Time has come for Chelsea FC

 Image Courtesy: www.skysports.com

The crowning of Chelsea FC as the European Football champions is the biggest milestone in my career as a football fanatic. From written-off underdogs to the cup glory, Chelsea has transformed the history of football. The days of infalliable supremacies are over. With perseverance and might, any team can challenge the favourites - this would be the lines to be highlighted in the newest chapter in the theory of football.

Roman Abramovich had lost count of the number of coaches he had changed at Chelsea by the time he appointed Andres Villas Boas. And there were very few left to get as a replacement. The Europa League triumph of Porto was very well noticed and Abramovich hoped the man he was looking for had to hail from Porto. And so he roped in the youngest coach he had in his options, and presented the team and the field to him with paramount expectation. Villas Boas came to know that Chelsea under Abramovich was one of the toughest teams to coach. A player goes out of form and the next thing the blue world saw was a new expensive player signed in. The out-of-form player slowly disappears from the first eleven to the subs, then to the reserves, and then nobody hears about him for a season or more except when another club decides to help him out – this was and is the state of affairs in the Cobham camp.

Villas Boas tried to change the Chelsea style. The fresh blood injected was put to use very well, but over a period of time, the strategies wore out. Old guards were under-utilized, Drogba got more time to attend to his hair and style than on practice. Even Lampard sometimes found hard to make it to the first eleven. Fernando Torres never stood up to the err.. ahem.. 50 million pounds deal he came in on. Victories became scarce and lackluster, and Chelsea and Liverpool promisingly competed to become the best ‘big four’ drop-out. By the time winter rolled out off the scene, Chelsea was written off the league contenders list. The familiar sack was ready for use anytime, and was used as a late answer to the only question – when?. Boas left in silence, bewildering a climactic finish his fans foresaw. 

 Image Courtesy: www.telegraph.co.uk

Now comes the ghost. Roberto Di Matteo, a former Chelsea man, the then assistant to Andres Villas Boas, was made the caretaker manager of Chelsea FC. He has an angelic appearance, which well suits his role of a saviour, though it contradicts the rough image of the Blues. But he has made miracles come true so effortlessly that sometimes it feels his exaltation at the time of goals scored or matches won is the only thing that proves he is human. Otherwise, he is in his usual calm with a subtle smile. I say only ghosts can be like this.  

He was handed over the keys to the Stamford Bridge  when a maximum of 20-odd games were left in the season. He would have a lesser number if he left the team to go it's way - the 1-3 away loss at Napoli indicated Chelsea's exit from the CL in the round of 16. But Di Matteo was not ready to go the easy way. A former Chelsea player, who used to be in furious form on the pitch before he had to retire due to serious injury problems, he took Chelsea for a frollicking ride - one that saw them beating all their odds. Di Matteo brought back the old gang of Drogba and Lampard back to form, and Torres showed promising signs towards the end of the season. 

Beating Napoli, Benfica, BARCELONA and BAYERN MUNICH was a result of the master plans laid by the manager of the season, Roberto Di Matteo. Benfica was a strong team, but they had to give up to the mighty Blues. Even Barcelona could not help seeing themselves out of the CL. Though criticized for the defensive tactics used against the Catalans, Chelsea could not have produced an attacking side overnight that would match Barca in all aspects. Instead, Chelsea made use of what they have - endurance. And there were master finishers we saw in Drogba, Ramires and Lampard, who did the best of the chances they got. Petr Cech was brilliant - he is back to his best again. 

Chelsea won against Barcelona, but their victory never elevated them from the underdog status - for they had to play the final against Bayern Munich withput four of their best players. Chelsea held high its fighting commitment to the game, especially big games, and they won the trophy, startling all their critics. Di Matteo touch was very evident throughout the game. Picking Ryan Bertrand was a gamble which gave good returns - Philip Lahm was kept at bay very well, and at times Ashley Cole got good support from Bertrand as a seondary left-back. Gary Cahill and David Luiz defended splendidly in their comeback match, and Ashley Cole once again proved he is the best left-back that the game could offer. Drogba was a beast in the game, hope he stays on in the club. Cech showed astonishing nerves when all thought Neuer was the better of these two goalkeeping legends. 

 Image Courtesy: www.championsleague.ca

Chelsea has signed out of the season in style, back-heeling Spurs out of next CL, and it's now all upto Abramovich to decide whether to take back the keys from di Matteo or not. Looking forward for the next Blue season.

Image Courtesy: www.chelseafc.com

"Blue is the colour, football is the game
We're all together and winning is our aim
So cheer us on through the sun and rain
Cos Chelsea, Chelsea is our name."

What's in a New Year !!!

