The resurgence of West Indies Cricket by adopting a vicious pace strategy in demonic fashion, is the stuff that legends are made of. And rightly so, many of them figure in this slightly offbeat masalafied  documentary, backed by much awe-inspiring videos, anecdotes, and of course Bob Marley and the Wailers.  The movie, as a testimonial to the mojo of the 70s and 80s team was very much overdue, and is really enjoyable to watch as well.

If you were around back in them days, ( or are a cricket tragic like me, and have peered at footage in xyz sports channels and the internet), you damn well know that the West Indies Pace quartet did deliver some sweet chin music, reducing batsmen to miserable lumps in the middle of the pitch ( which by then would’ve acquired a shade of red ). Yum Yum. And to think that we currently ban pitches and stadiums which are even slightly threatening under the arbitrary “awkward bounce” category. I WANT TO SEE  BLOOD ON THE PITCH, DAMNIT.

These deliveries were regular sights back then. The one that whizzes past your face, the one that was directed at your head, A quick fiery jab at the sternum, One at the unmentionables if you were being careless and duck-footed. And finally, when they were visibly bored of this playful waltzing – a lethal yorker to finish off the business.

Does this movie  deserve all the lavish praises thrown at it? Is this a sign of well-made cricket documentaries to come? Was the screenplay/story right in choosing to make this an overtly political movie including distinct tones of blackpower struggles, Rastafarian movement and anti-apartheid observations?

No. Hopefully. Not so much.

Michael Holding and Colin Croft have this to say. [ source ].

“What the film does well,” reckons Holding, “is show how what happened on the field affected what happened off it.” What he and the other players are less comfortable with is Fire in Babylon’s suggestion that the reverse was true as well. “The film is political,” says Croft, “but I don’t think any of us were playing political cricket. We were just playing to win.”

—————–

Read that whole article, to get an assessment of the cricketers’ opinions about this movie, and views from recent cricketers like Chris Gayle.

—————–

This in itself is an astute, but simple observation. A motif that is seen even when the Windies players supported Kerry Packer’s initiative. There was an inner drive, mostly motivated by Clive Lloyd, to take the sport more professionally. This coupled by the fact that they were being paid peanuts by their own cricket board ( rings a bell? ) was indeed one of the factors behind them pulling up their socks. This is not to reduce the romanticism and the devilish zeal behind the resurgence. If anything, it adds the concept of the working man’s struggle into the mix.

Racism is a tricky beast to handle. Many changes were happening in the Caribbean political climate around this time. The film makers, in an act of sensational overkill, decided to attribute almost all those factors to the cricket regime, and with a healthy dose of feel-good feedback to the political struggle delivered by the resounding victories.

I believe that the words that were exchanged by Aussies ( fans and players alike) could’ve been of racist nature, and smacks of arrogance . But what seemed irrational was portrayal of the bowling acts of Lillee and one of my personal favourites Thommo as wicked colonial oppression, white man’s violence yada yada, while the very same strategy being picked up by the west Indies was proclaimed as a Blackman’s victory ( with a proud inflection), by one of the loony old men narrating along.

To put it in an laymanish manner, You can’t use the race-card twice. And more importantly, when you discussed cricketing strategies, bringing political bias into it was just plain ignorance.

I’ve read on numerous sites, that some of the footage used was inaccurate/ wrongly timed. This again isn’t acceptable from a documentary point of view. It speaks for itself that the moviemakers paid more attention to the “Fire” outside the cricketing field, and didn’t get the basics of the sport right. A large audience for this movie would be the cricket-savvy folks, and this doesn’t go down well with us.

Now, to my last and a critical objection with this movie. Apart from Marley and the Wailers, and some key BGM tracks, most of the musicians chosen for this film were of the “so bad it’s good” category, selected mostly for upping the #kvltness of the movie, and for gratuitous usage of cricketing lingo in the lyrics. Horrible selection, and severly offputting in the context of the movie.

To sum it up, What the movie lacks in overall common-sense and bad choice of sensational matter, it more than makes up for by including delicious ( if i may say so) video snippets of raw and awesome fast bowling *.

