London: To have Sachin Tendulkar turn up for its national team could perhaps the dream of any cricketing country.

Understanding that this dream is basically unrealistic, the England cricket selectors have done the next best thing possible in the circumstance: Pick a replica. From the wax museum of Madam Tussauds at London, that is.

The exhibit from the Tussauds, for which the original Tendulkar himself modelled, is likely to be in the English line-up that will do duties this summer for the Test series against Sri Lanka and India.

‘Everyone has been crowing that this exhibit is as good as the original. Let us see how true this statement is. But, for us, even if it is half as good it will more than suffice,’ a beaming Geoff Miller, chairman of England Selection Committee said here today. Strategically, it’s seen as a smart move as the Indian bowlers have never had to contend with Tendulkar. ‘We intend to exploit that weakness,’ he added.

Tendulkar is undoubtedly the candle for the world cricket at the moment. But realise, when you are talking of candle, you are actually talking of wax, Miller said by way of explaining the logic to pick Tendulkar from Tussauds.

Terming the development as a historic one, Miller said this marks a new high in ‘kolpak’ deals. ‘The English national cricket team, as everyone knows, is a veritable UN force, comprised as it is by players from every possible country, and occasionally from England, too,’ Miller said and added ‘now we have upped the ante by selecting one without any country’s passport.’

It’s a momentous time for the world of cricket as such. After this, the way forward is to import exciting talents from the Avatar ‘s Pandora planet. They could be the players of the future  — all state-of-the-art and HD-ready, Miller pointed out, dropping hints about which way English cricket is headed.

Miller also clarified that this was not the first occasion that the English cricket team was experimenting with a wax exhibit. ‘If you recall, for the tour of India in 1991-92, we blooded a full-fledged wax dummy as wicket-keeper in the form of Richard Blakey’.

Brushing aside the sceptical criticism that how a wax model can play cricket, Miller cattily said, ‘remember we have had players who exhibited footwork less than a wax exhibit would. Robert Key and Graeme Fowler, to throw some random example, have Test match double hundreds. But their footwork seemed specifically designed at Tussauds’.

Okay, Miller agreed, there are downsides to a wax model. But look at the positives. ‘It won’t make idiotic rants on Twitter when dropped from the team. You will not have shameful pedalo night-outs. And most importantly, it will not suffer hernia complications’.

Miller conceded that fielding would be an issue. ‘We, as experts in cricket, understand a wax model is a wax model. But we consoled ourselves that it would still be better than a mobile Munaf when it comes to fielding’.

Miller also revealed that the selection committee’s original plan was to pick the Tendulkar replica in the World Cup team itself. ‘But apparently that would have been a clear case of ambush marketing.  World Cup commercial rules stipulate that there can be only one official Tendulkar in the fray.’

The Tendulkar replica is an experiment. If it succeeds, we will try and fill the team with similar exhibits. Bradman, Sobers, Hadlee are some of the names that the ECB is looking at to replicate. Agreed, it would look slightly bizarre. But nothing out of ordinary, as it is we are full of South Africans, Irish and Indian expatriates, Miller said.

Meanwhile, the ECB is hoping that with Tendulkar in the team, much financial riches will flow its way. ‘In fact, we are on a stronger wicket here,’ ECB chairman Giles Clarke said. ‘The whole world knows that when it comes to commercials, the real Tendulkar comes across, how do I put it politely, as if he is trying to learn facial expressions from his waxed doppelganger,’ Giles said candidly, thereby probably fulfilling his wish to use the word ‘doppelganger’ in an actual sentence.

Reacting to the developments of his replica being set for debut as an English player, the real Tendulkar, in Mumbai, said ‘it should remember it’s a team game. It should be happy as long as the team does well’.  Actually, Tendulkar’s wax model could have come up with more imaginative lines.

Elsewhere, it’s also learnt that the Kochi IPL franchise, Kochi Tuskers India, has approached the IPL governing council whether it can bid for the Tendulkar replica to play in its team. A member of the governing council, in a rare mood for truthful confession, ruefully said: ‘You have to ask only N Srinivasan on this. As a governing council, we otherwise are just a wax model’.

