Punter and a bet

We were away on another one of the meaningless activities of the workplace – the offsite. An early morning bus ride reached us to a place somewhere on the Bangalore – Mysore highway, where as we settled down at breakfast, or perhaps a little later, somebody piped up with “Ponting, 50”.

In the mood to needle the group, I said, “oh, cool. He’s going to make a hundred”.

This set in motion a chain of conversations which went like this:

“No way, he is not going to make a 100 – he is struggling.”

“Look, he is a 50+ test average batsman, and those guys get a 100 50% of the time they reach 50”

In hindsight I gave the odds away, and should have alternatively pushed for a 2:1 or even 3:1 bet. But the banter went on.

 “Well, that may be true, but he has never gotten a 100 in India.”

“All the more reason, he is a great and is going to set that blip in his record straight.”

Again, that was a pompous thing to say, instead of simply playing along and pushing the odds on that bet to up to maybe 4:1 or 5:1. Instead of pushing the odds on the bet to more favorable levels, I settled for a straight out 1:1 bet for a certain sum of money, which sure enough, I won. Think Ponting made an unbeaten century.

But it was terrible betting on my part, unnecessary one-upmanship and costly in magnitude many times over the size of the bet. So, here’s wishing Punter a great retirement, good betting, and if he decides to talk or write about the game, the betting, here is one reader who promises to be avid. Cheers!

KANDISA

Knights - Dark and Pale: Deshay Basara

The super hero tale needs to connect at two levels – one personal and the other heroic. The heroic component is an aspiration the entire audience has. Who doesn’t want to make 90 degree turns at high speed on a bike? Who doesn’t want to play million dollar poker hands without batting an eyelid? Who doesn’t want Anne Hathaway’s, and for that matter Eva Green’s, attentions? Who would not want to save Gotham?

The personal story may or may not have an equally widespread connection. Only a small portion of the audience is likely to relate to a David Dunn like experience. The odd person in the audience thinks back to the morning when her school bus rolled off the road embankment killing a few children on her bus, when she was herself found without a scratch sitting on the culvert. But when this rare connection does occur, the super hero becomes closer to heart. Audiences may also be prone to establish that connection, however stretched and contrived it may be.

For example, the dark knight’s “pain and suffering” has an appeal most adults would readily relate to. Emotions associated with risk-taking find resonance in how the little child or indeed the dark knight dealt with the pit they found themselves in. Safety nets and mediocrity may be close cousins. Credible commitments and their value in strategic games goes back a long way, to when the commander burnt the boats (bridges), and that was a good thing to do in preparation for bitter and equal battle. The common man (like the one Fawaz saw on a train, in the mid nineties) who is reflective may look back on instances of such close competition in his own life and relate to the super hero’s travails. The super hero’s afterglow helps him become a little less common.

The pale knight, Andres Iniesta (AI), looks back to his deep-into-injury-time goal at Chelsea a couple of years back (that hauled FCB to the CL final which they won) and says, “That was a brutal moment”. It stands to reason that it is a moment whose chief protagonist has revisited time and again, and found that the best perspective to describe it in is its own and not one of the teams’. While this is just ESPN it is still Nolanesque, the heroism is obvious and plain to see (CL, Europe and World champions). By assigning primary importance to the moment, his encapsulation goes beyond FCB and Chelsea fortunes, the pale knight connected with the wider audience at a personal level.

Mr. James Bond loses his woman tragically, Batman cannot have the nice happy life Alfred wants him to lead, AI continues to be plagued by injury and therefore the ordinary man may imagine himself to be dapper, knightly and off exercise only due to injury. Three act phenomena have a long history of making and annealing how mankind looks at itself – be it magic (pledge, turn and prestige) or riverboat card games (flop, turn and river) or FCB’s pale knight (CL, Europe, and World). Nolan’s chronicles of the events leading up to “Deshay Basara” may have, for better or for worse, ordained batman with the three-acts which he richly deserves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK4h9xR7Dec&feature=fvwrel

The World to See

Sometime around the Facebook IPO I read this amazing stat: 900 million active users post 300 million pictures on FB (per year?). That is a lot of POVs of a lot of subjects, lots of bokeh (thanks, Sangeetha). A world that likes to see and be seen also likes to share with other what it saw. I read about one ex-colleagues love for the mountains and history. I would never imagine that come weekend some office guys turn into wildlife junkies shooting amazing pictures. Somewhat less often you have the amazing photograph of a kid jumping over the washing wave, only her shadow caught by the water; or that of a green bus stopped on a winding road through what might be the Tundra.

Yes, a picture paints a thousand words. But what about blindness?