Also for multiple reasons like the ominous Moustache of Clive Lloyd ( wah wah ), The camraderie between Bob Marley and Viv ( which increased my respect for both of them), Vivian Richards’ casual swagger along with the incessant chewing of gum, girls swooning over him, the rhythm and enjoyment on the field that was shown by that team knowing very well that they were invincible , and that terrible desire to win by any means necessary while still honouring the rule books.

[*  not Agarkar fast, not sissy fast, not medium fast, but something that the batsmen feared to face for the tiny annoying reason to not have their heads knocked off ]

The present west indies team is in a sorry state, it’d do them well to draw inspiration from this movie. Sure, the joint of the Rastafarian movement has long since died down, the blackpower struggle isn’t a big motivator anymore, Aussies aren’t the champions they used to be, but that’s still no excuse to not get your sorry asses moving and reclaim the honour and pride of the idols you look upto.

Some random Bible passage has this to say, almost prophetically,

“and Babylon will become a heap of ruins, haunted by jackals. She will be an object of horror and contempt, a place where no one lives. ” .

May there be a revival of Caribbean Carnage. Some of us still love fast bowling the way it should be. Merciless.

——————

P.S : I was terribly disappointed that the movie talked about Malcolm Marshall for only around 5 mins. Terrible injustice, but I’ve been informed that in the context of the movie this was necessary.

The man’s a legend, a bowling stud beyond description, and provided hope for aspiring short-in-height bowlers ( relatively speaking) worldwide .

Here is a better documentary about him, which I thought was more inspirational than this movie itself.

I give you this, happy now?

Greeting Card/FauxMotivational Poster/ Collage

using Some Old notebook’s educational info about Elephants + Picasa + “First I was like X, then I was like Y” meme.

This was a pretty interesting experience to watch, as well as to participate in, as one could clearly see the effect of opinion snowballing, and mass-hysteria eventually taking over.

This is all I can say about ‘why’ did Rakhi trend. Well you see, ‘ The human mind is a complex system, and…”.

Oh, ditch that. It’s the ‘how’ that’s explainable.

So, how did Rakhi Madamji muster so much mojo?

Well, the obvious answer has to got to be – “due to a lot of tweets in a short timeframe”.

For the uninitiated, I’ll provide the same background that I wrote on http://whatthetrend.com/trend/Rakhi [ which incidentally, is a wonderful site to know why a topic is trending on twitter. So the next time you see something like "Cash for Clunkers" or " Bob Saget's gone bonkers" trending on twitter, you know where to look for answers ]

[ I'd throw in an image but for the fact that I couldn't find a single decent picture, and even among the bhajan variety, there were none with a Creative commons license. Perverts, please search here ]

So, with this much info, lets dive into some statistics.

[ Note: ATPS - Average Tweets Per Second ]

The show started at around 9.00 p.m [ I.S.T], and for the initial 10 minutes the tweet flow was quite slow, at around 5 ATPS ]

Soon, some celebrities [or  twittebrities, if that floats your boat ],  joined in the action, and all hell broke loose. Some samples.

[ Ah, the marvels of good liquor ]

[ Sums up the nation's opinion with this tweet ]

Soon enough, the twitter universe was flooded with retweets, ” what the eff ” ‘s, <brain explodes>, ‘shoot me. shoot me now‘ ‘s , on one end.

Not to be perturbed by this, the positive Rakhi Chee forces retaliated with tweets like ” Go Elesh“, ” I’d marry Elesh, He’s cho cute“, ” OMG, Rakhi Sawant looks so hot  ya“.

But it was mostly the apathetic crowd that both cheered and jeered [ I know that doesn't make sense on many levels, but work with me on this ], that was the peach of the tweetset. Sample these.

[ Witty that one ]

['Main is Desh ka damaad Hoon', but in a canadian accent. Sounds vaguely familiar]

By this time [ around 9.30 p.m], the term was buzzing on Twittscoop at around 10 ATPS. The next best term was “Shark week” at 30 ATPS, which had already started to trend. So, on an a normal day with not much news happening [ no plane crashes, no celebrity deaths, no white police / afro-american professor drinking chilled beers with the U.S president ], we can make a decent speculation that there has to be atleast 30 ATPS for a topic to trend.

This by itself is no mean feat, so Kudos to Rakhi for keeping us glued to the telly. Assume that the average twitterer, even in the heights of their frenzy tweets about 1 tweet per 10 minutes.

