And maybe this one to close the day, in memory of the greatest living Bose of all time.

In the 30 days since the start of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy, this post has scored more hits than the runs scored by VVS Laxman in this series. So it would appear that this listing of his cliches is generally very helpful to the public.

My lack of TV (forgot to renew the DTH subscription) and heavy work schedule makes it difficult to sit through a full day of live cricket and make a new list of cliches (including those spoken by Wasim Akram, Sanjay Manjrekar, etc). I shall probably do something on the lines in due course.

And thanks for coming to the blog.

“It’s always nice when you turn up to a ground where history suggest you can score runs. But that doesn’t really count for anything. We’ve got to go out and put our poor performance behind us.”

This could be by someone from the Indian team or someone from the English team. As it stands, this is Alistair Cook previewing the second test versus Pakistan in Abu Dhabi.

With regard to the Adelaide test which starts tomorrow, India has not lost at this venue since the 1991-92 season.

However, if draw is India’s top priority, than that’s difficult to achieve at this venue. Despite the batter-friendly reputation, in the last 13 Tests spread over 14 years, there has been only two drawn games.

And Australia have decided to not respect Sehwag’s claim that theirs is the best bowling attack he has ever seen and are dropping Starc for Lyon.

The move came after India’s Virender Sehwag described Australia’s pace bowlers – including Starc – as “the best bowling attack I’ve ever seen”. “They are bowling in good areas, they are not giving up easy balls to hit boundaries. They are playing with your patience and all,” Sehwag said. “I think that’s the best bowling attack I’ve ever seen, especially against Australia. Generally, when I played the fast men … I’d get a couple of balls I could hit for boundaries. But in this attack I hardly get any balls. So, I think, one of the best bowling attacks.”

And just for perspective, Rajasthan are the best cricket team in the country. Rajasthan could have pushed for an outright victory. With a first innings lead of 326, they had enough buffer to enforce the follow on and bowl out TN second time over. But they didn’t because they wanted Saxena and Bist to complete 1000 runs for the season. Saxena failed, Bist did. That’s how the best cricket teams in India play at the highest levels of the competition.

It is the measure of Messi’s greatness that no one ever talks about how much he is paid, or about the women he goes out with. Any conversation on the 24-year-old maestro will be so occupied with his feats on the pitch that there is no room for gossip. For the past half-dozen seasons the entire world of football has been beguiled by the way this little man skips, dances, wriggles and scuttles between defenders, scoring beautiful goals from all angles and any range. And when he celebrates, it is with the same modesty that he appears to conduct his life off the pitch.

And watch the greatest goal of all time (~ 1.00 minute mark)

According to Tourre, this year the high spring temperatures and combination of July rainfall and August sunshine helped the grapes mature to excellent quality. Tourre suggested in his presentation that people should buy a bottle of 2011 pinot noir to enjoy in 10-15 years from now.

The recognition of this pattern could become influential to area wine producers going forward.

To know more on pinot noir, I think Paul Giamatti is the right person to turn to.

Sante!

Tyson’s behavior sullied boxing’s always precarious reputation, making the sport synonymous with freakishness. He would be the last in a long line of heavyweights to bear a symbolic connection to American social trends. For just as the blustery John L. Sullivan represented a growing nation coming into its strength, and the magnetic Dempsey the birth of mass-media celebrity and commercial culture, and the stoic Louis the hard years of depression and war, and the mercurial Ali the age of rebellion and change, so Tyson embodied the postmodern hoodlum—the gangsta from an urban landscape pulverized by fatherlessness and anomie. Remarkably, a middle-aged Tyson is now trying to remake his life, a feat that, given the obstacles, would outstrip anything that his illustrious predecessors achieved, in the ring or out.

But about Pacquiao, he writes:

Pacquiao is the kind of figure who could restore boxing to its former glory, if such a thing were possible. Boxing devotees yearn for him to participate in a “super fight” like those in which Sugar Ray Leonard fought in the 1980s. The opponent for such a battle is standing in plain sight: Floyd Mayweather, Jr., a brilliant defensive boxer who has never lost.

