It is time to finally lay to rest the ghost of the fake ipl player. It’s been an amazing ride but like all good things this too must come to an end. Watch me this weekend on Times Now for the complete story.

Adios!

My first internet chat. And it was pretty awesome. Really enjoyed it. Thanks to everyone who came and asked their smart questions. For once, it felt great to be at a place where I wasn’t the dumbest.

If you couldn’t make it cos you were, quite frankly, doing something better with your time, here’s the link to the transcript (assuming you don’t have anything better to do).

http://cricketnext.in.com/chat/view/363.html

The Gamechangers – by Fake IPL Player aka FIP
Source: http://www.indiaplaza.in/

“Three hundred years ago, it was spices and gold that brought the world to India. In the twenty-first century, Bollywood and cricket will take India to the world” – quote from The Gamechangers.

The sports world is starting to provide us more thrills off-the field than on-the field. The fast blurring line between the showbiz industry and sports has made T20 cricket look like just another prime-time reality show. At the opposite pole, it takes one vertically challenged man to lift the game, from a recreational jig to the highest plinth of meditation with a super-human 2oo* not out. Notwithstanding its recent blemishes, the game is an integral part of the Indian soul and has hauntingly got under our skin like A.R.Rahman’s music – to borrow FIP’s words.

Do you know which the most entertaining spectator sport in the world today is? It’s not football or motorsports or even beach volleyball. It is called “SPOILSPORTS”! Lo and behold! And there descended the superstar of SPOILSPORTS – The Fake IPL Player, who was more entertaining than any other REAL player in IPL 2 (The Indian Premier League!). He saw, he blogged and he conquered! Every newspaper and TV news channel in India covered his blog and its revelations in detail throughout the duration of IPL 2. It was front page material in England, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Pakistan.

Sensational, scandalous, funny, scathing, irreverent, imaginative, entertaining, poison pen – the endless adjectives different people used to describe the blog, depending upon who they were. While the blog had a disclaimer in fine print, ”All characters appearing in this work (blog) are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and unintentional”. The caricatures were so real that any coincidence seemed to be only coincidental.

In The Gamechangers, the FIP is back with more inside stories; trademark tongue-in-cheek humour and his refreshing irreverence for the demi-gods of cricket, which had both the common man and the cricket lover eating out of his hand, and catapulted his blog to the second spot next only to Aamir Khan’s blog.
Evolving from a blog dismissed by one irate official as “poison pen writing of the dirtiest variety”, the book turns out to be thoroughly mocking, mostly humorous and even manages to be insightful in parts. The FIP has tweaked and fine-tuned his cynical nicknames for the players, staff and owners of the IPL, most of which are already legendary. Appam Chutiya is up there with Augustus Caesar! And no one involved in the tournament, from the ball boys to the ICC, has been spared in the book!

The plot moves at a feverish pace through 35 days of the Indian Bollywood League (IBL) Season 2 with the author and the smart detective PMS, who is hired to expose the FIP, taking turns in narrating the story. The FIP blog is used only as a focal point to further the plot: that consists of off-the-field drama during IBL 2 and the suave detective’s efforts to expose the FIP, with the blessings of Sadde Guru Sherlock Holmes. As in any detective story, everyone from Lalu to Gautam Sarkar to the ICC , qualifies to be a suspect! The sub-plots involving the Indian cricket captain’s love interest and the power equations in the cricketing world, add the right masala ingredients to make it a Bollywood potboiler! ( A movie deal might not be far ahead, I guess!)
It appears that the FIP has consciously changed some of the facts and names to escape likely legal cobwebs or maybe the plot demanded the changes. Nevertheless, the book is a light read giving a humorous account of the IBL circus off-the-field and comes across as a tad opinionated at certain places. Nevertheless, episodes like the one describing the “Tire and Fire” Project tried out by the Phoren Babas are hilarious enough to throw you off the chair!

FIP talks a lot about himself but reveals nothing at all. The mystery is whether detective PMS nabs the culprit or the FIP gives him a royal slip to remain an enigma! (We won’t play spoilsports spilling the climax!)

