbaikar. Plus, I still haven't got over my disappointment at Tamil Nadu not making the final despite having a great team and being presented the opportunity to do so on a golden platter (and yeah, I still hate you, Dinesh Kaarthick).


• Talking of the Tamil Nadu team, apparently I missed an episode of Coffee with Anu (a local rip-off of Koffee with Karan, which could be a rip-off of some random American show, I don't know) which featured Badrinath, Balaji and Vidyut Sivaramakrishnan! (oh Fate, why must you be so cruel?) Based on second-hand accounts of the show, apparently Kumble watches/used to watch Tamil megaserials, Muralitharan loves Rajnikanth and Matthew Hayden had some pretty entertaining nicknames in the CSK dressing room! So. Much. Joy.


• Oh, and of course, Matthew Hayden's retirement! My first reaction was a giggle and a muttered "about time!" but hey. I never really disliked the guy, and enjoyed watching him bat in full flow. Plus, this means he is available to CSK for the whole of the next IPL season. Which is excellent. \o/


• I also caught up with the whole furore over the ICC ranking of the All-Time Cricketing greats (or you know, whatever). Oh noes! Tendulkar at 26! Akram at 59! Who really cares?! (Except for papers like The New Indian Express to go about with huge headlines saying "10dulkar not in Top Ten" or some other shit like that with a blown up picture of a serious Tendulkar ducking a bouncer or whatever; come on, NIE!) I'm probably going to sound like a hypocrite, but why the insecurity? Anybody with half a brain would place Tendulkar above the likes of Hayden on any all-time list, we know that. (Which, huh, doesn't say much about the "ICC committee" that made up this completely unnecessary list, does it).


• Bangladesh giving Sri Lanka a deserved ass-whupping the ODI tri-series in Bangladesh! Despite everything, however, SL mananged to scrape through a victory in the final, and even that took once-or-twice in a lifetime batting heroics from Muralitharan! I'm loving it. And Shakib-al Hasan? You've found yourself a new fangirl.


• So we're off to play a five match ODI series in SL later this month and extra Test against New Zealand, apparently. Hm, all good, all good! Looking forward to seeing the Boys in Blue back in action. Will be crossing my fingers for a Balaji-selection, though that's not likely to happen. Hopefully Badrinath and Rohit will get opportunities too and capitalise on them.

I guess that's about it (for now), then. Funny that a lot of stuff that I mentioned actually had nothing to do with cricket played on-field. But hey. Business as usual, right?