One of the earliest advertisements I can recall, and this was much before I took up advertising as a profession, was for Signal toothpaste. The tag line for the brand was, ‘the red stripes contain hexachlorophene,’ which promised to take care of bad breath. Many of us rushed to the nearest provision store (Amazon was not even a twinkle in Jeff Bezos’ eyes) to get hold of a family-size tube of Signal. This was not because we were taken in by the unique chemical properties supposedly contained in those snazzy red stripes, but mainly because we thought those snazzy red stripes were, well um, snazzy. Truth to tell, we had not the foggiest what hexachlorophene was, but it sounded mighty impressive. Chances are all brands of toothpaste contained this chemical, but when one brand makes the claim clamorously and adds some red stripes to it, we will follow that brand to the ends of the earth, like so many mindless and gullible sheep. Are sheep gullible? You can think on that when next you are tucking into your mutton rogan josh.

During my working days at the ad agency, they used to call this the Unique Selling Proposition (USP), a concept that has been consigned to the rubbish bin in subsequent years, I know not why. Rosser Reeves, the ad guru credited with discovering USP, could be turning in his grave. On reflection, I think I know why other ad gurus gave USP the short shrift. There’s not much percentage in claiming bragging rights simply because you were the first to make the USP claim with no genuine exclusivity to back it up. Others will follow, splurge more money and shout even louder, completely drowning out the first mover. It’s not quite the same thing as Edmund Hillary being immortalized as the first Homo sapiens to set foot on Mount Everest with his faithful Tenzing (Sherpa) Norgay hot on his heels. Brands, however, must needs shout from the rooftops, if not from the mountain tops.

To get back to Signal, at the time most toothpaste brands extruded plain white paste from the tubes, and when some new kid on the block startled us with blood red stripes, we were sold. Speaking of which, if our gums were prone to bleeding due to caries or gingivitis or whatever tooth or gum-disorder we teenagers were prone to, thanks to not brushing our teeth after dinner and not saying our prayers before going to bed, the red mush in the paste camouflaged the actual, bloody discharge – an added advantage the advertising campaign failed to latch on to. Other brands promised whiter teeth, stronger gums and killing bad breath (…But no one kisses Katie). Colgate (or was it Forhans?) may have been created by a dentist and we would have died wondering where the yellow went when we brushed our teeth with Pepsodent, but in the end, the red stripes and Signal won the day. Here’s the irony. I once visited a dentist in Calcutta who suffered from an awful case of halitosis and like the advert says, even his best friends wouldn’t tell him. I was tempted to blurt out, ‘Dentist heal thyself,’ but thought better of it as he was holding the pliers. What is more, this Dr. Ghosh (or it could have been Dr. Bose) had this disconcerting habit of tapping the affected tooth and solicitously inquiring, ‘Do you fill pen?’ It took me awhile to figure out he wasn’t asking me about my fountain pen’s ink-filled status, but if I felt any pain! An endearing aspect of Bengali English. Sadly, for the dentist that is, I had to switch my custom to another molar-mangler, after taking the initial precaution of chatting with him at close quarters!

On a quick aside, as we are on toothpastes, another brand came up with a very novel idea. Or so they thought. They advertised heavily exhorting their clientele to spread the paste only up to half the toothbrush, claiming it will more than do the job of brushing, cleaning, removing bacteria, reaching every crevice, and all this with plenty of foam. This way the tube will last twice as long as any other brand. It was a clever ploy but as it happened, too clever by half; and it backfired. The advert worked only too well for its own good. Sales of this brand plummeted owing to the reduced usage. In short, the brand managers and their agency were hoist with their own petard and had to abruptly call off the campaign. Whether the agency was shown the door or not, I am in no position to say. For the record, I can assure you, from personal experience, that any brand of  toothpaste will pretty much give you satisfactory results with just half the brush ‘pasted.’

In case you were wondering, this piece is not so much about the power of advertising (It pays to advertise), as it is about how gullible we consumers can be (like those sheep) when cunningly fed with a good deal of pseudo-scientific gobbledygook on products we use daily. It’s a strange phenomenon that marketers and their advertising agencies have cottoned on to. Sometimes it is not the advertising, but what is on the bottle label or packaging that brings home the bacon. Which is where we enter the brave, new world of medicine, or more properly, medicines. There are those amongst us who know precious little about how our body works and at the slightest feeling of discomfort rush off to our family doctor, if such a one still exists, feeling much better when we come away clutching a prescription. I am a life-member of that club. Not a full-blown hypochondriac but apt to keep taking my temperature six times daily if I am feeling even a wee bit out of sorts. In recent years, I came to learn, after a routine blood test, that my thyroid functions were not quite within the normal range.

This is as good a time as any to confide in your shell-like ear that I had not the foggiest idea what the thyroid gland was supposed to do. (I refused to consult Google as that would have been the death of me). Until my doctor looked gravely at my test results, tapped his nose contemplatively with his pencil, removed his reading glasses (always a bad sign) and declared that my thyroid numbers were not all that it should be. It is one thing if my doctor had said my blood-pressure was high (or low). I could grasp that as a broad concept – 120/80 excellent, 140/90 fidgeting time, 150/100 call the ambulance. However, I was swimming in uncharted waters when it came to thyroid. ‘Should I worry about it, Doc? You can tell me.’ The man with the stethoscope replied that I should worry about it, but all is not lost, and a proper course of medication should set it right, whatever it was.

He then proceeded to gently massage my throat, just under the chin, grunted vaguely to himself and wrote out a prescription for a bottle of Thyronorm 25 mcg, two tabs a day for three months and return for a review. He said nothing more and I decided not to probe further. Best to leave well enough alone. Ignorance is bliss. I just kept popping the pills till my next test. Let me just cut to the chase. These tablets, amongst other things, contain something called thyroxine sodium and evidently my body needs them. Which is all I needed to know, rather like Signal’s hexachlorophene-filled red stripes. When I called my doctor and asked him what this thyroxine sodium was, he told me curtly not to pry into matters I knew nothing about. Some sort of secret ingredient, I surmised. ‘Just take the pills and stop reading the label on the bottle,’ he harrumphed as the line went dead.

So much for the healing touch. The point I am trying to make, in my somewhat orotund way is that, were it not for my GP mentioning those magic words, thyroxine sodium, I might have gone home without feeling any sense of reassurance. The moment I became aware that my thyroid medicine was armed with the equivalent of Signal’s hexachlorophene, my mood lifted distinctly. If I had been appearing for an ad commercial for Thyronorm 25, you would have seen me, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, looking smilingly straight into the camera, my teeth sparkling thanks to Signal’s hexachlorophene and mouthing the words, ‘I have no worries about my thyroid because I take Thyronorm 25 every morning. If you are concerned about your thyroid, ask your doctor to prescribe the same. Thyronorm – with thyroxine sodium.’ Ting-tong! Only I cannot do all that because medicine brands are not allowed to advertise, but you get the picture. Bottom line, I am still no wiser about the functions of the thyroid gland, any more than I am about strontium 90, but at least I am able to sleep better, secure in the knowledge that I have the gland under control, thanks to thyroxine sodium. Mind over matter. As that celebrated wag Mark Twain put it in another context, ‘If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.’

A prefatory note: I wrote this piece exactly three years ago on the shenanigans of the incorrigible cricketer-turned-politician, Navjot Singh Sidhu. For reasons unfathomable, I failed to include it in any of the three collections I published in book form. This column that slipped the net, as it were, was more in the nature of an inadvertent error of omission than a case of it being considered, in any way, shape or form, unsuitable for publishing. With the fiery Sardar so much in the news these days, what with his constant sword-crossing with the erstwhile Chief Minister of Punjab, Captain Amarinder Singh and his maladroit attempts to play the role of king maker, his frequent dashes to New Delhi to confab with the Congress party’s first family, all these have been making headlines and have been faithfully recorded in our avaricious media channels. The redoubtable Captain Amarinder Singh frequently refers to Sidhu as a ‘joker.’ Irrespective of which way he meant it, the cap fits to a nicety, though most of us are laughing out of the other side of our mouths. It was time for redressal, and I present it here, dug out of the woodwork and dusted, pretty much unexpurgated, and suitably embellished. On a fresh reading, what amazed me was that hardly anything had changed during this period and the piece therefore retains its fresh topicality in every detail, despite the passage of time. Read on.

