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Before joining Cricinfo, my interest in the game was a casual one. Sure, I’d sit glued to the TV (back at my parents’ home where I had a TV) whenever India would play an ODI, but Tests were something that only greying (or balding or both) uncles watched. It must be that I am fast transitioning to the aforementioned stage of life because I cannot wait for the South Africa v India Test series to commence!

The hot-off-our-CMS match preview by Sidharth Monga nails it:

Virender Sehwag and Gautam Gambhir play for the same club, same state, same IPL side. Dale Steyn and Morne Morkel play for the same franchise in South Africa. Sehwag and Gambhir are close friends, Morkel calls himself and Steyn best friends in the team. Sehwag and Gambhir run on intuition, their batting styles compliment each other. Morkel goes for raw pace and bounce, Steyn goes for swing, presenting a varied attack. Sehwag and Gambhir are the best openers in the world, Morkel and Steyn the hottest new-ball pairing going around.

Can we fix the toss for the first Test to ensure we start the series with its biggest selling point? Gambhir and Sehwag v Morkel and Steyn. Morkel knows how to build it too. “It’s going to be a very good challenge,” he says. “Gambhir and Sehwag have played very well for India. Myself and Dale are pretty new with the new ball, and it will be a big test, especially in Indian conditions. Luckily, the challenge is going to be for them too at the end of this year in South Africa. It’s not going to end here.” Imagine the first morning of the series, three slips and a gully, a fresh pitch, and Zaheer Khan bowling to Ashwell Prince. What a dampener it will be.

That was before I met Injkyji. And now I tend to notice them. Which is not such a good thing because the ratio of bad lyrics to good lyrics is about the same as the ratio of planets in this universe to the planets that can sustain human life.

I am not sure what the present state of pop lyrics is. If I were to judge by the limited exposure to contemporary pop through iTunes, I’d say it is as bad as the 90s. Back then boy bands were the biggest culprit. I am thus reminded of this wonderful example of timeless lyric writing by Backstreet Boys:

I don’t care who you are,
where you’re from,
what you did
as long as you love me.

Sounds like someone was living inside a dog’s head for one full year.

…the 80s were the goofiest years of human civilization.

The tracks on this disc oscillate between the memorable (Ninnu Kori Varnam) and the utterly forgettable (Botany Class). All in all, you cannot help but exclaim – we’ve come a long way!

Let’s face it, Avatar isn’t winning any awards for best screenplay, dialogue or acting (wouldn’t that be going to the animators anyway?) and yet watching it for the second time wasn’t as big a bore as I had thought it would be.

A good deal of Pandora’s charm stays intact even on second viewing, but there are some tedious scenes – especially as the movie draws to a protracted end – during which you can take time out for certain random experiments/observations:

1. Closing one eye makes the 3D “go away”. Expected, because most theaters, including the one we went to, use stereoscopic projection – which, to put it crassly, relies on each eye seeing its own thing. After all, we’ve all got Wikipedia to do the heavy lifting.

2. The font used for the English sub-titles of Na’vi dialogues was Papyrus, which looked a little jarring. I’ll try to see the glass half-full here – it could’ve been Comic Sans.

Today was supposed to be the last day of the Ranji trophy final in Mysore, but obviously that won’t be needed now. Apparently matches in India have been rescheduled in the past to avoid eclipses.

Anyway, in a few hours from now, I plan to work from our office’s terrace and even if clouds ruin the show (which I am sure they will) I’ll enjoy the evening sky at noon.

8:26 AM IST It’s a very cloudy morning with barely a hint of breeze. Doesn’t look like this will clear any time soon.

10:15 AM IST The sun came out, but only just. It’s back to being cloudy. Worse, it might just rain. We’ll see. Off to work.

10:40 AM IST At work. A gentle breeze has picked up. The clouds are drifting leaving an occasional patch of blue through which the sun can be seen. We’ll hopefully catch fleeting glimpses of the eclipse.

10:54 AM IST On the terrace but don’t see the sun. The breeze is still around so there’s hope.

11:00 AM IST This is how the sky looks:

11:37 AM IST It’s still light and shade. The eclipse isn’t here yet. We’ll be seeing it live via the iSight camera on my MacBook.

12:01 PM IST The pinhole camera shows that the eclipse has begun! Still too bright for the camera but we are about to try.

