300 guys

Some time ago I came by 300, a Frank Miller graphic novel with a
striking cover. The starkness of the book's colour palette seemed to me
to balance the absence of words. It is of course what graphic novels
do, but I was struck then by how little dialogue was needed to depict
war. As 300 Spartans held back Asia's relentless hordes, this book
plunged into the war, weaving between its characters like a movie
camera in a battlefield. Part of the book's mastery was in its power to
suggest something - a slash or a thrust - and have us imagine the
violent follow through. So words counted for little in this novel even
though the book itself was a retelling of the battle. It was classy war
pornography.

With this in mind, I braced myself in seat K2 of a dark hall yesterday,
armed with popcorn and a coke. The theatre brimmed with a horde of
young men, some clearly years away from admittance to an 'A' certified
movie. They came prepared like spectators at the Colliseum. The first
moments, where a baby is dangled over a ravine containing skeletons of
other babies, hint at what's to follow. They put in place a tenuous
prehistory to what is the main event. What this director, Zack Snyder,
really wants to show you is that main event. He's as eager for war as
the Spartans are. Every so often his characters assault women, jump
into orgies, and consult a fetching oracle. I like comic books, and
enjoy the stereotype of the fan they play up to ("likes muscular
bodies, big guns, large hybrid beasts and spandex") but this was too
heavyhanded for my taste. These incidents are held by a slender thread,
and just as they are on the verge of snapping, on comes another battle.

The war scenes by themselves are surreal in their effect, as the
director changes angles, colour, and slows down the pace before raising
the tempo again. There are two particularly delicious fights inspired
by video games. One is when a Spartan breaks out of his cordon and cuts
through a rush of enemies with his sword and deflects others with his
shield. The camera runs with him at the screen's centre, making him and
his enemies two-dimensional. Gamers will know what that's about. The
other fight is a trick we've witnessed in kung-fu flicks as well as the
second Matrix movie, but here we know they're fighting a losing battle,
that this bravery has its price - two Spartans, back-to-back, overcome
dozens coming at them from every conceivable angle, materialising out
of the mist. I'm in the market for this movie's conceptual art.

A few hours later I couldn't help but wonder: its weakest moments were
its overwrought dialogue. In this manner, I though, it continued to
evolve the language of earlier Arnold and Stallone guy movies, of
comebacks and dramatic declarations interspersed with the universal
language of guns and bombs. Then came Gladiator and its close relation,
The Mummy. After which came Kingdom of Heaven, Alexander, and Troy, all
in a short span. Now this. Of all the things it could have become, it
chose to be a guy movie.

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Demand

You could dress up in light bulbs, but they'll pretend they haven't seen you. They'll look the other way. Put a hand out and see. They rocket by you, taking it with them on their way to Ghatkopar or Film City or some other distant place. Skeeters.

Oh, the scorn! If they acknowledge you, forget telling them where you want to go - ask them where they'd like to go. Then you'll see that rare thing: a happy rickshaw driver. Anywhere, his face will say, as long as it's far away. Go to hell, then.

If it isn't you, there's always somebody else who'll travel to the distant edges of the suburb. Huge demand for his kind outside the train station at 7pm.

I travel late for the fun. A few hours later I get off the train at a near empty station, walk down past the drunk and the newspaper vendor closing shop, and step outside to just stand between a whole lot of them. They're sitting there, revving their engines, turning on radios, strutting around like male pigeons. They look hopeful. They look like touts.

All in it together

The ride home is long for this time of the night. Again, traffic. Does it affect the city in installments? One day, here, at noon. Another day, there, at midnight. A wrong corner turned and that's where you are stuck for the next hour, surrounded by the same cars with the same desperate drivers. How to get out of this? Which lane is faster - this one or the middle? But they end up going nowhere. It becomes apparent that no one will make way. Some abandon their cars and walk by, tapping windows and scraping doors as they go, unaware that those left are now abandoned too.

There we sit in sadness. Inside a metal case with a gray smog lurking outside the window. How could it be that so many people are here at this hour? Had they decided to wait until the rush hour was over before they left for home? They make me miserable, just as I make them unhappy. Why are they here now? They talk to each other, at peace with this mess. There's one, singing with the radio, I think. They've given up completely. Time could be fought for, with a swerve here and a few honks there, but it's just too late in the day for this. Being normal can wait till tomorrow.

What about Hritik Roshan?