Navjot Singh Sidhu strikes again. The garrulous Sardar has, once more, put his foot in it. Dropping another brick, adding to the many he has already dropped with metronomic regularity. At this rate he could easily build a decent-sized brick house. His latest faux pas has been to claim that he greatly prefers Pakistan to south India. And why this strange leaning towards our hostile neighbour in preference to his southern brethren? Can we then deduce that he prefers the rest of India to Pakistan, or is that debatable as well? Apparently, his inability to converse in Tamil or, come to that, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam, is a major handicap, whereas in Pakistan he can let loose a volley of the choicest invective in Punjabi, and no questions asked. Then there’s the food. Clearly India’s former opening batsman has had it ‘up to here’ with idli, vada, dosa, thayir saadam (curd rice), sambar and other such southern vegetarian delights. He would prefer tucking ravenously into aloo parantha with a generous helping of chicken tikka masala on the side. One sees his point, up to a point, but still…

It was barely a few weeks ago that Sidhu went on a hugging spree in Pakistan at Imran Khan’s Prime Ministerial investiture, drawing the ire of most right- thinking Indians, and deeply embarrassing his Congress party cohorts. His brave, though lame attempts to explain away these gestures as being all in a good cause to further Indo – Pak relations, fell on deaf ears. Hugging former cricket mate and now Prime Minister Imran Khan is one thing but embracing Pakistan’s top military brass is brazenly pushing the envelope. India was not amused. Now we know the real reason why he keeps haring off to Pakistan at the drop of a turban. He loves their cuisine!

Now here’s a man who, in his early cricketing days was dubbed by many commentators as ‘the stroke-less wonder’, for his limpet-like ability to stay scoreless at the crease for interminably long periods. In fact his extreme caution while batting was admired by many who felt that that was the way Test cricket should be played. Later on, Sherry Paaji, to employ his affectionate moniker, became more adventurous, regularly dancing down the track and depositing the ball into the stands. The great Shane Warne was the victim of some of Sidhu’s fancy footwork. As an aside, one cannot forget the stormy petrel Sidhu’s intemperate walk-out from India’s touring party in England in 1996, owing to an unseemly spat he had with his skipper, Mohammed Azharuddin. Evidently, Azhar kept abusing Sidhu, and who is to say he did not have just cause? Those never-ending wisecracks and jokes alone would have got the skipper’s goat. It was during this twilight phase of his career that Sidhu found his true calling, that of a cricket commentator and talk show host. In present day parlance, Sidhu 2.0.

The term ‘Sidhuism’ was thus born. From the commentary box, Sidhu would bombard us with a barrage of cringe-worthy aphorisms and silly shibboleths. This made him the darling of some sections of the viewing public, but his incessant banter and thigh-slapping recourse to English, Hindi and Punjabi jocularity began to pall. Unsurprisingly, languages from the south of the Vindhyas were conspicuous by their absence in Sidhu’s lexicon! Those of us brought up on a diet of John Arlott, Brian Johnston, Tony Cozier and Pearson Surita, found Navjot Sidhu an unbearable pain in the cervical and gluteal areas of the anatomy. However, to redress the balance and be even-handed, there are many who loved his corny and overwrought witticisms. Check out some of these classic Sidhuisms for yourself, dear reader, and make up your own minds.

The third umpire should be changed as often as nappies and for the same reason / Wickets are like wives, you never know which way they will turn / There is a light at the end of the tunnel for India, but it’s that of an oncoming train which will run them over / The way Indian wickets are falling reminds me of the cycle stand at Rajendra Talkies in Patiala….one falls and everything else falls / The ball slipped from his hands like butter from a hot parantha.

As Sidhu has now entered politics (Sidhu 3.0) with a bang, here are a few of his non-cricketing gems – Politics is not a bad profession, boss. If you succeed there are rewards. If you fail you can always write the book / Experience is like a comb that life gives you when you are bald / A hair on the head is worth two in the brush. Not sure what he meant by the last two epithets, unless it was an oblique reference to how politics can lead to hair fall in double quick time!

Whichever way you try and explain or deconstruct this maverick cricketer-turned-politician, Navjot Sidhu continues to defy definitions. At times forced slapstick, oftentimes embarrassingly unfunny, Sidhu’s main problem appears to be that his motormouth moves a tad quicker than the messages his brain signals. This leaves him constantly in the horns of a dilemma – of thoughtlessly shooting his mouth off, only to repent at leisure. His peerless batting partner, Sunil Gavaskar, had Sidhu sought his advice, would have told him to watch the ball hawk-eyed, and then decide whether to play or leave the ball alone.

It paid Gavaskar rich dividends. Sidhu should apply the same principle when he decides to talk to the media. To cite the recent incident, Sidhu should have paused and said to himself, ‘Idli, vada, sambar, they make me sick to the stomach, but I must respect my fellow cricketers from the South like Srikkanth, Sivaramakrishnan, Venkataraghavan, Laxman et al, who consume them by the banana leaf-fuls every day. I should not hurt their feelings. When I go back home to Patiala or Ludhiana, I shall gorge on chicken tandoori till the cows come home, if you’ll pardon the mixed non-vegetarian culinary metaphor.’

There you are, Sherry Paaji, a little thoughtful reflection and you would not have been hitting the headlines for all the wrong reasons. Now go home and write 100 times, ‘I will not speak ill of idli and dosa. I will also not mention Pakistan as long as I live, and no Pakistani shall ever feel the warmth of my dubious embrace ever again.’ In fairness, Mr. Sidhu, you will surely appreciate that your ill-advised, lovey-dovey gestures with the top brass of Pakistan will surely put the kybosh on any vaulting ambition you might nurse to become the Chief Minister of Punjab. As for your anti-masala dosa stance, you take such a position at your own peril if you are entertaining hopes in the future of strategic tie-ups with Stalin and his party apparatchiks, as indeed the rest of south India. Apropos nothing, I end with one of Navjot Singh Sidhu’s more opaque quotes, An idle mind is where mischief hatches eggs. Make of that what you will!

Postscript: Dear reader, that was then and this is now. Three years down the road, Navjot Singh Sidhu continues to rivet our attention with every move he makes and every hackle he raises. The more things change the more they remain the same. Or as the French put it so lyrically, ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.’

Let’s hear it for India’s top gun industrialist. Mukesh Ambani’s personal net worth has crossed $100 billion. He joins Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffet and a handful of other worthies who have worked their way up to the top of the wealth ladder. The list, recently put out by the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index (calculated on a daily basis), has the Reliance Group boss clocking in at eleventh place in the pecking order, which contains mostly American magnates of proven pedigree above him. Ambani’s compatriot Gautam Adani, while not quite snapping at his heels, comes in at a creditable number 13 with a value of around $78 billion.

It is significant that no Chinese name figures in this hallowed list till number 15, well below the $100 billion mark. One would have thought the likes of Jack Ma and a couple of others would have been automatic shoo-ins. There could be valid reasons for this conspicuous absence. Firstly, China’s financial position is beginning to look alarmingly dodgy, threatening instability across the globe. Remember, when Wuhan hatched the virus, the rest of the world contracted Covid, and we are still struggling to shake it off. Secondly, the Chinese powers-that-be have instructed their well-heeled citizenry to part with their hard-won cash and distribute the largesse among the poor – Capitalism meets Communism at the crossroads. This might have created a major dent among China’s billionaire club members, rendering them hors de combat, in so far as making it to the top of the world billionaire list is concerned. So, for the moment, we raise a toast in honour of the elder Ambani sibling.

The thing of it is, I am not quite sure how I am supposed to respond when the newspapers decide to headline Mr. Ambani’s prodigious pole-vaulting to the top of the financial tree. All these years, this wunderkind from Gujarat was chugging along at a measly $80 or 90 billion, somehow making ends meet in these difficult times. Now that he has crossed the Rubicon, perhaps never to return to his humble sub-hundred billion days, the Indian media naturally goes gaga. Will this accretion of a piddly $20 billion or so to his asset base change his lifestyle in any marked manner? Will he add a few more floors to his state-of-the-art mansion, Antilia (puzzlingly named after a phantom island, Antillia, in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Portugal and Spain) in Mumbai? Mr. Ambani’s Antilia is spelt with one ‘l’ less than the mythical island, doubtless with numerological issues in mind. Speaking of which, meaning no disrespect to Mr. Ambani or his architect, I think this ‘most expensive residential complex in the world’ is a startling eyesore and a blot on the Mumbai landscape. Strong and sensitive men passing by will flinch and avert their eyes. Extreme ostentation triumphs over understated elegance. From a distance the tower looks like a series of misshapen, misaligned matchboxes piled, higgledy-piggledy, on top of each other. Antilia is futuristically equipped with all the mod-cons that one can possibly imagine, not forgetting the three helipads, but wild horses will not drag me into the sacred interiors of this modern art monstrosity. I should be paranoid about a strong wind bringing those matchboxes tumbling down. Not that I am in any imminent danger of receiving an invitation to dinner from Mukesh and Nita.

That said, the Ambanis can pick up a few more football or IPL franchises, which will greatly add to their prestige without, in the least bit, creating a ripple in their balance sheet. Manchester United is having a hard time of it these days in the English Premier League, notwithstanding Christiano Ronaldo’s late recruitment. I would strongly recommend to Mukesh Ambani that he send his best brains to Manchester to get a due diligence done on MU. And if funds permit (that’s a laugh), he can also cross the Atlantic and take a dekko at a couple of NBA outfits. That will complete the picture. And if he feels up to it, he can emulate Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos and explore outer space, if he is not susceptible to vertigo.