The sensational event has sent the Indian media into a slight tizzy. In Mumbai, the Times of India headlined its report: ‘Twodulkars’.  In Chennai, The Hindu’s caption read as: ‘Test cap for Tussauds’ wax model on cards’.  Mid-Day interviewed two models, who were wearing only wax, for a special feature on the issue.  ‘Cricket for Dummies‘ was the headline of Tehelka‘s investigative report on how wax models of players from the minority community in Gujarat were burnt during the riots of 2002. NDTV sought the expert opinion of people who were experienced in lighting candles in church. Suhel Seth, as usual, was one among them.

(Disclaimer: We wanted to wax eloquent on Tendulkar. And this is literally how)

©2012 Crank's Corner. All Rights Reserved.

If you are a doctor you need not keep up appointments, especially since the patients wouldn’t complain lest you refer them to more tests, including the nuclear test. You can also pretty much take your patients inside a dark room, make them lie down on a bed and ask them to remove their dress. And it can all be for professional reasons, of course.

If you happen to be a lawyer, well, I want to say something funny and provocative here, but I know how powerful the defamation laws of the land are. So will instead peddle the euphemism lawyers are all honourable people.

And if you are a journalist, you will be called up to make, day in and day out, such inspired pronouncements. This, in normal human parlance, may be called lying, but we in journalism are prone to see this as a creative process.

Let me explain: Think of a typical Sachin Tendulkar press conference. But before we delve further, a few things need to be clarified about Tendulkar. Reporters and correspondents dread a Tendulkar press conference more than opposition bowlers fear him in a cricket arena. He may conceivably the greatest batsmen in the world for quite some time now. But Tendulkar at a press conference deals strictly in banalities and boring comments, which if the reporters were to write a dutiful report of, will have the entire nation falling facedown on their breakfast cereals in sleepy boredom.

Tendulkar says, ‘they have a pretty good attack and we can’t afford to be complacent’, of every bowling attack he faces, even if he were talking of his son Arjun’s kindergarten school team.

This kind of androgynous observations cannot be good enough for the news media that is otherwise dealing with people like Subramanyam Swami and Rakhi Sawant, who are prone to call a spade an inter-continental ballistic missile.

The point is reporters have to chip in with Tendulkar. So when Tendulkar parrots ‘they have a pretty good attack and we can’t afford to be complacent’ of, say, Bangladesh, the press correspondents professionally translate it as: ‘Tendulkar thinks Bangladesh’s attack is better than that of the Australian team’, and try and give a weather-worn cliché some respect it may not deserve. Twisting of facts, as you can see, is the chief virtue of journalism.

And then we have A R Rahman, who speaks so slowly and ponderously that the time gap between two of his words is s also the time taken by other music directors to compose songs for full-length movies. All Rahman news events are just about ‘ella pughazum iraivannuke’ and a few other incomprehensible observations. And scribes naturally give their own re-recording to Rahman’s words. When Rahman intones that he has listened to Michael Jackson, the next day papers report it as Rahman’s soul inspired by MJ and the duo were set to do a joint album. The trick here is Rahman, and for that matter MJ, will not take pains to deny the report.

If you are wondering where, we, journalists get this skill to play around with facts, well the answer is simple: We make a lot of leave applications.

Let me again explain: Among the many easily identifiable attributes of newspaper journalism is the fact that it is the field in which official holidays are roughly equivalent, give or take a day or two, to the number of birthdays you have in a year.

So newspaper hands are forever thinking up (barely) believable ruses to seek leave. There is always a pattern to this.

Chronic at Clinic Commode: If he is calling in the office in the morning at a time when he should be at his system and working on his news report, then it means only one thing: He is down with ‘loose motion’, an affliction he seems to willingly contract the moment he starts feeling disinclined to attend office. Many times, for the sake of whipping up the right realism, he will say that he is hardly in a position to even get out of the lavatory, and the phone call itself is being made from inside the latrine.

There are many practical advantages in claiming to be laid low by dysentery. One, it is common. Two, no one will ask for tell-tale evidences, something that has to be produced if the claim is for a sprained ankle or slit throat. Merely acting weak (facial expressions would do) is generally seen good enough to drive home the idea that one had spent a better part of one’s time over the commode. This is naturally popular with many journos whenever they are calling in to say they are sick.

