“Will it happen or not? I guess it’s called off. Well, how can they ask our passport details and still call it off? Till we sit on that damn flight, nothing is confirmed.”
These were the usual water cooler talks in the office when the plan to go for a vacation was mooted. Being a company sponsored trip, there was always an element of credibility to the plan, however, as it kept delaying, the idea seemed distant…. Until the mail to give our passport details appeared on our inboxes. So where were we going? Thailand.
Yes, I can see your smirk there as you read the last word. The smirk which everyone associates with a Thailand trip. And to give you a hint, it’s got nothing to do with the different kind of fishes that are sold in the markets there! I did get my fair share of remarks about going there. For, the party animals of Bangalore, it seemed Mecca. For the older generations of the family, Thailand meant elephants and beaches. But how I viewed it? My first trip outside India- nothing less and definitely nothing more.
The company didn’t disappoint us and made it happen. Tickets were done throughout in Thai Airways. So it was going to be a circuit of Bangalore-Bangkok-Phuket-Bangalore for 5 days. Not bad at all. After bouts of close shaves with forex card activation, I packed and dusted my 8-year-old passport for its first kiss with the stamp.
Pre reading Notes –
1 Circa 2017
2 The clarity of the pictures are limited by my Redmi 4’s camera
Terminal Talks!
Day 1- Sat 15th Jun 2200 IST
Kempegowda International Airport Bangalore
The menu of the day at the lounge in KIA was Thai curry. What a start to the trip! Thanks to a promotional tie up of the lounge with my debit card issuer, I got a free entry to the lounge. So after a heavy dinner in anticipation of starvation for the next few days owing to my vegetarianism, I settled down on the cosy couch and greeted all my colleagues who started trickling into the lounge. The lounge by then had become the de facto assembling point for us. I looked around. Every awake soul in the lounge was busy with their phones. Probably, that’s when the idea of this travelog struck me. I wanted to do a digital detox along with my tour. Minimal social media usage. After all, I went there for sightseeing, not sight sharing :). The midnight flight to Bangkok was a Boeing 777 with a lucky window seat assigned for me. Kill joy came in the form of the flight’s huge wing which was the only thing I could see from the window. Time to take off.
KIA- Customary first photo of the trip. I seriously can’t think of a caption for this. DIY
Rookie mistakes…
Day 2- Sun 16th Jun 0600 Local Time
Suvarnabhumi International Airport Bangkok
Never follow the queue. The biggest lesson my sleepy brain was taught after landing at Bangkok. Thanks to the untimely meal in the flight, I had spent my entire flight watching the movie Moonlight and random Just For Laugh Gags episodes. So the eagerness to see the fluffy hotel bed made me forget that I had to get a visa on arrival. Stood 30 minutes in a queue to find out from the stewardess that I had to go elsewhere. Consoling that it was a rookie mistake, I stood on the fast track queue for getting the visa on arrival. “1200 bahts please”, said a voice behind counter and within few minutes my passport was returned with a receipt for 1000 bahts for the visa. Time vs money is an exponential decay curve everywhere in the world, folks. The airport was huge. The delay in taking my baggage meant, it was kept outside the carousel for the next batch. Found it like an abandoned kid and joined the group for the cab that would take us to our hotel. As we exited the airport, 3 Toyota Commanders were waiting to take us to our hotel at Sukhumvit area. The place felt strangely at home for me. Reason, it had a Chennai-esque humidity about it at 630 am. Take that!
Our taxis to hotel. If Maruti Omni is awaits the patent for being the official kidnapping vehicle of India, Toyota Commander should be Thailand’s.Every vehicle was a petrol one. And most of them are AT’s there.So no clutch-jutting in all the cab rides there.Thaba=Thai+Dhaba. Watched the climax of an epic Thai movie with weird CG while our taxi was being re-fuelled.
Paddy fields. It’s a rice country. Sticky rice would be my go-to dish for the next 4 days.
This is legit. We gift them so much back here. Was an eye-opener for me too.
Yes! The sight my droopy eyes had been waiting for.
Sometimes he can flex his back by 45 degrees and upper cut a Brett Lee’s in-swinging bouncer and sometimes he can be dropped four times and still get out in the fifth time without scoring a hundred in a big game. Sometimes he can single-handedly win a couple of matches in Sharjah and sometimes he can even be called the ‘white elephant.’ With a career spanning more than my current age, when the man tells you his life story you can’t but get all macro in your head every time you read across names in the range of Sunil Gavaskar and Shane Shillingford. So wide is the horizon of this man’s story that the book, by default, is expected to be bogged down by the width versus depth argument. Does Mr. Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar’s 500-page Playing It My Way manage to address this issue like he did with the bouncer? Let’s repeat history and take it to the third umpire!
