Wikipedia describes Sir Arthur C. Clarke as a novelist, inventor and futurist. It would be doing the man grave injustice to even attempt an obituary. The only way I see fit to bid adieu is to probably post one of his stories, which was recommended by a classmate, and soon became a favorite.
THE STAR
by Arthur C. Clarke
Copyright © Arthur C. Clark
From lucis.net/stuff/clarke/star_clarke.html
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Even popular or escape fiction may have a thematic basis; it may make a comment about some aspect of the human condition. Although escapist literature (like the following science fiction story) is written primarily for entertainment, it can also broaden our own awareness of ourselves and our lives. The best stories achieve a balance between enlightenment and entertainment, skillfully blending the theme and the elements.
"The Star" makes a strong statement about human nature by blending literary elements like character, setting, and conflict with an entertaining narrative. Although the story is set in the future, Clarke's realistic characters still behave like people you may know. But their behavior is spurred by an event that is both familiar and puzzling.
Here are some things to keep in mind as you read.
o The main character in this story is a Jesuit monk, a member of the Society of Jesus (a Catholic religious order founded by Ignatius Loyola in 1534).
o Jesuits devote their lives to missionary and educational work and are also known as the intellectuals of the church.
o The story makes a reference to a painting by Paul Rubens (1577-1640), a Flemish artist who painted a well-known picture of Loyola.
o The story mentions two Latin phrases. The first, AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIUM, means "For the greater glory of God." The second is the Exercitia Spiritualia, which means "Spiritual Exercises," a book written by Loyola, which the Jesuits use for guidance.
Everything that happens in this story--the actions and words of the characters, the setting, the slow-but-sure progress to the surprise ending--points to a central idea which is a statement about the relationship we each have to God; it's a concern that is as old as human nature itself.
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It is three thousand light years to the Vatican. Once, I believed that space could have no power over faith, just as I believed that the heavens declared the glory of God's handiwork. Now I have seen that handiwork, and my faith is sorely troubled. I stare at the crucifix that hangs on the cabin wall above the Mark VI Computer, and for the first time in my life I wonder if it is no more than an empty symbol.
I have told no one yet, but the truth cannot be concealed. The facts are there for all to read, recorded on the countless miles of magnetic tape and the thousands of photographs we are carrying back to Earth. Other scientists can interpret them as easily as I can, and I am not one who would condone that tampering with the truth which often gave my order a bad name in the olden days.
The crew are already sufficiently depressed: I wonder how they will take this ultimate irony. Few of them have any religious faith, yet they will not relish using this final weapon in their campaign against me--that private, good-natured, but fundamentally serious, war which lasted all the way from Earth. It amused them to have a Jesuit as chief astrophysicist: Dr. Chandler, for instance, could never get over it. (Why are medical men such notorious atheists?). Sometimes he would meet me on the observation deck, where the lights are always low so that the stars shine with undiminished glory. He would come up to me in the gloom and stand staring out of the great oval port, while the heavens crawled slowly around us as the ship turned end over end with the residual spin we had never bothered to correct.
"Well, Father," he would say at last, "it goes on forever and forever, and perhaps Something made it. But how you can believe that Something has a special interest in us and our miserable little world--that just beats me." Then the argument would start, while the stars and nebulae would swing around us in silent, endless arcs beyond the flawlessly clear plastic of the observation port.
It was, I think, the apparent incongruity of my position that caused most amusement to the crew. In vain I would point to my three papers in the Astrophysical Journal, my five in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. I would remind them that my order has long been famous for its scientific works. We may be few now, but ever since the eighteenth century we have made contributions to astronomy and geophysics out of all proportion to our numbers. Will my report on the Phoenix Nebula end our thousand years of history? It will end, I fear, much more than that.
I do not know who gave the nebula its name, which seems to me a very bad one. If it contains a prophecy, it is one that cannot be verified for several billion years. Even the word nebula is misleading: this is a far smaller object than those stupendous clouds of mist--the stuff of unborn stars--that are scattered throughout the length of the Milky Way. On the cosmic scale, indeed, the Phoenix Nebula is a tiny thing--a tenuous shell of gas surrounding a single star.
Or what is left of a star . . .
The Rubens engraving of Loyola seems to mock me as it hangs there above the spectrophotometer tracings. What would you, Father, have made of this knowledge that has come into my keeping, so far from the little world that was all the universe you knew? Would your faith have risen to the challenge, as mine has failed to do?
You gaze into the distance, Father, but I have traveled a distance beyond any that you could have imagined when you founded our order a thousand years ago. No other survey ship has been so far from Earth: we are at the very frontiers of the explored universe. We set out to reach the Phoenix Nebula, we succeeded, and we are homeward bound with our burden of knowledge. I wish I could lift that burden from my shoulders, but I call to you in vain across the centuries and the light years that lie between us.
On the book you are holding the words are plain to read. AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM, the message runs, but it is a message I can no longer believe. Would you still believe it, if you could see what we have found?
We knew, of course, what the Phoenix Nebula was. Every year, in our galaxy alone, more than a hundred stars explode, blazing for a few hours or days with thousands of times their normal brilliance before they sink back into death and obscurity. Such are the ordinary novae--the commonplace disasters of the universe. I have recorded the spectrograms and light curves of dozens since I started working at the Lunar Observatory.
But three or four times in every thousand years occurs something beside which even a nova pales into total insignificance.
When a star becomes a supernova, it may for a little while outshine all the massed suns of the galaxy. The Chinese astronomers watched this happen in A.D. 1054, not knowing what it was they saw. Five centuries later, in 1572, a supernova blazed in Cassiopeia so brilliantly that it was visible in the daylight sky. There have been three more in the thousand years that have passed since then.
Our mission was to visit the remnants of such a catastrophe, to reconstruct the events that led up to it, and, if possible, to learn its cause. We came slowly in through the concentric shells of gas that had been blasted out six thousand years before, yet were expanding still. They were immensely hot, radiating even now with a fierce violet light, but were far too tenuous to do us any damage. When the star had exploded, its outer layers had been driven upward with such speed that they had escaped completely from its gravitational field. Now they formed a hollow shell large enough to engulf a thousand solar systems, and at its center burned the tiny, fantastic object which the star had now become--a White Dwarf, smaller than the Earth, yet weighing a million times as much.
