Reality Bits

Its been a while I have recorded or actually played seriously. But over the last few weeks there has been a spike and of the consequences of that spike is this recording. Please feel free to leave suggestions/criticisms because I would love to improve my recording and playing standards.

2nd April 2011 - The Second Odyssey.

I told you that I would be back if India won the last game ... WELL HERE I AM.. NOT JUST BECAUSE THE DEFEATED PAKISTAN.. BUT BECAUSE TODAY... THEY ARE THE WORLD CHAMPIONS OF CRICKET AFTER DEFEATING SRI LANKA.....

Many a times I have seen a match where our bowlers could not contain the batting side and they outplayed us defiantly eventhough we had gained the advantage early on....

Today I couldnt really understand the game.. for this Indian Team was doing the same thing to the Lankans... and it was feeling good. I was not sure if it was a true feeling of confidence or jubiliation or really a dream ... I still feel it. It seems its not really true but I have fed this dream for so many days and months and years that I would be destroyed if the bubble burst.. and I ended up waking up on my bed .... waiting again for the India SL match to start...

So I pinch myself...

And it hurts.. But I smile.. for I have done this before....over and over again.. to convince myself that its really true.. and that India has really won the World Cup Cricket Tournament...  and that I witnessed it live with a bunch of other Cornell grad/undergrads... ...  I really really cannot grasp the impact ...

Well, to be practical.. it doesnt matter so much for us does it.. People staying so far away from the actual action. I mean if our happiness quotient is 40x we would like to show its 160x because thats what we want ... and yet at the back of our mind we still have to do 2312414 other odd jobs for lab / home etc.. and its so different from home where even if you are 40x happy ... you will become 1600x happy just because of the sounds and sights around you. I am pretty sure.. there are still parties going on in India .. on the roads and streets. People making a whole lot of noise with bottles, utensils, Blow Horns, Car Honks etc etc.. dancing half drunk on the streets and I miss being so far away from it.

Nonetheless, I did decide to not work today in lab and probably even tomorrow. I will take a couple of days to recover. My head is still heavy, which is mostly because I havent slept last night and my throat's parched and silent.. due to all the shouting and cheering. Yet I dont want to go to sleep for some reason. I still go back to the same old news articles which wont change cause its really late in India but just in case I have missed the odd interview of the sight screen attendant... you never know !!

In my last post I had spoken about how cricket as a game affects us as a community and how I have justified the Indian teams's performance according to my life line... ( a rather ingenious pastime most Indians enjoy... of associating and entangling their own life with the ups and downs of the Indian Cricket Team) and thats the first thing that hit me. Unlike the last World Cup final in 2003, I was not watching this from home. I was in a small college based town in upstate NY where there will still enough fans to organise a communal screening of the game on a big screen and enough noise to attract "whiteS" from around the corner..... Some of my fellow spectators were still learning the rules of cricket such as "what is an over?" while others as usual were busy dissecting every delivery of Harbhajan Singh and how he really needed to check his line and length in order to contain the batsmen... It was truly a very mixed audience which was even exciting. Cricket was breakinc boundaries.. Indian cricket was breaking barriers of a different kind. Suddenly we now have two seperate generations of Indians talking about their experiences about the Indian team winning the world cup..

And I am part of one of them....


(More to come later...)

What it means to me to be up at 3 am on a week night..

Its only a few more hours and then the Indian Cricket Team plays one of their biggest matches

in their and our whole life. Its not as if we havent met Pakistan before. Of course we have. Its

not as if after this match PCB and BCCI will stop sending teams to tournamanets.  But me and

my friends are part of that generation that did not understand cricket in 87, was only

fascinated by colours and Jonty Rhodes in 92.. and cried desperately in Kolkata in 96. We have

then cursed Agarkar along with poor Zimbabwe in 1999. Some of us even believed that we had

the cup .....................  even after the first inningsin the final..... in 2003... and we were quickly

kicked back to reality by Ponting's men..and then by Greg Chappel in 2007.

So when people like Gavaskar and Shrikanth and others talks about 83 in front of us.. we nod

our heads and open our mouths in pride. We try to look back at youtube videos of that fated

final, Kapil's tremendous catch. Roger Binny's extreme performance. I even had a

memorabilia of 1983 world cup that describes all the matches with lots of pictures which I

used to bring out everytime India played their knock out matches in a world cup.. I dont know

who in my family bought it.... its tough to spot the hidden fans.... the same way.. LOOOOT of

people dont know how much i and we Indians as a country and us... as a generation .... love

this game.. Really... the Tony Craigs and the Nasser Hussains, The Boycotts and the

Benauds... there is so much you do not know.

Coming back to the game in hand... sure I have watched some amazing India Pak matches.

And trust me, if someone told me it has never been this big... then what was the T-20 Final my

dear a few years back ? Have you forgotten the U-21 World Cup?? But then why is this so much

special (... at least for me and if I can understand the feelings of a handful 20 other friends from

my generation)  ???

