Sunday, August 28th, 2005
Sports is from Mars, shopping is from Venus
This piece almost never got written.
The first time I sat to write it, India was playing Pakistan at Karachi and the team amassed 349 runs. I abandoned the computer keyboard for the television remote and jabbed away furiously, surfing 100 channels looking for Ten Sports and finally finding it housed on Doordarshan. In the second half of the game, I put a cushion on my lap and my laptop on the cushion. Some three hours later, I heard a faint beep, looked at the cursor blinking on a blank Word document and a red cross on the battery icon at the base of the screen. The game went down in history and I’m afraid my piece, too, was pretty much history.
The Editor let me off with a warning and a new deadline that, alas, coincided with not only a cricket match but with Formula1 in Malaysia. The TV screen and the computer screen, each vying for attention, spun around my head like Schumacher and Montoya whirring around the Sepang International Circuit. After a leisurely Sunday lunch (which was served in the presence of Messrs Afridi, Haq, Razzaq and Akhtar), I bit my nails to the quick as India’s batsmen slumped. Just as I was giving up on the game and the series and returning to the comp, Dravid and Kaif pulled off a spectacular rescue act. India was back in the series.