For the moment, Mayweather Jr is busy blocking head butts.

Lyudmila Pavlichenko

Woody Guthrie wrote a song as a tribute for her

I’d hate to drop in a parachute and land an enemy in your land.
If your Soviet people make it so hard on invadin’ men;
I wouldn’t crave to meet that wrong end of such a pretty lady’s gun
If her name was Pavlichenko, and mine Three O One

The Soviet women did kick some major ass in the Great War as did the men. 60+ years later, we have this fellow – riding horses, flying planes, cuddling bears, tagging tigers, tracking beluga whales, arm wrestling with other Russian dudes, driving F1 cars – and also doing his day job as prime minister of Russia.

Nancy Wake, legendary Resistance agent, hunted by the Gestapo who called her The White Mouse, passed away earlier this month. Honourd by France, Australia and her nation of birth New Zealand, Wake worked as a courier for the Resistance before being retrained as a saboteur. During a raid, an SS sentry spotted the maquisards she was aiding. Years later, when interviewed about what happened to the sentry. she simply ran through thumb across the throat.

I’ve travelled to Germany many times since the war. It’s a lovely country to visit but I keep well away from the older generation of Germans in case I become involved with some ex-Nazi. I will never be able to forget the misery and death they caused to so many millions of innocent people; the savage brutality, the sadism, the unnecessary bloodshed, the slaughter and inhuman acts they performed on other human beings. I am inclined to feel sorry for the young Germans of today, knowing how utterly miserable I would be if I was descended from a Nazi.

Nazi war criminals are being hunted even today  with guards and death camp officials being arrested and standing trial in Germany. However, the manhunt for Balkan war criminals seem to have come to an end. In what reads less like a news article and more like a paragraph from a Ludlum paperback the article traces the SAS and other agencies from the NATO countries picking up the war criminals from all sides – Goran Hadzic, Serb leader in Croatia, responsible for the destruction of Vukovar in 1991 reminiscent of Lidice, was the last of the 161 named by the ICC.

The first war-crimes arrests in former Yugoslavia were carried out on 10 July 1997 in an operation codenamed Tango. For the preceding four weeks it had involved SAS soldiers lying in a shallow trench beside a lake near the town of Prijedor, watching a man called Simo Drljaca. During the war, Drljaca had been Prijedor’s police chief, and had organised the “ethnic cleansing” of the town’s Muslims, who were driven into a string of horrific concentration camps at Omarska, Keraterm and Trnopolje. Many of the inmates were beaten or starved to death.

In peacetime retirement, Drljaca had relaxed, spending a lot of time fishing at the lake, and on this particular summer morning he had brought along his son and brother-in-law, unaware that his impunity had run its course.

In the clipped account of one British official: “It was a hardcore SAS operation. The SAS came out of the undergrowth saying: ‘We are here to arrest you.’ Drljaca pulled out a pistol and fired at them and they shot him.

Now that it is over

Justice is finally being delivered, but it has taken 18 years since the ICTY was established. During that time, many thousands of victims were killed and 10 Hague indictees cheated justice by dying before they were caught.

“We are pleased that at the end of the day they were all arrested, but was it really necessary that it took so long, and was so painful?” says Brammertz. “Many of the survivors of the crimes in the meantime died without seeing justice being done. So I share the frustration.” But he does not agree that justice delayed has been justice denied. As well as paving the way for a permanent war crimes court, the ICC, he said The Hague tribunal had struck a firm blow against a culture of impunity in the western Balkans and beyond.

Wonder what Nancy Wake would have had to say about the Balkan war crimes.

In terms of music too, my engagement has been indirect mostly through Hindi film songs based on Robbi T tunes. Recently though I kind of had this urge to rediscover Robindrashongeet. It happened when I was setting a quiz question on Kishore Kumar singing Ami Chini Go Chini Tomare in Charulata.

