My Bengaluru....

A popular saying these day’s in Bengaluru is that we have drifted from being a – Garden City to a Garbage City, more so when the saying is accompanied by a seeming perverse delight, as if the person in question is in no way involved and filth and garbage appear and disappear on its own accord. I have always held that the normal Bangalorean is a spoilt brat. A tantrum throwing adolescent who takes things for granted and complains about almost anything – its too dirty, its too sunny, its too windy, policemen are too strict or too lenient and the litany goes on and on and on.

The other day waiting at a traffic signal, I spied upon a family at my fore in a car. The kid in the car was either a poor traveler or had had too much to eat and was violently vomiting through her window while her mother looked on rather nonchalantly. The upshot was that the car side was soiled much to the chagrin of the family. What followed was bizarre! The mother uncorked a bottle of water and proceeded to clean up the side of the car, oblivious to the filth that she was creating around her on a road that did not solely belong to her and her family. Having soiled the road they just drove on, as did I with two wheeler whizzing past on adjoining footpaths that are supposed to serve the pedestrian. My anger was so great that I shot the lady, in question on my mobile camera of course!

CMJ

Cricket has lost much of its romance with television. A couple of decades ago one could listen, on radio, to Gundappa Vishwanath, late cutting Derek Underwood to the third man boundary past a diving Kieth Fletcher at second slip or even a Jeff Thomson bounding in to bowl to terrorized English batsmen on a bouncy Perth wicket. It was romantic because you had to imagine the action! TV robbed us of that and reduced our heroes to mere mortals. Radio commentating was an art and for over three decades Christopher Martin-Jenkins enthralled us with his comic, wit and understanding of the game of cricket. Jenkins was a tad eccentric too.It is true that on a golf course in Jamaica he tried to ring his office with the TV remote control he had picked up on his way out of his hotel room. Even when he recognized his mistake he seemed disgruntled that the device did not get him through to London. He had a distinctive style and he would compare cricketers to birds and animals. Mike Hendrik had a pigeon toed approach to bowling while Ravi Shastri resembled a Camel while he ran! Jenkins had this rather condescending approach to Indian cricket befor 1983. In the World Cup that year,he was fairly certain that England would beat India in the semi final and i could hear the quiet desperation in his voice as Mohinder Amarnath shut the Poms out of the tournament. In the final against the might of the West Indies India were shot out for 183 in just over a couple of hours on a green top at Lords. There was a finality in the voice of Jenkins.....the upstart was being put in place....and when India turned it around there was genuine incredulity and joy for the under dogs lead by Kapil Dev. CMJ was a consummate broadcaster. His clipped, precise tones soon became synonymous with the English summer, as did those wonderful stories that he told, whose end could be so hard to predict - often he was not quite sure where they were heading himself. He was brilliant on the radio: clear, distinctive, and always at ease in front of a microphone, even if he had only just burst into the commentary box seconds before picking it up. Jenkins died a few days ago from cancer and will be missed by many. I will too, for the romance that he created around my favorite cricketers, who were but mortal humans I discovered with the advent of TV in India!