Meanwhile, I had prepared a questionnaire containing some probing queries and mailed it to all the $100 billion moghuls. Predictably, none of them bothered to answer. I doubt if my mail even got to the spam bin of their inbox. However, I did receive a response and I cannot swear to its authenticity (my friends say it’s a fake), from the secretariat of the Chairman of the Reliance Group of Industries. I had requested for an online video interview with the great man, but I was met with a polite rebuff. So, I shot off the questions, which were answered without the employment of the first person singular. Which leads me to believe that it was not Mukesh Ambani himself who was drafting the replies, but one of his many bright, young executives. One can only hope that it had his imprimatur. Importantly, it was agreed that we would conduct a ‘live’ online chat. No video, so I was still in the dark as to who I was chatting with, but spontaneous give-and-take ensured reactions on the hoof, adding to the surprise element.

‘Mr. Ambani, warmest congratulations on achieving this tremendous landmark of crossing the magic figure of $100 billion. What are your immediate reactions?’

‘You know, we at Reliance believe in excellence in everything we do. Our Father (who art in heaven) always inculcated in us the spirit that we should not be chasing turnover and profit for their own sake. Rather, we should serve the people of India and the nation as best we can and the numbers will take care of themselves. That is our guiding philosophy.’

‘When you say “we,” don’t you mean “I” Mr. Ambani?’

‘When we say “we”, we mean “we.” You journalists might choose to call it the “Royal we,” but in the words of the popular 70s hit song by Sister Sledge, “We are family.” That is the Reliance family which encompasses the Ambani kith and kin as well as the shareholders and hundreds of thousands of people who are employed by us directly and indirectly. We are one, big happy family.’

‘That is hardly surprising, Mr. Ambani. Why would you all not be happy with the kind of dividends and profits that are declared by your company year on year? In fact, for sheer scale and glamour, your Annual General Meetings can vie with the Oscars evenings in Hollywood.’

‘If you say so, but that was more a statement than a question, albeit a rhetorical one. Again, you appear to be obsessed with profits, dividends and so on. Resist this tendency. Reliance is like a huge banyan tree the seeds of which Our Father first sowed. Today that tree has grown so large it provides shelter and comfort to an entire generation.’

‘In order to achieve the kind of success Reliance has enjoyed over the decades, surely there are many government functionaries over the years you must have been in the good books of? What was your secret when so many other business houses have struggled to come to terms with the capricious policies of the government?’

‘We are not sure what you mean by “in the good books of” but over several decades, Reliance has always respected governments of various political hues, as we have contributed to the state and central exchequers massively by payment of taxes and levies. Your employment of the word “capricious” is inappropriate. We have enjoyed nothing but the warmest and most cordial relations with all arms of government machinery.’

‘Then Mr. Ambani, are we to understand that getting into the exclusive $100 billion club is nothing earth-shattering for you? That it is just small beer, another normal milestone, a part of your everyday duties and concerns?’

‘My friend, we have said no such thing. Do not put words into our mouths. And please don’t bring beer into it, small or big. As I said before, every single person in the Reliance family strives for excellence. The process is the thing. The results take care of themselves. If that means, crossing an important landmark, we are happy.’

‘You are beginning to sound like M.S. Dhoni. Perhaps you should have signed him up for the Mumbai Indians at the first IPL auction.’

‘There we agree with you. That was our one big miss. The Chennai Super Kings pipped us to the post, but then, you can’t win everything. What is more, our Mumbai Indians have done us proud over the years, and we have no complaints or regrets.’

‘One last question, Sir. This humongous empire you and your “family” have built, do you think it is all just maya, an improbable perception, that you will suddenly wake up and realize it was all just a dream?’

‘You know, “the perception of reality is more than reality itself.” That is a quote from the film “Billionaire Boys Club.” If all this is a dream, then we have dared to dream and make it all a reality. We believe we have answered enough questions for one day. We must rush. Time is money for us. However, can you tell us how many zeroes there are in 100 billion?’

‘Ah, um, er….’

‘We thought so. We bid you good day.’

‘Thank you for sparing the time, Mr. Ambani, if it is indeed you. Will call you again when you reach the number one spot in the multi-billionaire club.’

Postscript: I am now more than certain these answers were not provided by the famous scion of a famous family. I mean, Sister Sledge? Billionaire Boys Club? Give me a break!

The term ‘batsman’ has been amended to the gender-neutral term ‘batter’ in the Laws of Cricket to stress the importance of the women’s game, the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) announced recently.

As an avid cricket aficionado, I have been in recent times turning my mind over to the subject of cricketing nomenclature. In particular, I am greatly exercised over this tendency of our cricket correspondents and commentators going all gender-neutral, calling those who wield a cricket bat, men and women, ‘batters.’ Let me state my position, straight off the bat as it were, that I am not in favour of said mode of address. Call me old fashioned and conditioned, but as I see it, that is just plain batty. What is more, batter does not sound right. The resonance is simply not there. Cricket is an elegant and refined game. The word batter puts me in mind of inelegant things like a battering ram or the semi-liquid flour-mix which forms the cooking base for baking various items of confectionery, not forgetting our own staple idli and dosa. You cannot blame me if I cringe every time I hear Graeme Swann or Sunil Gavaskar going, ‘the new batter taking guard is Dhoni.’ This batter abomination has been going on for a few years now, tentatively at first and rapidly gaining momentum, but the final nail in the coffin was hammered, or rather, battered in by the MCC and seconded by the International Cricket Council (ICC) just a few days ago. From their lofty perch at Lord’s, cricket’s officialdom formally blessed the term batter, in the overall interests of gender-neutrality. Which pretty much seals the issue, regrettably.

Lest you, dear reader, should be under the false impression that I am some kind of MCP who hates the idea of women playing cricket, perish the thought. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am very much the preux chevalier in this regard. Women have been playing cricket since the mid-18^th century, and the first officially recorded women’s Test match was played in December 1934 between England and Australia in Brisbane. They’ve been around, the cricketing ladies. I yield to no man (or woman) in my admiration for women’s cricket. The in-born grace and elegance they bring to the game is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Mind you, some of the girls from the countries who play the game at international level, have taken avidly to the gym – (weights, sit-ups, bench-presses et al) in right earnest and developed beefy physiques the better to batter the ball to all parts of the field. In particular, those from the western hemisphere who are preternaturally well-endowed. In contrast, petite sportswomen (sportspersons?) like our very own Smriti Mandhana and Mithali Raj are fine exponents of the delicate art of batsmanship. A subtle late-cut here, a delicate leg-glance there, a veritable feast for our eyes. And there, almost serendipitously, I chance upon my primary point d’appui. In the natural flow of my argument, I employed the term ‘batsmanship.’ Under the new dispensation, would that be considered an unpardonable solecism? Should I have properly said battership? I rest my case. ICC, what say you?

Now my mild rant against the use of the term batter will obviously raise hackles and the pertinent question as to how we should actually address girls who wield the willow. Fortunately, the term bowler is inherently gender-neutral anyway, so there’s no issue there. I think conventional wisdom avers that ‘batswoman’ or ‘batsperson’ is too unwieldy, and that we should arrive at a common terminology for both sexes. Well-intentioned which, as everyone knows, is also the road to hell. To draw on a parallel, has the corporate world agreed on what the Chairman of a company should be called if the post was occupied by a woman? My superficial research informs me that such a person is also widely referred to as Chairman! On occasion, Chairperson. Or simply, the Chair, and you cannot get more neutral than an inanimate object for sitting purposes. ‘The Minutes of the Meeting clearly states that the Chair was most displeased with the second quarter financial results, as she pushed her chair back violently and stalked off the board room to powder her nose.’ Bully for you, Madam Chair.

Here’s the thing. If I were sitting on the executive committee, or whatever it is called, of the ICC, the meeting might very well have proceeded on the following lines. The President or the Chairman (it is a he), would have called the meeting to order.

‘Gentlemen and Lady, since we have just the one present, we are called upon to take a decision on this vexed issue of the correct descriptor to be used to address women cricketers when they go out to bat. This will be viewed as a permanent guideline for cricket writers, commentators and the cricket world in general. After considering all options and painfully protracted deliberations, we have come to the conclusion that the term BATTER best meets the case. On the assumption that we are unanimous on this matter, I propose that we adopt this as a formal resolution. All in favour please raise your hands.’

I wade in here aggressively. ‘Not so fast, Mr. Chairman. You were too quick off the blocks to assume unanimity. I beg to differ. I think batter is such an ugly, unbefitting term. It goes against all the canons of this great game of cricket. It semaphores aggression and in time, will inculcate a crude and pugilistic mindset amongst our men and women cricketers, to say nothing of the boys and girls. God knows there’s enough adrenalin and testosterone visible on the field of play whenever a decision goes against a player. Must we encourage further pugnacity by using common nouns like batter with all its pun-induced negative associations?’