Oh critics may love Helen Mirren's depiction of the Queen, but have they watched Dhoom 2, the most frickin devastating use of three hours in which Roshan plays the Queen (and fools her security entourage even though the mask he's wearing is clearly from the Yashraj Halloween props department) , a bearded guy, and, to top it all, is the duniya ka sabse cool chor, aur uske "saath khelne mein bahut maza aayega"?

Our growing field

The first cricket game I recall playing took place in a space seven feet wide and fifteen feet long with a stairwell on one side, so balls frequently bounced off the railings all the way down to the ground floor, at which time my neighbour's younger brother, who stuck his neck through the aluminum barrier to watch the falling ball, announced 'akha neechey'. The unfairness of this predicament struck us early. The open stairwell was neither player's fault. Parents were irrelevant to this, so they could not be blamed. Who retrieved the ball from two flights down was a decision left to a tossed coin. Our games were dominated by batsmen and bowlers, for our heroes were of that kind. Jonty Rhodes was still six years away.

Even now, when I visit that space, the smell of the field reminds me of our uncomplicated games. We created stumps out of chalk, plucked rules out of the air. Our understanding of the game then was entirely personal, and since nothing confused us as much as leg-before appeals, we wisely did away with that mode of dismissal. Who could stop us except the passing of time? Nothing lies behind his door anymore, for a series of mishaps persuaded his family that ghosts were at work.

Before we drifted apart, our field grew larger and more competetive. Downstairs, in the middle of an enormous parking lot, we were tested by aggressive Pakistani batting and violent Pakistani bowling. The civility of our personal encounters became history with the first bouncer either of us faced. I was hit on the head while, if memory can be trusted, he swung one with a sweet tock! over the terrace of a nearby building. The ball was wrapped with electric tape - a device that at once made the ball swing, bounce, and scurry off the crusty tar surface. How he played it that well I'll never know.

The games then were rigidly communal, with international games the trigger for local violence. But it came to nothing more than pushing and swearing. Grandstanding, I think - we were taking up the positions we were historically meant to. The pride of our nation depended on us, and whoever blinked first gave up Siachen, Kashmir, you name it. But we met the enemy over the supermarket counter, at the doctor's clinic, heck, they even taught us. What choice did we have but to blink and give them a glacier?

Speaking of land, the field grew ever larger. Leather balls, damp helmets, the vibration of an unstroked bat. We encountered all these things. So what, you're thinking. So this: try it in 45 degree weather, humidity over 90%, on a concrete pitch in the middle of a large pebble and sand-strewn ground. And then dive to save a boundary. One day, in the middle of a school-level tournament, we came up against a team more unfortunate than our own. A collection of suicides, they were. I imagine them now, grown men laughing over a beating they cried about that day, that windy day when sand rose in golden swirls and stung our eyes, that day when someone - cough - took three wickets for nothing with spin and went home that night and revealed his career plan to horrified parents. He's a journalist now, on a field so vast that he can't make out its edges. And fetching balls from boundaries always made him uneasy.

Human desire

The prestige is the final flourish, the act that creates disbelief as a show concludes. The Prestige features three magicians' obsession with retribution. Watch them burn, watch them burning. Each is a saboteur of the other's plans to become the greatest magician in England - a drive so filling that it leaves no room for humanity. Their arts become darker. Having exhausted the possibilities of magic, they reach toward science, finding in it their final act, their prestige. What a prestige it is. All but the faintest spark of love remains in the final act, with warm feeling making way for machine-cold as the age of magic fades away. Death returns their colour, and emotion flows like blood from a deep wound. The prestige is about reputation, and about the deep desire to show the crowds something new. And that is at the movie's heart: the need to be creative and surprise and delight - it's about the stunned faces in the instant before the applause.

The rejuvenation of Zaheer Khan

Until February 19, 2006, Zaheer Khan had been given enough rope to hang the whole team. He claimed thirteen wickets in his last ten games at an average of 33. He leaked 4.9 runs an over. Nine of his thirteen came in three matches against a ragtag Africa XI alliance which was recognized officially but dismissed as pointless. Of the four remaining wickets, two were tailenders. In competitive games (the other seven) on average he conceded 55 runs. And then he ran out of rope.

The lack of news it made showed us one thing: we often complain about perceived gaps when there is nothing to fill them. But out went Khan and in his place came Sreesanth, Munaf, the Singhs. Isn'’t competition beautiful?

