Michael Schumacher is returning to F1 for personal than professional reasons. For, professionally, he has achieved what no other man has, in F1. So what could have brought Michael back in a F1 car?
Michael Schumacher hates losing. In 1994...he clashed with Damon Hill at the last GP of the season at Adelaide... In 1997, he collided with Jacques Villeneuve again in the last GP Jerez, this time though he was on the losing side. Schumacher rides to win and like a true winner, he hates to lose... rather even if he loses once, the next time he has to win.
While he managed to outclass names like Mika Hakkinen, Damon Hill, Jacques Villeneuve, Kimi Raikkonen, Juan Pablo Montoya and his brother Ralf, there is one driver who not only beat the German methodically and mercilessly but also managed to spoil his retirement. Alonso's back-to-back wins with a relatively weaker team like Renault in the presence of the might of Schumacher and Ferrari must have hurt the seven-time world champion the most. For someone like Michael, ending his glorious career with two successive losses must have been humiliating to say the least.
Never before had Michael tested such defeats after he began his spectacular rise in 1994. He won the 1994 and 1995 championships before moving to Ferrari. When he moved from Benetton to Ferrari in 1996, the Italian team was in a big mess. Therefore, it was not surprising that Michael didn't win the championship for the first four years. Nevertheless, he came within a hair's breadth of winning the crown in 1997 and 1998. In 1999, he broke his leg and was therefore out of the championship. As a result, even in the developing Ferrari, Michael was able to stamp his own class.
A colleague SMSed on Saturday (January 9) evening that the portion of a building at Dockyard Road in Mumbai had collapsed and some residents were feared trapped. It was the more than 100-year-old Reay Chambers, which had given me my first byline in journalism.
More than 20 years back, a girl (hey, sorry, I don't remember your name) called up The Daily chief sub-editor Neville D'Cunha. "Sir, I have a story which no newspaper in the city wants to publish. Our building at Dockyard Road is in very bad shape and will collapse at anytime. The authorities are doing nothing to repair it," she had probably told him.
Since I then lived at Mazagon, Neville sent me to cover the story. I was a few months in journalism, after a brief stint with The Free Press Journal, and I had never written a story, though I had edited many.
"How do I define history? It's just one f%*&ing thing after another" - Rudge in Alan Bennett's The History Boys
"We have a fundamental need to tell ourselves stories that make sense of our lives. We hate uncertainty and...find it intolerable" - Lewis Wolpert
The above two sentences remind me of a situation which I encounter almost everyday: "What's the story?" my editor(s) ask, when I make a pitch to them about something I want to write on.
Well I don't blame them for asking the same question over and over again. After all, newspapers are in the business of making sense of what is happening around us. But are we really doing that? Or to ask a deeper question, can we really do that?
Take the case of the Bombay Stock Exchange Sensex rallying by a little more than five hundred points on December 23, 2009. Now why did it happen? If newspaper reports are to be believed (including the newspaper I work for), the market went up because the Finance Minister revised the GDP growth rate to between 7.5% and 8%.
My Experiments with Sex could well have been the title of the other bestseller by Mahatma Gandhi.
Throughout his life and right into his old age, Gandhi tried to comprehend the power of sexual urges and shared his thoughts through his writings. Becoming increasingly spiritual as he progressed in life, he decided to become celibate after 36. As is well documented by Ved Mehta in Mahatma Gandhi and his Apostles and other books by Nirmal Kumar Bose, Erik H Erikson and Larry Collins-Dominique Lapierre in Freedom at Midnight, Gandhi put himself to test by taking naked women to bed.
With rare courage, he confessed in his autobiography, that during his sixteenth year, his mind was overwhelmingly preoccupied with sex, driving him repeatedly to the bedroom to his pregnant wife as his father lay dying in an adjoining room. He never forgave himself for missing the moment when his father died, all because of his "carnal desire even at the critical hour of my father's death, which demanded wakeful service."
Disclaimer: References to real people are true to the best of my knowledge. The views and visions here are my own. Of course I am aware it's a newspaper's blog. I am going to be responsible to be the best of my ability. Yet if anyone feels her or his sensibilities have been hurt, shoot me a mail, text message or call me at the office. Basically, let me know. I would do my best to address your concerns. In the end, never forget that in order to find Neverland one must first get to be friends with @katewinslet.
