Normally known for its upfront and uninhibited marketing methods, the Times of India had in a rare show of finesse and subtlety come out with a beautiful advertisement campaign for its print edition the last year. Emphasizing, its tagline of 'A day in the life of India', the advertisement showed a neighborhood crowd joyously celebrating the selection of their local lad in the Indian hockey team. When the news was communicated to the boy's grandfather, the old man simply picked up the copy of the Times carrying the news of the selection along with his reading glasses and quietly slipped in to his corner of the house. There, opening his trunk, the grandfather took out a copy of a sepia tinted edition of the Times - one that carried the headline of his being dropped from the Indian camp and superimposed the present day one upon that. A little jig to the faint tune of the bands playing in the courtyard outside followed, thus capturing an era between the dropping of one generation of a family and its redemption by another simply in the space of two newspaper headlines.
Why this reference to the Times on a freezing Delhi winter morning? Because, if you are a hockey fan like I am, you would really wish that the Times could apply some of its marketing brains to Indian hockey and bring it some sort of redemption. But alas, if wishes were horses...and marketing whiz kids don’t play sport, they only sell it. For Indian hockey, which returned empty handed from the Doha Asian games, redemption for its string of disappoints is nowhere in sight. Its fall from the glory days of the previous century to the barren state of today could well fit the Times tagline quoted above. But those who love Indian hockey, these have been long, unending and painfully dark days. Days spent watching a sport from a pedestal that seemed destined to be occupied by it for posterity. Days spent watching standards slip, others outpacing us, taunting and mocking us as we stumbled, slowed and eventually fell in the global race for success. It’s been a bit like watching an empire collapse, brick by brick, province by province – its king and people desperately unable to do anything against the approaching aggressor or the self-destructing monster within. It’s been akin to watching a company go down, years of toil and effort of those who built it now being put to the stake by the brutal hammer of a liquidator.

If Indian hockey was a corporate enterprise, it most definitely would have filed for insolvency with the BIFR today. Its seems completely bereft of any ideas to resurrect the game and attract the best of the young talents to it and despite all the good intentions its mandarins profess they possess towards the game; the suicidal decisions just do not seem to stop. So who is to blame? The administrators who took success for granted when the gold medals flowed and forgot that the game was changing the world over and we needed to change along with it? Or the current crop of rulers of the game, who simply do not want the attention to be focused away from them to the players and thus keep clipping the wings of any one who asserts his presence on the hockey scene by the dint of his performance? Or the government which turns a sleepy eye to what it calls the national game? Or the players who experts claim lack pride and application?

Maybe they all do and then maybe above all of them it is we with whom the fault lies. We, the followers, who just don’t love the game the enough to demand a change. We, the public, who can stone the homes of cricketers and condemn the coach in parliament for one bad overseas defeat or one stray remark, but just don’t care about the shenanigans that go on in hockey. Do we really bother about our national game? Do we even give a damn about the disgrace its present state brings upon us a sporting nation?

No sport can survive for long with a losing team and a non-existent domestic structure. The Indian cricket team may lose on the international stage, but is the unheralded domestic competition tournament, the Ranji Trophy that will sustain it through tough times. Its level of competition may not be up to the international standards, but is the spine that keeps Indian cricket erect. It is a platform for young talent, for seven months of the year it provides competitive action to a large pool of aspiring hopefuls. Just its presence on the national scale ensures the reach of the game, propelled manifold by the exposure that television provides to the international games. If a young lad in the interiors of India wants to emulate a Dhoni whom he sees on his TV set, then the Ranji trophy exists to provide a vehicle for his dreams.

But what of hockey? Where is the structure? Barring a few tournaments organized by welfare trusts and charitable societies, there is no national competition to speak of. The National Championships have not been held for many years. The under 19 and other sub junior tournaments are also conducted by non- IHF bodies. The Federation simply uses these events to pick players and judge their form. And the circus of the Premier Hockey League will attract crowds, bring in money for the television channel that markets it but will do little to make the game healthy. For it is supposed to be the icing on the cake, not the cake itself. Being the twenty twenty version of hockey, it simply cannot replace the original game where basics are honed, mistakes spotted and corrections made. It organizes teams on a basis of convenience, there is no spectator loyalty to arouse passions and it lasts barely a month. All major and successful hockey playing countries today have a professional club culture in place with leagues that continue throughout the year. But the word professional is an anathema to those who run India hockey; the winds of change that touched the Indian economy a decade and half back and brought an air of competitiveness to it have not touched Indian sports. Indian hockey administration has forgotten that in the globally competitive environment unless you change you perish – and Indian hockey is well down the road. The longer the team fails, the more the interest will wane and with no domestic structure to back it up the game will die, its demise accelerated by rulers who are too blinded by their arrogance to see the crumbling walls collapsing on them.

India’s last international success came three years ago at the Asia Cup; the talented squad which could have been a force at the Olympics was wrecked by an administration hell bent on showing the players their place. In any other sport, the heroes who win are feted. In Indian hockey they are booted out of the team. The nucleus of that last successful squad has been torn to shreds; its protagonists wander in the wilderness. Indian was out of the world stage long time ago, now we are out of the Asian stage as well. The next humiliation will be the non-qualification to the Olympics. The Indians need to win at least one of the three qualifying tournaments which will have the mid-level world teams and going by their form and the ‘shoot yourself in the foot’ methods of their rulers the Indian hockey team stands as good a chance as a turtle of winning an Olympic sprint. The funeral may take place then but the last rites have already begun.

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I wonder how many of you followed the success of Tyler Walker Williams last week. Tyler Walker who? you may ask. The only Walker that rings a bell in Indian minds usually is Johnny Walker (sorry Mr.Mohandas Gandhi, but your endless walking didn’t exactly reach this generation); so for those who didn’t open the news channels over the last few days (wow, the lucky ones!) or scan the front pages of the daily newspapers, Tyler Walker is the new Vice President of the student's union at the JNU. Duh! big deal!, did I head you say? Well, maybe yes and maybe no.

Tyler Walker presents a very interesting and humorous paradox in an equally complex place. The JNU is one of India's most respected universities. It the regarded widely (and not incorrectly to a great extent) as the fountainhead of intellectual thinking in Delhi. It wouldn’t be unfair to call it the India International Centre of the educational institutions, where if you don’t have an opinion you are wasting your and other people's time.