The World, Madras, Besant Nagar

I said something right off the screws, even so by Deepak standards, and it is only fit to write an entire post about it. What I said, over breakfast with colleagues, was “Besant Nagar, Madras (Chennai, if you will), India and the world; they all are things I use interchangeably”. That they bore the nonsense will great benevolence encourages the post, so for once, blame me but please also blame them!

Let me explain. When I was about four or five, the aunty who lived diagonally above our house in the MIG flats (MIG: middle income group) was visited by her son, daughter-in-law (Abigail) and grand-daughter. This was the first time in many years that he, the son, was in India. It was the first time the aunty was seeing her grand-daughter. Flash forward to 2012, she would have seen her grand-daughter over Skype, Facetime, or one of the many other video phone or video conferencing technologies. But remember, this was the 1970s. Some middle class and upper middle class Indians owned cameras, SLRs, etc. or spoke about Scorsese, but video over continents wasn’t yet quite there. Anyway, this was the first time that I had seen somebody with hair that was not black or silver. Aunty’s grand-daughter had hair that was pale gold.

The closest I had seen was this chap in school who looked a little weird because kids had black hair, old people’s hair was silver or grey. But here he was a fellow 4 year old whose skin was bleached white and his hair golden silverish. I had checked with my sister, and she said that this kid, my classmate, suffered from ‘albinism’, and that it was something about pigmentation or lack of it or something like that. Anyway it turned out that people had all kinds of hair color, aunty’s grand-daughter’s hair had a name, and it was blonde. They stayed for a while, an entire summer it might have been, because we saw a lot of aunty’s family. In some time we even began playing together, and now I noticed how her eyes were blue. By now, I knew there was nothing to worry and if you couldn’t look away from them it was not because of me getting dangerously mesmerized. A little later when trying to read, starting with ‘Archie’ comics, blue or green eyes, blonde or red hair, freckled faces were all fair game.

They, aunty’s family, came back a few times and it became one of the signposts of early school. The summer here and there would be peppered with speaking in English a lot, and how the same language could sound cold, or familiar, or exotic just by the way people spoke them. Dublin, Belfast and Heathrow, pretty much in that order, followed the names of places in my life, which at the point where Besant Nagar, Adayar and Hyderabad. Belfast struck a chord somewhat more pronounced than the rest, I had heard my sister and father talk about the fighting there; he played a cassette on the Grundig audio machine which had a song, ‘Belfast’.

70s Besant Nagar could look like a panel out of the Archie comics. There were sunny beach days just down the street, a little up the street people played tennis and discussed Chris Evert, John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors. Serious aspersions would get cast if you couldn’t spin a top in ten different ways, or throw a Frisbee horizontally into the wind, or hold your breath under the waves. Where the monstrous ‘Rajaji Bhavan’ stands today was a large field, and the best swings over midwicket reached the main road. Back at the beach, the kids would play in and about the Kaj Schmidt memorial. We, the kids on the street, ranged in order of height from somewhere around three feet to a six and a half. Some of us cast ourselves into a spell over the grand-daughter’s blue eyes, and some over the daughter-in-law’s.

She wasn’t the only European though. The Bengalis who lived in the T-blocks welcomed their son from Germany, with his German wife and son, Ronjan. “Ranjan? Ronjan? Ranjon?” we asked in utter confusion, when his parents brought him to the beach to play soccer. His mom, the German lady, Ingrid, laughed and spelt out his name, “R-O-N-J-A-N, but you pronounce it with a ‘Y’ and not with a ‘J’”. She had still another different accent, and would even join us for some soccer. When some of the college kids gawked too much, she stopped playing. But Ronyan, I’ll spell his name the way it is pronounced, was very different from the rest of us. He did not just kick the ball, and run behind it as if all hell had broken loose. He planned things, got his team around him, and kicked the ball exactly where a team-mate was or where a team-mate was running toward, etc. It was insane. It was obviously in his genes, being a distant relative of Franz Beckenbauer, on his mom’s side, or so the urban legend went.

It was not like it was a European riot, although you could have easily mistaken it. Pointing from where we played football on the beach, straight past the Kaj Schmidt memorial, from somewhere south east of us was where he came from, Kumar announced. He looked exactly like us, shiny dark skinned and a big smile, whose eyes shone when he smiled. His mom, elder sister and elder brother were all very happy to see him, Kumar, back to being a happy child. It was one of the main objectives for their family to leave a flourishing textile business in Colombo, and relocate to Madras.