Its not going to be the same as it was earlier.. I would still wake up at 4. But thats not because

the match is in Brisbane or Perth.   Ironically the match is at Mohali.. not to far from the JCR

where I WOULD go to watch the matches played at Brisbane and Perth..... and of course its not

going to be the same. I wont wake up a sleeping guard to open the common room for me.The

one room in the entire college that has the television and therefore the one room that would

suddenly accumulate at least 50 individuals..in the span of 5 minutes from different parts of

the college.. all sleepy eyed... straight out of bed.. some planning to go back to bed after the

day's play.. only to watch India win their first series victory against Austrailia..  Instead I would

be watching the game on my laptop. There is the possibility of going to watch it with a

thousand other undergraduates... both from India and Pakistan at the Mech Eng student

lounge here at Cornell. Ill probably pass that.. till the final. If India does make it to the finall.. ill

be there.

And yet.. this is not my story. As I said, this is the story of at least 30  (and DEFINITELY MANY

MANY MORE...)different people.. watching the game at different parts of the USA... waking up

at 2,3,4 am.. only to watch the boys in blue do what they are always expected to do.... smash a

thousand runs and then get the opposition out in exactly 10 balls. thats it. job done. we can

work now. for otherwise everything's a standstill. And it cant be the other way. Even if its

faster. Even if we can get them out in 10 balls we dont want to do that first.. For then we cant

watch our Gods bat.... and thats the fun in it after all ?

Sure we have some good bowlers.. but really ... we were always known for the short little

geniuses mainly from Bombay or Delhi... or sometimes the healthy allrounders from Haryana..

and once in a while a classy southpaw from the east..but thats about it..

Nevermind the geeky Bangalorean who left a software job to actually take all ten wickets in

the same match..it was against Pakistan wasnt it? Nevermind the near crazy Sikh who when

playing against the same goes berserk in every way.....

And yet... its not their story too. This is the story of my 300 other friends who I know are

watching the game in the same time zone..back home.. IN INDIA....updating their facebook

status as I do.with select exletives.. after every wrong decision by the Indian captain or the

umpire or the exceptionally (un)fortunate player from the opposition who dared to stop the

march towards victory.. virtually anyone who dare conspire against this juggernaut .. that we

know ... Indian Cricket fanaticism.

And just then do we realise that its a story of one of those little geniuses from Mumbai.. who

may not play another world cup.. and although known as THE BEST player that ever played the

game for the last few decades... would try his best to use this last chance ...

Its also a story of a coach who found a team in tatters.... and made some really hard decisions

to keep players out who on hindsight did not belong in this team.  Personally however it is not

a story of the captain.. at least not this tournament unless he does something special for the

remaining two games..

So... here we are.. back again 4 years after a shameful exit in the group stages being knocked

out by Bangladesh .. trying to claim the spot that we have been eyeing for sometime and a spot

that we did deserve at least at the beginning of the tournament (before Pakistand and Srilanka

 dazzled us) and its going to be big.

Personally I hope this game is as close as the India-Austrailia game.. but witha  similar result. I

dont think by beating Pakistan we will gain political superiority or the right to diss their

cricket tournaments or any other leverage except for the one that we play for. A place in the

final.

The performance of the Indian team in ICC ODI World Cup has been very similar to the

stereotypical lives of people from my generation....Quite similar to the notion of getting away

watching a late night movie we were all to happy to reach the semifinal in 1996.. and suddenly

out of nowhere before we understood we were out of the game.. and with only tears to show

we realised we had missed the climax.. and had to go back to studying.  We were too happy

destroying Sri-Lanka that we did not know how to beat Zimbabwe in 1999 .. something I would

compare to my own situation of solving complicated algebra equations with ease and yet

losing important points in my tenth boards for a minor addition mistake...Reaching

adolescence... we reached the final with the efforts of a leader as temperamental as

ourselves...  only to be taught a hard lesson by life. And since then it has only been downhill

until after college we realised to walk on our feet.. to be adults.. and here we are knocking at

the doors of another world cup final.....

Pakistan other than being our arch enemy can also be compared to a middle class' arch

enemy - expectations.. and it is this battle that those 11 men in blue will be up against

tomorrow.. and lets hope they win...
For if they do.... it will be a day to remember. Not for me but for my entire

generation.....except.. there will be still one more game to play...

Ill be back then....

Are you looking for Bengali Band Reviews ?

For quite sometime now I have been thinking of shifting my bengali band review blogs to a new address and I think today I had the initiative to do that. So from now on the Bengali Band reviews would be in a new address.

www.banglarockreview.blogspot.com

They will be reviewed there .

My music posts will still be here because they are an inherent part of this blog which is originally about myself and my opinions.

Bengali Rock Reviews are also my opinions but somehow those are posts that I want a lot of people to read other than my regular readership and I am not sure if I want them to know all the other things about myself! :)

Take care folks. And hope you have a great weekend.

Quick Post Nos - 23534612326

Just wanted to share a link that a friend and a band-brother of mine posted on facebook. He shared his blog link with me too and I think its a beautiful effort. Please do visit his blog ...

http://samsearblog.blogspot.com/

and the post


http://news.cnet.com/8301-13645_3-20028655-47.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=TheAudiophiliac

I completely agree to the post and I have been trying to do the same in my blog. Only slowly.. ! :)

All the best Sahil.

And by the way Sahil is an exceptional musician with good idea about beats (tabla), rythm (guitars) and tune (keyboards!). So if he says that a song is worth listening to I would probably do it than most other recommendations.