The glowing gas shells were all around us, banishing the normal night of interstellar space. We were flying into the center of a cosmic bomb that had detonated millennia ago and whose incandescent fragments were still hurtling apart. The immense scale of the explosion, and the fact that the debris already covered a volume of space many billions of miles across, robbed the scene of any visible movement. It would take decades before the unaided eye could detect any motion in these tortured wisps and eddies of gas, yet the sense of turbulent expansion was overwhelming.
We had checked our primary drive hours before, and were drifting slowly toward the fierce little star ahead. Once it had been a sun like our own, but it had squandered in a few hours the energy that should have kept it shining for a million years. Now it was a shrunken miser, hoarding its resources as if trying to make amends for its prodigal youth.
No one seriously expected to find planets. If there had been any before the explosion, they would have been boiled into puffs of vapor, and their substance lost in the greater wreckage of the star itself. But we made the automatic search, as we always do when approaching an unknown sun, and presently we found a single small world circling the star at an immense distance. It must have been the Pluto of this vanished solar system, orbiting on the frontiers of the night. Too far from the central sun ever to have known life, its remoteness had saved it from the fate of all its lost companions.
The passing fires had seared its rocks and burned away the mantle of frozen gas that must have covered it in the days before the disaster. We landed, and we found the Vault.
Its builders had made sure that we would. The monolithic marker that stood above the entrance was now a fused stump, but even the first long-range photographs told us that here was the work of intelligence. A little later we detected the continent-wide pattern of radioactivity that had been buried in the rock. Even if the pylon above the Vault had been destroyed, this would have remained, an immovable and all but eternal beacon calling to the stars. Our ship fell toward this gigantic bull's-eye like an arrow into its target.
The pylon must have been a mile high when it was built, but now it looked like a candle that had melted down into a puddle of wax. It took us a week to drill through the fused rock, since we did not have the proper tools for a task like this. We were astronomers, not archaeologists, but we could improvise. Our original purpose was forgotten: this lonely monument, reared with such labor at the greatest possible distance from the doomed sun, could have only one meaning. A civilization that knew it was about to die had made its last bid for immortality.
It will take us generations to examine all the treasures that were placed in the Vault. They had plenty of time to prepare, for their sun must have given its first warnings many years before the final detonation. Everything that they wished to preserve, all the fruit of their genius, they brought here to this distant world in the days before the end, hoping that some other race would find it and that they would not be utterly forgotten. Would we have done as well, or would we have been too lost in our own misery to give thought to a future we could never see or share?
If only they had had a little more time! They could travel freely enough between the planets of their own sun, but they had not yet learned to cross the interstellar gulfs, and the nearest solar system was a hundred light-years away. Yet even had they possessed the secret of the Transfinite Drive, no more than a few millions could have been saved. Perhaps it was better thus.
Even if they had not been so disturbingly human as their sculpture shows, we could not have helped admiring them and grieving for their fate. They left thousands of visual records and the machines for projecting them, together with elaborate pictorial instructions from which it will not be difficult to learn their written language. We have examined many of these records, and brought to life for the first time in six thousand years the warmth and beauty of a civilization that in many ways must have been superior to our own. Perhaps they only showed us the best, and one can hardly blame them. But their words were very lovely, and their cities were built with a grace that matches anything of man's. We have watched them at work and play, and listened to their musical speech sounding across the centuries. One scene is still before my eyes--a group of children on a beach of strange blue sand, playing in the waves as children play on Earth. Curious whiplike trees line the shore, and some very large animal is wading in the shadows yet attracting no attention at all.
And sinking into the sea, still warm and friendly and life-giving, is the sun that will soon turn traitor and obliterate all this innocent happiness.
Perhaps if we had not been so far from home and so vulnerable to loneliness, we should not have been so deeply moved. Many of us had seen the ruins of ancient civilizations on other worlds, but they had never affected us so profoundly. This tragedy was unique. It is one thing for a race to fail and die, as nations and cultures have done on Earth. But to be destroyed so completely in the full flower of its achievement, leaving no survivors--how could that be reconciled with the mercy of God?
My colleagues have asked me that, and I have given what answers I can. Perhaps you could have done better, Father Loyola, but I have found nothing in the Exercitia Spiritualia that helps me here. They were not an evil people: I do not know what gods they worshiped, if indeed they worshiped any. But I have looked back at them across the centuries, and have watched while the loveliness they used their last strength to preserve was brought forth again into the light of their shrunken sun. They could have taught us much: why were they destroyed?
I know the answers that my colleagues will give when they get back to Earth. They will say that the universe has no purpose and no plan, that since a hundred suns explode every year in our galaxy, at this very moment some race is dying in the depths of space. Whether that race has done good or evil during its lifetime will make no difference in the end: there is no divine justice, for there is no God.
Yet, of course, what we have seen proves nothing of the sort. Anyone who argues thus is being swayed by emotion, not logic. God has no need to justify His actions to man. He who built the universe can destroy it when He chooses. It is arrogance--it is perilously near blasphemy--for us to say what He may or may not do.
This I could have accepted, hard though it is to look upon whole worlds and peoples thrown into the furnace. But there comes a point when even the deepest faith must falter, and now, as I look at the calculations lying before me, I know I have reached that point at last.
We could not tell, before we reached the nebula, how long ago the explosion took place. Now, from the astronomical evidence and the record in the rocks of that one surviving planet, I have been able to date it very exactly. I know in what year the light of this colossal conflagration reached our Earth. I know how brilliantly the supernova whose corpse now dwindles behind our speeding ship once shone in terrestrial skies. I know how it must have blazed low in the east before sunrise, like a beacon in that oriental dawn.
There can be no reasonable doubt: the ancient mystery is solved at last. Yet, oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Friday, February 15, 2008
Selection Issues
On a sunny Saturday morning, the 11th of January 1992, 19 year old Sourav Chandidas Ganguly walked out to bat for the first time in a one-day international. His meagre contribution (three runs off 13 balls), and rumours of an ‘attitude problem’ kept him out of the team for the next four and a half years. It took an injury to Sanjay Manjarekar - and Navjot Singh Sidhu’s dramatic mid-tour return to India - for Ganguly to resurrect his floundering career with an epic ton on test debut at Lords, in 1996.
