February 2012 – Abhinav Bhatt

Dear Dr. Anjali, Why Sachin Should Not retire now!

Hello Anjali Tendulkar Ji,

I hope you are doing good, ahem, unlike your husband, err, no offence, as compared to his usual standards I mean. And what do I call you? Anjali Didi, Anjali Bhabhi or Anjali Aunty or let me call you Dr. Anjali, simply.

See Dr. Anjali, you all know him better than all of us, why does he adjust his abdominal guard every time before facing a delivery? Heh. Sorry. I mean you know what he goes through every time he comes to bat. More than a million people have already written that he carries the burden of billions of Indians who want him to perform every time he is out there in the middle. That pressure which he handles is enormous and no way anyone can even imagine. Still what he has achieved for the Country and himself is mind blowing. So no point writing about it again. This letter mainly focuses on the growing voices telling him to retire and all.

This ongoing CB Series is not going well for the Indian team as a whole. Sachin being a part of the team cannot be spared. When he was performing well say all his life and lately in the Cricket World Cup, everybody was quiet. And now when he is struggling, people are making jokes about him. Ex-cricketers who have nothing else to do other than giving expert comments are asking him to retire and hang his boots. Hanging boots might be difficult for him owing to his height but I also think that he should get retired. See the Aussies, they have all retired on a high note. Since I started watching Cricket, I saw Mark Taylor saying bye bye at the time he was brilliantly in form. Waugh Bros, Michael Bevan, Glenn McGrath, Mathhew Hayden and even Shane Warne bid adieu at the correct time. The best example remains Adam Gilchrist. These people will remain great. But, this Ricky Ponting, who is second only to the one who happens to be your husband tried to stick around. But Cricket Australia, the second strictest organization after the Nazis, dropped him and hence he had to say goodbye to ODIs disgracefully.

On the other hand, Indian Cricket has been sluggish when it comes to have an exit policy for the players. As far as I can remember, only Anil Kumble hung his boots at the correct time. All others have hung around. One of the best Captains we had ever, Saurav Ganguly, who played the most key role in shaping the team around the last decade so as to enable it to win the world cup under Dhoni, had the most shameful exit ever. Even the IPL franchisee didn’t want to bet on him. So, every voice from every nook and corner of the world wants your husband to retire NOW. Even I want the same.

But, see Dr. Anjali, if he retires now, history will be written. It will say, even though Sachin was, is and will be the greatest ever Batsman we could have, but during the end of his career, he was made to step down and not that he himself quit. It will be a small but visible blotch in his illustrative career. See, making 100 hundreds or one lesser won’t diminish his image. I cannot suggest anything to him as I am a nobody, but you can ask him to continue and keep all the allegations/advises/comments aside. I want you to tell him to go on and hit not just 1 but 10 more centuries and shut the critics up. I want you to make him believe, which he already knows, just that if you tell him, he will agree more, that if he quits when he is needed the best, I feel, his greatness, which needs no evidence to be proved, will increase many folds. Obviously we will miss the lofty cut over the 3rd man for six, the straight drive no mortal can play, the cover drive which goes faster than the Ravi’s tracer bullet cutting it in to pieces, the six over the long on which makes Shane Warne nights miserable but at least we will be slightly more happy to see him end on a high.

I have already promised to name my son Sachin, if I have a son and if the wifey (if I get married) agrees, I want you to tell him to stay.

Thank you Dr. Anjali, I hope your husband shuts up the critics one more time, for the last time though.

Still a believer that SachinIsGod.

Mandatory Valentine's Day Post

I was a shy guy from the onset. Though I could blabber around freely with my guy pals, I was slightly meek when it came to talking with girls. Because of this inability to talk to them, they probably mistook me as an arrogant chap. Though I didn’t care much about others, there was someone in the same class which was a class apart. She, who had joined the classes the same year only, used to sit 2 desks in front of me. But like it always happen, was never able to gather enough courage to talk to her directly. I thought that maybe she also thinks of me as a rude boy who doesn’t know how to talk to girls. Days went by, but the story remained the same until one day when I got the super powerful, the best thing invented after wheel and fire, ‘The Internet’.

I thought that okay; I might not be able to confront her directly so why not take the help of the media which everyone uses. It was 8th November of the year 2007. Diwali was on the 9th. I knew that visiting her profile will mean leaving my footprint on her home page, thanks to Profile’s visitor feature of Orkut. Still, I wanted to wish her Diwali on her scrapbook. I quickly made up fake profile on it and sent her a friend request. I kept sure that the profile didn’t look fake and I made no attempt to make it look cool. I just made it same as mine except a changed name. And posted a scrap on her profile wishing her a very happy diwali. Also, I mentioned her that I was in her previous school, so sent the request and the scrap just like that.

I used to check for her reply, each and every day but didn’t have any luck. After the Diwali break got over, I was on 7th heaven. She not only replied but also accepted my friend request. And hence began the most wonderful time of my life. Weird that it started online and continued to be online.

We chatted daily. I have no idea how and why but probably because I remained myself in my fake account she and I gelled pretty well together. She shared her ambitions in her life and I told her mine. Soon we became best buddies online. She used to come online daily in the night 9.30 PM and so did I. We kept on chatting and chatting and chatting till my Mom begged me to sleep.

On the other hand, off line, my relationship with her stayed the same. I still couldn’t talk to her directly. Whenever she brushed past me, my heart used to take 2 360 degrees somersaults. I thought this is good this way only. At least in some way I was in touch with her.

It was January. While on online front we had became best buddies while off line we remained stranger. Valentine’s Day was in a month’s time. I thought that this is the best opportunity to reveal her my real identity and let’s take it forward in the real offline world.

