There are no fairy tales

There are no fairy tales. The fact about four-leafed cloves or that elusive pot of gold at the end of a rainbow is as sad as drunken homeless man getting mauled over by a car on the highway; it doesn’t matter. Countless brave hearts have pondered over fighting dragons and innumerable girls have lost sleep instead of their shoe. The fact of the matter is that the world of make-belief is as real as air: feel it, breathe it but don’t dare define its colour or the next time you will be tagged as “lunatic” on Facebook.

 

The world was a cruel place, even before Adam ate that forsaken apple. It took millions of years for the atmospheric dust clouds to condense and take shape into an ugly orb. Pressurized gases accumulated into one giant solid shape and thus the Earth formed. No, this is not another history lessons on how the dinosaurs had breakfast and died or how the mammoth managed to befriend a sloth and a sabre-tooth, making merry in the ice. All another story that one. What I intend to picture, is reality as a person. You see, if Reality had a job, he would probably work for Fate. Now, these two guys would start up a business venture, luring man into their inescapable web. A person dreams of a house, nice place to work at, a content family and easy retirement. That will inevitably be your fate if, and only if you have a good deal with M/S Reality and Fate Associates. “LOL!” as many silly girls would giggle. “Can we bargain there too?” Well my friends, it’s not just Janpath or Sarojini that you can bargain, it’s with Fate too, and Reality is too busy messing everyone’s dreams. How? Look at yourselves people! Haven’t you had any dreams or ambitions, where you had everything coming through? And then stray back into your lives, have a peep and tell me, has everything been that way? Only a foolish man would say yes. Economics say human wants are insatiable; they can never be met, for one satisfaction leads invariably to another desire. That’s where Reality kicks you in the arse. 

But what about Fate? Is he the good guy, misunderstood like Harvey Dent, who thinks that the world is a bad place because of its inhabitants and what they make you do. All the blame lifts off your shagging shoulders in an instance if so be the case. But it won’t. Each and every person has a Fate bound to him or her decided by every action or reaction that he or she commits. I writing this article will, too, have new path-ways laid down by Fate. She is the architect in our ever bulging city of Life. Every decision has a yes and no. Good and bad. Two roads and you can drive on anyone of them, the only check-post being death where a person inevitably gets penalized for over speeding. We all want to fly away, don’t we? Become an astronaut or a pilot if that is what you want, your destiny, your fate and then soar over the countless others, who can look up and only gaze in awe. Don’t be a super-hero and try to jump off your balcony. If it’s a floor you will break your legs; two and you might fracture your spine and paralyse yourself; three floors and you’ve won yourself a one way ticket to paradise. That’s reality. 

So the next time you have dreams make sure you do everything in your power to grasp them with both your hands and never let go. Reality will follow; not with a chainsaw, waiting to cut down your tree of hope and ambition, but with a cushion: in case you fall. Fairy tales aren’t true, they were never meant to be, because each of us has our very own fairy tale to complete within a said time period. Let stories entertain you, not guide. Draw inspiration from your family, friends, idols and teachers. Once you have learnt everyone’s mystical story, I’m sure you will have gathered all the magic required in conjuring the perfect spell or potion in your very own cauldron. Or else you could just end up like me, telling everyone what is needed to be done and be told that you have done nothing.

The road less travelled, the road not taken

Humankind’s will to survive, to live has always provided instances of exemplary determination to continue.

History has often recorded such events. Against all odds, Hannibal crossed the Alps with dreams of victory in his eyes and elephants and scantily warmed foot-soldiers for an army. He achieved this mammoth feat just to prove the world that the Romans could be conquered and that Carthage had a will to survive, a will which was far greater than any other Mediterranean kingdom at that age. He was successful, briefly. The Romans eventually captured the Carthagean capital and rounded Hannibal off, cut his supplies, leading him to an eventual defeat. His loss was testimony for Rome to use and dominate the world for centuries to come. 

Hannibal’s story is far more than a history lesson. His expedition, though classified as a failure, had a strong moral takeaway. We all have our Rome and we all, ironically, possess a Carthage too. We have our dreams and ambitions, a place in the future where we would want to be, and then there is the realization of where we actually are. That realization sometimes gets too big for us. Weighed down by the enormous task, we shrink ourselves in small crumbles of hopelessness and gaze into solitude. We first distance ourselves from our friends, then family and finally our own being. Logic, reasoning, argument: vague properties of a fruitless mind. We shut the door too hard and cry out loud when the pain stings our feet; we had left a toe in, just enough for a beam of light to scrape through. This is where our Carthage falls. This is where the Roman chivalry of despair ransacks our present and leaves us stranded on the road with no origin and a very foggy destination. 

