A saturday well spent

I played the best soccer match of my life a couple of weekends ago .

My first every sporting encounter had ended in two things - a discovery of a passion for soccer and a medal . The silver medal came in my seventh standard in school in Ambala Cantt Haryana . Our captain was a burly haryanvi called Pal from the tenth standard and the team drawn from different classes of the Raman House . Pal was tall , hefty and strong . He was an able captain and everyone listened to him without questions . His sheer size gave him absolute authority and that he was a good player helped immesely . We fought hard and lost the final to a better team . I began the matches as an extra - a last minute inclusion because I enrolled quite late .I played in some matches . I still remember running a lot in the finals .

We won and I still have the medal .

Of the rest of matches in school , the most I remember was the unforgettable match in Southern Command school in Pune . Our team lost to a team six years younger . Our team of twelfth science was a motley crowd of unfit spectacled boys fighting for honour against a team of sixth graders . A self-goal , an inability to decide who should be captain , no ball control and overall sloppiness led us to a humiliating 3-0 loss .

Another Pune match stands out as remarkable - the one where we bunch of radio guys beat a software team from Onward tech on the Race Course ground 8-0 exactly as I had planned and predicted . The one played ten years ago in rains on the Shivaji preparatory military school ground was great too . But in most of these games , I would run hard , shout hard and push people hard .

That's why the Mumbai match was very different and special .

Our captain , who operates the TV studio production system , barely spoke in most matches , but was always available when a ball was passed his way to deftly weave through competition and pass it back closer to the post . We substituted every ten minutes and since the game was played in half a full soccer ground , it left us all with good energies to contribute effectively . Sixteen teams fought for a place in the final . The matches were organized such that all of them finished in a day . We played our first match at ten in the morning and won 1-0 . We then won round after round , defeating teams of varying calibre and capped it all with a closely fought 3-2 win in penalties in the finals . The opposing Private treaties team had this wafer-thin maverick Parsi footballer , Daryl , who won my immense admiration for his singularly spectacular footwork .

The crystal soccer cup proudly sits on my office shelf .

To my list of learnings on how to win a soccer match , including teamwork , ball-passing , leadership ,possession , covering the opponent and attacking from the word go , I have now added one more : Have a couple of Goans in the team . With three of our seven players being Goan -Dylan Pereirra , James Rodrigues and Salvador - each exhibiting tremendous ball control and following our strategy to a T , it was impossible to lose .These guys played soccer for a living and having them around makes winning a lot easier .

It took four days for my muscles to recover fully , but every minute that drizzling saturday was worth it .

The US economy is a train wreck

Landed on ... totallylookslike.com . Quite cool . My political hero Fidel Castro does have a striking resemblance to Daniel Day Lewis . There's Salman Rushdie with his fatwas looking eyes wide open like Stanley Kubrik . Noone will deny that Khomeini is not Bond after he has managed to keep US from attacking Iran for years while his 8-year war rival Saddam Hussein perished .And rockers have always looked like hounds .

Of all , probably the US economy one is the most closer to the truth .

Judo anyone ?

Russian President Putin just released a how-to video on judo .
Years back around the time of the 2000 Olympics , The Times of India ran a cover page headline with his photograph flooring another judoka with a powerfilled side-kick . That same front page had an article at the bottom of the page with Atal Bihari Vajpayee requesting the UN general assembly if he could sit and deliver his speech as he had severe knee pain .
And I had written in a letter to an editor the next day asking readers to guess which country amongst the two - Russia or India would win more medals in the forthcoming Olympics .
Jatha Raja , tatha praja !
Today , years later , as an unprecedented economic crisis faces the two countries both running rapidly towards capitalism like never before , Manmohan Singh has been fighting furiously . He's been dropping the CRR daily , increasing liquidity ,getting Chidambaram to front the press twice a day and pushing the US to get his pound of nuclear flesh . The fight is directed more towards the domestic markets than to any fundamental structural changes that can have any consequences in the futrue . The new Russian prime minister meanwhile got his armed forces to move into Arctic circle and lay claim on the Oil sources there , ensuring a robust domestic supply and a say in world politic for years to come .
Oh ! These russians .
Around two weeks back , a Norweigan ship with an Indian crew was hijacked by pirates around the coast of Somalia . The Indian crew on board is living in constant fear of losing its lives . The wife of the captured Indian captain has been appealing to the Indian govt to do something and we are dithering on who to approach and what to do . At around the same time a Russian ship got hijacked by Somalian pirates in the same waters .
Guess what Putin does ?
He's speedily sent a warship to surround their pirated ship in an attempt to tire and blow the Somalian pirates out . Ransom be dammed . The pirates attempted to dock the ship to take away the precious cargo - 33 Russian T-72 tanks , but the Russians aptly thwarted that attempt . They also enlisted help of neighbourhood US warships to surround the Somalians and starve them .
As the battle wages in the high seas , one just wonders why we aren't an active race .
Be it sport , economics or pirates , adjectives like 'Incredible ' , ' Emerging ' work well with India , but verbs like ' attacking ' , ' controlling ' don't .
Judo lessons , anyone ?

