Egotism ....a lifelong romance

Sunday, April 23, 2006






Sometimes it’s hard to get the words out
That’s when the pictures will have to do...


Recently, while trying to articulate the Sampras brilliance in a discussion with FSN and Dream Sporting, one of whom needs no convincing of the great man’s genius and one who refuses to acknowledge it in lieu of the bells and whistles of the sport, I wound up with something as astoundingly incoherent as this:

I cannot explain to you why Sampras is the greatest player the world has ever seen. I don’t have proof of it other than the record books and what’s in my head....[and it only gets worse, hence the censor].

Little wonder that while I’ve unfurled essay after essay on Roger Federer in the past couple years alone, I’ve never attempted to write about Sampras in close to a decade and a half. Simply because I don’t think the Pete phenomenon can be captured in words. So, for the sake of saving myself further embarrassment and with the welfare of my readers at heart, I have more or less resigned myself to the fact that my awe of the Sampras magic will have to remain upstairs. There’s also that recurring fantasy about knocking on Pete’s door and foisting my writing abilities on a biography he doesn’t want written, but let me not go into that, for reasons aforesaid.

The pain of depriving my weblog of more than a cursory mention of one of my greatest heroes of all time, however, has been somewhat alleviated by my chance discovery whilst attempting to clean my apartment this afternoon (a task put on indefinite hold since). When the signed picture of Mickey Mouse I’ve had since age 7 slipped out of an electric blue folder, it could only mean one thing -- my treasure trove of irreplaceable gems! I tore through high school certificates and holiday postcards alike to get to the clipping I knew was buried beneath all of it – an attempt to comprehend the sheer paucity of acceptance of the Sampras sublimity by a befuddled and helplessly word-deprived Nirmal Shekar prior to Wimbledon'01 in The Hindu, my most reliable source of tennis eloquence during the decade I spent being infatuated with the game’s greatest.

The second clip is from after Sampras’ defeat just two weeks hence, a very different scenario, albeit, one that inspired even more awe of a sporting hero that had so far stopped his contemporaries dead in their tracks. I remember, in the days following Pete’s loss to Roger, that article was almost an earworm in my head. I know, I know, earworms were meant for the Backstreet Boys back then, but I was dangerously apathetic to the boy band in the '90s, or after (uhmmm, maybe, if I’d taken my eyes off Pete for jus a little bit!)

I am not too happy about showcasing another writer on my weblog, but I need to have Pete on here, even if it means letting someone else do the talking. And Nirmal Shekar is one of the few people in the world I would entrust with matching my fascination for the king of Wimbledon (notice that he starts with an account of Sampras’ artful mastery over his opponents on the hallowed grass at Center Court and then goes off on an emotional and sentimental tangent, which in the case of Pete at least, is better suited to describe his game).

Note to The Hindu: I didn’t see any copyright protection notice, but if this is a violation, please address all correspondence to a certain Pete Sampras in Los Angeles, California, USA. I'd sure like to get his attention...

Thursday, April 13, 2006

Petty peeves

Now that Spring is here and the celestial bodies are behaving themselves, I decided to leave them alone and worry about the smaller things in life...

Would you please hit the freakin’ button!

You’d think in this fast-paced world, where bills get paid in minutes and google gives answers in seconds, the most obvious and fruitful thing to do when you got on an elevator would be to hit the door-close button. But no, some think the most fruitful thing to do is to remark on the lovely weather or worry about a lab mouse with cardiac arrest. That’s all well and good, but if you stand there any longer without shutting the door, Spring might just pass you by and your beloved mouse might not have a chance at resuscitation.

Don’t you start your car when you get into it? Don’t you turn on the light when you enter a room? Wouldn’t shutting the darn door be the natural thing to do in a 6-foot wide car that moves on a vertical shaft? On an elevator, people somehow seem to lose their earthly instincts. It’s either the screwed up gravity or the lack of oxygen. I couldn’t tell you, cos I happen to be in the minority – the I-hit-the-door-close-button minority (we have an affirmative action case going). And this is my official call to that small group of individuals that believes ‘the button’ serves a purpose and begs to be used. Some dismiss it as a placebo cos apparently it doesn’t do anything; I don’t care, I happen to be a pro-active human being and I need to hit it! Why? Bcos it is there, and the elevator door is open 5 freaking seconds after it needs to be shut.

If you’re a fairly observant human being, you would have noticed our kind – we are the ones that cling to the control panel, index finger on the mark and ready to go as soon as the last person is in; if we have the misfortune of being more than an arm’s length away we’d be gritting our teeth and clenching our fists, till someone finally reads our mind and does the needful. Boy, am I glad for my little clique! Quite like the glee that accompanies my chancing upon a fellow Maher-obsessor or die-hard steak-fanatic, my eyes light up when I see one of them enter an elevator. I heave a sigh of immense relief, resign to the rear, shut my eyes and lean against the wall, knowing full well that the job will be done...