Verdict: Go ahead and give it a read. This is a creamy serving of baby corn soup to warm up your appetite for the three-course IPL (3) feast!

P.S: Junta who liked the blog will love the book!

P.P.S: Junta who have not read the blog will be googling for it once they read the book!

Top blog lines that did not make the book:
From reader’s choice awards – Little John to Bookha Naan where Little John barges into his room and says “You say new pitch, but it’s old pitch. How you say how to do balling when you don’t know pitch”. Amidst FIP’s fans, the fiery dialogue is as famous as the Big B’s lines from Zanjeer!

Top Chapters :

The Legend of Appam Chutiya:

Excerpt:
“ ‘Appam Chutiya! Appam Chutiya!’ they chanted as a bemused Prasanth stood in the middle of the room. People were rolling on the floor, clutching their stomachs, tears streaming down their faces……………… The blogger’s special focus on him and the response to his nickname reinforced his belief that he was rich, famous and absolutely irresistible to women.”

Missing Pieces

Excerpt:
“They made him jog, which he did willingly. Then they made him sprint, which was in execution at best a fast jog. They made him stretch and i was happy to see that he could actually touch his toes. They made him do crunches, during which he came dangerously close to falling asleep everytime he lay back……………….. The coaches screamed and shouted at him to go for it, but he said, ‘Too far’ and waited for the next ball”

The Moment of Truth

Excerpt:
“I looked up and saw Ashok staring at me. ‘Yaar,’ I said, ‘Woh hum sabko Appam Chutiya bana raha hai’ ”

Personal note from the reviewer:
Your book belongs to a completely new genre which we may call scandalous-spoof. I thoroughly enjoyed the read. And people who will pick up the book surely understand that it is not going to be an exercise in literature and know whats in store. Your book will not disappoint its target audience!

You can buy the book @ 35% off from IndiaPlaza.in, India’s largest Online Bookstore!

http://www.indiaplaza.in/The-Gamechangers-Fake-IPL-Player-Anonymous/books/9788172238551.htm

Source: http://www.livemint.com/2010/03/04203921/Gautam-Sarkar8217s-googly.html

Last year’s blogging sensation, the Fake IPL Player, debuts as a fiction writer. An excerpt.

There was an air of expectancy at the Middlesex County Cricket Club where Calcutta Cavalry were gathering for their morning training session. This was no ordinary session, this was when the custodians of the team would put into action the master plan that would set them on a winning streak in IBL 2009. Project Tire Gautam, Fire Gautam was ready to be rolled out.

Jeff Buccaneer sat on a reclining chair under a lawn umbrella on the sidelines, with his two assistants, the fielding coach and a trainer squatting on the ground near him. They were going through the details of the gruelling drill that Gautam would be subjected to. It was a drill that Gautam wouldn’t survive, or so they believed. One of them even harboured the hope that it would tire him out of next year’s IBL as well.

The team was arriving in three batches due to unavailability of the big team bus. The first batch was halfway through their jogging when the second batch came in. Gautam, as usual, was expected to arrive last. The four others who were to arrive with him in the third batch would be subjected to the same training drill as Gautam. But they were expected to survive the harsh treatment because of their youth. And too bad if they didn’t. As Buccaneer put it, ‘Every cause needs a martyr’.

McMillan joined his boss near the boundary line as the second batch started warming up. The Execution Squad was filling McMillan in on the schedule when they were distracted by the sound of a vehicle drawing up. The third batch had arrived. Anticipation running high, they listened for the faint voices which got louder as the players walked towards them. They trudged in, one by one, and the think-tank’s excitement turned to anguish as they saw that, instead of five players, the third batch had only four. Gautam Sarkar was missing.

‘Where’s Gautam?’ screamed McMillan at the top of his lungs.

‘Isn’t he here already?’ replied one of the players.

‘No, he isn’t. Can’t you see?’ an irritated McMillan snapped.

It didn’t take long for realization to dawn—the entire team had arrived, with the exception of the one man who was wanted the most.

McMillan called Gautam’s cellphone. There was no response. He redialled five times without any luck. Then he called the hotel and asked them to connect him to Gautam’s room. There was no response on that phone either. The hotel manager sent a bellboy off to Gautam’s room to check. The boy confirmed that Gautam was not in his room.

