IPL. Still crazy after all these years.

Mahi and Kohli – they define the IPL

The Indian Premier League (IPL) is upon us. Once more with feeling. This is the 18th edition of this obscenely cash-rich tournament and no one seems to be tiring of it. It is another matter altogether that many cricket followers, particularly those of an older generation, swear blind that they will never watch another IPL game if they can help it. The conviction is palpably absent in their voice as they rain invective on this instant, slam-bam form of the game. When the day arrives and their favourite franchise is in action, you can bet your bottom dollar they will be sitting in front of their television screens eagerly looking forward to watching Dhoni, even if he decides just to stride majestically to the crease and walk back to the pavilion after facing a mere four deliveries, which may or may not include a couple of crowd-pleasing maximums. Or over-boundaries, as some radio commentators of a bygone era used to describe them. If Chennai Super Kings are fielding, then the fans will feast their eyes on their Thala pulling off an age-defying diving catch or whipping the bails off in a flash behind the wickets. The great man keeps mum on retirement plans, as on most other things, and his fans want him to play till he is 50. I tell a lie. Make that 60. And no one is prepared to lay any bets against such an eventuality.

Then there is Virat Kohli. If Dhoni is the ageless father figure of Indian cricket, then Kohli is its ageless sex symbol. Rippling biceps, well-trimmed goatee, body language full of aggro and a Bollywood starlet for a wife. What more can a man want? Or a woman, come to that. And with all that, lest we forget, a terrific batsman who has had the best bowlers in the world for breakfast. If the mood takes him, Kohli can do a fair imitation of a trapeze artist when his team bags a wicket or when he routinely takes India over the finishing line. Pity the bowler whose shoulders he leaps on with gay abandon. Whether it is elation or anger on the field of play, King Kohli can match King Kong! A cricketing equivalent of Novak Djokovic – a beast on the court and a thorough gentleman off it. At least, that’s the word on the street. Makes no difference, the crowds adore the former Indian skipper. After Dhoni, that is. Sachin? Who dat? Public memory is fickle. We live in the here and now.

I decided to catch up with a cross-section of cricket lovers and probe them on what they thought of the IPL. I dived into the deep end of the catchment area of cricket. I stood outside one of India’s better-known stadiums so that I could buttonhole all and sundry as they were getting into the stadium, or coming out of it, and challenge them with a few well-chosen questions. Every single one of them had just cricket on their minds and that helped.

I first stopped a 12-year-old boy (he could have been 15) who was holding his father’s hand (at least it looked like his father) and was about to ask him which his favourite IPL franchise was. Then I saw that he was wearing that famous yellow tee-shirt with the number 7 and ‘Thala’ emblazoned at the back. At which point, I bypassed the kid and sought another victim. No point going after the bleeding obvious.

Two high school girls, in high spirits were my next victims. The match had just given over. I asked one of them if they enjoyed the game. The first one, wearing an RCB tee-shirt gushed, ‘Virat is too cute, yaar, love his goatee.’ Her partner butted in with a ‘Kohli, Kohli. Anushka, I am so jay of you.’ This was going nowhere, so I asked the twitchy twosome, ‘So who won the match?’ The answer was swift, ‘Who knows and who cares? Kohli, Kohli,’ they chanted. They love their cricket, this generation.

A 70 something gentleman ambled out slowly, tapping on his mobile for his driver. I waited for him to finish his call and went up to him. ‘Excuse me Sir, but do you really enjoy this instant-noodles type of IPL cricket?’ He thought for a while and replied, ‘You know, in 1963 at the Eden Gardens when ‘Prince Salim’ Durani used to hit sixes on popular demand….’ I had heard enough. If I had allowed the senior citizen to continue, he would have gone on till the cows came home. Or till his car or Uber arrived. Which would have been about the same time. I smartly ducked and sought another prey.

I spotted a man of Oriental aspect, as Sherlock Holmes might have put it and wasted no time in blocking his path. ‘Good evening, which part of the world are you from?’ ‘India,’ he replied. Surprised, I said, ‘I could have sworn you were from China or some such. We normally don’t come across too many people like you at cricket matches.’ ‘My friend, don’t jump to conclusions. Looks can be deceiving. My family has been running a popular Chinese restaurant for over four decades in this city.’ I regretted being so presumptuous. ‘My apologies. Are you a close follower of the game?’ ‘Not really, don’t get the time. It’s just that my 95-year-old grandfather was keen to know if any player in the IPL bowled the Chinaman. I am here only to oblige him, as I did not have a clue what a Chinaman was.’ ‘Other than you, ha ha,’ I laughed at my own poor joke. ‘Ha ha yourself,’ he said and invited me for a dim sum and beer to his restaurant. Nice chap. Had a sense of humour. For a Chinaman!

Time was running out as I had to file my copy. I trudged my way back to hail an auto. In the receding distance, I could hear faint cries of ‘Dhoni, Dhoni, Kohli, Kohli.’ Must have been a CSK vs RCB game, I thought to myself as I climbed into the phut-phutty.

(An edited version was carried by Deccan Chronicle dt. 1/4/25)

Boring!

A bore is a person who opens his mouth and puts his feats in it. Henry Ford.

It is widely accepted that while being overly aggressive, offensive or too clever by half is not a personality trait to be admired, there can be no bigger pain in the posterior region than that of being a bore. Therein lies the rub. Bores can otherwise be pleasant to engage with, they may even be gifted in many ways. A handful of them have gone on to achieve great things in life. Scientists, sportspersons, musicians, novelists, politicians, toppers all in their respective fields but there is no guarantee that some of them, and they are the exceptions, if you have had the misfortune to be buttonholed at the club bar or somewhere else, won’t turn out to be crashing bores. Particularly if their best days are behind them.

The thing about being ensnared by a bore is that, oftentimes you are never sure what is coming. The conversation, or rather the monologue, starts harmlessly enough. After five or six minutes, it dawns on you that you are trapped with no escape route. You have not been able to get a word in edgeways and your mind is beginning to wander. Your eyes mist over with a glazed look and you keep looking frequently and ostentatiously at your watch, which the bore ignores with impunity. For the most part, you respond with a mechanical ‘Oh,’ ‘Ah,’ or ‘I see,’ not having the faintest what the bore is yakking on about. The modern-day trend is to feign a yawn and say, ‘Boring’ and walk away. Alas, we were brought up to be civil. Some bores will bore you over the phone but, at least you can interject with a ‘Sorry, that’s the doorbell, will catch up later,’ and disconnect.

If someone tells you he has never been boring, he is being more than economical with the truth. That goes for yours truly as well. Simply because I am writing a column having fun at the expense of bores, does not mean I cannot be guilty of that unwritten commandment, ‘Thou shall not bore another human being to death.’ The warning signal to watch out for, when you are in convivial company, is when your wife or a dear friend (both can be the same person) gently admonishes you with an ‘I think they have heard that yarn about your hattrick in school many times before, dear. You’ve downed one too many. Time to make tracks.’ At least, that is the gist of it. I am not much of an imbiber, but I do not require alcoholic stimulants to get people around me fidgety, once I am on a roll. Having blithely included myself in the list of probables as it were, I am now free to guiltlessly dive into the deep end on my current subject of choice. With a little help from some acclaimed published sources.

We all know that a confirmed hypochondriac holds pride of place when it comes to boring the pants off his companions. ‘I will give small eats a wide berth, if you don’t mind. Tummy trouble. Now if it were just a normal stomach upset, that would be one thing, but I keep getting these shooting pains at the pit of my stomach and I fear it could be something more serious. My GP simply brushed the whole thing off as a figment of my imagination. Take two antacid pills twice a day after meals and you will be right as rain. I was not convinced. I decided to get a scan done and you know what…’ And on and on he drones, while his friends are beginning to disappear having received ‘urgent calls’ on their mobiles. Puts me in mind of one of the Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome, ‘I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling you what is the matter with me. Life is brief, and you might pass away before I had finished. But I will tell you what is NOT the matter with me. I have not got housemaid’s knee. Why I have not got housemaid’s knee, I cannot tell you; but the fact remains that I have not got it. Everything else, however, I HAVE got.’

