Friday, March 25, 2011

2011 World Cup: When greatness beckons Dhoni’s India

By John Cheeran
Greatness beckons Mahendra Singh Dhoni and his men. When it mattered, India came up with a fine team effort to knock the faltering world champions Australia from their unsteady pedestal. From being banished from the first round of the 2007 World Cup, India, under Dhoni’s leadership, has come a long way.
In 1996, too, played at home, India had carved out a confident victory in the quarterfinal. However, that quarterfinal will now be played when India clashes with Pakistan in Mohali in what is 2011 semifinal. Few would now like to recall what happened in the semifinal against Sri Lanka in 1996. Banish all negative thoughts, say shrinks.
This has been an interesting World Cup so far for India and Indians. Dhoni, as a captain and player, and his men hardly inspired confidence in the group stage except against the West Indians, in their last group match. They stuttered against Ireland, the Netherlands, Bangladesh, England and South Africa.
Well, the important point was that they lost only one game -- against South Africa -- though they came quite close to that against the now-hot, now-cold England.
No one can now accuse India that they are over dependent on their talisman, Sachin Tendulkar. Yes, Tendulkar is in great form. He has hit two brilliant centuries but none in a winning cause and to say this would be churlish. It was not Tendulkar’s fault that the rest of the batsmen couldn’t contribute enough in those two matches to seal the victory. But equally what matters is that whenever India won there were other men working hard to ensure the winning runs. And that augurs well for India not just in the World Cup but for the coming days as well.
Hopes are ballooning to new heights now all across this vast, passionate but broiling land. Heat is on. Can India defeat their neighbours and intense rivals Pakistan in the semifinal to be played on March 30? A lot many people said India’s match against Australia in the quarterfinal was the final played two matches early. That is preposterous. The real turner, the game-changer is only at hand. No match between India and Pakistan could be watched without keeping a dose of aspirin at hand. The heart attack could come at any moment.
Many are taking refuge in the fact that India has never lost a match against Pakistan in the World Cups. Three of those wins came during the campaign of Mohammad Azharuddin, who knew how to spread his butter and bets. In 1992, when Imran Khan lifted the World Cup we could console ourselves by replaying the winning moments against Pakistan in the group stage. In 1996, India’s disappointments were washed away in the slipstream of the quarterfinal victory against Pakistan in Bangalore. In 1999, in the backdrop of Kargil skirmish, Azharuddin’s Indians were feted for defeating Pakistan yet again, though Pakistan went on to play Australia in the final. There is no final bigger than the clash against Pakistan. In 2003, Sourav Ganguly’s decision to bowl first in the final against Australia was pardoned since India had beaten Pakistan in the early stage.
All these are comforting thoughts. In a surcharged atmosphere in Mohali, India could stop the band of mercenaries from Pakistan, led by the wild and wily Shahid Afridi. Pakistan the country would be on the verge of an implosion but despite almost being a cricketing outcast, that team has been justifying its right to play dazzling and exasperating cricket. The absence of star players has not stopped Afridi’s men from being inventive, divisive and united on the field.
By applying the right kind of heat, the solid Pakistan can be liquefied. India outclassed an Australia in decline by playing to its strength, spin. Ricky Ponting, despite a self-flagellating century, lost the match to India by investing his faith in his pace trio of Brett Lee, Shaun Tait and Mitchell Johnson, the Kangaroo hallmark in the post-Shane Warne era.
Has Dhoni sorted out his bowling worries? To ask R Ashwin to open bowling could prove suicidal against the fleet-footed Pakistanis. How would Indian spinners fare when confronted by the cheeky Pakistanis? Is there a spinner in the Indian ranks with the effectiveness of Afridi, who has taken 21 wickets in the tournament so far?
Virender Sehwag and Tendulkar are capable of hanging Pakistani spinners from the outside edge of their bats. But one cannot be blind to the reality that Pakistan boasts of a better bowling attack.
Someone – fate, God or the betting syndicate -- has already decided who will win this World Cup. All of us – including Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka, are waiting to find out which is that side. The side that has much more than a Tendulkar, prayer mats and beads. You bet.

Friday, March 18, 2011

Dubai on Empty: AA Gill in Vanity Fair

Editor's note: For those who have lived in Dubai and those who are still living in Dubai and for those who are itching to go to Dubai.

Its skyline erupting from the desert in just two decades, Dubai is a cautionary tale about what money can’t buy: a culture of its own. After gorging on the Viagra of easy credit, the emirate has the world’s tallest building, the world’s most expensive racetrack, and a financial crisis to match. From the Western mercenaries and Asian drones who maintain the gaudy show to 100-odd families who are impervious to any economic reality, A. A. Gill discovers that no one truly belongs in Dubai, where the legacy of oil has made everything worthless.