To a bunch of kids who only knew this corner of the world, the beach, the roaring of the storm; Ireland became somewhat familiar. I went to a Catholic school, and when John, the Protestant, refused to join the Catechism class because he wasn’t Catholic (he didn’t say he was an atheist, because that would invite a caning from the teachers, and censure from his mom, but he really is), not many understood, but I did. The brother in the white robe fastened with the thick green band, gave him a caning, nevertheless. When the class ended, we walked outside the school by the side of the Adayar estuary. John was very happy with the caning because he could use this to avoid joining Catechism (his mom didn’t ever approve corporal punishment). Moral of the story: when you are caning someone, maybe he wants you to!

So, it was like the world was conspiring to visit my corner of the world, and mostly bring with it wonderful people and things. Blonde hair, blue-eyes, a distant relative of Der Kaiser himself, a young mom who listened to punk rock music on her LP, the Tam Brahm who traded bullion in foreign denominations, and such. I first suspected that not all tidings they brought were happy when the Dublin people spoke of the riots that they had seen just a couple of months before reaching Madras. Ingrid’s uncle, father's brother or periappa to us, had been incarcerated by the Nazis, and Ronjan could never understand that. Kumar’s was the first first-person narrative of something that was seriously wrong, plainly bad that even kids could easily understand. He had hidden in the motor-room room of their Colombo apartment from evening play time till midnight when shooting broken out in and around their apartment complex. His sister, Shanmati, later recalled that in those six or seven hours, they thought that perhaps Kumar had been kidnapped, or worse still, killed in the shooting. This was the late 70s and a bit into the 80s, some call it ethnic cleansing some call it a more complex social strife that had gripped Srilanka. Stuff still goes on about it, in Geneva it turns out as per the morning news.

People were, apparently, landing up and down the coast of TN in boats fitted with automobile motors, as out-boarders. Kumar and his family were definitely more fortunate, they could afford to simply take a flight. So, Ingrid and Abigail somehow seemed to like and empathize with Kumar. We knew that as far as we stuck with him, we would always get a fruit juice or a cold drink in their houses. We used it as much as possibly could, and if you been in Madras over summer you wouldn’t be too critical of such behavior.

It feels like an epoch, an era, or any very large extent of time, you know. And of course, these got to end or begin with some great events. I cannot quite recall when it all started, but a very early morning ride across two streets, in a lorry, followed by pujas to appease the Gods as we began living in this flat might be it. Some of them epoch ending events happened right there, diagonally above the flat where we lived, some happened in Wimbledon, some right across the globe in Mexico, and something 48 million kilometers away. The astronomy enthusiasts set up telescopes and helped people watch the Halley comet making its once in seventy-six year pass. This was in the beach, and gave us license to go play there even late into the night. The street lights and the recently installed beach flood-lights were switched off to allow the comet watching. So, only on well lit nights could we play anything. It was pretty crazy, come of think of it, because everybody got excited over sighting of the comet, but it could have been a stray comet shaped cloud very easily. Mexico: we all learned of places like Mexico City, Guadalajara (here ‘J’ didn’t become ‘Y’ but a ‘ha’), the Aztec stadium and only stocky character by the name of Diego Armando Maradona. His personal journeys would stay with us, unlike that of the Halley comet. It started with the red-card ignomy in 1982, the‘hand of God’, became surreal with his exploits all through that tournament (World Cup 1986), and became the conduits to learn of drugs, drug-addiction and the nexus between government, mafia, drugs, professional sport and the like. Everything in the world had a nexus with everything else, it appeared. A 17-year old German made us notice tennis for the first time, beyond it being the spring well of stolen balls which we could play street cricket with. But it was not as though the epochal events only happened afar, over television, or events in the heavens.

Abigail’s mother-in-law, the aunty who lived diagonally above us was evicted from her flat. Now, when it happened, when the bunch of tough men, with a leader who arrived in a chauffeur driven car, began to take things from the flat and throw them down the steps, it happened right there, in Besant Nagar, and no, it could never be a panel out of the Archie comics. It was loud, the men shouting, the arguments between the evictors and the neighborhood uncles, who tried to stop it. Some of us kids sneaked up stairs to see some women consoling the aunty, and helping her pick out and pack precious artifacts. Now, I didn’t know why she was being evicted, except that it was irreversible now. The tough men and their tough leader had some moral right to evict her it appeared.