Intervening night of December 10-11, Friday
@dearreader, I am afraid we will have to get used to the @ from now on. I have been tweeting. I have recorded 467 tweets till date. Till yesterday I was at 100. Hope you'll understand. Allow me to be honest just for now. Please. I really feel like talking to you right now. I promise that by the time you read this I am going to be as sober as it gets in this day and age.
(excerpted from a speech given at the First Inter-Species Conference on Planetary Peace and Ecological Harmony held at Copenhagen last week)
Dear humans,
I am here to speak on behalf of the pigeon community, a community that I daily see being defamed with impunity by the planet's (m)ass media which is, unfortunately, controlled entirely by two species: humans and asses.
Every day there are articles promoting cheap cultural stereotypes of pigeons, presenting them as dumb, as interested only in either crapping or fornicating, and producing a lot of crap and a lot of offspring in the process.
Now, I do not deny that we pigeons do produce a lot of shit. It is true that many statues of your esteemed forbears bear the tributes of our excretory system, a tribute which, in many cases, if I may venture to say so, is richly deserved. But there is one difference between us pigeons and you humans in the crap department: we produce our shit, and then move on. When we're not producing shit, we're emphatically not producing shit.
When tanks trundle down the expansive Chang'an Avenue near Beijing's stately Tiananmen Square, as happened one famous night in 1989, the rumble reverberates around the world.
In barely a few hours from now, just such an earth-shaking event will unfold in Beijing, but this time the mood will be festive: China will showcase an event, complete with tanks, missiles and air force jets piloted by female aviators, to mark the 60th anniversary of its founding as a modern nation-state. There will also be floats commemorating China's successes in many realms - and cultural festivities. It promises to be a grand spectacle. (More stunning pictures here.)
Any way you look at it, the past 60 years have been a remarkable period in China's modern history. As I noted here, on China's 60th birthday, the industrious Chinese people have much to be proud about: their country has been dramatically transformed by their blood, sweat, toil and tears. And, in turn, China is influencing and transforming the world in many ways. The near-unanimous verdict appears to be that China will inevitably "rule the world" someday soon.
Kobad Gandhy’s arrest has generated reams and reams of newsprint in Mumbai. Every report has unfailingly mentioned how this scion of a wealthy family gave it all up for the sake of the poor; how he and his wife Anuradha, who also hailed from a middle-class family, lived with the poorest of the poor in the deep jungles, and how she finally succumbed to cerebral malaria while he today suffers from various ailments.
Why does Gandhy’s story generate so much interest? Why are so many of us so keen to know more about this man who’s family ran an ice-cream business (according to one report, his family introduced fresh strawberry ice-cream to Mumbai and India) and lived on Worli Sea-face, still one of Mumbai’s most posh localities?
Perhaps the most compelling reason is that deep down in our conscience, there are many of us who secretly admire him. In college, most of us (but certainly not all), dreamt of working for a better India, working directly for the poorest rather than believing in some economic trickle-down theory that doesn’t seem to be making a difference at all?
The Kirsten manual for Team India, on 'how you don't need a partner if you have a good hand' - something that bridge players have known for ages - has intriguing possibilities. Right now it's just a little hand-holding, and visualising, to get the players into the flow of things. The theory is that 'solo sex' will get testosterone levels so high that the young men in blue will score on the cricket field too. In other words, 'if you can't get a quick 50, go jack off'. But what coach Kirsten and team psycho Paddy Upton may not have figured out yet is the full dimension of their proposal. Rahul Dravid, for instance, is usually the slowest to get off the mark on a pitch. But in bed? Could there possibly be a correlation between scoring rates on and off the field? Will Kirsten be keeping an eye on who is the last to make it to the team bus? So it looks like there's one more player stat in the coming... er, making. Anyway, if Kirsten has equally good ideas about what to do with a cricket bat, Team India will surely be on top.
These are the winners, in random order, since they all won it on their own steam, as it were, not against each other:
Zenzi. Bandra
Vong Wong, Nariman Point
Gajalee, Vile Parle
Samovar, Kala Ghoda
Mahesh Lunch Home, Fort
Moshe's, Cuffe Parade
Rama Nayak Shree Krishna Lunch Home, Matunga
Frangipani. Trident
Dum Pukht, Grand Maratha
Oh Calcutta!, Tardeo
Golden Star Thali, Charni Road
Swati Snacks, Tardeo
Stax. Hyatt Regency
Thai Pavilion, Taj President
Indigo Deli, Colaba
Zaffran, Crawford Market
Jaffer Bhai's, Grant Road
I saw red.
Red as in red light.