To go cups have got to go!

One of the prerequisites of the northeastern American lifestyle is the ability to, at some point in time, use a torso and two pairs of limbs to balance your bag, an umbrella and a coffee cup for miles on end to nowhere in particular. It helps the process (and your posture) to have your bag zipped, your umbrella folded and your coffee cup securely shut. Unfortunately, much as Starbucks and the other capitalistic coffee makers out there are inherently gifted in the art of grinding beans to give just the right flavor to that caffeinated stimulant (sweet mother of all things good and pure!) they happen to be surprisingly unqualified to make a paper cup with a lid that fastens just right. Reason why, I've never had coffee from a to-go cup without it streaming down my hand or my choicest white shirt (the inherent klutz in me accepts a fraction of the blame). So, my point is (yeah, I do have one) that Starbucks should collaborate with Nissan and start offering coffee in plastic mugs with screw caps [yeah, two capitalist pigs might as well get together and screw us (pun unintended)]. Apparently Nissan’s mug can be tossed at any angle to any distance without spillage. I personally think anyone that treats coffee with such insult should be appropriately penalized, but often times it’s not really in your hands (but in the air). Here’s how: you’re juggling your keys, your cell phone and your wallet while stepping into a puddle of microbe-enriched water (another exclusive of the Northeastern lifestyle) and your coffee mug just happens to be the one that takes the plunge -- quite possibly your pride does too -- but then you could jus swoop down and pick it right back. I meant the mug, of course, your pride’s pretty much a lost cause after that.

Spring – not cool?

I mean figuratively of course. Literally, it isn’t supposed to be cool, that’s what we like about it...
So, yesterday was a fabulous 70 degree day and I was more than excited to finally go on a run that did not involve fleece or insulated nylon or mittens or headbands, or the process of adjusting, yanking or removing half or all of them midway through the trail.
But I’d forgotten that with Spring and Summer come the rest of life’s troubles -- three quarters through my usual 4-mile lope, my lungs wanted more air, my gut wanted water and my legs wanted a break. Only that wonderful thing called mindless and irrational will power saw me to the end, and the extra rush of adrenalin was oh-so-exhilarating, but I must say, my body wasn’t exactly pleased. It is all good when the 70% water your body is made of is as frozen as the river you’re running by, but when the sun’s vaporizing every ounce of liquid you drank the past week, you could inhale the river and it wouldn’t matter. So, in winter, I had to desensitize to the low temperatures – let’s face it, I had barely breathed in 0°F until then, much less run. And now, I gotta acclimatize to the heat - the tropical inhabitant of two decades of 90°F has to now acclimatize to the heat! In this energy-starved world, that just seems like an awful lot to waste. You’d think evolution would have thought of that and just made us all cold-blooded...

The Da Vinci Code hanked

Considering I think The Da Vinci Code is literally the best book ever written (this could be attributed as much to my current reading slump as to the peerless Dan Brown), I’m obviously excited about the upcoming movie, though I know from past experience that a movie adaptation is almost never nearly as good as a book. Someone got that adage all wrong -- a picture is worth a thousand words -- no amount of pictures could equal an eloquently written piece, IM-writer’s-O. In any case, I was still looking forward to this movie and hoping it would be the exception that was Jurassic Park, and wondering who could convincingly play the elite and suave (and in woman-speak, oh-so-delectable) Robert Langdon. And what did I hear? Tom Hanks! *Groan* No offense to ol’ Tom – I have loved him in almost every movie he’s ever been in, but this is clearly not a Hanks-job! The Harvard historian in his crisp white shirt and tweed jacket, who rattles off a million connotations at the mere sight of an innocuous piece of art, who couldn’t drive a stick if you put a gun to his head but could logically work his way out of a deathtrap using only his mind and who still manages to beat his peers at water polo.

After all this rambling you’re wondering if I have any suggestions. ‘Course I do. Johnny Depp!!! IMO, he’d fit the role to a tee. At least I could have sworn he could play Langdon in The Secret Window. With Hanks, we’d all just be Sleepless in Paris.

Afterthought
I've thought about it and I now think Tim Robbins will be perfect for the role (yeah, Sony Pictures is holding off release till I make up my mind). And he doesn't even have to change anything -- he just has to be Andy Dufresne (The Shawshank Redemption) or Dave Boyle (Mystic River), as is -- smart, sexy, tranquil, elite and oh-so-endearing...

