Apocryphal Stories !!!

Are little things known to inspire people? If so, what makes them turn ‘on’ that imaginary switch in the brain? Do players knowingly get into a squabble to inspire themselves? All of this was in evidence in last night’s match between West Indies Pattinson started by spraying the ball, like he did in the previous T20. There was something that both the openers, Dwayne Smith and Charles, did that was effective and seemed like a well-planned move. That, one of them decided to move away from the line and the other tried to move into the line played havoc with the bowler’s lines For a few deliveries, it seemed that McKay stumbled on the good length. The good length to bowl to these batsmen was the ‘invisible fourth stump line’. Watson found the radar early and forced Charles to hole out to long-off. Pollard couldn’t repeat his heroics from the previous game. On his way back, Warner provided some lip service to him. At that moment it seemed inconsequential, but it came back to haunt the hom...

Around this time last year, Ravi Teja issued a press release. He stated that he is ready to give a chance to any new director and his doors would be open 24/7 for them. You can attribute that to the promotion for the film ‘Dongala Mutha’. After his subsequent movie, Veera, flopped, there was a talk going around that he is asking for bound scripts from the directors Nippu, in my opinion, would have been accepted in between those two phases. There would’ve have been no reason to accept this film had it been a bound script. Ravi Teja is known to make monumentally disastrous decisions while choosing films. Bhageeradha, Baladoor, Khatarnak, and Veera stand as testimonies for the same. On the flip side, he is also known to carry a movie on his shoulders. Though not on par with his previous disasters, Nippu will be a movie that Ravi Teja will stand to regret It was promoted as the amalgamation of different styles of cinema. One, bearing the trademark Gunasekhar stamp and the other being ...

Have you ever imagined this setting? You can actually stuff an entire country’s population in a match at Eden Gardens, Kolkatta. To top it all the country has a cricket team. Well, come out of the imagination and you can see the reality. Guernsey is one such country Their cricketers are the best ambassadors for small country cricket. Watching them from close quarters in WCL 5, I felt that they were the best personifications for the much abused ‘It’s just a sport’. While they give it their all on the field, they are gregarious and fun-loving characters off it In a match that was affected by rain, all of them volunteered to be the groundsmen for the day. This gesture was not lost on the opposition, Argentina, as they too ventured in getting the match started. It was the second match of Guernsey that I watched. What actually caught the eye and knowing that little more about the team was a little gesture at the break of the innings. All of their players stood up to applause in welcomi...

In the recently conducted MAA music awards, the normally reticent Trivikram shed his shyness and spoke about Sirivennela Seetharama Shastry. The tone of the speech varied from that of despair to that of angst. The speech was basically about the falling standards of Lyrics in Telugu film industry and how Sirivennela held his own all these years. The beauty of the speech was such that, you could have replaced Telugu and put any other language. The angst would have been the same, regardless of the language He started off by saying that he neither had the standing nor the vocabulary to talk about Sirivennala. “When I heard the songs in Sirivennala, I wanted to find the meaning of a few words used in the song. That was the moment I realised that there exists a dictionary in Telugu and bought one. I referred to the words in the dictionary.” He says in no unmean terms that Sirivennala’s name adds to the song. “The job of a lyricist is to not just write songs that are understandable to the a...

How much would you admire a person whom you have never seen before? How much influence will an endearing person, wield over your choices? These are the questions that I encountered over the previous week. It was because of two incidents, unrelated, over the past week One was K R Deepak winning an award for his photography and the other was a friend visiting Bheemunipatnam and his clicks there. You might wonder how these things are related and some of you might venture out to take a guess. Your guess might be that the clicks by my friend would have reminded me of K R Deepak. That’s a part of the reason why I am writing this Nine years ago, on a sunny day, two first-year graduation students went to Bheemunipatnam on a bike after finishing their final exam of the term. On the same day, there was a meeting headed by a politico in the same place. The two students went to the beach and found that it was nothing different from what they saw at the beach near their college. Now that they w...

Djokovic signed off from the court, after his semi-final by saying that the final against Rafa was going to be physical. Though the words turned to be true, even he wouldn’t have foreseen the longest match at the Australian Open. A lot of credit is due to both the players. They played their hearts out. Not a single soul, who watched the match, would have demanded more. The quality of the service games, returns by Djokovic, trading of the forehands and the backhands. Everything about the match can be branded classic. If we dissect the match, it was Djokovic who had the upper hand after losing the first set. After dominating the next two sets, it seemed that he was on his way to a win in four sets. Remember, these guys hadn’t played a five setter before this match. At 3-4, 0-40 up, he seemed to be just five points away from the championship. Rafa roared back into the match with an eclectic mix of serves, forehands and backhands. At that moment it seemed that if the match went into the ...