It was Jan 9th. We were in school that day, as I clearly remember. I was to board my bus to go home and she was sitting in her’s. And then the tragedy happened. As soon as her bus was about to take a turn, a truck coming from the other side hit the bus. The impact of the truck was not major but it shook the bus off. As she was sitting on the seat nearer to the door, she fell out of the bus and severely got injured. She fainted and blood started to rush through her head. Everyone ran towards her and took her to the nearby hospital. I was about a 100 ft distance and I just stared at the scene. I couldn’t move and couldn’t speak. She was admitted to a hospital and we were informed that she has gone into coma. I used to go online daily but she stayed offline. On Feb 14th I got to know that she had passed away. I was as heartbroken as if someone had snatched my soul away. School declared a day off and the scenario in the premises was sheer sadness.

Time went by and activities in school became normal. Sadness stayed with me though. I still couldn’t believe what had happened on that day. Call me idiot or what but I still couldn’t show to the world that how well I knew her. What she wanted from life, what she wanted to become, who all were there in her family, what she thought of me, I kept thinking daily all the time. I used to go online every night, just to see a grey dot in front of her name. Though as a rule, I used to read the chat history to feel better. They were so full of life though there was no life left in them. And time moved on once again.

It was Feb 14th a year later, Valentine’s Day once again. I was still the same shy guy who was single. My mood was as dull as it had been since many years. I was over her but a part of me still longed for her. I switched on my computer and opened the Gtalk. There were no contacts but her and still the grey dot stayed there. I shook my head and decided to delete the fake profile once and for all. When I was about to click the delete button, the grey dot in front of her name became green, a notification popped from the right bottom corner of my screen and a ping came saying ‘Hi <my real name>’.

That's Traffic!

Bangalore: The Garden City or the City of Bangalore (Bengaluru) has known to be a harbinger in many aspects as far India is concerned. While people in rest of India were still looking up in the sky in order to irrigate their crops with rain water, people in Bangalore were thinking ways of loosening up the pockets of people in USA who were looking for cheap labor, thus making itself the Silicon Valley of India. Bangalore became the first city in India to get electricity. It was the first City to get an Internet Service Provider and similarly, it has been the first to achieve things, other cities could only dream of achieving.

Not Silkbaord — Silkboard, as rendered from a commuter's dream while sleeping on the traffic signal.

While Bangalore was still in its nappy as in infancy, after the British had left, it gradually became Pensioner’s Paradise. Army Personnel and other retired people got shifted to Bangalore because of its delightful climate and peaceful environment. The city boasted of many gardens from which it bears the nickname ‘The Garden City’. This concept of making the city Garden-like, though, had some ill-effects which could have not been thought by the people then. As garden has narrow walkways, the architects of the city thought of playing a practical joke with the future residents of the city by making the main roads and streets as narrow as possible. Their vision of future Bangalore was as narrow as the possible and so they kept up with the legacy of being the first city to make narrow roads with heaviest traffic.

In a recent study, it was found that the traffic running on the roads of Bangalore is so slow because of pathetic traffic condition that even atomic clocks are finding it difficult to measure the speed. Chief Assistant of Bangalore Development Authority’s youngest son’s Girlfriend who also happens to be a team member of the research organization Search for Lethargic Objects WorldWide or S.L.O.W. told us that they came up with the speeds of lowest objects on this planet and surprisingly they found that Bangalore traffic is slower than the slowest of the slowest things possible. While it takes 1 minute for a snail to travel 1 cm, it takes hours for a vehicle to even shake a bit to be measured. Turtle, Sloth all travel faster than the Bangalore Traffic. In some weird cases it was observed that it might take more than to deliver a baby from conception than crossing an important junction of the city called as ‘Silk Board’. Of course we are talking about the gestation period of Eastern quoll of Australia and not humans. Though she added that it might be unjust to compare living entities with the speed of traffic. So, she showed the stats and figures that proved that even the Indian Postal Service can be called lightening fast when compared to BT. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the former Prime Minister of the country, was known to complete his speech in lesser time as compared to time taken to cross Brigade Road on a vehicle.

Another series of experiments like time taken for ketchup to drip completely from a bottle was compared with the time taken to cross the Marathalli bridge, the time taken to login to Airtel’s Website was compared with the time taken to cross the Graphite India red light signal in Whitefield, the duration of an Ashutosh Govarikar movie was compared to the time taken in turning towards NGV from Forum Mall in Kormangala showed the same story that everything other than the traffic moved faster.

Initially, the study suggested that there are only pockets of city where the air is thicker as compared to the rest of the city. Thus, the viscosity of the air makes travel difficult. But then it was soon realized when the device used to measure viscosity viscometers didn’t reach at all the places because of the traffic itself and they had to be returned back. They were on rent, for your information. The traffic police was not shy in poking fun at the fate of the people who travel on Bangalore roads by creating an outrageous upper limit of 60 KMPH for all vehicles. Demonstrations were held at Freedom Park against this inhumane sarcasm on the part of the traffic police. Though the demonstrations were not attended by much as they were stranded and stuck at traffic lights at various parts of the city so they were called off soon. To add to the fun, the BDA decided to start as many as 6 flyovers, underpasses on Outer Ring Road where there is basically no need but since they had extra money so no one complained.

To help the commuters from this draconian task of travelling on the roads, Namma Metro was devised and after spending millions of Rupees, the services finally started between places where there was no need of metro.

Finally, the research came to a conclusion that Bangalore can be a perfect spot for testing the Einstein Theory of Time Dilation as people travelling in other cities as compared to those who were on the roads of Bangalore tend to age quicker. Therefore, once again, living up with the tradition, Bangalore has been named as the first slow-motion city of India.

– An Agent Foobar’s Exclusive.