Arch, one of my closest buddies over the years and the most resourceful production manager anyone could ask for has started blogging. It’s a blog where she mainly writes on man-woman relationships. My friends link list has not been updated in a while. I promise to do that soon. Just leave a comment if you want me to give a link to your site, will also ensure I drop in to your space more regularly!
🙂
Cheers!
Posts By sudhishkamath
Love at first kick!
I’ve had my rockstar bike for a week now.
This pic was taken with a camera phone and obviously does not do the bike any justice. But due to lack of a better camera at my disposal and the fact that it’s already too late, here I go.
And yes, I can see why this bike has a tagline that goes ‘Feel like God.’
I can really feel it. It has been happening for a week now. I take the bike out and everyone in the street becomes my audience. As I kick it, a crowd begins to gather and soon, there are advisors (ha ha!) asking me to use the self-start.
And every morning, I have to tell a different person on the street that the first start in the mornings should always be a kick. It just makes it that much more easier on the battery. Besides, it’s a mark of respect to old school and my Last Samurai. And an exercise as well. An exercise which will come in handy the day the battery fails.
So its like a ritual every morning. I religiously wipe the dust off it, so that the screaming wine red colour shines and gives it that gleaming glory it truly deserves.
A ride on the Avenger, is pure magic. At 180 cc it has all the power you need to rule the road, but when you ride it at 40-50 (as you are supposed to, during the honeymoon period), it is a saint… it’s so gentle that you won’t even hear it on the road. So as I watch people check the bike out as they overtake me, I just merely smile. Im just content and happy that I have my bike. You know the feeling when you have enormous power and you are happy just possessing it and not putting it to use. That is the feeling of being like God.
It’s clearly not a bike for those who wanna do road-rash. It’s a mature, grown up bike. It’s not the fastest, but it can really zip if it has to. It’s not the most powerful, (the Bullet is way ahead it terms of power and then there are the 600cc and the 1000cc, which only the rich can afford) but it can really handle long distance trips if it has to. It’s a bike for those who are content to the extent of being philosophical and grown-up. That is the feeling of being like God.
It’s become a habit getting watched. Yes, it started off with the Orange avatar of Last Samurai but for entirely different reasons (yes, it is now orange after my art-directors gave it a new personality for my movie… obviously I rejected it at the audition level cuz my friend thought I stole it from a mechanic’s garage before he could put it together) but these days, other riders just look at it in awe, often catching up just to ask: “Enna mileage Sir?” I tell them it’s 45 as they continue riding beside me refusing to take their eyes off my cruiser. It’s great when people look at you. The feeling of being like God.
At the parking lot, it occupies the space of one and a half bikes and tends to jut out of the alloted space at work. Clearly out of the ordinary. The feeling of being like God.
[Everytime I come to take it out of the space, I catch fellow employees stopping to stare and ask: “Enna cost Sir?” “Mileage?”
The height of all the attention was cops stopping the bike. Some three of them in three days. Just to ask how much it costs and what’s the mileage. I’m considering putting up a sticker. Ha ha! ]
This is the only bike in India that has a cruiser design in the truest sense. Look at the distance between the front and the back wheel. No other bike, not even the Thunderbird, or Bullet Machismo or the cheap imitation Yamaha Enticer have that kind of distance. Hence, the Avenger is a longer bike designed for cruising, a mini-Harley. And take a closer look at the back wheel of the Avenger, it’s thicker than a Maruti 800’s tyre. By convention, a cruiser does NOT have identical wheels. The Avenger’s front wheel is 2 inches bigger than the rear wheel and it is also much fatter than all other bikes giving it a much superior road grip. It’s so smooth that its really like sitting on a topless car. Only that here, you can also experience that divine feeling of the wind blowing on your face. Puts you at peace. The feeling of being like God.
Anyways, so this saint of a bike flutters like a bird that you can hardly hear it at 40, but just accelerate a little and hit 60 and it gives you a sample of the roar… a roar that can give even Bullet a complex. I love its roar, it instantly makes you feel powerful and you can sense the bike asking for a long stretch of road. One of these days, I’m gonna give it the space it deserves. After all, to experience the feeling of being like God completely, you have to rule the world. Or at least its roads!