The only way to make sense of Dubai is to never forget that it isn’t real. It’s a fable, a fairy tale, like The Arabian Nights. More correctly, it’s a cautionary tale. Dubai is the story of the three wishes, where, as every kid knows, with the third wish you demand three more wishes. And as every genie knows, more wishes lead to more greed, more misery, more bad credit, and much, much, much more bad taste. Dubai is Las Vegas without the showgirls, the gambling, or Elvis. Dubai is a financial Disneyland without the fun. It’s a holiday resort with the worst climate in the world. It boils. It’s humid. And the constant wind is full of sand. The first thing you see when you arrive is the airport, with its echoing marble halls. It’s big enough to be the hub of a continent. Dubai suffers from gigantism—a national inferiority complex that has to make everything bigger and biggest. This includes their financial crisis.
Outside, in the sodden heat, you pass hundreds and hundreds of regimented palm trees and you wonder who waters them and what with. The skyline, in the dusty haze, looks like the cover of a dystopian science-fiction novella. Clusters of skyscrapers lurch out at the gray desert accompanied by their moribund cranes, propped up with scaffolding, swagged in plastic sheeting. Dubai thought it was going to grow up to be the Arab Singapore—a commercial, banking, and insurance service port on the Gulf with hospitality and footballers’ time-shares, an oasis of R&R for the less well endowed. But it hasn’t quite worked out. The vertical streets of offices are empty. A derelict skyscraper looks exactly the same as one that’s teeming with commerce. They huddle around the current tallest building in the world—a monument to small-nation penis envy. This pylon erected with the Viagra of credit is now a big, naked exclamation of Dubai’s fiscal embarrassment. It was going to be called Burj Dubai, but as Dubai was unable to make their payments, they were forced to go to their Gulf neighbor, head towel in hand, to get a loan. So now it’s called Burj Khalifa, after Abu Dhabi’s ruler, who coughed up $10 billion to its over-extended neighbor.
Dubai has been built very fast. The plan was money. The architect was money. The designer was money and the builder was money. And if you ever wondered what money would look like if it were left to its own devices, it’s Dubai.
My driver gets lost more than once. He’s lived here all his life. He says he always gets lost. The roads keep changing. It’s a confusion of orange traffic cones and interlocking barriers; access roads peter out into long drops to rubble and dust. Nothing actually goes anywhere. The wide lanes loop around endlessly, and then there’s no place to go. No plaza or square, no center. Nowhere to hang out, nowhere to walk. Why would you walk? In this heat? You pull over and throw your keys to a valet, and get indoors as quickly as possible, generally in one of the countless shopping centers that look like the airports of lesser nations or Egyptian tombs. They echo with the slow footfalls of the security guards. In the boutiques, the glossy assistants stare at mannequins with a mutual mime of cashmere-folding despair. Dubai has been mugged by its own greed. Its consumer economy is being maintained by oil-rich families to whom depressions, booms, lottery wins, and recessions mean little. Riches and wealth are relative terms. But not ones we’re related to. There is an indoor ski mountain, probably the biggest indoor ski mountain in a desert, where the Arab boys queue for suits and boots and skis. The smarter locals arrive in their own designer après-ski gear, with fur and moon boots. You walk through the doors and it’s like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—the land of permanent winter. The fat boys push past carrying their snowboards toward the Tyrolean chocolate shop and Swiss fir trees and slide down the hill with a practiced arrogance. The girls slither, splay-legged, hijabs fluttering, in the manufactured snow.
No one dreamed of this. Twenty years ago, none of this was here. No Narnia. No seven-star hotels. No tallest prick buildings. Just a home of pastoralist tented families herding goats, racing camels, shooting one another. And a handful of greasy, armed empire mechanics in khaki shorts, drilling for oil. In just one life span, Dubai has gone from sitting on a rug to swiveling on a fake Eames chair 100 stories up. And not a single local has had to lift a finger to make it happen. That’s not quite fair—of course they’ve lifted a finger; to call the waiter, berate the busboy. The money seeped out of the ground and they spent it. Pretty much all of it. You look at this place and you realize not a single thing is indigenous, not one of this culture’s goods and chattels originated here. Even the goats have gone. This was a civilization that was bought wholesale. The Gulf is the proof of Carnegie’s warning about wealth: “There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.” Emiratis are born retired. They waft through this city in their white dishdashas and headscarves and their obsessively tapered humorless faces. They’re out of place in their own country. They have imported and built a city, a fortress of extravagance, that excludes themselves. They have become duplicitous, schizophrenic. They don’t allow their own national dress in the clubs and bars that serve alcohol, the restaurants with the hungry girls sipping champagne. So they slip into Western clothes to go out.
The Gulf Arabs have become the minority in this country they wished out of the desert. They are now less than 20 percent of the total population. Among the other 80-plus percent are the white mercenary workers who come here for tax-free salaries to do managerial and entrepreneurial jobs, parasites and sycophants for cash. For them money is a driving principle and validation. They came to be young, single, greedy, and insincere. None of them are very clever. So they live lives that revolve around drink and porn sex and pool parties and barbecues with a lot of hysterical laughing and theme nights, karaoke, and slobbery, regretful coupling. In fact, as in all cases of embarrassing arrested development, these expats on the short-term make don’t expect to put down roots here, have children here, or grow old here. Everyone’s on a visa dependent on a job.