Family Fanatic: The one great advantage of the family system that India is justly famous for is that it gives enough chances to seek leave in the office. Embedded in each relationship is the possibility for myriad leave. Uncle son’s wedding. Aunt’s daughter’s ear-piercing ceremony. Third brother-in-law’s second sister-in-law’s housewarming function. Co-brother’s father’s demise. Cousin’s betrothal and such bagatelles are used to avail easy half-a-day permission. And then there are also friends, who can be conjured up in a trice to throw up reasons and occasions to seek permission for absence from office.

With so much to practice on a daily basis, Indian media scene is naturally floating on inspired lies masquerading as news.

PS: I filed this report from home today because I was down with, you guessed it right, upset stomach courtesy the food at grandma’s 80th birthday function.

Tomorrow remind me to feign weakness at office.

(This is my column for the week)

©2012 Crank's Corner. All Rights Reserved.

Sachin Tendulkar mocks at someone wanting to open a bookshop. What is the connection with insurance here? Beats me. Perhaps it should have been in the cricket match that followed it.

Somewhere else, the idea of insurance is sought to be driven home with an old chap trying to get off a train on his own, refusing a hand proffered in help. Again, I didn’t get the logic, which I presume should be inherent in it. Elsewhere, a husband and wife talk in ersatz serious tones about the need to cut down on household expenses as he had superannuated from work. After a succession of confusing exchanges, he shows her tickets for Singapore. Cue: Happy faces and laughs. Thanks to insurance. So this immediately begs the question, what does ‘superannuated’ mean. Well, it is a word that is used as a show-off when there is a perfectly acceptable and, more importantly, easily understandable description ‘retired’ to mean the same. But superannuation is something that the insurance industry seems partial to. So that in itself tells a lot about the industry than I possible could come up in the remaining length of this piece. But I promise you that I will think up something on the way to justify my idea, which, as you would have guessed by now, is something that I am not still not very sure about.

But how can anyone be sure about insurance? How does it work? Rather, does it work at all? How is the premium on insurance calculated? The last question is easy to answer.

Think of an amount that you believe that you are worthy of and hence insuring against. If it is ‘x’ rupees, you have to divide it by the number of people you know in life and add all their ages together and subtract by the marks you scored in biology even though you studied in commerce stream. Now the thing to do is to name the value you have got as ‘y’, since it is what those who teach algebra (by the way, isn’t algebra an insidious way to impose English through mathematics?) keep telling.

Now you have to multiply ‘x’ and ‘y’ and immediately get a matching headache and go to sleep. When you wake up, think of a fresh four digit number, this will be the amount you have to pay. Don’t try to tell me that there is no logic in what I have written, as if there is some logic in the way premiums are actually cooked up. I had four different insurance marketing personnel approach me recently. Three of them were from the same company, and each one quoted a different premium for the same policy. How? Well, my guess is each one had a different kind of headache that morning.

Why would anyone want to insure himself? I can understand some logic in trying to safeguard, on an assumed prospective basis, your valuables like car or jewels or Rambha’s thighs or Pamella Anderson’s …well I leave it your imagination though she herself hasn’t left anything to imagination . But why put a notional amount against yourself, and presume that it is your value on the day you croak?

Sooner or later, you are certain to meet your maker. But why pay up to a company in between? If you think that it will salvage something for your family in the event of you kicking the bucket untimely, then think again.

The process of encashing an insurance policy has almost forced many living persons to wish that they were dead, and made dead persons feel that they were alive to kill the insurance company in question. Insurance companies are generally strict and stringent and don’t part with the money unless the dead person himself or herself comes and tells that he or she is indeed dead.

Also, don’t for a minute think that investments on insurances can fetch you tax cuts. What you think as what you saved from being washed away by the tax man is what you eventually cough up as premium, which, as it emerges, is actually another way of paying the insurance company’s tax.

You may still turn around and ask, if insurance is such a stupid thing would there be so many companies entering the field? Well, my gut feeling is that these insurance companies have all been started only to escape from other insurance companies, and perhaps give more chance to make money for Sachin Tendulkar, who, in case if it has not occurred to you at all, is one person who doesn’t need any insurance policy at all.

(This is an old column of mine)

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©2012 Crank's Corner. All Rights Reserved.