The Cutest!

ZigZag - 3

• If life is dull the opposite should be interesting. To rephrase to follow the standards: if dull is life the opposite should be interesting.


• In my childhood, I had the habit of sleeping for long hours during the day. Still I have that.


• Indian Cinema is growing worse by the day. All gross movies become box office grossers. In the name of high quality cinema, these movies nudge their way into the global market. But on the flip side, their naivety is being exposed comprehensively at the global level.


• People who are experts in coding like trained monkeys tend to believe that the rest lacks the basic sense of logic. Can there be any logic in belief?


• True Cinema should give you an exhilarating experience of a journey into its own world. But, it should make you treasure the realization that it is only a cinema.


• I remember that the first word I ever looked up in the dictionary is Orangutan. A girl who sat near me in a class in 1st standard reproduced the exact word and said, "My mother calls father like this".


• It's not important what others think of you. What's important is asking what others think of you and then hit them back saying you don't care about it.


• Music is inside every one of us. But only a musician is capable of boldly dressing them up to present with concrete evidence. Idiocy and an idiot can be explained in the same way.


• None of the news channels seem to make news about an average Indian who drinks tea while blogging some random weird stuff.


• Somehow I prefer bullets to numbers. Bullets give a faster death.

Player

Lose,
One who wants to win can,
But one who wants to play cannot.

Dawn of the Don

Mar 27, 1994

Sachin Tendulkar 82 (49)

The date is etched in my memories like a pristine glass art. Thinking back those moments, I reel into a complete state of trance and I am now right there, exactly 15 years back, early morning 2:30 a.m. I tune into the sports channel, set a feeble volume, make a cozy bed out of the tiny sofa and settle down with a cup of mild tea. All of this to watch the 2nd ODI between India and New Zealand held in Auckland. The fan is even turned off so as to aid hearing the commentary. For any cricket follower, this might look to be a very ordinary match from a very insignificant series. But for me, this was something special.

New Zealand was bowled out for a measly 142. It was one of the dullest displays of batting as they battled around for the entire 50 overs to reach this score. Though the chances of winning for India looked bright, I cursed myself for waking up so early on a Sunday and watching this. Sidhu and Jadeja were stated to open the innings originally. So I thought I better switch off the TV and go back to sleep for the entire day. But there was a surprise. In came, Sachin Tendulkar padded up instead of the injured Sidhu. Sachin, at those times was a very young talented cricketer. He used to come down at 4th or 5th and score only 30 or 40 runs. Only very few fifties were in his kitty. He had impressed me with few of his resolute innings in test matches such as the 111 at Johannesburg, 114 at Perth and 165 at Chennai which I witnessed from the stadium. But somehow he never struck me as a great ODI player. He fell short of runs far too often. Casual nicks to the fielders and rush of the blood strokes made him look like an easy bunny for the bowlers. Seldom had I seen him go past those 60s and 70s apart from very few instances. But on that day, I don’t know what Azhar had in his mind when he sent the little man to face the likes of Danny Morrison on a bouncy Auckland track first up. Sachin stepped up for the occasion in style. The shock was on for the bowlers right from the first ball. He started playing deliberate loft shots straight down the ground and fielders stood ballwatching. Dancing down the track against the fast bowlers, he took them to cleaners. Elegant drives, effortless flicks, vicious pulls and rampant hooks took me for a roller coaster ride. And there was no respite for spin bowlers. He introduced new shots that were never seen in the book. I just couldn’t take my eyes off the game as it was the first time I ever saw a live performance so dynamic, authoritative and promising. The power packed hitting drubbed out the NZ bowlers who literally gave up in the first 10 overs. Maybe this innings made a statement to the world that he belonged to this position.