But it has been equally notorious for being politically dedicated to the communist bent of thinking. The Student Union has been a communist bastion since decades and is a training ground for future politburo members. It has had its tough times, most notably during the tenure of the previous NDA regime when it got labeled as a 'madrasa' by the motor mouth of Praveen Togadia of the VHP. It was again in the news for the wrong reasons when last year the PM's speech at the university was disrupted by the Communist union members who raved and ranted and carried black flags. During this day and age, it is safe to say that if Lenin was to be reborn, he would like to land in India and contest student elections at the JNU for it is only there that he stands any chance of getting his ideas heard.

In this red fort now comes an American – the country, the economy, the very idea which is an antithesis to the Communist manifesto. You would think that Tyler Williams is another one of those young American hippies attracted to the ethnic and rural chic of India; one of those goras who landed up to learn Hindi and would gush about the rich diversity, spiritual beauty and other similar things about which India was noticed before the reforms and software came along. But taken at his words Williams is none of that. He is simply put – a communist who happens to be an American. In fact if you hear him speak about the economic policies of Manmohan Singh or the foreign policy of George Bush, you would think that he is more of a commie than even Buddhadeb Bhattacharya. (But then these days everyone seems to be more of a commiee than Buddha babu). Tyler Williams denounces the Iraq invasion, believes that the democrats won because the American public is tired of a disastrous war, thinks that the economic reforms of the Indian government are bypassing the rural poor and in fact proudly proclaims that he was one of those raising a black flag against the PM last year at the JNU.

So why am I gloating about an American who believes in Communism? Simply because of the paradox I touched earlier. Tyler Williams won an election (something that most communist nations never experienced during their years of Red Raj), in a foreign country (a rare occurrence in student politics) and that too by proclaiming a line of thinking which if heard by Mr.George W can lead to a revocation of his American passport. Just as the Communist party can ride to power in a democratic India (though only in a couple some states) and exert influence at the centre, so can an American become a student union leader (without any anti-gora campaigns against him) in a student electoral franchise in an essentially liberal Indian university. Walker in a sense has succeeded in a set up which his ideology has historically stood against and that too without any racial or national prejudice. In a sense, it only highlights the inclusiveness of democracy and the wide and sometimes odd examples it can throw. Walker’s success thus may be seen as a vindication of giving the people the power to choose… and perhaps the final nail in the already decaying coffin of Soviet communism…and perhaps also a timely reminder to Mr.George W, a reminder that policy making is more about of achieving consensus amongst diverse opinions rather than using a bulldozer to swamp over them.

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I have been busy for a bit too long
no time to party or sing a song
hours have ticked by and the days have flown
i ve spent many late nights with a groan
work's been hard and a bit of a slog
resulting in a neglect of my dear own blog
the winter is setting in and the sun is out
maybe there ll be time to laugh and shout
a single post may not may not make up for the neglect
maybe i can find more time to reflect
so here's to makin another new start
with a rough burp and a little fart
regular shall be thats my vow
with this the lazy knight takes a bow.

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I recently received a forwarded Power point presentation from a friend on pseudo secularism. Let me know what you think of it, he asked. I went through all the twenty odd slides patiently. They sounded very much like a typical RSS or VHP pamphlet – raving and ranting at the liberals for labeling hindus as fundamentalists and treating the minorities with kid gloves.
So why am I writing about it? And why didn’t I just label the mail as trash and send it to its right destination i.e. junk folder of my inbox. Because at a certain stage we who claim to be liberals must face these accusations and answer them. We can no longer run and we can certainly no longer hide behind the label of perversity we put on such attempts. It is time we spoke and reflected on what we stand for and proclaimed what we believe in.
So here is a rebuttal of every accusation that people who are supposedly pseudo secular have to live with. The questions are verbatim from the presentation.
Q) Show one Muslim country which provides Haj subsidy? And if Haj is to be subsidized then why are Hindus or Muslims taxed for pilgrimage to Amarnath and Kailash?
A) Being an irreligious agnostic, I care two hoots for any subsidy or pilgrimage. But the Haj subsidy in my belief began as a simple practical measure that has now snowballed into a political and judicial issue. Travel to Saudi Arabia can only be by air or sea and majority of the Muslims wishing to go may not be able to afford it. Hence, the concessions and grants. And to the best of my knowledge there is no tax on Hindu pilgrimages (the age of Alamgir Aurangzeb and Jaziya is long over). The Amarnath yatra is carried out with much fanfare and tight security with the state taking the responsibility for the safety of the pilgrims. Show me one country which stakes its reputation on one holy journey? The Kailash mansarover lies in territory under Chinese occupation, and for over a half a decade inspite of the freeze on the Sino – Indian border, the pilgrimage goes on smoothly. Show me a state that overlooks a territorial dispute to facilitate a pilgrim’s journey?
And are we to now compare ourselves with Muslim dominated nations, the religious clergy of many of which does not allow its women to go out to and work? States in which women have to be in purdah? States in which a Sania Mirza would have to step on to a tennis court wearing salvar kameez and not shorts? Have our aspirations sunk so low?

Q) Show one Muslim country where Hindus are extended special rights that Muslims are accorded in India?
A) I often wonder what are these so called rights. Apart from granting the Muslim fundamentalists the right to speak freely without rebuke, the Indian state has not extended any special rights to the community. Do our statistics show it? Muslims today rival Dalits and other backward communities on many social development indices. Education standards are on an overall basis low in the community, majority of them have low per capita incomes and their representation in higher levels of society are abysmally low. Unlike the Sikhs, they have not been able to either acquire economic muscle or agrarian prosperity. In fact in a world where even your next door neighbor could be a suicide bomber, Muslim identity is regarded with suspicion. Finding accommodation in many urban areas, as newspaper reports have proved, is downright tough if you are a Muslim. Where are those special rights? And why isn’t the community a healthy, self - confident and prosperous lot because of these rights which cause such indignation to the protectors of the majority?

