Column

There is an old maxim, which the shepherds who graze their sheep outside Fargana in modern day Uzbegistan use. Translated roughly it goes like this, ‘Tis better to have holes in your watermelon than holes in your head’. What this quotation means, especially for the watermelon, is anybody’s guess. However since, both you and I are not extremely fluent in Uzbeghi let’s move on.

A group of us from MTV with holes all over (let alone the head), spent the weekend in Indore and this time it wasn’t because we didn’t pay the full fare for our air tickets. In fact, we were there to host the grand finale of the Castrol motorbike championship.
As preparations at the Nehru Stadium were on in full swing (it’s required by law to name one out of two stadiums after Pandit Nehru, the rest being named after you know who), the rain started pelting down through our watermelons.

The stage was soon under 50 metres of water and the statue of the great opener Mushtaq Ali changed colour from grey to white, thanks to Mushtaq’s first bath in 20 years. To the left and to the right our workers and technicians were sinking in the heaps of mud, never to be seen again. This by itself was not a catastrophe, but when our drivers started sinking, it all became too much.

It was then that our young intrepid Hiren Kapadia wearing a superman T-shirt, which was drenched enough to make him look more ‘wonder womanish’ and less ‘supermanish’ asked the most important question, “What do we do about our main watermelon, our chief guest John Abraham? a) Do we let him drown? b) Do we save him? c) Do we let him drown and save one of the drivers instead? Thanks to Hiren we went for option ‘c’. After all at MTV our holes are in our watermelons and not yet in our heads.