We are not entertained.

... except by one teensy little insignificant thing called cricket, but we'll get to that later, shall we?

Look. I haven't watched cricket in a long while, OK? And I've been looking forward to this IPL. So while sitting down to watch the opening ceremony yesterday, I did not expect an absolutely unpalatable hodge-podge of poorly executed amateur gimmicks. Hi, people! 2010! Billions of rupees! Internet! International access to the best around the globe! Creative heads!

You can do better!

So it starts off with.... silence. The ceremony took the longest time to kick off, and meanwhile the camera kept panning over the crowd in the weirdest headgear. Weird headgear only = awesome when they're funny, people. These... were not funny.

I was reduced to watching reruns of Psych I'd already watched twice before when I heard that the ceremony had started. Eagerly I flicked channels. And seriously, Psych was helluva lot more entertaining.

There is this huge... cloth cuboid tent thingamajig that's slowly lifted off the stage in the centre of the ground, revealing... okay, the performers, I guess. The guy in front starts singing, and dude. It's the most boring song ever. Look, I'm as big an Abba fan as anybody, but, really? For this ceremony? For this tournament?

Indian Premier League! I.n.d.i.a.n.

Get a few local artistes, belt out some pop B'wood tracks, get the crowd on their feet, and everybody wins. What is this goshdarned obsession with foreigners? Look, if you're going to get foreigners, you might as well get Lady Gaga or somebody. Not some washed-out band that's decades old (no offence meant). The singers were the ones jumping about on the stage, shaking their made-up manes, trying to infuse some non-existent energy. The crowd? Maybe just slightly bewildered.

Then these people with the white dresses standing around the boundary came filing in.

Whoever came up with that idea, please fire him.

They were... look, I don't know. My brother suggested, "chefs" while my grandmother was pretty insistent they were "hospice nurses" or maybe "nuns". Personally, when some built in lights in their dresses started glowing, I was going for extras from a hybrid of Star Wars and The Omen (don't ask me why).

These lights were of different colours, and a lot of them didn't even work. They were scrambling about, ostensibly trying to get into some kind of formation, but I don't know. They were just going about with confused, embarrassed smiles on their faces. It was like slow torture, having to watch this (until I realised that, you know, I didn't have to watch it).

Then came Deepika Padukone and her ultra-short dance routine, with support dancers who were dressed in costumes so grotesque I can't even snark about them. The song selection started off great (I gotta feeling, by Black Eyed Peas) and quickly devolved into lameassery. And the dance moves? Were not even fit for exhibition on a Filmfare awards show.

When I came back again, they were showing a laser show on the big white tent, a sort of 'nostalgic' recap of the first two IPLs. And people, I was ready to lose it. Hello, you are only two years old! We haven't got short term memory loss, you know! We remember (like you ever let us forget)! Look ahead! Do something new and flamboyant and stop wasting our time!

And then came Lionel Ritchie and some song and some fireworks, but by that time I was tired and pissed off and wishing really hard for some cricket.

The cricket turned out to be actually kind of awesome (KKR def DC! That makes me happy) but it turns out there was one more annoyance lurking in the bushes:

In between balls of an over, the camera would shift to the digital board, which would blare out an ad in full volume.

And, listening to Akshay Kumar's inane, loony laughter while 'advertising' Micromax mobile for the umpteeth time, I really lost it.

I HATE THIS. I REALLY, REALLY DO. SHUT UP, PEOPLE. THIS EXCESS IS PISSING ME OFF SO BAD, I DON'T HAVE THE WORDS.

Either that, or I'm getting cynical in my old age.

EDIT: Oh, it would be amiss of me to not mention the match preview show. Navjot Singh Sidhu is back, with all of his metaphors and gesticulations, a hilarious counterpoint to the anchor's style.

So he's waxing poetic about "music as a language" and Mr. Kocchar decides to take a brave step beyond saying "Indeed" and adds "Music is really bubbly, it gets all the batsmen bubbled up" and somewhere I was dying out of laughter.

Now that's entertainment.

The height of audacity

... is Sangakkara electing to bat first after winning the toss.

I'm sure a lot of us have already taken an India v Sri Lanka final for granted, but you didn't have to show it like that! This was not a dead-rubber! Don't you want to make things just that a little harder for India? You even went in with a full-strength team - against one that decided to rest its best opening batsman, its frontline spinner, and a senior pacer!

And after being trampled over by India, the man admits, "I don't think we learnt much by batting first."

All I can say to that?

It started with a century...

... and ended with a misfield.

Thanks, Zaheer.

Never did get much out of catching half a dozen buses across the city to get to a TV showing the match, did I.

Oh well.

Do not want.

They hate us. They really, really hate us!

India Darcy'd

Perhaps the contrasting performances of the two captains playing at number three best described the proceedings in the Twenty20 played between India and Sri Lanka on Thursday.

Sangakkara, suave, authoritative and just as articulate with the bat as he is with the English language, blasted 60-odd off 20-odd, while Dhoni left with a failed attempt at (once again) transcribing his ODI game into his Twenty20 one.

While not as big an Austen fan as some of my contemporaries, I've been very fond of Leela's "brown Mr. Darcy" assessment of Kumara Sangakkara.

India's problems probably started before the match itself.

For one, it's bowling "attack". Nehra, Dinda, Ishant Sharma. Yusuf Pathan.

... What?

Ishant Sharma has been dropped from the ODI and Test teams. So why was he in the Twenty20 team? Has he confidence or recent good performances in the shorter versions of the game on his side? Was he successful in the IPL? Hell, was he even part of a successful team in the IPL?

And what was with Zaheer Khan being treated like a giant pista and rested for the Twenty20s?

The less said about the fielding, the better.

The last time India -- the same India that's ostensibly deriding the highest echelons of the game, ruthlessly promoting Twenty20 to the point of blatant exploitation -- won a Twenty20 international convincingly was October 2007.

India falling prey to a lack of seriousness in Twenty20 that used to characterise its opponents in the past?

I don't know, but then again, I don't know how else to explain the selection of the likes of Ishant, Dinda, Yusuf Pathan, Rohit Sharma.

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.