For numerous reasons, the concept of a New Year is not that great. Moreover, I don’t like the way it is perceived. Conceptually it is the birth of a new unit of time, but it just adds up to the list of festivals, thereby becoming another occasion for treats, celebration and other extravaganza. Liquor literally flows on new year nights. Purely for entertainment, millions of gallons of liquor and unimaginable amounts of money are thrown away, on just one day. I can’t help but sound like an anti-liquor campaigner, in this regard. Because India simply does not require any other reason to boast that 75 percent of its people are poor. For the past couple of months, Wikipedia is running a fundraiser for itself, and it says something like this: “If all those who read this donate Rs. 100 today, our fundraiser would be closed by today”. It is exactly a similar situation what I am referring to: if all those who spend extravagantly in the name of new year or any other occasion are thoughtful enough to cut short their luxury from extravagant to adequate (God knows if there is anything as adequate luxury!!), then it will be a big leap for mankind. I have seen people sympathizing over their brethren struck by poverty and calamities. But there ends all. Who does anything at all? Surely not those who prefer setting up golf clubs to charity fundraisers.

Everybody nowadays seems to be ardently trying to find some reason or the other to party. Partying and merry-making has become the purpose of life, above everything else. To an extent it is true that get-togethers make life happening. But we forget that such small happenings overshadow other big happenings in life!! Moving ahead like aimless nomads, ticking back every day from life, does this life really make sense? Isn’t it like an inflated balloon that is attractive outside but hollow inside?

Now I have done the easy job of penning down this thought. But how to materialize this? Here is a rough plan. It might be simple at first sight, but becomes more and more difficult the more you actually try to do it. Out of say 100 rupees earned per month, 25 rupees are spent for regular monthly expenses. In the remaining 75, 15 are spent on luxury. It might be more or less, varying from person to person, and thereby leaving 60 rupees as monthly savings. What if in the 15 rupees, 5 be allotted for the sacred cause I am pointing to? Or if not in terms of money, why not in terms of resources? If not now, why not later, but with good planning which starts right from this moment?

There are infinite possibilities, infinite ways to pursue ultimate happiness. Why be a party animal when there are much better ways to be social… At least let this new year make a difference in everybody who believes in it. Give a 10 rupee note to a hungry kid begging before you with his hands on his sunken belly. You may have to skip going in an autorickshaw and walk the way to your home. Or don’t give the kid anything at all, but please don’t give that yucky scornful look that I have seen on hundreds of faces, I hate it! Be human.

Welcome 2012.

Life in a Metro

What would you call an Indian Metro? What kind of people live there? Well, there are some minimum mandatory requirements that a city should have so as to achieve the status of an Indian Metro. Chennai will help me best to explain. It is a city where people from all walks of life commute in front of me. Round the clock. I often wonder where all these people keep going. I do so especially when I am in a sea of vehicles and stuck in traffic. From millionaires through corporate communists through the clichéd middle-class through homeless beggars to streaking mad men, all these people pass in front of my eyes or I travel across them, every now and then. Given below are some trademarks of the different classes of society I listed in the former sentence.

1.    The millionaires are not a majority lot. I don’t see many of them out in the open except in air-conditioned imported cars that never sound to vroom by or in expensive attires in shopping malls and multi-plex cinemas. Wherever they are, they make sure they are in an air-conditioned, aromatic and imaginarily red-carpeted spaces surrounded by big glass walls. They breathe air-conditioned air. KFCs and Baskin and Robbins are for them what road-side chat shops are for me.

2.     The business dons and political magnates – they decide what others can do. In sun-filmed and UV-protected SUVs assisted with security convoys they roam the city and the blocked traffic trails to where they have gone. I don’t know much about what these people do, but at the end of the day, they run the show and the law.

3.    Corporate chaps are easy to spot – they set, follow and do (and rightfully they  have the right to do so) the trend. Work, eat, sleep and party. Now sorry if I omitted family people – they too do a lot of partying sometimes with family or sometimes when they have time after work and attending to family matters.

4.    Corporate communists seem pretty good in camouflaging and others think they change their colour. They might not have been fortunate to be born with silver spoons in their mouths, but they will make sure their kids have spoons of atleast silver. But these people really have an inclination to the society, and most of them really do some good stuff to the society. The rest are turncoats who stand not for the cause, but by the side where victory and justice are apparent. I have felt at times whether I am a corporate communist myself.

5.   Now the most talked about and the most hyped and the always baited bunch – the middle class. They consider them the wealthiest and the most happening in this world, until they see some wealthier people pass by. Even though, they are what we call the man power. People who move the world. Thus constituting the best portion of the working population, they deserve better respect than what I have given in my words. They are into everything man has known, and become real social animals. I claim that I belong here.

6.     The homeless are a big lot, now they keep wandering from road to road, slum to slum, and live at the mercy of the political heavy-weights and hence end up as a loyal resource to the election and other political propaganda.