Q) Show a Muslim country which has a Non-Muslim as a Prime Minister or President? Can any other country have a Muslim president and a Sikh Prime Minister?
A) The question answers itself. One of the good things about this country still is its participatory democracy. Most of the Muslim majority states do not even have a Prime Minister or a President. They either have royal families or American backed despots ruling over them. A democracy by itself is meant to provide representation and a choice to all. Do we now need to turn towards our western neighbor to realize the value of electoral franchise?
Q) Show a Mullah or Maulvi who has declared a ‘fatwa’ against the terrorism?
A) The Darul Uloom of Deoband, a respected and acknowledged centre of Muslim religious learning in India, has repeatedly remarked after each major terror incident that it is not in the teachings of Islam to kill or maim innocents. Islam’s problems today stem from a strong sense of victimization in the middle east – a feeling which has been strengthened by the Wahhabi sect of West Asia and the easy oil money which is spewing out terror factories in the laboratories of poor Muslim dominated states. The extremist religious fringe in many corners of the globe has been issuing provocative remarks or offering silent support to the violence being perpetrated by local terror groups. But if the entire clergy was extremist, then India would be a hotbed of terror today and the blame for spreading terror would not be put by intelligence agencies on rogue states and their leaders but on the clergy as a whole. And the law of fatwa cannot work both ways. The fatwa cannot be used both as an instrument to deride the Muslim clergy as well as a barometer to test its loyalty to the state. Leave it to the state to fight terror, the maulvis and the pandits should stick to what they are best at – reading scriptures.

Q) Muslims have become CMs of Hindu majority states. Can a Hindu ever become the Chief Minister of J&K?
A) People who raise this question forget that till date J&K has a Hindu king and had one for decades before Independence. He lost his influence not because his Muslim people decided to overthrow a kafir but because he ceased to represent their wishes. And what were their wishes? To join the Hindu majority but secular India and not the moth ridden Muslim majority Pakistan.
The J&K today sends five MPs to the Parliament. Only one of them, a Hindu from Jammu is a Minister in the central government.

Q) Muslim population in India risen from 10.4% to 14% since Independence while Hindu population has gone down from 87% to 85%.
A) The change in the figures is marginal at best. And if the Muslim population is rising then instead of heralding it as a sign of imminent threat to Hindu majority, it should be seen as a matter of grave concern. Simply because it reflects two hard and unpleasant truths. One that migration from the border areas of the north east adjoining Bangladesh continues unchecked and two that India’s largest minority community has been left relatively untouched by the population control measures. It is a reflection not of their growing strength but of a worsening standard of living. Even with increased numbers, Muslims have not climbed on the social indices which only means that as the number of children have increased, the families have slipped further and further into poverty.

Q) When Hindus gave 30% of their country to Muslims at the time of partition why cannot they be allowed to reclaim their holy sites at Mathura, Ayodhya and Kashi?
A) Since when did we start talking about India in terms of ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’? India does not belong to a religion or caste. Pakistan was a hand out to Jinnah and his Muslim League and not to the Muslims of India. For if Pakistan was really about protecting Muslims, then a larger number of them would not have stayed back in India. And all the above mentioned sites can be perfect examples of religious co-existence, only political interests of the so called protectors of Hindu religion have allowed them to be transformed into centres of religious tension. One may accept that the mosques may have been built to smite the defeated Hindu pride. One may also accept, that as a goodwill gesture the Muslim leadership should have offered to land adjoining the Babri Masjid to the Hindus for construction of the temple. But would a community voluntarily yield in an atmosphere of hate, tension and incrimination? Would Ayodhya have been solved peacefully by now, had the BJP and VHP decided not to pull down the mosque? And more importantly is it wrong in a modern, developing and secular state to ask the Hindu majority not to look upon the Kashi and Mathura mosques as symbols of Muslim aggression? Are Hindus barred from worshipping in these temples? Are the interests of the Hindu faithful harmed in any way harmed by these silent structures?

Q) Why are post Godhra riots blown out of proportion while no one talks of ethnic cleansing of Hindus in J&K?
A) The biggest misfortune of the Kashmiri pandits is that the pogrom against them occurred when there was barely any independent Indian media. At the time when they being persecuted, no one brought their plight alive to the nation. Today, a decade and a half later they are a forgotten lot. But why blame the media alone? The man who was Governor of the state when the migration happened and thereby was naturally accountable was not even censured. Years later, the same very political party which stands for aggressive Hindu nationalism made him a Union Minister. Which Hindu group or political party pays any attention to the Pandits, many of whom still live in one room refugee camps?
And why are post Godra riots always considered to be exaggerated? Was the burning of the shops, the rioting on the streets, the murder of innocents all a media constructed gimmick? What is spontaneous about a riot that only targets minority slums, colonies and shops? What is natural about violence which is justified using Newtonian laws by those who are supposed to protect those being maimed? Will we tomorrow say that the anti – Sikh riots of Delhi were a lie? That partition never happened?

Q) Do you consider that - Sanskrit is communal and Urdu is secular, BJP is communal and Muslim league is Secular, Praveen Togadia is anti-national and Bhukari is Secular, Hinduism is Communal and Islam is Secular, Hindutva is communal and Jihadism is secular?
A) For all I care both Praveen Togadia and Imam Bukhari are blood brothers and belong to the same gang of troublemakers. They both should have been exported to Afghanistan long back – Bukhari to support his beloved Taliban and Togadia to rid the world of jehadis. As for the BJP and the League, one wonders whether today anyone in this country apart from the BJP considers Jinnah’s party as secular.
But there is a deeper side to this. Hinduism is not communal and neither is Islam. They did not land form heaven. It is individuals and institutions that shape faiths. And if we allow ours to be hijacked by those who think they know what is best for us, then we would be laying the seeds for extremism. We should not forget that religion is about individual faith and collective identity and not the other way around. Neither Hindutva nor Jihadism has a place in a secular and democratic India. India is defined by its heterogeneity and not by a religion or identity.