Two assistant coaches, a fielding coach, a throwing coach, a physiotherapist, a trainer, a running coach and a captain stood around Buccaneer, the man with the plan, wondering how Gautam Sarkar had, yet again, wriggled out of their grasp. Although no one said it aloud, there was just one question on everyone’s mind—‘Did someone tip him off?’

The frustration of Gautam’s absence was taken out on the hapless others who went through a harder than usual training session. Three hours later, they headed back to the hotel, groaning and grunting as they massaged their tired muscles. After dumping their bags in their rooms, they headed straight to breakfast and soon after to the swimming pool. And there he was. Wearing red shorts with a Mickey Mouse pattern and a white floral shirt, sun glasses on his head and a glass of orange juice in his hand, Gautam Sarkar was relaxing on a poolside recliner.

‘I had very disturbed sleep last night,’ Gautam said when they asked why he hadn’t been at training. ‘I decided to sleep a couple of extra hours so that I am mentally alert for the game today.’

‘Why weren’t you answering your phone?’ McMillan asked, gnashing his teeth to control his anger.

Looking for all the world like he had no idea what they were talking about, Gautam said, ‘I must have slept very soundly in the morning to not have heard anything.’ He smiled, ‘Boys, I think I am all set for today’s game.’

The Gamechangers is due to be released on 11 March.

Source: http://greatbong.net/2010/01/15/a-real-interview-with-the-fake-ipl-player/

The Fake IPL Player (henceforth to be known as FIP) needs no introduction. But I will give a brief one nonetheless.

Last year during the Indian Premier League, a blog suddenly appeared that was purportedly written by a fringe ‘anonymous’ player of one of the IPL’s most popular franchises. Giving a warts-and-all, brutally irreverent, fly’s eyes view of the inner workings of a doomed team and liberally peppered with salacious accounts of the off-field activities of our superstars (whose actual identities were hidden behind easily-guessable monikers –a few of which like Kaan Molu and Appam Chutiya have since become part of our vocabulary) the FIP became a viral Internet phenomenon.

Who was this FIP? Was he a disgruntled player? Was it a publicity gimmick, stage-managed from behind? More importantly was this the truth? Or like everything else we are told, the ardh-satya?

Whatever or whoever he be, The FIP soon became water-cooler talk in every office where cricket is discussed as people poured over screens dissecting the allusions to real players and events. Certain players were suspected to to be the sinister blogger, a newspaper even broke the so-called identity of FIP and then retracted, the said franchise came up with an official statement on their blog, and as the FIP’s posts sounded realistically accurate, confusion became more confounded. The world waited eagerly till the end of the tournament, not just because it was overtly long but because FIP promised to reveal his identity only then.

He did. Well not really. In a video which showed his shadow, the FIP confessed to not being an actual player.

Then who was he?

Just a Indian cricket fan, but not an ordinary one.

Somebody special who during “the faceless journey of life”, happened “to get intimately exposed to cricket. From the Kings of Bollywood to the pimps of cricket and vice-versa”, an experience that converted him into “an insider, the the fly on the wall, the ghost in the darkness.”

He left with a promise.

Being intimately involved, I think I saw a lot more happening that most people saw on TV. I saw so much. It will probably take me a book or two to spill it all in. But if I actually write a book, I will be history even if my book is not. Still, it is a story that has to be told.”

Well the FIP is back to make history. With his book ‘ The Gamechangers’ being brought out by Harper Collins. And to tell you more is the man himself in his first ever interview.

In case you are wondering, this interview with me is not due to the fact that we are both share the publisher. As some of you may know, I won the Indiblog of the Year at the Indibloggies. Now it is normally the tradition that the winner is interviewed. However Debashish, the administrator of the award, felt that since I had been interviewed after winning the same award before it would be better that we did an interview of someone else. And FIP, the winner for Indibloggies Sports Blog of the Year, was the obvious choice.

Enough talk. Silence. Because here he is. The Fake IPL Player. For the first time since he stopped blogging.

Q. What led you to start the FIP blog? Was it something that you had wanted to do for long or was it something you thought of one fine day on an impulse?