Modern Indian cricket history is littered with instances of talented youngsters, who play a handful of matches, and are then pushed to the sidelines. Thankfully, Ganguly was not one of them. There are cricketers who sparkle for a while, lose form, and are then shunned into obscurity. Then there are others, who despite their tremendous potential, for some reason, never get to wear the national cap. And it is perfectly possible that at least some of these players could have been match-winners in their own right, if given a chance at the right time.
There is a tendency to push talented youngsters into the deep end, when they are not ready yet – an obsession with ‘child prodigies’. Among these are Vinod Kambli, Parthiv Patel and Irfan Pathan. Making his debut at 18, Kambli, arguably more talented than the great Sachin Tendulkar, faded out of the scene by 1996. Pathan, fresh out of the under-19 team, was suddenly the new poster-boy of Indian cricket. A lean patch followed, and he had to suffer from the ignominy of being the first ever Indian cricketer to be sent back mid-way through a tour. Parthiv - Test cricket’s youngest wicket-keeper at 17 – might never regain his place in the team.
Sunil Gavaskar rightly pointed out that selection to the Indian team largely depends on how young a player is. Unlike Ashley Noffke, who found a place in the Australian XI at 30, someone like Subramaniam Badrinath might never get capped. With a first class average of 57, Badrinath should’ve been a shoo-in for national selection in a young team with a shaky middle-order. The 27 year old from Chennai, who has been the backbone of his state team for quite some time now, made his first class debut in 2000. He came close to selection early last year, but didn’t quite make it. An excellent fielder at point, Badrinath also has a decent strike rate of 80. Consistently among the top run-getters in the domestic circuit, and one of the few technically correct batsmen, he has a strong case for selection.
While it is a nice sight for any team to have young players, one should either persist with them – like Arjuna Ranatunga did with a young Marvan Atapattu, who got a string of single-digit scores in his first few matches – or not have them in the team until they are ready. Persisting with a consistently under-performing youngster is hardly a plausible solution in the Indian set-up, with the media constantly baying for blood. An ideal situation would be to have a player who is mentally tough, and ready to face the rigors of international cricket. Sachin Tendulkar or Yuvraj Singh are once-in-a-generation players. The others have to play enough domestic cricket to be confident on the big stage.
Even if older players do well in the first few games they play, the focus still remains on bringing in younger players. This parochial mentality has the dual disadvantage of putting the breaks on the career of the older player (Joginder Sharma’s name comes to mind), to blood a youngster, possibly before he is ready. Dinesh Mongia, even VVS Laxman – arguably the most elegant among his contemporaries – have had to grapple with this.
The focus now is ostensibly on building a young team for the 2011 World Cup. The old guard has to make way for tomorrow’s heroes. Many young players will come and go. A lucky few might return from the depths of ignominy, Gangulyesque, like the proverbial Phoenix, and leave behind a blaze of glory.
Anyway, as Peter Roebuck aptly put it, it is foolish to plan for three years ahead, because in one-day cricket, a lot can change in a matter of months. As team India looks to dethrone the mighty Australians, the obsession with half-baked youngsters might just be the Achille’s heel.
Adveith Nair
Modern Indian cricket history is littered with instances of talented youngsters, who play a handful of matches, and are then pushed to the sidelines. Thankfully, Ganguly was not one of them. There are cricketers who sparkle for a while, lose form, and are then shunned into obscurity. Then there are others, who despite their tremendous potential, for some reason, never get to wear the national cap. And it is perfectly possible that at least some of these players could have been match-winners in their own right, if given a chance at the right time.
There is a tendency to push talented youngsters into the deep end, when they are not ready yet – an obsession with ‘child prodigies’. Among these are Vinod Kambli, Parthiv Patel and Irfan Pathan. Making his debut at 18, Kambli, arguably more talented than the great Sachin Tendulkar, faded out of the scene by 1996. Pathan, fresh out of the under-19 team, was suddenly the new poster-boy of Indian cricket. A lean patch followed, and he had to suffer from the ignominy of being the first ever Indian cricketer to be sent back mid-way through a tour. Parthiv - Test cricket’s youngest wicket-keeper at 17 – might never regain his place in the team.
Sunil Gavaskar rightly pointed out that selection to the Indian team largely depends on how young a player is. Unlike Ashley Noffke, who found a place in the Australian XI at 30, someone like Subramaniam Badrinath might never get capped. With a first class average of 57, Badrinath should’ve been a shoo-in for national selection in a young team with a shaky middle-order. The 27 year old from Chennai, who has been the backbone of his state team for quite some time now, made his first class debut in 2000. He came close to selection early last year, but didn’t quite make it. An excellent fielder at point, Badrinath also has a decent strike rate of 80. Consistently among the top run-getters in the domestic circuit, and one of the few technically correct batsmen, he has a strong case for selection.
While it is a nice sight for any team to have young players, one should either persist with them – like Arjuna Ranatunga did with a young Marvan Atapattu, who got a string of single-digit scores in his first few matches – or not have them in the team until they are ready. Persisting with a consistently under-performing youngster is hardly a plausible solution in the Indian set-up, with the media constantly baying for blood. An ideal situation would be to have a player who is mentally tough, and ready to face the rigors of international cricket. Sachin Tendulkar or Yuvraj Singh are once-in-a-generation players. The others have to play enough domestic cricket to be confident on the big stage.
Even if older players do well in the first few games they play, the focus still remains on bringing in younger players. This parochial mentality has the dual disadvantage of putting the breaks on the career of the older player (Joginder Sharma’s name comes to mind), to blood a youngster, possibly before he is ready. Dinesh Mongia, even VVS Laxman – arguably the most elegant among his contemporaries – have had to grapple with this.
The focus now is ostensibly on building a young team for the 2011 World Cup. The old guard has to make way for tomorrow’s heroes. Many young players will come and go. A lucky few might return from the depths of ignominy, Gangulyesque, like the proverbial Phoenix, and leave behind a blaze of glory.
Anyway, as Peter Roebuck aptly put it, it is foolish to plan for three years ahead, because in one-day cricket, a lot can change in a matter of months. As team India looks to dethrone the mighty Australians, the obsession with half-baked youngsters might just be the Achille’s heel.