The Chairman was getting hot under the collar. ‘Do you have a better idea? It’s all very well for you to come over all high and mighty, but we have been threshing this subject out for three years now without reaching any positive conclusion. Batter is the one word that embraces both the sexes without the need for complex prefixes or suffixes. It is not only a better idea, but the batter idea. I am putting it to the vote.’

‘Just hold it right there Sir, if you please.’ It was me again, horning in. ‘Notwithstanding your better and batter idea, I have what I think is a fair suggestion. Which is that we continue to address the men as batsmen and you can call the women batterinas, which will subliminally remind us of graceful ballerinas. Come to think of it, all these years we called the ladies batsmen as well and they had no problems with it. Now all this neutrality shoo-sha has muddied the waters, and the ladies feel they should be called something else, and if batter is the best you can come up with, it’s just not good enough. Really! And kindly refrain from quoting out of context Shakespeare’s A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’

The Chairman then continued, ‘We are all impressed by your erudition, but why don’t we ask our sole good lady representative on the board what she thinks. Dear lady, can we have your considered view on the matter, please? Do you fancy batterina?’

‘Mr. Chairman, your rather patronizing way of saying “Dear lady” irresistibly reminded me of the fictional Sir Humphrey Appleby from the Yes Minister / PM franchise, but I am going to let that pass, like the idle wind. On reflection, I do rather fancy batterina, as suggested by our friend from India. I can even now hear Harsha Bhogle, “Smriti dances down the wicket like a ballerina and straight drives for four. What a batterina!” A novel, innovative and decidedly feminine term. The girls will love it. Let’s go for it, I say.’

‘We can’t just “go for it” dear lady, sorry, madam. We have to take a vote of all the members present and that is the only democratic way of arriving at a proper decision.’ Under his breath, the Chairman was heard hissing, ‘Batterina, my foot. Over my dead body.’

The vote was duly taken, the proposal to change the terminology to ‘batters’ was passed by majority vote with only two dissenters. That is how matters stand. I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I shall continue to call male cricketers at the crease batsmen. I have yet to decide on the female of the species, but for the nonce I will go with batters, just to show there’s no ill feeling. If my writing and commentary contracts are all withdrawn as a result, so be it. See if I care.

Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.’ – John Greenleaf Whittier

As you age irrevocably, well into your dotage, you start to think more about things. All sorts of things. Could I have handled things differently, should I have handled things differently? Should I have considered a career in medicine, healing the sick and the lame, instead of landing up in an advertising agency helping to promote cigarettes, soaps, tea and tyres? I was a mean off-spinner as a teenager. Why did I not think of cricket as a potentially profitable livelihood? The answer to that question is not far to seek. There was no IPL when I was viciously turning those off-breaks. What I meant to say was that the off-breaks were vicious, not me. If you want me to be brutally frank, the god-honest truth is that my off-breaks never turned at all (just went straight on), and ironically that is how I deceived most batsmen who kept playing for the turn, poor saps. Cunning, I call it. Then again, I may not have made obscene sums of money thanks to there being no fat cat sponsorships those days, but look at Sunil Gavaskar. Same age as me. Extended his career brilliantly as a commentator and sports management consultant, and the best hair job in town as well. I could have done that, barring the hair job (I am quite happy with my shock of distinguished silver-grey hair, thank you). All else failing, I could have been a writer. If only I had started writing a novel around 50 years ago, who knows, by now I might have been the toast at various literary festivals, holding forth (and fifth) with great elan, my name being spoken of in the same breath as Salman Rushdie. Look, if I am going to indulge in pipe dreams, I might as well go the whole hog. Instead, I write trite columns like this one, hoping a handful of staunch followers will actually read them and post a ‘like’ or ‘thumbs up’ on Facebook. That’s pitiful, that is.

As that opening paragraph was becoming a tad too long, I must provide a separate segment for music, another passion. I was not a bad singer, even after my voice broke at the age of 15. Terrible thing this business of the voice breaking. For days on end, you are not sure if you are a soprano, an alto or a tenor, a kind of vocal schizophrenia, till it finally settles into a reedy tenor. Notwithstanding, I was an ‘A’ singer in the school choir, if you must know. At home, my mother forced Carnatic music down my throat, but in retrospect I am eternally grateful for her insistence. We are a family devoted to that arcane art form (my nephew is a top-flight Carnatic musician). I guess what I am trying to say is that, whether I crooned Paul McCartney’s Yesterday at parties or Tyagaraja’s Entaninne sabari in the raga Mukhari at family get-togethers, I drew generous applause from those two very different circles of audience, not forgetting the odd geometry box as a consolation prize at our local club. Not that I had the foggiest notion of what to do with set-squares, protractors and compasses. Actually, I am guilty of false modesty here. I did once take part in ‘The Sound of Music’ national talent contest and won third prize. One of the judges told me I could have won first prize, were it not for my ambitious attempt to reach an impossibly high octave in the girl’s part in ‘You are sixteen going on seventeen.’, and coming a stunning cropper. Putting all that to one side, the final verdict was, ‘He could have been a singer but didn’t quite put in the hard yards.’ Yet another instance of (sigh), ‘if only…’

However, without getting all maudlin and soppy about it, I am quite happy with my lot. Advertising was an exciting profession to be in during the 70s and 80s, and a bit during the 90s as well. Earned my keep, met many interesting people, not the least of which was my wife. She was not my wife then, of course, but you know what I am getting at. All right, I should have said ‘my future wife,’ thanks for nothing, you pedants. I could have also said ‘alright’ instead of ‘all right’ and the pedants would have been up in arms all over again. One has to be ever mindful of these sneaky devils who were once proof readers at publishing houses or ad agencies, and who take perverse delight in pointing out that you’ve got it all wrong with your apostrophes, colons and semi-colons. Ask me, I am a card-carrying member of that dubious and painful club.

All in all, while I am enjoying my early years of retirement, I think the verdict on my life could be summed up with a simple ‘He has done all right.’ (Here we go again!). That doesn’t sound like much, I admit, but if doing all right was good enough for the Right Hon. James Hacker from the brilliant Yes Minister / Yes, Prime Minister television series, it’s good enough for me. Not perhaps quite an Einstein, Fleming (the penicillin chap), Bradman or Dylan (Thomas or Bob, take your pick), but can’t really complain. Sometimes, when our ad agency bagged an important client after days of blood, sweat, toil and tears, life got momentarily pretty exciting. Drinks all round and so on. The simple point I am striving to make is that you should be happy with your lot, if you have made a decent fist of it, and not worry too much about what might have been. Sure, who would not like to have been a Federer, but if the lord above gave you a backhand that was non-existent, you might as well just sit back and enjoy watching the balletic Swiss genius at work. A similar analogy can be applied to cricket. If you are incapable of dispatching a juicy full toss to the boundary, you are better off enjoying Geoff Boycott’s classic description of that sorry state – ‘Me grand mum would have hit that for four with a stick of rhubarb.’ Get the picture?

In his celebrated essay, The Superannuated Man, the essayist, poet and antiquarian Charles Lamb, wrote this memorable sentence, ‘I had grown to my desk, as it were; and the wood had entered into my soul.’ Had I heeded my father’s advice and opted for a career in accountancy (he was a banker of some repute), I might very well have echoed Charles Lamb’s sentiments. He (Lamb that is, not my father) toiled for 36 years at the East India Company behind a desk, which explains his deeply felt cynicism.

Those of you, like myself who devoured the works of the Master, P.G. Wodehouse, will also be aware that he worked briefly at the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank in London, a job he intensely disliked. Being a purveyor of humour and unlike Charles Lamb, he chose to put a mordant spin on it – ‘If there was a moment in the course of my banking career when I had the remotest notion of what it was all about, I am unable to recall it. From Fixed Deposits I drifted to Inward Bills – no use asking me what Inward Bills are, I never found out….. My total inability to grasp what was going on made me something of a legend in the place.’ Contrastingly, Nobel Laureate and poet extraordinaire, T.S. Eliot found his eight-year career at Lloyds Bank of London a soothing spur to his poetic pursuits. ‘I am absorbed during the daytime by the balance sheets of foreign banks. It is a peaceful, but very interesting pursuit, and involves some use of reasoning powers.’

 I can fully identify with the quandary in which Lamb and Wodehouse found themselves mired in. I manfully struggled through to obtain a university degree in Commerce when I would have been much better off taking Literature. Perhaps my dad had visions of his son following in his banking footsteps. Even today, if you asked me to analyze a bank reconciliation statement, you will find me gasping for air. All of which, of course, eminently qualified me to join the advertising profession, the primary sine qua non for which was to be in possession of a good English diction, an awareness of where the apostrophes were to be placed and above all, to be able to down three large rums (or whisky) straight up and be able to walk in a straight line or stand up erect and say, she sells sea shells on the sea shore. If you could play a bit of golf, you went straight to the top of the class. The rest you picked up as you went along. I may be accused of mild exaggeration, but as the saying goes, in vino veritas.

