Monthly Archive for May, 2011

Ghostly tales of the cricketing kind

Published on May 27, 2011 in Latest. 18 Comments

Originally appeared in the Mirror – Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune, Ahmedabad Click here

Last week, the Indian Council of Tantriks and Black Magicians (ICTBM) reported a sudden spurt in abnormal paranormal activity. A deeper study revealed the reason behind this.

Apparently, Chetan Sharma’s ghost, who had been wandering aimlessly for a really long time, has finally found a home in Lakshmipathy Balaji. The study was concluded the moment Ambati Rayudu hit the waist high full toss from Balaji for a six off the last ball of their last league match. Digging into the case files revealed that the said ghost was so sure of finding a home for himself in 2007 when Joginder Sharma was put in charge of the final over of the T20 world cup that he had already thrown a party for all other ghosts. Unfortunately for him, though, he lost out to the ghost living on a 99-year lease in Misbah’s body.

But now, finally, he can rest in peace until the next Balaji shows up. We wish him a happy house warming.

Aila Aunty-la
Reports emerging from the Mumbai Indians camp say that Ambati Rayudu is most determined to win the IPL for his team this year. The reason for his grit and determination, though, go beyond his hunger for success.

The man for all dirty jobs - Rayudu


Last Friday, the Ambanis invited the entire Mumbai Indians squad to their famous home Antilla. Other than the music, drinks and dinner, the evening included a guided tour of the mansion popularly known as the ‘Eyesore of the Arabian Sea’. At the end of the two hour tour, Mrs. Nita Ambani dazzled the already disoriented team members with a short but effective lecture totally befitting an Ambani. Displaying a strong grip on modern management techniques, Aunty Ambani told the team that, if they didn’t win the IPL, they’d spend the rest of their contract period cleaning the Antilla. Almost instantaneously, all eyes turned to the hapless Mr. Rayudu.
For, it’s common knowledge now, if there’s a dirty job to be done it’ll fall on Rayudu’s lap.

Not surprisingly, with four needed to win, Rayudu dispatched the last ball for a six. Given the enormity of the punishment staring at his face, even if thirty six were needed off the last ball, I’d bet on Rayudu scoring it.

10 Chris Gayles
Vijay Mallya is reviewing a revolutionary proposal submitted by a team of scientists from Tempe, Arizona. The scientists have proposed to clone Chris Gayle and make 10 more of him just so no one can challenge the Royal Challengers in any edition of the IPL in the future. But, given that VJM XI beat SRK XI by seven wickets, Dr. Mallya is pondering over the idea of cloning himself ten times over. Purely on humanitarian grounds, the scientists are believed to be opposed to this idea.

Papa knows best
For defending champions Chennai Super Kings, though, there’s neither a need for investing into cloning technologies nor resorting to North Korea style punishment tactics. When your team owner also runs the BCCI, small matters like player retention, auction list, match schedules, pitch conditions are always taken care of. Word on the street is that IPL is a really long tournament to decide who plays CSK in the finals.

You can hear my alternative cricket commentary during match hours on www.pitch-invasion.in

The real IPL action is taking place on twitter

Published on May 20, 2011 in Latest. 20 Comments

Originally appeared in the Mirror – Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune, Ahmedabad Click here

On Wednesday night as I returned home after doing commentary for yet another mind numbingly boring IPL match, fighting hard to keep my eyes open, I switched on my computer for a last scan of emails and tweets for the day. And wham!!! Like a stroke of lightning I was jerked out of my stupor. Lalit Modi had just gone berserk on twitter. Without an iota of exaggeration, this was the most exciting one hour of IPL. Re-tweets from Lalit Modi were filling up my timeline at the rate of knots, as Ravi Shastri would put it.

Twitter is a simple webpage where you can put your thoughts in 140 characters which all your followers can read. It’s a bit like sending group texts. Re-tweet is simply when somebody forwards your tweet to all his own followers. In this case it becomes exciting because a tweet from you to Lalit Modi, which would be read by about 100 followers you’d have as a regular person, is suddenly read by more than 300,000 followers that Lalit Modi has, if he decides to re-tweet your original tweet.