Adveith Nair
Player profile: Anil Kumble
"I knew that I had to go back home because of this injury, so I thought I'll give it one last try," said Kumble, after coming out to bowl with a fractured jaw, and scalping Lara in Antigua, 2002. This sentence probably captures everything Anil Kumble, India’s newest Test Captain, has stood for. With 573 wickets in 119 tests, and 337 wickets in 271 one day internationals, Kumble has broken every Indian bowling record. No other cricketer has had a career more downplayed than Anil Kumble. No other cricketer has probably won more matches for India.
Kumble, who started out as a medium pacer, relies more on bounce and variations than spin. A right-arm leg spinner, he is best known for his flipper. He also has a good faster delivery, which has fetched him many wickets. Many batsmen, over the years, have aired their views on playing Kumble on Indian pitches, describing it as the most difficult challenge. While many people have criticized Kumble’s style, his fast turners have given him tremendous success.
Kumble has often been criticized for his inability to perform abroad, but he silenced his critics with an incredible performance in the 2003-04 series against Australia. After being dropped for the first test, and coming into the side owing to an injury to Harbhajan Singh, Kumble took 23 wickets in three matches. He employed greater variation in flight, and a much improved googly, to emerge as the highest wicket taker for either side. This, after his place in the Indian squad was under scrutiny.
Kumble will perhaps be best remembered for his ten-wicket haul against Pakistan in Delhi in 1999, when he became only the second bowler to take all ten wickets in an innings. He will also fondly remember his hundred at The Oval. The crowd and the Indian dressing room erupted, as Kumble raised his bat, and acknowledged his maiden ton, which was seventeen years, and 118 test matches in the making.
Kumble retired from one day cricket, following India’s dismissal showing in the 2007 World Cup. Although he was vice-captain for some time, he was never a serious contender for captaincy. He only captained India once in one-dayers, a match the Indians won.
A month before his 37th birthday, Anil Kumble, was named the test captain for the home series against Pakistan, something he described as ‘the greatest honour’. He picked up seven wickets and the man of the match award, in a match that India won comfortably.
Over the years, many people have written him off. But he keeps proving his detractors wrong. Kumble, who is third on the all-time list of the highest wicket takers in test matches, might not be the ‘classical leg-spinner’, but he is, without a doubt, the greatest trier India has ever hard.
Adveith Nair
Kumble, who started out as a medium pacer, relies more on bounce and variations than spin. A right-arm leg spinner, he is best known for his flipper. He also has a good faster delivery, which has fetched him many wickets. Many batsmen, over the years, have aired their views on playing Kumble on Indian pitches, describing it as the most difficult challenge. While many people have criticized Kumble’s style, his fast turners have given him tremendous success.
Kumble has often been criticized for his inability to perform abroad, but he silenced his critics with an incredible performance in the 2003-04 series against Australia. After being dropped for the first test, and coming into the side owing to an injury to Harbhajan Singh, Kumble took 23 wickets in three matches. He employed greater variation in flight, and a much improved googly, to emerge as the highest wicket taker for either side. This, after his place in the Indian squad was under scrutiny.
Kumble will perhaps be best remembered for his ten-wicket haul against Pakistan in Delhi in 1999, when he became only the second bowler to take all ten wickets in an innings. He will also fondly remember his hundred at The Oval. The crowd and the Indian dressing room erupted, as Kumble raised his bat, and acknowledged his maiden ton, which was seventeen years, and 118 test matches in the making.
Kumble retired from one day cricket, following India’s dismissal showing in the 2007 World Cup. Although he was vice-captain for some time, he was never a serious contender for captaincy. He only captained India once in one-dayers, a match the Indians won.
A month before his 37th birthday, Anil Kumble, was named the test captain for the home series against Pakistan, something he described as ‘the greatest honour’. He picked up seven wickets and the man of the match award, in a match that India won comfortably.
Over the years, many people have written him off. But he keeps proving his detractors wrong. Kumble, who is third on the all-time list of the highest wicket takers in test matches, might not be the ‘classical leg-spinner’, but he is, without a doubt, the greatest trier India has ever hard.
Adveith Nair
Indo-Pak cricket: The era of dwindling intensity, and war metaphors!
9th March 1996. Pakistan was well on course for a win in their World Cup Quarter Final against India. At113/1, stand-in captain Aamer Sohail decided to vent a little aggression on Venkatesh Prasad. Having smashed the medium pacer for a boundary through the covers off the previous ball, he signalled a spot, and pointed with his bat, as if to say, “I’ll hit the next one there too!” Sohail was clean-bowled off the next ball, triggering a batting collapse, which ultimately helped India win the match by 39 runs. The Chinnaswamy stadium erupted with chants of ‘Pakistan hai hai’, and posters of Pakistan great Javed Miandad were burnt. Wasim Akram couldn’t return home for days after the loss.
Those were the days when an India-Pakistan match was nothing less than a war on a 22 yard strip. When every single Indian victory was like a battle won, and every single Pakistani victory an apt reply to the humiliation of 1971. As Mike Marqusee said, “The (Indian) fans seemed keener to celebrate a Pakistani humiliation, rather than a strong Indian performance.” It was no different in 1999, when soldiers on both sides of the border prayed for a victory to boost their morale. Or in 2003, when the Indian army Chief called the Indian team to congratulate them on a victory over Pakistan in the World Cup. It did not matter if the Indian team lost every other match, a win over Pakistan was all that the average fan wanted.
Since 2004, however, Indo-Pak encounters have become a regular phenomenon. Fans no longer have to wait for years to see a match. The obvious result is, of course, the lack of intensity, and (thankfully) the war metaphors. While fans burst crackers and burnt effigies after wins in the 1996, 1999 and 2003 World Cups, hardly a single cracker was burst when Dhoni’s men won the 2007 series against Pakistan. Contrast this with the news reports of people being injured, even killed (in rioting in Ahemdabad), during violent displays of joy after India’s win, in 2003.
The lack in intensity can be attributed to the lack of personalities, especially in the Pakistan team. From a team that boasted of Javed Miandad, Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis, among others, they now field a team, which has players like Shoaib Malik and Kamran Akmal. Though these players are definitely match winners in their own right, not one can claim to be a ‘character’. These are not guys who can set the field alight with their ‘colourful antics’. The Pakistan team of the late 80’s and the 90’s was packed with players, who would force the most hardcore Indian fans to grudgingly acknowledge their talents, and even give them the occasional standing ovation!