Then there is a third category of people: the drones. The workers. The Asians: Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, and Filipinos. Early in the morning, before the white mercenaries have negotiated their hangovers, long before the Emiratis have shouted at the maid, buses full of hard-hatted Asians pull into building sites. They have the tough, downtrodden look of Communist posters from the 30s—they are both the slaves of capital and the heroes of labor. Asians man the hotels; they run the civil service and the utilities and commercial businesses; they are the clerks and the secretaries, the lawyers, the doctors, the accountants; there isn’t a single facet of this state that would function if they didn’t maintain it. No one with an Emirati passport could change a fuse. Yet, the workers, who make up roughly 71 percent of the population, have precious few rights here. They can’t become citizens, though some are the third generation of their family to be born here. They can be deported at any time. They have no redress. Many of the Asian laborers are owed back pay they aren’t likely to get. There are reams of anecdotal stories about the abuse of guest workers. I’m told about the Pakistani shop assistant who, picking up an Arab woman’s shopping bags, accidentally passed gas, got arrested, and was jailed.
The Arabs live in their own ghettos, large, dull containments of big houses that are half garage behind security walls, weighed down with satellite dishes. We drive by an empty lot, and my driver tells me that this was the site of the house of the second son of a high-ranking official. Daddy had it bulldozed when his boy was caught having a Western-style rich-brats’ party. There is a growing, unspoken problem with the indigenous youth here. Fat, and spoiled beyond reason, they are titanically rude. They have reportedly taken to forming slovenly gangs that have been responsible for random attacks on foreign workers and women simply for the computer-game fun of it. This is a generation of kids who expect to never seriously work—but do expect secure jobs. An Indian manager who runs hotels in Dubai told me that everybody dreads the call from some royal Arab telling them to expect a nephew who will be coming to work. The boy will demand an office, a secretary, a car, wages, deference, and an empty schedule. It’s a sort of protection shakedown that you pay to do business here.
The Al Maktoums are secretive and autocratic, as most Arab despots are. The emir is always prime minister. Abu Dhabi’s ruler is always president. The royal family’s public exposure is universally adoring, supine, sycophantic, and breathlessly bland. There are rumors, always rumors, about disappeared princesses, abducted children, madness, and suicide. The royal family owes its power to an intricate web of family alliance, patronage, and operatic charity. It is sincerely respected.
The Al Maktoums have taken to horse racing. They practically own the British and Irish bloodstock business. It’s a clever and self-serving hobby. Horses are one of the very few upper-class American and European enthusiasms that are shared with Arabs. All racehorses have a little Arab in them. So the Al Maktoums can mix in the West without that stigma that the Saudis suffer from back home—the public decorum with a private, Western decadence. The simple business of betting is of course ignored with a disdainfully turned shoulder. Since Dubai’s construction-based economy stumbled, the prince has obliviously opened a massive and spectacularly hideous hippodrome, the Meydan Racecourse. The biggest racetrack in the world, it cost almost $3 billion to build. It’s home to the Dubai World Cup, the most expensive horse race in the world, naturally. This place couldn’t have the second-most expensive horse race in the world. The winner pockets $10 million.
The track sits in a wasteland surrounded by the exhausted squirm of motorways. I walk around it and look not at the galloping horses and their bright jockeys but back up at the stands. Here in one long panorama is the Dantean vision of modern Dubai—the Arabs huddled in a glass dome, looking like creatures from a Star Trek episode in their sepulchral winding-sheet dishdashas. Next to them are the stands for Westerners, mostly British, loud and drunk, dressed in their tarty party gear. The girls, raucous and provocative, have fat thighs that wobble in tiny frocks. Cantilevered bosoms lurch. The boys, spiky and gelled, glassy-eyed and leering. In the last enclosure, the Asians, packed in with families and picnics, excited to be out of the Portakabin dormitories and the boredom and the homesickness of Internet cafés. In front of them all are the ranks of wired-up security guards, making sure the layers of this mutually dismissive society don’t pollute each other. After the horses have run, Elton John will perform.
Dubai is the parable of what money makes when it has no purpose but its own multiplication and grandeur. When the culture that holds it is too frail to contain it. Dubai is a place that doesn’t just know the price of everything and the value of nothing but makes everything worthless. The answer to everything in Dubai is money. In the darkness of the hot night, the motorways roar with Ferraris and Porsches and Lamborghinis; the fat boys are befuddled and stupefied by sports cars they race around on nowhere roads, going nowhere. Taxi drivers of their ambitionless, all-consuming entitlement. Shortchanged by being given everything. Cursed with money.

