The living cricket ...

Well ... you can have all the "logical" discussions on Him ... criticizing him ... questioning Him ... demanding Him ....

But He is the one of the very very few in our lives from whom we have DEMANDED things ... we didn't just appreciated or criticized Him ... we DEMANDED Him to perform coz when He performed we felt a part of ourselves is performing to the best of His ability

Tagging Him God is something I have done and I will continue doing ... but not in this post coz in the present world we have made God a distant entity ... He is well within us

By Saying this I question myself that why I didn't say this for Rahul Dravid or Sourav Ganguly or many such great personality ... and at that time I ridicule myself coz it utterly false to think that now I am saying this for Him means I am doing some injustice to other players whom I probably love more ...

When I am typing this ... I am not portraying only Him in my mind but also these great souls well ... He is great coz He in His entire life He achieved greatness without taking away the greatness/share of the others ... Media might have given other players lesser comparatively but that's media's fault not mine and so I say this about Him without any Guilt ... I do share same feeling with a slight different flavors for Rahul Dravid., Ganguly, etc.

There is no second opinion coz its a fact that something which have earned a synonym of permanence is ending ...

A person who have been not playing in a match, but the people had the Him somewhere in the back of the mind ... It was never a case when in a match or in a discussion of cricket He was not discussed or compared or many a times mocked ....

It is like you take a dive in a 30 feet pool ... you are doing a deep water swimming with no air what so ever around you to breath ... but you do it with confidence coz you have trust that you just need to rise up the water level and you will breath life ... A Goodbye from Him has created a mistrust in me and many other you feel like they are deep diving in cricket ...

Mistrust that is the air still there??!!

He is leaving cricket ... but its hard to imagine that cricket will leave Him ....

I strongly feel that He would still be discussed, appreciated and possibly mocked at times by many ... but He can't be forgotten ... He won't be forgotten ...

He has left a mark on the stone slab of cricket ... "Sachiiiiiiiiiiin .... Sachin" will live in parallel universes and in the minds and subconsciousness of all ....

But the Mistrust will remain forever ... is the air still there??!!

The Part of me which says - "I love my country"

Just saw … in fact witnessed … the episode 7 - season 1 of the T.V. series “The Newsroom” (I want to call it an EPIC, but will try and control the exaggerated dramatic emotions I am going through). The Episode is related to the operation which killed the master mind of the attach of 9/11, this statement reflects how unsafe and tense we have created our internet that I still fear to name the guy because I feel that some cops would come and arrest me on some charges of creating havoc.

The episode starts with a funny note, which is rare in this T.V. series. The “fun” I see is wrapped in sarcasm on this T.V. series and I feel proud that I understand most of it after watching the episode twice or thrice. The episode, yes it starts with a funny note and then by the end of it has definitely made my spine shiver.

But I didn’t decide to articulate this particular discussion I was having with my mind roughly since 30 minutes to praise the T.V. series “The Newsroom”. This note is something I wanted to share as a citizen of India. 

This episode of “The Newsroom” tries to show the vulnerability and the grief of the people of America when they recall 9/11. For me, it tries and portrait how the knees of each and every American even today bend when they talk about 9/11. And this for me exhibits a great strength of unity and a strong sense of all the people of America having something in common, though it’s too brutal and sad.

We as an Indian have faced too much, attack of 26/11, attack on parliament and much much more. But I as an Indian feel that we just are spectators watching a horror movie when we think about these attacks. I am never connected to people using these brutal attacks as a medium. We just discuss it as a story. 

I thank Mr. Ram Gopal Verma to make a movie on 9/11 which doesn’t show heroic nature of any protagonist but shows the helplessness of the common police guy who sits right in the middle of the pool of blood. The grief and the sadness is a strong binding agent. This episode of “The NewsRoom” tell me that it’s time to consider India as an individual/individuals whom you dream to be with for the rest of our lives since you had a life, rather than considering India as something too great and distant to connect to. 

India is the sister with whom you have fought since childhood and still find her the safest person to share the deep down secrets. India is a mom whom you scold, don’t answer, consider as a person who won’t understand your generation, and still believe in her opinions/decisions blindly for topics as small as buying a jacket to topics as big as deciding the girl of your life. India is a friend whom you chose to be in your life at the cost of letting go other people who too were in the race of being your friend.

India is very close to you, it’s not an entity residing in Delhi and Mumbai. It’s with you like your sister, Mom and friend. And when something goes wrong with your Sister, you feel sad and you are on a mission to eradicate the entity which made things go wrong for her. Eradicate the entity in the manner which will make her feel satisfied and in turn makes you feel satisfied. We have a moral responsibility NOT to let the grief die down, the grief that something went wrong to an thing close to you and you couldn’t control that. This grief is the driving force to make things better for that person in pain and this should be made clear that India is one of those entities close to you and not some third party company whose shares if go down will just be news to you, no sir!

Just see the episode 7 of “The Newsroom” season 1, the joy on the faces of Americans was clearly noticeable. The fellow Americans killed the person responsible to kill the fellow Americans. The grief was common and so was the happiness for all, be it the 2^nd most viewed television anchor or be it an air hostess. Well I know it’s just a fiction, a drama, but I think fiction is something which makes me believe that life eventually will be good if we follow the ideal characters of a fiction. 

