Test Team of the Noughties

Mathew Hayden (8364 runs @ 52.93, Centuries – 29, Fifties - 29)

An opener of the highest pedigree, the enforcer of the all-conquering Aussie teams of the decade. Never one to graft, Hayden bludgeoned bowlers into submission and his amazing conversion rate meant that your best chance was getting him early. His strike rate during this period was 60.85, surpassed only by Adam Gilchrist and Virender Sehwag among batsmen who scored 5000+ runs in the decade.

Virender Sehwag (6248 runs @ 52.50, Centuries – 17, Fifties - 19)

The most influential cricketer of the decade? Sehwag would come mightily close to that title and might even have clinched it had there not been an Adam Gilchrist. At a time when openers were supposed to see off the new ball threat, Sehwag threw all such cautionary tales out of the window. A makeshift opener, thanks to the vision of Saurav Ganguly, Sehwag rewrote the Test opener’s role and has played a major part in India’s surge to the top of the Test ladder. His brute force paced the game for his team, the biggest example being the England Test in Chennai when he tore into an English bowling comprising Harmison, Flintoff and Anderson. Needing 387 to win with a day and half’s play left and the famed Indian collapse lurking somewhere round the corner, Sehwag blitzed his way to a magnificent 83 of 68 balls; India cantered home with a Tendulkar special but Sehwag had already knocked England off the radar.

Honourable mention: Graeme Smith.

Ricky Ponting (9458 @ 58.38, Centuries – 32, Fifties - 40)

Cricinfo’s player of the decade, Ponting’s game sported shades of Bradman during the decade. A hooker and puller of the highest category, he was seldom troubled, most notably during horror runs in the subcontinent, but was sublime elsewhere. Never one to be bowed down, Ponting scored at least a half century every 2.55 innings he batted and his batting like the two openers in this team was based on an attack only theorem.

Honourable mention: Rahul Dravid, Kumar Sangakkara.

Sachin Tendulkar (7129 runs @ 53.20, Centuries – 21, Fifties - 31)

Tendulkar’s stats were more convincing enough for him to grab a coveted two-down position, but mere stats cannot measure his contributions to the team. He scored runs everywhere unlike Jayawardene, another contender for the # 4 spot. And most notably, he was at his majestic best against the number one side in the world. In 31 innings against Australia during the decade, he scored 1625 runs @ 60.2 with 5 centuries and 7 fifties. Remarkable!

Brian Lara (6380 runs @ 54.06, Centuries – 21, Fifties - 19)

It’s an ode to Lara’s genius that such batsmen do not grace the field often. The art of West Indian batsmanship achieved its culmination in Lara; he was Sobers’ genius, Viv’s audacity, Greenidge’s ferocity, Weekes’ calm rolled into one. Has there been any cricketer ever who embodied so much nonchalance yet was so expressive? Never had Muralitharan been collared in the way Lara did in the seminal series in Sri Lanka and never had Test cricket seen an innings of the calibre of his 153*. If Tendulkar, his friend and rival revelled in wholesome mastery, Lara found joy in the impossible. An once-in-a-lifetime player, they don’t make ‘em like him anymore.

Jacques Kallis (8630 runs @ 58.70, Centuries – 27, Fifties – 42, 205 wickets @ 32.00, Ct - 122)

Jacques Kallis had to relinquish his favoured # 3 spot for Ponting, but can he be denied an entry in the team of the decade? His numbers, misleadingly comparable to those of Sobers in some ways, are unlikely to be matched. Ever! A giant of a man in every sense of the term, Kallis has been the mainstay of South Africa’s batting for ages and is likely to remain so in the next few years. A technician of the highest calibre, a batsman in the classical mould, Kallis can be relied upon even when the side is going through a collapse. And add his bowling and slip catching, your head might burst at the enormity of those unrealistic numbers.

Honourable Mention: Andrew Flintoff

Adam Gilchrist (5130 runs @ 46.63, Centuries – 16, Fifties – 23, Ct – 362, St – 35, Dis/Inn – 2.19)

Cricinfo selected Ponting as the player of the decade. My vote will go to the man who revolutionized cricket like the way a doctor did two centuries earlier. With Gilchrist, Australia unfairly played with 12 players and more often than not, his whirlwind knocks blew the steam out of ordinary bowling attacks. Or if we consider a bowling line up comprising Donald, Ntini and Kallis or an attack consisting of the two Ws plus Shoaib Akhtar and one Saqlain Mustaq  ordinary ones! Gilchrist owned up bowling attacks and batting has never been the same since.