Dropping players in poor form makes even more sense when you see what they transform into. In the last fortnight Khan has been accurate, skillful, and has bowled with thought. His approach to Graeme Smith was superb in its execution. After starting the first game with two wides, he has made batsmen awkward regularly. The third one-dayer, in which he dismissed Smith and Kallis in three balls, was especially significant because he harassed them repeatedly. This wasn'’t Khan. Not the bad old Khan. Would this transformation have come about if he knew that a place in the team came cheaply and to those with reputations? This is a guy who depressed fitness trainers.

It's possible that Virender Sehwag requires a similar approach. How long can you keep a bad thing going?

A terrible love affair

Indians have a noted fondness for cricket, but what use is love without understanding and empathy? The reaction to the losses in South Africa is by now predictable. As the team alternates between victory and defeat, its followers move from peace to violence. Followers aren't necessarily fans.

The hooliganism of Indian watchers is rarely spoken about. The tendency to depict fans as an oppressed bunch of cricket tragics who descend into violence as a result of daily suffering is a tired and lazy generalization. Indians can now buy more, there are more places to attend to and more forms of entertainment. Yet violence is justified by love and the people's sentiments, as if the two explain everything. After a particularly torrid game against Australia in 2003, Mohammad Kaif's home was painted black by aggrieved people. A few days ago it was caked with cow dung as a way of conveying disappointment. But because the forum was yet again a violent one, the message was clearer than that: if you don't win we can hurt you. The threat of a lover turned sour.

Urged on by the media, politicians jumped in too. The cricket board considered pay cuts. All for a few games lost, as if disappointment and failure were unacceptable. Had they believed that throwing money at the team would paper over a shortcoming against bouncers in the first place? My understanding is that players were highly paid because they brought in sponsors and significant advertising money. Because the arrangement was percentage-based, if the advertisers left, cricketers would find themselves with less money. So in a way their pay is already performance-based.

What people who call for heads forget in that the Indian team is a result of several processes. If you grow up playing spinners on flat pitches, that's your area of expertise. If individual centers decided to prepare faster pitches South Africa might not appear as daunting. But this particular love is blind to history, recalling only its faults, and everything about it suggesting despair. If it were a woman, we'd be advising Indian cricket to pack its bags and leave its belligerent lover before the mental strain of satisfying a savage started to show.

India's cricket revolution

An edited version of this piece appeared here in today's Wall Street Journal.

The world of cricket has long been a small, cozy place, where change is resisted by the stalwarts of tradition. Now a new cricket board in India is shaking things up--taking advantage of the world’s largest fan base to put the sport on a more commercial footing.

England and Australia may play more matches. But it’s in India that the money really rolls in. With more than 500 million fans, it’s no surprise that 10% of the $2.8 billion spent on advertising in India last year was cricket related. When the national team travels overseas, advertisers are quick to follow them, snapping up prime promotional spots in stadiums wherever Indian teams play. As a result, more than half the sport’s global advertising revenue comes from Indian companies.

You’d never guess that from looking at the state of the country’s cricket league. Fans are forced to make do with uncomfortable concrete or wooden seats, with no shade from the baking Indian sun. Many of the stadiums are in a dangerous state of disrepair. In one case, a wall collapsed during an international game in the Indian city of Nagpur a decade ago, killing eight spectators.

Indian cricketers fare little better. Until recently, top players received as little as $88 for each day they played, with a similar amount paid into their retirement fund. Although that’s now been increased to $2,277 a game--its still far less than even junior cricketers in England earn.

Businessman turned cricket administrator Lalit Modi aims to change that. Mr. Modi and his colleagues took control of the Board for Control of Cricket in India, the sport’s national governing body, in a bitter election contest among India’s state cricket associations last year. They’ve accused their predecessors of allowing the sport to slip into this state of disrepair by not investing enough in the game. “There is no doubt that the [Indian] board was underselling itself,” Mr. Modi, now vice chairman of the board, said in an interview with the weekly newsmagazine Tehelka.

Now, Indian cricket is being reorganized along modern business lines. Sponsoring and merchandising deals worth $113 million were struck last December. That was followed in February by a $619 million four-year deal for global broadcast rights for all India’s international matches in India with Nimbus, a television-marketing company. Then in April, Zee TV, an Indian channel, paid $219 million for rights to a further 25 international matches that would be played at venues outside India. These additional matches would be played in Malaysia, Canada, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States - in other words, places with a large non-resident Indian population.

All of this is no more than you’d expect from an entrepreneur who observed the American sports model up close during his time in university there. Upon his return, Mr. Modi entered the sports business, and helped launch ESPN in India. He currently has ambitious plans to launch a comprehensive website - the BCCI currently has no website - with complete match footage of every game India plays.