12:13 PM IST The sun is obscured by the clouds. Hard to tell what’s up. Cannot even say if the loss in light is due to the clouds or the solar eclipse.

1:22 PM IST It’s very surreal here. The birds are beginning to get befuddled. The shadows under the canopies of the trees are crescent shaped. Nature’s very own pinhole camera!

1:50 PM IST None of the digital cameras (including iSight) work. We just get a flare of light – cannot underestimate even the eclipsed sun!

2:14 PM IST It’s fast getting over. That was fun!

…not here at any rate. Not even if it is a not-so-closely, not-so-keenly fought contest between India and Sri Lanka who’ve played so much cricket together of late that it’s a miracle to see Dhoni not do his press conferences in Sinhala.

Café Pascucci at MG Road has a big LCD TV inside that drew a small crowd of onlookers outside. I don’t know what’ll happen during IPL or the World Cup. I guess they’ll learn that big TVs tuned to cricket channels and glass facades are bad a idea in this country. The Reebok showroom on Brigade Road has a small LCD TV – where, by virtue of them being the official sponsors of the ICC, cricket must be the sole (pun unintentional) programming. But it drew a big enough crowd outside to probably start a mini-riot. The smaller the TV and the harder it is to catch a glimpse of the action on screen (let alone read the score), the bigger the crowd. Like moths flocking around the tubelights at a garish Indian wedding on a humid summer night.

The obligatory last post of the year. Have an excellent 2010!

We were leaving everything behind – well for 9 days anyway – our work, the media, the Internet, the swine flu and the mosquitoes in the Kingfisher Red bus who were hell-bent on kissing us good-bye.

On the Delhi-Leh flight, the landscape below changes before the cabin crew drags the food trolly to your seat. In the beginning, we saw mountains that lacked my notions of Himalayan grandeur – inferior specimens disowned and banished by the Himalayas. But once you cross Shimla, you start to see what you’d probably consider no-so-distant cousins to Mt. Everest. Most mountains were covered in snow. Wisps of clouds cast sharp shadows on them.

As we got ready for descent, snow-capped peaks went into the background and their place was taken by mountains of varied colors and textures – barren but strikingly beautiful.

The luxury of being able to go from Delhi (239 m / 784 ft. above mean sea level) to Leh (3,500 m / 11, 483 ft. above mean sea level) within 90 minutes, comes at the risk of altitude sickness. You won’t feel a thing immediately – in fact you’ll welcome the crisp mountain air after having inhaled the re-re-circulated airplane air for over 90 minutes. But a few minutes there and you’ll realize that your breathing is suddenly not a sub-concious activity you perform in the background.

Our guest house was a mere 10 minutes drive from the airport and despite being in the main area of the town, was nicely secluded from the hubbub of tourists and traffic. We had our breakfast at the guest house’s roof-top café in stunned silence – it is hard to talk with a view like this:

The guest house also had a well-tended garden. Most plants have a 3-4 month window of survival and the flowers and plants here were determined to make the most of it; even more than I was determined to make the most of our first day indoors:

What is common between an Auto driver in Bangalore and a Nikon D90?
One-And-A-Half.

p.s. Don’t worry if you didn’t get it. The audience for this PJ is probably in single digit.

Plonked a considerable sum of money on a new camera. Was looking for one with a better sensor (less noise for higher ISO), better focussing system, better shutter performance (1/8000 and 6.3 fps burst) and overall better handling (weather proofing, better viewfinder). EOS 50D fit the bill nicely. Seriously contemplated a switch to Nikon but it had the significant disadvantage of being incompatible with my existing collection of lenses – besides it would’ve got me fewer megapixels and no weather proofing for more money.

Yes, it doesn’t do HD movies – even the entry level EOS 500D does that these days; but I am not in it for moving pictures. And then, I can make up for my camera’s inability to shoot video with html and javascript. Here are a couple of studies in waltz time – performed by anonymous cast in front of the camera shop where the camera’s burst mode performance was being tested (very grainy ISO 3200):

1. Intro to waltz
2. Promenade Waltz

The links will open in a new window. Give the page some time to load and once the pictures start moving, hover over the them to see tooltips (and to slow the action down a bit). And please use a respectable browser (i.e. not IE).