The Country With The Dragon Fixation

 

The year of the Dragon is here. It may not mean much to you and me, but to the Chinese? ha! think again. Rare is a Chinese couple which did not conceive keeping the Dragon year in mind. The Chinese want their children to be born in the year of the Dragon and since, to quote a giddy pregnant lady, “it comes but once every 12 years”, almost all of them have taken extra measures to make it happen.

The thing is Chinese consider Dragon babies to be auspicious/lucky and destined to be successful. They’re also believed to be born smarter and of a higher intellect than those born during the non-Dragon years, like, say, the Rat babies.

<cricket> I, for one, hope cricketers learned how to plan conceptions from these Chinese mamas. The trick, you see, is to have the wife/girlfriend deliver during the off-season. The more dashing and confident ones can probably even aim to have the wife deliver during the 4th day of a test match, if India happen to be the team visiting. </cricket>

But, ironically, it so happens that the Dragon babies will, in fact, be severely handicapped compared to the (yeah, you’ve guessed it) non-Dragon babies. Yup, even the Rat babies will have it better. Why? Well, there’s invariably a population boom and because of that more children in a single class, and because of that a more unfavorable student-teacher ratio, and because of that, in all probability, poorer quality of education.

Anyhoo, when has superstition given a rat’s ass, or a dragon’s ass for that matter, about statistics? The legend lives on! (much to the chagrin of a certain Justice Katju. Or is he only concerned about Indians?)

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The Chinese want Dragon babies. Quick, corner the diaper market. You know how classic Hollywood villains corner the essentials and trigger a world war, right? Well, this is something like that, but luckily for you, the trigger has already been pulled by a Dragon. Wait a minute, are you a Dragon baby too?

The Chinese want Dragon babies. Best gift you can give your Chinese friend- a Blu-ray/DVD of  ’How to Train Your Dragon’. (I can totally imagine Seth Meyers doing this joke in his SNL bit.)

The Chinese want Dragon babies. I had no idea Fincher was so big in China. Wait a minute, now I get why there was that unprecedented amount of growth of Chinese on social networks last year.

The Chinese want Dragon babies. Somewhere, the alert heads of a studio owning the rights to the Dragonball franchise are planning a 3D re-release. Toy Story did it, Lion King did it, Beauty and the Beast did it, why not Dragonball?

The Chinese want Dragon babies. Irrepressible population growth? OMG! the Mayans were right.

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Those that didn’t make it

The Chinese want Dragon babies. This can mean only one thing- surplus labor. That would translate into lower wages for those assembling your iPhone 25 and iPad 22. Yay! killer offers in the offing.

The Chinese want Dragon babies. Raw material imports have shot up and the Bellary Bros. have become richer than the Ambani Bros. To put the symbolic cherry on top, the Bellary Bros. bought Mumbai Indians from the elder Ambani. Nita Ambani was none too pleased and Mukesh, in order to placate the wife, bought her Alaska. He wanted to get her Hawaii but he couldn’t out bid Siddharth Mallya. (The Republicans, concerned over mounting fiscal deficit, had decided to auction distant territories.)

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The Proteas Exposed: How they are nowhere near being at the top and how they are just pretenders

We do an excellent job pretending guys!

Gut feel number 1: When the opposition bats first, either they collapse or the South Africans collapse.

Facts: Lets define collapse as one where the team gets bowled out for below 200, so as you can see, whenever they fail to bowl the opposition out for below 200, their batting panics and they instead collapse. This has happened in each of the last 5 tests the opposition batted first.

India vs South Africa 1st test: Ind- 136, RSA-620

India vs South Africa 2nd test: Ind-205, RSA-131 (Ind batted 2nd in the 3rd test)

South Africa vs Australia 1st test: Aus-284, RSA-96 (Aus batted 2nd in the 2nd test)

South Africa vs Sri Lanka 1st test: SL- 180, RSA-411

South Africa vs Sri Lanka 2nd test: SL-338, RSA-168

Interestingly, all these happened in front of their home audience. Looking further back at tests played at home when the opposition batted first, we find

South Africa vs England 4th test: Eng- 180, RSA-423/7 (England batted 2nd in all three remaining tests)

South Africa vs Australia 1st test: Aus-466, RSA-220 (2008/09 series)

South Africa vs Australia 2nd test: Aus- 352, RSA-138

South Africa vs Australia 3rd test: Aus-209, RSA- 651 (yes, the 200 model doesn’t fit to a T but a similar pattern is quite glaringly visible)

So the gist of it all is if you happen to bat first against South Africa, get a decent total, sit back, and enjoy them press the self-destruct button.