I have always found autobiographies are sometimes the best and the worst ways to spend your time. The duality stems from the fact that this genre can be as engaging as fiction if you are aware of the author or it can make you give up within 20 pages. Let me explain this a bit more (from another camera angle!) In a fiction there is generally a thread or a storyline that binds you towards the book and engages you to turn pages. But what is its equivalent binding factor in biographies/autobiographies? For long, I have been thinking it is the chance to get into the head of the celebrity who is penning it, find out the ideals he/she keeps for himself and , moreover, getting inspired by these ideals by juxtaposing them with your life. But after reading this one, I feel the real engaging factor is the ‘meta’ story behind every story we have seen. A Rashomon effect of recent past. In this aspect the book is just too ‘unputdownable’ as the story is etched in the deepest echelons in the brain of all cricket fans in the country. After all, the author is SRT!
Interestingly, I feel, the same factor acts against the book at many points. It is but natural for a sportsperson to follow a chronological course in the book. However, it would have been nice to read a non-linear narration of all the famous scenes of cricket’s favourite child. It might have given him the freedom to connect to each of the poignant moments in his life better without coherence concerns. In fact, Ian Thorpe, in his autobiography This Is Me, starts it from when he decides to make a comeback at 2012 Olympics after retirement and keeps shuffling back when needed.
Nevertheless, the book is very much like a typical Sachin innings. It is described throughout the book that he likes to play his shots early in his innings to settle down. Similarly, his book also starts off breezily describing his childhood and his nondescript lifestyle. The words are crisp and the flow is consistent. In fact I didn’t have to use the dictionary at any point while reading the book. Good work there, publishers! Like quick singles there are also few jibes comparing his childhood life with his current life. For a person who has visually perceived many occasions in his life, his memory is pretty accurate.
The important deterrent in the flow comes when you reach the ‘International Career’ phase in the book. It is segmented match-wise and many times these segments compromise on the overall flow. For a cricket follower like me, it can prove helpful as I was able sift ahead to a particular series if I felt like doing so. (I did that only once when I went to see the 2001 Eden Gardens Test and cursed myself for tasting the cake when it’s half baked!) Like his usual abdominal guard-adjusting jerk between balls, Sachin mentions exactly one sentence about every person when his/her name appears for the first time. And sometimes, things get too statistical and follows the pattern “match result-my output-match output-injuries, if any”. That is where I feel the co-writer has taken the driver’s seat. Although, Boria Majumdar does a nice job of polishing off Sachin’s perspective of every match with relevant match facts, he could not stop the monotone from setting in and as a reader I was left waiting for the familiar matches to appear in the book.
Just like his innings on a tough pitch, the major portion of the middle one-third made me restless to such an extent that I had to resort to thumbing the image sections before I resumed. As a true Sachin fan who has been following him keenly from 1998, I must admit most part of the book sounded like a long Sachin Tendulkar interview with known anecdotes. Even the sensitive part where he wore goggles to hide his tears while practising after his father’s demise is a well-known one. So I was partly let down by all these moments. When you are following a celebrity crazily, you definitely dive into autobiographies thinking it can offer more than biographies, newspaper columns, interviews and the internet about your idol. Whether it was a conscious effort to be politically correct or the sheer width of the timeline, it was definitely the ‘nervous’ ninety zone of the book!
The last third of the book (right after 2007 World Cup) is where it makes a superb gain of flow according to me. Perhaps because it was during these times he wasn’t playing a complete season and there are many surprising and serious reflections towards his family, injuries and life in general. The ‘so-called’ controversial part also features in this section. Here, at some places he skips the usual timeline sequence in some chapters which, I feel, is due to the need to express better without the chronology constraint. The time between 2007 and 2011 World Cup and the change in the dressing room environment as seen by the master during this period was lapped up faithfully by yours truly because this was the period when I followed Indian cricket to the fullest. Going by the analogy, this part of the book is post-century Sachin at his best!
I have always felt that using the count of centuries as a major yardstick to assess a player in India started because of Sachin Tendulkar. It was always easier to improve our cricket stat-knowledge by comparing other players’ stats with Sachin’s rather than analysing it absolutely. We started following his contemporaries like Ricky Ponting, Brian Lara, Steve Waugh, and Jacques Kallis better in this fashion. Throughout the book, I noticed the importance Sachin gives to his centuries and the pride he derives out of each one. This simply goes to show the high standard he had kept for himself in every outing in his long career.
As we near stumps, one thing stands out throughout the book albeit in an ethereal manner. It is Sachin’s constant push towards performing at his best every time. Also, it interesting to observe how he reads every game. The increase in narration of this part as the book progresses also tells a great deal about the acumen he has developed through experience. The best part of the book according me is the minuscule section where he defines ‘presence’. I feel this definition forms the crux his method to soak up the eternal pressure he had to endure during his playing days.
As I do not believe in ordinal rating of books which ,in my opinion, is useless, I give a green signal from my side for this one and the player remains unbeaten in this innings as we both wait for the next day’s play…..!
In the wake of a national arousal that was result of an inglorious mortification of human rights orchestrated by a group of Indian citizens on another citizen who was different from them on the basis of sex, there has been a sudden crank of necks towards the laws of our land and the its validity in the current scenario. Blame it on the selective sensationalization by the media or cultural interludes on the issue, as per laws of nature, this was bound to come.