It stared at me unblinking. Obedient to a fault, I stopped my car. Conscious of the new rules for driving to save petrol, I switched my engine off.
A persistent honking was happening behind my car. Loud and insistent, as an impatient bus driver tried to make me move on with the sheer force of his blast.
I wondered quickly if I was blocking his way... to a right turn. I was not.
Meanwhile, another bus pulled alongside and went lumbering on ahead. Past me, past the light.
I saw red again,. A flash of it before my eyes.
A flash of it in my brain. As in danger. What if... I thought, seeing fleeting imagas of motorcyclists or pedestrians cutting across the bus's path.
Its a personally frustrating situation for the most of the environmentally conscious individuals. Everyone who agrees that there is something wrong with our environment doesnt know exactly what can be done to undo the damage. We all know what is causing damage, but none of us are in a position to prevent it.
None of the NGOs, voluntary organisations, governments or even United Nations' set-ups have been effective in restraining exploitation of environment the world over. There is no power on earth which can ask the United States to curb or reduce the consumption pattern. In a liberalised economy the boost is on improving lifestyle and consumerism, which necessarily means dumping more CO2 in the environment.
I have just received a letter from Amitabh Bachchan. Correction-I am among several journalists who have received a letter from Amitabh Bachchan. It is a copy of a long letter he has sent to the Times of India in response to an article by Jug Suraiya. Suraiya, in a column on March 1, took many potshots at Bachchan for the latter's alleged critical comments on Slumdog Millionare.
While running down Bachchan for making those comments, Suraiya's column also brought in many other charges against Bachchan, invoking earlier reports about the star having conducted religious ceremonies to get rid of the "Manglik" curse on his daughter-in-law Aishwarya Rai.
Several people I have met over the past week have argued that this question presupposes the survival of the state of Pakistan. But that reduces the recent tragedy in Lahore to a kind of frenzied rhetoric that is not the concern of this article. Cricket lovers, all said and done, are romantics, not even hard-boiled realists, leave aside cynics.
Mushy sentimentalism has surely no place in these troubled times, of course. What happened in Lahore was horrific. The fact that the Sri Lankan team was assaulted by armed gunmen gives lie to the belief that cricketers face no threat in the sub-continent. We now have to live with the new reality that nothing and nobody is exempt from the terror threat.
But Pakistan cricket, in as much as is possible, needs to be seen distinct from whatever else is happening in the country. Indeed, if help is forthcoming from other cricket-playing countries, it will not only help sustain the sport in that country, but might perhaps also further the larger cause of keeping young minds away from other ills that threaten to usurp everyday life there. Indeed, as Younis Khan has said, cricket could be the panacea for the state of Pakistan itself.
Someday I shall write another kind of blog. Not about terrorism and guns and carnage and worse.
I will write about other things.
I will write about winter in Delhi (where I am visiting soon) and how the women bring out their choicest shawls and the men dress like they were in a Jane Austen novel.
I will write about how much I miss Mumbai’s three departed chroniclers-Busybee, Frank Simoes and Dom Moraes. (I wonder what words they would have chosen to describe what we’ve been through.)
I will write about the boys who sell books and magazines at traffic lights who I’ve come to befriend when they hitch rides off me from point A to B. All of them bright, enterprising, needy. All of them with the same story. (I’m working to pay off my school fees.) I once tried to find one at the address he’d given me to arrange for his fees-and was told no one by that name existed-but that’s another story….
I will write about Cat Stevens and his latest album after so many years of silence, which at first I didn’t enjoy but slowly began to appreciate.
The relentless TV coverage of the Mumbai terror attacks is an indication of both its success and failure. Over the last three or four days, I have received lots of email criticising TV coverage of the event. Among other things, TV reporters have been accused of giving away critical information to the terrorists by indicating the size of the NSG forces, etc, etc. In particular, Barkha Dutt seems to have become a particular hate target, with bloggers harshly critical of her breathless and emotional coverage of the Taj and other operations.
I am no fan of TV coverage. In the pursuit of TRPs, TV anchors tend to look for ways to hook the viewer, and often this means catering to low tastes (especially in the regional media), and sensationalism. I am particularly aggrieved, since relentless TV coverage of a triviality forces newspapers to follow suit - since TV often sets the news agenda.
However, I would also like to say this in defence of TV mediapersons. One, if they are all that bad, why are we still watching them? During the Mumbai attacks, most people I know were glued to TV. We now know that even the cabinet secretary and the National Security Advisor were probably watching TV for a first-hand feel of what was happening in Mumbai on that day.
