Giving thanks - part 1

For the past few days I have been reflecting on everyone I have to be thankful to for shaping me and my life. Apart from the usual suspects (family and close friends) there are a few I need to remember while I can for the little things they showed me or did for me.

In no particular order:

BPJ: He did a lot of things for me and I cannot thank him enough for them. But the biggest thing he probably did was insisting that my PhD funding was tied directly to being able to drive the departmental truck to our field site. If I did not get the license to do so, he said my funding would be revoked. As simple as that. And it worked. And he insisted that I take official driving lessons to do so. It changed the direction my life was to take.

EP: My driving instructor. Even now when I change lanes, take an exit, brake for a traffic light, take a curve or parallel park, I apply the little tips and rules he told me during our hour-long night sessions so many years ago. All our sessions were in the dark and it rained during every one of them (which maybe one reason why I am more comfortable driving at night than in the day time, relatively speaking).

GM: I would not have taken his course if a researcher at ISU had not taken back his offer of a fully-funded PhD program. But, in hindsight, I am glad the offer was rescinded. The way I teach today is based almost entirely off the GM playbook. He had the incredible gift of being able to take a complex issue and simplify it so the students could learn it piecemeal without losing sight of the bigger picture. Someday, I hope to be half as good as he is.

RP: Bored me to death with his long-winded, one-sided conversations but he did teach me one important thing before he left for Atlanta - how to iron my clothes. Don't scoff...it is not as simple as he made it look.

SM: When the temperature drops and the house gets cold I remember his tip - take a hot shower and then you'll be fine, And the bathroom also becomes the warmest room in the house in the winter.

RT: His simple policy for office hours - if the door is open, come right in - is one that I practice. Nothing gives me more joy at work than having a student walk into my office, sit down, and chat about life in general.

KDK - One week after I received my driver's license I was convinced to be the sole driver on a road trip to Alabama. A lifelong love for the open road and spending weekends in different places was born. The confidence I gained from that trip was immense and life-changing.

SKP: The most generous and giving person I have ever met. Never said no to any request for help without compromising on his ideals. I am not as good as he is but at times I have my moments.

JM: The first person in the US who took me aside and talked to me about my anxieties. He was my professor (and adviser) but I never felt a gap between us. When I wasn't sure if I was good enough to do a PhD, he took me to CEM's office and the two of them convinced me I was capable of it in just two sentences. More than half the labs I teach in my Ecology course are ones I learned from him. He passed away recently and has been in my thoughts a lot since then.

KM: Taught me how to cook dinner for two in 20 minutes or less. And also gave me his warmest winter coat when he moved back to Japan so I did not freeze as much when I walked to my classes.

CR Jr: Ice-fishing? Check. Canoeing? Check. Rafting through rapids? Check. Playing croquet? Check. Golfing? Check.  Indoor soccer? Check. Trapping coyotes for research? Check.How to throw a football in a perfect spiral? Check. Spelunking? Check. Bowling? Check. There are more "firsts" that C was able to check off my bucket list but you get the picture. He even drove me to WV and back from Illinois just so I could visit with BPJ and see the PhD program there.

JM: For teaching Biometry. The best statistics course I have ever taken and even today I can teach basic stats without referring to notes because of him.

Field of dreams

On his blog, Harsha Bhogle waxed nostalgic about Fateh Maidan.

(© Getty Images)

Harsha's memories of the stadium are from an insider's perspective, since he had access as a commentator long after he ceased visiting it as a spectator.

The Lal Bahadur Stadium was like that to us, except that nobody called it by that name. It was always the Fateh Maidan or the “stadium”. It was holy, it was the home of cricket, it was ours. I saw my first match there, played on a turf wicket there for the first time and my first commentary session was there too. Do I give the impression that the pillars spoke to me? I might have thought it was so…once.
(...)
Around that time I had first set foot in the commentary box, like the dressing room, a much hyped place made special only by the people within it. All of 19 and wearing a twenty rupee t-shirt, a pair of jeans and rubber slippers, I had done my audition there. It was where Shyam Karwande and HK Srinivas sat and talked about the “Hill Fort End”, Naubat Pahad to everyone else. In my audition I said “Hill Fort End” and felt special too.

It called me back often and I grew to like the little area, only a little bigger than a cubicle with two wide windows we looked through. It was where the first step had been taken, it was mine. 

My memories are more of the Fateh Maidan Club, whose Tandoori chicken and parantha are unmatched in my memory. I guess I was spoiled at a young age - I have never been able to enjoy either of those food items since then as what I have pales in significance with the FMC items. Even after all these years, I  can still taste them, if that makes sense.

I watched a few matches at Fateh Maidan. Two stand out in memory. There was a game against the Australians where RP Singh (the other one) began his international career with a maiden over and little else about his bowling was remarkable. Australia batted first, Bruce Reid read a Sidney Sheldon book (for once I had good seats in a section right next to the Australian players), and a torrential downpour forced the match to be abandoned soon after my hero, Mohammad Azharuddin, came in to bat. I walked home from there as I did not feel like fighting the crowd at the bus stop and I was already soaking wet. Back then it did not seem too far away to walk home. Those of you who know the distance will know it took me a while to do so. And it rained all the way home!

The second one against the Kiwis holds better cricketing memories for me - I got to watch Azharuddin play a sublime innings filled with boundaries, Richard Hadlee found swing where no one else did, and Arshad Ayub pleased the locals with a few wickets. That inning of Azhar's was enough to fill me with a lifetime of good memories and thoughts about the fellow, all his subsequent (alleged) shenanigans notwithstanding.

