Euphoric rise meets a sudden fall

The cat is out of the bag! All those who had bet a significant amount on the duration of Indian cricket team's domination on world cricket can now safely redeem their purses. How the public mood has shifted! An average Indian cricket fan is more of a skeptic now than a believer like yesteryears, so much so that it is now as much a staple of mainstream culture as the talented commentary booth comprising of erudite orators like Wasim Akram and Mohinder Amarnath (what happened to Richie Benaud & David Gover?). 

After every jaunty home series victory, the common rancor surrounding the neighborhood tea stall is-"Wait for a foreign tour and see how badly they perform." People no longer talk about how our team is one of the most feared squads when playing at home, or how much our performance has improved over the course of the last decade when playing at a bowler's paradise in England or South Africa (compared to pre-Y2k years). Coincidentally, the World Cup victory last year did no favors to our reputation as chokers outside our sovereign territory. Hidden somewhere in the corners of the sports section were columns suggesting that India might have to another 12 years before they can think of getting their hands to the cup. A highly anticipated series with England followed, billed as the informal Test cricket championship due to the rankings of the participants being 1 & 2. While England held up their end of the bargain, the Indian team appeared flustered, unprepared, and last but not the least, exhausted. By now, we all know that the Indian cricketers are as active as Digvijay Singh's publicist, with the already busy calender cramped further by the IPL. But so do most of the top 5 nations, and Kumar Sangakkara was valiant enough to put it in words during his speech at the MCC last year. So stop blaming the IPL for our cricketing woes. It is as transient as pulling an nightout before an exam, for all practical purposes. 

Also, spare a thought to our cricketers. While mental preparation is a big component of achieving the level of success and competency that our players do, they are not blanked from the negativity surrounding Indian cricket in general. The Indo-England home ODI series witnessed empty stands even at the cricket-starved Eden gardens. Key players are getting injured left-and-right, while the public mood is swinging in the other direction to empathy. England went through a similarly disastrous phase in 2006, when they were mauled at the hands of the Aussies in the Ashes, followed by a disastrous World cup campaign. England have since gone on to retain the Ashes twice, most recently away from home, and even won that elusive major championship in the form of the T20 world cup. If you think our media is cut-throat and fickle, the English media is predatory in nature, so much so that the phone hacking scandal surrounding News Corp has been described as just another event in the day-to-day British media circus, that happened to get exposed. 

In a nation of 1.2 billion cricket enthusiasts, we are also unfortunately 1.2 billion strong cricket pundits, or so we would like to believe! Sachin's search for the awe-inspiring 100th international hundred has been beaten to death in the public. Let the man enjoy the last leg of his glorious career without hounding him with the intense glare that surrounds every post-match presentation. If nothing, this shock might be exactly what the Indian team needs, a sense of emergency that can prop them to hit back like the 2003 world cup. 

PS: Speaking of Sach, this is my favorite of all his commercials. And Carl Hooper would make a great Ra.One is SRK is thinking of a sequel to the best comedy of 2011. 

If we all sit idle...

Controversy is media's favorite child. Just let one erupt and they lash onto it. However, it is poignant to note that a major factor behind all the derision surrounding the fundamental nature of controversies is the idle mind. Yes, if we all sit idle, all we do is to conjure mindless chatter which ultimately blows up into a controversy. Nowhere has it been more prominently on display than the two 'stories' jostling for space on live television.

It is a well known fact that in India, nothing works better than the word of God. So people claim to have received divine intervention and suggest it as a means to justify their actions. The so called 'antaratmaa ki aawaaz'. First, a harmless directive from the honorable Supreme court constituting a special committee to prepare an inventory of the speculated wealth lying around in the holy confines of the Padmanabham temple in Thiruvananthapuram. The media didn't pick up the news when a retired IPS officer and a stout devotee of the lord filed a petition praying for the transfer of the control of the temple administration from the hands of the royal family of Travancore to that of the state. They didn't pick it up when the members of the teams were announced. They certainly wouldn't have picked it up if it weren't for countless artefacts of historic (and monetary) value that started teeming out of the underground chambers. The media went into a frenzy, and a controversy was born! The debate shifted from how to protect the wealth to how it got there in the first place and who should be the owner and protector of it. I have been to the shrine situated in the capital of Kerala. I remember it vividly because I had to buy a dhoti from a nearby stall to gain entry into the temple. Yes, the rules of entry to this shrine are as stringent as any other temple you could fathom. What wowed the attention of all present inside with me was not what lay beneath, but what lay above- the reclined statue of Lord Vishnu whose darshan could be taken from three huge doors. I would have loved for it remain that way.

The topic of frenzy shifts just as seamlessly to another god of sorts. Sachin Tendulkar is one short of his 100th international century, one that is of sentimental value to his billions of followers. Yet, the debate rages on. Is he the greatest of all time? Frankly, why should anybody care. Why not simply live in the present, when the man is playing in perhaps the best form of his life. Then came the announcement of the greatest test team of all time, to mark the occasion of the 2000th international test which begins tomorrow at Lord's. While the list is definitely not what a pundit would like it to be, it is what it is- a survey of the popularity of the players who live on in the fans' memory. The point of the matter is, the so called greatest team in no way undermines the greatness or the talent of any of the great players who happened to have plied their art in an era before the advent of facebook and twitter. Dear media, let it be!