Seriously though, I guess the point I am driving at is not to look back regretfully at what might have been. Rather, grab whatever comes your way and make the best of it. If that sounds a wee bit preachy, so be it. As the late British comedian Peter Cook (alter ego to Dudley Moore) once said, “I could have been a judge, but I never had the Latin for the judgin’.” Likewise, if only I could have actually turned my off-breaks, who knows what heights I might have scaled. Quite so, but having stumbled into advertising and now having become a maddeningly obsessive blogger, I am as happy as a lark. That does not stop me from day dreaming. In the words of the Bard of Avon, ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.’

The President of the United States of America, Joe Biden, recently had the world in splits, embarrassingly so, with a stunningly casual throwaway line while addressing the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison. It happened at a joint live video communique announcing the formation of an important defence strategic alliance between the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States. Joe Biden took over the microphone, virtually that is, from Britain’s PM Boris Johnson, thanked Boris, tactfully refraining from commenting on why Boris had not combed his hair that morning, then turned to the screen displaying the Aussie PM and said, wait for it, ‘And I want to thank that fellow Down Under, thank you very much pal.’ Collapse of stout party, as the venerable Punch magazine used to put it. To Scott Morrison’s credit, he was very diplomatic about the whole faux pas, and in statesman-like fashion, dismissed the incident as one of those things that happen, and that one should not make much of it. That was very large of him but the media had a field day, wondering if Biden’s shocking memory lapse was a portent of more sinister things to come.

For now, Mr. Biden would do well to firmly commit to memory the names of all the world’s leaders he is likely to meet during his tenure as POTUS. The last thing we in India want is for him to address our Prime Minister thus, ‘Gee whiz, what’s that guy’s name with the long, white beard? Thanks for everything buddy.’ No, no. That wouldn’t do at all. No siree, Bob. After all, when his predecessor, Donald Trump last visited India, even his carefully crafted and presumably rehearsed speech found him comically floundering with some iconic Indian names. Try this on for size. ‘Swami Vivekaamundan, Soochin Tendalkar and Virot Kohli.’ I guess we should be grateful that the former President did not say, ‘That Swami feller with the orange tunic and turban.’

American leaders dropping bricks in public fora is not a new phenomenon. On rare occasions this may happen due to an unfortunate slip of the tongue, but more often than not, lack of adequate preparation bordering on carelessness and callousness is the prime cause. Without wishing to rub salt into the wound, Joe Biden again takes the spotlight for an earlier gaffe. In 2008, while campaigning in Missouri, he exhorted Senator Chuck Graham of Columbia, who had been wheelchair-bound since the age of 16, to come forward and take a bow. ‘Chuck, stand up. Let the people see you.’ For one mad, fleeting moment, the public wondered if Biden was possessed of some divine power to perform a miracle cure. America is full of such charlatans. ‘Could he part the waters, make our Chuck walk again?’ That was not to be. Red faced and realising his goof-up a bit too late, he tried to make amends asking the crowd to ‘stand up for Chuck.’ The crowd were already standing and Chuck was still sitting in his wheelchair, a wee bit miffed, I shouldn’t wonder.

Yet another American President, Ronald Reagan, who has appeared in a few Hollywood films in his time, got his roles mixed up on one notorious occasion. Taking part in a sound check shortly before his weekly radio address to the nation in August 1984, Reagan decided to have some fun and announced with much histrionic fanfare, ‘My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you today that I have signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.’ Unfortunately for Reagan, a recording of this flippant and not awfully funny, sound check was leaked to the Russians, who decided to put their defence forces on high alert. Frantic behind-the-scenes diplomatic efforts prevented what could have turned into an ugly situation. Why do so many of our world leaders fail to be mindful of errant microphones which are either accidentally or, at times, deliberately left switched on? That said, as lay people we should not complain as such unintended bloopers provide us with much comic distraction.

One would have normally credited former US President Barrack Obama with tact and good sense and the ability to mind his Ps and Qs. However, he too fell victim to the ‘hot mic’ syndrome on one occasion at a G 20 conference during a private chat with the then French President Nicolas Sarkozy, just before the scheduled press conference. The assembled reporters were handed translation boxes but were told not to plug their headphones in until the leaders’ backroom conversation had finished. Several people ignored the instructions and heard Mr. Sarkozy talking to Mr. Obama about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. ‘I can’t stand him anymore, he’s a liar,’ Mr. Sarkozy said. ‘You may be sick of him, but me, I have to deal with him every day,’ replied Mr. Obama drily, clear as a bell for every reporter to faithfully record. Sacré bleu, about sums it up.

In case, dear reader, my observations thus far have led you to believe that American Presidents have cornered the market on public brick dropping, that is far from the case. `Even the normally understated and extremely tactful Queen Elizabeth of Great Britain had a blushful moment some years ago. The 95-year-old longest reigning British monarch made a blooper when, in a rare diplomatic solecism, she was caught on camera referring to Chinese officials, characterising them as being ‘very rude’ during President Xi Jinping’s state visit to the UK. Coming from the Queen that was almost the equivalent of top swearing. Unfortunately, her remarks were recorded by the official Royal cameraman, which then raises the pertinent question as to how it was leaked to the avaricious British fourth estate. Doubtless the concerned cameraman would have been rigorously questioned by the Palace, his camera taken away and sacked. ‘You will never hold another camera in front of royalty ever again.’ So, he scoots off and joins The Sun or Daily Mirror, tasked with shadowing the royal family wherever they go, armed with a state-of-the-art, long-focus telephoto lens camera. Many a royal has been caught unawares by prying cameras doing unroyal things they would rather the public be blissfully ignorant about.

India has had its own share of prominent personalities who did not quite think through what they were saying, and tended to come a cropper under the unremitting glare of the media. Former senior Congress leader, the much- respected Ghulam Nabi Azad, provided an original twist to the concept of family planning and how best to execute his ambitious programme in a hugely populous country like India. During his tenure in 2009 as Health and Family Welfare minister, he turned the spotlight on the implementation of a massive rural electrification programme to achieve the desired results. You heard right. Electrify the nation and our population growth will decline dramatically! Give the man his due. He had a credible explanation. The minister gave it as his considered opinion that in many backward and rural areas of our country, the lack of electricity meant people had nothing better to do after dusk and invariably resorted to sex for entertainment, which is a necessary precursor to a burgeoning population. If electricity was widespread, people in small towns and villages can visit community halls and watch television till late into the night, the minister opined. By the time they return home they will be too tired to indulge in love making and will make straight for bed to catch up with their beauty sleep. A truly original thought! One wonders why successive governments waste their time and resources towards educating our folk on family planning, contraception and the like when all it needed were millions of television sets placed across the country and the requisite power feed to run them for the diversion and delectation of our outback, small town denizens. Unfortunately for the minister, the numbers indicated no dramatic fall in the population figures. In fact, one could go so far as to say that the romantic antics of our film stars and starlets only enhanced their innate tumescence.

On the subject of population control, here is a quick aside. The late Sanjay Gandhi was ‘credited’ with promulgating the disastrous ‘nasbandhi’ or forced sterilization programme during the late 70s to keep India’s population growth in check. This was during the infamous Emergency and the policy had his mother, then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s blessings. Free transistor radios were distributed to those who offered themselves to be thus humiliated. Informed reports also attributed the aggressive intervention by ‘western loan sharks’ like the World Bank and the IMF in the government’s misguided programme, which cost the Congress Party dear at the hustings.

Saving the best for last, three of my favourite gaffes come from the late Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, who was famously adept at saying the wrong things at the wrong time. For which reason, the British media declared him a national treasure! In 1969, on an official visit to Canada, he quipped, ‘I declare this thing open, whatever it is.’ On a state visit to China in 1986, he told a group of British students, ‘If you stay here much longer, you’ll all be slitty-eyed.’ Later in 2003, he told the President of Nigeria, who was attired in his traditional, flowing robes, ‘You look like you’re ready for bed.’

In sum, we should all be grateful when our leaders go off script, as it gives rise to so much mirth and merriment.

(A one-act play. With apologies to Tom Stoppard)

The curtain rises and on stage are two beds in a nursing home. Lying on the beds are two very ill middle-aged males. At the foot of the beds hang two boards with the same bold legend on each, ‘Rosencrantz – Nil by mouth, Guildenstern – Nil by mouth.’ IV drips, tubes and clear, plastic bags carrying all manner of liquids into the patients and more tubes and bags conveying other liquids and semi-solids coming out of the patients, are visible. Flashing, beeping monitors overhead keep them constant company.  It seems only a matter of time before they are carried away in body bags. However, they are able to speak, just about. For the benefit of our readers, it should be said their feebleness in speech is dramatically raised to what all theatre buffs call ‘a stage whisper.’ Loud enough for the audience to hear, and on the printed page, for us to visualize.

Rosencrantz – ‘Good morning, Guildenstern. First off, is it morning, afternoon, evening or night? They keep the curtains drawn all day and all night.’

Guildenstern – ‘I am going by my body clock. And in my present, enfeebled state, that is not ticking with Swiss precision. If push comes to shove, I’d hazard a guess and plump for late afternoon. Pre-dusk, kind of.’