Glen McGrath (297 wickets @ 20.53, 5WI – 14, 10WM - 2)

In a disappointing decade for the fast men, here was a man who was never mastered by any batsman. McGrath averaged 21.3 India, 21.64 over his career and 20.53 in the decade. Man, machine, McGrath. If ever man and machine became one in communion on a cricket field, the result would be McGrath. Trash all the talks of the man not being naturally talented, here was a man who had conquered his mind to such an extent that he could predict his 299th and 300th Test scalps, here was a fast bowler who embodied indomitable. It took the genius of a Michael Vaughan to unravel the mystery, albeit for a brief period, and not even the oomph of Tendulkar was enough to tame the lion for good. Fragile looks, a clinical rather than a bustling run-up, a delivery stride far from the extravagant leap of an Imran, and boy! The ball wouldn't simply stop talking in his hands. The greatness of McGrath did not lie in the realm of the sensual, his was an approach where a great batsman was a case study, the lesser ones were footnotes. Jacques Kallis never managed to play him well enough, Lara seldom dominated him, Tendulkar's magical brilliance was never a sustained one. And McGrath had hypnotized one Michael Atherton to submission, bunny being an understatement. 

Dale Steyn (170 wickets @ 23.97, 5WI – 11, 10WM - 3)

In terms of wickets Steyn lies 19^th in the list, 13^th if you discount the spinners, but his average is bettered only by McGrath in the decade, his strikerate of 40 unmatched in the history of the game. Not even Sydney Barnes, with an astounding 7 wickets per Test match could boast of such a strikerate. Steyn in full flow is one of the finest sights in modern cricket, his bowling action reminding that of his idol Donald’s. And not many in the modern game can bend it like him at such an astonishing pace. The first true great fast bowler of this millennium. 

Shane Warne (357 wickets @ 25.17, 5WI – 21, 10WM - 6)

The first spinner in my team is  Shane Warne because of a fantastic strikerate (50.7 w.r.t Murali’s 50.9) and the pure aesthetics he brought into the art of spin bowling. A spinner with the heart of a torero, Warne in full flight was a sight for the Gods and with three fast men in this team, all right-handed, Warney could exploit the rough from the other end better than any other man could, before or since. 1993, Old Trafford, Mike Gatting facing Shane Warne. The next moment is history and an entire generation of batsmen if left scarred forever. 

Muttiah Muralitharan (565 wickets @ 20.97, 5WI - 49, 10WM - 20)


The numbers rarely tell the story, but in case of Murali they are enough. Murali in the noughties was bowling's answer to Bradman, someone who just needed to roll those arms to pick wickets by the bucketful. 

Movie Review - The English Patient

Gibran’s passionate says “Beauty is a thing of might and dread. Like the tempest she shakes the earth beneath us and sky above us”. For Socrates “Beauty is on a par with Goodness and Truth in the trinity of perfect Ideas.” Love is yearning for this beauty; it is the poet’s elation, the artist’s revelation, the musician’s inspiration. Anthony Minghella’s epic The English Patient explores love like no other modern day movie has, heart burning with raw passion, mind befuddled about right and wrong. The moral boundaries get blurred; love sometimes is incompatible with morality. The English Patient is no Romeo-Juliet tale; the forbidden fruit status of Katherine Clifton lends the classical tragedy touch to the movie. Michael Ondaatje’s captivating novel had won the Booker prize in 1992. Minghella brings all the lyrical prose into the screen, keeping the audience enthralled in his 160 minute long love saga.

The movie starts in 1943; a British plane flying over the Sahara is brought down by German anti-aircraft machineries. The pilot is rescued by Bedouins, his “organs are packing up.”; he is “a bit of toast”. Horribly burnt and amnesiac from the accident, the patient is passed over to the Allied authorities; the English patient had arrived. The patient is taken care off by a Canadian nurse Hana (Juliette Binoche). Hana persuades her seniors to let her stay with the patient is a deserted villa. The young Hana’s loving affection helps the patient to recall events from his past; drifting sporadically between his memories of the desert. He was a desert-based archaeologist, a Hungarian, Count Laszlo Almasy, whose reticence doesn’t give an insight to the passion burning in the man. When a fellow adventurer of the Royal Geographic society, Geoffrey Clifton arrives in the desert one day with his beautiful wife Katherine, Almasy is not exactly elated. Katherine greets him “I wanted to meet the man who could write such a long paper with so few adjectives”. Almasy brushes her off “A thing is a thing, no matter what you put in front of it; small car, broken car, still a car”.

In the Italian villa where they had put up, Hana tries to recover from the recent death of her boyfriend. Dosed up by morphine the Count goes on ruminating memories from the past. The seemingly taciturn Hungarian is swept by a fervor; call it love or infatuation; for Katherine. “The heart is an organ of fire”, the Count writes later. Soon the duo is dancing together, much to the ire of Geoffrey.