Beware of the man who starts a sentence with, ‘I shan’t detain you long,’ or ‘Did I tell you the one about…?’ I can state with absolute certainty that he has told you the one about. Yes, my friend, you have. More than once, and that is an understatement. But here’s the thing about bores. They don’t listen to what the other chap is saying. They bash on regardless. ‘In that case, I had better start at the beginning. Waiter, another fresh lime soda sweet for my friend here please.’ And the long evening wears on. Here I would like to cite an interesting example from one of P.G. Wodehouse’s early gems. No, it’s not from another Jeeves-Wooster, the Golfing tales or Blandings Castle caper. This the Master wrote in 1903 for the celebrated but now defunct Punch magazine. Anonymously. That it was, indeed, Wodehouse came to light much later.

In a two-part short story titled, Dudley Jones, Bore-Hunter, the object of Wodehouse’s satire is none other than Sherlock Holmes. Holmes’ stand-in is introduced to the reader as follows. ‘Dudley Jones was a man who devoted his best energy to the extinction of bores. With a clear-sightedness which few modern philanthropists possess, he recognised that, though Society had many enemies, none was so deadly as the bore. Burglars, indeed, Jones regarded with disapproval, and I have known him to be positively rude to a man who confessed in the course of conversation to being a forger. But his real foes were the bores, and all that one man can do to eliminate that noxious tribe, that did Dudley Jones do with all his might.’

Musicians are, by and large, a noble lot. As long as they perform on stage or in a recording studio. Singers or instrumentalists, they may have their good and bad days, but the audience generally takes kindly to them as there are not too many around who have the requisite skills to hold their fans in thrall for long periods of time. Parts of a concert can be boring to some, but the fans wait for the good bits to wake them up. Most musicians are reluctant to engage in long, drawn-out conversations or speechifying as they believe that is not their forte. Many of them do speak well, but prefer to keep their opinions to themselves. That said, I have known some Carnatic musicians who love to convert their concerts into lecture demonstrations. They talk more than they sing and that can be trying. And boring. ‘This is the first song my guru taught me. He made me practice it more than 50 times before he allowed me to perform it on stage.’ Wild applause. That is all very well except that he has narrated this particular tale to us more than 50 times. And why does he keep looking at his laptop if he has practiced this song so many times?

It is instructive to examine the issue of boredom in music from a western perspective. Here is Jude Kelly, artistic director of London’s Southbank Centre on the subject. ‘An audience must have the confidence to admit that there are structural inadequacies in the great works. We’ve all had moments when we’ve dozed off. But there is also a sense that the best art is like life. Some of it is a bit dull, but you need the boring parts to appreciate the climaxes. Reaching the end of a Wagner opera is like climbing a mountain: part of the achievement is in the struggle to get there.’

Finally, a word on teachers. During our impressionable years in school, the quality of our teachers was central to our ability to absorb and enjoy our lessons, irrespective of the subject being taught. The teacher who held our attention was the one who did not treat his class as a flock of sheep. He would interject his lessons with the odd light-hearted quip. ‘Boys, do not copy your neighbour’s mistakes’ was a gentle admonition that made us laugh and taught us a lesson in thinking for ourselves. On another occasion, our Moral Science teacher was explaining to his class the importance of prayer and how it helps the students to assimilate the values of life and trust to a higher power. ‘Does anyone have another opinion?’ A back bencher piped up with, ‘I don’t pray because I don’t want to bore God.’ ‘Who said that? Vikram, was that you? Stand up and explain yourself, boy.’ Vikram stood up and said, ‘Actually Sir, it was the actor Orson Welles.’ The class was convulsed with laughter and the teacher saw the funny side of it and joined in the mirth.

In sum, I agree with the late George Harrison who said that ‘The Beatles saved the world from boredom.’

Leaves that are green turn to brown

I was twenty-one years when I wrote this song / I’m twenty-two now but I won’t be for long / Time hurries on / And the leaves that are green turn to brown. Simon & Garfunkel.

Not finding anything earth-shattering to write about this week (if truth be told, it happens to me every week), I was moping around the house scouring newspapers, keeping the television set on for interminably long hours on the off-chance that some entertaining nugget would come my way and I could start beavering away at my keypad. No such luck. Kejriwal, Modi, Trump, Zelenskyy, Rohit, Virat, Rahul (both of them) have all become yesterday’s news. During my early teens in school, if someone came up with second-hand news, we would tease him mercilessly thus, ‘Stale news stinks and so do you.’ For the full effect, it had to be delivered in a screechy, sing-song voice. We were an insufferable lot, we boarding house boys. In short, posting a column week on Sunday week is not a walk in the park. If I manage to pull something off before desperation and thoughts of self-harm set in, it is only because of sheer bloody-mindedness. That is precisely when I spotted this dried, withered leaf peeping out from the middle of that estimable tome, Cardus on Cricket, on my bookshelf. A bookmark! but where did that dried leaf come from? It has lain pressed between pages 134 and 135 for at least 15 years, give or take, since I last read it. A superb book, a literary cricketing classic but my interest was riveted on the leaf. It was an ‘Eureka!’ moment. Not a non sequitur, in case you were wondering. I had my idea for the blog. And thereby hangs a tale or three.

Let me revert to that dried, brown leaf converted into a bookmark. It was bright green when it gently alighted on my head from a tree, the botanical genus of which I am ignorant, somewhere while traipsing in the verdant, beautiful Black Forest in Germany eons ago. I was about to instinctively brush it away, as one usually does when something unexplained falls on your head, often a bird moving its bowels. My wife, who has a keen eye for all things pertaining to plant life, decided to preserve the leaf as a souvenir from our trip to this part of Deutschland. ‘This is the Black Forest. We may never come back here again. This leaf will be a constant reminder.’ So saying, she secreted it away somewhere in her handbag. This was so much more imaginative than spending a small fortune in a gift shop in Frankfurt’s Duty Free. Now, whenever I look fondly at the brown and frail leaf, I think of those chorus lines from Simon & Garfunkel’s lovely song, And the leaves that are green, turn to brown. The song goes on to elaborate on the leaves, And they wither with the wind and they crumble in your hands. I dared not touch that leaf for fear that it might have completely disintegrated.

Stepping lightly away from leaves, I shall now turn my attention to stones and pebbles. We have a few of them at home mostly serving as paperweights or just something to put into an empty brass or glass bowl. These are not just any common or garden pebbles. A couple of them were picked up on the beaches of the Costa Brava in Spain. Smoothened by years and years of erosion, they are lovely to touch and feel and, for the most part, just to look at. Therapeutic, as well. Once again, I am serendipitously back with Simon & Garfunkel and another line from that same song, I threw a pebble in a brook, and watched the ripples run away, and they never made a sound. And the leaves…You know the rest.

As for the stone, we chanced upon it in the Lake District in England. There is nothing pretentious about it. Just a greyish, misshapen lump, like any other stone you might find anywhere on a city street. The poet Wordsworth, who lived in this area would not have been inspired to knock off a verse on sighting this stone had he tripped over it. But here’s the catch. On this non-descript stone was an imprint of a shell which might have excited any anthropologist. Not being able to find one readily, we showed it to our hotel manager, a Basil Fawlty type of individual. He examined the stone carefully, looked at it this way and that, took a magnifying glass to it and finally declared, ‘I think you’ve found a gem here. 14th century, I shouldn’t wonder, the late Middle Ages. Plenty of volcanic activity about at the time. Take it to Christie’s or Sotheby’s in London and you might become a very wealthy man.’ He was clearly having me on. The mischievous glint in his eye was a dead giveaway. We brought the stone home with us, along with the leaf and the pebbles, but every time I look longingly at that stone as it rests on my bank statement file, I cannot help wondering if I missed out on the main chance. The stone could have acquired international fame and I, a small fortune. Instead, like Bob Dylan’s rolling stone, it remains a complete unknown.

I shall always remember the look on the Calcutta Customs official’s face when he asked me if I had anything to declare. I was sorely tempted to take a leaf out of Oscar Wilde’s canon, ‘I have nothing to declare except my genius.’ Wiser counsels prevailed. Instead, I produced a bagful of stones, pebbles and one half-dried leaf. He was about to say something nasty, but a carton of Benson & Hedges silenced him instantly. He chalk-marked our suitcases with a flying tick of approval. There were more bottles of Scotch in the suitcase than the permissible, duty-free limit. Remember, these were the 70s. Even if you were a non-smoker, a few cartons of imported ciggies went a long way in keeping the wheels of bureaucracy well-greased.