But the jury is still out on how much of this new revenue will find its way back into the game. Editorials in Indian sports newspapers have been asking sharp questions about why the game doesn’t seem to be benefiting as yet. Some of the board’s key pledges--such as employment of professional management--staff have yet to be fulfilled. Mr. Modi and his colleagues respond that it takes time to implement changes.

If the money does filter through, the benefits would be significant. As a career choice the sport has always been, at best, a gamble in India. In contrast to England or Australia, Indian league players rarely make news, and are more often forgotten. Greater salaries, especially at lower levels of the game, would attract more players, and benefit the game as a whole. More batsmen and bowlers will pursue the sport, knowing that even if the bright lights of fame elude them, they can still enjoy a comfortable living, and go on to become coaches or umpires.

After decades of neglect, Indian cricket may be on the verge of a brighter future. But the verdict is still out on whether its new cricket board will deliver on its promises.

"I thought it up when midget cannibals strung me upside down high above a glass of boiling vodka"

It is said that when JP Dutta read his script to Aishwarya Rai, she cried. It was then that he knew she was the Rekha he had sought. This is Dutta's version of events. Which brings us to this: it's not enough that movies and stars are legendary these days, even the back process needs to become the stuff of myth. Take for example the writer of the lyrics for Hum Tum. He was reportedly sitting in a bathroom in an east asian country when the words came to him. Since then there have been instances of writers, directors, and musicians finding inspiration in unlikely places. Desks and offices are clearly passe. The more unlikely the location, the more fantastic the story is likely to be. People will be stunned by this brilliance. "What a breed of supreme being," they will think, "he finds his ideas while strapped to the underside of a 747. Amazing." As DBC Pierre writes here: "A fib so cumbersome, so improbable, that to question it would be to question the whole of his bloodline and its psychologies."

If I were a cricketer

"Right before I put my pads on, I'm watching myself on television. Crap hairstyle, I'm thinking, I don't know what I was thinking then. And no lighting from above next time. It makes my nose look huge. Dhoni's in the next one, selling some uv Brylcreem gel. And I think: that should be me selling uv gel. They missed a trick. Yuvi, uv. Anyway, good for him. The boy's made it. He's now earning, what, 30-40lakhs a deal? Nice. And now Rahul's out. Oh dearie me. Here I was, thinking of advertisements and endorsements, and now I've got to bat. Hold on a second. Out the door, walk like you own the place, tell cap he played well, walk on, no, wait, ask how the pitch played, walk on, say hello to the umpire, listen to Viru but don't hear a thing. I wonder what's on tv right now. This is the part where they cut to commercials. Am I on right now? I hope it's not that Xbox 360 ad. You looked too gawky there, son. Okay, concentrate, concentrate. It's Bravo and his crap slower ball. Blast it into Sidhu's mouth, just as he's talking about airhostesses and bicycles. How many ads does he... Oh hell. Hell. Here we go again. 'Too many ads, I should be punished, I'm a maverick...' Here we go again. Look depressed. Shake your head. Shake it harder, with more energy. Now look angry. After taking off the helmet. Swear and hit your pads with the bat. Maybe I should stop the ads. Then when I'm out like this they'll blame money problems and I can act again."

Well, that was fun! But I still don't understand why people link what cricketers earn through advertising with how badly they play. It's almost as if everytime they appear on screen people think, 'There he is again.' Why grudge them that? If they fail consistently, their contracts won't be renewed. And it's not like they're shooting an ad film between every over. A day or two of their life, for every ad, and it's over. Tendulkar, for example, gives Pepsi ten days of his year. This talk of concentrating less on advertisements and more on their game is nonsense.

God parted the waves over the India-Burma plates

It was some coincidence but yesterday I saw two sides of television. An afternoon documentary described vividly the tension between two tectonic plates that led to the December 26 tsunami. It explained that as the India plate slipped below the Burma plate, the two resisted and jammed, building the pressure. But the India plate continued to push downward while the other plate held it off. They both bent downward, tense as a stretched rubberband. Inevitably, the Burma plate had to give. The plate snapped up, and its entire boundary rose. displacing a large volume of water. Imagine a glass full of water suddenly becoming half its size. The water has to go somewhere. The water was forced either side of the plate boundary at approximately the speed of a jet plane. As the waves reached the shore they slowed down, but from behind more displaced water kept pushing, and so they became bigger. These were the walls of water.