Recuperation is a Herculean task, but no an impossible one. As we tread on the road less travelled, we accept that we cannot hitchhike nor piggyback. Help is necessary just to stand up, and not to provide a shoulder to walk. Hannibal fought on until the very end, when only a few of his commanders were all that was left of the might Carthagean army. Even without almost any artillery to defend themselves, he never gave up. Sure, it sounded ridiculously easy to walk out of that old warehouse and surrender to the enemy. It would have ensured that he lived; Rome took pride in showcasing defeated leaders to its people, restoring confidence within them. But Hannibal took the road not taken. 

Realization often lands a punch to the gut that knocks us down. We try to get up and it shoves us back down again. And again, and again, till we ourselves notice that the punches get weaker, get slower. Our oppressor grows tired. We could then duck the next blow and land one back, knocking the fangs out of it. We look down at the fallen terrorist, grin a bloody smile and walk past over its body, our hands still stinging from the blow.

Hannibal’s road may have been too extreme. He claimed his own life. But that was his road. Each of us is the designers, contractors as well as labourers of the roads, the paths of life we choose to travel on. In the end we have to decide – is it a highway to hell, or a stairway to heaven?

Of dreaming to think

How are we different from each other? Is it our faces, the colour of our eyes, the tone of our voice, or simply the differences in our thoughts suffice? 

The answer plunges down like a gusty torrent and lies splat on your feet. Some argue it is a scientific reason; we are an evolving species after all and the process is far from completion. There may come a time when every person, every man, woman and child on Earth will resemble each other, in all biological aspects, just like zebras or lions – every other looks the same. Humankind has been wondering this world for about 100,000 years now. Society existed from time man had learnt to communicate. We also had alphas and omegas, fights for supreme leadership of our clans, and even faced perpetual exile on defeat, only to vow gory revenge. No I’m not talking signifying ‘The Lion King’, but yes, that indeed is a story more human than we could ever be. 

When we look around us, we find all sorts of faces – many grinning, some straight, some pensive, others meek and a few gloomy. Well expressions may hide what thoughts cannot, and humankind had learnt the effective use of deception a long time back. Slaves deceived their masters in ancient Sumeria by cloaking their sorrow with toiling labour, spice lords of the east tricked European merchants into thinking cardamom was clover, clover to cinnamon and cinnamon with dried grapes. The Popes concealed their true desires when they asked all Catholic kings to wage bloody crusades, and Hitler honestly and truthfully made the world believe that bearded men were goats, waiting for sacrifice. What significantly distinguishes us isn’t the length of our smiles, but the weight of our thoughts. We may be dreamers, far-fetched thinkers, dead and buried in conversations but alive and kicking in reveries. Day-dreaming is sorcery without wands, without magical cauldrons, without eyes. We can just shut our eye-lids and imagine anything possible; scale the mightiest peaks, swim the deepest trenches, jump to the moon and back or visualise the galaxy as one of our many canvases. 

This is where we can ‘classify’ people. Many of those who I come across just blurt out that thoughts are for retards, and that if you think too much, everyone tags you on Facebook as a social freak. But just because someone has a higher intellectual capability, is that person actually a freak? Few centuries ago, an aimless teenager began sketching his backyard, and when his neighbours complained to his family about this freakish habit, his well-wishers were grim. Those drawings didn’t make any sense. Humans occupying the same entourage with God were unheard of back them. The matter was all hushed up and the boy was shifted to a painting school to pursue his desires, but shape his thoughts. It didn’t happen. He went on to paint ‘The Creation of Adam’, sculpt ‘David’ and ‘Pieta’ and finally painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Dripping paint may have fogged his eyes but not once was “Angel Michael’s” vision blurred. Michelangelo painted his thoughts and immortalized himself on canvas, stone and history. Well, we all can’t be painters let alone the great Italian, but whose holding us back in our minds? Breaking free is not an option; it’s a choice, a choice we do not regret once we commit into it. 