The trigger for Lalit Modi’s shooting spree was a news article where he had been quoted saying things which he had merely re-tweeted from other people. “Don’t they understand the difference between tweets and re-tweets?” Modi tweeted in anger. “They should be taught twitter lessons. We should call it Twitter 101,” he suggested. And then, to point out the difference, he started re-tweeting like Chris Gayle gone mad. And, hoping for a brush with fame, people started tweeting him words of praise that Modi promptly relayed to the rest of the world. I tweeted him “87% of listeners on our online radio commentary think IPL without you is like a movie without an item girl”. And bang came the re-tweet. To test him, I tweeted, “Sir, have you lost it?” Putting all doubts to rest, he re-tweeted that too. Then, I asked him an open-ended question. “Do you think there’s life in outer space?” He replied, “I always thought there was life in outer space…but…” leaving the rest to our imagination. After an hour and more than 100 re-tweets, he finally signed off with a “Goodnight”. Promptly someone replied to him, “Goodnight. Don’t forget to use condom.” Our regular listener Subash Jayaram summed it up in his tweet, “Lalit Modi’s twitter was on a dangerous combo of angel dust, meth, coke and Redbull IV.”

A few days ago, Lalit Modi and RCA president Sanjay Dixit squabbled on twitter, each desperately trying to stoop lower than the other. Modi tweeted, “Sanjay Dixit gets enough publicity messing with legends”. Dixit replied calling him a “Bloody fugitive”. Modi retorted with a few words of his own. Dixit sent a scan of Modi’s indictment in a drugs charge in the US in 1985. The contest on twitter was far more dramatic than the cricket being played at the same time.

Chris Gayle ranted about the 50 flies in his hotel room in Dharamsala. Then, at 4.30 am, he tweeted about the construction noise outside his room. A few hours later, he complained of the cold water in the shower. The next day he was out for a duck. And, to those ribbing him on twitter after the loss to KXIP, Vijay Mallya tweeted calling them a name that starts with ‘c’ and rhymes with ‘punts’.

You’re lucky if you haven’t followed IPL this season. But you’re truly blessed if you’ve followed it on twitter.

Ending this column with great news from the cricket field. Kochi Tuskers played on Wednesday night. It was their last match. We won’t have to see them for another year.

You can hear my alternate cricket commentary on www.pitch-invasion.in

Finally, IPL gets its piece of meat

Published on May 13, 2011 in Latest. 21 Comments

Originally appeared in the Mirror Click here

So, IPL has finally got the controversy it was looking for to become relevant again. A tweeting bird has been packed off home for telling the world what everyone already knew about IPL. Was anyone surprised at reading what she wrote about the goings on in the VIP rooms? I suppose not. The one refreshing bit was to get a woman’s perspective at how she feels at being treated like a “piece of meat”. The players, and all men in general, should probably read those blog posts to understand how not to behave. But then, that’s asking for too much, isn’t it?

The crux of this matter is not about what the cheerleader wrote. The real story is in the conduct of those involved with IPL. A macho player with a penchant for hitting fours and sixes runs crying to the school principal to report on a girl. Couldn’t he have had a quiet word with her asking her to respect individuals’ privacy? Probably not. He is, after all, a cry baby who loves to ‘cuddle’. What we now want to know is if he also carries a teddy bear on tour. I bet he does.

The school principal takes immediate action and asks her to be expelled. The team management sends her back without an explanation. And, in the process, saves the money due to her to make up for the millions lost on Kieron Pollard.

