Star of the Aircel Chennai Open 2012- Vishnuvardhan

At last something to cheer about on the sports scene other than cricket. The overfed, overpaid, underperforming giants put to rest the long-held opinion that they are giants in their part of the forest. All top-order giants collapsing one after the other and giving the new Australian pacers the debut of their life. Enough of bat-ball and allied headaches.
Okay now, back to the object of my admiration and reason for cheer this week- Indian tennis- an oxymoron in itself isn’t it? I am not saying that there is a star on the horizon or that Indian tennis has got its knight in shining armour and all that blah. What I am saying it that I saw great tennis coming from the racket of a young 24 year old Indian called Vishnuvardhan and surprise not as a part of a doubles pair! I saw booming serves (207 kmph) and cracking passing shots, cross court forehands and down the line backhands that didn’t end outside the court or worse in the net. Vishnuvardhan’s play had me engrossed totally while he engaged world no. 35 Ivan Dodig of Croatia. There was a solid confidence about his play and I as a spectator never for a moment doubted his shots that sailed effortlessly over the net and into the opponent’s no-man’s land. Something that I have never experienced while watching Sania Mirza. Watching her play is being subject to agony over every point. That’s another story though.
Vishnuvardhan’s world ranking is 313 and who know where he might be one year from now! He might knock the 3 on extreme right or the first digit from the left. Eitherways he is a winner and I wont be surprised if he does. He has age on his side and the attention of the mentors who matter most on the India tennis scene- Mahesh Bhupathi and Leander Paes. This tall, dark solid guy who hits the best down the line forehand and backhand (that I have seen of Indian tennis players) even has a B.Com in computers and works in HR for ONGC. He has his basics right- few unforced errors and winners that land right in. Though I did notice that most of his volleys got in the net or landed wide off the court. In the end, he lost to Ivan Dodig but not before he showed consistent quality of play that is the hallmark of all players aspiring to break into higher ranks.
Go Vishnu Go. Vamosss!

Fantastic holiday followed by disaster- Don2

I have been lazy for the past couple of weeks, been completely unproductive. I have had a block, a writer’s block. I have had plenty of ideas but none have translated into a post or that those elusive hundred pages of a book I have been trying to write. So it’s been frustrating and yet I have had the most amazing holidays in recent times. We switched off completely- no television or newspapers, no modern day elements to entertained save the magical night-time sky to keep us busy counting and identifying stars and the bonfire to keep us warm. Our three night stay at the foothills of Kodai was absolutely primitive in that sense. The all-pervading quiet of the property was like a balm to me and ideas flowed thick and fast but my fingers simply didn’t have the strength to hack away at the laptop. So I left it at that and I am still struggling to find words within me to carry in the plot of the book….until yesterday when Farhan Akhtar unleashed that fire in me!

I saw Don2 yesterday and the block lifted. I was simply bursting to post in the blog about what I didn’t like in the film. I have seen Don1 and when I see Priyanka look longingly at Don I can’t think as to what Messrs. Excel Entertainment were thinking when they planted the idea that Roma could have had feelings for the criminal who killed her sister, brother and brother-in law (is that correct?) in cold blood. Don is chatting conversationally with Roma to tell him about her ‘story’ with her cop colleague Arjan (it is Arjun actually but maybe Priyanka has been given a diktat to sound and look as artificial as possible, just like Sonam Kapoor in Aisha and to talk without making an ‘O’ of her lips) .

I understand the need to look glamorous but when a film-maker has Priyanka his job is in glamour department is DONE. Priyanka is glamorous; she has fantastic screen presence- check Aitraaz and the scene where she devours Akshay alive. It gave me the shivers. In Aitraaz she fit the part perfectly, but sometimes a filmmaker needs to work a little hard to make glamour look credible and she certainly doesn’t look the part of a police officer (and I find the director guilty) And what about Don aka. Shahrukh Khan? Many dialogues for Don start or end with ‘sweetheart’ and it doesn’t seem natural, it sounds grating, forced, and not effortless. And I truly wish the scriptwriter would have etched Roma’s role as the perfect foil for Don, in her single minded pursuit for vengeance. I would have enjoyed Don better if it were a vehicle for Roma as well. But her vengeance is not only forgotten, it is given a thorough kick in the rear by the director as we are treated to the Don’s verbal strut when he not only dares to suggest that Roma is in love with him but also has the arrogance to believe it and (here I kick myself on the rear) he has made his arch enemy gaze at him longingly, eyes dripping the forbidden and lips parted.