[ The power twitterer does about 1 tweet in 2 minutes say, and the other twitterer who's just an innocent bystander,just pops in to say " Oh, why's this topic trending". say 1 tweet per 30 minutes].

In some universe with a favourable averaging scheme, the number 1 tweet in 10 minutes figures, and I’ll use that.

To achieve a critical state of 30 ATPS, for say about an hour, for the trend to be noticed, we’d need,

1 person can tweet 1 tweet in 10 minutes = 1 / 600 ATPS

x people need to tweet 30  tweets in 1 second. 30 ATPS

So, assuming an equal distribution of tweeting in the timeframe, we needed about 18000 people to start the trend, which is quite reasonable and achievable, since there around 25 million twitter users globally out of which around 2% are Indian, [1] [2], which makes it a potential 500,000 Indian users.

This was the tweet density for yesterday. This is what a one-time-wonder trend looks like.

So, as you can notice, ‘rakhi’ was in the limelight for around 2 hours[ mentally visualize chopping off the curve where the height reaches 30 ]

[ graph courtesy: Twittscoop ]

There were some obvious side-effects of this inane exercise. People not used to seeing their twitter stream getting littered like this, got extremely pissed off, and started issuing death threats in all possible directions. Sample.

[ My my, such strong emotions. Now you know how provocative Rakhi's aura can be ]

So, in conclusion. Bah, easy peasy work. We can make anything trend, given enough determination, teamwork and resolute joblessness.

Hum honge #kaamyaab ek din. [ Loosely translates to " May the #manForce be with you" ]

P.S: Respect to all the twitterers featured in this post. I come in peace. Don’t shoot the messenger.

• They don’t have a middle layer which acts as a NSFW [ stands for Get Kicked Out of Office if you open This here] warning. There’s the append ‘+’ at the end of the link hack. But seriously, who does that usually? You barely have enough time to click on links these days, save reading their contents as well.
• They’ve a “This page has been reported to serve malware in generous doses” middle layer, but since it’s Mr.Twitter who’s one of their major link sources, this has to be more ‘realtime’. Depends on what realtime means, yes. But everyone’s using that word nowadays, so what the heck.
• They’ve a twitter monopoly. You’ve got to hate the leader. It’s a rule.

So, Should I plan to start my own Url Shortening service, it wouldn’t have all these issues. And just to humor myself,  I shall call it id.ly

And since there’s no Country Top-Level domain with .da, I’ll have no competitors like va.da . Humour monopoly, FTW…

Pre-(Post-Script):

Is there a Mai Ka Laal, who can gift Mr. Veerappa with a moi.ly domain… He’d be the cool-kid on the block, instead of the peddler-like grumpy face that he flaunts usually.

You know, as genuinely awesome as the chap to the right, who’s currently booked under the Limca records, for the fastest fast in India. [ No, I'm kidding. Maybe]

Obligatory Show-off Post-script section :

Whate pity. Honourable Son of the Soil can’t get the prized gow.da. He’ll have to settle for de.ve , I guess.

“Tout ce que dit en français, des sons de classe” – ‘Anything said in French, sounds classy’ – Monsieur. Abhishek, Circa 2009.

Well, enough of dillydallying.Yesterday, Akshay and I, had been to the Fête de la Musique, at the Alliance Française de bangalore. A cozy place, and a Cultural hangout for the French, in Bangalore. We had no clue of the lineup, and I, had almost thought that it was the ‘Galeej Gurus’ who’d be performing.

I saw the calendar, and it said “Today’s Special“. And that, was the name of the band. Band names[ and songs] mostly come out as as the aftereffects of drunken revelry. [ Considering that this band cites whiskey and beer to be some of their driving influences, my guess isn't that far-fetched ].

And needless to say, it’s a decent pun as well. I suppose they get stuff like, ” And Ladies and Gentlemen, Today’s special performance is by well, Today’s Special”, all the time. Much like when there was this bunch [including Frank Noon], who called themselves “The Next Band“. [ And the Next band is ......] , or even better, this group that performed at Decibels at Saarang 2009. It was simply called “The Previous Band“. Man, the confusions.

‘Today’s Special’ was listed in the lineup for Saarang as well. I couldn’t see the entire Decibels event, hence must have missed them there.

