Oops he did it again! - An ode to Akhtar

Its 7 in the evening, Bangalore is under a cloud cover, my manager has sent me a mail with some work just before I leave on a Friday, Shoaib Akhtar has been thrown out of the Pak team on disciplinary grounds and everything is fine with this world.

For the Shoaib part, this time for using an equipment he is ill equipped to handle. A bat. He aimed a cover drive at Asif’s thigh over a tiff it seems. You cant blame him for practising his batting though. It is that bad.
But he should have chosen his target a little more carefully IMHO. You know its round, its red and its made of leather.

Had he got a million for every act of indiscipline he has done, he would have been in the Forbes list by now. Most fast bowlers are dumb as per the stereotype. They may scream out against this branding (as any self respecting person should against any stereotyping), however, people like Shoaib just reinforce it. And he is a show pony to boot. Which is a ghastly combination in a game which involves the usage of the piece of muscle between the ears rather extensively.

Otherwise why oh why, should he take a furlong long run up when a shorter one would serve his purpose beautifully? Why should he put up that obviously fake accent when he has a fairly passable English? And why do we always see him barely clothed whenever we see him in a photograph in newspapers?

I think people like Shoaib are suffering from the ‘spotlights-on-me’ syndrome a mild version of which has affected our boy Sreesanth as well. They feel terribly inadequate if they wake up one morning and find not a single news item on them in the morning newspapers. Sad for such a talent (even with hyperextension and all that). High time he is kicked out from the game forever. We will miss the theatrics I know, but it is supposed to be a sport, right?

Layman’s guide to Boy’s hostel – Part 2

The story goes that before the the Electronic Voting Machines were introduced in India, it was tested in an IIT Chennai hostel. The modus operandi was that they air dropped the EVM into the hostel. And the rest was left to the budding engineer’s destructive testing abilities. A week in the hostel and when no one was able to find a way to change an already cast vote, the equipment was deemed ready to face the worst of the booth capturer in Bihar.

The most hapless souls of any boy’s hostel are the warden and watchman. It’s a shame to the Indian job market that such gut wrenching professions still exist. The watchman had a set of duties which you wish even George Bush the Lesser (as Arundhati Roy prefers to call him) is not inflicted with –

- Whenever there was a call from home to the only landline phone in the hostel (this is a period epic, set at a time when mobiles were as rare as landline phones are now), he had to scream his lungs out to call the relevant person’s name. And of course the relevant person chose just the time to visit the loo wholly unaware of the pandemonium outside. Every vocal excursion of the watchman was followed by a volley of, shall we say, unparliamentary verbals from the other hostellers directed at the watchman; for disturbing them from there sleep or video games or evening snacks or twilight strolls or night crickets or whatever they were doing.

- He was supposed to prevent the hostel inmates (I use the word deliberately) from coming in after 12 in the night. This meant that he had to keep his face perennially directed away from the gate after 12. What could the poor inmates do if the show started at 10 in the night? And these shows were serving the larger purpose of aiding them in growing into responsible ADULTs.

- His job description also included keeping his senses shut tight for some of the, shall I say, indiscretions of youth (political correctness can test your vocabulary like nothing else). So if an inmate comes and slaps him in drunken stupor, he has to guffaw and bear it. Or if a few inmates break the pipe to water tank to postpone the next day’s examination he has to keep his eyes wide shut. Or whenever there are a few words said against him questioning his parentage because he called out someone for phone, he has to pretend that he lost his sense of hearing for those 2.33 seconds. And if he smells liquor somewhere… well, he is trained into not smelling it.

The warden’s lot is not much better. Our warden (who used to teach whenever he was not getting a mouthful from the boys) used to stay cooped up inside his room in the hostel to come out only when he had a class. With good reason too. Boys’ hostel is not the place to exercise your fundamental rights, especially so, when you are dumb enough to complain against a few.

Though we all enjoyed our stay in the hostel, it was not the same for the support staff. It never can be a win-win, can it? Drunken revelry for one is sunken devilry for another!

Layman's guide to Boy's hostel – Part 1

There are 2 types of guys in this world – Guys who have stayed in hostels and the guys who have (you guessed it right) not. As a Chemistry professor will put it, a hosteller is easily identifiable by the following characteristics -

- Hostellers are not finicky about food. Give them a rubber bladder wrapped around thermocol and they will happily lap it up thinking it is Aloo bhajji . A few years of hostel food and your stomach linings can be used to make bullet proof jackets

- They don’t mind scratching there arm pits in public. Private hygiene would be in public domain if they have there way.

