aditya kumar's weblog

Back in 1996, one day in the school, a friend told me he had a couple of stickers for the Dangerous tour. What was that, I asked. It was Michael Jackson touring India and I would be stupid not to know it, I was told. The tour was called “The Dangerous Tour”. Oh, Michael Jackson. I thought his best song was “Black and White” or something but it was the grooviest thing I had ever heard and had fallen in love with the video, especially because it showed an Indian girl doing Bharatanatyam with Jackson in the middle of the road.

For a boy who didn’t know the difference between “Black and white” and “Black or white”, it must have taken some convincing to do, that this friend eventually gave one sticker to me. It was a prized possession. After much thought, I pasted it on the back of an address book which I was sure I would use forever (The “Black and/or White” confusion was because Philips electronics had used the song jingle and conveniently called it, well, “Black and White”, for promoting their colorless television set on radio).

Then in 1998, an uncle who had studied in the IIT while graduating to Jackson’s music came to visit us. When he agreed to buy me a music cassette while checking out some music at the local store, my hands went to Michael Jackson’s Dangerous. He told me not to go for it. If he were to buy me one, it would be Thriller. I resisted it (because I had never heard of Thriller and I did not want this chance to go waste by letting him buy me something I did not know about). Eventually he had me convinced that it’d be a sin to choose Dangerous over Thriller. That was my first MJ tape.

Then, three years later, one day I went to my best friend’s house. He had an impressive music collection and we had evolved to mp3s. In his CD rack, I found the audio CD of Dangerous. Not willing to lose it this time, I told him that I was taking it home. It had songs I had long wanted to hear. It also had “In the Closet”, which was and remains, till this day, the sexiest song I have ever listened to. The video with Naomi just adds another dimension to it.

Shortly thereafter, in Indore during my first few days of graduation, I met Devashish Bhatt. Quite simply, he was the greatest fan of MJ I have ever met. While discussing music one evening, I told him that “Stranger in Moscow” was a song I wish I could listen to more often. My Sony Walkman was playing UB40’s “Can’t help falling in love”. Dev sang the first four lines of “Stranger in Moscow” for me and then offered a deal – we could swap what our “Walkmen” were holding. So this way, I ended up with the Blood on the Dance Floor tape that had “Stranger in Moscow” and Dev had his UB40 with a host of other cheesy love songs in the “Now that’s what I call Love!” tape.

I was not very generous to Dev in our future dealings. I ended up taking the History Part 1 & 2 tapes and never giving them back.

Then in 2001, in Pune, I met Pushkar Krishna, my room mate’s brother. Impressed by my knowledge on books and music, he took me one day to the infamous Fergusson College road. After a bulk of books and tapes that we carried home, he put a smile on my face by a simple gesture that I remember vividly till this day. He gifted to me Invincible – MJ’s last album.

From my perspective, the best part was that MJ’s music always found a way to get to me. Call it luck, but it just happened. I never tried hard. I never had to.

I graduated to Michael Jackson much later than I should have. But it happened. I traced his music back and forth. In this journey of music, I have met very few people of my generation who actually knew what Michael Jackson was all about — for mine is a generation that has seen Michael Jackson as a fading star. What a pity would it be for those people who now are left wondering, having seen Michael Jackson for the first time on the front page of the newspapers yesterday, in his death. Would he be greater to them in death than when he was alive? Would they ever know what he was all made of? Would they realize the gravity of this loss?

Does someone see the irony in this?

One guy calls me Pakistani after knowing my family migrated from Punjab’s Pakistan during partition. He says that yesterday I must have been a happy man, afterall Pakistan won the cricket match. I ask him if he had similar thoughts about the bengali friends he had, who came from East Bengal in East Pakistan — he has not heard of it. I ask him East Pakistan, 1971 war, he doesn’t know about it. I asked him 1947 partitioning of India, he tells me he never loved history. And then, as if forgiving me of my sins, he calls me an immigrant.

I have faced this situation at least two dozen times and yet I can’t learn to live with it. It just gets worse.

These are the young Indians who aspire to change the world.

Chandan Mitra, editor of The Pioneer, member of the Rajya Sabha and a BJP supporter, in an interview to rediff.com here, says, among many other things, “We failed to really reach out to the blogging community and the social networking groups”.