Q) When uniform is compulsory in schools then why do we not have Uniform Civil Code? And why does Article 370 still persist when J&K is no different from Maharashtra or UP?
A) I wish the answer to the first question was simple as putting on a school uniform. Different religions have different personal laws and separate religious decision making bodies. Uniform Civil Code has often been mischievously used to poke at Muslim practices of polygamy and triple talaq. But the question to ponder is this? Is any religion in India free from prejudices or medieval thinking at a certain level? What of the Hindu caste system which has so bitterly created social and political divides in large parts of North India? What of the Sabrimala temple located in the supposedly progressive South India which does not allow women to be anywhere near a supposedly bachelor and virgin god? What about the rights of the Hindu daughters and brides? What of female infanticide among Hindu and Sikh families of Punjab? Would the prosperous and politically active SGPC yield space to a Uniform Civil Code? Would the RSS and VHP allow Hindu and Muslim family successions to be governed by the same set of laws?
The truth is that each of India’s religions faces serious problems, the solution of which lies in sociological reforms that must begin from within. Foisting a Uniform Civil Code would hand over the power to the state to clamp down on religious identity. It may lead to curbing of disturbing practices (which given the political interest to be milked by catering to the fundamentalists, it eventually won’t) but it will also lead to attempts to enforce religious homogeneity, which as has been demonstrated in the case of France can lead to social unrests.
Religious identities must flourish under the broad umbrella of the concept of a nation state, but the moment we start to defile a community (it was the Sikhs in the 80s, it is the Muslims now), we defy the very idea of India. An idea which has defeated the pessimism of the western analysts of the mid twentieth century, an idea that holds out inspite of all its scars and scratches, hope of co existence to a bitterly divided and fractious world. The idea of India is a lot bigger than the falsely perceived sense of insecurity possessed by some members of its majority community.

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World Champion, Convicted Rapist, Disgraced sportsman, bankrupt showpiece. That in effect sums up the life of Mike Tyson. A man with unbridled talent now reduced to a broke. As Tyson gets ready to make displays of mock boxing in a Las Vegan casino for visiting gamblers, one cannot but feel sorry for a man for whom everything that could go wrong eventually did. Bursting onto the scene as a teenaged kid who had a streetfighter’s tenacity and the intimidating presence of bully, Tyson was boxing biggest draw. The boy who was destined to rule the ring, to be the champion, one who would reach out globally as Mohammad Ali once did.
Tyson did reach out but in the most internecine of ways…as happens in many sports but more so in the hard and mercenary world of professional boxing, too much success at too early an age coming at the back of a deprived childhood rendered harrowing consequences for Iron Mike. Within a couple of years of his great arrival, he was involved in brawls (many deliberately staged to promote his fights), was running the gauntlet with the cops and eventually found himself in prison for forcing his way on a young woman. He came out years later and returned to the ring but wasn’t the same threat anymore and had to resort to biting his opponent’s ear off to keep himself in the fight – an act for which he found his license revoked. Out of job and out of money, Mike Tyson today is a roving joker in the casinos of Nevada. A man showing his skills to a crowd…but not in the ring of boxing fight but that of a circus.

Was he a victim of too much glamour and money at too young an age? Or did he simply did not possess the strength of character to deal with what professional boxing exposed him too? Or did Mike Tyson never really grow out of streetfighter that he grew up as? We may delve and we may ponder. But the point to consider is this – Tyson today reflects the sad reality of the world of professional boxing. Where success is a flash, careers shorter than starbursts and retirement benefits something unheard of. Tyson is as much of a product of the streets as he is of a sport that at times resembles the staged world of professional wrestling. A sport that must ponder why it creates champions like Tyson…men whom the public loves to hate, men whom you would point out to your kids as examples of what not to be. Boxing must ask itself why it kills the very champions it creates.

******
I must confess I knew I was taking a risk when I bought a ticket for ‘Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna’.
‘You survived?’ a friend asked when I told her that I seen the movie. Most reactions ranged from surprise (I am a known Karan Johar baiter) to unbridled criticism from those who had seen it.
Piece of trash, said some. Gross and crap, said others. And for once I found myself doing something I thought I would never end up doing ever in life – defending poor Mr. Johar.

Has he grown up while making the movie, as he claimed to a newspaper? In parts yes and in parts no – if there ever is a thing called growing up in bits. But here’s why I actually sat through the entire three and something hours watching his New York based saga of an extra marital affair - because for some minutes in those long three hours ( by the way, ever wondered why does the length of a typical Hindi movie have to be equal to that of an examination ?? ) Karan Johar goes where Hindi filmmakers never would. He shows the courage and temerity to break up a marriage, make a working woman throw out her husband (the feminists loved this part the best…three cheers for Karan!), shows a father abandon his young son and most of all makes us believe that an aging and dying dad – in – law can ask his son’s wife to walk out of her marriage if she hasn’t found love in it.

Bold? For the surreal brand of filmmaking yes. Even the big daddy of romantic movies Yash Chopra refused to breach the moral legitimacy of marriage in ‘Silsila’.


Pathbreaking? Sadly, no.
The movie remains tacky, packages in songs like any mill of the run romantic fare and never is truly honest with itself. It is an Indian story with Indian characters. So what are they are doing in Manhattan when they all could easily have been in Mumbai? Is that because the movie is aimed for the large NRI market or does putting infidelity in a liberal America with its supposedly loose social and moral values accord it a legitimacy which always remains at a comfortable distance from the pseudo liberal Indian audiences. And why are second generation NRIs speaking in flawless Hindi without even a trace of an accent? (Can you imagine Omakara being dubbed in the Hindi which you and I city dwellers speak?) And why on earth cant Shah Rukh Khan stop grimacing all through the movie? And is crying the only form of expression of emotions? Can we have some subtlety please?

So yes, I did survive. And yes of all the Karan Johar movies this one is the most watchable and attempts to make sense. Now if only our directors did not grow up in parts.

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There is a certain sense of sadness and inevitability when a childhood hero rides into the sunset- bidding goodbye, never to be seen again in the arena which in a certain day and age belonged to him. As Andre Agassi played his last game of tennis at the US open yesterday, one couldn’t help thinking that for once he appeared on the court as a completely honest image of the man he is. In his mid thirties, his back troubling and hindering his movements, his reflexes slowed by creeping age and an inflamed disc in the lower spine…Agassi to the layman must have looked over the hill and too old to be out there playing with the fancy new hard hitters.
But then Andre Agassi has never been what he seems. Even yesterday, he battled pain…took on injections and stretched his unwilling body to the limit. In fact, at one stage he even had a set point to carry the match into a fifth and decisive set. For the some one of his age and physical limitations (he had been playing with the inflamed disc for the last one year), he summoned mountains of will and effort to carry himself through three grueling games against men almost half his age. And when he cried at the end of the game in the centre of the court, you knew that here was a man who not only loved his sport but also carried all the emotions that it brings right on his sleeve.