Many ardent cricket followers would say that Kris Srikanth was the first cricketer ever to make use of initial fielding restrictions by playing deliberate loft shots over the inner circle. And yes, they are right. But, if you ask me who popularized that concept in world cricket effectively, I would say Sachin with my eyes closed. It all started in this match. The kind of rampage created from this innings of 82 runs in just 49 balls with 15 boundaries and 2 sixes, Sachin announced his arrival as one of the greatest ever openers in the history of One Day Cricket. It certainly sent a shudder across the spines of many great contemporary bowlers who always looked to lay down plans specific for the little master before every game. Then the dynamite called Jayasuriya started adopting the same technique in 1995/96 and joined the club of the most terrorizing openers to have ever played the game. Sachin became a permanent opener for the Indian team after this match. Barely had he lost that spot since then. This set up his career ever so beautifully. Records tumbled like a house of cards. Being an opener, he was offered the full 50 overs which meant that he rose to be considered the best player in the team. And how he made use of that in coming years! Centuries and centuries and centuries and what not! Now he stands with 43. Cheers!

March 27, 1994 - People, that’s the day it began.

Snakes

Picture it. You wake up in the middle of a night to find a snake hooded in front of you with its venom trickling down the fangs ready to paralyze every little tissue in your body. Then you turn to see a thick rattle snake on the window pane rattling incessantly causing a sharp pain in your ears. It will take a minute or two to realize you are just being paranoid. Well, I had this nightmare coming every time I had witnessed a snake in my life. I could remember few incidents where I had been grossly stuck in a position where the snake could almost bend down and kiss me saying, “Howdy baby!”

I love watching snakes so much, yeah, on TV. I stay glued to the seat whenever they air those shows in the Nat Geo or Animal Planet about the deadliest snakes in the world. They portray the lifestyles of different kinds of snakes such as Russell Viper, Rattle snakes, Inland Taipan, and Black Mamba and measure their deadliness based on few attributes. I wish I were a person who knew which is poisonous and which not, because for a layman like me, all snakes look poisonous. It’s ok to say that you determine whether a snake is toxic or not by the scales it has. But the moment I witness a snake, all I could see is a man dressed in a black suit knocking at my door to give an invitation to hell.

Snakes have that power – the power to instill hallucinations in your mind once you have seen the real one. Anything you see in the form of a wire, you imagine a snake in it. Phone cords, earphones and even Maggie noodles seem to transform into a snake. What makes them so deadly? Their presence is very secretive. It’s also the way they move that rearranges the fear inside me to different scales. Since we live in a cement world, snakes are hard to find. Hence I could easily list the incidents where I had witnessed the snakes in such a limited blog. Imagine the situation of villagers near farms or swamps, and also people in suburbs. Maneuvering snakes is part of their routine.

Incident 1

This happened sometime in 1989 when I was in BHEL, Trichy, doing my 1^st standard. Though this incident didn’t involve me directly, it was the first time I remember seeing a snake. That lush green colored snake, coiling itself around the wooden stick that the capturer used, still stays fresh in my mind. It happened in my neighbor friend’s house. My friend’s father had found the snake neatly coiled around the water tap (water snake, I suppose) in the toilet. Luckily he found the snake before he settled down for the job. Imagine otherwise – it would have been a NO-GO situation for him. My friend narrated me the entire incident as if his whole family had been possessed by the ghost of the snake. I mention ghost here, because they killed the snake and buried it on the grounds outside the block. I also remember they caught hold of an innocent kid riding his BSA champ bicycle and asked him to ride over the buried area to level the grounds. People from all the houses in the street gathered to witness the burial. The poor snake wouldn’t have got a better send off. But what I still don’t understand is why there were so many people shouting around the kid’s ears maniacally while giving the directions to level the exact area. What were they thinking? The dead snake was going to rise and spray venom like a fountain?