Rosencrantz – ‘You are not being very helpful. At least, if they wheeled in porridge, eggs and tea, I’d know it was breakfast time and I could keep tabs from thereon. This “nil by mouth” nonsense with all the tubes and everything, along with the drawn curtains, makes a mockery of time consciousness. Why don’t they fix a clock on the wall, preferably one with a cuckoo?’

Guildenstern – ‘A cuckoo clock. Nice idea. It will hourly jolt us awake if we drop off into a near coma. Actually, we should be grateful we are conscious at all. Why are you so obsessed with the time? It’s not as if you have an appointment to keep. I mean, we are virtually strapped to these hospital beds for ever and anon. Me, I keep myself entertained, when I am not sleeping that is, watching these liquids racing up and down the tubes. Very soothing to the nerves. I have asked the duty nurse if she could see her way round to providing coloured liquids. Bit more psychedelic. Blue, red and orange sludge squelching around the tubes in tandem.’

Rosencrantz – ‘You are a weird one, Guilders. And while you’re about it, why don’t we ask the nurse to place the beeping monitors somewhere in front us, instead of behind us where we can’t see them. Not only would that be helpful in keeping tabs on our pulse, BP, oxygen levels and so on, but all those coloured flashing lights and metronomic sounds they produce, along with your multi- coloured liquids, would turn this place into a medical discotheque. Cheer us up no end. Why, even our playwright, Tom Stoppard worked it into our play, “The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody.”’

Guildenstern – ‘Good point, Ros. If they can play some bouncy, instrumental music along with all that, we may not actually be able to get up and shake a leg, but we can try and move side to side in rhythm. I’ll speak to the nurse when she’s here next with the bed pan. Music wise, what is your preference? Easy listening from the 60s like The Shadows, The Ventures or something more avant-garde like, say, Weather Report? It’s all there on Spotify, so no problem.’

Rosencrantz – ‘What on earth are you rabbiting on about? They can play our national anthem, for all I care. We can’t stand up anyway. Or even sit down come to that. To get back to the point, Guilders, did it ever strike you that we can ask the nurse what time it is? Why did we not think of something so obvious? And why no television?’

Guildenstern – ‘Your memory is shot to pieces, Ros. You did ask the nurse, last time round. And you know what she said. In fact, she didn’t say it. She actually sang it, a snatch from that old Cyndi Lauper hit Time after Time – Lying in my bed I hear the clock tick and think of you / Caught up in circles confusion. Very cheerful, I don’t think. And since you ask, television is too depressing, as they have only news channels.’

Rosencrantz – ‘But very appropriate. The nurses here are quite strange. They don’t give you a straight answer to any question. I once asked one of them if we will ever get out of here. Dead or alive. You know what her response was? And I am quoting verbatim. “Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else. Tom Stoppard.” I could not make head nor tail of that. What did she mean “Tom Stoppard?”’

Guildenstern – ‘Come on, Ros. Surely, you can’t be that forgetful. Didn’t you pop your memory pills this morning? Stoppard is the chap who wrote both of us into this play. You said it yourself just a short while ago. We might have been two minor players for old Shakespeare, recruited to stick our knives into Hamlet, and in the process, get our own heads chopped off, but this Stoppard chap detected hidden potential in the two of us and made us the heroes of this play. London’s West End simply couldn’t get enough of us. And I am sure we conquered New York as well.’

Rosencrantz – ‘Of course, it’s all coming back. “We’re actors — we’re the opposite of people!” What a line that was. The audience was rolling in the aisles. I am so glad you reminded me of who we actually are. Actors! So why am I getting so depressed. Is this a one-act play, a black comedy, or will there be an interval? I can’t wait for the curtain call, then we can get in front of the screens, bow to the audience two or three times, and saunter off to the pub for a quick one, after the thundering applause dies down.’

Guildenstern – ‘Look, let’s not get carried away. I am still not absolutely certain if at this very moment of my speaking to you, we are in Tom Stoppard’s play or if we are actually two terminally ill patients in a dank nursing home struggling to figure out what time of day or night it is with only colourful tubes and flashing monitors to keep us company. And not a cuckoo clock to be seen for miles around. And waiting for the Grim Reaper to claim us for his own. Then we will get carried away. Ha ha. As Mr. Stoppard wrote on our behalf, “We’ve travelled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation.” Let’s just chew on this situation for a while. Perhaps it’s all a dream.’

Rosencrantz – ‘And here I was dreaming of retiring to our dressing rooms after the curtain call and sipping champagne with the rest of the cast, meaning those two nurses. The director would have been there, of course. Perhaps, even Tom Stoppard. Bouquets of red roses all over the place. Not forgetting the throng crammed outside the doors for selfies and autographs. I mean, if I am dreaming, I might as well go all the way. That line he gave one of us, I forget who, was a classic.  “Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You’d have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I’m not dead.” If you ask me, I am betting that we are just play acting. Don’t you agree Guilders? Guilders? GUILDERS!’

(There’s no sound from Guildenstern’s bed. Not even the faintest comatose breathing. Rosencrantz looks up at his friend’s monitor. Just flatlines.)

Rosencrantz – ‘Maybe that’s why they call it “theatre of the absurd.” And why call it an existential drama, when I am not even sure of our ability to exist? What was that our celebrated quarry, the Prince of Denmark said, in the deft hands of the Bard – “I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” When the curtain rises, I’ll know if all this was a bad dream, will my partner Guildenstern continue to remain inert and lifeless, or will he jump out of bad and break into song, “Oh, what a beautiful mornin’,” from Oklahoma. Not that he has the slightest clue if it is morning, evening or night. For now, I can do no better than to end with Stoppard’s own final line written for us, “We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”

(Stage lights off, curtain comes down, hall lights on)

     

I am somewhat ambivalent on the subject of footnotes*. I can take them or leave them. For the most part, I find footnotes intrusive as they tend to get in the way of the natural flow of whatever it is that one is reading. Not all authors take recourse to this literary device. Those that do are well-intentioned.  The apparent exercise in taking the reader off at a tangent, is to explain in considerable detail some reference that the writer is keen to elaborate upon, paint in a bit of background information, as it were. Doubtless, the aim is to be helpful, enabling the reader to obtain a better understanding of reference to context. I can fully understand the need for footnotes when one is involved in an academic exercise if you are in the realms of higher learning, say, a post-graduate or doctorate in literature.

Thus, if your university syllabus for Eng. Lit. includes Shakespeare’s arguably greatest play Hamlet**, then you cannot just pick up any old version of the play and go to work. The prescribed text book for the course will have several pages of introductory notes by some noted Oxford don, the index and reference pages alone running into nearly half the length of the book and above all, or rather, below all, the explanatory footnotes.

There is also the issue of why footnotes are printed in an almost illegibly small font size. This can be explained quite simply. Small type fonts will force the students to go close to the page, squint their eyes and concentrate hard. In other words, it is a practical aid to focus single-mindedly. Students who smuggle into their tutorials magnifying glasses to enable them to read the footnotes in comfort, are usually taken to task and severely reprimanded. Standard punishment takes the form of forcing them to stay back for detention and read the whole of Richard the Third set in 8pt Times Roman, with extensive footnotes set in 6pt of the same typeface.  That will put the lid on their winter of discontent.

The footnotes in this piece are set in an indeterminate type size to enable you to read without too much strain. I have no wish to turn off my readers, the few that there are. American author Joanna Russ, in her book How to Suppress Women’s Writing, had this to say on the subject. ‘I once asked a young dissertation writer whether her suddenly greyed hair was due to ill health or personal tragedy; she answered: “It was the footnotes”.’

* An additional piece of information printed at the bottom of the page, always in much smaller letters, guaranteed to give you the mother-of-all headaches. Footnotes are intended to cite references or comment on a designated part of the text above it. For example, say you want to add an interesting comment to a sentence you have written, but the comment is not directly related to the argument of your paragraph, that is an ideal excuse to bung in a footnote. Also, footnotes can give the reader the impression that the author is erudite, scholarly and not to be trifled with. So, when you come across one or more of the star marks at the end of a word, stop right there and go to the first footnote. Then wait for a word with two stars, then three… you get the picture. At student level it is safer to assume a low IQ level when it comes to figuring out footnotes. Never read a footnote in isolation – that is a cardinal rule. Incidentally, since this is a tutorial, these star marks are also known as asterisks – asterikos or ‘little star’ in ancient Greek. Not forgetting astericus in ancient Latin.

** Hamlet, one of the Bard of Avon’s greatest plays. With some terrific speeches like, ‘To be or not to be, that is the question.’ The play is also a ghost story featuring a chap called Banquo who has this great one-liner, ‘Good sir, why do you start and seem to fear / Things that do sound so fair?’ Hang on, hang on, that’s from Macbeth, not Hamlet. Never mind, this was to illustrate the use of the footnote. Hamlet or Macbeth, makes no difference. Tell you what though, I will certainly ‘start and seem to fear’ if Banquo’s ghost turned up uninvited at my doorstep.

