Travelling Times

  “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”   The earliest that I can recall of an Indo-Pak tie was the quarter-final of the '96 world cup. I had cut out the fixture from the local newspaper and marched off to show it to my pakistani neighbour. Neither of us knew nor cared about the bad blood that existed across the border. We weren't part of the separation in 1947, and so didn't give a rat's backside to the diplomatic stance of the two countries. Our knowledge of cricket was restricted to the annual whipping in the arid deserts of Sharjah. It seemed that it was the scenario since the time M...

         At the end of tomorrow’s day, a lot may change around me. India may no longer be a part of this World cup (the last and the only time they won it, I wasn’t around to see it). Not that it would break my heart. Or prompt me to give up on the Men in Blue. For me, it means a lot more. It depicts the end of an era.     The 1990s was a time of awakening for the Indian economy. It was a time of VCRs, Walkmans and Maruti-800s. It was an age when still cameras needed roll film, there was only one Bachchan, Air India was still making money and the gift-toting NRI uncle was treated as a VIP. An age, where I grew up learning about cricket through a certain Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar.      As a kid, I’d watch him come out to bat and my heart would go thup-thup-thup. I’d cross my fingers and hold it behind my back, and it would stay affixed till he made the long trudge back to the pavilion. Once his contribution to the game ...

  And still of a winter's night, they say, when the wind is in the trees, When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas, When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor, A highwayman comes riding— Riding—riding— A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door.        18000 dead. And the count keeps ticking. Death came across and swept his share in a Christmas bag. If any clan had managed to survive the effects of radiation from 1945, not a soul would be spared at the aftermath of the recent disaster. Unlike the previous one, a natural disaster.      Man proposes, God disposes. They could withstand the 8.9 magnitude earthquake to an extent with their modern structures, but the tsunami swept away half of the nation. But the impact wasn’t felt till the nuclear reactors started exploding. One after the other, they brought back the ghosts of the pasts. And will remain to haunt the Japanese for the next f...