Shoaib Akhthar recently admitted that the lack of these characters and regular matches have led to a lack of intensity. He said that it would be best for the teams to meet not more than once in four years. This is, of course, not to suggest that the commercial viability of the matches have declined. Sponsors literally queued up to buy airtime for the Indo-Pak final in the Twenty20 World Cup. Even the ongoing series has no dearth of sponsors.
Since the 2003 World Cup, there has been a vast change in how these matches are viewed. The 2004 series was even billed as the ‘Friendship series’. The matches are no longer described as ‘proxy wars’. Even war metaphors are seldom used. People now look forward to matches with other countries as much as Indo-Pak matches. “India-Australia contests”, says Boria Majumdar, “have taken on a greater edge.” It is indeed encouraging that fans now think of Australia as the biggest rival!
The intensity might have dwindled, but the players still give it their all. An Indo-Pak match is inevitably filled with twists and turns. It is a roller- coaster ride, and a nail-biting, exciting one at that. One still wonders what could have been, though. As Majumdar says, “If the Indo-Pak partition could be reversed, the Australian hegemony in modern cricket might never have been a force to reckon with.”
Adveith Nair
Those were the days when an India-Pakistan match was nothing less than a war on a 22 yard strip. When every single Indian victory was like a battle won, and every single Pakistani victory an apt reply to the humiliation of 1971. As Mike Marqusee said, “The (Indian) fans seemed keener to celebrate a Pakistani humiliation, rather than a strong Indian performance.” It was no different in 1999, when soldiers on both sides of the border prayed for a victory to boost their morale. Or in 2003, when the Indian army Chief called the Indian team to congratulate them on a victory over Pakistan in the World Cup. It did not matter if the Indian team lost every other match, a win over Pakistan was all that the average fan wanted.
Since 2004, however, Indo-Pak encounters have become a regular phenomenon. Fans no longer have to wait for years to see a match. The obvious result is, of course, the lack of intensity, and (thankfully) the war metaphors. While fans burst crackers and burnt effigies after wins in the 1996, 1999 and 2003 World Cups, hardly a single cracker was burst when Dhoni’s men won the 2007 series against Pakistan. Contrast this with the news reports of people being injured, even killed (in rioting in Ahemdabad), during violent displays of joy after India’s win, in 2003.
The lack in intensity can be attributed to the lack of personalities, especially in the Pakistan team. From a team that boasted of Javed Miandad, Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis, among others, they now field a team, which has players like Shoaib Malik and Kamran Akmal. Though these players are definitely match winners in their own right, not one can claim to be a ‘character’. These are not guys who can set the field alight with their ‘colourful antics’. The Pakistan team of the late 80’s and the 90’s was packed with players, who would force the most hardcore Indian fans to grudgingly acknowledge their talents, and even give them the occasional standing ovation!
Shoaib Akhthar recently admitted that the lack of these characters and regular matches have led to a lack of intensity. He said that it would be best for the teams to meet not more than once in four years. This is, of course, not to suggest that the commercial viability of the matches have declined. Sponsors literally queued up to buy airtime for the Indo-Pak final in the Twenty20 World Cup. Even the ongoing series has no dearth of sponsors.
Since the 2003 World Cup, there has been a vast change in how these matches are viewed. The 2004 series was even billed as the ‘Friendship series’. The matches are no longer described as ‘proxy wars’. Even war metaphors are seldom used. People now look forward to matches with other countries as much as Indo-Pak matches. “India-Australia contests”, says Boria Majumdar, “have taken on a greater edge.” It is indeed encouraging that fans now think of Australia as the biggest rival!
The intensity might have dwindled, but the players still give it their all. An Indo-Pak match is inevitably filled with twists and turns. It is a roller- coaster ride, and a nail-biting, exciting one at that. One still wonders what could have been, though. As Majumdar says, “If the Indo-Pak partition could be reversed, the Australian hegemony in modern cricket might never have been a force to reckon with.”
Adveith Nair
Thursday, September 20, 2007
This is a wonderful piece by Michael Gartner, editor of newspapers large and small and president of NBC News. In 1997, he won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. It is well worth reading, and a few good chuckles are guaranteed.
"My father never drove a car. Well, that's not quite right. I should say I never saw him drive a car.
He quit driving in 1927, when he was 25 years old, and the last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet.
"In those days," he told me when he was in his 90s, "to drive a car you had to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet, and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life and enjoy it or drive through life and miss it."
At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in: "Oh, bull----!" she said. "He hit a horse."
"Well," my father said, "there was that, too."
So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car. The neighbors all had cars -- the Kollingses next door had a green 1941 Dodge, the Van Laninghams across the street a gray 1936 Plymouth, the Hopsons two doors down a black 1941 Ford -- but we had none.
My father, a newspaperman in Des Moines, would take the streetcar to work and, often as not, walk the 3 miles home. If he took the streetcar home, my mother and brother and I would walk the three blocks to the streetcar stop, meet him and walk home together.
My brother, David, was born in 1935, and I was born in 1938, and sometimes, at dinner, we'd ask how come all the neighbors had cars but we had none. "No one in the family drives," my mother would explain, and that was that.
But, sometimes, my father would say, "But as soon as one of you boys turns 16, we'll get one." It was as if he wasn't sure which one of us would turn 16 first.
But, sure enough, my brother turned 16 before I did, so in 1951 my parents bought a used 1950 Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts department at a Chevy dealership downtown.
It was a four-door, white model, stick shift, fender skirts, loaded with everything, and, since my parents didn't drive, it more or less became my brother's car.
Having a car but not being able to drive didn't bother my father, but it didn't make sense to my mother.
So in 1952, when she was 43 years old, she asked a friend to teach her to drive. She learned in a nearby cemetery, the place where I learned to drive the following year and where, a generation later, I took my two sons to practice driving. The cemetery probably was my father's idea. "Who can your mother hurt in the cemetery?" I remember him saying more than once.
For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was the driver in the family. Neither she nor my father had any sense of direction, but he loaded up on maps -- though they seldom left the city limits -- and appointed himself navigator. It seemed to work.
Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a devout Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that didn't seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of marriage.
(Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire time.)
He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20 years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustin's Church. She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back until he saw which of the parish's two priests was on duty that morning. If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her home.
If it was the assistant pastor, he'd take just a 1-mile walk and then head back to the church. He called the priests "Father Fast" and "Father Slow."