Lest I give the reader an impression that footnotes are provided only for text books in schools, colleges and educational institutions, I would like to disabuse you of that impression. It is true that you are almost certainly not going to be provided such learning aids if you are leafing through P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit*** or Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express****. Those worthies wrote simple joyful stories about love among the chickens or people getting stabbed on trains with daggers bearing strange Oriental designs. Footnotes are surplus to requirements in their scheme of things. Which is why I was taken aback when I picked up Jane Austen’s classic, Pride and Prejudice*****, only to be assailed by a rash of footnotes.

*** At this point, I would normally have dwelt at length on when the Master of comic writing wrote Jeeves and the FS, 1954 if you’re too lazy to look it up, a brief outline of the plot which usually involves the hero, Bertie Wooster, getting embroiled in all kinds of scrapes and Jeeves invariably extricating him out of trouble. The novel will also feature a gaggle of aunts, butlers, scheming secretarial Baxters and possibly a gardener or two. Throw in a fat pig, if you wish. Items of jewellery or a silver cow creamer could get purloined, but somehow the complicated plot will unravel, the brooding newt-fancier will get the mooning girl, while Bertie will escape walking down the aisle by the skin of his teeth. Jeeves delivers yet again. Cynics of Wodehouse’s oeuvre will moan that all his novels have the same plot. To such ignoramuses my unfailing response is, ‘A pox on you, and may you be plagued extensively by unreadable footnotes like this one with every book you pick up to read.’

**** Murder on the Orient Express features the mystery of a murder on, you guessed it, the Orient Express, a luxury train that runs from Istanbul to London. Except that the train is halted mid-way by a snowstorm, during which a dead body is discovered on board. What good is a Christie novel without a corpse or three? Enter a funny looking Belgian with a funny accent and a funnier moustache, the remarkable Hercule Poirot (the H is silent), the detective supreme. The passengers on the train have strange names like Bouc, Foscarelli, Dragomiroff, Hildegarde Schmidt, Arbuthnot, Andrenvi, Hardman, Stavros Constantine and some less exotic names like Debenham, Hubbard and Ratchett. Comic relief is provided by Poirot trying to pronounce these names as he conducts extensive interviews to figure out ‘who killed Ratchett?’ Oops, I have already given part of the game away by naming the victim. Damned if I am going to reveal the murderer. I’ll leave it to Poirot, if you can get past the Belgian accent.

***** Pride and Prejudice is the archetypal novel of manners, written in 1813. Few authors did it better than Jane Austen. I saw the film before I read the book. In a nutshell, the story is a straight-up romance between the protagonist, the demure but proud Elizabeth Bennet and the even prouder and aloof Fitzwilliam Darcy, known only as Mr. Darcy. The version I read was introduced and notated throughout the book by some literary don, who went to town with a rash of needless, explanatory footnotes. After a point I was not sure if I was to follow the endless trail of footnotes or the main storyline. After finishing the book, I had to go back and watch the film on cable to figure out what’s what. Keira Knightley is sumptuous as Jane Bennet, but Colin Firth’s Darcy gets my vote in the earlier television mini-series.

I am presently reading a voluminous book, by a very contemporary author, who has often been described as the enfant terrible of modern English literature viz. Martin Amis******. He deserves a six-star footnote. Weighing in at around 525 pages, the book rightfully belongs to the heavyweight, wrist-endangering category in more ways than one. It is titled Inside Story – A Novel. I can understand why it is called the ‘Inside Story,’ as pretty much all of it is autobiographical. As to why it is also dubbed ‘A Novel’ I am at a loss to fathom. Nothing fictional about it. That said, the man writes like a dream and the book is a compulsive read, like most of his works.

****** Son of celebrated British author of yesteryear, Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim), Martin Amis wears his famous surname lightly. This is a rare case of a son outdoing his father in terms of achieving fame and notoriety. However, the reason for talking about Martin Amis and his new book is to highlight his inordinate obsession with footnotes in this volume. Every other page has detailed notations, often exceeding in length the actual text on the page. The book, already forbiddingly lengthy, gives you a sense of running the marathon as you flip with great relief from one page to the other. As I turned over the final page, excluding the Index pages, I felt a monumental sense of achievement. I have read longer books without experiencing that steep, oxygen-sapping mountainous climb. Make no mistake, Amis Jr. wields a mellifluous and eloquent pen. I would devour the telephone directory if he wrote it. It’s the hellish footnotes that get my goat.

Postscript (not to be confused with a footnote): Whoever said ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions,’ nailed it. Footnotes, hellish to ingest, are ultimately good for you, rather like Epsom salts.

Just for a change, this week I decided I will take a bird’s eye view of various happenings around the country, particularly those that had something peculiar or ridiculous to comment upon. Fortunately, in India we are never short of news items culled from our dailies that amuse and / or startle us. Whether these nuggets should be classified as ‘funny peculiar’ or ‘funny ha-ha,’ is largely up to you, dear reader. Comedy lies in the sensibilities of the beholder. Truth to tell, most times funny does not even come into it. A person being put to death or gangraped can never be funny or amusing. The circumstances leading to such a heinous crime, however, can befuddle and even amuse, in a dark, macabre kind of way.

Take what happened in the garden city (that tired moniker is quite funny) of Bangalore. Mubarak Pasha, a 30-year-old businessman comes home from work, his wife sets the table for dinner. ‘Dinner’s ready, come and get it,’ she coos invitingly, presumably in the vernacular. The bread winner of the home sits down to eat, examines the fare on offer, scrunches up his face and looks extremely displeased. ‘Where is my fried chicken?’ he demands. Evidently this Pasha is a bit of a fried chicken freak, and cannot bear to go through a meal without sinking his teeth into some succulent chunks of the local equivalent of KFC. ‘I specifically told you to cook fried chicken for dinner and you have arrogantly disobeyed my orders, and not for the first time either.’ Clearly, the couple have had foul words before over fried fowl. Now whether his dutiful wife gave him a rude retort or merely walked away in a huff, the news report was not forthcoming. What happened next was what grabbed the headlines. The short-tempered Pasha flew into a fit of rage, looked for the nearest lethal log of wood, and proceeded to bash his wife’s head in. Before you could say Kentucky Fried Chicken, he had become a widower and their three children were left motherless. The fact that he trotted off to the nearest police station later and confessed to his crime is neither here nor there. My plea to housewives, therefore, is to be ever vigilant. Today it is fried chicken, tomorrow it could be mutton biryani or masala dosa. I am not suggesting you should be ready to serve your lord and master’s favourite cuisine day in and day out, at his whims and fancies. I am merely advising you to be on guard, keep your own weapon of choice handy, be it a log or a well-honed axe or meat-cleaver, just in case your husband starts acting up violently. Forewarned is forearmed.

Let’s move on to another horrific incident. The Home Minister of Karnataka upbraids a young university student and her boy friend for straying out and wandering around in the vicinity of the picturesque Chamundi hills near Mysore well after dusk, as a consequence of which the girl was waylaid and gangraped by a bunch of six inebriated goons. The boyfriend had been neutralized. Not to be satisfied, the criminals had actually made a video of the assault. ‘What was she doing there at 7 – 7.30pm? Why did she go to a secluded place with her classmate after sunset?’ asked the minister. At a very basic level, the minister’s scolding, rather like an irate parent’s, would have been reasonable (just about) if the victim had returned home safe. In the face of a ghastly incident, not to have first-off, condemned outright the venal crime and targeting instead the victim’s apparent carelessness, the minister was at best unbelievably naïve and at worst, criminally callous. To be fair, he did describe the incident as ‘unfortunate’ and that drastic action will be taken against the culprits. Naturally, the opposition political parties, always with an eye to the main chance, rightly deplored and condemned the minister’s insensitive remarks. Later on, the state’s Chief Minister tried to assuage matters by strongly condemning the home minister’s tasteless comments. Whether the matter will end there or take on a more incendiary form, only time will tell. Meanwhile, the unfortunate victim’s life has been irretrievably damaged while the goons, at the time of going to press, are still at large lurking around for another quarry.

Still on the subject of rape, the Chhattisgarh High Court had an interesting take on the subject. Wait for it and fasten your seat-belts. This is what their honourable justices of the court had to say on a plea from a wife claiming intolerable sexual harassment by her husband. ‘The complainant is the legally wedded wife….therefore sexual intercourse or any sexual act with her by the husband would not constitute an offence of rape, even if it was by force or against her wish…’ (my italics). The court, as per the news report, did add a proviso that the ‘victim’ should not have been under 18 years of age. We should be thankful for small mercies! Naturally all manner of sections, sub-sections and clauses were quoted by the High Court in extenuation of their archaic judgement. My heart goes out to the poor wife, the complainant, who will, in light of the judgement, not be able to proffer the age-old excuse of suffering from a headache to ward off the lascivious advances of her husband. The horrible man will whip out the rule book and point to the loopholes in the IPC Section 376 of the relevant act, as deemed by the esteemed court, and demand conjugal satisfaction – headache or no headache. Perhaps the Act ought to be amended to provide relief to the unfortunate wife, in case she is suffering from a migraine or some other ailment to which women are prone. That will serve the wanton hound right. Otherwise, every other male in the country will quote this judgement and make his wife’s life a living hell. Come on, all you lords and ladyships, can we have some amendments please?

