Dil Se

Now that Sachin Tendulkar has finally clinched one of the most epochal moments of this century and changed the world order for good, one can settle down like dust on drawing room furniture and look back at a week where Tendulkar was the only saving grace amid tumult and turmoil. A lot of bad happened around the 100th good. For starters, Team India lost the match to Bangladesh and marred the maestro’s most magical moment forever. But over and above that, and on a more serious plane, baby Falak stared out of the news pages in a white body bag. The little one, battered and shattered, lost the battle of survival after 56 days in hospital. It was a blood curdling picture — a lone mother at the burial site staring helplessly at her dead daughter. Apparently, Munni was all alone at the burial but for one relative and two-three cops. And, she had gone for the burial after spending long hours in court, attending to a hearing in the Falak case. One wonders where the media and all those ...

It will be unfair to compare Sachin with God today. Yes, He is good and all that but He is nowhere close to Tendulkar or his feat. In this context, when 38-year-old Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar turned 100 at the Sher-e-Bangla stadium at Mirpur in Bangladesh this Friday, it was sad to see that there was more relief than happiness on the master’s face. Considering that the maestro, his fans, family and nation, not to mention the globe at large, was recording not just cricket’s but world sports’ OMG! moment, you can call his muted reaction to the feat this century’s biggest understatement! Indeed, the 100x100 punctuation came after a long sentence, but it is a moment that will take a century or more, if ever, to brook even a whiff of competition. It is a mindboggling achievement, so what if it came after a mindboggling wait — in exactly 370 days and 33 innings after he scored his 99th ton in a World Cup match against South Africa on March 12, 2011 at Nagpur. Yes, it will weigh on the ...

I t was a quick weekend to the Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary the other week. It all began on a high note with me having won the bet that it would take not more than four hours from Delhi to reach the vintage haveli we had booked in Bharatpur for our short stay. Of course, the excellent condition of the road till Mathura ensured I won the bet (the loser had to pay for the petrol). The eight-lane highway ensured smooth flow of traffic at an average speed of 80 km/hr. Indeed, it surprised me that Mayawati has done a good job of maintaining at least the arterial roads in her State — a fact that became even more stark once we turned from the Mathura highway into the wobbly, potholed road to Bharatpur under the Rajasthan Government. It was frustrating that it took us just 2.5 hours to reach the diversion point and an entire one plus hour to traverse just 34 km to Bharatpur from the Mathura turn! Rajasthan is a tourist intensive State so the bad condition of this road was puzzling, more so co...

S porting rivalries live in a world of their own. It is a world where there are no boundaries, where the fan mails can come from far removed, almost mystical lands with no connection whatsoever with either the sport or the sportspersons as such. It is a world of hyperactivity, of loud altercations among rival supporters, of verbal fisticuffing in the form of tweets and Facebook entries — some woeful, some angry, some laudatory and some downright abusive — considering which icon upped or downed you as per your camp loyalty. Take the case of the Thursday (January 26, 2012) blockbuster from the Australian Open. Eternal rivals, though somewhat aged on both sides of the net, were facing each other in a grand slam event for the first time after 2009. So, it was only expected that not just tennis icon Roger Federer and tennis ace Rafael Nadal would be in the throes of energy, but also their supporters from all across the world. Though I work hard at maintaining team spirit in my departme...

The good news about last week was that two-year-old Falak survived and continued to battle with death despite septicaemia, cardiac arrests, water in the lungs, brain surgeries and broken to pulp limb bones. The bad news, actually the alarmingly bad news, is that we in India live in a society which allows such nasty and inhuman things to happen to a defenceless baby, more so a girl child. Falak’s case is not about a stray incident in an otherwise circumspect society. It is rather shameful that very many babies like Falak are stolen, beaten, bruised, raped and even dumped into bins where dogs can tear them apart as the police and the other authorities act only on the hindsight. Is it not a matter of extreme concern that baby stealing and illegal adoption rackets prosper right under the nose of our law enforcers? People in the midst of child saving campaigns swear that Falak is not a stray case. It is only that she has been brought into the headlines and, thus, become the cynosure ...

Water bodies are the lifeline of tourism and hospitality but we take them so much for granted that their upkeep has never been a serious concern for many of us. On a recent visit to Kerala, I happened to spend two days at the mouth of the great Vembanad lake whose parameters are as legendary as its wanton beauty. Relaxing at the Taj Malabar, which occupies pride of place at the tip of the Willingdon Island in Kochi, hours would go by just gazing at the lake cavorting with the Periyar river and then falling into the mouth of the Arabian Sea in suicidal togetherness. Huge ships would appear suddenly on to the horizon of this unique confluence like unannounced predators, sometimes taking your breath away in the evenings when they would appear to be stepping out of the amber glow of a dilated sun falling into the sea in all its orange glory. In fact, to call the Vembanad a lake seems such a shame when you consider it’s stunning bigness — the fresh water lake in India, 14 km at its w...

Believe me, there’s nothing that makes you feel older and out of date than the fast changing lingo and your absurd puritanism in trying to save a language that has fallen deep into the precipice of being a slanguage (my 20-something colleague tells me slanguage is a combination of slang and language)! Forgive me being condescending to this new monster called slanguage, but in a profession where the written word needs to be honest to the good old Oxford Dictionary, I have been having growing problems in setting right the written word by all the youngsters around me. I can no longer explain why ‘why’ can’t be just ‘y’ and why ‘u’ needs to be as long-winded as ‘you’. Really, English language has long been inexplicable in content but the modern drive to sweep it clean of conservatism is quite an experience to be in the midst of. As the language shrinks into the needs and confines of an express society, where saving time by hook or by crook is the only real currency for an entire gen...