I was greatly interested in understanding how Ray, a self-proclaimed aficionado of classical music who preferred working with Pt. Ravi Shankar, Ud. Vilayat Khan and Beum Akhtar, came to be working with Kishore Kumar.

When in Kolkata recently, I went to MusicWorld on Park Street and decided to explore the appropriate music shelves. I picked up a lot of stuff including a fascinating piece “Tomar Akash Tomar Batash“. A compilation of a radio series hosted by Soumitra Chatterjee, it presents, in 3 CDs, a number of classic numbers sung by legends like Hemanta and Dwijen. The third CD featured RobindroShongeet influences in the movies of Ray and Ritwik Ghatak. The above song is one example.

The story goes, as narrated by Soumitra, that Kishore Kumar, a favourite of Ray, was busy but greatly interested in doing the song for Ray. So he convinced Ray to come to Bombay and do the recording. Ray had his wife Bijoya sing it and he took the tape to Kishore. Listening to the tape, Kishore sang the song to the accompaniment of only a piano. The piano piece is played by Ray himself.

20 years later, Kishore Kumar would do another song for Ray and Soumitra in Ghare Bhaire. The high energy, acapella song Bidhir badhon, a performance that is guaranteed to draw out those goosebumps every time.

And this song from Meghe Dhaka Tara which is significantly elevated by the performance of the on-screen actors and Ghatak’s filmwork, the black and white night time scene giving a different pathos to it.

There are many more songs with interesting stories. More in later posts as and when I have time. I shall close this post with this ever popular number based on the tune of Auld Lang Syne. (Hemanta singing in this Uttam Kumar flick Agnishwar)

Cheers.

The first one is an effort to remember the various speakers on that significant night of the 14th / early morning of the 15th August 1947. There is one paragraph which is pretty interesting:

What is nearly forgotten is that between Nehru and Dr.Radhakrishnan was another speaker, symbolically chosen to second Nehru, who was soon to become a victim of those divisions. His name was Chaudhuri Khaliquzzaman of the Muslim League, presumably chosen to represent the Muslim voice in the Constituent Assembly. That this role didn’t go to a Muslim from the Congress like Maulana Azad may have been because an attempt was being at that time to involve a wider spectrum of Indian political opinion in the nascent government. The Cabinet sworn in the next day included non-Congress ministers in prominent positions like Dr.B.Ambedkar as Law Minister, the Justice Party’s Shanmukham Chetty as Finance Minister and the Hindu Mahasabha’s Dr.Shyama Prasad Mookerjee as Industries Minister.

His other piece is a quest for children born on that specific midnight, like Saleem Sinai. Unfortunately he does not find any news about births occurring on that particular day and time, even after checking the archives of the Times of India.  Not finding any mention of any real life midnight child, he explores the city of Bombay through the words of Rushdie.

If 1981, the year it won the Booker Prize, saw the birth of a formidable literary talent, it also saw the birth of Bombay as a literary city – colourful and chaotic, teeming and stinking, yet also wealthy and stylish, dangerous yet not discouragingly so, a city poised between West and East (but usefully English speaking) and in Bollywood, possessed of an industry involved in creating even more tales to add to those already spun by the city.

To round up this post, I close with Salil Tripathi’s piece in Mint where he traces 20 years of the reforms launched by PV Narasimha Rao and his finance minister Dr MM Singh. His closing sentence, as is always the case, gives you this hopeful thread to ponder upon for the future:

As India tries to reclaim its erstwhile predominant position in the global economy, it has the opportunity to show that economic and political freedoms can go hand-in-hand; that to grow you don’t have to be authoritarian, and democracy doesn’t hinder wealth. That might sound false to those still in awe of China. But India is not China, and that’s worth celebrating.

To quote the pilot in my flight back to Mumbai from Kolkata on the 15th, Jai Hind.