After he retired, my father almost always accompanied my mother whenever she drove anywhere, even if he had no reason to go along. If she were going to the beauty parlor, he'd sit in the car and read, or go take a stroll or, if it was summer, have her keep the engine running so he could listen to the Cubs game on the radio. In the evening, then, when I'd stop by, he'd explain: "The Cubs lost again. The millionaire on second base made a bad throw to the millionaire on first base, so the multimillionaire on third base scored."
If she were going to the grocery store, he would go along to carry the bags out -- and to make sure she loaded up on ice cream. As I said, he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and she was 88 and still driving, he said to me, "Do you want to know the secret of a long life?"
"I guess so," I said, knowing it probably would be something bizarre.
"No left turns," he said.
"What?" I asked.
"No left turns," he repeated. "Several years ago, your mother and I read an article that said most accidents that old people are in, happen when they turn left in front of oncoming traffic.
As you get older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth perception, it said. So your mother and I decided never again to make a left turn."
"What?" I said again.
"No left turns," he said. "Think about it. Three rights are the same as a left, and that's a lot safer. So we always make three rights."
"You're kidding!" I said, and I turned to my mother for support. "No," she said, "your father is right. We make three rights. It works." But then she added: "Except when your father loses count."
I was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road as I started laughing.
"Loses count?" I asked.
"Yes," my father admitted, "that sometimes happens. But it's not a problem. You just make seven rights, and you're okay again."
I couldn't resist. "Do you ever go for 11?" I asked.
"No," he said "If we miss it at seven, we just come home and call it a bad day. Besides, nothing in life is so important it can't be put off another day or another week."
My mother was never in an accident, but one evening she handed me her car keys and said she had decided to quit driving. That was in 1999, when she was 90.
She lived four more years, until 2003. My father died the next year, at 102.
They both died in the bungalow they had moved into in 1937 and bought a few years later for $3,000. (Sixty years later, my brother and I paid $8,000 to have a shower put in the tiny bathroom -- the house had never had one. My father would have died then and there if he knew the shower cost nearly three times what he paid for the house.)
He continued to walk daily -- he had me get him a treadmill when he was 101 because he was afraid he'd fall on the icy sidewalks but wanted to keep exercising -- and he was of sound mind and sound body until the moment he died.
One September afternoon in 2004, he and my son went with me when I had to give a talk in a neighboring town, and it was clear to all three of us that he was wearing out, though we had the usual wide-ranging conversation about politics and newspapers and things in the news.
A few weeks earlier, he had told my son, "You know, Mike, the first hundred years are a lot easier than the second hundred." At one point in our drive that Saturday, he said, "You know, I'm probably not going to live much longer."
"You're probably right," I said.
"Why would you say that?" He countered, somewhat irritated.
"Because you're 102 years old," I said.
"Yes," he said, "you're right." He stayed in bed all the next day.
That night, I suggested to my son and daughter that we sit up with him through the night.
He appreciated it, he said, though at one point, apparently seeing us look gloomy, he said:
"I would like to make an announcement. No one in this room is dead yet"
An hour or so later, he spoke his last words:
"I want you to know," he said, clearly and lucidly, "that I am in no pain. I am very comfortable. And I have had as happy a life as anyone on this earth could ever have."
A short time later, he died.
I miss him a lot, and I think about him a lot. I've wondered now and then how it was that my family and I were so lucky that he lived so long.
I can't figure out if it was because he walked through life; or because he quit taking left turns.
"My father never drove a car. Well, that's not quite right. I should say I never saw him drive a car.
He quit driving in 1927, when he was 25 years old, and the last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet.
"In those days," he told me when he was in his 90s, "to drive a car you had to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet, and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life and enjoy it or drive through life and miss it."
At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in: "Oh, bull----!" she said. "He hit a horse."
"Well," my father said, "there was that, too."
So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car. The neighbors all had cars -- the Kollingses next door had a green 1941 Dodge, the Van Laninghams across the street a gray 1936 Plymouth, the Hopsons two doors down a black 1941 Ford -- but we had none.
My father, a newspaperman in Des Moines, would take the streetcar to work and, often as not, walk the 3 miles home. If he took the streetcar home, my mother and brother and I would walk the three blocks to the streetcar stop, meet him and walk home together.
My brother, David, was born in 1935, and I was born in 1938, and sometimes, at dinner, we'd ask how come all the neighbors had cars but we had none. "No one in the family drives," my mother would explain, and that was that.
But, sometimes, my father would say, "But as soon as one of you boys turns 16, we'll get one." It was as if he wasn't sure which one of us would turn 16 first.
But, sure enough, my brother turned 16 before I did, so in 1951 my parents bought a used 1950 Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts department at a Chevy dealership downtown.
It was a four-door, white model, stick shift, fender skirts, loaded with everything, and, since my parents didn't drive, it more or less became my brother's car.
Having a car but not being able to drive didn't bother my father, but it didn't make sense to my mother.
So in 1952, when she was 43 years old, she asked a friend to teach her to drive. She learned in a nearby cemetery, the place where I learned to drive the following year and where, a generation later, I took my two sons to practice driving. The cemetery probably was my father's idea. "Who can your mother hurt in the cemetery?" I remember him saying more than once.
For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was the driver in the family. Neither she nor my father had any sense of direction, but he loaded up on maps -- though they seldom left the city limits -- and appointed himself navigator. It seemed to work.
Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a devout Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that didn't seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of marriage.
(Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire time.)
He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20 years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustin's Church. She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back until he saw which of the parish's two priests was on duty that morning. If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her home.
If it was the assistant pastor, he'd take just a 1-mile walk and then head back to the church. He called the priests "Father Fast" and "Father Slow."
After he retired, my father almost always accompanied my mother whenever she drove anywhere, even if he had no reason to go along. If she were going to the beauty parlor, he'd sit in the car and read, or go take a stroll or, if it was summer, have her keep the engine running so he could listen to the Cubs game on the radio. In the evening, then, when I'd stop by, he'd explain: "The Cubs lost again. The millionaire on second base made a bad throw to the millionaire on first base, so the multimillionaire on third base scored."
If she were going to the grocery store, he would go along to carry the bags out -- and to make sure she loaded up on ice cream. As I said, he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and she was 88 and still driving, he said to me, "Do you want to know the secret of a long life?"
"I guess so," I said, knowing it probably would be something bizarre.
"No left turns," he said.
"What?" I asked.