Of course, there is nothing to suggest that BJP thinks that this is THE reason for losing the LS elections but what surprises me that this is even mentioned as a reason. I mean, is this guy serious? Does he actually think that influencing bloggers will help his party to an extent that he even mentions this at this stage? You don’t talk about influencing bloggers and networking groups when you end up at 120 seats. If this is the rethinking and post-poll thought process in the BJP camp, well, the less said the better.

Oh and by the way, it was BJP that had sent their “young workers” dressed in suits to various management schools across India. The idea was to, well, “reach out” to these young lads. This whole exercise was called “Advani @ Campus”.

Varun Gandhi may have won at Pilbhit but actually BJP paid a very heavy price for it. They never condemned what he said and never fully disowned it. Instead they asked for a forensic check on the CD. All in all, what was the party’s stand on it? None. They did not know how to handle the situation. That is where they lost more votes than they gained. Now compare it to what Congress did with Sajjan Kumar and Tytler.

And does someone actually care what Advani’s personal ambitions are? By saying it repeatedly that it was his heart’s desire to become the PM, he gave an impression that he is bigger than the party. I think this is a problem with BJP — they have always portrayed individuals bigger than the party or the ideologies they stand for. And while we are talking about ideologies, one should remember that BJP has been facing a never ending dilemma of how much degree of Hindutva they should toy with.

Meanwhile, I wait for the day when our politics rises above all this. For all its worth, it’s really disappointing.

In the overall constructive years of my adolescence, my cricketing conscience was taking shape. So in 1996, when Michael Atherton played the shot and at ESPN they said that it’s the best cover drive you can ever get to see, true to copy book style, I took it to heart.

It was also the year when I formed one of my earliest opinions of the Indian Cricket team of the pre-John Wright/Ganguly era. I noticed that India always lost its first test match when they toured. And then they trailed. If they were lucky, they’d come back with a 1-1 result but that was a rarity. Generally it was 0-2, 1-2, or worse, 0-3.

Indeed, it was ironical that when this particular opinion was formed, the same very series, two boys debuted in the second game of a series that India was trailing and one of them went on to bring a whole new dawn to Indian Cricket; the one on which I have named an “era” in itself. The second cricketer, of course, will be seen as the one who always lived under the shadows but rose to be called the greatest test cricketer India has ever seen.

So the 1996 India tour of England, has been on my mind this evening. Why, you ask? None of the reasons above, I can tell you that.

Well, the India tour of England, 1996 was India’s first test tour after the 1996 World Cup debacle. It was also the tour when Ganguly and Dravid debuted in the second test match, in Lords and Dravid fell short of a well deserved century by all but 5 runs. But why I remember this tour the most is because of one Chris Lewis. A well-toned, dark body, running at full throttle and single-handedly destroying the Indian batting in the first test match at Birmingham, England.

It was horror. A 15 year old test cricket loving boy’s, and I tell you – you won’t find many, expectations lay shattered.

And it is indeed an irony again, that the same Chris Lewis is in prison. Well, maybe not the same Chris Lewis.

It formed some opinions, that series. It still does.

Coming back from an unintended hibernation, I am surprised how non-reactive I have been to issues like (among other things) recession, Varun Gandhi (well not really), 80 year old chaps contesting elections, the heat waves across the country, the annual cricket tournament which lets you turn on the tv and put it on mute because you just cant afford cricket every single day for a month.

So here I am, making a very silent comeback while I also try to know how much of you missed me. Name the two movies these quotes come from. Even cheating would do, I am just interested to know who makes it reading here and cares enough to comment.

Also, I keep the right to post anonymous comments here to save embarrassment.

Quote #1 –

“There has to be a mathematical explanation for how bad that tie is. ”

Quote #2 –

Character 1: It’s finding the center of your story, the beating heart of it, that’s what makes a reporter. You have to start by making up some headlines. You know: short, punchy, dramatic headlines. Now, have a look, what do you see?
[Points at dark clouds at the horizon]… Tell me the headline.
Character 2: Horizon Fills With Dark Clouds?
Character 1: Imminent Storm Threatens Village.
Character 2: But what if no storm comes?
Character 1: Village Spared From Deadly Storm.