This is just a small example of the kind of ‘members only self-serving club’ that IPL is. It’s an eco system of people who have conspired to build a façade intended to blind an entire nation. During the Lalit Modi era, people were just taken in by the grandeur of it all. Post Lalit Modi, the façade’s started to peel off and the muck within is obvious to all. Until recently, Lalit Modi’s successor had one great deed to his credit. Telling us how he had saved $100 Million by scrapping IPL parties. But the next one, ousting a blogging cheerleader, is by far his greatest conquest. This alone puts him amongst the pantheons to have defended the honour of the nation. “Hail Chirayu Amin!” we should all stand up and say.

The hypocrisy that rules IPL shows up in different forms. Last season, a perfectly choreographed and rhythmically swaying Nita Ambani in a sea of children was enough to make you throw up. This season, it’s gone to a different level. After treating him like garbage, SRK dedicates a win to Dada. Mallya runs an airline company, flies his private jet all over the world, and then dresses his team up in green for environment. And if they think that the public will still be taken in by it all, they are mistaken.

No matter what data they throw at us, people aren’t bothered about IPL this season. If it wasn’t for the curious case of the blogging cheerleader, IPL would have come and gone like the Mumbai winter without anyone even noticing it. If Lalit Modi was still around, he’d have probably handed a special bonus to Gabrielle for doing IPL such a big favour.

About Gabrielle and her noble endeavour, she should have been careful about two things. One, she shouldn’t have shared this with anyone. Because there will always be the itch to tell at least one more person. And once two people know, it’s out of your control. Two, she shouldn’t have taken any real names. These are the two things that had kept my anonymity for as long as I wanted to.

Pitch Invasion: Estd. IPL 4

Published on May 6, 2011 in Latest. 13 Comments

Pitch Invasion – Voice of the people

Sometime in the middle of the 2011 world cup, quite accidentally, I re-discovered the joys of community cricket watching. No, I didn’t suddenly start watching matches in pubs or inviting groups of friends over. I just re-activated my twitter handle @_fakeiplplayer and started tweeting through the games. And Twitter completely changed my cricket viewing experience. It acted as a vent, gave me room for creativity and humour, and provided instant response from others. I soon realised that the ‘cricket+twitter’ combo was almost as good an experience as watching cricket in the hostel during my university days.

If 140 characters of text could do so much, imagine what magic could be created if we could add voice to it too. This thought, in a nutshell, was the trigger for Pitch Invasion.

The concept

Pitch Invasion is an online radio station that streams live commentary during IPL matches. I use the word commentary for the lack of a better word because it isn’t really ball-by-ball commentary that we do. The show is actually about 3 guys jamming on cricket – watching the match, talking about it and everything else related to it. It could be about the game on at the moment, or the players in view, or their WAGs cheering them, or trivia about past matches, some banter and cheeky comments; but keeping it all in the context of the game. We’ve tried to give the listener a feel of eavesdropping into our conversation.

But that’s just half the fun. The killer app in the show is the built-in audience interactivity through twitter. Listeners continuously tweet in their thoughts which we read, comment on, and discuss further. For the listener, it’s a great way of getting himself heard and then broadcasted to a broader audience. It’s the kind of instant interactivity that everyone craves for but no other medium currently provides. Several listeners have said that they feel they are back in college and watching cricket with their friends. Despite the one-ball lag that the show has, many of our listeners prefer to listen to us while watching the match on Mute. Others listen to us while watching the match on the internet stream or following it on the Cricinfo timeline.

Early milestones

In the two weeks that we have been live, we have built a bit of a cult listener base who tune in everyday during match hours – sometimes from home, sometimes from office and even on their phones while driving. We have an average of around 1900 listeners a day who listen for an average of 2 hours and 17 minutes per match. Yesterday, our twitter handle @pitchinv started trending and was ranked second in India, ahead of Sachin Tendulkar’s and Amitabh Bachchan’s twitter handles.

Last week, Pitch Invasion also signed an exclusive contract with Sprite for this IPL season. For Sprite, we are promoting a unique contest on twitter called #CRICKWIT where people need to send witty cricket-related tweets adding the #CRICKWIT. The #CRICKWIT started trending on twitter within 12 hours of the launch of the contest. And within 3 days of launching, we received more than 2000 tweets with the #CRICKWIT.