So, here I come, world!
As the Last Samurai retires to stay at home forever. I’m gonna give him a fresh coat of paint soon. So that my brother next year can train with him to be a Jedi. And then one day, a few years from now, when I give him this rockstar bike, I will indeed feel happy.
And yes, feel generous like God!
Foul language drives up traffic by 25 per cent!
People!
I was curious after someone suggested that foul language would keep away readers. Not that I really care too much, cuz if they are that touchy about language, they clearly are not my kinda readers.
And seriously, I’ve had enough of moral policing that all I really wanna do to people who try telling me what to do or how to talk/behave is: “Oh yeah, can you read? Well, read this… actually just visualise it: this is the back of my palm, now… read between the lines!” Yup, that tallest one there is specially reserved for you and right now it says “UP YOURS”!
I just checked up statcounter and it tells me that i’ve got over 200 hits than normal… and that too on a weekend when traffic usually drops. And on a day when I’ve not updated my blog. What this means is people love to watch a fight. And I’m more than happy to entertain them.
After all, this blog is home ground. And hey, I always make the rules for the fight here. If I don’t like you, I delete you from this space. So someone who wants a fight here desperately must be someone who’s really addicted to losing. As much as I hate to fight losers, they don’t gimme a choice. They come streaking here with a mask on their face but they’re trying to say something through their ass. Yes, you can’t help but notice when they scream for attention and you can see the right butt cheek say: “Me” and the left says: “Hit”!
So obviously I’ll use the blogger-cane on them! Cuz I, like most of you, do NOT like what comes out from between the cheeks! So I’m gonna whip their ass while you guys watch the fun and contribute to Counterman.
He’s notched up 21,ooo hits in less than 50 days… 46 days exactly!
Moral of the story: Everybody likes to watch a fight… so what if they know how it ends! There, another reason why the WWF is so popular! 😀
Review: Ghajini
Strictly only for those with short term memory loss
My friends and me had a very big argument after watching ‘Ghajini’. We fought over which was worse — ‘Anniyan’ or ‘Ghajini,’ unanimously agreeing both are bad films and also acknowledging that ‘Ghajini,’ like ‘Anniyan,’ would ultimately go on to be a superhit, because both these films have a winner of an idea at their core (which inspite of failing in classy execution and a convincing narrative) will work simply because the audience are starved of decent entertainment. They will lap up anything remotely good.
‘Anniyan’ and ‘Ghajini’ fall in that category.
Methinks ‘Ghajini’ is better, though just marginally.
Let me first begin with a quick review of ‘Ghajini’ to substantiate.
‘Ghajini’ is, if I remember right, all about short term memory loss, I think.
The producers were so sold on to the idea of short term memory loss that seems like it rubbed off on to everyone in the unit including the director.
The screenwriter director forgets he’s pinched the idea from ‘Memento,’ and tries to pass it off as original.
He forgets the purpose why half the characters he’s created exist in the first place (the hunky overacting cop who dies a most hilarious death, for example, or the twin villains probably created to beat ‘Anniyan’ in special effects)
He forgets logic and reasoning and starts believing all characters have short term memory loss (the entire police department after detaining a man with a tattoo on his chest that says “Find him and kill him” lets him go without even filing an FIR because they just found out he’s a patient and a tycoon)
He forgets that a mass-based audience has brains. The movie is sooo dumbed down (the doctor in beginning says: In medical terms, this condition is called (hold your breath) ‘Short term memory loss’ (and not retrograde amnesia or any such jargon) or the line that was greeted with applause from the entire audience, when a Commissioner Nataraj-look alike looks at Surya’s tattoos and announces his discovery excitedly: “All ten digit numbers. These must be mobile numbers.” Ooops, just like the director I opened too many brackets that I lost track of how many to close. 😉
Hence, ‘Ghajini’ is a film best watched with a failing short term memory. That way, you won’t question the obvious flaws in the plot-hole ridden narrative and just sit back, smile and enjoy it. Like you would do with any of those unpretentious Superstar or Ilaya Thalapathy movies.