Amongst other collectibles that I did not have to pay a penny for during our travels abroad in the distant past, mention must be made of my hotel room keys (in duplicate) in Birmingham, which I failed to return as I checked out. You may rightly surmise that this particular hotel was still operating in the pre-digital era. The keys, with their plastic room tag, were guiltily jangling in my blazer pocket as I reached the station to catch the train to London King’s Cross. On arriving, I called up the Birmingham hotel reception and proffered my embarrassed apologies. The lady at the desk was very sweet about it. ‘No problem, Sir. Those keys will serve as a constant reminder of our hotel when next you visit Birmingham.’ By now they must have changed the keys to the digital card format.

Bus and train tickets, theatre tickets, (Phantom, Cats et al), a ticket each for Wimbledon and Lord’s, admission cards for Madame Tussaud’s, the Louvre, the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh and other must-see destinations around Europe – all these are lying around somewhere along with our photo albums stored over the decades. When am I ever going to get around to digitizing them? But somehow, it is that leaf from the Black Forest, those stones and pebbles from the Costa Brava and the pair of keys from the Birmingham hotel that bring a broad smile to my lips. It is true, as a cynical friend of mine tartly pointed out, I could have picked up an identical leaf from a tree outside my home or stones and pebbles if I took a leisurely stroll down the Marina Beach in Madras and passed them off as exotic souvenirs from far-off lands. No one will know the difference. Then again, I will. And that makes all the difference.

News channels move over, the Podcasters are here.

I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I have all but stopped watching the news bulletins on television, along with their noisy debates. As I am channel-agnostic, my disenchantment with the news as purveyed cuts across all television channels. There are two reasons for this cynical observation. The obvious one is the abysmal quality of the anchors (with a couple of notable exceptions) as well as their field correspondents, most of whom appear to have staggered fresh out of college. Wet behind the ears, as my English master in school had it. There is simply no gravitas in their reportage, whether they are standing in front of a Chief Minister’s palatial residence, gripping a microphone, hoping for a sound bite on some corruption charge, along with all the other rival channels, pushing and jostling, waiting for the gates to open and some unidentified limousine to drive out. Else you are likely to find them commenting from a disaster site where a building under construction has just collapsed slaying ten. On one occasion, a young girl correspondent gave frantic chase to a minister as he put his hand up and hurriedly dived into his car. ‘Sir, Sir, please. What do you have to say to the victims’ families?’ I could have told her it was a hopeless pursuit.

 Cut to the studio for the much-touted debate at prime time. Need I say more? Ten faces, including the redoubtable anchor’s mug, stare at you, and some of those faces don’t even get a chance to get a word in edgeways, given the cacophony of the combined voices in non-unison. If the anchor is unhappy with the line taken by the guest, he or she will not think twice about cutting him off just as the unfortunate panellist is gathering a nice head of steam. Some very distinguished commentators at times appear on these shows much to their everlasting regret. One must assume the appearance money is good.

Those are primarily the negative reasons why I have stopped watching news channels on television, and I am happy to state that I am in excellent company in this regard. The more positive reason as to why I have no more requirement to waste my time with the regular news channels is thanks to the new, improved YouTube offerings – Podcasts to accord its proper title. Forget about the entertainment choices, they are too numerous to mention and I have dwelt at length in the past about the joys of watching clips from sport, humour, interviews with the high and mighty and so much more. And when you add Netflix, Prime Video and Apple TV to the cable smorgasbord, one’s cup truly runneth over. Not wishing to be sidetracked, let me confine myself to the main purpose of this contemplation, namely current affairs.

On YouTube, you get a multiplicity of choices, both Indian and foreign, where not more than one or two distinguished experts sit and discuss at length the important headlines of the day. For those with a keen interest in wishing to understand, in-depth, the issues bedevilling India’s politics or economics, the likes of Barkha Dutt, Palki Sharma, Smita Prakash and Karan Thapar, just to name a few, speak to knowledgeable experts on a variety of subjects. The anchor lays down a marker in terms of explaining and outlining the limits of the topic and the guests are given a free hand and more than ample time to elaborate on their points of view. One does not usually get the impression that the invited speakers come to the studio with a pre-determined agenda. The exchanges are marked by a ‘feast of reason and flow of soul’ and no animus is displayed. They make their points with refreshing candour and an injection of humour, a rarity on our screens. Some of these self-same participants, on our regular television channels, have often been seen tearing their hair out merely to make themselves heard. Ask Anand Ranganathan, J. Sai Deepak, Abhijit Iyer Mitra or the Poonawalla brothers, just to provide a soupçon. When you get firebrand Mani Shankar Aiyar firing on all cylinders or the suave and ever so sane former Foreign Secretary Krishnan Srinivasan eloquently elaborating his views, we are in for a treat. Shashi Tharoor is a perennial favourite when he is not beset with his own political challenges.

I cannot not mention the case of podcaster Ranveer ‘Beerbiceps’ Allahbadia, who got so carried away with his phenomenal success that he went overboard with a harebrained level of idiocy, asking a guest a highly tasteless and personal question about his parents. He can consider himself extremely lucky the Courts let him off with a stern rap on the knuckles. That he apologised profusely is neither here nor there.

Lest you get the wrong impression, it is not merely the English-speaking programmes that I am talking about that grab eyeballs. Some of the podcasts in Hindi like The Jaipur Dialogues with the laconic Sanjay Dixit at the helm, approaches sensitive subjects with a delightful sense of irony, tongue firmly in cheek as both he and his guests who are podcasters in their own right (Abhishek Tiwary, Sumit Peer, Aadi Achint along with a plethora of palmists, soothsayers and astrologers) treat viewers to an elevating and entertaining programme. My Hindi has greatly improved as a result, not that that is of much consequence to the powers-that-be in Tamil Nadu.

The same goes for Sree Iyer of PGurus, who runs his programme from Washington (The Capitol conspicuously projected behind him) while conducting his interviews with several experts from India. Special mention must be made of ‘Scoop Raja’ Rajagopal who commences all his observations with a sloka in Sanskrit from one of India’s religious texts prior to launching his diatribe against whoever may be in his crosshairs on a particular evening. They wear their religious caste marks prominently on their sleeves. Or rather, on their foreheads. These gentlemen do not hesitate to display their allegiance to the ruling party, but they do bring to the table an impressive bank of knowledge and experience along with their homespun philosophy. Those who espouse the cause of the opposition alliance have their own podcasting channels from which to denigrate the Prime Minister on a daily basis. In other words, battle is truly joined and provides infinitely more elevating viewing pleasure than your run-of-the mill news channels.

If you are interested in what is happening in the United States, Western Europe, Ukraine, Russia and so on, the choice of podcasts to watch on YouTube is humongous. You need look no further than the celebrated Joe Rogan whose incisive interviews had even Donald Trump sitting with him for hours. Probably the only Indian who had Rogan star struck (by his own admission) was our very own Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev! Search for Victor Davis Hanson or Bill O’Reilly and you are assured of a most erudite and reasoned discussion on the political turmoil in America, the convoluted and dangerous issues surrounding the Ukraine-Russia conflict, with bit players like Starmer, Macron, Vance and others in walk-on parts but always completely overshadowed by the all-encompassing, omniscient presence of Donald Trump.

Snippets from the US Senate hearings and the ensuing debates (these are real debates) provide us in India with a deep understanding, not to mention the entertainment value that people like Trump can give us. Have you ever heard a sitting President refer to a former President as a ‘stupid President?’ That is what Trump called Biden who, in turn, had earlier described Trump as an idiot. A slanging match for the ages! In short, a splendid time is guaranteed for all. It is worth bearing in mind that if Trump sneezes, India could get a severe cold. The unseemly spat involving Trump, Zelensky and Vance at the Oval Office continues to remain at the top of the hit parade. Viewers simply cannot get enough of it. What is more, several computer-generated ‘funnies’ have come out of this infamous incident taking pride of place on social media.

