Good times are here again. Sourav Ganguly returns to the Indian cricket team.
Technique or no-technique, Ganguly continues to remain one of my favourite Indian cricketers (the others being Laxman and Dravid).

Dravid is beyond excellence but does not seem to have managed to make a team out of his players. Individually he is brilliant, a super-star in the true sense of that word. But there has been a dismal failure on the part of Greg and him in building a team. India seems to have slipped back to the pre-Wright-Ganguly days when it was a motley bunch of extremely talented individuals. The whole is now less than the sum of the parts. Whatever that means, you get the point.

It will be ofcourse interesting to see how Greg and Ganguly get along in the dressing rooms, no pun intended. Ganguly, lacking superior talent, was the person who created Team India, the blue brigade, the team that won.

It will be too much to ask to reinstate Ganguly as the captain since a lot of damage has already been done and tinkered egos are harder to satiate.

However, what would be interesting to see is how Ganguly copes with the enormous pressure that shall rest on his once-broad shoulders as he walks towards the pitch in the African continent.
The sun shall be beating down on him, the bowlers would be waiting to throw the cherry at his ribs, the non-striker would be praying that he doesn’t get his former captain run-out, Ganguly would be hoping that the next nick does not go down the second slip’s throat, Dravid wouldn’t know whether to wish ill or wish good for his former friend, Dada would hesitate a twitch-little before coming down the track to a spinner for his famous fresh-from-the-oven sixes, the Left in Kolkata’s assembly shall cover its face in anxiety, would a 100 be required to cement his place or would a difficult 50 do, Vengsarkar would be busy in transit since he has been entrusted the role of messenger between Sharad Pawar and the team, Kiran More wouldn’t watch the match.
Amidst all this Ganguly creams a four through the covers and announces the return of the prince. Boycott gets a heart-attack.

Ladies and gentlemen, I leave you with my favourite quote from the cricketing world:
“On the offside, first there is God and then there is Sourav Ganguly” – Rahul Dravid

If you are utterly bored and don’t know why you are in this world: Read what the Left has been upto in Kolkata.

Colonize other planets to survive, says Stephen Hawking.
News courtesy: Fox News

Excerpts:

The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there’s an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy the Earth

“It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species,” Hawking said. “Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.”

Universe, here we come. Mankind at its cosmic best.

A thought provoking video by the dove self-esteem fund.
This one is probably for the women out there rushing to look like the next supermodel.
Click here to watch.

(Link obtained via an e-mail)

Going to bed at 5:30 am when the birds start chirping is a scary thing – Dhi Truism.

Late in the night (or early in the morning), around 3:00 am I decided to read, once again, Samuel Beckett’s famed play – Waiting for Godot.

The first time I had read this play was last year while I was acting in Maayavaan’s production, Pratidwandi. My fellow actor talked about staging Waiting for Godot and wanted to discuss about it.

I got the script, read it and found the play intriguing primarily because it was talked about a lot in the so-called theatre circles (visualise me rolling my eyes and raising my fingers to denote the double quotation and wearing a theatrey kurta on jeans and saying “theatre circles”).
However, I failed to find any coherence in the play and it didn’t quite reach out to me except for a couple of powerful lines.

I came across a reference to this play while I was browsing the internet and well, I read it again.
But this time, it did make some sense to me. Vladimir and Estragen wait, day after day, for Godot. Nothing ever happens. Each day is like the next. Pozzy and Lucky are two characters who pop-in and everyone refuses to believe that yesterday was the same as today.

I am blending in words here, but the essence of the play is the irrelevance of our existence in the whole fabric of time. It is also about hope. Godot represents hope.
Vladimir and Estragen are the primary characters who wait tirelessly for that hope to arrive. Godot never does arrive. Consolations in form of Pozzo and Lucky come by, but they are not enough for our tragic heroes.

The play then turns around and talks about how to live through time in a life which offers no hope. This despair of lack of hope leads on to a daily struggle to pass time. The concept of repentance (for having been born) and waiting for salvation to arrive in the form of Godot is brought out by these lines:

VLADIMIR: Suppose we repented.
ESTRAGON: Repented what?
VLADIMIR: Oh . . . (He reflects.) We wouldn’t have to go into the details.
ESTRAGON: Our being born?

I loved reading this play the second time. Needless to say, staging this play requires enormous effort and craft. It is not easy to put a play of this stature and expect the audience to get the pith of it within a span of 2 hours. Someday, I would like to stage this one. Someday.

Until then, I leave you with some of the lines that made my early morning worth every moment.

*****
POZZO says this, “……..The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. (He laughs.) Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. (Pause.) Let us not speak well of it either. (Pause.) Let us not speak of it at all. (Pause. Judiciously.) It is true the population has increased.”

*****
VLADIMIR: But you can’t go barefoot!
ESTRAGON: Christ did.
VLADIMIR: Christ! What has Christ got to do with it. You’re not going to compare yourself to Christ!
ESTRAGON: All my life I’ve compared myself to him.
VLADIMIR: But where he lived it was warm, it was dry!
ESTRAGON: Yes. And they crucified quick.