And it there that the Las Vegan differed from his contemporaries. Pete Sampras was the composed, steely and dry champion. A man who possessed an unbeatable game, a man whom everyone would like but few would love. Michael Chang and Jim Courier, Agassi’s two other American compatriots from the famed generation of the early nineties, sizzled too briefly for history to capture their light. Agassi though was a man tailor made for a sport that craved a hero who could bring the crowds in. He was the extravagant, young no holds barred American who wore the latest fashions on the courts. He was the new John Mcenroe, signifying his resistance not against the referees but those who thought tennis was a game of whites. He brought in more than just color to the game; there was effervescence to his game, a certain kind of freshness as he grunted and sprinted his way across the courts in denims, headbands and outrageous looking t-shirts.

My first memories of Agassi are as a seven year old watching the final of the 1990 US open between him and Sampras. I still recall staying awake late into the night with my father. It is an age at which you are too young to understand the nuances of the game and make preferences by appearances. You choose by looks or color.. and I liked the guy in all blue with the long hair and girly earrings. Agassi lost that night (he was to loose more Grand Slam finals than any of his contemporaries… which in itself prompts a question of what might have been had he won even half of those); but for me he was a favorite from that night on. I remember egging him on through a thrilling five set French Open final that he lost to Jim Courier…feeling at top of the world when he won his first Grand Slam at Wimbledon and then feeling morose as he lost himself completely for a year or so in the mid nineties.

But Agassi was not one to fade away…he came back hungry and in the first of the many comebacks he would orchestrate, he won the US Open as an unseeded player in 1995. He was a complete contrast then to his image at the beginning of his career. He had shaved his head, sported a beard and looked more like West Asian than an American. He resembled a fugitive out on a chase who hadn’t been able to get his hands on a razor. The turnaround had begun. As he began to do justice to his talents, another slump followed which culminated in that epic French Open win in 1999. Down two sets, he came back (once again) and won when no one had given him even a fig leaf’s chance.

Growing up watching Andre Agassi’s exploits one realized the difference he possessed as compared to the others. Sampras was cool, stoic and won with boring regularity. The same is the case with Federer while Rafael Nadal looks like a kid who cant stop himself from pumping his forearms inside the gym and outside on the court. With Agassi you experienced the entire range of emotions a sport carries with it…joy when he won, despondency when he lost and sheer frustration when you saw him wasting away his talent.

At the end of his two decade long carrier Agassi stands on his own; one of the greatest to have played the game… a man who brought color and crowds to tennis…a worthy successor to the rebellious Mcenroe but also a man who refined into the graceful sportsman. But more than his eight grand slams and the fact that in the modern era he remains the only one after Bjorn Borg to have won on all the four surfaces (even Sampras and Federer have not been able to win on the French clay), Agassi will always be remembered as the man whom you would love to watch. He remained a crowd favorite from his first day on the court to his last. A respected champion who made the uninitiated and the casual follower a part of the tennis caravan… an idol kids loved to imitate without any apology. He remains an inspiration to middle aged men around the world that life’s best years need not occur in the best part of the twenties. He may leave the court but Andre Agassi’s legacy will endure long after the nets have been rolled up and balls have been boxed and kits packed. For many people around the globe he would remain the only reason for loving the game of tennis.

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My journey begins on a muggy July morning at the crack of dawn. The Shatabdi express to Amritsar leaves at half past seven in the morning, which means that mom wakes me up at six. I have to drag myself out of the bed, through a bath and into the car as we drive down to the station. The New Delhi railway station is buzzing with life. Its daylight now and it’s a normal day at the platforms. All the usual sights are there. Freshly arrived passengers being hounded by auto and taxi wallahs. Coolies hanging on the stairs, some smoking their bidis, some casually waiting for a heavily loaded customer to come. The platform ticket checker’s seat is empty and the entry to the over bridge linking the platforms is without any hindrance. Nothing at the station makes one feel that just a few days back, powerful bombs ripped through trains in Mumbai. There is no sign of the ‘Red Alert’ or the heightened security measures that one read about on the front pages of the newspapers. It’s almost as if no one has noticed what happened a few days ago. Life is going on at its usual place. Is this a measure of our strength? To move on without letting our heads drop? Or is this our biggest weakness? In a country of so many billions, how does the death of the few matter?

As I settle down on my seat in the Shatabdi express, I haven’t yet been able to shake off the sleep from my body. And I realize much to my dismay that I do not have a window seat; which deprives me of my favorite pastime when on a train – just gazing out of the window at the passing countryside. The Amritsar Shatabdi is equipped with the new swanky looking coaches; at least they look fresh from outside. On the inside, they are dull and kind of dingy. But the one thing I like the most about the Shatabdi is the leg room its seats offer. The economy class seating of domestic airlines is cramped to say the least. In the Shatabdi you have to reach out to touch the edge of your food tray when it is opened up, while in the air economy class the food tray will gently brush against your chest as you lean forward to eat. Wider space also means that your chair can recline more and there are fewer murmurs of protest from those sitting directly behind. Through the five and a half hour journey, the audio system of the train plays instrumental tunes of old Hindi songs, interspersed with muffled announcements whenever the train reaches a station with a halt.
The stillness and quiet inside allows me to sleep and the catering staff is kind enough to let me be without butting in with something or the other every few minutes. (On the smaller routes, they almost irritate you with the frequency with which foodstuff arrives. Everything has to be served within a short time to provide value for the ever rising ticket prices).

We reach Amritsar ten minutes past one. I was hoping for an overcast sky to make my trip slightly comfortable, but I am greeted by a clear blue and a blazing sun. It is humid and sticky. We board a rickshaw and start making our way to the Golden Temple, a fifteen minute ride from the rail station. Being a Sunday, the markets are closed and we make our way smoothly to the old city and the temple vicinities. It is there that the chaos greets us. The older parts of the city are not too dissimilar to Chandni Chowk, it is crowded with narrow road space. Cars, rickshaws, tempos, bicycles and pedestrians all merge together into a complete logjam. There is honking, shouting and cursing going on all around. We are stopped about a hundred yards short of the temple by a traffic constable. The remaining way will have to be made by foot.