The explanation was easy to comprehend. And you understood then that it would happen again, because that's how the earth is. God did not play any role here.

Later that day, on Miraclenet: a catholic preacher held hands with his translator and fishermen before the sea. He invoked god, asked him to lay off the tsunamis, told the sea to back off and never return, he prayed that people donated boats and nets and motors, he commanded fish to come to their nets, and last, he told the fishermen to remember that all this was the doing of Jesus.

Here's the frightening thing: earlier this year a guy from TAM, the tv ratings agency - it is inaccurate but it's the only decent system around right now - told me that the religious channel market was already bigger than the music channel market. And this is only in the towns and cities with a population over 100,000. Will the percentage be larger when villages are accounted for?

Simmering before cooking

The nervousness comes first, before the serving, before the cooking, before the planning. Now that you've invited them, you'll have to learn to cook. To make matters worse, there is a cook among them. They feel each taste, mull over textures, analyzing, scrutinizing, judging. Judging. The final authority, pronouncing you competent or otherwise. The word sounds severe but isn't it usually that way? The final word. The end. This isn't an opinion of your food, it's an opinion of you. Barriers can be constructed anytime, but cooking a meal is an intimate act which requires a lowering of your defenses. The barbarians will ring the doorbell, cross the moat, and tell you just what they think of your sauces and starters and lunch. So it does get personal.

'You have to bloom where you're planted'

David Remnick's profile of Bill Clinton in the New Yorker is fantastic.

Right man, Wright time

Tehelka, 24 September, 2006

The recurring themes that turn up every so often in John Wright’s Indian Summers — the realisation that a desk job is dour, the lure and the challenges of cricket, the demands on patience made by an often confounding country — bolster this story about the country’s first foreign cricket coach. “[In India, you see] much that is admirable and uplifting: the emphasis on family, the humility, the spirituality, the grace and dignity in the face of hardship,” he writes. “These were the people you wanted to do well for and who deserved a team which shed blood, sweat and tears.”

Wright coached India for five years, overseeing and, with Sourav Ganguly, forging a transformation from the sedentary tea-and-biscuit days of previous decades to ones of toil and success when it mattered. His book captures what it took to effect change in an environment of strong opposition from an entrenched system. “The nature of the system meant that survival was the number one priority,” he writes, “so it was little wonder it produced cricketers who tended to play for themselves.” He could not change it from the ground up, as he desired, but he tried persuading people who mattered to do things differently instead. Persuasion, he realised, could vary from a soft word to grabbing someone’s collar. Making his way through the subtleties of Indian cricket, Wright finds that his status as an outsider affords him a certain leeway. “During my last season, Viru said to me that speaking your mind in India was not easy because emotions got involved. ‘We can’t say it like you do, John... If you speak your mind and upset someone in India, he can take it to his heart and it can remain with him for a long time.’”

Wright’s account of his India years is similar in many ways to a travelogue, with its wonder-struck descriptions of the cricketing landscape, the characters central to its story, and how the country grew for him in personal meaning. His tenure begins with a series of mishaps which become commonplace once he settles down. He understands selection procedure only when his players explain it. “When I raised the issue at a selection meeting,” he says, “I got blank stares.” He is bemused by the crazy scheduling. His friend Raj Singh Dungarpur advises him to be patient, and the words hold him in good stead. Over time he understands that everybody is held hostage to everybody else. “Looking back on it, I tend to think we were all prisoners of the system, even Dalmiya… I know for a fact that many coaches and former and current players want to do things differently, but they too are prisoners of a system they can’t crack from within and don’t know where to begin.”

This focus is often turned inwards, and the story of his personal growth is as captivating as are the accounts of his dealings with the players, for whom he feels great empathy. “Getting dropped is horrible, but it’s even worse when you’re a big-name player and an established figure in the team... You think it’s a bullshit call, but there’s nothing you can do about it.” One chapter, in which he tracks his cricketers’ path to the international game, is a telling study of the hard life before the recognition. In explaining the lives and choices of the cricketers he lived with for half a decade, a large portion is also dedicated to why some lose their head when success comes.

Indian Summers explores modern India as few other cricket books have. The usual stories, the ones that grab the headlines, are all here, but the picture’s bigger. Wright understands how much the sport means to the country, and explains it as justly as he can. In hindsight, every moment that brought controversy was part of an ongoing process to leave the comfortable past behind, change mindsets and override the huge role politics play. In the centre of it all is Wright, who grew to take uninvited ex-players and BCCI gaffes in his stride, and who has left us with a book that is revealing about both cricket and the country it is played in.