When Varun Gandhi made that speech at Pilibhit, Indian Politics hit a new low. Its a shame that the great-grandson of the late Pt. Jawahar Lal Nehru, architect of the modern day democracy that India is, has even uttered those words. It goes on to show how politics of hate is ruling the country, irrespective of what party is at helm at the center. That we listen to the crap that politicians like him have to offer is a sign how immature a society we are. Muslims in every nook and corner of the country will disapprove him for his speech as it was anti-muslim but only the (mostly) urban and rational Hindu will condemn it whole-heartedly — and how many would that be? The rest will glorify him and that is very unreasonable and disturbing.

Then there is the Charlie Chaplin statue that has evoked extreme sentiments in Karnataka. Why is the statue not allowed to be erected? Because the comedian was a Christian. Karnataka has started to scare me now. I mean, when were we so intolerant that we decided on our heroes based on their religion? Why does religion decide so many things for us now? Okay, I think there is a little mistake here. The people who decide things based on religion, the netas, leaders, politicians, the sevaks — birds of the same flock these, are not us. They go about doing this because they think they have a certain moral authority which I think comes because of the political power that they possess. The first thing that we, as people who disapprove of these birds of the same flock, can do is stop accommodating them within the realm of us. Stop letting them within the range of we. And then we take away what gives them, what they think is the moral authority that they have. We vote these people out.

On the way to Delhi I find myself in the company of jaats, in fact a whole bunch of them. Now jaats are nice people but you don’t want to displease them because then they can be not-so-nice, at least thats what the general assumption is. This assumes more significance when they are wrestlers and there is a whole team of them. So while they freely chose to sarcastically comment, I continued to talk with a co-passenger girl who was an English Literature graduate student. Our talking mostly revolved around writers, writing and reading — as it happens when two aspiring writers meet. But as I later found out, she chose to change her seat for the rest of the journey, much to the dismay of her accompanying father, I assume. When I met her the other day, she quite predictably, blamed it on the jaats.

There was this one moment though when two jaats decided to push the middle berth back to its original place thereby making the lower berth a place for everyone to sit to (than to lie down). One guy had been already lying there and he chose to push the middle berth (hanging then) to its plying place without looking at the hook which was to hold it after the push. Obviously, the middle berth was not able to sustain itself and came back swiftly. The other jaat then quipped — Spiderman nahi dekhya hai ke? Jyada Taakat ke saath zimmedaari bhi aani chaiye (Haven’t you seen Spiderman — with great power comes great responsibility).

In Delhi, on a Wednesday evening I am in front of PVR Cinema, in Saket — The same place I once saw that journalist 13 years ago and watched an English movie first time in a movie theater. I am there to watch a movie and I have no idea what movie would be it. Valkyrie, looks good and I get a ticket to Audi 2, Row E, seat number 8. Before the show starts, I spend the little time I have listening to Robbie Williams on my iPod. As I enter the cinema, the security guard frisks me and my possessions quite thoroughly. So comprehensive that he wants me to show him my two cellphones and my iPod in “working” mode. I know the answer but I ask him why. So that we know these are not empty cases, he tells me. What harm could an empty case do, I am tempted to ask, that little wee bit of sarcasm and just to drag it a bit though I know exactly what he means. The glowing screens of my gadgets seem to satisfy him.

In the movie, just as another plot to kill Hitler is hatched — Intermission intervenes. You know its not supposed to be there but the cinemawalas need you to go get something to eat while they modestly show you their overpriced menu. I get myself a tea while I wonder how Tom Cruise looked the same, just as young as he is now, even during the times of Hitler. And while I try to make the most of the wide leg room at offer, my foot hits something hard on the floor. Its my iPod, lying there since I don’t know when.

Saturday evening I am at the exact same place at the exact same time and as it would later turn out the exact same seat as well (thankfully, not the exact same movie). I get myself a ticket to “The Curious case of Benjamin Button”. The security guard this time does not seem interested if I am carrying empty cases of what look like gadgets (And this baffles me — its a weekend so the “threat level” should be at a higher degree). And at Audi 2, Row E, seat number 8, this time I am left wondering how Brad Pitt who has been invariably looking the same since eternity has chosen to be born as an old man.

A little confused, I check for my iPod. Assured, I make the most of the wide leg room at offer.