Nolte soccer

It is great to be playing soccer again out in the sun. It's that same field as last summer - Nolte Center, which isn't supposed to be a field exactly. This field has two huge triangular sections of a rectangle separated at it's diagonal by a broad patch of concrete for people to walk on. Ok you can say that the triangular patches are just two sections of lawn we play on and nobody at the University cares. I tore my ACL in this very field last year trying to play a ball from the right flank to absolutely no one in the box. All my efforts of running after a poor ball went to waste plus I got myself injured. This year I am happy to be competing at the same physical level as the others. I am not a forward anymore it's a boring position to play soccer. I love playing central midfield and I know almost everything about what to do at the position although I can do only 20 -30% of the job. It's a place where you can spot your players and the opponents. Envision and execute some top notch passes or guess your opponents movements and try to stop them. I am a good passer I think and I can run well and get free. But I am not as good as the others at dribbling and I am so so with tackling. I try to make up for it by combining with someone while attacking. I think I have a good understanding with Karthik who I think is good naturally as a winger. Shyam is a menace, he's an awesome dribbler and it's difficult to win a ball against him. I shouldered him several times and won the ball about once or twice. I thought he was being nice to me since he knows about my injury. Although I hate that attitude towards me I have to admit that I am not a pro player and I have other things to take care of. Shyam keeps a cool head in not getting provoked by my physical style and makes sure he doesn't hurt any one. Prashanth likes to stick to the ball and holds it for a long time and waits for a player to make a run. I hate it when he shows his back to me, I haven't figured how to get the ball off him when he does that. Raghu is a good player and very relaxed in his approach. He is very experienced and can make good use of a mistake by the opponent. Vardi is a natural sportsman, he understands team games superbly and is a basketball player from college. Although he doesn't follow soccer he has the ability to adapt to the game. He is famous for his clumsy dances with the ball, but he's a very good team player. KC is the player I miss, he's off to California for good, but playing soccer with him was immense fun, a very passionate player who doesn't like to lose. He's a skilled forward but lacks heavily in stamina. He creates problems in small pitches. Soccer makes me happy and feel young. It's the best form of work-out according to me. Nothing gets me excited as much as soccer does. I am really looking forward to our game today!

Just Smile!

I recently visited my friend in Ann Arbor, Michigan. On the day I left Minneapolis I was kind of tired and a bit sullen. I finished checking in my luggage at the Airport and I was at the gate 1/2 hour before boarding. Just to make sure everything was ok I went up to the desk at the gate and asked "Am I all set to go. Do I have to do anything?". The guy replied "Just Smile!". It conjured up a smile in my face as if it were some sort of a magic trick or hypnosis since I kind of got instructions as to how much I can smile by looking at his suggestive face. Whatever that was, I was in a very good mood that day and it made a wealth of a difference to me. Thank you gate guy!

Crying - Physically challenged - Television

Laughter is the best medicine. Let me tell you.. tears are equally good. A friend of mine tells me she cries for no reason at all some times and it helps her to feel better. Well.. that might be a bit weird, but the point is that crying helps. Whatever the reason may be,I have this new found love for crying. Laughing makes you feel happy, crying makes you feel good... sometimes crying makes you feel better. Living all by yourself without your loved ones around is a strange experience. You feel that something is wrong but it's hard to understand what that is. Sometimes all you need is someone to ask you "What's wrong?". I am not creating sympathy here but I wish to analyze my emotions in a not so emotional fashion. When you miss home you don't exactly know what you miss about it. When you are sad, you rarely know what exactly you desire to make you feel better. Sometimes all it takes is to fool the system with a few tears. You share your sorrows with a friend... how does it make the situation any different?; but you often feel better, relieved or supported. Crying is similar... it's a drug. However it needs a trigger and it's not easy to cry. People who often cry are experts with this trigger. People who don't cry often can't cry because they don't know how.

I found this Japanese Series on stage6 called "1 litre of tears". I started watching this initially because I thought the girl in the lead role was too cute and also due to my recent craze for the Japanese language. But as the name suggests it is a very good tear trigger. I am so in love with the quality of this series, the acting, the background score and the direction and it has a very touching story. It is about a girl who suffers from spinocerebral ataxia by which she loses all her physical faculties slowly. Her slow degeneration from the age of 15 till she dies at 25 is well portrayed with the highlight on the difficulties she faces in the society and the hardship she faces in realizing herself that she's not the "normal" person in school anymore. This is based on the diary of Aya Ikeuchi, originally intended to inform her doctor about the progress of the disease. This kind of a series in my view is definitely a good way to bring about awareness in the media about physically challenged people. It makes one understand things about disabled people we would normally otherwise not think about. I injured my knee last year this time and I had to undergo surgery to fix it. I was so to say "handicapped" for a few months deprived of my very basic physical activities like running. It took me 3 months to get my walk proper. I am not saying I am in a better position to understand the disabled but I know what it feels like to see people around you walking 3 miles to downtown to watch a movie or playing in a sunday league soccer tournament. I can understand what frustration is. I wonder what I would have done without my friends who always made sure my spirits were high. They even agreed not to give me my birthday bums :). So I could relate to this story where Aya Ikeuchi talks about how her friends made her life less miserable. Once she says "Just being alive is a lovely and wonderful thing". Very true, isn't it? People keep talking about luck and fortune these days... I ask how greedy can one get? Anyways I seriously recommend "1 litre of tears" to our Indian housewives and nannies if they are really fond of crying. It is much more meaningful than our commercial soap operas. Cry for the good I say!