Oh my god! Where is the Farhan Akhtar of DCH?

Vidya Balan and the Dirty business of movies

No no no, Vidya balan has nothing to do with this column or the views personally. Her association with this post is purely on the basis of her job as an actress. Her latest movie only reinforced my age-old beliefs that the film industry is not the right business for women to be in (the other is the armed forces). I was quite rightly embarrassed by our actors/ actresses doing what they did for the whole world to see. I wondered as to how a man and woman could touch each other with love and without (witness all those nightmarish rape scenes) in front of the film making crew and then put out their work for the world to see. It was something I could never understand. Then over the years, I thought it’s a job like any other. Maybe it’s not so hard after all; that the person playing the lothario, or the prostitute or the villain or the vamp with a thigh-high slit is definitely not like that in real life, maybe it is easy to alienate yourself from the role and people’s perception and go on living a normal life (I don’t believe this one bit though)
Then came cable TV and numerous shows (even news channels started actors like they sat in Lok Sabha). The actors started losing their exclusivity bit by bit by giving interviews, participating as judges in competitive shows, or even in programs where the camera followed them wherever they went and thus the ‘star’ became human or even ordinary with the same values as you and I, the same ethics and moral code that we live by. The film industry that I thought of as debauched, rampant with casting couches and leery personalities suddenly became like a garden when I could go for a breath of fresh air. I mean if hotties like Bipasha Basu, Vidya Balan, Mallika Sherawat, Mallika Arora can blossom in this rough industry then it must be a nice place. If they say that there is no casting couch and that the couch exists everywhere (it is solely our choice to decide to park in the couch on our way to good roles) even in the corporate world then yeah it must be true. Surprisingly men are more realistic when they admit to sexual favours being a very ‘there’ form of currency that you exchange for favours that range from roles to party invites…that proverbial foot in the door. I guess it is easier for men to admit to this than women (exactly like the way they admit so freely to losing their virginity at 15 or any other age…have you noticed that all ‘admittors’ of ‘virginity losing’ stories are men).
So I was saying how actors are shooting their mouths off on every channel about how the industry is a nice place, their constant talking is making the film industry almost sound like something I might want to cuddle up with on a cold winter night! Then I saw trailors of The Dirty Picture (not even the whole movie) and my innocent visions came crashing down violently. First and foremost, let me commend Vidya for her courage in taking up this role. Then let me also do an about turn and say that I will not let my daughter do such a role. Even if it’s a role, I do not want my own flesh and blood to be on the posters that are really dirty and violate your most intimate space (read- Vidya Balan looking on with the faces of three men being shown at three vantage points of her body- namely her breast, neck and shoulder). I hope this poster/ photo was not shot and that it was put together by morphing pictures. Even for art’s sake, the very thought of doing a movie like dirty picture where my daughter goes through all these motions is unbearable for me. Yup it’s just art but what the audience is doing in the theatres while watching the films and taking home Vidya in the their minds do all sorts of things is not what I want my little baby (let me clarify by saying that ‘my baby’ refers here to my daughter. The clarification is necessary due to over sexualisation of the word ‘baby’).
I do not want my daughter to go up there and pander to the male ego and fantasies even if it’s in a movie. And who says its confined to just the reel world? Fantasies start where the film ends. I have the ‘third eye’. It’s way different than that of Lord Shiva’s in that it cannot burn down entities; though how I wish I could those men who mentally strip women and worse you can see it in their eyes. The third eye tells me if the man’s gaze is just that or it is ‘laced’, ‘spiked’, ‘lustful’ and more than just a gaze. It tells me to avoid such men and if I cannot then alter my behaviour in a manner that will make him scoot. But I cannot do this in a profession where I am a ‘man magnet’, where I need to look good, wear revealing clothes (or risk being labelled boring) and also wear dizzy stilettos and shake a leg or two. No sir, Films is no good for a girl. As a mother I get slapped both ways and so does my daughter. Sample this- if I were to accompany my daughter to shoots, I get labelled as the dominating mummy and my daughter gets labelled as ‘being dominated by mummy’ , as incapable of taking her own decisions. So how does this work? Do I let my little one go out there in the world of wolves all alone? Don’t be daft and compare this world to any other, say IT for example. Don’t believe it when the actors say that the couch is everywhere and that it is a matter of choice whether you give in or not. I say these actors are just protecting their names and their turf. Men might be men everywhere, but the proximity and opportunity has just multiplied 1000 times more in films then say in the automotive industry or IT or publishing or research.
All in all I might be sounding just the opposite of the feminist in me. But Films is not a suitable profession for women. Maybe the TV industry where the (god alone knows why or how) all women are clad in the way normal people are (discount the heavy jewellery and silk sarees). Oh okay not normal really, but at least they are fully clothed just like the men. And to end this, have I said that films stars (particularly actresses) are 10000% deserving of their remuneration (allegedly in crores) for all the risks they take and the courage they need to be in such dangerous profession?