The movie starts off on a very promising note (if you don’t let dumbing down put you off) with quite an entertaining flashback sequence (clearly the highpoint of the film) of the love story. Asin is adorable, saucy, chirpy and bubbly, a point that works against the film cuz you later have to put up with a contrasting mini-Shakeela in Nayantara looking so whorebble… so much that when the bad guys chase her in the second half, I was actually rooting for them. “Someone please kill her.” Her overacting and close-ups do not exactly compliment her either.
Anyways, back to the narrative, the film goes downhill from the moment the flashback in the first half finishes. The cop closes the hero’s diary and announces: “Oh shit, what happened the next day. This diary has only till December 31.” Talk about compelling story-telling, the cop actually wants to know the climax for the love story.
You just can’t have the audience laughing at such obviously redundant lines.
The lesser said about the second half of the film, the better. It would really be doing the readers gross injustice to tell them that the spoiler is that there are no spoilers in this aspiring thriller. It’s just a free-fall from a respectable first-half.
A friend of mine wished Murugadoss was faithful to Memento. But I wudn’t have liked to watch it then, cuz it sucks to watch a suspense flick when you know how it ends.
Or, like he said, maybe it would have been better had the director chosen to make the film a full-length original love story since the climax for the affair between a tycoon-in-guise-of-common man and a model-in-guise-of-tycoon’s girlfriend in the flashback was far more suspenseful than the film itself.
Instead what you get is a dead end, a free-fall and a sudden lapse of memory that leaves you wondering: It started off good. But what the f*** happened?
However, (I’ve saved up the best words for the last) Suriya rocks, doing a damn good job of not forgetting continuity and underplaying a role that he could’ve hammed through and won acting honours like Vikram did in ‘Pitamagan’ or ‘Anniyan’. He lends a degree of credibility to the short term memory loss patient.
Kids will love this film cuz they don’t watch films to find flaws.
There’s action (actually a little too violent which they might enjoy even more), there are special effects, there are two good-looking people Suriya (my friend couldn’t stop swooning over him, she went crazy) and the bubbly Asin.
And then, there’s their endearing love story. Which is why I like it more than ‘Anniyan.’ But for this, ‘Anniyan’ and ‘Ghajini’ are equally bad, or good, if you liked ‘Anniyan’. Both these films, like I said before, are dumbed down stories told clumsily for dummies. Had they not insulted your intelligence, you may have actually liked them.
Excellent idea, Narayanan!
Narayanan Venkitu has started an excellent campaign on his blog. Thought I must direct all traffic there so that every single person who wants to show anger or give feedback to Dinamalar could do that. It would not even take a minute. If you’re in a hurry, just email here right away. And I request all bloggers to take this up and divert their traffic to Dinamalar’s feedback page so that people could let these idiots know what we really feel about their double standards.
Kudos to Mr.Narayanan for taking this wonderful initiative!
And thanks China for pointing it out to me.
Lets go people!
The ten-minute film school!
Just to take my mind off work and the city’s Taliban system, I thot I’ll post something that makes me happy.
Movies.
I just met this guy who wanted to make a movie. And called himself a wannabe filmmaker. In fact, I have a lot of such guys telling me that they want to make films and want to work under someone.
I dunno. You don’t learn shit working under a filmmaker. You would probably learn all about production hassles, but filmmaking?? No… You surely will learn more watching films. But since I’m a filmmaker yet to prove myself, I will now pass this class on to Robert Rodriguez, whom I met during a Yahoo search recently. Over to Robert…
(Just in case they move the link, here’s the text)
Good Morning Class!
Now a famous film-maker a while back said something about ‘Everything you need to know about film you can learn in a week.’ He was being generous. You can learn it in 10 minutes.
Set your watches we will be out of here in ten kids.
Okay, so you wanna be a film-maker?(Class choruses ‘YES’)Wrong! You ARE a film-maker. The moment you think about that you want to be a fillm-maker you’re that. Make yourself a business card that says you’re a film-maker, pass them out to your friends, soon as you get that over with and you’ve got it in your mind that you’re one you’ll be one, you’ll start thinking like one. Don’t dream about being a film-maker, you are a film-maker. Now let’s get down to business.
