Monthly Archive for March, 2010

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.