Yes he has attained the superstardom. Yes, the eyes of the entire Telugu film industry are on him. Yes, he seems to quite enjoy it. Yes, he is coming out of his comfort zone. Despite all this Mahesh Babu will learn a new thing from this movie. He will need to thank Puri Jagannadh for that He gets to utter the best dialogues in the movie. He is omnipresent in the movie. And it is well justified. The camera seems to love him and so do the ladies who come to the theatre to watch him. I needn’t go any further than reproducing what a lady said after the movie “Too Cute”. This must have been the reason that prompted an observer to say “Make Mahesh Babu run for three hours on a treadmill, people will still throng to watch him”. Now don’t get naughty ideas Ram Gopal Varma! Puri is the man, again, giving direction to Mahesh’s career. This is the first movie that exploits the superstardom of Mahesh Babu. Puri makes no bones about it. There are a lot of moments in the movie where Mahesh is ser...

At 67/2 in 10.2 overs, with the required run-rate climbing to nearly 10 an over, Melbourne Renegades finished the match off in the next 44 balls. At that exact moment, the captain McDonald was on 11 runs of 19 balls. Of the next 18 balls he faced, he creamed an astounding 49 runs. The partnership with Hodge was the game breaker In the years to come, this innings might be shown as a model for ‘Pacing the innings’. McDonald did what five batsmen before him, couldn’t. He converted the start he got into a big innings. Henriques was close to doing it. He was stopped in his tracks by the accurate bowling. McDonald, on the other hand took time in settling in and once in, he didn’t allow the momentum to shift He might not be able to repeat the feat on a regular basis but the innings today showed what a finisher means to the team. On April 2 nd this year, India lifted the World cup and Yuvraj Singh was awarded the Most Valuable Player award. Nobody grudged the honour on him. It is the finish...

On a fateful day in March 1992, few hearts were broken and a lifelong relationship for a young kid started, with a team that scraped through with the skin of their teeth. It was the second one-run win for the team against their opponents in a World Cup setting I was too young to realise the vagaries of the rules in the rain-hit matches. They favoured Australia more than India in that game. What I realised, though, was the importance of the game. It was one of those days where my father put a stop to the ad-guess game, as we called it. As my father sunk into despair after the match, I found a new hope- Australian cricket team. It didn’t matter to me that they were out of the tournament before the semi-finals Cricket is a team game but there are individuals whom you find yourself drawn to, more than the others. From that day on, I had at least one person in the team that I looked up to. Mark Waugh, Steve Waugh, Shane Warne, Ricky Ponting, Damien Martyn, Adam Gilchrist, Michael Clarke,...

BREAKING NEWS: Allu Arjun and Ravi Teja from Telugu movies make a fleeting appearance in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Doesn't matter that they appear in a TV footage in the movie From the time it was announced that Anil Kapoor would be a part of the Mission Impossible franchise, it was marked as an awaited movie in India. It was widely anticipated that he would play a major role in the movie. Though he serves as a major connecting link in the movie or rather the main reason, why the movie moves to India, he is projected as a lusting billionaire One of the very good things about the movie is its humour content. There are a lot of subtle one-liners by the guy who operates the computer and is the technical guru in the movie. The movie is about an evil mind getting his hand on nuclear warhead and the mission is to stop a full blown war between USA and Russia There are a lot of things that are interlinked in the movie. For example, at the beginning of the mission when it’s sa...

What does a person do when he/she has tasted success in life? Look to better it obviously. What if the success has resonated for a period of time? That’s when the person grapples with questions in the mind. Whether to succumb to the need of people who have gifted the success or to satiate the urge within Ten years ago, after his biggest hit, Pawan Kalyan, was compared to Rajnikanth by AM Ratnam (the producer of the movie). He said that these were the two actors that knew the public pulse very well. Ironically, after Khushi there is not one movie that Pawan Kalyan can remember with fondness When confronted by similar questions, Mahesh Babu, went for an overhaul in his image and came out successful with Dookudu. One can’t expect Pawan Kalyan doing a similar thing because the carefully cultivated image might go for a toss In his initial movies, he tasted success through remakes and there is no harm in actually doing the same now. That his next movie is a remake might provide the emotio...