Let’s Play!!
What you need to learn is that being creative is not enough in this business. You have to become techinical. Creative people are born creative – you’re lucky. Technical people however can never be creative. Its something they’ll never get. You can’t buy it, find it, study it – you’re born with it. Too many creative people don’t want to learn how to be technical, so what happens? they become dependent on technical people. Become technical, you can learn that. If you’re creative and technical, you’re unstoppable.
Experience – Do you have experience in movies? You do, right – you WATCH movies. Now you need to have movie experience – you’re not going to learn from just watching movies, you’re learn some things, you’ll learn more picking up a camera, making your own films, your own mistakes – mistakes don’t have to be mistakes, everything is subjective – a mistake to one person is actually a piece of art to someone else. Hide behind that, tell everyone its art, you can get away a lot.
Start with a screenplay. Does anybody here know how to write? No – good. Everyone else writes the same way. Start writing your way. That makes you unique. You can take writing classes, that’s good, but don’t bother to go to film school or you’ll be making films like everybody else. We want to see your film.
How do you write a script? Well, you obviously don’t have a lot of money or you wouldn’t be in my class. So you wanna make a movie but you don’t want to spend a lot. You’re gonna come up with problems everyday on your set. You can get rid of the problem one of two ways – you can do it creatively or you can wash it away with the money hose. You got no money, you got no hose. So let’s make a screenplay for a movie you can actually make without having to make your parents poor. Let’s make a cheap movie.
How do you make a cheap movie? – Look around you, what do you have around you? Take stock in what you have. Your father owns a liquor store – make a movie about a liquor store. Do you have a dog? Make a movie about your dog. Your mom works in a nursing home, make a movie about a nursing home. When I did El Mariachi I had a turtle, I had a guitar case, I had a small town and I said I’ll make a movie around that.
How do you visualise a movie? With storyboards, you can do that. You can previsualise your movie and draw them out, but what you should really do is make a blank screen for yourself and watch your movie. Close your eyes and stare at this. Imagine a screen, imagine your movie. Shot for shot, cut for cut. Sit there, close your eyes and get rid of everybody, get rid of all your thoughts in your head except your movie and watch your movie. Is it too slow? Is it too fast? Is it funny? Does it make sense? Watch it and then write down what you see. Write down the shots that you see. And then just go get those shots.
Equipment. OK let’s go over the equipment. The worse the better. You don’t want anything too fancy, remember this is your first movie – you’re not Spielberg yet. I used this one for El Mariachi, almost the same one, I used a 16M this is a 16S, this is exactly what I had. It helped me move fast because it was light, it was very noisy so I could do the sound in a wacky way, but this thing here would cost you about $2000. Don’t spend that kind of money, find some monkey that own’s one. I found somone who had one of these sitting around, he wasn’t using it. I borrowed it from him, I shot my movie.
(Points at what look’s like a damn heavy tripod) Look at it, this is a nice stand, its a very solid stand, y’know what’s gonna happen? The camera is gonna stay on the stand, you’re just gonna keep it there, ‘cos its so nice, meaning your movie’s gonna look…stiff. Take it off of there, sit in a wheelchair, push yourself around, get some energy in your film. That’s the great thing about first films is that they have so much life and so much energy. Big productions can’t even duplicate that energy, because they’ve got too good a stand and too much crew and everything is really smooth and polished and its lifeless. Add life to your film by getting rid of the fancy stuff. (Points at the tripods) Too good, too heavy, too good – just use your hands.
Here’s a lightmeter, this isn’t the write one, I broke my other one. This is a spotmeter, that’s OK but it’s too fancy. You just need one with a little white dome on it, point it to your subject, read the light, look at the number on your lightmeter – remember your lightmeter is your friend – feed that into lens and the iris, and then you’re set. Start shooting.
Don’t overlight. On Mariachi I had two lights, regular lightbulbs, they were balanced for indoor film, so look fine. In fact everyone said the lighting looked moody because there was very little light . Your mistakes, your shortcomings suddenly becomes artistic expression.