The blog itself was a spur of the moment thing. What happened was, over the years, I had collected a bagful of juicy stories which I sometimes shared with my close friends. For obvious reasons, they loved them. One evening, a few days before I left for South Africa, we were sitting around, drinking beer, me and three other friends, when one of them suggested that I put the stuff out on a blog so they can enjoy the stories in real time. I said cool. It was supposed to be a dirty little black book between just the four of us. I never thought of making it ‘Private’ probably because I never expected anybody to find out about it.

But, I do remember thinking about how to make it more interesting than just a discussion board. I thought about Fakesteve and ‘War for news’. And, coincidentally, I watched the movie ‘Wag the dog’ on the flight to Jo’burg. The Fake IPL Player persona was, in some ways, influenced by all three.

Q: People start blogs and struggle to get noticed. How did you manage to create a readership so quick? More specifically, how did an initial set of people even come to know that there was this delightfully “evil” blog called the FIP?

To be honest, I have no frickin’ clue how it got out. For the first few days, it was just the four of us having fun on the blog. Then, one fine day I woke up to see 5 or 6 guys not known to me who had signed up as Followers. And several others who had started commenting on the blog. I asked my friends if they had talked about it to anyone and they all said ‘No’. I have a feeling though that at least one of them would have told somebody. [At the time I felt differently about it, but now I am not complaining ] By the end of the day, the Follower count had reached double figures. I was a bit worried then. I texted the most sensible guy in our group and asked him if I should continue. His response was ‘Lage Raho Munnabhai’. So I continued. A couple of days later, Cricinfo put it on their home page. I remember I was on my way to Kingsmead for the KKR Vs King’s XI game when my friend messaged me saying that the blog was on Cricinfo home page. By the time I returned to my hotel, the Follower count was 150. Eventually, it reached almost 9000. I can’t stop laughing every time I remember how scared I was when it had reached 15.

Cricinfo got to know about it very early. My guess is that either they chanced upon it accidentally or one of the earliest finders may have posted it on their facebook wall or something. I don’t know. But, I think they were amongst the first to know. They may have monitored it for a couple of days to confirm whether the stuff being written was true or not. Once they were satisfied, they probably put it up. After that, it just took off.

Q: Was it all a work of fiction or was it what film-makers call “based on facts”? If it was, did you have a source inside the team or inside the press corps?

I stand by the disclaimer on the blog, “All characters in the blog are fictitious. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is purely coincidental and unintentional.”

Q: Were you ever bothered about the ethics behind maintaining the ruse of being an actual IPL player (I am going by the video you put up where you talked about merely being an avid cricket lover), which if taken seriously might lead to witch-hunts inside the team and ultimately to innocent players being put under a cloud? Or did you consider the use of the word “Fake” in “Fake IPL Player” enough of a disclaimer, even though the principal appeal of the blog did come from people perceiving it to be real?

I always ensured that I gave enough clues that would tell the management who I could or could not be. I must confess that during the initial days, when the blog was still private, I was a bit careless on that front. But once it got popular and I decided to continue it, I edited out some of the earlier indiscretions and made sure I wrote stuff that wouldn’t put any particular player under the scanner. There certainly was a witch-hunt on and I followed it closely, but I was sure that no innocent player would pay a price for the blog. I trusted the team management with at least a quarter of a brain not to do something that stupid.

I was concerned when Aakash and Bangar were sent back. I stopped blogging for a couple of days until I got a confirmation from none other than Aakash himself that it wasn’t because of the blog.

To correct your question just a wee bit, while I have always been an avid cricket follower, over the last ten years or so I have had opportunities to be a little more than ‘merely an avid cricket follower’ and I think something to that effect was mentioned in the video post as well. But, you are right, I did think that the word ‘Fake’ in the name absolved me a bit.

Q: Will you ever reveal your identity? If not, why?

I don’t know about ‘ever’, but at the moment I am quite happy in anonymity.