Postcards by guided missile

Tehelka, September 30, 2006

Bill Bryson wrote his latest book after promising his wife that he would stay at home. He had also promised his publisher that this book would be entertaining. And personally, he missed being funny. So here then is The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, a memoir that’s likely to make his wife, his publisher, and his regulars rather chuffed.

Bryson has made a delightful career out of stumbling from one place to another. His books have spoken of the looniness of solitary travel, which is filled with strange characters and strange journeys. In a way, Bryson’s traveling life has been similar to his childhood. The book is a solid retelling of absolutely everything from his childhood, like a diary maintained from preschool with the perspective of an adult.

Bryson’s first book, The Lost Continent, written after his father’s death, was about how life had changed in small America since he was young. This one is about how things were, and what his relationship with Des Moines, Iowa, was all about. He grew up in the 50s and 60s, a time that was “fearful, thrilling, interesting, instructive, eye-popping, lustful, eager, troubled, untroubled, confused, serene.” Incidentally, “it was all those things for America too.” The tone that this book starts with is unlike the slightly sour one in his first: “I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.”

Des Moines, it turns out, wasn’t half bad for a boy. The town had strange characters – and many things seem stranger looking back when you’re grown up – made even stranger by the fact that it was a strange time for America. Bomb drills required children to brace themselves under a desk. “I remember being profoundly amazed,” Bryson writes, “that anyone would suppose that a little wooden desk would provide a safe haven…Once I realized that no one was watching, I elected not to take part. I already knew how to get under a desk and was confident that this was not a skill that would ever need refreshing. Anyway, what were the chances that the Soviets would bomb Des Moines? I mean, come on.”

Bryson’s town in the fifties was arrested by progress and visions of the future, as was the rest of America. Neighbours proudly exhibited their latest television, toilets were cleaned not just by water but with a solid burst of radiation, and the post office promised to deliver mail by guided missile. But the place was puritanical too. Deviant sex, which in those days was anything other than straight sex, was illegal. The church especially, Bryson writes, was in on it. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese declared that sex outside marriage promoted Communism. “Quite how a shag in the haymow helped the relentless march of Marxism was never specified, but it hardly mattered. The point was that once an action was deemed to promote Communism, you knew you were never going to get anywhere near it.”

The anecdotes with which Bryson describes his life and times are made richer by his details and exaggerations: “…he treated me to the hanging spit trick… it wasn’t even like spit – at least not like human spit.” It was “a mossy green with little streaks of red blood in it and, unless my memory is playing tricks, two very small grey feathers protruding at the sides. It was so big and shiny that I could see my reflection in it, distorted, as in an M.C. Escher drawing.” There are memories of his father, a sports writer who demonstrated isometrics in airplanes and saved money by visiting dentists who didn’t use novocaine, and his mother, who sent him to school in his sister’s Capri pants.

After A Short History of Nearly Everything, and four years since his last travel book, this is Bryson’s return to humor and everyday happenings. It is by no means deep, or as insightful as his last one, but as he maintains on page 33: “So this is a book about not very much: about being small and getting larger slowly.”

Meeting Sanjay B Jumaani

This was published in Tehelka, September 15 2006

Sanjay Jumani’s had been a middling life. At 17, he began working because it was nice to work. He left college incomplete, underdone, and became a distributor for an alcohol company. He got married. Special things happened to others around him while he worked, slept, worked, slept. The pay was barely enough to finance a trip to the hospital if someone fell sick. Meanwhile, after his own run of poor luck, his father, Bansilal Jumaani, made a profession out of predicting things. It started slowly, with a simple suggestion to Manmohan Desai: work with Amitabh Bachchan because your numbers match. Three decades later a friend, Farhad Nathani, tested him for a year to predict the fate of films due to be released. He was impressed by Bansilal’s accuracy and introduced him to Rakesh Roshan, the movie director. Roshan was warned that ‘Kaho Na Pyar Hai’ would not work. The numbers were not good. Two ‘a’s to the title could make it a bigger movie than the blockbuster of the time, Dil to Paagal Hai. Kaho Naa… Pyaar Hai was massive.