Remember her weeping and crying, and wondering to myself how unfortunate it was for this to happen when her son, daughter-in-law and grand-daughter had just left back to Ireland a couple of days back. I didn’t know back then a number of things: landlords and tenants, mortgagers and banks, notices and such, and money beyond the Rs.2 it took to buy icicles. Some of our behaviors then betrayed what we would go on to become in our lives. A girl took it on herself to console the aunty, ensure she could collect the things that were dearest to her, among them the many pictures of her just concluded reunion with her family. She even took a few of those pictures for herself, so that someday when old friends meet up, they could look back at how things were. A boy fought off the first of the eviction gang, and although no match for their muscle or for the paperwork that silenced the adults, it was never a doubt whose side he was on. Somebody salvaged a LP that Abigail had left behind, and that had fallen out of one of the boxes when they were thrown on the road. It was the ‘Boy’ album of U2, and is one of his most precious LPs in a fantastic music collection. Somebody, who would die in a road accident just four years later while not yet eighteen, went and organized a flat for rent just a kilometer down the road, so that the aunty’s stuff could be put in a lorry and she would have a place. He also helped her set things up there.

As for myself, I gave enough reason that one evening for the entire bunch to make fun of for the next few years! I cried a lot, and stuck around the flat that was getting evicted. Of some utility was my taking and passing on messages from and to the different folks of the neighborhood who came and went, as they ensured aunty’s relocation went as well as it possibly could, given the circumstances and the violence any eviction wrecks on a neighborhood. So, that is that, somehow, everything is either prior to these momentous upheavals or after.

Here's the thing of it. Sitting firmly on the planet, people took interest in what is going on in the heavens. Rakesh Sharma, the first Indian in space went there as a cosmonaut, and not as an astronaut. It didn’t need us to have been in a spacecraft, in space, in an aircraft, or in the moon to get the thrill of it, a comet burning crazily around the solar system. What we read from the books and dated magazines was enough. What folks, who understood the physics, math, chemistry and astronomy of it, shared with us created the reality. You didn’t have to have physically inhabited the path from A (the Besant Nagar beach) to B (in space, aboard the finest technology), to get it, to appreciate it and want a piece of the excitement. In fact, we could replace the location in the parenthesis of A with any place on earth, and it would be the same.

The next farthest thing for us folks on the beach was, and remains to be till this day, the US of A. Some have returned now, into their sixties, to take care of their parents. Some have returned because they have earned their right to be a walk away from the temples and the kutcheries (Carnatic music concerts). Some have returned from somewhere in the spectrum between a H1 visa and their current status as American citizens with a PIA.

When we talk, we learn a lot about a country distant in geography and travel cost, but could well be between 600090 and 600041, an imaginary (complex?) pin code between Besant Nagar and Thiruvanmiyur. Yes, the Polish Catholic married to the Tam Brahm, or the ways of social etiquette do surprise me, and elicit a “wonder how would be like”. But, by and large, their lives and experiences have filled our consciousness via newspapers, television, long distance phone bills, and annual summer vacations dedicated to learning of India’s heritage, culture, and poverty. Ingrids and Abigails have returned too. They are younger, and here out of a yearning for the India experience, and not out of wanting to meet the husband’s family.

You have been patient to get here or you have skipped right to the last paragraph to figure out if this guy is saying anything at all. For the former, many thanks! For the latter, I have wondered the same too. My interest here is not to elevate the western world to the heavens, and neither is to denigrate Halley’s Comet. But I wonder if I need to have peered through a space telescope to recount a few nights of whooping at every Halley lookalike cloud. Do I need to have been in space to ask questions regarding zero gravity? Do you need to have travelled every corner of the world, every remaining forest, every wetland, every mountain, and every casino before a fascination for these wonderful things takes hold? What conversational quality is enhanced by the specification such as the world, Madras, or Besant Nagar?

Gate-crashing

Guess the coolest thing I did in Bangalore was just before I left the city and it was gate crashing a party! It was a party held off the Bangalore Mysore highway. The Saturday evening poker over at Bhaskar’s place lasted past the wee hours of Sunday morning when I excused myself, saying “have to head out in a couple of hours, my friends, I have to go”.

For the record of it, over the evening Mr. Abhinav stacked up enough chips to make a fort of ‘em, and I got a cool photograph of him surveying the wealth, and another that included Mr. Bhaskar in the frame – both joined a few other memorable photos that were lost when later in the year, while back in the city for the Metallica concert my phone was stolen in a BMTC bus. That is different story, included a chase from in front of Christ to a little past NIMHANS, and didn’t lead to me retrieving the phone. Gone, ashtae!

Back to the gate-crashing – Back from the poker, it gave me about one hour and twenty minutes to sleep before heading out with Kishore for the Sunday party crashing. In fact, he was not even crashing it; it was only I who hadn’t registered for it. Missus was so sleepy opening the door and I hoped that the details I would briefly furnish wouldn’t register, and that she would go back to sleep. No such luck! “What!” was pretty much all she said on hearing that I planned to sleep for an hour or so, and head out for the two hour drive to somewhere off the Mysore highway. Of course, it – the plan – could not have pleased her one bit.