Simba could have gone on to be as ruthless as Scar or be weak and timid after assuming that he was responsible for his father’s demise. Enter Timon and Pumba, and show his what life is all about. They don’t have a care in the world, eat off rotten logs and spend drowsy summers in a mystical oasis on soft ferns. These are not just animals, not just figures enhanced through computer-graphics, but digital expressions of thoughts generated from sparks on nerve endings in our brains. Sculptures and oil-portraits, poems or lyrics, chimes or chords; these are all thoughts coming alive. 

I, too, am a dream, often lost in lush green meadows of Wimbledon, sometimes making it to the finals only to fall graciously in defeat to Roger Federer. Where do these thoughts get me, you ask? Well, they take me to a world where creativity never ceases to exist. It is an on-going saga of expression that enables me to make compositions and draft comic essays. So let thoughts guide you on, but yes Mr Kipling wouldn’t like it if you made them your aims. We should build a golden stairway with our dreams, which sparkles and glimmers even in the faintest of lights, shimmering in the horizon like a lighthouse to stranded buoys and storm-torn vessels, offering one sole ray of hope in a hurricane. 

Dream on. Hakuna matata.

Filling cricket cv’s with much more than IPL

It was a dream debut for Suresh Raina. 

He toiled for over 250 balls to get his maiden test ton, on a flat wicket against Sri Lanka in the summer of 2010. With this he joined an elite class of cricketers who had gone past a hundred in their very first innings of a test match, much like another middle-order southpaw, Sourav Ganguly. That summer was special for Dhoni and Co. as they recorded a series win over the Lankas after quite some time, much unlike an out-of-favour Yuvraj Singh. The Punjab da puttar was having a difficult phase, lacking the temperament for the longer version, critics claimed. How stark was his comparison to Raina, who himself was going to suffer from indifferent form in the same format. 

The selectors had pondered over the coveted number ‘6’ position in the Indian batting middle-order ever since the retirement of former captain Ganguly. Now back in 2008, Dada was forced to concede into hanging his boots after a fair share of pressure and a genuine show of disrespect towards him. Quoting India’s most successful test captain, “Just one last thing lads, before I leave. I just want to say that this is going to be my last series. I've decided to quit. I told my team-mates before coming here. These four Test matches are going to be my last and hopefully we'll go on a winning note.” He was of course mentioning the Border-Gavaskar series of 2008 (which is also noted as the last series of Anil Kumble, and which India famously won 2-0). Well, Dada did end on a high, scoring a century in the series as well earning a deserved winners medal. Dhoni was even august enough to let Ganguly captain the final overs of his last test match. Besides all the ostensible fan-fare, the BCCI’s persistent hanker to breed youngsters was the prime cause of the predicament. The use of the word predicament is no show of fancy vocabulary. The sorry state stands visible to all. No player has averaged 40 in that batting position ever since Dada retired. The Bengalis are very superstitious, and would resort to peevish explanations that its a jinx. “You do bad things, and bad things happen to you,” they would say. Well, I wouldn’t take advice from people who offer fish as ‘prasaad’ (I’m not stereotyping!), but the statistics speak for themselves. Yuvraj had displayed he could bat 5o overs with a superlative knock against Pakistan the previous autumn. Adding to his resume, was his handy left-armers that was quintessential on Indian terrains. He obviously deserved a place in the team and for no reason, Ganguly was the one who had to be scrapped. That was an easy decision, after all he had been dropped before, and the Board was all up for it again. Yuvraj came, hardly saw and definitely didn’t conquer. His might have swash buckled in the shorter versions but Test cricket was not his glass of lassi.

Enter Suresh Raina. Same promise, ironically same result, which was sheer disappointment. Though the team stuck with him for a year or so, the telling scores was a story of “we-told-you-so.” Indeed the game was a great leveller. Well Raina is indeed a very talented batsman, but a talented shorter-version batsman. Some people may ask for more time, but as Sunil Gavaskar  once said, if a batsman wants to pull, he can never duck. He should want to leave the ball more, respect the good deliveries and dispatch the bad ones. With a monumental increase in T20 matches, the original Little Master’s words fade in to bare whispers. T20 requires you to hit everything; short or full, off or leg, and unfortunately, good or bad. It was supposed to be a game dominated by youngsters, but good players, good test players showed that if you could bat for 10 hours, you could definitely bat for 10 overs.