- They have an eye for pretty girls. Both the eyes in fact. While the eyes follow the girl, the mouth curses the bend that the girl has disappeared into, nose smells the perfume she took a bath with and the ears cock up to listen to any sneering that the other hostellers have on offer. It is multitasking at its puerile best.

- They have a healthy disrespect for the establishment. If you happen to talk to them, they will tell you about how their bosses are screwing their lives (by forcing them to work full day on a Friday), how the principal of the college deserves to be thrown to the crocodiles (for not giving 3 days off to celebrate Sant Ghasidas Jayanti), how there parents are being terribly unreasonable (by asking them to come home before 3 a.m in the morning.) and other such excesses.

- Hostellers cannot relieve themselves inside the confined claustrophobic environ of a loo. Show me a person who is letting mother earth have it and I will show you a hosteller.

“Engineering hostels maketh the man” as one of those queer Victorian poets should have said. An economist would call it a free for all market.

I have spent 6 years of my life in hostels. 4 years with my engg hostel and 2 years in the B-school one. The B-school hostels are a refined version of the engg ones simply because the management does not allow you to show your true colours as it were. In my hostel we were supposed to be back inside the blanket before 11.30 pm. My engg hostel authorities did not commit such gross acts of human rights violation and we made it count.

There is something in the air of hostels which makes people do things they would never do after that period of life.

Your shoes are not yours. They would be open to the general public on a first come first wear basis. Goes without saying that your shoes may not be used to your feet. If you are smart enough you will have a plan B and C. This means your feet will snuggle into someone else’s shoes. As per Law of Conservation of Mass every feet will have a shoe, just that the ownership will change from one form to another.

The same goes for shirts, soaps, toothpastes, (hold your breath!) underwears and any other contraption humans have devised to make there lives more comfortable. One of my friend’s new shirts traversed 21 backs before it could come to rest on his own. All 21 of them were kind enough not to wash it. You see, washing means 2 days of turnaround time (rinsing, drying, ironing et al) which is an opportunity cost for 2 backs.

Classes were an unnecessary inconvenience and were treated so. Since everyone woke up 15 minutes before the first class, there would be a traffic jam on the way to the loo and the 3 washbasins would have 30 suitors ready to wash the sins of the previous nights using a toothpaste. Bathing was an activity that could be compromised upon. Many were not too narrow minded about brushing their teeth as well. That eased the pressure on the bathrooms slightly.

You see, with great laziness comes great responsibilities.

When your formative years are such a cauldron, it is difficult not to come out burnt… and hardened.

Misplaced aggro

India wins the series and so typical of us in India, we are already into the game of finding faults with the match that was drawn. The armchair fans are disappointed that Dravid did not go for the kill (yawn!!!!). As Dravid replied “If I was on an armchair, even I would be disappointed”. The fellow has a studious sense of humour about him but he was not too far off the mark.

Aggression in cricket, as far as I am concerned is an over rated concept. People insist on it because it looks good. It provides us with the goose bumps and makes us look forward to it. But so much of the cricket’s folklores are built around those gritty, nail scraping, inelegant but priceless knocks. For every majestic 281 by Laxman, there is that ugly 180 by Dravid. Take out that 180 and you will find Laxman stranded at 80 not out with no one from the tail to stand by him.

Tell Tatenda Taibu to be aggressive with his ragtag group of men (to call it a team would be stretching the meaning of the word a tad too far) and u will find that he will create a newer record in the margin of losses every match. Aggression for a team is a function of the kind of players there are in it. You can afford to have 4 slips for Mcgrath because he will land it outside off stump on a coin if he wants, 6 times out of 6. If Mpumelelo Mbangwa is asked to bowl to such a field the captain must have had a fight with his wife in the morning.

You can tell Sehwag to go and play his natural game because he has the Big 4 acting as props. You cant tell a Zimbabwean opener the same because the batting line up is one long tail. The former Sri Lankan captain Arjuna Ranatunga, considered a great strategist, used to resort to around the wicket negative tactics whenever the batsmen were attacking. The reason being that his bowling line up read Murali and the rest. He just could not afford to let the match slip away quickly as the only wicket taking option was Murali.

Its all good to beat your chest and say that we will be aggressive but its not a bad idea to just look around and see if you have the men for it.