Finally, postproduction. When you’ve finished shooting your movie what do you do? (Picks up video mixer) These are your friends my friends. Video editing systems, computer editing systems, anything like that, its immediate, its easy, its cheap. Do not cut on film. Film is your enemy. You may be shooting on film but don’t cut on film. If any of you want to cut on film get out of my class right now. Go spend $20,000 on a real film school and do that. You’ll never get a job though – believe me.
Everything is on computers or video these days. Film is slow, film is expensive, film is not creative – film take’s too long. Cut on tape that’s what I do. I shot Mariachi for nothing. I edited on video. I had a three-quarter inch master that looked beautiful because the negative was transferred right to tape. There was no middleman so it looked like 35mm – clean, pristine. I made VHS copies of this, sent them out all over Hollywood. I never made a film print. (Picks up film strip) Waste of money. You have to string them up, they get worn out. They’re expensive. They’re copies of your negative. You don’t want that, you don’t want copies of your negative, you want your negative…on tape. Where people can duplicate it and watch it and get you work.
OK so you’ve made your movie, you’ve cut it, you’ve got it out, people want you. What do you do? The first thing you want to do is get an agent – right away. Hollywood is full of sharks, you need a shark working for you. These guys go and get you the best deals, they get you the best prices, they get you the best movies.
What you’ve learnt is what no one else has. How to make a movie dirt cheap. No one else in Hollywwod knows how to do that. You guys can make them cheap, you guys can make them better, don’t get swallowed in the system, take advantage of your position.
Now I make movies that are still low budget but they look like big budget movies because I learnt the techniques that I just showed you today.
All right I’ve got to go back and do my own films so I hope you guys learnt something today, I hope you grab some of these cameras and go shoot something of your own, I hope you write down the ideas that you have, the dreams that you have.
Stop aspiring, start doing.
See you in Hollywood – be scary!
Episode 6: Watching your weight
(Shonali initially refused to write a response to this saying it was extremely distasteful and not worth replying to. I’m glad she did! Aint she good?)
He says:
Ever heard of a girl who eats her heart out and your whole wallet along with it?
In all probability, very unlikely.
Even if she did, it’s incredibly simple to get her to stop.
Pssst: Move romantically closer to her ears and whisper the magic word: Calories!
Then, just sit back and watch: She’s sure to jump out of her chair, pull her stomach in and rush to the restroom. No prizes for guessing, she’s in there checking her waist praying: Mirror, mirror on the wall, can I ever reduce at all?
I don’t get it. Why are women paranoid about putting on weight?
Yes, agreed, there are guys too — the types who believe that the gym is the temple that makes you God.
But that’s just a minority really. Men don’t seem to mind having a little paunch. Some of them, in fact, flaunt their pot-bellies like proud pregnant mothers before the delivery.
The health-conscious decide to burn the beer and the beef by working out the very next day. And the rest know that a few smart lines is all it takes to get the woman find you attractive because women go for brains remember? Or at least they claim so.
Besides, when men are fat, women do seem intelligent enough to realise that there is “more of you to love.”
But to be honest, it’s great that women are figure-conscious.
Men do think that women who watch their weight are super smart. Because, they appreciate and totally dig beauty and attractive women. Besides, what will we men do every time we need a date, but for that adorable babe in the hot dress all dolled up and looking like a billion bucks? Ha ha!
She says:
They say that if Barbie had been a real woman, the only way she would have been able to move with that body structure would have been by crawling.
She must have been thought up by a man.
And she proudly goes on to give women complexes about their appearance even today. But what a lot of men don’t realise is that air brushed magazine models, anorexic ramp walkers and perfectly proportioned movie stars might be the stuff dreams are made up of, but are very likely complete nightmares to date, or live with.
After all, how sweet can you disposition be if you’ve live on a diet of celery, obsess about your skin and hair all day, and spend every waking hour pulverising your body into shape.
No lazy weekends on the beach, no heading out for icecream and hot chocolate after dinner, no sitting up late with cappuccinos and friends. Because, getting sunburnt, putting on a hundred grams or gaining the faintest shadow under your eyes could just be a fate worse than death.
