Rare Pair!

The past few days have been chaotic to put it mild. Odd hours according to my body clock, even odder according to my mind.... it has been a lot of testing 'hours' really. Getting back to London was good, but seeing the state of my home, when compared to the slick outlook of my hotel room in Singapore, has opened many a eye inside me.

Its a mammoth task to get things in order, let me remind you. You have got bills to pay and then its the cleaning, kitchen looks fungy, fridge even more... bedroom and hall have sort of become interchangeable... all the right motives to prove that I am living a bachelor life.. king size!

Somehow I have managed to keep the expectations between what is need at work and home - unlike the ideal 'Work-Life Balance' lingo which every company preaches but never practises. Wednesday was going to be special in some ways, because there is this cricket match between India and Australia and most of my generation heroes - Tendulkar, Ganguly and Dravid - will be playing their last season there. So it was important to ensure that I was 'alive and kicking' to watch the match live.

The only slight problem was the timing. 2 AM in the morning. With the energy balance being negative and the food consumption/burnout efficiency really high, on most occasions, I would have cursed myself if I had to get up at 2. But I did manage to sleep for around 5 hours. Got up at 4 AM. All my dreams were about the match and I was constantly getting some scores shown to me ... I finally managed to check how much reality matched my dreams.

Tendulkar. A person who has managed to sway the emotions of millions of people for well over 2 decades. I think if ever there is someone closer to God, in terms of being a mass attracter, it would be him. And to justify my getting up early, he was playing amazingly well. The odd cheeky shot off the slip cordon, and then the flick to the midwicket boundary. But when I was watching the game, he played a shot which really stood out, mainly because, its both a rare and difficult shot to play. Unbelievable was the reaction - seeing it live.

Its truly like a 'leave the ball first and then play it over the stumps above the slip cordon and into the boundary'. Man, this shot was enough to tell the devil inside me that I did the right thing getting up. The case was closed and the verdict delivered.

I have never seen anyone else play this shot as cleanly as Tendulkar did and this is not the kind of shot you can play in most other cricket pitches in the world.

A rare pitch brings out a rarer stroke. Now thats a rare pair!!