Oh! Dog

While driving down my house on a surprisingly cool March morning, a street dog looking for comfort under the first rays of the morning sun set me on a hot chase of this question: Why do we value things in life?
I was forced to take my mind of the road and journey into my own enlightenment when the dog, thankfully unaware of my predicament (and its own), made me think of my daughter and then forced me to steal a smile at the recollection.
Now it happens that my daughter shares this naïve fascination of spotting things - living and inanimate - and learning to identify them every time her eyes, new to the world, behold a visual treat.
Dog is a vital part of her nascent vocabulary, which she flaunts to perfection in front of others with an infectious delight. Since we do not own one - my otherwise stoical wife's symptoms of morbid fear and loathing for the canines has prevented us from indulging in the pleasure - street dogs, benevolently left to gay abandon by our municipal corporation, happen to be the building blocks of my 2-yr-old daughter's vocabulary. Well she is actually less than two. (Now why did I say that?)
That dog on the roadside pulled off the incredible! It found a place in my heart and, if I might add, gave me some comfort by stirring up my daughter's memory. The best part about the entire rendezvous was that it happened in the most commonplace of all circumstances, while I was driving down to my house by the same road I take every day, around the same time and in the same car that has two years' of feisty run under its hood.
My daughter's association with the dog had redefined the moment for me. And, so it was in some way, remotely valuable for me, just as a tattered kite dangling off its broken spine from a Neem tree holds meaning for me, because like the dog, it speaks to me of my daughter.
My tryst with the dog has made my life simpler. For when I value something I know it is not the subject (or the object) that holds meaning, but the moment spent, the time lapsed and the memories shared with it that makes me yearn for it.
It made me realise events that are absurdly meaningless and terribly insignificant import a promise when a shared past happens to peer through the trivial that our eyes picked off the routine landscape.
It is the same feeling that radiates from the songs we remember from our childhood and carry with us to afterlife. Because they touch a beautiful raw chord somewhere, some place, in past, which now lies buried in the worthless mundane of our busy lives.

Batman or Badman?

As a rookie scribe I was once reminded by my editor on how one has to be 'little selfish' to make it to the top. "Think about yourself," he would pat my sorry conscience when it chose to confront me in a dog-eat-dog world. After watching Sachin go after his 100th ton in Bangladesh, I just cannot help feeling how well he has been playing for himself. There is a difference in playing for the country and playing for one's own enhancement.
Now I am not a great follower of the game and I might miss out on where Sehwag scored his triple century or the year Kapil's Devils got the Holy Grail of cricket home, but my inconsistency with the game is what gives me the pleasure of having a ringside view of the goings-on, when my cricket-crazy friends are blinded to the follies of the playing eleven.
In other words, I can play the third-umpire, like it or not.
So, I found myself practically amused when people underplayed a nation's loss to an individual's milestone. Sachin might have scored his hundredth ton, but nothing can take away the fact that India was beaten by arguably the weakest cricketing side in the world.
At the end of the match, I found my colleagues, who would be reasonably stable in a crisis-situation, completely missing the cue. That includes some very responsible individuals who wouldn’t miss the woods for the trees on a normal day. They seemed to be hopping mad at everyone, blaming them for the team's loss - the bowlers who couldn’t scalp wickets, the captain who picked the wrong team and of course the missed opportunities.
That's when I started to wonder why not Sachin? Had it been any other cricketer on any other day, he would have been flayed for playing slow and poor. One might choose to ignore, but there were 82 dot balls in his 100th ton. That explains two things: One he is certainly not the same batsman he used to be and he wasted 14 overs in his run-up to personal glory. How many batsmen, I suspect, would have been allowed that measure of leeway by the fans or the selectors?
That is why I would rate Dravid, Ganguly and Sehwag far ahead of Sachin as a team player. They did not go after the records, but after the opponents.
As ironical as it comes, his latest ton may have made him immortal, but it has also earned Bangladeshis the right to tell the world that their boys beat the God to his game on this day.
Here I am reminded of the closing remarks of the Batman in the move The Dark Knight where he tells Lt Gordon, "You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain." Perhaps for Sachin it is just turning out to be true.