The only thing I envy about Europe

is the open borders (oh ok there are others things as well but this is first on my envy list). I first heard about it from a dear friend who lives in Moenchengladbach in Germany close to the Dutch border. She told me how her friends planned impromptu weekends in Amsterdam or any other part of Netherlands. I asked her about visas and permissions and lengths of insurmountable red tape. She looked at me not really understanding my question the same way I hadn’t grasped the ease with which Europeans crossed borders. And this is the sore, sole sticking point with me and my romantic ideas of travel across the length and breadth of the Indian sub-continent and south-east Asia.
I have been careful about preserving these feeling that were harboured in college. My love for Geography and cartography kept fuelling travel adventures in my head. Then of course reality set in and neighbours like Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Burma soon acquired different and undesirable associations. Ideas of going to places like Dushanbe, Samarkand and Tashkent from Skardu (alas Skardu is in Baltistan which is a part of Pakistan) were deeply buried in the fast-shifting geo-political conflicts of the sub-continent and with the onset of terrorism my romance all but died a swift death.
This was until now when the IRTC announced a new train that would connect Kanniyakumari and Dibrugardh (or Dibrugarh) passing via Trivandram-Coimbatore- Cuttack-Midnapore and Guwahati. Wow, 4,286 km of pure, uninterrupted ‘express’ pleasure that ends only after 82.30 hours! I started making plans and my feverish imagination came back from the dead. I would travel upto Dibrugadh (and its location is fantastic- right on the banks of the Brahmaputra). From Dibrugadh I would take a bus to Senapati in Manipur and then cross over the border into Burma. What a delicious thought. Little did I know that this wondrous border town (in my mind of course) of Senapati has been a hotbed of violence due to clashed between the armed forces and insurgents. So there went my plans..put paid by events not in my control. Still I could rough it out if wanted to. My first destination in would be Mandalay, the second largest city in Burma. It was here that Lokmanya Balgangadhar Tilak was incarcerated here from 1908 to 1914 and where he wrote ‘Gita Rahasya’. From Mandalay, it would be Yangon or erstwhile Rangoon (remember- mere piya gaye Rangoon, wahan se kiya hai telephoon…) and then who knows? Maybe Chiang Mai, Bangkok? But as easy as this is in the head, the ground realities are far, far different and dangerous.
Then I thought if not Senapati, I can certainly go upto Madhubani and then cross into Nepal! Howzzat? This time though the problem is not one of ‘foreign hand’ but of internal location. Madhubani falls is Bihar and to pass through Bihar is like passing through the badlands, the wild, wild west and basically living and travelling on a prayer. But if you are successful then Nepal is yours for the taking. Or is it? Leafing through the latest of issue of Tehelka, I read about how Madhubani is the most porous patches on the Indo-Nepali border and basically reads as easy ‘entry’ and ‘exit’ signs for all nefarious elements (read terrorists).
So not where do I go? Which direction? How about Sri Lanka? Suffice it to say that Sri Lanka no longer issues us visas on arrival. We would not have to apply online for a visa prior to making travel plans and yes…pay for it too!

All chors rise as one to defend their house and rights!

The unthinkable happened yesterday when the ‘parliament rose as one’ to condemn attack on Pawar. Janata Dal chief Sharad Yadav criticised the electronic media for showing one slap as 50 slaps by repeatedly broadcasting that one tight slap.

Good I say! Time and again our democratic leaders have been given this wake up call and I must say that any form of physical pain is any day to be feared than let’s say a weekend getaway @ The Tihar. Mr Pawar said that the people had the right to raise their voice in a democracy but not at the cost of its institutions.” Thank you Mr Pawar for this short and succint lesson in democracy.

As you say this system of country management is for the people, by the people and of the people and when the people think that their voices are not heard (never heard by the way) they will resort to one tight slap which will resonate across the House of Chors and deliver a little warning. Little because you will go back to consorting with criminals and looting the country. Case in point being his declaration of income and assets as being worth only 12 crores. I think even 12 crores will make him liable to be sued in the court for earning through illicit means as a man of only modest employment (read government of India). We spend our entire lives honestly paying tax through deduction at source and still struggle to earn even a quarter of what Sharad Pawar has declared on the Prime Minister’s website.