This did not, however, stop her from fixing breakfast – bread, jam, tea and water – before seeing me off for the run – this one as unprepared and ill-advised as any.

After picking up Kishore on the way, we followed the usual short cut from Basavanagudi, past DG pump, through Padhmanabhanagar, Rajarajeshwari Nagar (where I shared the broad outline of the famed "consignment" stories) and finally emerged onto the highway near RVCE. Unlike last year, this time we make it just in time it appeared but still, it was no reason to panic. We stopped at the Coffee Day more for use of their toilet than their breakfast. But this year we knew exactly where to park on the Coorg road before walking up to the start line of the Kaveri Trail Marathon – 2011. You could read detailed and useful accounts of the run, although chances are that it would be called a ‘race’ in them.

I am going to skip the timings bit except to tell you that we were both running somewhere between 2:00 and 2:30 pace for the half-marathon, and Kishore ran inside his PB by about 5 minutes.

I was initially worried that somebody at the start was going to notice that I didn’t have the timing chip tied in my shoe laces, or that I didn’t have the chest running number. This made me nervous while walking up to the start zone and tried to keep somebody between me and the left hand side of the trail, where final instruction were being given, and some people were taking a nervous swig at the refreshment stall. They must of set it up for those finishing the race, but why the heck did they set it up so early?! Anyway, I kept glancing furtively to the left and right until Kishore said, “relax, they are not looking out for gate-crashers, it is not a UB City party, remember?”

From that point on I began to relax. He was right, this is after all a good 120 km outside Bangalore, a wonderful early morning drive out but the party consisted for running the choice of one from 10k, 21k or 42k distances, and a party not prone to gate-crashing I guess.

A few of the runners were clearly serious, well-trained, time and running fashion conscious (thank God for that!). Up and down the trail, I didn’t suspect it might be the city just being kind to somebody leaving it, there was a good collection of well toned legs – some of the women lost in their music, some glancing at the watches often, and some just pulling away effortlessly. It would have been a shame if somebody had pulled me out of the run in the middle – but thankfully, that didn’t happen.

At the turn I had only a 100m lead on Kishore, and by sheer fluke the pacing was okay! Anyway, I was soon back to being fairly absent minded through the run except when I saw Mr. Pankaj, Mr. Bhasker and a other luminaries fly past. Then, I would thank them for their encouragement and wonder for a couple of minutes where they got this love for running from, and how they kept it burning. A couple of runners stumbled on the trail and it is on such occasions that this could be tough - as the organizers branded it to be. Mr. Manu’s observation, that humidity of the micro-ecosystem of river irrigation canals was cartoon compared to seaside humidity, came to mind.

Anyway, soon I had entered the arid zone in a half-marathon when you are not fast enough to catch up with the fast pretty women but have pulled past the medium-fast pretty women. That’s when you realize that maybe this is not much of a party.

Burning toes, CNS and other chaffing has you looking for the distance marks – always a bad sign. It was another 3km to go, and this year the sun stayed behind the clouds and except for coming close to a twisted ankle once, it looked like I would make it back – in slow time, but of far more importance, and in one piece. Like any other party I suppose, here is a bunch of people enjoying each other’s company to do crazy things many wouldn’t even remotely associate fun with. There were the usuals who knew the crowd well enough, some slightly strangers, and some gate-crashers.

I could recognize the turn leading up to the finish and I suppressed a smile to myself on the topic that had been oft repeated those past few weeks – "just when you get used to and recognize things, you appear to be packing your bags!" Anyway, challenged a couple ambling up to the finish and the guy responded well enough to overtake me before the finish. Just as well: I needed – I felt – some cover while approaching the finish – what if somebody noticed and found out that I hadn’t registered. The paranoia was back!

Anyway, the kind folks who organize this run (race) came forward and put a finisher’s medal around my neck. Amidst the typical milling about in the finish zone I finally recognized Kishore strolling about. We decided to join the many folks who put their feet into the cool Kaveri canal water. It is a nice soothing thing to do after running for more than a couple of hours. It is a nice spot for a picnic too.

Maybe next time I’d give it a shot after catching some decent sleep. Maybe Kishore will go even faster next time. Maybe I’ll train for a decent period of time, and give the KTM 2012 a good shot, maybe I will even register. Maybe, to the contrary, this is a party best enjoyed by crashing it! One thing is for sure, I slept like a log in the car on our way back to Bangalore.

With or without revolution