When all is said and done, one must determine for oneself if anything you watch on television should first and foremost be elevating and entertaining and the devil take the hindmost. I am inclined to veer in that direction. After all, if I wish to be seriously involved in matters of state, I can read from a variety of excellent sources. There are exceptions even on the telly, as I have pointed out earlier in this piece, but in the main, you want someone compelling to hold your attention. That is why I have turned my back on the conventional news channels where the quality of delivery traverses the bandwidth from silly to utterly unwatchable. It becomes increasingly clear why some wise sage dubbed it ‘the idiot box.’ If you are not careful, it makes idiots of us all.

Pulitzer Prize winner, American author and columnist Dave Barry, with delicious irony said this about the news on television, ‘I would not know how I am supposed to feel about many stories if not for the fact that TV news personalities make sad faces for sad stories and happy faces for happy stories.’ That pithy one-liner, more or less, puts the lid on it.

   Brother can you spare 5 million USD?

Say don’t you remember, I’m your pal / Brother can you spare a dime? From the song composed in 1932 during the Great Depression in America.

POTUS, or to put it in its expanded form, President of the United States, Donald Trump has just made an announcement the whole world would do well to pin its ears back and take notice. Apparently, the world is. Taking notice, I mean. He has declared that anyone from any part of the world is now free to earn a coveted Gold Card, a superior avatar of the much-prized Green Card, and such a one can claim full rights to become a bona fide citizen of that great country. There is, however, one small catch. An individual wishing to take advantage of this handsome offer needs to cough up a bit of small change to the tune of 5 million US dollars. Now I have not had the opportunity to read the small print contained in this proclamation, and I am not sure if the White House has released any document outlining the ifs and buts. Apparently, the President hopes to mop up at least a million such munificent investors, bringing in a whopping 5 trillion USD into the system, thereby greatly reducing the country’s total debt in one fell swoop. ‘It will sell like crazy,’ Trump predicted. Pure genius.

I guess what I am driving at is, to the best of my knowledge, you cannot simply walk up to the US Embassy, approach the Immigration counter and greet the gentleman or lady sitting there with a cheery ‘Good morning, with regard to your President’s announcement yesterday, here’s a cheque for 5 million dollars US. Would you be so good as to hand me my Gold Card with my name embossed? I have filled up this simple form so you can get my spelling, date of birth and so on just right. If you can arrange to take my photograph, I will collect the card and be on my way.’ I do not think you will get much change out of the Embassy staff with that casual approach, if you get my meaning.

I was curious to find out more about this incredible offer. Not that I was in the least bit interested in becoming an American citizen and even if I did, I should be so lucky if I could scrape up even an infinitesimal fraction of that amount to put into Mr. Trump’s coffers. As they say, I would be hard pressed to find the proverbial two coins to rub together. Nevertheless, nothing ventured, nothing gained even if I was only trying to gain some knowledge to satisfy my curiosity. Curiosity might have killed the cat, but I called up the Embassy on their helpline and the following conversation ensued. This after the usual rigmarole of having to press several digits for a variety of different services, then had to wait for something like 15 minutes while The Star-Spangled Banner was played on an endless loop. Finally, a human voice. I was disappointed that the male voice did not sound anything like Trump or Musk or Kash or even Vivek. It sounded like Laloo Prasad Yadav on one of his bad days. What is more, he spoke in Hindi on the glib assumption that I could not speak English. This after I had selected English as my preferred medium of communication. This is what gets the goat of people like Tamil Nadu CM, Stalin. Why not Tamil? Quite right, Thiru Stalin, but let me get on with my story.

Anyhow, on request I was directed to an English-speaking lady. Not American but probably a young lady from Hyderabad who is a Green Card holder, on special duty at their New Delhi Embassy. More likely, she was from an outsourced facility sitting in a poky office in downtown Chennai. Still and all, she sounded courteous and helpful.

‘And how can we help you this morning, Mr. Subrahmanyan?’ I was not sure how she knew my name because I had not introduced myself. Better not to ask, I thought. You never know what these people had on you. I felt it was best to be discreet than valorous. I responded politely.

‘Good morning to you too, Madam. You seem to have the advantage of me. May I know by what name I should address you?’

She brushed me off gently. ‘My name is not important Sir. I see from the form you have filled that you are interested in taking up our President’s offer to become a proud Gold Card citizen of our country.’

This was getting a bit sticky. ‘Not really. I needed answers to a few questions before I could consider your President’s most generous offer.’

‘Shoot,’ replied the lady.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I mean, go ahead and ask your questions. I can only give you ten minutes and you have already consumed 4 of them. There is a big queue behind you.’

‘What queue? I am calling from my mobile phone at home.’ I was a tad miffed by her peremptory tone.

‘I was speaking metaphorically, Sir. I have kept the others on hold in an online queue.’

I was somewhat mollified. ‘Right, firstly I would like to know if the amount of 5 million dollars can be paid in instalments.’

‘I cannot answer to that, Sir. I will have to check with higher authorities. How many instalments did you have in mind?’ She sounded dubious.

‘Well, I don’t know. It could run into several thousands. Instalments, I mean. 5 million dollars is not chicken feed, I am not sure how many zeroes there are, but that is not the issue. I would like clarity on the principle of the thing.’ I knew this was getting me nowhere, but I kept the dialogue going.

‘How old are you, Sir?’

‘Now you are getting personal. Asking rhetorical questions when I have clearly mentioned my DOB on the application form.’

‘Ah yes, Sir. My apologies. You were born in June 1949. Assuming there is an instalment option, which there probably isn’t, the pending instalments will outlive you be several parasangs.’

‘My, my what big words you know, young lady. Parasangs indeed. Where did you graduate from? Yale, Harvard, Oxford?’

‘If you must know, Eng. Lit (Hons) from Loreto House, Calcutta, but thank you anyway. Now then, Sir, I must terminate this discussion, delightful though it has been. You will be much better off applying for a tourist visa to our country and even then, it could take upwards of 9 months to get it cleared.’

‘That’s strange. I thought you were an American citizen. Loreto House! Fancy that.’

‘In fact, I am an American citizen. Proud of having been educated in India. Sought employment in the US and here I am, talking to you, Sir, about your fanciful 5 million dollars. May I also remind you that you are meant to invest this money in some profitable business in the U.S. thereby providing meaningful employment to many Americans. Have a good day, Sir. I must get on to the next caller.’ She was quite chuffed at her own cheeky response.

‘Thank you, nameless one. Or should I call you Anamika? I hope the next caller has 5 million dollars at the ready. And give my regards to Mr. Trump. He has got the whole world spinning like a top. Our stock markets are hurtling southwards like there’s no tomorrow. So I had better cut my losses and stay home in Bharat Mata. Good bye and thanks for the time.’

All said and done I had been given the bum’s rush and deservedly so. Wasting the Embassy staff’s time, even if outsourced, with my footling queries just for a lark. However, to those of you who witnessed the dressing down Ukraine’s chief honcho Zelenskyy got from President Trump, one must carefully consider if it is at all worth one’s while to obtain this virtually unobtainable Gold Card that carries a 5 million dollar price on its head. Assuming you had that kind of money lying around, why would you want to enrich the coffers of the richest nation on earth? The Birlas, Tatas, Ambanis, Adanis, Infosyses and their ilk are doing just fine looking after their considerable wealth and counting the pennies here in India and abroad. The rest of us should go back to good old Bank FDs as the stock markets are playing ducks and drakes with the investors instead of bulls and bears. Though the bears are running amok with a little help from POTUS.

Thanks Mr. Trump, but no thanks.

Too much of a good thing

The dreaded day is upon us. They say it comes just once every four years, but in between we have another variant of the same which overwhelms our television screens. And our lives. In case you have still not cottoned on to what I am obliquely referring to, let me set your mind at rest. No, it is not Covid or some other deadly scourge that periodically visits humankind, nor some rare galactic event that is occupying my mind.  I am talking about these cricket world championship tourneys which keep reverberating before we can even get used to the one just gone by. The latest edition of the 50-over One Day Internationals (ODI), not quite the World Cup but given the moniker of Champions Trophy (featuring just eight teams) is upon us and will stay with us for a few weeks. Here is my quandary. Didn’t India just win the World Cup a couple of years ago, beating South Africa in the final, if memory serves? I am then put right on this by a young neighbour, in tones one would adopt whilst addressing the mentally challenged, that that was the T20 World Cup in 2024 Uncle, 20 overs. This is the Champions Trophy, 50 overs. He almost spells it out. This chastisement is followed by a ‘duh’ that pretty much puts the lid on it. It’s all rather confusing, really.