When things go south laughter is the best policy, so please do check out these comments the readers posted on Times of India website at http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-09-06/people/30115719_1_sharad-pawar-assets-move-privilege-motion
You will laugh till the tears in your eyes wash away the 12 crore silliness!

Sharad Pawar slapped by ‘serial slapper’ Harvinder Singh

I loved Anna Hazare’s comment “what only one slap?” when Sharad Pawar was giving one tight one by the aam aadmi.
Alas slaps are wasted on politicians because by the time you want to slap them they are already being inhuman, I mean incapable of feeling normal human emotions like shame, scruples, embarrassment. So a slap would be like a mere fly sitting on their cheek. The fly could derive some satisfaction when the person ends up slapping himself while attempting to drive the fly away.
We need more such serial offenders. I say we need to go beyond slapping and indulge in some good old-fashioned activity of the donkey and chappal-garland variety.
Kidnap the politicians, make them sit on a donkey, paint their faces black and hang a garland made of chappals around their neck. Of course stoning is mandatory. Let us drive fear in the hearts of these useless and very expensive (witness scams) leaders so that they think twice before indulging. It’s about time we make them realise that the price of ‘leading’ a country might occasionally lead to such occupational hazards

The excitement of watching the ATP tour tennis tournament at O2, London

The one sport that I watch with total involvement is Tennis. I actually sit in front of the TV set with an intent to watch, complete with involuntary jerks and hand motions imitating all the shots that the players should have gone in for. My agony at a netted forehand or a drop shot that falls a hair’s breadth outside the side lines rivals that of the player who at the moment is digging a hole in the court with his racket using it like a pickaxe. I must have been a failed tennis player in my last life or at the very least a failed singles player who turned to the doubles game (mind it! The doubles version is quite entertaining and players earn a decent livelihood. Point in case- Mahesh Bhupathi and Leander Paes).
I am completely transfixed. Never mind Wimbledon and those high falutin Grand Slam championships, it is the ATP 1000 World Tour at the O2 that I wait for every year. Held in the dying weeks of the tennis season, this is a tournament only for the Top Ten of the World. Meaning, only the Top Ten are invited and they play each other in a round robin till the champion is distilled through the finest and the best ten layers to emerge as the only person on the podium. There are no easy opening draws as with other championships where a good player has it easy by playing wild cards or players outside the top 50. Here it is grunt, shovel, grunt, sweat, pant from round one.
This year’s ATM 1000 was no different. Federer playing Tsonga in round 1 and then Federer and Nadal battling in O2 gladiatorial arena with blue light washing over spectators and white light flooding the center court. It’s like going straight to the dessert part of dinner without having to eat your broccoli and fish soup. And the tickets! That’s the best part of this championship. You don’t need to bankrupt yourself or dip into your retirement fund to see a spot of action between top players. Even at this moment, you will find tickets available in boxes closest to the court going for the cheapest ticket of 179 pounds to the most expensive of £ 950. There are other tickets available also immediately around the court perimeter for as cheap as £ 119. The tickets for the finals again the box close to the court goes for as high as £1950 and as cheap as £ 227. Well there are also tickets available for as little as £ 96.99 and £ 179 for a night and afternoon play session respectively. These tickets are for seats at the top tier which if you consider the court as a fish bowl then the top tier would be the rim of the bowl. Oh there also the prize money of $5million to consider. A neat pile to earn at the end of the season so that you must stop at a bank on your way to the Caribbean or Bali for a well-earned r&r.
Compare these with any other Grand Slam tickets and you will notice the difference. For all Wimbledon’s claims to be a Middle Class, genteel sport where heads wear lovely hats and hands hold the customary bowl do strawberries and cream, it is anything but. The ATP World Tour Finals is a more egalitarian venue where tickets are available for as low as 20 pounds for initial matches and you don’t feel cheated because even that early in the tournament you get witness world class action from players who play a far different level of sport than say Qatar Open or Dubai Open.
So folks I suggest unless you are given free tickets in the corporate box, do check the ATP World Tour Finals at the O2 in London. The tickets are cheap, the atmosphere very sci-fi and the location awesome. Am I promoting this event? Absolutely, especially after my initial outrage at the astronomical prices of the premier tennis events.