Anyway, about yesterday’s performance. Absolutely loved it. Primarily funk based music, and the fact that they can dabble in with a bit of metal as well, makes them extra special.

Now, that’s some branding. Bound to impress.

Here’s what the band has to say about themselves.

“We are a Bangalore based blues rock band, mostly into classic blues, blues rock and retro hard rock, with an added flavour of funk.We cover songs of Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Phish and the likes, and also compose originals that fall in the same taste.”

Some would call it confusing and disoriented that they have so many influences, but the fact that they switch easily between these at will in their tracks, makes them versatile, I feel.

The Band’s line up [ I picked this from the website, I'm sure about at least the vocals and the bassist], and my opinions about them:

Aditya : Vocals – Roaring, High voice at times, which suits the retro style very much. Could do a semi-growl if need be, I guess. The lyrics are very much set to the swing style [ Elvis -like ], and this chap sings fast-paced as the style demands.

Dhruv : Guitars -Very Naice, Sir. Nice techniques, the sweep Picking was awesome, and the riffs were very distinct.

Sathwick : Drums – Brings the song into picture right from the start. The bass and the drums combination is probably the signature of this band, from what I could make out from most of their numbers.

Shalini : Bass – Let’s get out the most obvious fact first. A Female bassist? Yes, that’s something really rare. Unique enough to feature an independent wiki.

Ok, once the whole hullaballoo and temporary jaw-dropping was done, we were actually in awe of her performance. One hell of a bassist. And as I said just two lines before [ were you noticing?? ], the bass+ drum intros defined the course of the song.

Yesterday’s performance featured originals like “Aloo Tikki” and covers like “Hush – Deep Purple“, and “Woman – WolfMother“. The wolfmother cover was nearly identical, and the highlight of the gig, for me.

One minor complaint is that once I tried to some post-concert searching for this band, its tracks and lyrics, I was thoroughly pissed off.

It’s a pain googling for them. Try some innocent search term like “Aloo Tikki Today’s Special”, and a hajar Tarla Dalal like cooking sites pop up.Aargh. With a little Search engine kungfu I could manage to find their myspace page, and some two tracks. Seriously guys, A Blog comes for free these days.

Kindly to be setting one up soonly. Thank you.

Akshay pointed out yesterday that Rock n Metal music seems to have dried up in Bangalore for the past few months, what with absolutely no gigs of interest happening.

Genetically mutated concert organizers, Please take note.

To all those crazy lunatics over there, let me fuel it further by saying that June is the 6th Month, and 4 is the date.  Oh . Holy Moly, that’s 6 and 4.  => 64? Get it? That’s a perfect square…

Go ahead, I’ve made your day. Send all those crazy forwards, and troll in all possible forums out there, because deep within your stupid hearts, you know it to be true.

With all due respects to Google, Wolfram Alpha still continues to totally arouse Geeky researchers ( and trivia hunters), with the same feeling that people used to [ and still get ], when randomly bouncing off wikipedia pages.

And in keeping up with my holy tradition of keeping the kernel of the post in the very end, and most often than not, missing it entirely, here’s them goodies…

[ Open the image in a different tab, if you wish ]
Well, there has been no editing absolutely. There in lies my integrity [ as well as differentiability, from other arbit meme creators out there ]. Don’t believe me, check it out.

http://www.google.com/squared/table/ageTYAeHzVe5UFezJFN2MFtg

Now, let me expertly dissect this information, as a certain annoying Arnab ComeSwami would.

Some Salient Features:

• Vajpayee proves why he’s still the best out there. He’s a DLF maximum, and a citi moment of success all rolled into one smooth package.
• Karat’s priced at 2 Dollars. he he. Take that you pseudo-communisty bleddy red-chaddis. No Marx for you this time. For all that dirty Lenin that you washed in public, serves you right.
• Advani’s priced slightly higher than Mr.Singh. That’s just the added value of viral marketing, and internet flash ads. And him being the Iron Man of India, to boot.
• Lalu foxes even Google. Even the mighty know-it-all search engine cannot figure out how much stash the Bihari-Bond is hiding.
• Sonia Gandhi -  well, I refrain from commenting, in accordance with previously maintained policies. Respect mam, or as they say in fluent Italian, ‘KThnxBai‘.