"No left turns," he repeated. "Several years ago, your mother and I read an article that said most accidents that old people are in, happen when they turn left in front of oncoming traffic.
As you get older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth perception, it said. So your mother and I decided never again to make a left turn."
"What?" I said again.
"No left turns," he said. "Think about it. Three rights are the same as a left, and that's a lot safer. So we always make three rights."
"You're kidding!" I said, and I turned to my mother for support. "No," she said, "your father is right. We make three rights. It works." But then she added: "Except when your father loses count."
I was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road as I started laughing.
"Loses count?" I asked.
"Yes," my father admitted, "that sometimes happens. But it's not a problem. You just make seven rights, and you're okay again."
I couldn't resist. "Do you ever go for 11?" I asked.
"No," he said "If we miss it at seven, we just come home and call it a bad day. Besides, nothing in life is so important it can't be put off another day or another week."
My mother was never in an accident, but one evening she handed me her car keys and said she had decided to quit driving. That was in 1999, when she was 90.
She lived four more years, until 2003. My father died the next year, at 102.
They both died in the bungalow they had moved into in 1937 and bought a few years later for $3,000. (Sixty years later, my brother and I paid $8,000 to have a shower put in the tiny bathroom -- the house had never had one. My father would have died then and there if he knew the shower cost nearly three times what he paid for the house.)
He continued to walk daily -- he had me get him a treadmill when he was 101 because he was afraid he'd fall on the icy sidewalks but wanted to keep exercising -- and he was of sound mind and sound body until the moment he died.
One September afternoon in 2004, he and my son went with me when I had to give a talk in a neighboring town, and it was clear to all three of us that he was wearing out, though we had the usual wide-ranging conversation about politics and newspapers and things in the news.
A few weeks earlier, he had told my son, "You know, Mike, the first hundred years are a lot easier than the second hundred." At one point in our drive that Saturday, he said, "You know, I'm probably not going to live much longer."
"You're probably right," I said.
"Why would you say that?" He countered, somewhat irritated.
"Because you're 102 years old," I said.
"Yes," he said, "you're right." He stayed in bed all the next day.
That night, I suggested to my son and daughter that we sit up with him through the night.
He appreciated it, he said, though at one point, apparently seeing us look gloomy, he said:
"I would like to make an announcement. No one in this room is dead yet"
An hour or so later, he spoke his last words:
"I want you to know," he said, clearly and lucidly, "that I am in no pain. I am very comfortable. And I have had as happy a life as anyone on this earth could ever have."
A short time later, he died.
I miss him a lot, and I think about him a lot. I've wondered now and then how it was that my family and I were so lucky that he lived so long.
I can't figure out if it was because he walked through life; or because he quit taking left turns.
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Sunday, June 03, 2007
Damn it!I’m outta corny titles!
Adveith is by now regretting sending me the invite to write on his blog.Yeap, that’s right.So if you were wondering dear readers, (weren’t there 7and a half of ya’ll at last count?) why he keeps kicking himself or why he sometimes raises his arms heavenwards and goes WHY?!WhY?!!!!wHy?!why?why?why?!!!WHHHHYYYY?!(thus scaring the B’jesus out of his dawgs),now you know.It’s me.
Anyways…I was sitting in my living room yesterday ,doing nothing (I’m outta rehab by the way) when this rock broke in through the window shattering it to pieces.The rock was wrapped in a piece of paper and on the paper was … no, not a ransom note…on the paper was the following message.
Hearken oh Malevolent Spirits
That derisive doggerels weave
You foist us to bear your pernicious jests
And our reputes in ruins leave?
The evil you beatify
And bedevil the good
You flay the ilk of the latter
More than Satan’s whip ever could
You loathe the virtuous and pious
The ungodly you laud
And yet your cruel hearts claim to bear
Malice toward “one and all”?!
Innocent souls with mire you bespatter
Vilify them for reasons unbeknownst
You take pride in spreading scandal
About your nefarious intents you boast
The puerile prattle that you slander call
Is devoid of basis indeed
So unsophisticated it is to fathom
That he who runs may read
We bemoan not your cruel ways
Nor your pity we beseech
Malicious darts in vain you aim at us
For callous hearts what jests can reach?
Though laden with great ignominy
We deftly dodge your quips
Cringe or writhe we never shall
Until the last of our blood drips
Your nemesis will be delivered by destiny
When angels of retribution descend upon earth
You shall recant our feeble image
Atone for your sins which face no dearth
The propitious dawn of a new era
A grim future for you portends
You shall soon go whence you came
To the farthest of netherworld’s ends
Signed
Benevolent Spirits on behalf of readers
Damned Benevolent Spirits!Bastards!Defending stupid readers!So what ,like , bearing malice is a punishable offence now?!
Anyways…I was sitting in my living room yesterday ,doing nothing (I’m outta rehab by the way) when this rock broke in through the window shattering it to pieces.The rock was wrapped in a piece of paper and on the paper was … no, not a ransom note…on the paper was the following message.
Hearken oh Malevolent Spirits
That derisive doggerels weave
You foist us to bear your pernicious jests
And our reputes in ruins leave?
The evil you beatify
And bedevil the good
You flay the ilk of the latter
More than Satan’s whip ever could
You loathe the virtuous and pious
The ungodly you laud
And yet your cruel hearts claim to bear
Malice toward “one and all”?!
Innocent souls with mire you bespatter
Vilify them for reasons unbeknownst
You take pride in spreading scandal
About your nefarious intents you boast
The puerile prattle that you slander call
Is devoid of basis indeed
So unsophisticated it is to fathom
That he who runs may read
We bemoan not your cruel ways
Nor your pity we beseech
Malicious darts in vain you aim at us
For callous hearts what jests can reach?
Though laden with great ignominy
We deftly dodge your quips
Cringe or writhe we never shall
Until the last of our blood drips
Your nemesis will be delivered by destiny
When angels of retribution descend upon earth
You shall recant our feeble image
Atone for your sins which face no dearth
The propitious dawn of a new era
A grim future for you portends
You shall soon go whence you came
To the farthest of netherworld’s ends
Signed
Benevolent Spirits on behalf of readers
Damned Benevolent Spirits!Bastards!Defending stupid readers!So what ,like , bearing malice is a punishable offence now?!
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Vroommm...Going Goa...Crash... Tinkle...