Right then, let me attempt to regain my dignity and back track. As I understand it, the ODI fiesta comes round once in four years. Then there’s a Champions Trophy in between which I thought (erroneously) they had done away with, not to mention the T20 jamboree, slotted somewhere in the middle of that four-year period thereby providing undiluted pleasure for the fans every couple of years. Assuming always that you are a gone case fanatic who wouldn’t think twice about leaving a trail of cricket widows in your wake. I am, in the main, addressing adults of marriageable age, and not the teenagers and toddlers who are beyond redemption.

As if all this was not lunacy enough, through some extraordinary sleight-of-hand planning, the cricket czars of the world manage to fit in the IPL in India which goes on forever. Never mind whether the cows came home or not. There are other similar tournaments played elsewhere in the world, but they barely get a mention. At least not in my neck of the woods. The IPL in India rules the roost, the money is beyond the dreams of avarice, and the foreign players make a beeline for Indian shores during the most forbiddingly hot, Indian summer. All except players from neighbouring Pakistan naturally, but that is another story. Incidentally, horror of horrors, there is also a 10-over variant (not officially recognised) played in outposts of the erstwhile British Empire like Hong Kong and Singapore. Easy money.

These are the different avatars of ‘fast-food’ cricket which keep the turnstiles clicking and bring in the moolah to keep the wheels of the good old 5-day Test Match variant well oiled. That one can play this traditional version of cricket, lovely cricket over five long days without a result being guaranteed is what drives the untutored Americans bonkers. ‘Five days and neither team wins? Exciting draw? What does that even mean?’ During the 60s, it was not uncommon to hear Indian radio commentator Professor Ananda Rao informing us over the air waves in grave, avuncular tones, ‘That was Bapu Nadkarni’s 45th over, 37 of which were maidens, he has conceded just 9 runs and has yet to take a wicket. The man can drop it on a dime. What an economical spell.’ And we lapped it all up. Today, the forward defensive push, bat angled down, bat and pad locked together, has become an anachronism, a museum piece. Gavaskar and Dravid were the last to play that way. The BCCI should commission a sculptor and erect statues in their honour in Mumbai and Bangalore respectively. They erected one in honour of Tendulkar who hardly ever ‘blocked.’

In the days of yore, Test match cricket was merely a two-country affair in different parts of the world, each going against the other, and only the Ashes between England and Australia being given the requisite publicity. Things have now changed. While various teams are playing each other throughout the year, points are awarded to determine the two best teams who face off against each other for a single Test shoot-out for the coveted ICC mace. To put it in a nutshell, Test match cricket is being kept alive thanks to funds generated from the limited overs format. The world of cricket owes a debt of gratitude to the late, much-maligned Australian magnate Kerry Packer, who introduced an astonished world to what was then dismissively referred to as ‘pyjama cricket,’ an oblique reference to the introduction of coloured clothing in this pristinely white game. Packer, and those cricketers who followed the Holy Grail with him, were shunned by the establishment at Lords and elsewhere. All that soon changed, the prodigal sons returned home and limited overs cricket took off and has never looked back. Money talks, as Packer so presciently foresaw.

The problem, however, is that there is simply too much of it. Cricket fatigue sets in for many of us who are somewhat long in the tooth. It is not that I do not follow the scores, particularly if India is playing an international series, irrespective of the format. It is simply that I have long since stopped bringing my lunch or dinner to gawp in front of the telly, just in case I miss a brilliant cover drive by Kohli or a superb diving catch in the slips by Ben Stokes. I can always watch the severely shortened highlights on YouTube at my own leisure. The other downside of the TV dinner is you are not aware of what you are shovelling into your mouth as you have eyes only for the screen. I once bolted two large green chillies and paid a very heavy price. I think the cook did that on purpose, just for a laugh.

Lest we forget, there’s the distaff side of cricket as well. Women’s international tournaments are keeping pace with the men’s side of things. India’s ladies have generally been giving a good account of themselves and there is quite a bit of interest being evinced by the public. However, all this means is that there is one more arrow in cricket’s quiver and when the men and women are playing simultaneously as happens quite frequently, you cannot blame many of us for feeling that all this is too much of a good thing. As the Bard had it in another context, ‘Give me excess of it that, surfeiting / the appetite may sicken and so die.’ Fat chance.

All in all, I have made my decision. If I must watch live sport it has to be world class tennis or Premier League football when the top three or four teams are playing. The action is fast and furious and, by and large, does not take more than a couple of hours. Once in a rare while a Grand Slam 5-setter can drag on for over 5 hours. Some years ago, Nadal and Djokovic played at the Australian Open final which took over 6 hours to complete. They were both offered chairs to sit at the prize distribution ceremony, in case they collapsed. To the best of my knowledge, no one left their seats, such was the gripping fare the two warriors dished out. Did someone ask ‘who won?’ For the record, Djokovic lifted the trophy but that is an irrelevant fact in a game where, to employ that tired old cliché, the game of tennis won. So tennis and a bit of football would be my fallback sports entertainment given that excess cricket has begun to pall. Even the present Championship Trophy is not running to capacity judging by the sparse crowds. We must, however, reserve judgment till the India-Pakistan face-off in Dubai.

All else failing, as a last resort I shall turn to YouTube and watch Donald Trump swaying, dancing and giving all his opponents (and a few friends as well) his words of wisdom. He has virtually crowned himself ‘King of the World’ and we ignore his daily pearls of wisdom at our own peril. If nothing else, he is presently the greatest entertainer bar none. Cricket, did you say? I will take a very long raincheck and at that, I will take a lot of convincing.

Postscript – I called up a good friend of mine who shares my views on cricket and related matters, and invited him for lunch as I had not met him in a while. His reply was curt. ‘Sorry pal, India is playing Pakistan on that day. I shall be glued to my television set and hope there are no power cuts.’

‘Et tu, Brute! Then fall, Caesar!’

Too clever by half

Where do you see yourself ten years from now?

I was reflecting the other day on my first job interview. I am talking about an incident that occurred a tad over 50 years ago. At my stage in life, reflecting on the past plays a big role in one’s daily thought process. It’s all very well for people to lecture you on not being morbidly stuck in the past. ‘Past is past,’ they say. ‘Look ahead to the future. And enjoy the present, live in the moment, in the here and now.’ What these well-meaning friends do not understand is that for people like me the past is the present. I wallow in my small triumphs and smile ruefully at my little failures. Did I actually bag 4 wickets for just 6 runs in that Under 14 Inter-school championship? I must have because even the local newspaper had it on their sports pages. ‘Suresh takes 4 for 6’ was the headline. I still have that cutting somewhere. The unbelievers may go, ‘How do we know it was you? Suresh is a very common name. Is there a photo alongside the report?’ O ye of little faith! My friend, even if there had been a photo, which there wasn’t, my then 13-year-old visage would have been a 100% mismatch to what I look like now. So there.

And how about my winning the elocution competition in school reciting Henry V’s famous St. Crispian’s Day speech? I had the audience consisting of teachers and students in the palm of my hands as I closed on these rousing lines, ‘And gentlemen in England now a-bed / Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here / And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks / That fought with us upon Saint Crispian’s day.’ Some of the spelling and grammar there might look a bit dodgy, but you can blame it on Shakespeare. They couldn’t tell an f from an s in those days. When you hear that the Bard wrote his plays for a fong, you will appreciate what I am saying.

I realise I am rambling on a bit, but that goes with the territory of long-term reflection with rose-tinted glasses. There are so many little turn-offs and diversions. Everything is rosy. Let me get back to that first job interview. I was one among many candidates being interviewed for a management trainee job in a well-known multinational company. Rs.800/- a month stipend during probation was on offer, which was the equivalent of a prince’s ransom in the early 70s. Anyhow, when my name was called, I walked in to the board room confidently, adjusted my tie knot, clutched my file containing my certificates tightly and faced three gentlemen comprising the interview panel. I essayed a bright smile as I wished them good morning and sat down. If I felt nervous, I tried not to show it.

The person sitting in the middle of the threesome, presumably the boss, opened the proceedings. He had a copy of my single page bio-data in his hands, which he peered at intently, turned over the page, found nothing and returned to the typed-up page.

‘So Suresh, what makes you think you are fit to be a management trainee in our company?’