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Gut feel number 2: Mark Boucher and Ashwell Prince are walking wickets/ South African tail begins at no.6

Facts: Since December 2009, Prince has come out to bat on 26 occasions, he’s passed 50 thrice and two of those were against the West Indies. 

Since Boucher isn’t in as a pure batsman, let’s reduce his cutoff to a random looking lowly 18.Even then, he’s managed to pass that figure just thrice in his last 14 innings dating back to June 2010. 

The South African tail indeed begins at number 6.

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So, when it comes to South Africa, the gut is indeed right. Also, can a team with such mental fragility and ridiculously short batting line up seriously aim to be no.1? My gut says they aren’t good enough for even no.3!

How the actions of one TV conglomerate are affecting our unity and denying us our viewing pleasures

For the sake of this post, let’s define Upper Class as those who have access to both Ten Action and Ten HD, Middle Class as those who have access to Ten Action but  not Ten HD, and Lower Class as those who have access to neither Ten Action nor Ten HD. It’s a given that all 3 classes have access to Ten Sports.

Our society which was egalitarian and founded on the principles of equality till a couple of years ago started developing fissures and subsequently got divided into haves and have-nots following the introduction of Ten Action. This move left many consigned to make do with “second best” offerings. The general populace didn’t bother and rise in revolt as the “first choice” usually broadcast matches of a team which no one bothers to watch unless there’s a chance of them slipping up and having their backs handed to them. This happened at the time of last year’s final and some of us planned on taking the charity route to make amends, as you must be aware of.

But starting this year, the number of classes have proliferated thanks to the advent of Ten HD, and in the meanwhile Ten Action became more readily available; thus spawning a new ever-expanding division of Middle Class.

To get a taste of the varying privileges of these classes sample what happened in the early hours of 23rd November 2011. The Lower Class got to see Bayern Munich vs Villareal; one club had already qualified and the other was already well on its way out. The Middle Class, in addition to that match got to see Louis XVI slip on a banana peel and the Upper Class took the cake in the form of Napoli vs Manchester City. In other words, the Upper Class got to witness a Roman amphitheateresque war of gladiators replete with the hostile environment, the Middle Class got to see a Monarch(whom everybody hates) get beheaded (well, not quite) and the Lower Class was left with a battle of clowns.

Guess football isn’t a poor man’s game anymore. What we need to do now is to occupy White Hart Lane, block off access to Stamford Bridge and set up (Nou) camps till equality is restored.

Song of the day

How I wish you could see the potential, the potential of you and me.

Its like a book elegantly bound but in a language that you can’t read, just yet.

You gotta spend some time, love. You gotta spend some time with me,

and I know that you’ll find love, I will possess your heart.

The Punch

 

You’re not the movies that you watch

You’re not the quotes that you quote

You’re not the things that you like

You’re not your FB profile.

You’re not the status message you use as bait

You’re not the smileys you use as a shield

You’re not the fake guffaws you convey

You’re not your Gtalk avatar.

You’re not your music library

You’re not the songs that you scrobble

or the songs that you love

You’re not your top artists

Stop flaunting your Last.fm page like it was you.

You’re not the 140 characters you limit yourself to

You’re not the tweets that you retweet

You’re not the sly DMs that you send (looking at you Weiner)

Your value is not correlated to the number of followers you have.

You’re not the mails you compose

You’re not the replies and the fake composure

You’re not the mails you prioritise

You’re just fucking spam.

You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake

You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else

We are all a part of the same compost heap.

Artcic Monkey (intervening): Er.. thank you Tyler, but don’t you realize you’re just a hallucination of a nameless guy who’s got an imaginary gun stuck in his awkwardly open mouth?

The Social Experiment

The Notice:

” Anyone willing to allow a 6ft stranger into their living room to watch the Champions League final. I promise to not only behave but also support whichever team you support.

Cheers,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        22 yr old from c2-1102 (you may contact me using the intercom or the elevator)”

//End of notice//

If anyone does reply, I totally plan to not go empty-handed. I’ll go bearing gifts, i.e snacks and drinks (but I didn’t put it up there in the notice since I didn’t want to sound too, for lack of a better word, desperate).