7.     After the nomad come the mad. These people happen out of weaklings when the world turns too cruel for them to handle, and then their clocks stop ticking.

This financially divided demography will continue to exist and the divide will increase even more, as more and more metros come up, more and more development happens. A metro has to have all seven of the above members intact to sustain it as a metro.  A holistic approach like this will make life in a metro a little less metrosexual. Give it a try!

Shedding a gloomy face

I was the kind of a child who was the teachers' pet at school, but was reserved to the core, especially when it came to matters of mingling with people. I was so very less outgoing. Even now I am not much better.

I used to put up a gloomy face whenever my mood was slightly or entirely off its best. Too much of time I spent on thoughts, and thus I used to be led to skirmishes of capricious threads, one leading to another and ultimately all these would squeal and scratch my skull from inside. Occupy all the pleasant space inside my mind. Over the time as my Innocence Quotient dropped, at the time of an increased reserve, my grey cells turned into a cornucopia of thought. This I welcomed with great relief. I was a refugee who sought something more than existence.

The coarse terrain of life weathered my reserved nature somewhat as I treaded along it, but my fervor for thoughts never died, it overflowed and some of it, words like these, left imprints on paper as well. The gloomy face was as effective as a Guy Fawkes mask in displaying a fabricated intent. It helped at times – at those when I did not want people to know what ran in my mind. But the same became a problem. 

It struck me a big blow when a well-wisher observed and pointed this out recently. I realized how much true his observation was, and how large an impact this had in my life. The gloom was read as an unwelcoming attitude, and thus many knocks passed by without falling on this naïve door.Opportunities are mostly biased to optimists. And I don’t want to lose any more chances in this rat race of a life.

Now I am shedding the gloomy face. I adopted a bright and happy face from then on - as a facade to positive thoughts that lay beneath. I try to think less, never let thoughts go astray, keep unnecessary anxiety at bay. Even without growing tumours of thoughts, it should be possible to spur my way through. I don't give a damn if the universe conspires or not.

The Chetan Bhagat Revolution

Gone are the days when companies used to come to campuses to do a very meticulous and selective recruitment of capable students. Now companies from the IT-services sector swarm into campuses and rope in hundreds at a time. Chetan Bhagat sweeps majority of the Indian audience in this fashion. The books sell at every nook and corner of India in incomparable numbers. Now the fifth of his books, Revolution 2020 are out, and I found it the best among the five.

This, I call, cotemporary writing. Even though the inevitable scenes of affairs and sex are included as in his previous novels, undoubtedly to sell more copies, Chetan has hit the right chords with the evergreen topics of love and greed that run throughout the story like stave in an orchestra composition. When writers spend months to coin phrases that might hold the verbose-liking readers to ponder over non-existent meanings, this IIM-A graduate has tabled his cards in a plain and simple fashion. Now here I might have hurt a few of you, but I don’t care - because bestsellers are not always meant to adorn the shelves of ardent literati fans and amateur wannabe pedants.

From a masala-point-something of a story to millions of books sold, Chetan has so far got the right going in everything. He was in the TIME’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world, and he is the biggest selling English language novelist in India’s history. Hope he uses this influence as a jig to instill in youth the realization of the need behind the youth to come forward for every common cause, rather than sulking away to comforts. He quit his career as an international banker, to dedicate his full time to writing. The Indian youth needs icons desperately, and this guy might have already proved his candidacy through his influence.

At a time when sins are redefined and erstwhile taboos have come out of sediments to the periphery, that the people (especially youth) have started to view corruption from a third person point of view gives hope. The book spits overt blame on the Indian educational system, but finally gives the reader a chance to choose which was right and which was wrong

Awesome reading, guaranteed.

How to Satisfy Our Daily Appetite

Slurrrrrrp!!!

I just wiped clean with my tongue the last drop of curd that tickled down the side of my right hand's little finger. Waaah! That was a lunch and a half I had just now. The menu was amaaazing! Rice, curd, pickle, 'dosa podi' and salt. I felt each grain of rice, the unique tomato garlic pickle, and amma-made-dosapodi filling my stomach - it was that relishing. Catch up to this line if you are held up in between the previous two lines, trying to read something there. No, there's nothing. That was it, the menu was short and simple but awesome. The best-to-have food, I found, is self-cooked. This would be the case with everybody, we get the most satisfaction out of having some food we have cooked, even if it's a delicacy or not. Objection, anybody?

