The only decent scene in that Venga Boys movie

LOKI: ENOUGH! You are, all of you, beneath me. I am a god you dull creature, and I will not be bullied...
 

HULK: Puny god



 _____

What a surprise!

I popped into an IStyle outlet recently. Just browsing, not really wanting to buy anything. I saw a cool carry case for the Macbook Pro, but they only had it in a 15" size. I asked if it was available for a 13" MBP and the guy at the store said he could find out. I carried on browsing.

As I was leaving, he asked me if I'd like to leave my contact details so he could follow up on the carry case. Sure, I said, expecting him to go up to one of the big-ass Apple cinema displays and fire up some killer app to take down the enquiry details. Imagine, then, my utter surprise when he pulled out a good old fashioned A5 size notebook, opened up a blank page and handed it to me.

  

Phittay munh!
How un-stylishly low-tech can you get!?

__________

Note: the above pic is a simulation.

Independent candidate

My vote goes to Chaudhry Sheeda Kharpainch Gadha (pictured below) for Prime Minister.

He seems to have a more-perceptive-than-most understanding of the trials and tribulations we are facing. He is also displaying genuine concern for our benighted nation, which is a whole lot more than can be said for all the other gadhas running (or desperate to run) the country

into the ground.

Why is the price of gold plummeting?

Answers on the back of a postage stamp in words of one syllable or less, please.

Are we ourseves to blame?

if you want to get a handle on the attitude of india (and sadly, by association, of espn-cricinfo) towards pakistani cricket, just take a look at the structure and results of this poll being conducted on cricinfo. 

ha ha, i'm lore-fing moy orse orf
(perhaps i need to rediscover my sense of humour)

Spreading the Word

Proof, if any were required, that the people of Pakistan are generous to a fault when it comes to sharing our blessings with our friends and associates... in this case illustrious El Presidente, H.E. Asif Ali Zardari who, his party's official website states,

“...was elected following a period of decline in democratic institutions and a worsening of security conditions for the people of Pakistan. One of the greatest challenges facing President Zadari [sic] has been to create transparent and enduring democracy.”

With their own cloned versions of the grate man, I have no doubt that India, the United States and Israel can begin to create transparent and enduring democracies of their own.

Three cheers for the magnanimous people of Pakistan!

_______

Note: the banner reads

O Lord, may you bless India, America and Israel with a Zardari each

(The people of Pakistan)

.

Banksy Redux

“Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.”

Giving the lie to the myth that India loses when Sachin scores a hundred

Amidst all the hoopla and attendant hype surrounding the lead-up to Tendulkar's hundredth ton, and the even more heightened h&h following his (final) achievement of this statistically awesome milestone, combined with the anticlimactic, though hardly bathetic result of the match (against Bangladesh), tongues have, inevitably, been wagging.

My own views on the matter have been frequently expressed; viz, that the actual hundredth hundred means very little in its own right. This is a man who, as all his fans proclaim, scorns personal milestones, concerning himself only with the job at hand, i.e. winning the game. As far as I'm concerned his greatness would be diminished not one iota if he had retired with only 99 centuries. (If anything, it may have added more of a Bradmanesque aura to his image.) I have also stated on numerous occasions that the average Indian punter doesn't give a toss about the result of a match as long as Sachin gets a hundred, never more true than during yesterday's match at the Sher-e-Bangla.

Personally, I am thrilled that the great man has finally granted Indian fans their most ardent (if not his own greatest) wish. Cricket can now dust itself off and get on with itself, and Sachin is now one step closer to retirement (unthinkable to anyone in India prior to yesterday's match). Don't get me wrong. I am a great fan of the maestro. Of his technique, his commitment, his enthusiasm, his modesty and the amazing depths of discipline, composure and grace under pressure which he always exhibits. He is a wonderful ambassador for the sport we love, and a throwback to a lost era of “gentle” manly behaviour (Bodyline notwithstanding). With that other gentleman of the game, Rahul Dravid, having bowed out, we are now closer than ever to final capitulation to the chest-wig hooliganism of Aussie-rules cricket.

But I do think that both cricket and India need to move on. I would like to see Sachin retire at his peak (or to be more precise a tad below his peak), to bow out on a high with the cheers of a billion fans ringing around the world like Great Tom (though to justify that simile, I guess we should hang about for century #101).