A couple of years ago, I met this fascinating man in Paris. He was extremely well read and knowledgeable, but other than that he seemed like a regular, middle aged guy with a regular job at a French Football Club. Nothing out of the ordinary. He invited me to spend a weekend at his upcountry home with his wife and three kids. When I went there I realised that his upcountry home was actually a chateaux, he was a billionaire and part-owner of the club. I asked him how and why he keeps such a low profile. His response was ‘vivre cache pour vivre heureux’, which means ‘to lead a hidden life is to lead a happy life’.

Q: What led you to suddenly backtrack from revealing your identity?
There was a chance that my identity would put some players I know well in a bit of a pickle. When I thought of it I didn’t feel right about putting them in an awkward situation for no fault of theirs.

Q: Do you read other blogs? If you do, which ones?

My favourite blog is thevigilidiot.com This guy is just hilarious. I actually watched Kurbaan after reading his review to see how mind-numbingly inane it could possibly be.

The other blog I love is the Inclusive Planet blog (http://inclusiveplanet.wordpress.com/). Inclusive Planet is an organisation that provides services to the disabled sector and on their blog people with physical disabilities from all over the world share their experiences. The best part about it is that you hardly ever find any sympathy-seeking sob stories there. They are intelligent, evocative, well-written and inspiring stories. Personally, through this blog I have learnt a lot about a community that I understood very little about earlier. On the blog, read jbarath’s and Gidi Ahronovich’s posts.

I enjoy a couple of travel blogs. Janchipchase.com is the blog of the Nokia head of design. He captures the world with pictures and his acute ethnographic observations which others would normally miss. Then, there’s this interesting little blog of this IT sales guy from the land of Appam Chutiya who lives in Europe and blogs about his experiences. bottomofheart.blogspot.com

I like Cricinfo’s Page 2. They have some funny writers on their panel. Jamie Alter, Anand Ramachandran, Andrew Hughes, Nishi Narain, George Benoy they’re all quite good.

Prem Panicker’s twitter feed is another favourite and occasionally I visit ‘Cricket with Balls’.

Who has been your favorite Knight Rider player? Who do you think shouldn’t have been in the team?

My favourite Knight Rider? Well, there are so many.

Chris Gayle is great company. In fact, I think, Gayle and Gibbs are the funniest cricketers in the world. Although, the funniest guy one can ever spend an evening with is David Lloyd. He should have been coach of KKR, to be honest. They would have still lost all their games, but at least they would have laughed their way to the bottom of the table.

Another favourite Knight Rider would be John Buchanan’s laptop. For the whole month it kept him hypnotised like a nubile nymphet doing a strip tease. Since he was mostly distracted by the raging sexual energy of his laptop, players could afford to breathe.

Who, I think, shouldn’t have been in the team? Well, don’t we all know that the fish starts stinking from its head?

Q: Where does FIP go from here? Will he come back this IPL season? Tell us about the book.

My book ‘The Gamechangers’, which I have been writing for the last six months, is due for release in February. It tells everything that the blog didn’t or couldn’t. I am very excited about it.

About the blog, well, I still don’t know how close I will be to the action in Season 3. So, it’s a little hazy on that front.

Q: Do you think your book will sell more due to the buzz/controversy created by the blog? Also do you anticipate any legal actions (defamation etc) being taken against you by BCCI when you reveal yourself at the launch of the book?

I don’t know about whether the book will sell more due to the blog or not, but I know for a fact that the book would never have happened if it weren’t for the blog. If it wasn’t for the blog, the folks at Harper Collins wouldn’t have thought of me as anything more than a horse’s ass.

Q: Any words for your fans?

To those who followed my blog and commented on it, a big Thank you. You really kept me on my toes.

During the blogging experience, I realised how harmful public adulation can be to one’s character. Words like ‘You Rock’, ‘Genius’, ‘Dude’ can make you bloat up with pride and ego. The result is almost always a crappy post that would get the same guys to prick the balloon with a pin and cut you down to size. I think the followers of the blog balanced the bouquets and brickbats very well and my sincere thanks for the same. I hope they will support my book too.

Also, 50% of the blog’s success was due to the comments. There were many people who’d come to the blog to read the comments. Some of them were very funny.

Thank you for your time. Here is wishing you a whole DLF maximums of Citi moments of success for The Gamechangers.