The chaos outside is in complete contrast with the feeling of serenity that greets you the moment you step inside and see the sight of the gold glinting in the sun. Being a Sunday, there is a larger crowd than usual (all my three previous visits were on weekday evenings when the crowd was sparse). There is commotion in the sarovar and all around the parikrama. We make our way barefoot across the marble; for some strange reason the colored marble stones feel hotter than the plain white ones. Around us volunteers are filling buckets from the sarovar and splashing the water on the floor to cool it down.

Walking around the parikrama is itself an experience. It allows you to seep in the sight of the Harminder’s magnificence and of its tranquility (the one quality I have not found in any other place of worship so far). It is hard to imagine how this place would have been two decades back, when the number of guns inside the temple premises could have easily outnumbered the number of Guru Granth Sahibs in it. There are no visible signs left of those days of turbulence. As I stand in front of the north gate, it is impossible to imagine army tanks moving in over the marble steps and blasting away at terrorist trenches. No Sikh alive in 1984 can ever forget Operation Bluestar, but the temple on the face of it, it seems has. The rooms where Jarnail Singh Bhindrawale’s men hid are today either locked or occupied by granthis with snowy beards reading the Holy Scripture in deep thought. On entry and inside, I saw not a single armed guard. Guns are not allowed by the SGPC anywhere near the temple premises. And yet in those turbulent days of the mid eighties, the Golden Temple boomed with mortar and rifle fire. It was the most unlikely of all battlefields with the most unlikely of all battles. For the first time in its history, the Indian army conducted such a massive operation on its own soil against an entrenched enemy. Both sides underestimated each other; the army underestimated the strength of the terrorists and Bhindrawale underestimated the government’s resolve to knock him over. Casualties were heavy on both sides (with many innocents pooled along) and the physical damage to the temple premises was matched in gravity by the damage to the psyche of a community and a nation.

Perhaps the most ironical aspect of the temple is the number of stone engraving of thankfulness and remembrance left by different army formations. All around the marble perimeter walls are inscribed with messages of worship or gratitude to the almighty; majority of them by different army battalions who have served in Punjab. Despite the bitterness over the Army action two decades ago, these still stand proudly with many of them displaying names of martyrs who sacrificed their lives in the three post independence wars. In a small measure the Harminder also serves as a war memorial. The armed forces have found their walls; Bhindrawale and his band of gangsters got not even a square inch. It is a reflection of popular Sikh sentiment and proof that in a democratic state no honor is derived through killing and festering divisiveness.

As we make our way towards the sanctum sanctorum, we get suck in an unmoving queue. It’s only then that we realize that it a day of the sangat and that it has accounted for the extra crowd in the afternoon. It takes us an hour to make out way to the centre of the temple; an hour during which I glance at my watch anxiously several times. I have no plans to miss the train back home in the evening.

The blazing heat is somewhat quelled by the shamiana and the fans hanging from it over the column leading to the entrance of the sanctum sanctorum. Yet, it is muggy enough to cause two elderly women to fell giddy and collapse. I am thankful to the good lord when I finally reach inside and calmly make my way out through the back. We make our way towards the Akal Takht- the seat of the Sikh religion, from where religious (and quite often political edicts) are issued. The sixth guru, Guru Hargobind had set up the Akal Takht as the place of his address to his followers and it was here that he introduced the concept of singing of folk songs and ballads to inspire martial qualities in his followers. Today, it is the seat of the SGPC – which controls the Sikh gurudwaras. Badly smashed up during Bluestar (Bhindrawale’s body was recovered from its basement), it was rebuilt first by the army and then again by the SGPC. I climb the stairs and reach the main hall on the first floor; it resembles the hall of any normal gurudwara with the devotees sitting around listenting patiently to a granthi chanting along. Behind the main hall are rooms which house the SGPC offices. Nothing seems out of place or extraordinary. Nothing gives you the impression that you are standing in what was once a war zone.

At around four we make our way through the parikrama and out towards the main gate. The crowd is swelling and a large band of pedestrians is making its way towards the temple. It is a procession complete with all the noise of accompanying drums and religious chants. Traffic is virtually stuck a hundred yards from the temple gate. There is complete logjam at the nearby crossing with every vehicle of every kind merging into each other. Once again, like at the station in Delhi I wonder how fragile is the security (in fact at the Golden temple it seems non-existent). It is the perfect place for any miscreant and a small amount of explosives can cause massive human casualties. Mom hunts around for a few Punjabi jootis unsuccessfully before we clamber back on a rickshaw and make our way out of the old city. The garment market just beyond the temple has now opened a little and roadside stalls and small eateries are doing brisk business thanks to the procession. In spite of the clear sky and the bright sun, it is comfortable rickshaw ride to the station. The rickshaw can probably be the best exploratory transport for the older any Indian city. It can access cramped lanes and provides an unobstructed view of the surroundings and brings you within touching distance of everything around.

Our compartment on the return journey is a theatre of cacophony. There is tiny girl, maybe three or four, who starts wailing at full blast every time her mother tries to restrain her. There are a couple of foreign ladies in the adjacent seat who keep babbling loudly in what sounds a bit like Spanish. Three young boys from the seats behind us keep running up and down the length of the compartment. When their running ceases, they get down to playing antakshiri and more song and noise follows. In between their family joins in as well and the back of the compartment resonates with sounds of popular Hindi songs.

I realize pretty soon that any attempt to sleep will be futile. I try to make friends with the wailing little girl, but the moment I touch her arm as she crosses by my seat, she wails even loudly than before and I quickly retreat and start peering into my book innocently.

Delhi arrives at half past eleven at night. The station like in the morning is buzzing with life. I drag myself out of the platform and to the parking where Dad waits patiently in the car. All I want to do is crash on my bed and sleep soundly for the Monday ahead. I end my day the way I started it, in a state of slumber. Sleep slowly drags itself into my eyes. Its been that kind of a day – it seemed it would be active, busy and touch and go….it ended up running at my pace…slow, groggy and just about trundling along.

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One of history’s most riveting enquiries is the ‘What if?’ A simple two word question but one which can throw up unthinkable and unimaginable answers. It represents the black hole of the historical universe, the area where no one knows exactly for sure what lies and where no one has traveled before. The ‘What if?’ is history’s alternative- the path which could have been, the destiny which escaped us either by a sheer stroke of luck (or bad luck in some cases) or by the individual or collective brilliance of certain minds.