Six years later, I visited Sanjay’s office in Mahim. Scrapbooks with clippings of repetitive interviews, of predictions made and prophecies fulfilled lie on a curved glass coffee table. Vineet Jain, the Godrej family, and the Birlas consult him. So does Sharad Pawar. (Why?) On a sofa sit a collector and his wife, poring over an analysis of their fortune, and what they can do to alter it. A number of small statuettes of a number of big gods sit in a glass cabinet. Above them is a single signed picture of Rahul Dravid. There’s no indication of the number behind his jersey, though it’s likely to be 19. He used to adorn No. 5 until a couple of years ago, and look what happened since. One plus nine equals ten. One plus zero equals one. Ones take command. The walls are coloured blue and yellow. Is it a luck thing? How much can you do to insure luck? What if you did everything that numerology, astrology and feng shui said was right, and put it all together? The receptionist waves to get my attention. He’s ready, she says.

After seventeen years of moderate luck, in 2001, Sanjay Jumani gave in to his wife, Jhernna S Jumaani (a “germologist” who runs a company called ‘Gemz Bonnd’, according to her business card), and changed his name. “I’d tried everything else, now I thought I would try this too,” he says. By now Bansilal had acquired limited fame in high society, but kept his opinions guarded. Sanjay approached him for a change. “My name added up to a number that meant struggle.” Within five months, he says, he became inclined to the “occult science” of numerology. Friends were not encouraging, but he took his chance. Some broke ranks and now consult him.

It’s easy to see the effect Sanjay B Jumaani and his father have had on the landscape. They’ve made the job of a sub-editor hell. Is it Shergill, or Sheirgill? Kya ye pyar hai, ya kya ye pyaar hai? “Are you aware that 90% of all successful serials today have misspelt titles?” he asks. Later he suggests: “Your name… not good. Add your father’s initial. Add a ‘y’ to your last name.” Rahul A. Bhatiya. We wear our names casually because they’re as sure as daylight. Fudge mine a bit here or there and I suddenly understand the fright an eclipse causes.

Visitors consult Sanjay in an small office whose walls are painted blue. Bansilal died in May (a diabetic, he had predicted his death this year), and Sanjay, now 37, sits behind his desk, surrounded by things that make him happy. On his desk, under the glass surface above the wood panel, there are sheets that tell you that the 26th is an evil day, and they list the disasters that have taken place on the day in various months. “People come to me mainly for financial advice, but it’s always insecurity,” he says. “Those who are doing well want to do better, those on top want to stay there. Those who aren’t doing well have huge dreams and ambitions.” What use does Sharad Pawar have for numerology? He smiles brightly and then turns serious. “I can’t talk about it.”

Sanjay made his father’s business grow. Roshan introduced the family to Ekta Kapoor, and together they altered hindi. Sanjay wrote about his father’s success in Mid Day, and the Times of India followed up on September 11, 2001. Things changed then. Word spread, and celebrities from cricket, movies, and television stopped by for help. Tushaar Kapoor became a much happier Tusshar, says a testimony on the Jumaani website. Tusshar, however, philosophized in a newspaper that there had been no great success, but that’s okay, life’s like that.

Is it possible to change a person’s destiny by altering a name? “I don’t have to give you more instances, but look at Reema Lamba, who struggled for six years. She changed her name to Malika Sherawat. The body and face were the same. People didn’t see that with Reema Lamba? She’s a number six now. Suddenly she got Khwaish, she got Murder. Could she have dreamt of being a sex siren then?” Sanjay is steadfast in the belief that his science works. He points out to the blue walls around him. “They make me more positive.” They are the colour of his planets. Numbers govern his life, and he sees nothing unusual in that. “I started my show ‘Boley Sitaare’ on my lucky date, and it was a hit.” I asked how he dealt with inevitable numbers, like 8 o’clock. “Minutes aren’t important in numerology.”

It’s debatable whether astrology could flounder in India. There are forums on the internet related to astrology where visitors desperately sound out the hopeless day they were born on, and the hopeless name they were born with. “There’s something else that’s important apart from the right numbers,” Sanjay says. “Hard work, timing, and the proper direction.” All along, a receptionist kept coming in with news of other appointments. He seemed to be having a busy day. “I see three people everyday for various things. Only recently have I stopped working on Sundays. I used to work for eight to ten hours with my sales job, but now I work for 12 to 14. Just because you can add an alphabet to make life easier doesn’t mean you should work less hard.”