Monday, March 14, 2011

Wild Things by Dave Eggers: A Review


By John Cheeran
As a kid I never read Where The Wild Things Are, the picture book by American writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak. I missed the film version too when it was released. Now I’m lucky to have read Dave Eggers’s version The Wild Things at such an adult age, where there is little room left for wonder. Or so, I thought.
But The Wild Things made me five all over again. I was worried about the fate of Max the King every time Carol or Bull disagreed with him and gave dirty looks. With an imagination that often lands Max in trouble, the King uses it to good effect to rule over the beasts in the island.

To write engaging stuff for young people is a challenging task. Although it is only a retelling of the Sendak tale, Eggers’s skill as a storyteller comes across clearly. And, for me, not having read Sendak’s story, the joy, excitement and anxiety were real. Editor of McSweeney’s has done a great job.
Let the wild rumpus start!

Friday, March 04, 2011

Do you still bet on Dhoni and India?

By John Cheeran
The World Cup is finally coming alive. With associate member Ireland outclassing England, the inventor of the game, in a glorious exhibition of cricketing nous, this World Cup is full of possibilities. There could be more stunning upsets along the way to Wankhede Stadium on April 2.
First is a straight question. Will India win the World Cup? Now there is swelling rank of doubting Thomases despite the belligerence against Bangladesh in the Cup opener and Sachin Tendulkar’s century against England. India’s bowling is weak with or without S Sreesanth, captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni must concede that point.
There is another immediate question. How much of a struggle will it be for India to overcome Ireland on Sunday? Yes, India will win against Ireland, will they huff and puff in doing that? If Ireland could chase down 327 runs against England, they could pretty well stretch India’s resources at Chinnaswamy Stadium. And remember that Ireland had knocked out Pakistan from the 2007 World Cup. And in this edition, they had come quite close to surprising Bangladesh. Now with the West Indies humiliating Bangladesh, they were bundled out for 58, Group B can throw up fascinating equations. And to consider that many had written off the West Indies side when the tournament began. It will hurt India hard that it lost a point when it tied with England. But, then, they were lucky to stop in England in its track in the final over.
In any tournament, in any international match, be it Test cricket, ODIs or Twnety20s, India’s problems always stemmed from its flaccid bowling attack. It does not take a third eye to spot that. With India’s fielding far below par, batsmen have a daunting task ahead of them. India’s spinners are struggling to take wickets. On the other hand, for Pakistan skipper Shahid Afridi has injected a new life with a stirring performance by capturing five wickets when it mattered against a rebellious bunch of Canadians.
And now we wonder who said India were the favourites to win the cup?

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest: A Review


By John Cheeran
I just finished reading Stieg Larsson’s final part of the Millennium trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest. I’m yet to figure out the storm around Larsson’s trilogy. The book can hardly described as riveting writing or a thrilling piece of crime fiction. Yes, Larsson deals with individual freedom in an advanced society such as Sweden where personal liberty counts a great deal.
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest is not a book that you would return to. It is too detailed, too long and lacks the element unknown to sustain the reader’s interest. I, however, found that Larsson’s depiction of newsroom tension quite interesting. It is hardly surprising when you consider that he was a journalist and an editor in Sweden. The other striking thing about Larsson’s work is the role of women. Lisbeth Salander is unusual heroine by Indian standards. She is the central figure in Millennium trilogy, warts and all. Not just Salander. A whole lot of feisty, independent women play crucial roles to take the story forward in Larsson’s long winding effort, including editor Erica Berger, lawyer Giannini and security agent Figuerola. All of them know what they want from life and go about getting it without less drama and less fuss. Compared to them the investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist is a wallflower.
Men, too, are from a different world, with their actions determined to a large extent by individual freedom with society taking a back seat in determining what is wrong and what is right. I did not enjoy The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest as crime fiction but it helped me to understand how life gets unspooled in a society where individual comes first, most of the times.
Disclosure: I’m yet to read the first two books – The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire in the Millennium trilogy.
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