Not many would have noticed another headline that flashed on the newspapers few weeks before this incident where an Indian couple was sued by the Norweign Government on charges of Parental Abuse towards the children. This may have also featured as the headline of a Norweign newspaper but the light thrown at them would have been equivalent to the gang rape case in India.
But for most of us, this was an eye-opener. We were amazed at the severity with which the grills of law panned a couple when their son reported to, rather shared with his teacher his mom’s reproach when he wetted himself in the school bus. The most satirical part of the issue was that the Indian High Commission was dragged into the matter for their acquittal.
But just like how we quickly check our shoes when a PT teacher pulls our friend out for not polishing his shoe, this issue has thrown a glare at parenting laws in India. And our shoes are not polished too!
Looking at a logical point of view, any sort of harassment of a particular community would be brought to the limelight by the organizations working for the betterment of that community. For example, many women’s organizations were involved in the recent protests vociferously because the victim belongs to their community. This implies that a there should be a community for children too. One may ask there are organizations for children. But, unfortunately, their members are fathers and mothers at home and not sons and daughters.
This problem appears bleak right now because there is no enough sensitivity attached to this issue. But there are two reasons why this problem can be dangerous. One, it is prevalent in all classes of people. In case of middle and upper class, it is attached with the ever- strong academic pressure, emotional harassment whereas in the lower echelons of the society, it might take the form of work burdens. In a vague view, honour killings are also belongs to the territory of Parental Abuse. The second reason can be viewed from a psychological angle. The effect of an emotional abuse at a young age would have its sediments on the attitude of the child in future.
The issue has not only drawn us towards law enforcements on parenting but also on the historical approach of parenting in India. It is a question of the behavioural patterns of Indian parents. Smearing the words like tradition and culture as an ointment after burning a child with a cigarette is not acceptable for a rational mind. Also, no tradition would vouch for this approach.
As a watchful Indian youth my cry would be for the sensitising the future parents or the children of our country. A sudden impose of a strict parenting law may lead to manipulations. Laws should be trickled on this subject with a sufficient buffer of sensitizing. Then at one point we will be in a position where there is a full-fledged and a functional law against Parental Abuse on Children in India where its citizens are sensitive to their wards.
I sincerely hope that this article will be branded irrelevant in the future! J
Looks like my second post has smiled. It is said that the great Indian Cricket Captain Mohammed Azaruddin had this superstition of not using any new gear for international fixtures. Following the footsteps of the wristy player, I have posted a poem which I wrote a year back. Okay now let me blurt out….I haven’t got any idea to post so I serve you the old one first. My previous sentences are just publicity gimmicks. 🙂
I have already shared this in my FB page. So guys who have read it and are currently viewing this post, you can have the luxury (?) of reading it here again.
I am planning to post an simplified version (basically to explain this cacophony!) as my next post. After all, our Wikipedia has Simplified English as a language option.
Disclaimer- A long one! Read it if you are not having your boyfriend(s!) or girlfriend(s!) pinging you in other tab(s!) 😛
The poem is recursive in nature i.e. it is about itself. Thus, it becomes the journey of a pen on a paper !
In the world so cold, ground snow-white
With its twin called sky,
He drags himself in his path of plight
By the command of his lord so high.
He meanders through the snowy path
With his bleeding feet
Leaving a remarkable trail
All through his beat.
As this devil thinks too hard
Why on hell is he here?
He remembers only his sorcerer’s charm (Yours faithfully)
Before he disappeared.
He turns back to check his trail
Sees his blue blood all the way
“Can I complete this tormenting sail?”
With blood- draining gut, now he prays. (refill!)
Halting to catch some breath
He is unable to and still moves ahead
Soon he realises the happening myth
His sorcerer’s charm still controls his armoured head. (cap)
The eternity of snow now ends
Bordering the brown desert sand. (Table)
But the charm on him still impends
He is dragged back to the former land.
Fatigue intrigues his mighty grit
As his precious blood is wasted
With searing pain now he writhes
With his rubber boxers ‘waisted’! (grip)
On the way, he thinks of his home
And his lass and her floral presence, (Camlin Flora!!!)
His kids who can erase any thought he has borne (Erasers of course)
With their white hearts that ne’er ceases to glisten.
All of a sudden he soars high into a black hole
But is held between wet, white gates. (Ma teeth)
Barricading a slippery road.
In seconds he lands back
And runs for life
Skating through the snow racks
To cease his bloody strife.
He strolls, jogs, skates, wobbles and even flips
Dancing to his master’s tune
Finally he jumps high, lands and almost slips (Full stop)
And eyes a familiar sand dune.
Guessing his mission is accomplished
He dares stepping ahead
He is soon punished
With his armour off his head.
He jumps onto his armour-cap
That seals his Lobster blood.
His master stops the charm-tap
And he flies home diking a happy flood.
With his lass on the balcony of his round palace
Under the spongy sleepy sun
He wonders why he was commissioned.
She looks at him inquiringly but he doesn’t return.
As he gazes the neighbouring Snowland,
He notices his still-present trail and his doubt dies.
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