Incident 2

This gets closest to my heart as for once I can quote one of the fewest books I have ever read in my life. This happened in 1995 when I had already lived in Chennai for 5 years. In my school, there used to be library classes. This is significantly related to the snake incident because of the word “slimy”. In those classes, we were asked to take a novel home so as to encourage our reading habits. My friends pounced on the books written by Enid Blyton (Famous Five and Secret Seven), Hardy boys, Nancy Drew as they were the serie that gave identity to reading habits of a middle school kid. But I picked one book called Water-babies written by Charles Kingsley. Believe me; this is supposed to be a primary school moral fable novel. I didn’t care since I just wanted to fill the quota of taking a book for the weekend. But I was thrilled to read that book. It’s about a small boy working as a chimney sweeper. Dirty all the way, he becomes a subject of abuse for everyone. He accidentally drowns in a river and dies. Then he transforms into a pure water baby. The adventure of the pure baby underwater with all the creatures inside is the story.

I was narrating the entire story to my friends in my apartments on a rainy night of power-cut which had always been a strong reason for us to slap the school books shut and gather downstairs for an incessant chat. We narrated horror stories, said one-line jokes, got into conflicts about the run stats of Sachin (He was sensational, wasn’t he?) in every match he had played so far.

There is one scene in the book where the author would describe the baby’s skin as clean and slimy. As I was saying that with a juicy mouth, under the moonlight, I saw something huge, slimy, black and shining, silently snaking past me into the garden behind.

“It’s a snake! Snake! It’s into the garden”, I shouted as the other residents started getting fidgety about it. Kids went berserk screaming at the top of their lungs. I saw all of them galloping here and there as if that single snake had coiled around the legs of every single person there. People then started building their own stories about the snake’s color, size, and scale patterns and even went onto throw details up to the level of phylum Chordata, subphylum Vertebrata, class Reptilia, order Squamata, suborder Serpentes. Actually, I was the only one who saw the snake that night. The youngsters then rolled up their sleeves and came down with big wooden sticks to show their heroics in front of the girls. Nobody could find it under the poor flashlights. When one guy claimed he had killed the snake, another guy would come up saying, “No, no, he is lying, I found the snake in another place”.

One thing was sure – the residents in the ground floor of the block near that garden would have had a sleepless night. I tell this because I was already able to see the old people from those houses settled outside on their reclining chairs chanting Kanda Shashti Kavasam.

Incident 3

This happened so recently that I can quote the date and time of the incident. It was the day when India pumped a humongous score of 413 against Bermuda who later on was requested by the Indian team to win against Bangladesh for India to reach the next stage. Kudos to Bermuda!

It was the day after Pakistan Coach Bob Woolmer died and the whole media was in the money making spree. Channels speculated different things about the death as they were so fussy to remove the tag “murder”. It’s fair to say that the media made more money with that episode than the entire World cup. The funny thing was how they used the footage of Shoaib Akthar pushing Bob Woolmer during a practice session for sensation. It was being repeated across all channels with a melodramatic BGM, as a probable root cause of the murder.

I was in a resort called NIPM in ECR, Chennai with my family. We go there for a weekend once in a while. I just woke up that morning around 11 after having watched the scandalized news for the entire night. I didn’t want to get up from the bed. I wanted to be as lazy as possible and it happens when you go for a vacation. The remote controller was inoperable, so I had to reach the TV to change the channels. I saw the silhouette of some tree branch behind the window curtains and it looked strangely twisting and turning. Intrigued, I opened the curtains as a long snake almost thin as spaghetti shot closer to me viciously. I fell down instantly and scampered out of the room in no time calling for help. Then, as usual, the capturers did the job.

Though this incident had the snake hissing closest to me, it gave me the least shock because the shock of India losing to Bangladesh few days back seemed heartbreaking.

These incidents speak of only one thing. I can’t tackle a snake on my own. All I know is to run and call for help. Hope I don’t find myself in a stranded situation in future. Whatever said, snakes hold a special place in my memories than any other animal in this planet. Any programme on snakes, I am there to see it. Even a yawning hippopotamus doesn’t intrigue me. Snakes are such a beautiful creation.

The rapid urbanization is like a slow poison to that species. I wish they were left in their own territory which I shamelessly accept is not possible too, because they are not as harmless as cows.