School days

Reminiscing one's past can be such a great pastime as I discovered a few days back, lying on my bed after a good meal, recalling my good old school days. Most of the memories that i managed to recollect were unimportant and inconsequential, like the one time I pulled off an absolutely splendid catch standing at point (which was followed by wild celebrations), only to find that it was a no-ball, and the time my report card read that I received first rank to my disbelief only to realise that my class teacher had made an gross mistake at calculating the sum and so on. A couple of funny incidents popped which I felt worth sharing.
One incident that I remembered happened at the time my class ten board results were announced. Back then, I was good at all subjects except English. I used to narrowly scrap a pass and anything close to 60 was a reason to celebrate. Somehow I never developed a liking to the language which was worsened by the attitude of my english teacher. According to her, I was an "INCORRIGIBLE CHAP" who could not string together two words even to greet someone(I never used to greet her 'Hari Om'/'Good Morning', she misunderstood it to be the result of my supposedly thickskinned nature, but I can assure you that I was deliberately rebellious). She was true, I was beyond repair as far as her subject was concerned, even I had given up. Coming back to the incident, when the results were put up, to everyone's surprise/shock (including mine) I had topped English. (This was something unexpected, perhaps evidence to the existence of 'the supernatural', although it was something I didnt want, I would have happily exchanged the same marks with the ones i scored in math or science.) But it had its worth, I did not see my teacher until the Annual Day when I received a book in recognition of my performance, and when my teacher approached to congratulate me, once again I did not put together more than two words. Had she been over 50, I bet she would have had a heart attack. I imagine her having epileptic seizures that night and losing the ability to have orgasms henceforth. (Dont judge me by these words, I had suffered under her regime for four years, besides the hate was mutual).
Another incident that makes me laugh until my stomach aches happened when I was in eighth. That was the time guys started learning some of the unmentionable words(the 'f' word for example). We used to develop aliases for these, for public use would mean swift and severe retribution. (I was caught once for using them but was let off lightly, I had to chant 'Hanuman Chalisa' eleven times for 21 days, for the first time in my life i was happy to be in a religion oriented school) Interestingly, the girls too had some code worded abuses. Any disagreement involving a girl and a boy used to be followed by exchange of these 'abuses'. Neither group knew what the opposite party's code words meant. One boy in our class was so curious to know what the girls' code meant, that he went and offered an gentlemanly proposition to a couple of girls, 'i will tell you what my code means and you tell me what yours mean'. The girls agreed to this offer but asked the boy to volunteer first. I can tell you it was a big mistake, the initial excitement at knowing the boys' code was quickly shadowed by the realisation that they were being subjected to some of the most offensive slurs. I will not mention the guys' abuses to avoid censorship, but the JIM's and GEM's, the most lethal weapons in the girls' abuse armoury turned out to be 'Jayalalitha In Miniature' and 'Ginger Eating Monkey'. (Between I wasnt the one who leaked the code, I have already explained my 'condition' whenever i get within five feet of any woman in one of the previous blogs, although i will admit that I was curious to know what their code meant.)

It remains a mystery as to why of all the incidents I remembered these. But I bet each one of you can think of such silly anecdotes when you are lying after a good meal.

Kay-K

P.S
And by the way the blog url has changed to fantasticbore.blogspot.com, which obviously is yet another useless piece of information that I am puking all over you, for you wouldnt be reading this if you didnt know the change.

What I redeemed from the Shawshank redemption ?

Case 1 :

Well, You occasionally get to watch a movie which hits you so hard in your mind, that makes your blood to rush at the speed of light.U feel u would have the handled the situation much better than that dumbo (the hero).U wish to do something unbelievable,something so adventurous that the whole world will stand up and celebrate you.... But then...wait a moment.... You have a nice deep slumber, wake up fresh next day and u dont even realise that u had such amazing thoughts running in your mind just less than 12 hours back. You are that same old jack-ass, no different from the one that you were yesterday.