The elements
As for the station jocks, it’s a bit of a motley crew. Other than me, there’s a PhD. in Astronomy, a writer/photographer, a failed cricketer, a filmmaker, a musician, an ex-advertising man, and a gaming expert. Each brings his own character and individuality to the show. Our statistician lives in Shanghai, goes by the name Jagga Ji and feeds us all the stats over Gtalk while we are on air. And there are hilarious specials like Venue Ka Menu – a comical eye on each city, Kurukshetra – a Mahabharat style intro of matches, spoof ads and spoof songs.

The plan
As far as I am concerned, the proof of concept is done. The product has been accepted and it can only get better from here. I am confident that Pitch Invasion as a concept has what it takes to go the distance. In the immediate future, it can have a combination of live stream, audio and video podcasts, and text. I’d like to let it grow organically into any form as long as it retains its irreverent character and speaks the voice of the people.

Confessions of a first time IPLer

Published on May 6, 2011 in Latest. 9 Comments

Originally published in the Mirror – Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune, Ahmedabad Click here

A few days ago I spent an hour with someone who’s travelling on the IPL bandwagon for the first time. We’ll call him Mr. Blue for now. Over a couple of beers, Mr. Blue shared some of his IPL experiences with me. Here’s the gist of it.

Waiting
From the time he took to serious cricket, Mr. Blue thought ‘waiting’ is just what you say to your batting partner when asking him to watch before running. He never realised that the word had a completely different connotation in IPL. Mr. Blue tells me that IPL is just a series of waiting periods. He reckons that 70% of his waking time in the last 4 weeks have been spent waiting for something or the other. You wait at the hotel lobby for your teammates to arrive. Then you wait for your bags to be loaded in the bus. At training, you wait for your turn at the nets. After that, you wait for everyone to finish. You wait at airports. You wait for the owner at events. You wait for your chance to get into the team. And once you’re in, you wait for others to get out so you could go out and bat. And just when you give up and start thinking about your fielding, two batsmen get out off successive balls and you have to go in to face the last ball of the inning. “I might as well have booked myself into the waiting room of a railway station,” he says with exasperation.

Sachin at Wankhede
Mr. Blue thinks that the atmosphere at Wankhede when Sachin is batting is indescribable. The chant of ‘SA-CHIN SA-CHIN’ is continuous, synchronous and way loud than one can imagine. For Mr. Blue, it was as close to an out-of-body experience as he would ever have. “Being there is like being transported to a different universe that revolves around one man,” he says. The way he described it, it appeared like you don’t feel like you really exist there but are somehow getting a view of that universe through a fishbowl.

Cheerleaders
In every respect, the cheerleaders at IPL have met Mr. Blue’s expectations. Except that he had no idea that every group of cheerleaders had a coordinator who kept a very close eye on their activities. And, sharp at 3 am, the coordinator would call for each of them, do a headcount, and ferry them back to the hotel. And, they don’t stay at the same hotel as the players do.

SRK
At Eden Gardens, people at the stands that are around the one where Shahrukh Khan is don’t watch cricket. They watch Shahrukh Khan. For the entire three and a half hours, their heads are turned towards Shahrukh Khan’s gallery and they would punctually go delirious every 10 minutes when Shahrukh Khan waves at them. At nightclubs, the security would cordon off an area for Shahrukh Khan and his entourage. Almost anyone important enough will then virtually queue up to have their two minutes with the emperor. “SRK jahan khada ho jaata hai, line vahin se shuru hoti hai,” Mr. Blue quotes a famous Bollywood line.

Match fixing
Mr. Blue says that, with constant surveillance and monitoring, it’s extremely difficult to engage in either match fixing or spot fixing. Further, with new sets of players in each team this year, cliques and coteries aren’t formed yet. “But, one cannot say with 100% guarantee that it doesn’t exist,” he adds belatedly.