It has been (just) two years since I started living neither at home nor in a hostel, and from then it has been a search for the best place to eat, to live. Of course, almost the complete later half of this period I stayed at my uncle's place in KK Nagar, Chennai, so during that time I had the best food I could get it Chennai. After that the hunt for the place which gave the next best food started again. I have been to many restaurants, 'messes', caterers and food stalls. The ones among these that managed to hold me as their regular visitor were 'Sridevi's Dosa Corner'* at Camp Road and Arvind Caterers in Muthamizh Nagar. I am not a great connoisseur of tastes, but I got bored everywhere because I found something lacking, in all these places. And each time I did, I would resort to something tedious and time-wasting at my first notion, but worth the toil and time spent in the end - and that act is nothing but cooking! If the end product of what I cook is harmless and eatable, then I find the element which was missing when I ate from outside - satisfaction. 

Eat-outs indeed give us tasty food we cannot prepare at home daily, but fail to lure us to come and eat everyday. The secret ingredient that gives our curd rice a 'five-star rating' is right there with us - our own culinary touch. But did I miss the most important clause - 'cooking works out only if we have time!'?

Now I am signing off for a nap, let me see if I will wake up in time to make an evening tea. 

*There was this 'normal dosa corner' at Camp Road, East Tambaram. GT and I used to frequent this place. Around the corner of the same road there was this restaurant, the name of which was so long and hard to remember, and my friend Sridevi used to eat from this restaurant. Later on, all three of us made this restaurant our official dinner place, and named this as 'Sridevi's Dosa Corner'. Thus the name.

I hate to blame the system to use the failure of the system as a curtain to conceal our unpreparedness. But sometimes the systems in place are so bad and inefficient that they just don't allow me to remain silent. 

Today something of this kind happened. I want to take my bike from my home in Malappuram, Kerala to Pallavaram, Chennai, the place where I live and work.  It's a 15-20 minutes walk from my Chennai home to office, and of late I have been thinking on this idea of getting a bike so that commuting to office and other travel in the city will be easy. The bike, a 100cc TVS make, is in average condition now and is used now only when my brother (he lives in Cochin, doing his B. Tech Mech Engg) or I am home.I don't want to spend too much to buy a new bike either, and this mostly rarely used bike at home is the best option I have. The bike will get a lifeline, its condition will better once I start using it regularly.

Now I need to get an NOC (No Objection Certificate) issued from the RTO (Road Transport Office) or Joint RTO under the sphere of which my locality falls. [As per rules this is not required - NOC is to be produced only if the registration number of the vehicle needs to be changed to another area, especially another state. I have a temporary plan only - I will use the bike in Chennai for another 7-8 months, after which I will send it back to Kerala, as my whereabouts after that time is uncertain!]. But to make myself equipped with all documents in case any traffic police wished to stop me, ask me to pull over to the side and expected cash to cover up any missing document, I thought I will obtain this NOC as well. 

I went to JRTO Perinthalmanna, as my residence is in Perinthalmanna Taluk. Now at the outside the JRTO, which is on the second floor of a yet-to-be-furnished building, there was a man behind a desk that had a small board on it which read 'Help Desk'. I was surprised and happy about this people-friendly arrangement. There was a very small queue in front of the desk - around four people. This was a proof for the efficiency of the man behind the desk, I thought. 

But it was not to be..

When I reached the head of the queue, a person came from behind - he was panting probably after a long walk in the sun. He too had come to get an NOC to use his vehicle in Kannur, and from his conversation with the 'helper' man I found that NOC form was not available in any nearby shops, forget at the JRTO. The 'helper', after learning from me that I wanted an NOC too to use my bike in Chennai, he asked me if I could get a form from a printing press a bit far away. I walked all the way just to find out that the press did not have any NOC forms. So I returned back to the 'helper' and described to him the situation. He then took out from an old file a filled copy of the form, and asked me to get a photocopy of that after hiding all written stuff using white paper. I went downstairs, went to a photocopy shop and got a couple of copies. An important thing was that the cash collection counter inside the JRTO would close at 1 o'clock and if I did not go in time, I would not be able to get the NOC before I start for Chennai tomorrow evening. And tomorrow and the day after are off-days for the JRTO. Finally, at about 12:45, with a lot of confusion the 'helper' finally helped me fill up the form, pasted a Rs. 5 stamp on it, attached the originals of my RC book, Insurance Certificate, Smoke Test Certificate, and asked me to submit it together at a counter inside. And from that counter I understood that the form I used was a wrong one, and that there was a separate form for NOCs outside Kerala. That was called Form 28. Furious, I wet out and asked the help-desk person about this confusion. He acted as if he did not know anything, and as if I was the one who got things wrong by hurrying things up, blah blah blah. And then he said that he had copies of Form 28!!! I shouted at him for not giving the correct information earlier, and then I saw that my watch, which runs 5 minutes fast, showed 1:10 PM. I walked away from the help-desk, showering my anger on the 'helper'. 

Now I cannot take my bike to Chennai tomorrow, for doing so would end me up emptying my purses to the Chennai traffic police. No wonder people make fun of people at government offices working in a sluggish manner.