In the villa, passers by drop every other day. One of them is Kip, a Sikh who is serving in the British army. The young Hana develops tenderness to this soldier and their love accentuates between the long flashbacks of the Count’s love tale. Another visitor is David Caravaggio, a thief who worked for the Italian resistance during the war. Caravaggio seems to know more about the patient than anyone else. Hana is content with her patient sailing in the seas of his remembrance; Caravaggio seems like a man on a mission to dig out some unhappy truths about the count.

The English Patient is a soul-stirring tragedy that goes directly for your tear ducts. Ondaatje’s novel itself is a piece of classic fiction and the lyricism is expressively translated into the screen. The most striking aspect is the photography; never has the desert looked so beautiful after Lawrence of Arabia. But John Seale’s Sahara is much more feminine, its beauty doesn’t burn, rather it soothes. With such a magnificent backdrop, the camera just gently caresses the actors, capturing their mood through their eyes. The background score by Gabriel Yared is a winner all the way; alternating between the melancholic and the ecstatic embodying the pain and bliss that every heart in the movie harbours.

The acting is Oscar caliber and uniformly high. Few actors today can match Fiennes’ intensity. He is reticent; Katherine complains “You speak so many bloody languages, and you never want to talk”. The hallmark of great actors is that they can talk through eyes. Brando’s brittle sad face turned American cinema upside down, Pacino’s eyes were enough to convey his Corleonesque charm. Fiennes rarely talks as Almasy “I am a bit rusty at social graces”; yet you can feel his sweltering desire for Katherine. Kristin Scott Thomas is sensual and intelligent, carefully nuancing her way from eroticism to intellect. Juliette Binoche is cute as the nurse Hana, but her role is not fully realized by the script.

The English Patient evokes one word: passion. Morally, its not pristine love. The movie portrays passion in all its terrifying reality. When you sit down to analyze whether their love was wrong and hence reprehensible, you get a gentle yes from within. When you ask yourself whether their love was sublime, the consent gets stronger. “Beyond happiness and unhappiness, though it is both things, love is intensity”, wrote Paz. The lovers in the movie had gone mad in their adulterous affair, yet they were courageous enough to defy society. In one of the scenes, Katherine slaps Laszlo hard, and then takes him into her arms; she does not want to taste the forbidden pleasure but in the depth of her heart she is unwilling to resist it.

The English Patient is moving experience that carries us across the expanses of the Sahara to the serene Italian countryside, from the dark alleys of man’s desire to the radiant realm of love. Dying on his bed, the Count remembers his beautiful Katherine. “Sail your smile into the air; it will reach and enliven me! Breathe your fragrance into the air; it will sustain me”. You have got to see it to feel the yearning for love. It rates as the best love saga after Casablanca.

Movie Review - The Last Emperor

Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor is a sweeping epic rendered in the grandest scale. This lavish film portrays the life and times of the last monarch of China, Henri Pu Yi, who ascended the throne as an infant at the age of three in 1908; and died a common man in 1970. The movie uses the life of Pu Yi to reveal a fascinating phase in Chinese history; the transition from feudalism to the revolution that it engendered and paved the way for modern day Communism.

Pu Yi ascended the throne at the age of three, growing up under the argus-eyed eunuch servants until he abdicated at the age of seven. Still Pu Yi remained as the nominal figurehead living a life of opulence for the convenience of the invisible powers that be. Under the watchful eyes of a Scottish tutor, Reginald Johnston, Pu Yi learns the ways of the western world, gets married and takes a concubine. In 1924, the emperor is exiled to Manchuria by the Nationalists; here the Japanese take control over him. Knowing fully well the ecstasy of freedom, yet having never tasted it, Pu Yi’s frustrations get the better of him as he turns into a decadent playboy. With the World War II taking center stage in world affairs Pu Yi is relegated to a mere puppet, always at the beck and call of the Japanese. With the WWII coming to an end, he is captured by the Russians who in turn hand him to their new allies, the Communists.

Pu Yi seems destined for an execution, a fate that he had resigned himself to, yet his new “masters” “re-educate” him in the Communist ways. Pu Yi lived the last 10 years of his life as a gardener in Peking until he died in 1967.

The movie seamlessly continues Hollywood’s penchant for grand offerings; Gone with the Wind to Ben Hur to Cleopatra to Lawrence of Arabia to The English Patient to Titanic. It’s a biopic with a difference. As in Gandhi or Lawrence of Arabia, far-reaching historical changes rang during the lives of the protagonists; the men in question were instrumental channeling those winds of change. Unlike them, Pu Yi had no control over the state of affairs. This is an epic, a different one; it is passive in its rendition. Pu Yi was born to riches but no freedom, his world of paradoxes never allowed him any power, he was a monarch but could not ever assert his authority.

