A league apart

When I was visiting Mumbai recently, my friend Rakesh Joshi called me.

“I have to tell you about the revolution taking place in Indian sports!” he gushed over the phone.  We agreed to meet that evening for a drink.

When I reached the bar, Joshi was already there, a half-consumed mug of beer in front of him.

As soon as I sat down he said, “Do you know how the sports scene in India is transforming into something spectacular and mind-boggling at the same time?”

He hadn’t even asked me what I would like to drink! This told me how excited he was because otherwise this polite man would never have committed such a breach of etiquette. However, I was not excited and my etiquette was very much intact; so I calmly ordered a mug of beer for myself, waited for it to arrive, took a deep sip, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and then spoke.

“No, I have no idea. Please tell me.”

“Simple concept,” he said, “Learning from the huge success of the IPL – the Indian Premier League – for cricket, Indians have launched similar leagues to promote other games.”

“But I thought the IPL was a success because cricket is popular,” I said.

“So did I! But we were wrong. It appears that cricket is popular because IPL is a success!”

I frowned and tried to concentrate. “I’m sorry, I don’t get that. What do you mean, cricket is popular because IPL is a success?”

“Not sure,” he said briskly. “It sounded nice, so I said it.But what I do mean to say is that by shortening the format of cricket, IPL has made cricket even more popular. And it’s doing the same to badminton and kabbadi and hockey!”

Been There Bungled That

A piece of news: my book Been There Bungled That is being published by Random House.

Been There Bungled That is a funny look at our everyday journey through life – navigating career, managing relationships, encountering people and traveling outside our comfort zone (physically and metaphorically) – through the eyes of the fictitious Jags Srinivasan.

In a way Jags is a reflection of me. Many of his fictional fumbles are based on my real-life ones. Like him, I studied engineering not out of passion for the field but because I made it into a good engineering college. However Jags and I are not alone in this regard. A large section of my class applied for engineering because that was what you did after school. And if you secured admission, you went on to study engineering (though ‘study’ may be a strong term to apply to what I did in engineering college).

However, even with my strong penchant to goof things up, I would have found it difficult to stumble through five distinct careers in one lifetime. After a brief stint in engineering, I settled upon marketing and have restricted my bungling to this field ever since. But I’ve made Jags jump from engineering to consultancy to advertising to marketing to banking because it’s funnier that way. And while ‘truth may be stranger than fiction’, fiction should at least be funnier.

Which brings me to the next point: Been There Bungled That is unabashedly a humour book. It may offer you pearls of wisdom that redefine your life and make you a better person, both physically and philosophically, but most likely it won’t. However I hope it will make you laugh. And that’s not a bad thing, I say. Consider how many things don’t make you laugh today. The price of onions, corruption in high places, corruption in low places, delayed flights, stressful job, pollution, irritating co-workers… I could go on, but you can read today’s newspaper to get a better idea of what I’m talking about. If George Mallory climbed Mount Everest ‘because it is there’, I write humour for the opposite reason: because it is not there in everyday life, at least not in sufficient quantity to enjoy.

As a famous person said – or if he didn’t, he should have – ‘Humour may not make the world spin but it will help keep you from spinning off it.’

If you would like to read the book (and you missed all the links I helpfully provided above!) you can pre-order it here.

“Thank you for not apologizing”

A few days ago, I was to meet my wife at a mall at 6.30 p.m. but what with having to deal with a few delicious last-minute emails at work, it was 6.50 by the time I reached there.

“Thank you for coming early,” I said.

“I didn’t come early,” she said coldly. “You came late.”

“Yes!” I said enthusiastically. “Thank you for waiting.”

She didn’t take it well. “At least have the decency to say ‘I’m sorry’,” she said in a clear healthy voice that carried to nearby shoppers.

“Don’t embarrass us in front of all these people,” I hissed, lowering my voice. I clutched her elbow and took her to a secluded area in the mall. “Etiquette has evolved, woman. You need to keep up with the times. It’s no longer chic to say ‘I’m sorry’. The right form nowadays is to thank the other person for the inconvenience.”

“What nonsense are you talking?” she said.

“I don’t blame you for not understanding,” I said. “I myself picked up this new form of manners only in the last week.” I began to relate what I had learnt.

The problem with tennis in America

In my youth – that is, a few years ago – America was known for Big Business, Disneyland and Tennis. Having observed (with mild amusement) British aristocrats in white flannels and full-sleeved shirts moving sedately around the court and sipping tea afterwards, the Americans took up tennis with gusto and soon began to dominate it. In the eighties and nineties the US had so soundly established its supremacy over the game that it was difficult to find a non-American male player in the top 10. Today things are reversed: Sam Querrey, the highest-ranked American man, is at Number 20!

When I visited the United States two weeks ago, I came face-to-face with the problem with tennis in the country. I landed on the weekend of the Rome Masters 1000 tennis finals, a much-anticipated repeat of the phenomenal rivalry between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, Obviously the first thing I did, even before ironing my shirts, was to check out the room television set.

“Wow, digital!” I said and began looking for Tennis, the only channel showing the match. After clicking through the hotel’s 43 channels three times, I rang the concierge.

“I can’t find the Tennis channel on television.”

“Which channel, Sir?” he asked.

“Tennis.”

“How do you spell it?”

After I helped him out, he checked while I waited.

“Sorry, Sir. We have many options: entertainment, sports, news, travel… we just don’t seem to have this particular channel.” His tone conveyed a hint of reproach at my unreasonable, exotic request. “Perhaps you’d like to watch the action-packed thriller Taken 2 available ‘on demand’?”