Why l Jumped .

I jumped the world's highest skyjump of 233 metres , from the 61st floor of the Macau tower last week .
And have lived to tell a tale .
Why did I jump ?

Firstly , so I have lifelong bragging rights .
Secondly ,I think its just one of the 100 things to do before you die .
Thirdly , it was part of testing myself constantly - having just about mustered courage for a large ferris wheel ride or the safe as a walk in the park 'london eye ' , a couple of years back I moved into thrill & adventure sports .I first tried parasailing . On the secluded platform in the middle of the sea near Coral Islands in Pattayya , tied to a high-speed boat I let myself be pulled into the sky and then watched the world go by as I circumnavigated the boat for a full ten minutes before being got down . My heart pounded and how . High up in the sky I wondered why I was doing it too . The Coral Islands looked like a spec and the wind flapped the chute vigorously . I lived .

I swam around the coral reef in the Islands - an amazing feel . The spectacular colour added to my joy , except the painful thorn-like jibes that the coral left on my palms . I googled it to find later that Corals are live and the jibes were algae skin ecdyzing !

Next up , a high-speed tube ride attached to a boat was wild in itself and holding onto the thin handles on the tube for your life was a sheer adrenalin surge . The ride lasted all of twenty minutes but seemed like a lifetime . The guy on the aquascooter pulled the four of us across waters at such a high speed that on one of the turns I contemplated letting go . I held on just to test myself . Endure , bugger , endure ; I kept telling myself .

My first free fall was the ' space shot ' in Genting Highlands , the steep fall down in the belted-up chair car with a magnificient view of the mountainside made it an exhilarating experience like no other . A couple of smaller roller coaster rides was the most I was willing to do - not trusting my heart too much .I mean I was sure it will stop for half a sec but it not starting again was my fear . The very next year I did the large and huge roller coaster and the sleeper-twister in Genting Highlands , topping it with a blind roller coaster in Disneyland , Hong Kong . In pitch dark with bats and other scary animation hitting you , it was quite scary .
A bungee jump was the logical next step .
I chickened out of the Bungee at Macau when I realized that the max weight was 115 kilos and I was 114.5 kilos - just about there .My weight surprised myself . I am 108 kilos on the ground and I thought I would be lighter ( Isn't gravity lesser in atmosphere ? Isn't everyone lighter on the moon ? Wondering why the heck I have to gain weight 233 metres above the ground ?) I opted for the sky jump - the world's highest sky jump - instead . I performed the jump to my own surprise .Am now sure that the Bungee jump is also possible to do . So bungee jumping , flying a microlite , paragliding and parajumping will be next .
This jump will remain special . The view of Macau from the 61st floor of Macau Tower is dazzling . As you look down , fear grips you and your bloods races through your veins . For a fraction of a second , your life flashes by - things that you ave done , things that you haven't . It is an amazing feel . The priceless experience of pounding adrenalin at 233 metres can't be substituted for anything else .
The certificate given by the AJHackett company says that I have earned the right to ask the world -'Do you have what it takes ?'
And as the Tees sold by them say - ' why live on the edge when you can jump ?'

No teams please , we are Indian.

Okay , so the Olympics are over . What's the big deal ? The big deal is India ending them with rank 50 out of 55 countries and with three medals. Right ? No !

The big deal is that we are still an individual nation . We win individual medals . This country of a billion and half can't work together . We are a nation of individuals and will stay that way . As spectators , we get collective consciousness raised to remarkable levels . As participants , we want our victory for ourselves . Vijendra Singh , Abhinav Bindra and Sushil Kumar won their medals on the basis of their individual skill and strength without the system and without anyone hogging their moment under the sun . That's want we want as a country . Like crabs in the well known story we can't co-create , we can't co-celebrate . Every achievement is and has to be individual . Vishwanathan Anand , Anju Bobby George , Sania , Leander , Geet Sethi , Fereira , Padukone and zillions of others . Athletics , archery , wrestling , badminton , golf , snooker , chess anything will do , except Soccer , basketball , relays . No teams please , we are Indian .