This is for all you wise-arses who think you can come to Goa and ride your bikes, just because you know how to... well, we have some rules, such as make out with your girl while speeding down a road you are not familiar with, and pray to God there isn't a bend in the road any time soon...and many more, re!
All Goans are born drivers, and do not need any lessons. The proof of our legendary skill is found in graveyards all over Goa.
All accidents are an act of God, therefore no one is to be blamed. Except, ofcourse, if a tree is involved, then it is to be blamed as it would have not happened if the tree was not there. Stupid tree...
Most people like to drive on the left hand side of the road, but this is optional, just "go with the flow"... and sure, everyone ELSE is riding the wrong way....dufus....
Speed limit: The maximum speed of the vehicle. A vehicle has two speeds, parked and maximum. And if there's anyone going at 60 or below, feel free to horn incessantly, yelling, "quit hogging the road, grandma" Or feel free to run them over...
Brakes are provided on imported vehicles, but not required in Goa.
Suspensions provided, again found on some imported vahicles, not required in Goa as the roads are good.
Mirrors, interior mirror are for grooming and/or oral/nasal hygiene. You missed a spot, right there...
Cross roads, road junctions: Approach at maximum speed to avoid having to wait for them lil old ladies to cross the road....or them slow assed 'conscious' drivers...
Bridges: Cross at maximum speed or the river spirit will take u. oooOOOOOoooooo.....!!!!
Motor cycles, driven by happy, well-mannered, helpful people can be a little annoying when you have to be nowhere really quick. Feel free to run them over. Try to rationalize to count motorcycle accidents a week, or there will not be enough for everyone. Maximum passengers allowed are 3 to 5 or 7 small children. Picnic, anyone???
Cows, donkeys, goats, pigs and sheep on the roads. Always approach at maximum speed, they will soon disappear...
Overloading: You can't overload a vehicle in Goa, as there is always room for more!
Women drivers, the cause for many road hold-ups, traffic jams, due to careful driving techniques. They need to be overtaken immediately within the time they take to search for the accelerator pedal... or to decide which hairstyle suits them best...
Police, road safety, highway patrol: On the roads of Goa to help you drive in discipline, do not waste any time listening to them.
Tyres should always be as smooth as possible for minimum grip 'cause this will affect highway speeding. and everyone knows that slow-mos are gay....
Headlights: Do not use in the dark, they can dazzle on-coming traffic.
Parking: Always park to cause maximum inconvenience to other road users. This will show everyone that you are a big man.
While overtaking, try to overtake on the brow of a hill, on a bend in the road, anywhere that you cannot see ahead. This will keep you and other road users alert and awake. Remember, always overtake any vehicle you see in front of you.
Roundabouts, traffic signals are designed by the Portuguese to confuse the drivers and cause traffic holdups. Damn em Portuguese!!!
Windscreen, optional, only required in rainy season, but must be normally half-tinted, for, er...you know...
Windscreen wipers, fitted to some imported cars: Not required in Goa. After all, our cats-n-dogs kinda rain ain't that bad!!! What are ya, a friggin panzy?? Windshield wipers....
The horn is the most important part of the car, use it continuously not to fall asleep in traffic jams or to greet friends and acquaintances. (Arre, Savio murre!! long time re!! honk!!!)
Side indicators, if fitted: Do not use as they cause confusion to other road users. The four-way flashers can be used all the time, to indicate that you are awake.
Reversing is a very difficult maneuver, do not attempt as you could end up not knowing whether you are coming or going... like, remember that time when you backed up into anna's flower garden...tch...tch...
Never bother about the oncoming ambulance, but make way for the public transport and Kadamba buses to pass off safely.
Happy Riding!!!
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
With malice toward one and all
Come all ye faithful readers
Wait your turn to be mortified
Watch as we hone our spiteful jests
To pique you and deride (you)
For an iota of pity
In vain you wring our hearts
We spare no one whatsoever
Our sharp, malicious darts
Let our sordid intents be known to all
And our sinister bent of mind
In the farthest reaches of our hearts
It’s only hatred that you’ll find
Cringe as we spew slander
Writhe as we scandal spread
No mercy shall we show anyone
For our souls have long been dead
We loathe the virtuous and pious
The ungodly we laud
We’re the guardians of evil
And Satan is our Lord
We’re such a plague of malevolence
As no one can forestall
Till eternity this earth we shall walk
With malice toward one and all
Wait your turn to be mortified
Watch as we hone our spiteful jests
To pique you and deride (you)
For an iota of pity
In vain you wring our hearts
We spare no one whatsoever
Our sharp, malicious darts
Let our sordid intents be known to all
And our sinister bent of mind
In the farthest reaches of our hearts
It’s only hatred that you’ll find
Cringe as we spew slander
Writhe as we scandal spread
No mercy shall we show anyone
For our souls have long been dead
We loathe the virtuous and pious
The ungodly we laud
We’re the guardians of evil
And Satan is our Lord
We’re such a plague of malevolence
As no one can forestall
Till eternity this earth we shall walk
With malice toward one and all
Monday, February 12, 2007
A Post At Last!
12th August 2006-An evil literary genius sets out on a voyage to the Caribbean in the quest for a treasure chest rumored to hold a never ending store of wealth. Why? Because he has run out of money to pay the "readers" of the epic saga that is his blog – ‘Have A Nice Day’. After six months and an uneventful journey that includes mundane confrontations with a sea monster the size of China and cannibals who refuse to eat him after discovering that he is only 17.63% human; being stranded on an island for 3 months with beer as the only source of nourishment; he returns triumphant and thankfully sans a permanently drunk demeanor. But alas! his triumph is short-lived, for he soon discovers that he has lost his will to write and unless he finds a writer for it soon, his precious blog will fall into ruin. By a stroke of luck the evil genius chances upon the perfect unsuspecting potential victim. And so it is that bad luck befalls Eidyia, a simple minded girl ironically named after the Greek Goddess of knowledge, who accepts his invitation to salvage a priceless literary treasure in exchange for an offer that she cannot refuse – a dime for each post and something to occupy her time. Will Eidyia ever discover that she has fallen prey to the persuasive charm of an evil, selfish, practical joker (woe betide him) with debatable intentions? Will she realize that she can avenge him by ruining his blog and driving “readers” away with her incomprehensible , obscure sense of humor and extremely long sentences? Only time shall tell …….
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