The Last Emperor set a record of sorts; it won each of the nine Oscars it was nominated for, including Best Picture and Best Director. While it deserved in all aspects, John Lone playing Pu Yi missing out to Michael Douglas (Wall Street) for the Best Actor was an unfortunate one. Lone does exceptionally well to portray the passivity of the character, the helplessness, the decadence and the aging; particularly in that order. Peter O’Toole brings all his charm into Reginald Johnston.

The Chinese government granted exclusive authority to Bertolucci to shoot the film in the Forbidden City, thus giving him the opportunity to be the first Westerner to get inside the Forbidden City. Colours are brilliantly blended into the entire length; the esoteric walls of the Forbidden City are as much characters as the humans they contain. Bertolucci shot the movie in the most exotic manner possible, making it a visual treat. But it never fails to touch the heart. The movie ends with an extraordinary sequence, in which Pu Yi visits his old abode, the Forbidden City. Years ago, on the day of his coronation, the infant king had received a gift from a soldier; a grasshopper flaunting all its verdant beauty. The infant king had hidden it under his Dragon Throne. Pu Yi, now a commoner, finds the box containing the grasshopper, now old yet somehow managing to mock time. Yes, time is the real protagonist in this grand saga of the last emperor of China. And that makes the movie a venerable one. The exotica of locales, the vibrancy of colors combined with the Bertolucci’s wide-ranging vision of the times makes The Last Emperor an unforgettable experience.

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Phir Mile Sur

One of the most enduring memories of the late 80s television was the national integration video, Mile Sur Mera Tumhara. Launched on the republic day of 1988, the 5 minute song was homage to the idea of "unity in diversity". Needless to say, the hummable tune and the plethora of stars made the video an instant craze and till date it remains an icon.

Circa 2010 - The Times Group re-launched a new version naming it "Phir Mile Sur". The new version is more than 15 minutes long, has the entire Bollywood fraternity lining up and depicts “youngistan” in its colorful persona. But did it fail to strike a chord?

I watched the video courtesy YouTube and here's my reaction. Excruciatingly bad, it brings a sense of abomination. I am tired of watching the buy one, get two free package (read the Bachchans). And it is really very difficult to comprehend how Deepika Padukone's leggy avatar contributes to national integration. Aamir Khan, personal favourite that he is, seems to be selling TZP DVDs, the less said of Shahid and Ranbir Kapoor, the better. And above all, the patron saint of all mannerisms, the guiding angel of all the love that is in the air, arms stretched out, lips quivering - does he even need a name? Heads will burst; if this is "youngistan" or whatever such balderdash means, I would be happy dwelling in my glorious stone age with the old world charm of the original Mile Sur; a Amitabh Bachchan than a grumpier version out to prove his greatness, a thoughtful Kamalhasan than a Surya, a heady cocktail of Bengali illuminati than that I-smile-like-a-sheep Shaan - the older version does what it was originally intended to do - evoke emotion.

While I agree that some parts of the video have good intent but overall the video fails to connect. E.g., Amitabh in the opening sequence. The great actor that he is, he makes me feel tired these days. And in the song, he has such a prolonged presence, what more does he need to prove, what is there to prove apart from the fact that his son is a failed dumpster-of- an-actor, his daughter-in-law has been miserable in those crass crossovers and his family owns up all the juries in those ludicrous film awards. The idea is to focus on the theme, not the actor because the theme is much greater than Big/Small/Lady B.

The video had some glaring omissions too. My list of the celebrities who missed out:

· Hrithik Roshan and by extension the Khan and Roshan families and if you can stretch your imagination a little bit more, Barbara Mori and her entire Mexican nation. I mean it makes a better business sense to go for the Khan-Roshan combo than the buy one get two free logic (the Bachchans).

· Add a dollop of Jeetendra and you will have Ekta and her extended Balaji family. Her brother will be a bonus and Salman can play deaf and dumb with him. Two idiots, anyone?

· Why leave Dharmendra aside? He missed out on last term and it wouldn't be bad to see Sunny, Bobby, Esha, Ahana, Hema, Anil Sharma, Tara Singh etc. We could even include scenes of an Indo-Pak war.

· There was no Hurricane Katrina. She is ubiquitous these days and could have made a better Liril girl than Deepika. And with Katrina can come Singh is King, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Rajesh Khanna, Pushpa I hate tears, Nawab Pataudi, blackbucks, Saifina, Randhir Kapoor, Neetu Singh, Chintuji, I can't go on more - a melee of the biggest stars on this planet.

Overall rating - Disgusting, a sheer waste of time