It’s definitely not a good time to be an Indian cricket fan.
We’re getting raped by a bunch of kangaroos that seem to be rediscovering their
ability to molest bigwigs. Earlier, the men in blue were beaten black and blue
by the Poms. The worst thing about being an Indian cricket fan is that, like
our politicians, we are so autocratic and arrogant and can’t think of turning
to another sport for comfort in times of bad weather in familiar terrain. Not
that we’ve been doing well in other sports.
The Indian cricketing team is not the only Indian sporting community
that seems to be bad at tests. The Indian weightlifters are worse; they are
horrible when it comes to tests, they seem to fail every time, especially dope
tests. And do we even have to discuss Indian hockey and tennis?
Unlike the typical Indian fan, I’m a little open minded. I
don’t mind looking elsewhere for a reason for entertainment, though I wasn’t
left with too many choices. I had to choose between the disastrous Indian
sports scenario and the Tamil film-world that seems to be experiencing a dull
period now (It becomes quite obvious when critics start raving about a Vijay
film). I chose neither and as I started ruminating about the possibility of
exploring other options that had never appealed to my mind till date, my eyes
started to lose the capacity to stay tuned to what was happening in front of
it.
The conductor woke me up and told me that the bus had
reached its destination, Poonamalee. Poovirunthaveli A.K.A Poonamalee is a
village on the outskirts of Chennai and I had to get down there to take a
connecting bus to Tiruninravur, my hometown. My mind found it tough to migrate
between the hazy thoughts that had breezed past it before it chose to turn off
and the busy and noisy surroundings that characterized the Poonamalee bus
stop. So it did what it was best at.
Going blank! It stayed in that state of ecstasy before a storm woke it up. A storm that woke us all up, all of us whose
minds were experiencing a state of blissful nothingness.
It was a scene straight out of a movie: a kudikaara,
kodumakaara purushan (a ruthless drunkard husband) walked up to a responsible
wife who was selling flowers to address her hunger and to sponsor her husband’s
drinking bouts and gave her a hard pat on her head and said,
Hubby (In an “I am cool, check me out” tone): Yei. Kaasedri.
(Hey you, gimme money)
Wife: *With a paavam look on her face, looked up, endured a
moment of eye contact with her hubby and went about her business again.*
Hubby (With a “How dare you ignore me, I am so cool” look on
his face): YEEEEIIII (The message was loud and clear) Kaasedrii.
Two things followed:
The busy, noisy bus stop went silent all of a sudden and a slap that
cannot be classified as hard or soft, landed on the wife’s cheek. The wife
stood her ground, seemingly unperturbed. The blow seemed to have obtruded more
damage on the stability of the inflictor than the inflicted, thanks to the
degree of alcohol in the inflictor’s blood.
The hero in me was wide awake by then. He wanted to do a
thousand things. Like for example, he wanted to call the police. But then it
could become too late or he could end up embarrassing himself as the incident
may eventually have a meek ending. He
wanted to negotiate with the drunkard but then some timely Gyaan from Swami
Sudarshananda saved him. “Drunkards are the second most idiotic bunch of people
on earth. The first are the bunch of people that try to negotiate with them”. He
wanted to interfere and settle scores with the drunkard for inflicting violence
on women, but then he had already lost trust in the journalists of his age. To
make their news story interesting, they could come up with something like, “Brash
youth lose life in a tiff over alcohol” or worse, “Angry, drunk husband kills
21-year-old for being involved in an illegitimate relationship with his wife”. The hero in me wasn’t afraid of dying, but he
was very philosophical and was certainly worried about “life after death” and
didn’t want his friends to wake up to such headlines!
The worst thing about death is that you will never be given an opportunity to prove people wrong after that.
The worst thing about death is that you will never be given an opportunity to prove people wrong after that.
But the mental chaos finally came to a halt and I put my
right foot forward hoping for the best when something happened; something that
brought the world around me to a standstill. The drunkard lifted his hand to
come down heavily on the woman once again when another force counter-acted at
the right instant to prevent the inevitable from happening. I never knew that
the paavam-looking poo vikkara(flower selling) woman had such a MAASSS side to
her. Or did she? But then, things were surely heating up.
The counter-acting force was strong enough to send the guy
down and there he was on the road, his eyes red with fury. His male ego had
taken a thrashing and he had to retaliate. He rose up and all hell was set to
break loose. He picked up momentum though it wasn’t uni-directional, thanks to
the alcohol in his blood again. He was
up and running with a definite plan. The woman seemed to be in mortal danger
and there I was, my mind blank as usual! But then, I am talking in terms of
reaction time tuned to the order of seconds, so even Jonty Rhodes in my
position wouldn’t have been able to do much.
As the guy rose his hand up once more, the woman landed a quite
a hard punch on the man’s tummy. Yep, you read it right, HEROINE INTRO!!!
TWISTU!! After that, it became a bit too
violent for my liking. The game entered the Kolaveri mode; the woman probably
forgot the fact that the guy she was beating up was her husband. One more kuthu
on his tummy and then she made him bend down and gave him three more on his
back and he finally got the ultimate strike on his cheeks. Down and out.
Poonamallee was busy again, people went about their businesses and rightly so.
I wanted to go ahead and congratulate the woman but a second thought helped me
stay back. I realized that I was on the verge of congratulating a woman who had
beaten up her husband, though he was a drunken Baskar(That is not his name. I
chose that name because my mom advised me not to use expletives on the
internet).
I wasn’t able to conceal my adulation towards the explicit “heroineism”
on display but could do nothing but contain my outrageous wish to congratulate
her for the same. Once the initial shock left my brain, I started laughing like
an idiot. And once I stopped laughing, I realized something. I realized the
fact that I had been celebrating reel-life heroes who had landed punches on
drunkards on screen all my life and was laughing when a woman did the same in
real life. I wondered how idiotic it would be if a woman replaced all mass
heroes on screen and for a second, I questioned the rationale behind men doing
it. I realized that both the drunkard
and I were dealing with the same problem- MALE EGO. I realized that I had to
stop celebrating heroes who were possibly celebrating the biggest flaw in my
system; and in that of drunkard’s too. I realized that women were capable of
defending themselves and that they don’t always need a hero to rescue them. The
hero in me had been beaten black and blue too, like team India, my male ego and
the helpless dude on the floor.
Finally, I realized that I had experienced the truest form
of admiration towards a person belonging to the opposite sex. I realized that
my school boy notions about my dream girl were untrue and was grateful to the
universe for letting me wake up to the truth. I am most likely to fall in love
with a person like the woman I saw in the Poonamallee bus stop that day; a
woman who shatters my male ego and manages to do that consistently to
eventually make me realize that this is a planet that houses equals, afterall.
But the most important realization of the day was this: I
had finally got my share of entertainment; from a highly unlikely source
though!
The incident also brought to my mind a beautifully written
song from Mouna ragam:
naan pennaanadhu kalyaanam
thaedavaa
oa kannaalan vandhu poomaalai
poadavaa
ae ammaadiyoa pen paarkkum naadagam
yaar vandhaalumenna thirumbaadhu
njabagam
poovilangu thaevaiyillaiyae