But then, any man who thinks that he’s achieved his very purpose for living when he gains a ‘babe in a hot dress’ hanging off his arm probably isn’t really looking for a girl friend. He’s looking for a trophy.
And as any intelligent woman knows, we’re not trophies. And we’re not decoration.
A beautiful woman lights up a room, not because of her measurements, or an itsy bitsy dress, or because she’s steadfastly refused herself chocolate cake for the past ten years. She’s beautiful because she’s funny, intelligent and glows with self-confidence.
Intelligent woman don’t count calories. And intelligent men don’t expect them to. Beauty, after all, is not only subjective. It’s also just skin deep.
How many of you think kissing in public is obscene?
Yes, serious matter.
No jokes, at least till we have some serious responses.
The last few days have been extremely disturbing.
This season’s moral policing started with Anna University VC telling girls what to wear.
Next, it was the turn of petty politicians to target Khushbu, telling her what (not) to talk about.
The latest of course is Dina Malar’s inexcusably cheap disgusting act of gatecrashing into a nightclub and carrying pictures of girls having a drink, dancing and some of them having intimate moments with their boyfriends/husbands. The captions were distasteful and outrightly perverted. They just stopped short of calling them sluts. Just like how they called Stephanie, a victim of drunken driving last year, a cabaret dancer just because she was spotted dancing along with another guy at a nightclub hours before her death in an accident when four young guys in an inebriated state ran over her. Anyways, drunken driving is altogether another issue and moral policing an equally serious one. Does the media have any right to take pictures of you spending private time with your girlfriend and publish it and then pass judgement on it and call it obscene?
A nightclub is not a public place. It’s a club, which by definition, allows entry only for its members, at a cost, for its services.
Instead of the police arresting the newspaper for invasion of privacy, the dumb f***s arrest two young managers and put them in jail for over 48 hours (if they really had the balls, why not arrest the Managing Director of the hotel, a friend asked).
I heard the Mylapore Deputy Commissioner tell my colleague that they want to finish off nightclubs and arrest every woman from the photos published in Dina Malar. Now, what did these girls do that deserve humiliation or arrest? Is drinking only for men? Is it illegal for women to drink? Is it obscene for a wife to kiss her husband or a girlfriend to kiss her boyfriend even if its a public place (the hotel in any case wasn’t exactly a public place)?
I wrote a story today on how we seem to have two set of rules: One for men and one for women.
We are going to continue this campaign against sexist moral policing, which basically amounts to: telling women what to do, what to wear, what to talk and how to behave.
As I do this, I really want to know opinions. How many of you think kissing in public is obscene? If yes, do you think we need police to crackdown on kissers? If yes, are you willing to stop watching kisses on film and TV? Those who are willing to be quoted in the newspaper could specify your full name with initials, your age and occupation.
Are we becoming a regressive society? I think we’re on our way.
Cuz any society that tries to control its women is. The Taliban did it in Afghanistan, the RSS-Sena tried that in Mumbai and now look, we’re next! Unless, we stop the f***rs at the gates!
The He says, She says blog!
To hit a completely contrasting note (read: lighter, taking-a-dig-at-women tone) and to convince you that Suderman’s multiple personality is still around, here’s a quick update:
In case you guys haven’t noticed, the He says, She says column will be updated every fortnight at its home blog. Dummies, click here to read the latest episode.
🙂
Sport greater than stats!
It’s becoming a cliche to hate Ganguly and scream for his blood.
I’m not gonna do that.
I truly believe he should continue as captain, at least for another six months.
I also think it’s only fair that India’s most aggressive captain gets a chance to sign off in style, when he’s among runs.
Also, that the next six months will be a true test of character. If he CAN really perform in the next few months, not only will he silence all those people who think they know more than the man in the middle but he will also get himself the platform to exit in style: lead the team for the World Cup and an opportunity to win it.