Case 2 :

You have never heard of that movie, it lies in your PC for months unwatched, it just got copied to your hard-disk along with other junk movies.... and one day u feel so bored, so alone, and very very jobless that u put this stuff...the movie goes on...but you dont imagine yourself as the hero and you dont run your own movie in your mind.. u just watch it... the movie ends.... it was a happy ending, but still u heart feels so heavy... u cant realise that movie has ended and the movie's starcast is scrolling up, but u keep staring at the screen as if the movie has just begun.

But then again...wait a moment.... You have a nice deep slumber, wake up fresh next day and u still feel heavy... even though u didnt have any amazing thoughts or adventurous dreams running in your mind last night.

Days pass by, months pass by, but every now and then, u start relating things happening in your everyday-life with some scene or dialogue of that movie. u have never seen that "everyday happening thing " in this point of view ever before...

And that was how your outlook changed without u realising it...
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FYI,This is not a CASE study of movie watching... its my crude classification of all the movies i've seen till date. all the other movies in my movie portfolio which does fall under class 1 or class 2 come under a single section named- " CRAP OR BULLSHIT OR BOTH ".

I can put a hell lot examples for case 1 , but a notable one and a one which I can recollect right now is a hindi movie of the recent past.

Its called "Lakshya".

The hero turns from this rich and ruined asshole to a war hero saving the nation's pride in less than three hours...but the movie is awesome.... still one of my favourite flicks... For my childhood dream of becoming a pilot in the Indian Air Force, the movie was more than perfect to make my nerves taut. I had watched it over and over six or seven times, but alas i couldnt help it falling into class 1.

There are very few examples that i can put forward for case 2.

The best one would be "The Shawshank redemption", the one that the world thinks is the second best ever ( source : http://www.imdb.com/ ).

I dont want to ( in fact, I can't) give out a review here, no words are worth explaining it, you got to watch it to realise it. but there are things told in this movie which sticks to your heart so closely, that it gets binded with your character and changes the way the look at things.

View count?
I really dont have a count of how many times I've watched it

Story?
Smart banker Andy gets a life imprisonment in Shawshank jail for supposedly murdering his adulterous wife. makes a good friend "Red" in the jail, perhaps the only guy he trusts and vice versa, does all the tax paper work for jail officers, stays there for almost 20 years before breaking the jail and escaping the invincible prison.

As simple as that...

But when movie ends, u will understand the near perfect meaning of "what is hope?" if weren't already aware of, and what it means to any individual...

Some sample excerpts...

In the end, Andy says to Red "... hope is a good thing, its indeed the best of all things..."

and why? Andy digs through the prison wall for twenty years with a small rockhammer kept hidden in his bible. He just hoped he would reach the other side of the wall some day, he hoped he would be a free man someday, He didnt lose hope even though that "someday" came twenty years later...

"You get institutionalized with these (prison) walls...

First, u hate them..

Then, u get used to them..

In the end, u start depending on them so much that u can't leave them.."

what is it to get institutionalized?

Brookes, the librarian of the shawshank jail gets released from prison after fifty years imprisonment on goodwill. He was such a respected and educated guy in that prison. Man comes out and realises that he just doesnt fit anywhere in the society. Commits Suicide!

Every single scene and dialogue in the movie that makes so much sense, maybe not right away but when we face new things in life.

Whenever I feel I have redeemed enough from the movie, I watch it one more time jus to realise that its just the beginning of my redemption...

If u think all this is such a bullshit and so should the movie also be, do watch the movie once and come back to read this again...

Strange Decisions

Steve McLaren seems to have brought the English team to good shape by recalling Beckham. Beckham proved his critics wrong and he has raised the question whether he should have been dropped in the first place after the world cup disaster. It's true that football is a team game and victory/loss is a result of collective team effort. But the English football association and the media are very fond of making some of their players scapegoats for the lack of results. The blame for the loss is often taken by an individual and not the team as a whole. However the return of Beckham has it's good and bad. The good : There's no doubt now as to where Gerrard should play - Central Midfield. The combination of Gerrard and Lamps proved great vs Brazil and Estonia. But the problem however is that Beckham doesn't make runs which means the right back should be a good wing back. Gary Neville is decent but England seems to miss someone like Dani Alves or Philip Lahm. Jamie Carragher used to be right back and he replaced the injured Neville vs Brazil but it was clear that he doesn't fit that role anymore having played as a center back for quite a while now. But Rio's injury means Jamie can play as center back. Steve McLaren made the right decision of playing wes brown instead of carra vs estonia but why did he play king and not carra as center back. Is it because he's well built? According to me it's a strange decision since carra has played and shined against the best attackers in europe. The recent show against Ac Milan in the final of the champions league is a good testimonial by itself. I hope McLaren plays Carra against the good teams if Rio doesn't play in the future. England now look good to take on the big sides of europe next year. But elsewhere Germany, Norway and Sweden had thumping wins against San Marino, Hungary and Iceland. Looking forward to Austria-Switzerland!


--Guru