‘I can speak and write well, Sir. That should be useful in any job, don’t you think?’ I thought that was a snappy response. The man in the middle was not impressed.

‘If it’s all the same to you, we will ask the questions.’

‘Sorry Sir, my question was not really meant to be a question eliciting an answer. It was kind of rhetorical, if you get my meaning.’

‘Oh rhetorical, eh? What big words we know!’ This from the bespectacled, balding man to the left of the centre-forward, oozing sarcasm. The sort of person you take an instant dislike to. ‘Are you trying to impress us?’

‘That was the general idea, Sir. I am keen to impress you, but if I crossed the line, the Lakshman rekha so to speak, I apologise and take back the offending rhetorical word.’

The young smarty-pants sitting to the right of the middleman piped in now with, ‘I see you are familiar with the Ramayana. And what word would you like to replace rhetorical with?’

He was clever, this one. He was testing my brag about my knowledge of English. And my Ramayana reference would have irked him further. My brain was whizzing. Rhetorical, synonyms, synonyms. Come on. Ah, got it! ‘Declamatory or florid would work equally well in place of rhetorical Sir, since you asked. I am not trying to impress or show off. There are a few more, but those two should suffice for the moment.’ I sat back in my straight-backed chair, looking smug and quite pleased with myself.

The boss man chimed in. ‘Look we are interviewing you for a management trainee job which calls for skills other than a scholastic knowledge of English and familiarity with the epics. This is not an audition for a stage play. How numerate are you?’

‘I beg your pardon, Sir. Can you elucidate?’

‘Ah ha, not so smart after all. You lectured us on the meaning of rhetorical, but you are stumped when it comes to numerate. Numbers my friend. How proficient are you in analysing graphs, tables, charts, sales projections and so on? What is 377 times 548?’

‘With due respect Sir, I am not Shakuntala Devi. Neither am I autistic. Remember the film Rain Man? Dustin Hoffman. Drop a boxful of toothpicks at random and he could tell you, in a trice, exactly how many toothpicks were lying on the floor. I need time to do the multiplication. You know, 8 times 7 is 56 carry 5 and so on. I did not bring my calculator with me.  If you have studied my bio-data Sir, as I am sure you have, you will find that mathematics was not my strongest suit.’

A wry smile wreathed the left winger’s face. ‘You said a mouthful there, young man. 36% in Algebra, 38% in Geometry and 40% in Arithmetic. Not exactly a budding Ramanujan, leave alone a Shakuntala Devi. How did you even make it to the interview stage? You will cut a sorry figure making a sales presentation to your boss. However, you could be the next Rain Man.’

Now he was hitting below the belt. ‘That is as maybe Sir, but you ought to consider me for Advertising and Public Relations. That could very well be my forte. Not everyone who can, in the blink of an eye, correctly give the answer to 377 times 548 is necessarily a genius. Some of them are pretty dumb. Being numerate is not everything.’

‘You are quite a cocky sort of chap, aren’t you? And that, by the way, is a rhetorical question.’ The Chairperson guffawed at his own poor joke. ‘All right, we shall put you out of your misery. Last question. Where do you see yourself in our company ten years from now?’

That old chestnut. I was forewarned by my friends about this question and I was forearmed. This was, if selected, going to be my first job. I was still four months shy of my 22nd birthday. How on earth could I possibly visualise where I will be ten years down the road? I did not even know what the organisational structure was, to be able to guess what my progress might be.

‘With respect Sir, if recruited I will be more concerned about what I am going to be doing on my first day at work. Projecting myself 10 years down the road requires a level of far-sightedness I do not possess. I don’t have the bandwidth. Perhaps I can work on it as I cut my teeth on the job.’

For once, the Chairman of the Board did not seem put out. ‘Notwithstanding your proclivity for aphorisms, that is an honest answer, young man. If you had said you see yourself as the Managing Director of the company, you would have been out on your ear. Anyhow, you have given us some food for thought. We will let you know in due course.’

‘Out on my ear, food for thought, bit of an aphorisms man yourself, Sir. Thank you and bon appétit.’

I walked out of the room without waiting for a reaction. ‘Cheeky and too clever by half,’ I heard one of the interviewers mutter under his breath. And no, I did not get the job. In the event, I got an opening in an advertising agency in Calcutta. They asked me just one question at the interview. ‘Can you hold a drink?’ At the age of 21, despite my proficiency with aphorisms, I was not sure exactly what that meant but taking no chances, I answered in the affirmative. I got my appointment letter and joined the next day.

‘Alas, poor thing!’

‘Alas, poor Yorick!’

At the outset, let me proffer my humble apologies to Shakespeare, Hamlet and poor Yorick’s skull, which was Hamlet’s object of profuse sympathy. Yorick was the court jester and, I daresay, was a barrelful of laughs as he and his master downed many a tankard of the blushful Hippocrene at the nearby King & Crown. My current quote is of more recent vintage and can be attributed to the mother of the Leader of the Opposition (LOO) Sonia Gandhi, who was caught on camera saying ‘She could hardly speak, poor thing.’ The present Grande Dame of the Grand Old Party, Sonia Ji was moved to express her heartfelt commiserations in those ill-chosen words to the President of India after a long and presumably tiring speech to open the Budget session at the Lok Sabha prior to Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman occupying centre stage. Whether she meant to say the President’s speech was physically tiring to President Murmu, or was found tiresome to Sonia Gandhi and her near and dear ones, we shall never know. Tiring and tiresome. Two words that sound so similar and yet convey very different meanings. Evidently the lady thought she was speaking off the record outside the Parliament’s impressive precincts but you know what they say, ‘Stately columns have ears.’ Off the record, but on tape. Next thing anyone knew, her somewhat innocuous jibe, if indeed it was a jibe, had become a national cause célèbre.

The ruling BJP party, with an eye on the main chance, moved in on Mrs. Gandhi’s remark like a pride of starving lions circling their victim prior to the kill. With the all-important Delhi state elections very much on everyone’s mind, every morsel of opportunity thrown at them had to be snapped up avidly. The Congress Party was already reduced to the margins and viewed as a bit player at the forthcoming hustings, with AAP and the BJP being the perceived frontrunners. This off-the-cuff remark on the President by Sonia Ji was a godsend to the BJP. What is more it might also have spelt the death-knell for the Congress Party as far as the Delhi elections were concerned. Not that they were in with a shout in the first place.

 It’s all politics, of course. The BJP leaders would have known full well that Mrs. Gandhi did not really mean to throw an insulting broadside at the President. However, why look a gift horse in the mouth when it is handed to them on a platter? That is the way they would have looked at it and who can blame them in our dog-eat-dog world of political backbiting. As for the materfamilias of the Gandhi family, she could have exercised a bit more restraint, seeing as she was confronted by a hostile battery of media scribes and cameras. Her choice of words, probably not meant to wound, came out all wrong. One unguarded moment, one word out of place and there is hell to pay. At least her son, who is quite accustomed to dropping bricks over the years, the remnants to be picked up by his minions, could have advised his mother on the perils of sounding off in front of microphones and cameras. ‘Hot mics’ they are commonly referred to and they can singe, as the lady from Vicenza discovered to her cost. The scion of the Congress Party’s first family was untouched by all the brouhaha. He strutted about in his white tee-shirt, flexing his biceps, with nary a care about the consequences of his mummy’s, possibly unintended, faux pas. As far as Rahul Baba was concerned, it was comme si comme ca, if his French was upto scratch. Just another day at the office.

I do not wish to take a political stance on this. When it comes to dropping bricks, our politicians across party lines, frequently keep saying things when they would have been better off maintaining a discreet silence. Then again, discretion may be the better part of valour, but our politicians, for the most part, are not conspicuous for being discreet or valorous. A few years ago, the health minister of Bihar, Mangal Pandey found nothing wrong in Patna’s Indira Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences asking applicants to declare their virginity as, in his wisdom, virgin meant unmarried and pure. Else their admission could have been in jeopardy. Surely, nothing to make a song and dance about, he felt. Since the report was short on detail, one assumes the stricture applied to female applicants only.

The late Samajwadi Party supremo, Mulayam Singh Yadav sought clemency while opposing the death penalty for a gang of thugs facing the noose on a gangrape and murder charge with this throwaway line, ‘boys will be boys, they commit mistakes.’ He even went on to cast aspersions on the victims suggesting that the girls frequently come on to the boys and when things get ugly, they cry rape.