When dates get convoluted

While watching the Burlington commercial for the weekend Easter sale, I happened to glance at an e-greeting from my folks back home. Wondering if they had now begun wishing me for the traditional American holidays (my mom is my most reliable source of info on Daylight saving time and long weekends), I clicked on it. The card proved to be an exercise in my native language -- mustering all of my unseasoned tamil from the forgotten recesses of my brain I unveiled a wish for New Year’s Day, celebrated around the start of the financial year all over India, albeit called differently and observed by a wide variety of creative rituals in different parts of the motherland...
When April 14th has come to largely represent DO YOUR TAXES for the past four years, it isn’t entirely my fault that the New Year needs reminding. To make up for it, I did go and pull out some sticks of unbelievably crispy cod from the freezer – a far cry from the manga pachadi of yesteryears, but till Bush delivers on his promise of delivering the mango, the fish will have to do....

Sunday, April 09, 2006

Trials and tribulations of the long-haired mane


I’m in a hair-segue right now – that’s right, other than the emotional, mental and intellectual ones that happen every week, this one boggles my upstairs in very different ways.

The last time I sported hair anywhere longer than the nape of my neck was when I was 18 and foolish and didn’t have my priorities quite in order. In other words, back then, it was okay to have to spend 10 minutes of my precious morning running a comb through my untameable, chaotic cap of hair.

All that is well and good, except that the task usually followed barely waking up at 9 am (my roommate was the only one that successfully testified to it, on account of my eyes being open), rushing to the dorm bathrooms and finding them devoid of water, hurtling down to the cookhouse and draining the last drops from the tank, both only made possible by that thing called gravity, carrying my well-earned reward up two flights of stairs, engaging in a really quick cleansing ritual and donning the only pieces of clothing that seemed to vaguely match each other and that could be lugged out of the pile of washed garments with minimum effort.

So, it’s bad enough that I now gotta remember to brush my hair, straighten it on a bad day, pin it up on a worse one and even use an annoying butterfly clip sometimes (which looks uncannily Pebbles-like). And the constant 25 mph winds in Philly certainly don’t help (though I must admit there’s a certain sail-like quality -- I seem to be flowing easier with the wind, not necessarily in the direction I am headed, but pleasurable nonetheless ;)).

As it happens in a variety of these experiments, when you change one thing, you gotta change a whole lot of others to avoid the “cartoon effect”, if you will. So, the past year I have added more than just some length to that mane: clips and hair accessories pervade an area once restricted to a couple of hair brushes, which didn’t get used a lot (running of the fingers is all the grooming a short coiffure really needs – the close-cropped men of the world will vouch for that). Now, to describe them as ‘accessories’ is actually a misnomer, cos when the jumbled mass on your head is growing in all possible directions at uneven lengths and skewed angles, waving where it isn’t supposed to, curling where it strictly shouldn’t, and sticking up in bristles when it should bend down and grow with its cousins, a half dozen hair slides, a wrap and an elastic band become essential.

The costume jewelry that follows, however, could be classified as accessorizing. Your ear lobe now feels insecure with just a little stud earring to keep it company. It was all good when your hair was minding its boundaries, but not when it’s flailing all over your face and stifling your essential senses. Same reason why you go and get your nose pierced. And flaunt it till you finally realize that it defies all of humankind’s most innate reflexes – picking, sneezing, scratching, breathing, to mention just a few.

Sometimes you gotta do things in life that make it a little more complicated than it is...It gets boring when it’s too easy...When Destiny starts doing her job herself, that’s when you cut back :)

Monday, April 03, 2006

Seein' Spots...

In all fairness, I think the spots were more cos of my relentless rambling than the spots themselves, but I decided I couldn’t take the risk. Besides, it’s always good to change your look – so, now it’s new, classy and intellectual – ok, one out of three ain’t bad ;)

But don’t worry, I am not changing my spots anytime soon – still the incorrigible, opinionated, condescending libertoid the world so loves ;)

As for the blog, a little sprucing and pruning is in order -- will get around to it, mostly to add some color. For now, the black and white should be tolerated -- just like my opinions :)

Oh, while I’m at it, I happened to glance at my blog on the IE browser a couple days back, and I realized it’s horrendous --- the font’s all awry, the layout is skewed and the caricature’s twisted (probably closer to the real me, but why ruin my awesome image in the blogosphere?)

In any case, my apologies to all IE/Safari users. The Mac/Firefox transition to PC/IE ain’t the greatest, or maybe I just don’t know how to work around it – both equally likely, though I’d give the people at Mozilla the slight edge, cos I do think they’re slightly more tech-savvy than I am.