That brings me to Cricket . Even cricket is such a game that I hated from the bottom of my heart till IPL came along but that's another story .

I hated cricket because of its soap opera system - individual players turning up at regular intervals , the length of the engagement needed ( five days for one format of the game ! ) , the one-man show culture , the inability to create a result in many games , the static-ness of the game ( you move muscles very little for half of the game ) , the non-contactedness of the sport ( soccer is contact sport at its best ) and the match fixing rackets ( at some point I wasn't sure whether to believe what I saw ) . It remains a very individual game , with glory for a few . Soccer is sheer tenacity , teamwork and leadership on display . A game that consumes less time than a hindi movie yet gives you absolute pleasure . No teamwork , no victory .( Just won a soccer cup last weekend - love the game )

Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupati can't get themselves to play together for even a tournament . Guess the Olympic Association should focus on creating champions for individual sport and forget about hockey and the rest .

Ever heard of a co-authored Indian book ? Keep looking . Ek Myaan , Do Talwar ? No way .

We are Indian . No teams please .

A new emotion

Barack Obama is an emotion . A new kind of emotion .

When I bought his book 'the audacity of hope' last year , he had just stepped into the race to be the next president of America . An amazing race this time for sure - the first woman , a sixty year old war veteran from a war Americans want to forget - Vietnam and an african american with a middle name 'Hussain ' and a surname that rhymes with their biggest enemy . Obama has just about repaid his education loan for Harvard Law school studies while media discovered his ancestral home in Africa and a broke half-brother in London .

He is the American Dream and as he said earlier , no black son or daughter will now be able to complain to their ma and pa of missed opportunities, discrimination and unfair competition .Following the election has been a great pleasure - his speeches , his ability to turn crowds on , inspire an new generation , mobilize enormous amount of monies for his campaigns and even to visit Iraq and Germany to build his foreign policy credentials are surely stuff of folklore . Black Boxer Cassius Clay gave up after winning the Olympic Boxing gold , throwing the medal into the Hudson river and becoming Mohammed Ali . Will Smith has managed to reach the pinnacle of the entertainment business with his efforts as a musician ( winning grammy's ) , TV sitcom actor and movie star . But Barack Obama is not on the fringes of society . He is the new society . As President Of America , he presides on a new world order - a post American world order .

Finally , years and years of slavery will be remembered and maybe banished from memory forever . And Martin Luther King will turn in his grave with a smile . Not since Alex Haley's roots has there been a tale of such a lot of toil , perseverence and revere . Remarkable achievement against Unsurmountable odds .

From hereon , whether he wins or loses , Obama will be a new emotion .

For now let's call it 'audacious hope '!

Upside Down

As I sit to do a mid-year review , I realize that the world has turned upside down .
Last year this time , oil was $70 a barrel , ( happened as I was in Dubai ) , yesterday it touched $140 and talks that it will hit $190 are doing rounds . Speculators have moved from equity to commodity to oil . Stocks hit 21500 in Jan this year and trade at 12700 today , taking with them loads of my hard-earned cash too ! Real estate has hit ridiculous levels - a 3bed house at 5 cr ! A tent on a piece of land will be good enough soon . Cauliflower hit 45 bucks a kilo last week. Do consumers switch to Daal ? Recession coupled with inflation in the US has people scurrying to Walmart ! And Spain defeated Germany to pick up the Euro 2008 title ! Name one spanish player and I will buy you a ticket on Virgin Inter-Galactic flight to the Moon ! Business class in most airlines is emptying , denying me interesting company . Gingerly ,the government has increased petrol prices by 4 bucks - if they increase by 15 , each tomato will be 25 bucks !
My 2008 resolutions have all bitten mid-year dust - am 4 kilos more than when I joined the Gold Gym last year - losing 25 kilos is a great pipe dream yet , have lost 57% of my share portfolio instead of making 25 lacs and have read just 5 books in half year , making the resolution to read 20 tougher .
But like Scarlett says in Gone With The Wind , ' Tomorrow is another day , things will turn out better . I will find a way .'
Will I ?