*****

Read the play :
Waiting for Godot – Act 1
Waiting for Godot – Act 2

Ladies and gentlemen, life rocks. In the meanwhile, we wait for …..

My experiments with the lens:

Click to enlarge. Go ahead.

I walk into my room, draw the curtains aside and open the windows. The afternoon heat pours in with glee. The fan increases its speed almost as if it could gauge the heat’s presence.

The post-it note on the shelf above my desk starts fluttering slightly under the fan. The word “focus” that was scribbled on that note on one sleepy night moves along with the note, asking me to look at it.

Roobaroo plays in the background. Takes me back to the days gone by.
Screaming and dancing on chairs
Hugging and comforting
Being there and not saying a word, yet being the biggest help around
Lying down under the open sky and looking at that dried tree veiling the moon with its bare branches
Seeing a future
The early morning coffees
The late night coffees
Seeing a future destroyed
Bus journeys that taught me a lot about people
Playback theatre sessions that taught me a lot about people
People that taught me a lot about myself
Barista and the young girl selling roses; refusing to accept free money
An impactful goodbye conveyed over a long-distance call from a phone booth
A late night at Java City
The traffic signal and handing over a box of chocolates to two young boys in rags
Cleaning the living room at 4 am when the fish-tank cracked and leaked
Looking at the terrified fish struggling to fit into a corner and suddenly realising your power to save life
People and their expectations
Life and its pacifying blanket made of time

The note flutters with a start and the word scribbled on it re-appears within my sight.
Time to return.
Time to continue.

“You are a person of culture”, says my fortune today on orkut.

Try telling that to a bowl of curd.

Watch the trailer of the new Bond movie – Casino Royale. (Courtesy: The Telegraph).

Daniel Craig doesn’t quite fit the image of James Bond, but then, once the theme music takes over and the high-speed chases flash across your screen, little does it matter who is playing the role of 007.

Bond movies have always been a source of thrill for me. For the record, I possess the entire collection of the 20 movies of Bond made before this one.
My personal favourite was Roger Moore followed by Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan. Timothy Dalton was the worst of the lot; Craig appears a tad better than Dalton.

Needless to say, Eva Green is hot in Casino Royale.

Rocks. Life rocks.

A group of 17000 people go berserk in a town in UP. They smash motor vehicles and molest women.

Who are these people?
Aspiring policemen who had just finished writing a test for the post of a police constable.
Reports ibnlive:

These wannabe constables went on to pull out women from cars and three-wheelers and molested them, even tearing some of the women’s clothes and manhandling the men.
As soon as the candidates finished the exam and came out, they realised there was no mode of transportation available for them, which was probably the reason for the outburst.

It may make for sensational reading or light humour. But it does not augur well for the quality of our police force. What would such a force do when a riot erupts? It wouldn’t take much for them to join-in considering the fact that they didn’t blink twice before smashing vehicles and molesting women.

But this leads us to a bigger question. How does the police force ensure that their incoming recruits are of high moral and ethical calibre? Is there a way to achieve that? Or is it possible to have stricter policies and rules in place which deter a person from crossing the line between a protector and a destructor?

How do business corporations ensure this? As of what I know, the only thing that they do towards checking this aspect of a candidate is by conducting HR interviews. Ofcourse, this requires high-calibre HR professionals which I have surprisingly found hard to come by.

Now, if police forces employed HR people to conduct their last leg of interviews, would the issue of keeping apparently un-ethical people out be addressed? I doubt it. Primarily because ethics and morals can be tested only to a certain degree. That certain degree can ofcourse be polished up for an interview session.

Many people also forget that ethics and morals are not always constant within a person. They change based on circumstances and events. So, there is no guarantee that a person shall hold the same views about certain things as he did at the time of joining the police force.

My conclusion is that nothing much can be done about this problem. And that’s not just because of the reason above.

Factor in the budget that the police force has. A police constable earns somewhere between Rs. 3000 and Rs. 5450 (Source: Karnataka State Police) . After spending the budget on salaries and training, only Rs. 138 is left for police welfare per head! (Source: DNA).
The police just doesn’t have the financials needed to rope-in expert recruitment agencies.

To top it, add the complex issue of reservation and we have completed the bouquet.

You commit murder at the age of 55.
A case is registered against you.

The case is suddenly deemed high-profile and is handed over to the CBI.
The only eye-witness was a lady aged 60.

The CBI takes 22 years to investigate the case.
After 22 years, the CBI closes this case since the only eye-witness is now dead (She died at the age of 82).

In the meanwhile, you have aged to 77 and have lived your life.
Justice done.

Sounds unreal? Read this piece of news from ibnlive.

Congress leaders Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar who were accused of involvement in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots may soon come out clean.
Tytler and Kumar were accused of instigating rioters in Delhi, but 22 years later the CBI’s investigations have reached a dead-end and the agency is finding it very difficult to take their investigations further.

Reason?

…mainly because witnesses have either changed their statements, are untraceable or have died.

For 22 years, CBI was not able to investigate. Now the witnesses have died (no fault of theirs ofcourse). And hence the CBI lets everyone go off the hook.

There, justice done.