Recently Virat Kohli has been taking giant strides in world cricket. The past two years or so, had laid a platform that has suited him ideally. It was the under-21 World Cup where he was first noticed, the IPL-1 was where he took centre stage and has never looked back since. India has a plethora of genuine batsmen, who time the ball well and can very much fill in the gaps of the Indian batting line-up. There will come a time in the near future where we will desperately need more Kohli’s. Its almost curtain-call for India’s three aging gladiators, and the time has come that they pass on the mantle to the likes of Cheteshwar Pujara or Rohit Sharma. 

What the BCCI has to follow, is that Test matches are a different ball game from the IPL. It is important to recognise talent from this popular, cash-rich format. But the likes of Ganguly, Tendulkar, Dravid and Laxman didn’t have an extravagant stage to highlight their talents, 15-20 years ago. They churned out performances against good bowlers in domestic cricket, and were selected on those grounds. Taking a hat trick, or scoring a meaty century in the IPL shouldn’t be sole criteria for recruitment. If a bowler manages to dig out six yorkers in a T20 game, it isn’t compulsory that he might succeed in the same manner in a test match. A batsmen will just defend all those deliveries and eventually dispatch a bad one to the boundary. 

Selection, rather proper selection, should be the base of Indian cricket as we look forward to a Test World Cup in the coming years. Australia, Pakistan and even England are posting gallant teams that look and play mean cricket. It is no time for us to be meek. But putting a brave team is not the  only answer. A player who can hit a 100 metre six in 20 overs, may get bounced out in Tests. This is fact. If you expect him to duck the next time, that’s fiction, for he will not. We need ideal replacements, and quick. Or else Virat Kohli may end up like a Brian Lara, a batsman capable of distinction in a fairly average team.

About food and friendship

Food has various emotional as well as psychological connections with every one of us. Whenever we have a particular dish or visit a certain restaurant, there’s always some property of the delicacy that we feast on, that helps us remember something. It may be anything at all, a person, place or even an event. We always tell that no matter where we have our food, the best dish will always come from our mothers’ hands, and so it is.  Some foods help us recuperate, helps to find balance during surging times. Foods often bear goods news, and seldom bad. Alexander the Great wanted to uproot every mango tree when he was crossing the fertile plains of the Indus and have them planted in his private orchard in Babylon. It reminded him of victory; sweet, fleshy and rewarding, he said. Apart from what would have been an ecological disaster, the mango would perhaps never have reached the ripeness they possessed in India of course. I wonder how many poor gardeners would have been executed in the pursuit of sweet mangoes. Instead, the rulers of the nearby kingdoms gifted the Macedonian warlord with bucket loads of mangoes. It was a token of friendship as well as a ploy to slow down those wind-like Persian horses in battle if necessary. The latter was just a funny hypothesis, the former proved effective in enhancing Indo-Greek relations. In fact, whenever a Greek scholar roamed the parts of Northern India, it was about mangoes that often enabled him to strike a blissful conversation with locals.  

Picking up from where those scholars left about two millenniums ago, we still use food as a very interesting topic of conversation in our daily lives. We often quibble at home with our grandparents that spinach is actually still green and ugly not matter how many paneer pieces are put in the crockery to decorate it. Similarly, I was able to convince my younger cousin that Popeye’s green “thing” was actually spinach, and that he still couldn’t punch me any harder after he grudgingly had a bowl of it. I would feint pretty well though. Food conversations often lead to friendship too. How many awkward moments of foolishness have we endured, that have perhaps always been eased out with food. All those unpleasant moments of silence with a new room-mate, shattered with the sound of tiffin being opened, only to mesmerise your sense of smell with an every-filling incense of home-cooked food. Or the time you stayed over at your friend’s place, only to see his or her mother preparing a beautiful breakfast as you were about to leave. Those fun-filled moments in college canteens, coloured with the “bread pakodas” or “rajma chawal.”

Food has numerous properties. It is rich in nutrients, good for your health (well some of them at least) and can blossom and idle mind into writing sentimental essay like this one. Well, we need not elaborate its types and candtell you what a carbohydrate was or the benefits of protein. But its special use as a binding agent in situations irrespective or dissimilar to the very taste of food is a property perhaps best exploited by us. Fun dissolves well with spice, sorrow glues appropriately with sweetness, suspense with heat and hysteria with tang. Our tongues only perceive what we eat, our minds decide how it tastes, and our hearts digest the pleasure it provides.

 So, the next time you have home-made cookies stored up at the back of your cupboard, don’t hesitate in distribution. It will of course mean that you may lose a few calories, but will certainly ensure that you gain many more friends.