Sitting at the far end of the ground, diametrically opposite to the FMC end, I did not know then that my life would change in a few months. I have never been to an international match at a stadium since. In hindsight, I am glad that those days at Fateh Maidan remain my last memories of a day spent watching a Test match.

P.S. Here is another recollection of the glory days of Fateh Maidan from former South Zone offspinner V Ramnarayan.

Mad Dog and the Big Hurt

I have never really followed Major League Baseball too closely and it has been exactly 5 years since I even paid attention to the scores or highlights.  After I moved to Chicago two baseball players with connections to Chicago held my interest.  Greg Maddux, a pitcher, and Frank Thomas, a first baseman for the White Sox.

Maddux had been a Cy Young award winning pitcher for the Cubs who had been unsigned by the Cubs, paving the way for the Atlanta Braves to grab him.  Maddux would win the Cy Young for the next three years as well underscoring how badly the Cubs had misjudged his greatness.  Frank Thomas was a huge (6' 5", 240 pounds) hitter who was as good a singles hitter as he was a slugger.

Even as their careers wound down and they changed teams, I kept track of the box scores just to see how they were doing.  Maddux finally ended with 355 wins, one more than Roger Clemens which pleased me no end (and still does even today)!

Yesterday, in their first year of eligibility Maddux and Thomas were voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.  A perfect ending to my "association" with them.

Someday I will tell you of the one time I went to see Thomas play live.  I was more fortunate with Maddux, seeing him pitch multiple times, including a 9 inning gem where he did not give up a single run and still did not win the game!  That game - on August 28th, 2002 - remains my favorite baseball game.  I had a seat right behind home place at PNC Park in Pittsburgh and got to watch Maddux unveil a 100 pitch masterpiece.  When he left in the 9th inning the score was 0-0!

Maddux was not only a good pitcher, he was also a great fielder, winning the Golden Glove a record 18 times.  Think about it, for 18 different years he was best fielding pitcher in baseball.  A testament to his longevity and excellence at that position.

Words of wisdom

"A bird foraging for food in the swamps and marshes sinks rapidly if it doesn't move. It has to keep pulling its feet out of the mire to move on, regardless of whether it has caught something or not. And the same applies to us and to our love. We have to move on, we can't stay where we are, because we'll sink."

— Milorad Pavić (Dictionary of the Khazars)

Paradise lost

Many summers ago I was lucky enough to be able to travel extensively in the Caribbean. I went island-hopping by myself and one of the places I visited was Montserrat, an island in the Lesser Antilles region of the Caribbean. Two striking features of the island nation that caught my eye were its black sand beaches and the sulfur springs in the central mountains. The former was an indication of the past of the island while the latter was a significant hint of the future to come.

Blast from the past

Sometimes, when you least expect it, the past comes tumbling back into your life, ensuring that old memories swirl into the foreground, fighting to explain what you remembered in light of who you have become today. Moreover, when these are memories that have spent more than two decades in the recesses of your brain, thinking about them is a surreal experience.

Before I talk about what triggered these memories, let me take you back in time. This story begins in the early 1980's when I was just starting to figure out the nuances of cricket. I was still a young kid, pre-teen and all that, but had a grandfather, who loved cricket, for company. From him I learnt a lot about the past of the game and the bliss of a properly contested Test match. India had just won the World Cup and cricket was popular like never before.

Stomping grounds

From Azhar's Facebook page I came across this oldie-goldie. The photo in and of itself is not that remarkable, except that it jogs a lot of memories in my head. Not for Mohammad Azharuddin and Raj Singh Dungarpur, though that has a lot of connotations with it, but for the backdrop. I spent many days at Fateh Maidan Club and the lawns of Lal Bahadur Stadium that doubles up as the floor of the dining hall. The paranthas and tandoori chicken of FMC remain etched in my mind and I have never found any that have even come close to duplicating them.

My mouth is watering as I type these words.

Aside: The last time I attended a match at LB Stadium, I was fortunate enough to watch Azharuddin and Hadlee in a splendid face-off that was thrilling in every sense of the word.

Having evoked those two greats, let me leave you with two videos. The first is of Richard Hadlee's greatest performance with the ball - 15 wickets (9+6) at the Gabba. He had a chance to get all 10 but unselfishly took a splendid catch for the 9th out. (Aside: Considering the recent troubles that Ricky Ponting is having with the hook/pull shot, it is interesting that in Andrew Hilditch, the current chairman of the selectors, he has a kindred spirit, one who understands the fascination with playing a hook shot.)



Finally, Azharuddin during the most purple patch of his career. Breath-taking stuff.

Those were the days..

"You see the whole country of the system is juxtapositioned by the hemoglobin in the atmosphere because you are a sophisticated rhetoretician intoxicated by the exuberance of your own verbosity."

The future is now

A long time ago there was this new thing called the "Internet". I'll let Tom Brokaw take it from here...

Yesterday once more

From the far reaches of youtube and the inner recesses of my mind comes this flashback to the super-90's. While surfing the web I stumbled upon this song, and immense nostalgia abounded. In typical Bollywood fashion, the incongruity of the wedding singer being allowed to prance about untouched while he states his case, while gyrating in synch with identically dressed back-up dancers, is not even worth mentioning. If you are the hero, you are allowed such transgressions! After all, true love is at stake.

(By the way, whatever happened to Ronit Roy, who eerily reminds me of Hrithik Roshan here? Ah, the always reliable imdb.com has the necessary information.)



And while at it, the following song from Meri Jung was the rage for Javed Jaffrey's dancing, but I never got to see it. Now, almost 25 years later, I finally saw what I had missed. Whodathunk it?!

Once you get past the initial awkwardness, Javed's dancing isn't too bad, is it?