The pressure on Sourav when he next goes in to bat will be more than that of a No.11 player going in to bat chasing six of the last over of a World Cup final. Because, Sourav will know he’s being watched. He will know he’s being evaluated, he will know that there are critics waiting to jump up in delight screaming: “I told ya” as he walks back to the pavilion. He knows there will be Greg Chappell waiting with a smirk, a VVS Laxman and a Kaif waiting to replace him in the very next season.
If he can handle this kind of pressure and come out of it with his head held high, I think he deserves to stay.
I think it’s only natural for a successful captain to turn complacent. To take his position in the team for granted. Sourav may have been guilty on that front in the last few years. He no longer can do that, and that’s the good news.
I think it’s wonderful that he has not been sacked. I’m also glad that the BCCI has not let the coach down either.
Sack Ganguly and you instantly can see morale of half the team go down, after all he has been backing his set of faithfuls. Sack Chappell and you can see the morale of the other half of the team collapse. The truth is we cannot afford to lose either half. Not the regulars. Not the hopefuls.
So, I really like the idea of putting two people who don’t like each other into a same room and say: “You got no choice, guys. Live with it. Perform or find yourself out. We’ll be watching.”
There are no more secrets. Ganguly knows Chappell thinks he’s a misfit. Chappell knows Ganguly hates him. What more needs to be said? They’ve exchanged it all or will do so in the next few weeks. But soon, they will realise that they REALLY have no choice but to work together. Because, there is a sense of purpose that binds them. That purpose is victory for the team.
As a filmmaker and a scriptwriter, I know that a crisis is a point of transformation. It is the lowest you can hit in the span of a story.
Also, what many people forget while baying for Ganguly’s blood is that statistics and current form alone cannot determine a person’s future in a team. Which is why I think it’s okay to make Ganguly sit out for not being in form but you cannot sack him as captain for good, which is usually what the case is in Indian cricket when someone over 30 sits out.
Because, cricket is a game. Numbers are important but not everything.
But a captain is everything, and not just important.
Sport is played not through statistics, but through raw passion, ungirdled emotion and pure unadulterated spirit. It’s played with aggression, for God’s sake. And Sourav personifies that very essence of sport. Agreed that Dravid is too much of a gentleman cricketer, a diplomat liked by all members of the team. That’s great if you were leading a delegation of managers but not when you want to intimidate your opposition. Not when you want to whip up the adrenaline. Not when you want to override convention. This is where Sourav scores.
Sport is about a team and the interplay of personal relationships in it. The ability to manipulate efforts and emotions of individuals into the objective of the team: Victory. To instil, to bind and create spirit out of interactions and personal relationships. No amount of talent can replace team spirit.
Sourav is an emotional guy. And that’s why he will make a great leader for a sports team. He’s demonstrated this before. He’s one of the few Indian captains who has been successful in putting opposition under pressure with aggressive unconventional field placements. He’s a risk taker. Dravid’s field placements as we’ve seen are way too safe to produce a victory.
It is this emotional quotient that gives sport its character. It is this emotional quotient that will give Sourav the perspective to make amends with coach Chappell. It is this emotional quotient that will help him stage a comeback. And help him resolve the differences in the team. If he still has it intact, that is.
The only way to resolve differences in a team is to resolve the differences between the power centres and not introduce new power centres and give it that much more time for the interplay of characters result in new unpredictable power equations. If the two can resolve their differences and share from each other’s ideologies… Sourav being all heart and Chappell being all mind, between the two of them, they can create a potent lethal team that is sound in both its heart (emotional department run by Ganguly) and head (rational scientific thinking supplied by Chappell).
It is media speculation and analysis that is the prime reason that every one today thinks he’s an authority on the subject. Regular everyday sport conflicts suddenly have come under the microscope. Conflicts have always been around. It does not mean we stick our noses into the dressing room, sitting so far away from it and take sides.
Let them be, they (the captain and the coach) will figure it out. They know the game more than you or me do.
It’s best for Indian cricket that they are made to live together. That’s how Indian marriages have worked over centuries. The in-laws (selectors) are watching. Neither the bride nor the groom can afford to screw-up.
For Sourav, the test of his life begins now. He alone is responsible for his fate from now on. Not you, not me, not Chappell.
MADRAS INK. 