The Chances:

There are 7 blocks, with a notice board serving each one. 800 families is the tentative count, but since the community is relatively new and not all apartments are taken, let’s assume there are 500 families right now.

The proportion of football viewing families goes up as you move up the economic ladder, don’t you think? So, let’s say, 1/4th of these families are into the game. The chances of anyone looking at their notice board are pretty slim, marginal in fact. Let’s go with an optimistic 1/20, anyway. Of the football viewing families who do glance at the notice board, lets say 1/5 are comfortable with having a stranger over (keep in mind that the stranger I speak of is a part of their “community” and thereby a lesser stranger).

Also, take into account the fact that I don’t have a printer and moreover don’t intend to write the notice 7 times over. I’ll probably just go for one and hurt my chances. (This one block which I’m a part of can accommodate 130 families and presumably 75 are in.)

Doing the math, the chances of me getting invited to a stranger’s house to watch the Champions league final between Barcelona and Manchester United (thank you God) will be…………. 0.1875 families. That’s less than 1, isn’t it? I know where this notice is going.

 

 

Mediocrity and You (part-1)

What do you do when you find something written by a person you’re comfortable interacting with totally bereft of any sense and intellectually devoid?

Do you

a) Leave a comment vaguely indicating as such and append a ‘:P’ towards the end?

b) Not even risk firing a blank, even though deep within you want to empty a whole cartridge of live ammunition?

c) Just shrug your shoulders, think of that time you wrote something as stupid, and forgive each and everyone and thank the lord for giving you a chance a live?

d) Deliberately choose to ignore the shortcomings and amplify the positive aspects of this friend, having read thus in a self-help book?

e) Do the above step unconsciously?

f) Take a high stand and refrain from judging (in other words, are you a vegetable)?

g) Act according to the mood you are in?

h) Just tear him/her a new one and tell them how exactly you feel?

i) Be a sycophant and agree with, nay praise, the piece for being so marvelously insightful and thought provocative?

j) Say “keep writing” ?

k) Not leave a comment but show the work to every passerby and get a big laugh off it?

l) Begin to hold the person in a lower esteem?

m) Not give a crap as you are a “happy go lucky” kinda person and forget it was ever written.

(Not even the alphabet-handicap can put a cap on the number of options. Humans are so diverse that the number of ways they think in, if you stop to think about it, are countably infinite. Think 13′s as good a number as any to come to a premature stop then. Feel free to share if the way you react isn’t one among the first 13 that came off my head)

p.s: In case, you had to read the opening sentence more than once, I apologize.

Malkovich Malkovich

OMG! Obama went inside his own portal.

Repatriation

Hello IIIT Blogroll! Long time no see. What took you so long to get back up? Some of us lose our spirits on seeing you down and don’t bother to bring ourselves to write. Please don’t go down for so long ever again. As it is, Twitter and Facebook are eating into your share and providing us people with platforms ready-made to vent our reactions there and then, instead of say, bottling them up, organizing them neatly, cherry-picking the words, airbrushing the punctuations, accentuating the effectiveness, and hitting the ‘Publish’ button.

You know you are up against it Blogroll, when a half-baked semi-witty rushed-through status on your rivals’ platforms gets more love (or should I say ‘Like’) than a completely coherent, thoroughly thought out, time devoting outpouring of honest emotions over here.

Better pick up your game, before we attention-deficit players go elsewhere seeking fame.

Lighthearted banter

Sachin’s fans are up in arms and screaming their lungs out holding datasheets showing the percentage breakdown of match results following Sachin scoring a century. Why this outpouring of bookish defensiveness? A few of us were cheeky enough to latch on to the string of results ever since the WC and dared to poke fun at the God.

Using the same argument, Torres has a great overall record too, but has that stopped anyone from poking fun at his recent slump? No, it hasn’t. So I guess it’s only fair to admit not every Sachin’s century leads to a defeat and not every game finds Torres failing to score. But right now, that’s what’s happening and the mischievous ones have every right to indulge themselves.

I guess what I want to say is all of you with your bowels in an uproar, take your datasheets and stuff them in there.

Will Sachin score a match-winning century or will Torres find the back of the net first? The race is truly on, and until then the jokes won’t stop. Grin it and bear it.

P.S: Came across this classic tweet following Arsenal’s fuck-up against Liverpool- “Did Sachin score a century for Arsenal?”