Sanjay begins everyday normally, with no regard to the numbers on his alarm clock. He drops his son to school before going for a morning walk with friends, who help him “throw out the negative energies that develop through the day with his clients.” Once in a while, when a date that adds to number eight brings with it an earthquake, his friends call to discuss the event. “My friends believe in this, and it’s not because of my convincing powers. They’ve seen my life change 3000% after I changed my name.” Numerology changed one big thing for him: earlier, he says, he had ten or twenty relatives, but now he has over 2000 of them, and each and every one wants to know the future.

Because he has immersed himself in numbers, they have taken root completely. Where we see an IBM or an Imran, he, like Keanu Reeves in a black trenchcoat, sees a stream of numbers. “Sometimes it’s so bad that I find myself calculating the words ‘no exit’.” It’s why companies come by to see if their names are okay, and if the colour of their logo is okay too. Colour plays a big role in things. “You’re wearing a shirt and pant. I’m wearing that too, but they’re my lucky colours.” His shirt was white with large pink circles. “The chair you’re sitting on is a lucky colour too. (Blue.)”

This science doesn’t seem rational. It doesn’t even seem like science. I asked him about non-believers. “I don’t have enough time for believers, so where does having time for non-believers come in? I was a non-believer myself. Why worry about them? I can talk to them and influence them through my television and radio program. If they don’t believe it, that’s fine, because it’s their belief.” What about changing a name? Given how inevitability is an intrinsic part of religion in India, wasn’t it like messing with fate? “What’s wrong with trying to change fate? When you get up at six in the morning you’re trying to change fate. Why not get up at ten and nine?” Yes, I protested, but it wasn’t like changing a name. This felt more and more like a playground spat. “Look, it’s a precaution. When you do yoga, it’s a precaution for your health. You’re changing fate. So does that mean you shouldn’t do it? These are catalysts. They help things get better.”

To survive life and live in it happily, Sanjay recommends that people learn numerology and see a numerologist. These days people come by with new babies. “I think it’s a very healthy practice,” he says. “Instead of struggling for 33 years like me and then changing… I would have not had to struggle for 17 years of my sales job if my name had been on a good number.”

Vanish

Say it never happened, it never existed. Some day you might deny leading the life you have today. Sometimes it does feel rather fragile. Look at the trees, their leaves turn brown eventually. Look at trees of families, and watch fortunes change with time. Nothing assured, nothing set in stone. You're adrift endlessly, from the first decade to the last. Some decades you have company on the raft, in others you do it alone. Sometimes the past feels as unreal as a mirage of the future.

Lost

The second season of Lost, one of the greatest shows ever, begins with survivors setting off from the island on a raft to find civilization. Some hours later they are barely alive and adrift, clinging to tattered remains after an encounter with another boat. As the boat appears at first there is hope, these are the first unfamiliar faces they have seen for a long time. But within minutes a survivor's child is kidnapped and an explosive is detonated on board the survivors' vessel. On the island a hatch is discovered, and one by one people lower themselves into it, knowing fully that what awaits them at the bottom is not wholly pleasant. It is one of Lost's defining features: we know and relish the fact that no danger deters the survivors. They may pause for thought and consider what lies around the corner, but will always hurtle into what is inevitably an escalated level of evil.

Next Thursday can't come soon enough. More on this later.

The maharaja's molls

The monsoon is a terrible time to fly. One whiff of a cloud and the airplane begins to rise and fall like an irregular heartbeat. At moments like these you look to the bright interiors for cheer, or to fresh-faced airhostesses who smile benignly. These things reassure me greatly. So when I stepped into an Air India plane two nights ago for a two-hour flight and saw the stern lady at the door, I considered cancelling my ticket.

Our nerves were shot by the time we landed. Everytime an airhostess walked by I would sit straight with my arms where she could see them. Sometimes they would inspect us as they walked by like examiners in a hall. It felt like the worst moments of school. When I tried sleeping, one stood by me in the aisle and yelled at my wife, "Is he your husband? Is he your husband? Is he your husband? Is he asleep?" It was so strange. This profession is supposed to be lucrative and exciting and dreamy. We know it isn't so, but it's supposed to seem this way. If I had a kid who wanted to be an airhostess, I'd take her on a few round trips on this airline, and that'd straighten her out. When the seatbelt lights came on mid-flight and the plane began to shudder, the frown on their faces sunk deeper, and I grew more worried. And then the pilot's voice came over the intercom, "We are in bad weather." That was it. Five words, he was done, we were done for. Some sweated profusely because the air conditioners were switched off. A stale smell developed. Then the plane landed with a thud, one set of wheels at a time. An airhostess said, "We hope you will fly with Air India again," to which a man at the back yelled, "Hopes!"