I conclude this ignominious round-up of bloodthirst and unbridled lechery with yet another sleazy account that simply refuses to go away. A basketball coach, who preyed on his young female wards and who was briefly incarcerated under the POCSO (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences) Act, was recently released on bail to roam free. Pramodh Kumar, that was the disgraced coach’s name, is presumably in hiding somewhere, while his alleged teenage victims have been coming out of hiding to narrate horror stories of forced sexual advances, inappropriate touching and all manner of unsavoury acts. Some of the descriptions trotted out by over 20 girls, all aspiring basketball players, were quite graphic and does not leave much to the imagination. That the local police authorities were unable to explain precisely why the accused was allowed to leave the suffocating confines of his prison cell continues to baffle. Evidently all this happened in the state of Karnataka which also witnessed the fried chicken murder and gangrape. Not that I am suggesting that Bangalore and its mother state own sole copyright on salacious crimes (it happens all over the country), but that is the way the cookie crumbled this time round. In passing I must add that the photograph of the alleged offender, the basketball coach, in the newspaper, a passport mug shot, would make any mother want to welcome him home as a son-in-law – pleasant, trustworthy and good-natured was the impression created. Who knows, perhaps the photograph was inappropriately touched up to give a favourable impression! This should be a lesson to all those matrimonial match makers who go superficially by an exchange of photographs. Dig deeper. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but those words could reveal more than you had bargained for.

I ran into an old timer a few days ago during my morning walk at our nearby park. I employ the phrase old timer with due care, given that I am not exactly a spring chicken myself. Let’s just say that he had the drop on me on the seniority front, which made him a very senior citizen. That’s all I am willing to divulge so far as our respective ages are concerned. It’s simply not cricket to go around asking people how old they are, unless you happen to be an insurance agent cadging for business. And that is an excellent cue to take off on what this elderly gent and I got to talking about.  The cue? Cricket, of course. This early morning walker’s name happened to be Thomas Cherian, and I addressed him as Uncle Tom. He was quite the cricket pundit, full of anecdotes and reminiscences. A voluminous book lay opened on his lap. Wisden, naturally. If you got stuck with him, you got that eerie feeling of being trapped that so engulfed young golfers who ran into The Oldest Member at the club in many of Wodehouse’s hilarious golfing stories. Frequently and ostentatiously shooting my cuffs, speaking metaphorically (I was wearing a tee-shirt), to look at my watch made not a blind bit of difference. Like Old Man River, he just kept rolling along. In present day parlance, he was on a roll. He was at that moment, seated on a park bench with a faraway look in his eyes. His companion was a rather overweight black Labrador on a leash, a bit long in the tooth, that sat motionlessly under the bench, doubtless dreaming of bones to gnaw and cats to chase.

‘Good morning, Uncle Tom. A penny for them. What is it that occupies your mind this early in the day? You seem to be deep in thought.’ That was my opening gambit while jogging in a stationary position, not wanting to make the cardinal error of sitting down next to him. I had things to do. The Labrador looked up at me balefully. I gave him a friendly scratch under the chin and he went back to sleep.

Uncle Tom peered at me quizzically, from the top of his bifocals. ‘Ah, young man. Ganesh, isn’t it? Good to see you. Why don’t you sit down and I will tell you what it is that is occupying my mind, as you so eloquently put it.’

‘Mar gaya,’ I muttered to myself. ‘It’s Suresh actually, not that it matters. Well alright, just a couple of minutes then. I have some guests coming round for breakfast and the wife will be getting anxious.’ So saying, I sat down next to him. Big mistake.

‘You were asking me what I was thinking about. This Kohli chap. Fine batsman and all that, but why does he keep jumping up and down, like one of our ancestral primates? Just can’t stand it.’ You could see the old codger was visibly upset, resorting to phrases like ‘ancestral primates,’ when a simple ‘monkeys’ would have met the case. What’s more he seemed primed for a long, leisurely chat. My references to guests, breakfast and the wife had made not the slightest impact on him.

Nevertheless, I decided to wade in on the debate. I sprang to the Indian skipper’s defence. ‘Look Uncle Tom, you can’t have it both ways. You know, hunting with the hares and running with the hounds. Or is it the other way round? If we lose, the captain was too laid back, allowed the game to drift. That’s what they said about the great Dhoni at times, and if Kohli gets into the opposition’s face, he is a monkey. We won the game, did we not? You are just biased because he sports a well-trimmed beard. Then again, pretty much every player in the team is bearded. It is the look of the day.’

‘Was Gavaskar bearded? Or Visvanath? Or, for that matter, the peerless Kapil Dev? All clean cricketers and clean shaven. As to your other point, winning is not everything. And don’t tell me it is the only thing. These present-day wisecracks will be the death of me. You speak as if Kohli will lose all his strength if he removes the fungus. He is not Samson, for God’s sake.’ He was in an irascible mood. Uncle Tom then went into a dreamlike trance. ‘Ah, the good old days, when cricket was cricket, and not the circus it is today. I well remember Frank Worrell and Len Hutton. Such thorough gentlemen.’

‘Uncle Tom, those gentlemen used to thrash us within an inch of our lives. They could afford to be gentle. And our Merchants and Hazares were even more gentlemanly, tamely genuflecting and taking it on the chin, at times literally. You talk so feelingly and go all misty-eyed about the good old days. What about Jardine, Larwood and all that leg-theory stuff? Bradman survived, but they nearly went to war on that one, the Poms and the Aussies.’

That was a huge error on my part. Once I engaged him in what was turning into an argument, he then launched into a major lecture on cricket being a gentleman’s game and that sort of claptrap. Holding my hand tightly, so I couldn’t get up, he proceeded to flow into his narrative from the 1940s. I couldn’t even shoot my non-existent cuffs. ‘You know Lala Amarnath, he bowled off the wrong foot. Foxed the batsman completely. Neck and crop. Lock, stock and barrel. What a man! He was a tough nut, independent India’s first cricket captain. Mind you, later on as a commentator he tended to shoot his mouth off somewhat.’

I was starting to shift uneasily. Time was ticking away and I was getting late. ‘Tell you what, Uncle Tom. I’ll come over to your place one of these evenings and we can have a long chinwag about those halcyon days when batsmen walked before the umpire could raise his finger. I’ll bring a bottle.’

This seemed to mollify him somewhat but he still had an iron grip on my left wrist. ‘No, no. What’s the rush Mahesh? By the way, I am very glad you don’t hold with this modern-day abomination of calling batsmen batters. All because women have started playing. Why can’t the women be called batspersons? To get back, I haven’t quite finished with this Kohli situation. Sit still, will you, otherwise Blackie will get restless.’

Blackie seemed perfectly at rest, just shaking his head once and flapping his ears, the way dogs do when winged insects alight on their heads. Uncle Tom continued remorselessly. ‘I know we won that Test match at Lord’s, and very exciting it was too. Joe Root held all the aces on the final day, but he was perhaps a bit too timid and…..’

‘Exactly, Uncle Tom. That is my point. In Root’s place Kohli would have moved in for the kill. Game, set and match.’ I apologised for mixing my sporting metaphors.

‘You surprise and disappoint me, Naresh. That Bumrah kid peppering their tailenders with bumper after bumper. That happened only because that wretched Kohli instructed him.’ I had long given up trying to correct him on my name.

‘But Uncle Tom, that fast bowling tailender was Anderson and he had given our nine, ten and Jack the same treatment. What’s more, the tailenders were all armed like one of the Knights of the Round Table. Tit for tat.’

‘Mind your language, Ramesh. I am 86 years old.’

‘What? What did I say?’ I was flummoxed.

‘You know what you said. I cannot repeat it,’ he said with prudish pomposity.

‘Oh, you mean…..’

‘That will do. I won’t hear another word. I thought you were a decent bloke, but I was clearly mistaken. If it’s all the same to you, this conversation is at an end. You may go. Come on Blackie.’

‘Uncle Tom, don’t take on so. I can explain everything. What is more, you are still holding my hand.’

He finally released my hand and I got up to go. As I was leaving, I thought I saw a couple of blue tits foraging for worms in the lawn. An incredibly rare sighting this, blue tits in India, if indeed they were so. I am no expert. I thought I will draw Uncle Tom’s attention to the birds, he being an avid bird watcher, if not a full-blown ornithologist. But after seeing his extraordinary reaction to my ‘tit for tat’ remark, I thought better of it and walked away, waving a courteous goodbye. Uncle Tom did not wave back, though Blackie gave me a friendly tail-wag.