What if for example Alexander ‘The Great’ had not died of a mysterious illness while on his way back from Asia to Greece? Would Europe and the Middle East been more integrated than they are today? Would Islam have risen as strongly in West Asia as it eventually did in the early centuries after the death of Christ? Would the Crusades have taken place and would the Greek empire under a strong headed and at times autocratic Alexander have given way as easily as it later did?

Looking at modern history, What if Adolf Hitler had honoured his non-aggression pact with the Soviets and not marched on to Moscow in the winter of 1941? A German army not strained by its demoralising losses on the Eastern front would surely have been much more difficult to overcome. The United States of America and Britain might still have invaded mainland Europe but would have had to contend with much stiffer resistance and much larger casualties than they eventually did. In fact, a stronger and undefeated Hitler might well have prompted the wary Americans to show some element of accommodation towards him. Remember, Germany had not attacked any American citizen or property before the Americans declared war on Japan. It would have indeed been a strange world in the mid 1940s with Nazi fascism co existing with Soviet Communism and American liberalism and democracy. Its anybody guess as to how long an unrelenting and whimsical Hitler would have allowed the status quo to continue but had he decided at the height of his power not to succumb to his hubris and invade Russia, the Second world war might well have not turned out to be a world war after all. Britain would have suffered; its power undermined by both the Nazis and the Communists. Would there have been a Cold War? Would the United States been as powerful as it eventually ended up being after the war… and would George Dubya have remained a Texan cowboy in a remote ranch somewhere near Houston.

In the Indian context certain What Ifs are equally intriguing. What if the Congress ministries had not resigned en masse in all the states ruled by them after the British unilaterally made India a part of the second world war? In hindsight, it is considered as a political mistake on part of both the Mahatma and his disciples Nehru and Patel. A mistake not often quoted and rarely discussed. But the reality was that in those three years between 1939 when the Congress ministries resigned and 1942 when the party came back to the political centre stage with the Quit India movement, the initiative was surrendered to Jinnah and his Muslim League. In 1940, the League passed the Lahore resolution demanding a separate Pakistan. Riots were precipitated all over the country and the British gently encouraged Jinnah and his mad plan for Pakistan in the face of an obstinate, uncooperative and rigid Congress. The lost intiative was never recovered; the League gained strength, the politics turned shriller and with the British only willing to play cynical spectators, reason and sanity were lost in a growing cloud of communal cauldron. Would the future of India and the Indian subcontinent as a whole been different had the Congress stayed in power and not created a political vacuum which was an open invitation for Jinnah? Would a less powerful and less ballistic Jinnah gone for broke and stopped nothing short of Pakistan? And would the Muslim League, which was badly routed in the 1938 elections to the provinces, been able to exert itself politically in the face of a centrist and secular Congress administration?

But independent India’s biggest What if is far more interesting and complex. It is rarely posed and addressed and its possibilities seem to have become barred with the lapse of time.
What if on a hot June morning of 1980 a two seater Cessna aircraft had managed to complete its routing flight after taking off from the Safdurjung Airport in Delhi and not crashed barely a few kilometers away from Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s residence? What if Sanjay Gandhi had not died at a tragically young age? What if the Congress party had not lost arguably its most powerful member and India its biggest thug and goon?

The impact of Sanjay’s death has never really been holistically considered, as if the nation was too grateful to watch him go and too scared to consider what might have been. Sanjay Gandhi was his mother’s undisputed successor and despite the ignominy of the emergency very clearly the man in charge of the affairs of his party and as some suggest even the office of the Prime Minister. His was the overall looming presence and four months after a fresh electoral triumph of his mother, he was poised to regain his political space which he was forced to temporarily yield post emergency. An alive and active Sanjay Gandhi might well have reacted very differently to the challenges which his mother and brother were confront later in the decade. With Sanjay alive Rajiv Gandhi would have worked and retired peacefully as an airline pilot. Rahul and Priyanka would probably never have appeared on a Congress poster or advertisement. And the ambitious and equally whimsical Maneka Gandhi might well have become the Congress party’s new Mrs.G after her husband.

But more important is to assess the impact Sanjay, the man and the politician would have had on the state of India. Would he have ordered an Operation Bluestar? Would he have been more belligerent in dealing with the Akalis and the militants? Never one to consider constitutional proprieties, Sanajy Gandhi would surely have taken Punjab in his own hand, and then gone about swinging deals with the Akalis and the gun wielders. At the time of his death, he was still untested politically and one wonders how he would have performed in the face of grave political challenges. The only hints come from his personality and his actions (specially those during emergency). An unrelenting and pushy Sanjay, devoid of tact and wisdom, would have sought to crush any challenge to his authority. The response to both Punjab and Kashmir would have been more blunt and forceful and more damaging.

How would he have fared in the face of a lagging economy and ballooning deficits? Would India have witnessed a minor China type economic revolution in the mid eighties? Sanajy Gandhi had the knack of pursuing what he thought was correct with single minded zealousness. Would he have tolerated opposition to economic reforms? Would liberalization have come a decade earlier than when it eventually did? Would tough economic decisions like labour laws and foreign direct investments which governments seem to side step till date have been taken earlier? And would all of this been done by brutally suppressing protests and undermining basic rights and freedoms (ala China)?

The last question probably exposes the biggest threat. Indira Gandhi at the end of the day was politically more her father’s daughter than her son’s mother. Her son would have had no such inhibitions. He would have readily subverted democratic norms and institutions to extend and prolong his power. India may have had to deal with another emergency, this time a consequence of an electoral defeat. Sanjay Gandhi as a Prime Minister would have sought to undermine Parliament and more dangerously the judiciary. Powers would have been curbed and laws subverted to keep him in power. Sanjay had all the makings of despot. Would he have become one? Would Indian polity have become like its western neighbour- held hostage by some one who claimed he knew best how to determine the direction of his path? Would we have seen rigged elections and brazen manipulation of political power? Would a critical press have been stifled and social rights curbed? Would we have become a banana republic?

These are grave and disturbing questions. Questions that a nation may never have to seek answers to. Looking back, it can be said with reasonable certainty that as a mother and a family grieved when the Cessna piloted by Sanjay Gandhi crashed, a nation heaved a sigh of relief. The man who could have swung its destiny, for the worse as many believe, was gone and with him went certain possibilities which we all would rather not contemplate.