A junior minister in the BJP government some years ago, termed all south Indians as blacks. This was in response to a group of Africans in Delhi being assaulted within an inch of their lives by a mob for alleged acts of cannibalism, which resulted in Indians being branded as racists in an international forum. While that might have gone down as a wild generalisation, the minister’s response was startling to say the least. ‘If we were racist, why would we have all the entire South (India) which is… you know Tamil Nadu, you know Karnataka and Andhra… why do we live with them? We have black people all around us.’ Just priceless.

Lest you get the wrong impression, this foot-in-mouth disease is not confined just to our country, notwithstanding that this piece was prompted by an Italian lady who has made India her home. It has an endemic quality where the good and the great have been known to commit unpardonable solecisms in such far-off lands as Great Britain and the United States. Allow me to give you a few samplers. The late Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, was a past master at saying things that would doubtless have made Queen Elizabeth II blush a nice shade of crimson. Whether he intended to or not is not for me to surmise. To a young policewoman wearing a bullet-proof vest, he commented, ‘You look like a suicide bomber.’ At a reception at Buckingham Palace for a group of British Indians, the Duke peered at the name badge of businessman Atul Patel and remarked, ‘There’s a lot of your family in tonight.’ Addressing a group of British students during a royal visit to China he said, ‘If you stay here much longer, you’ll all be slitty eyed.’ Sino-British relations might have taken a nosedive after that gem. Finally, here’s one on which the whole world would have agreed with the great man, ‘British women can’t cook.’ A serial offender, the Duke.

American Presidents are no slouches when it comes to saying the wrong things at the most inopportune moments. During the Nato summit in Washington in 2024, President Biden introduced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as ‘President Putin.’ A remark he might have had a huge problem living down. Anyhow he stepped down from the Presidential race not long after. Long before that, when Richard Nixon famously declared, ‘I am not a crook’ after being found guilty in the Watergate scandal, people did not know whether to laugh or cry. In 1992, President Geoge H.W. Bush Sr. vomited on the lap of Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa during a state dinner in Tokyo. Reports suggest the meal consisting of raw salmon and caviar made his stomach turn. My tummy would have behaved no differently. The American contingent, including the First Lady Barbara, was sick to its stomach after the incident.

Clearly, Sonia Ji is in distinguished company. As the Congress Party apparatchiks mull over their former President’s unfortunate choice of words while apparently expressing sympathy for India’s President Murmu, they will also be wondering what went wrong in the just concluded Delhi assembly elections. The party could not even muster a single seat and lost their deposit in a staggering 67 out of 70 seats. Evidently, this represents a double hat-trick of ducks in Delhi for the party. A rare, if dubious, record. One’s heart bleeds.

Alas, poor Sonia!

The Budget. A taxing exercise.

The goodies are in the bag

 It’s clearly a budget. It’s got a lot of numbers in it. George W. Bush.

It is that time of the year again. In just a few days, February 1st to be exact, India’s Finance Minister Ms. Nirmala Sitharaman will step up to the podium in the Lok Sabha to deliver the nation’s 75th Annual Budget for 2025. For a record 8th time, if I am any judge. If past practice is anything to go by, she will clear her throat in front of the microphone (this carries more gravitas than saying ‘hullo, hullo, mike testing, mike testing, 1,2,3’ etc) as the clock chimes 11 times ante meridiem. She will be attired in an understatedly elegant fashion, befitting a lady of her exalted and dignified position amongst the nation’s comity of cabinet ministers and parliamentarians. The Prime Minister will be seated by himself, watching his FM avuncularly. As is her wont, Ms. Sitharaman will speak with pursed lips even as an enraptured and anticipatory public will await the goodies and freebies that will, with any luck, be disgorged from her purse strings. Or not. But not before she recites the statutory stanza from some Tamil poet or the other, which no one will follow. That said, it’s eyes down for a full house, as one of my favourite British comedians Tony Hancock used to say.

India’s captains of industry and commerce as well as several self-appointed financial and business analysts will be seen huddled around tables in various television channels parsing and analysing every single statement that the Minister makes, its likely positive or negative impact on an unsuspecting public. The Nifty and Sensex readings, visible at the bottom of our idiot box screens, will jump up and down like a yo-yo with every provision Ms. Sitharaman announces. The late Mr. Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, whose pearls of wisdom on the budget and the bourses we so eagerly awaited will be sorely missed, but there will be several others of considerable standing who will be sitting uneasily and holding forth and, at times, fifth and sixth as well.

These worthies will be taking delicate bites of their cookies, samosas and cream crackers generously supplied by the channels as they provide their own learned sound bites, hydrated with endless cups of hot beverages. Each of these panellists will be armed with something that looks like a mini tennis racket, without the gut strings naturally, bearing numbers from 1 to 10 in descending order of approval, 10 signifying ecstatic to 1 being pathetic, which they will wave at the screens on being asked to score each of the provisions announced. All of which will be collated by the television anchor and a final verdict on Ms. Sitharaman’s long peroration will be delivered. For the record, I have rarely, if ever, come across an industry magnate say anything negative about the budget. After all, he has to deal with ministry officials over the next 12 months and knows only too well which side his bread is buttered on. A final tally of 7.5 over 10 is about par for the course.

Once the budget has been delivered to the nation Ms. Sitharaman, proudly displaying her carefully designed and embroidered crimson-red budget valise, will pose with her posse of brainy departmental secretaries for the cameras, relief and triumph clearly visible in their broad smiles. Then it’s off to be interviewed by a dozen or so television channels, who will all ask her the same questions only to be given the same answers. Of course, the FM will not fail to acknowledge the inspiring leadership role of her Prime Minister after every second sentence. The TV channels will also buttonhole the heads of various chambers of commerce who will unfailingly shower encomiums on the FM’s far-sightedness. In the immortal words of The Beatles, it will have been A Hard Day’s Night for the Finance Ministry.

Enter stage left, the leaders of various opposition political parties, to whom the television channels will scamper to get their take on the ruling dispensation’s budget provisions. Every single member of the opposition, regardless of the party in question, will roundly condemn the budget. ‘This is a pro-rich budget,’ they will scream. ‘Nothing for the poor, the farmers and the middle-class. Prices are soaring and the people are struggling’ they will intone in unison. ‘This budget speech was written by Ambani and Adani and faithfully read out by the FM,’ will be the final salvo. ‘But Sir, she has provided huge tax relief to the salaried class, isn’t that something?’ the microphone-waving correspondent will butt in. The riposte is swift. ‘Ah, you fell for that, did you? My friend, she is raising corporate taxes and levying additional imposts on air and train travel. You think we are idiots?’ Well, that’s not for me to venture an opinion. You know what you are. Come on folks, tell us something we haven’t heard before.

We are then left with the man and woman on the street or the Common Man, as the late, beloved cartoonist R.K. Laxman collectively portrayed India’s much trodden-on average citizen. Here is a cross section of India’s citizens giving us the benefit of their views after the budget speech. At least, that is how I think they will respond, as the budget itself is yet to be presented.

Mumbai housewife – ‘Yes, yes. Every year, my husband returns home from work on February 1st in a foul mood because of something or the other the Finance Minister said which will affect his take-home pay. He says we will have to cut down on household expenses. No more chocolates for my daughter, only toffees. Eating out only once a month. Thinking of selling his second-hand Maruti and buying a two-wheeler. But he is very silent on his one bottle of Old Monk rum every week!’

IPL debutant – ‘I was bought out at the auction for Rs. 52 lakhs. And Rishabh Pant got Rs.18 crores. I am only 17 years old and now my team’s accountant tells me I have to pay the government at least 30% of my pay plus some additional amount because of the budget. What is a budget anyway? And who is this Ms. Sitharaman? I have never read a newspaper in my life. On my mobile? I only stream Instagram and TikTok. Rishabh Pant hasn’t read a newspaper either. He’s got a shock coming. I was thinking of giving up cricket, but my coach told me to concentrate and score 50+ runs in ten balls and my pay will instantly go up to Rs. 3 crores. The accountant can then guide me on how to avoid paying taxes. So I am practicing hard to hit sixes. Maybe I will consult Mahi Bhai. They pay him crores just to face 4 balls and hit three sixes.’