In other search engine news : Microsofty released their new polished search service, which they call Bing.
which apparently stands for ” But It’s Not Google”.
Several scapegoats have confirmed this fact to be true, and have unanimously bleated out that a search engine so lousy, cannot definitely be a clone of Google.
But, do not shoo off this Bingy thingy so soon. If history has taught us anything, [ other than about one crazy dude pillaging through other another crazy dude's city, and general voyeuristic/hedonistic activities of folks with lots of cash ] , it is this.
“Services/Movements/ Tools/ Softwares with recursive names might not be successful commercially, but will definitely end up being a major pain-in-the-ass of the opposite party concerned. “
off the cuff examples being, GNU, LAME, WiNe.
So, watch out. Microsoft hopes for some Bing Bling soon…

Oh, and by the way. This happens to be my 50th post.[ Hurrah, yippee yay. Saavdhaan, Vishraam.]
Muchas Gracias to all of you for all this nice readership thing that’s happening so far.
Keep up the good work
If there was an award for the highest blogging throughput, an award for the most prolific and active blogger out there, you know, the person with all the witty regular posts, and amazing rapport with the readers…..

I wouldn’t have got it.

I discovered N-Blox some days ago, when chappar , wanting to get some cheap highs, was looking at psychedelic visuals on this site. And sent it to me.

Turns out Paul Neave is a brilliant Flash designer, with a passion for Retro games. Kewl. And I found Tetris. Blissh.

The gameplay is superb[ Considering that there's not much scope for innovation]. But as it turns out, Neave is a bit of a N*gger [ Southpark fundaes]. With the sole intent of pissing off fans, he sets out and puts a score_reset which is called at the stroke of midnight.

I could think of only a few possible excuses that he could have.

• Probably to save on diskspace of the scores.txt file. [Wtf]
• To give every newbie a chance to figure on the highscore board. Turns out they already do. Through simple,stupid, “Injection” techniques. [Come on, Man you...]
• “It’s my game.”  ”Respect Mah Authoritah“…[ Awesome ]

Well, the third reason seemed the most logical, and we laud his spunk n all that, but we didn’t like it in principle. He could have at least given people the source code and allow us to tinker with it. But that’s his choice and we respect that.

But, we did want the game.

So, The php whiz from college, and myself, tweaked around the flash file for a while to send the scores to a different location. And the php to receive, process the scores at this remote location, and send back the results back to the flash file. No edits to the gameplay/graphics. Honest.

Did someone miss a beat? Never mind, Let me beat you again.

Me n php? Ha ha…

Well, truth be told, he did both of those. Great work dude, and btw, the Inci site rocks, as usual.

And me, with my stupendous Html skills, set up an oldschool website, which is approximately Web 0.2. So, enjoy Nblox on the site shown below ( while it lasts), and u get to post ur highscore as well.

So, without much ado, here’s N-Blox Reloaded peoples…

Phree Publicity: Check out http://byethost.com/   Free, and Hassle-free webhosting, with php support, and nice technical support as well.

I tried out using some known standard cases, and here’s the goldmine.

Gosh, I didn’t know that Machine Learning had become so accurate these days. Be paranoid, very.

Incidentally, Chappar, when you were on wordpress, your manliness rating was 83%. Did anything special happen during the transition phase?

A thousand apologies, plus one extra, just in case.

And to those who might think of an oh-so-brilliant, “Look who’s talking !!!”,line. I’m at 71%. Muha ha ha.

P.S: Incidentally again, this is the 2nd in the chappar series of posts, the first one having been written nearly 2 years ago.[hyper-link to click in case you're bored]

Update: Google Hindi translation of this post is too funny. 

excerpt: जबकि internets पर, घुड़सवारी और ट्यूबों सर्फिंग, मैं इस गंधा साइट भर में आया जेंडर विश्लेषक कहते हैं

lol [link]

Editor’s note: “Nehru bit” added for extra scope, and does not suggest the writer’s extensive political repertoire.

Abstract:

Its a surprise, and deep shame, that generations after generations have endured shoddy satire emanating from rusty retired maamas,as pale as Stalin. Or athletic Aaanties, as stale as Palin.

They did not rise up to them, or flip ‘em the bird. They didn’t chuck these jokes out of their humour vocab. They didn’t. No. No.