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For the better part of the last few years i was opinion that the reservation genie was firmly locked tight inside its bottle and would not escape with a bang like it did in sixteen years ago when the name Mandal first became synonymous with reservations all over India. I felt i had firm grounds on which my confidence on the non-appearance of reservations was based.
First and the most important reason was the very consequence of the Mandal implementation in 1990. Instead of achieving a lower caste consolidation as the then Prime Minister VP Singh has expected, Mandal ended up dividing North Indian politics on sharp caste lines. VP Singh’s initiative was hijacked by caste based leaders like Ram Vilas Paswan and Mulayam Singh Yadav who suddenly saw a political goldmine waiting to be tapped. As the Congress declined and governance weakened, Mandal served to highlight the caste identities of the people and regional politicians were only too eager to exploit the same. The polarization was complete when a Laloo Yadav or a Mayawati sought political power on the platform of empowering their caste and not development oriented politics. Suddenly, in the North Indian cowbelt states of UP and Bihar which send the largest number of migrants to Delhi ( both to its Parliament and its university) the only way for achieving economic and political prosperity was to vote your caste since only a Yadav could look after a Yadav, only a Kurmi could look after the interests of the Kurmis and so on.

This worked smoothly for a decade and the likes of Laloo and Mulayam reaped the rewards, secure in the belief that an assured caste arithmetic made the politics of development and progress redundant. Caste assertion is not in itself something bad. In fact i would go the extent of saying that the caste politics of North India was a bitter tonic which had to be gulped as the political evolution of India reached into its second chapter with the decline of single party rule and the broadening of political representation. In states like UP and Bihar where investments are absent, jobs are scarce and lands saturated, political power was the safest route to economic stability and success. If your caste was in power, you would have a say in the governance; more importantly lucrative government contracts which are the only sources of investments in these two states would also come your way. It was my belief that as caste politics grew, it would bring along with itself its attendant problems. While the lower castes, having tasted political power would not let it go, they would also look at the rest of India and see how it was speeding ahead while a caste ridden north still trudging along at a bullock cart’s pace. This would then lead to a demand from such populace to seek to join the caravan of progress; that with political empowerment India’s lower castes would also see the importance of economic empowerment and demand the same from their visionless leaders. The electorate would want roads for connectivity, telephones and computers for communication and certainty of power and water for their homes and fields. Reservation would not have figured then in such an equation.

My second belief was based on the change India had gone through ever since the turbulence of the late eighties and early nineties. The economy was stronger, wealthier and more rewarding for those who were ready to chart the course for their success. Post liberalization, the government was no longer the principal job creator. The skilled Indian labour suddenly had a world of opportunities before him. And unlike the old days, the new India of entrepreneurship, of Infosys and Wipro, would create enough space for all, irrespective of which surname they carried. The lower castes would not have sat on the side and waited. They would have wanted to be a part of the success story, they would have voted governments out for not putting the schools for their children in rural India in order and making them run with the seriousness they deserved. It would have been a slow process but one which would have reinforced the concepts of economic health, recognition of abilities, education and democratic participation.

But of course i was wrong and I was naïve. I grossly underestimated the politician’s ability to pursue their political goals with single-minded disregard for the consequences or public opinion. I overestimated the impact of a growing economy and of course, most importantly I did not factor in a certain and a slightly disgruntled Arjun Singh. I underestimated the zealousness of a government keen to over turn every decision of the courts that went against the interests of the political community and the wide spread support spineless politicians would offer to help the genie out of the bottle.

But another round of reservations are now a reality. And none of the two episodes of Mandal have been put into execution stage by a lower caste politician who would have sought to gain the support of his constituency. Both VP and Arjun Singh are upper caste Thakurs, a caste which has no love lost for those below it in the social hierarchy. And therein lies the strangest tale of affirmative action in this country. Both Mandal I and II had been initiated by upper castes leaders to off balance their political rivals. And in both cases they succeeded in initiating a fragmentation rather than consolidation of the society.

The entire reservation process in the country suffers from serious structural shortcomings. It is handed out like a concession, a condescension, a waiver from the high entrance marks required, a drop in the eligibility, a lowering of the bar. The so called social justice is ad hoc, arbitrary and typically reminiscent of a feudal lord throwing a jewel or money at his bedraggled and starving serfs.

Reservations in India are top down; the world over affirmative action begins from the primary education level and nations which introduce such measures at a later stage of learning have a system that guarantees schooling for all. Here quotas were first introduced in jobs. Reality - many reserved seats remain vacant because there just aren’t any candidates from the lower castes with requisite job skills and education required. Then quotas were introduced in higher educational institutions. Reality - many students fail to find themselves incapable of handling the stress higher education brings with itself in this country. Moreover, as a measure of social justice, reservations are ironically elitist. Out of a mass of 50 million backward castes in this country, the government wants the upliftment of only 5000 odd (being 50% of 10000 - a reasonable estimate of the annual intake in central universities, IITs, IIMs and IAS) Is this our brand of social justice? The poor landless farm labourer in the interiors of Bihar cannot even send his kid to school while our politicians would assure him of a seat in the IIMs for his son.

It is this irony and the sheer ridiculousness of the quotas that often gets lost in the cacophony of bitter slanging matches. Primary education reform, even quotas only in private schools would throw open a lot more opportunities for a lot more people. Twelve years of good schooling equips a student to face the pressures of higher education, and two students of different castes coming from the same primary education system would not need differentiation as they pursued a seat in India’s elite colleges. But of course, such reform comes with a long gestation period. By the time its results would be visible, half of our politicians would be under their graves. It is not a convenient electoral rallying cry and it certainly does not have a scope for vote bank mobilization.

A pro quota student recently said in a television program that the backward castes were not willing to come to the birthday party and merely stand and clap; they wanted a share of the cake too. I would request him to stand up and demand from this government… our government, to increase the size of the cake. We should not become modern day political Robinhoods, robbing one person and giving his share to another. The cake of India’s economy should be large enough to feed both its affluent and deprived classes. The weaker sections must be the given their shares by right and not as a part of the leftovers handed over to the family servant after the party is over.

Unless we reverse this process of distribution, until one man’s social justice continues to be another man’s denial of opportunity this friction will continue. There will be more protests, more cynical exploitation of caste identities and more frustrations and fragmentation. It is something we as a nation can ill afford.

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