Who wants to see Sachin fade away from international cricket? Too stiff to dive in pursuit of a ball racing away to the boundary, too crampy to run that extra run, too arthritic to take a second-slip dolly catch, just too old to post a decent score.

I imagine, with a shudder, uniformed nurses trundling him out onto the field in a wicker wheelchair and propping him up in front of the stumps, holding a lilac parasol over his head, so that he can wobble his way to a score of three, and thus complete 20,000 test runs. A few years later he might be stretchered in and dumped onto the pitch during a match against Papua New Guinea, with 120,000 Eden Gardens spectators egging him on to edge his way to his 200th international fifty (he currently has 160 scores of between 50 and 99 in international matches).

Do we really want to see that?

Team India needs to let go of the talismanic hold that it has allowed Sachin to exercise over it for far too long. Never was this more possible, with Sehwag and Gambhir still in good (if not top) form, and with the likes of Raina, Sharma and (on current form) the potential replacement for Sachin and Viru combined - Virat Kohli - knocking up storms of their own.

But then it is not my call. (Is it?) I mentioned something about tongues wagging earlier. One of the most common threads I have come across is the canard that Sachin's hundreds are a luxury and a waste of time. That India always lose when he gets a ton. To all those naysayers I say “baqvaas!”

I have painstakingly compiled a list of all Sachin's international centuries (well, it would have been back-breakingly painstaking had I not been aided and abetted in this endeavour by Cricinfo's wonderful Statsguru engine), and segregated them by the result of the match in which each was scored*.

To summarise:

In tests (as you all well know by now) he has scored 51 centuries, of which 20 have been in a match India won, 11 where they lost, and 20 in drawn games.

His record in ODIs is even better: of his 49 ODI tons, 33 were in a match India won, 14 where they lost, and 2 in tied/no result games.

I will grant, though, that in recent years India have lost more Sachin-hundred ODIs than won. In tests, however, since 2001, India have won 15 matches in which Sachin got a ton and lost only 4.

(But please Sachin bhai, do consider retirement, na.)


__________
* Those of you who would like to see the list can email me, or post a comment here.

The Banksy of England

so it seems there's this (in)famous graffiti artist by the name of banksy, whose stencil-based art, adorning buidings and walls herethere&everywhere (mostly in britain) takes pot-shots at advertising and consumerism, the capitalist ethos, and warmongering in general. in a recent rant against advertising, he proclaimed:

Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

he is officially my hero of the week, and possibly the rest of the decade.

on his website he says (among other things):

Please feel free to copy any Banksy imagery in any way for any kind of personal amusement

Please do not take images off my website and ‘license’ them for a huge fee to a German calendar company

Cheer Up England

Saeed Ajmal trying to bring some comic relief to
the proceedings after witnessing the England team's
despondent expressions in the nets

Jiyalas in Training

The picture above was spirited away from pee-pee central at great personal (tho' little professional) risk by our intrepid political espionage crackerjack Sheeda Kharpainch. It shows the latest batch of inductees at the top secret jiyala training camp located in its state of the art facility (the overflowing garbage dump behind Bilawal House). They are of course undergoing intensive training in preparation for next year's lieutenant-colonel elections.

On the left is the party's Chief Suit Wearer, Syed Y.R.G., in charge of trying-to-look-snooty-but-failing-miserably training. To the extreme right is Kantutta-in-Chief Rehman Malik, who drills these crack troops in the art of ball crushing, bat wielding and information technology.

In between are the stalwart Jiyalas, warts and all, who, once properly trained, will attempt once again to liberate our benighted country from the yoke of whatever it is that has a chokehold on us, as well as shortlisting the 387 awards and accolades that Shaheeda Benazir Buttho so justly deserves.

I
cannot
wait


.

The lady doth protest too little, methinks

While one can understand the desire amongst professional women to distance themselves genealogically from the sheer sleaziness of politics and those paragons of moral decrepitude who practice its dark arts, no less (or more) a luminary than Marhoom Ronald W. Reagan The First once linked the two... more to the detriment of practitioners of the oldest profession, no doubt, than that of the second oldest.

__________
[Note: the t-shirt reads “The prostitutes insist that the politicians are not their children”]