Bollywood double – ‘I am the poor mug who doubles for Shah Rukh Khan and all the other Khans in Bollywood whenever a dangerous, life-threatening sequence has to be shot. Whether it is going toe to toe with a man-eating tiger or saving some damsel in distress from a rapacious villain with only one thing on his mind, I get to do all the dirty work while the Khans rest comfortably on their laurels. They pay me a measly Rs.20,000/- per two-hour shift (and no accident insurance), while the Khans get paid sums with so many zeroes my head spins dizzyingly. The Bollywood Doubles Union put in an appeal last year to the FM to give us doubles some special benefits in the budget but she took no notice. Instead, actors like the Khans get all kinds of sops in case some nut tries to stab them in the middle of the night. We’ve got doubles for that as well.’

Managing Director of a large corporate house – ‘Life is hard as it is. My family and I have to get by on just Rs.52 crores annually after taxes. I have to maintain four chauffeur driven cars, my daughter and son are in Stanford and Harvard respectively, my wife has had to reduce her foreign holidays with her friends to just once a month. It is simply not good enough. Then there are the three servants, two cooks and four security guards, all of them costing a bomb. And I really wish we had stopped at two Golden Retrievers and one German Sheperd. And one of them is pregnant. That’s a lot of doggies but no, my daughter had to have the two Pekinese to play with on her holidays home. The Budget just ignores people like us who contribute to the wealth of this nation after slogging 90 hours every week. I have sought an urgent meeting with the Finance Secretary. No response so far.’

There are so many more tragic tales like this. Will the Finance Minister look into all such genuine grievances and help the distressed citizens of this great nation while delivering the Budget speech? You can do it Madam. Loved the sari you wore last year. Let us Make India Great Again (MIGA). I can hardly wait for February 1st.

 Larsen’s Toubrohmanyan          

The chief honcho of one of India’s largest corporate entities, S.N. Subrahmanyan of Larsen & Toubro, has riled a whole lot of people for making a couple of ill-advised statements recently. At the outset, I wish to make it abundantly clear that, notwithstanding that he spells his surname the same way as I do, we are in no way related or connected. He has been reported as saying two things that got the goat of many observers. Firstly, that all companies should make their staff slog for 90 hours every week, Sundays presumably being optional, or even included. It is not clear from the reports if public holidays such as Holi, Deepavali, Christmas and Id, as per Chairman Subrahmanyan’s diktat, should also be barred from his employees’ enjoying a bit of R & R with their families and friends.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s slave driver, Simon Legree of Uncle Tom’s Cabin notoriety, comes irresistibly to mind. As if cracking the whip all year round was not bad enough, the company’s chief whip (a serendipitously apposite description) went on to question the dubious pleasure of sitting at home and staring at his wife all the livelong day. To be fair to the man, he added that this will be equally tiresome for the wife who might wish for nothing more than for her hubby to leave her alone to take out their second chauffeur-driven limousine, indulge in a bit of luxury shopping and live it up at a gossipy hen party with other happily marooned ladies. Closely reasoned, but his pronouncements did not sit well with the public at large.

As usually happens when such quotes, perhaps given in a hasty and irreflective moment get wide traction, the author of said quote is likely to claim that that was not what he meant and that he has been quoted out of context. A standard, anodyne response. Pull the other one, say I. Things said on the spur of the moment are often to be repented at leisure. Anyhow, a clutch of other top-notch executives around the country joined the fray and, for the most part, decided to play safe and delivered Subrahmanyan a broadside for making unsustainable demands on an already overburdened work force. Be that as it may, speaking for myself, I am happily retired with no personal stake in matters concerning an employee’s working hours. During my working days, weekends were sacrosanct, when bosses and their ambitious underlings headed for the golf links at the crack of dawn, played 9 holes and headed straight for the bar, leaving their golf widows at home. A rarest of rare ‘hole in one’ earned you free drinks from your colleagues for as long as your liver would allow. We live in far more straitened times. This is based on reliable hearsay as I was not remotely interested in golf and was, for the most part, abstemious.

The newspapers, social media and most television channels have already covered this corporate contretemps with varying observations, some deadly serious and others, trying to look at the lighter side of things. As an irrelevant aside, a former friend and colleague of mine who had worked briefly at Larsen & Toubro, told me that the company employed so many Sindhis and Tamilians that they code-named it Larsani and Toubrohmanyan! True story, which inspired the headline to this piece.

The fact that the wife-staring utterance attracted far more media attention than the ‘90-hour week’ remark, speaks for itself. For myself, I thought it might be a good idea to talk to a few people from different walks of life and see what they had to say about the idea of employees working round the clock, in a manner of speaking, till they are ready to drop. I was privy to a few interesting responses. All names have been changed lest they face the almighty wrath of other workaholic bosses, who are already in a foul mood thanks to their self-imposed, near-suicidal work schedules. I kept the wife-staring bit out as it would have been a needless, frivolous diversion, many of them unmarried or in live-in relationships. My question to all the respondents was the same. ‘It is being mooted that 90-hour workweeks, 7 days a week, should be the way to go if companies are to perform to their optimal potential. How do you react to this idea?’

Sheela (IT Group Head) – ‘The idea, as you so fancifully put it, is not compatible with live brain activity. As it is, in the IT industry, we work our backsides off speaking to people with indecipherable accents in Texas, Ohio, Manchester, Warsaw and many other cities with punishing time-zone differences. Punsishing for us, that is. Frankly, I have no idea how many hours a week my team puts in, even allowing for Sundays off. If it is not more than 90 hours, I will change my name, from the changed name you have already given me. Good night. Or is it good morning?’

Walter (Ad Agency Creative Consultant) – ‘Clients always want to look at everything for approval, from press ad layouts to film storyboards, instantly. Wanted yesterday, as we say in the agency. Which leaves us with no option but to burn the candle at both ends, rum and pizzas supplied on the house and billed as part of creative fees to client. Workaholism feeds on alcoholism. Next morning, bleary-eyed, we make the presentation to the client who rejects the whole damn thing, asks us to come up with a fresh iteration, this time wanted (you guessed it) the day before yesterday.  90 hours, did you say? Piece of cake. After this, we are all hotfooting it to Sri Lanka, Goa being too crowded – for plenty of rum and to sleep like so many logs and work off our giant hangover.’

Ramachandran (Bank Manager) – ‘The order just came in from H.O. 90 hours to be logged each week. I have decided to keep the branch open till 11 pm every day. That way, at least the customers will benefit by taking advantage of the extended banking hours. I have put in a requisition for a sanction of free dinner for all the branch employees. Many of them will then go to sleep, including the security guards. Particularly the security guards, who sit all day long oiling their rifles with no bullets in them. That will put anyone to sleep. The neighbourhood thugs are already planning a big heist. See if I care.’

Avantika (Travel Agency Executive) – ‘As it is everyone is booking their flight tickets online and we have very little work to do. Hardly anyone comes to us for domestic or international bookings. I spend all my time with a group of IT nerds, specially hired for the purpose, to try and virally infect the computer programmes of all the online travel companies, thus forcing customers to come to our office for help. So far, no luck. Brick and mortar will lose out to digital space. We will be lucky if some of us are not apprehended by the cops sooner than later. Can you blame us? If we are forced to work for 90 hours a week, we have to keep ourselves busy. By hook or by crook.’

Banerjee (Retired MNC Director) – ’90 hours? What does that even mean? See my young friend. Back in the day, we clocked in at our office at 9 am sharp. Some good-natured flirting with the secretary, followed by going through some files, dictating a few letters when the tea service arrives. Discuss office politics with a colleague, attend an internal meeting on sales targets, kick some butt, then it’s time for lunch. A short drive home for a bite, a quick gin and tonic and a few drags on my pipe. Followed by a catnap on the heirloom chaise-longue, and back in the office at 3 pm. Somehow the time passes and it’s back home by 5.30 pm, all set to go to the club for a round of bridge with plenty of liquid nourishment. Care for a small one for the road?’

There you have it. You have heard the voice of the people. They are being asked to work for almost 55% of their week hours, all because the man at the corner office has had his fill of staring at his better half with little to show for it. I can do no better than quote the opening lines from Welsh poet William Henry Davies’ Leisure, ‘What is this life if, full of care / We have no time to stand and stare.’