They instead chose to tell it to us. Oh, the Humanities!!!

But, enuph is enuph. Its time for Change.

Background:

These jokes are easily identifiable with any Indian kid’s disturbed childhood. To avoid lethal exposure, I will be jotting down only some of them. Feel free to add more if you’re itchy.

The List, and its interpretation:

• “Which is the most dangerous city?” asked  Master Maams. What ? What ? asked we, in full awe of Maams’ general knolij. “Electri-city”. Get it? Ha ha ha. Maams used to reply.

        It’s a pity we weren’t using WTF back then.

• A particularly putrid, bengalurean variant would be the dreaded, “ Which is the biggest stick”? Maje-stic, maams would say, hardly caring about the kids writhing in agony.
• Or its perverse inverse verse from the alternate universe. Which was worse. “Which is the smallest stick”? “Lip-stick”, apparently. No one would have dare guessed.

         I’ve not heard these for nearly 5 years. Hope they decay soon.

• And there used to be this mother of all J-bombs. I’ll provide a short recap. For the uncut version. Run ‘line 1 – line 2’ some 5 times in a loop.

         Ramu:- “BJ.Franklin discovered Elecktri-kitty”.

         English Teacher:- “No, Ramu. It is pronounced as ilek’trisitee ”.

         I still don’t get the morbid fascination about electricity in so many of these jokes.( There are more like these, believe me) Probably that was the most happening thing back then. Positively shocking. The joke continues….

          Ramu’s Dad:”What seems to be the problem, Teacher?”

          Teacher:”Your son can’t pronounce ilek’trisitee”.

This joke’s punchline. Boy Oh boy!!!

           Ramu’s Dad:” What to do teacher. That is his Kapak-itee.”

So, basically suggesting ramu and his dad had some kind of speech impediment was supposed to knock your socks off, in times yore. Man, George Carlin would have created an 8th swear word, if he’d heard this joke.

• And of course, the ever so popular, and recurring, “I don’t take any decisions, My wife is the home minister” joke. And all its mutated variants.

Khushwant Singh protested in vain,in some of his books, against this genre, and then for some reason, started vacillating between Sardar Jokes and chaddi-ke-neeche waala humour.

• And we all know that it was your P.T Sir who was the stupidest man in the entire universe. And only he made the, “Stand in a straight circle” joke.

Now, If your P.T teacher was involved in a love-triangle, it offers some interesting punning propositions, of geometric proportions.

Results:

Here is an irrelevant experimental graph.

Conclusion:

I’m putting these and any that I may receive from fellow victims, in permanent quarantine. And I ‘umbly request you, not to pass on these family heirlooms to your kids. And one more fatwa – All future fatwas must always be in the paper publication format. I want to see the exact reasons behind the Mickey Mouse one.[1]

And, ya, I’m one of them.[2]

With Vista having chosen the Red Screen of Death , as its official time-please message , the devout and loyal fans of a much peaceful colour were very disappointed. Having to see the altogether familiar shade just on special occasions like the Beijing Olympics, did take its toll on an XP zealot.

BSOD was  ZOMG level in funnity. It was the zen in awesomeness. It unleashed previously unseen waves of creativity amongst the developers [ to use that time on a different OS, I must confess].

Anyways, here is the kinda froody things that you could do with them blue screens. [ Statutory Warning : Not safe for Work, especially if you're at Microsoft]

 

Cheaply mashed from the following sources [1 ],[2].

Anyways, the point of this painstakingly researched article is to, waht-else, reveal a conspiracy theory of course…

The people at microsoft, ever so attentive to their customer needs, have heard our earnest pleas.

They are rolling out a new and improved version of BSOD on the clouds…Call it BSOD 2.0 if you must.

You don’t believe me, do you? I knew it. But I have ball-clinching evidence to this effect.

What do they name their Cloud computing OS as? What better a name to support my theory, than “AZURE”. [1 ],[2 ]

A reasonably accurate dictionary defines:

Noun: azure

1. A light shade of blue

Verb: azure

1. Colour azure

Adjective: azure

1. Of a deep somewhat purplish blue colour similar to that of a clear October sky.

The clues are out there, on the cloud .

See, don’t tell me that I didn’t warn you before.

Happy Computing. I’m on Cloud 7 already…