Also here “killing” the person responsible is not the source of happiness, the T.V. series depicts very clearly that it’s the successful execution of a decision made by a nation, which in turn are the people, is the core reason of the happiness. If the decision would have been to capture the person responsible for the massacre and send to prison, I strongly believe that the joy wouldn’t have been less. 

Here the point to be induced like the DNA is this fiction drama tried to communicate that each and every person considered the grief as their own. And when the entity responsible for that grief was booked, they felt a rare combination of joy and sadness, all of them. Here “all of them” is the thing which is important.

I just hope that our media, using media I am including the movie, T.V. and the news fraternity, just consider this as their moral responsibility to strongly induce this feeling in our minds. Why the media? Because they form the face of India for we Indians. They need to induce the feeling that India is something you are, and India needs all of you to make "India" bigger. With this it should also clearly make us understand that though we are responsible to make India great, India is not so vulnerable that we can break it. We DON’T have the power to break or ruin something so big. We just owe too much to this name and so it’s not just a moral choice that our deeds should be in favor of the Nation, but it’s our moral accountability. THIS is the only possible way to pay back a bit in return of the honor and privilege we have been given to call ourselves Indians.

I am not saying to go out and kill everybody who according to you is harming the nations. We cant do this because of 2 basic reasons: First that its "according to you" that someone is doing something wrong and we can make a decision on the basis of personal thought process and Second, we have some jurisdictions and we need to abide by that. All I am saying is  We have a moral responsibility NOT to let the grief die down.

"Vinnaithaandi Varuvaaya" Vs "Ek Deewana Tha"

I watched a movie “Ek deewana tha” a few days ago. Though predictable romantic movies are NOT in my “movies-to-watch” list since long time, but found this movie quite fine. The music played a vital role in this thought I guess. It was predictable, as mention by many in reviews, but was not totally insane, like the once our bollywood has produced a lot of times. These days it seems bollywood is suffering from some kind of “lets-make-insane-movies” epidemic :P …

A friend suggested the original Tamil make i.e. “Vinnaithaandi Varuvaaya”. Just completed this Tamil make and found both the movies exactly the same as far as the story goes, till I saw the end. “Vinnaithaandi Varuvaaya” climax was way good better than the Hindi make. Climax of “EK deewana tha” seem to be dipped in the bollywood curry. I don’t blame the director, at last he makes films for the audience and this is what bollywood audience has projected about themselves.

Now I am sure that the climax of “Vinnaithaandi Varuvaaya” would have been made keeping in mind the kollywood audience. All I am saying that for me Vinnaithaandi Varuvaaya had a better ending (I guess I should think of migrating to some Tamil oriented Theatres now :D). I liked it because for me it was more logical.

Since the start bollywood has loved propagating one thing, “when one is in love, whatever “THE HEART” decides is correct”… Till now “THE HEART” has done a pretty good job of pumping blood to each part of the body, but still I am not sure how would “THE HEART” perform in this job which is totally not related to his work experience :)

Anyways leaving my personal disappointments behind and coming back to the original topic, the climax of Vinnaithaandi Varuvaaya gave many things in the movie a logical reasoning, things which would seem to be just fillers.

For example the song “Mannipaaya”, Google says the meaning is “Will you forgive me”. The replica song in the Hindi remake “Ek deewana tha” portraits girl asking forgiveness to the guy for various things she did to him, which actually excited the guy in the complete course, but again let’s me prevent myself from going into the dark clueless path of analyzing a song in literal sense and try finding a logical end in it.

This song was just a song; rather filler in the Hindi remake. But in “Vinnaithaandi Varuvaaya” the climax gave a totally new meaning to it. It made me think that the director had a life planned for the song.

Now, I like the complete movie “Vinnaithaandi Varuvaaya” and as “Ek deewana tha” was an exact make of it, the scene of “Ek deewana tha” also made me feel good.

But it seems evident that the actress in “Ek deewana tha” had difficulty in speaking Hindi and as a result the lip movement with the dialogues didn’t have that feel. This was one major reason why I was getting detached in the movie and it demanded efforts from my end to stay connected. Also in the Tamil make, the male protagonist acted as if this was it, either act good here or go home. Tinny things like his hand trembling while he was holding himself from crying in scene where he meets Jessi in America. This made me feel that he is a good actor.

And after this scene the climax, I was in shock. A similar shock I did get when I saw movies like chocolate of bollywood, though chocolate sits at the supreme position, but I am not comparing here. A shock which is an outcome of the situation wherein you get hit by something totally unexpected. Of course the reason I was shocked is I saw the Hindi remake first and both the movies were running parallel till the climax came. So the pre-judgement that both the movies are same and then the different climax was more responsible. It was not a climax which one can’t imagine when your mind is neutral; the mind was morphed by the Hindi remake.

But this doesn’t change the fact that the acting of people involved in “Vinnaithaandi Varuvaaya”, the authentic feel of the scenes and the people blending into it, etc. kept this movie ahead in the race and the climax came in as a last push to victory J