India's T20 Team Selector

The job of being a selector of Indian Cricket Teams is no longer an honorary role. I don't know if fans, with little cricketing history can apply for the job, but here's my application for the same.

So here's my 15 for the T20 world cup in West Indies:

Sehwag
Gambhir
Raina
Dhoni(C)
Yuvraj
Yusuf
Irfan
Jadeja
Praveen
Bhajji
Zaheer
Vinay Kumar
Manish Pandey
Uthappa
Dinesh Karthik

If Gambhir, Yuvraj and Dhoni are unfit, then the best replacements on form are Pandey, Uthappa and Karthik. I'd actually want to pick SS Tiwari actually, but I guess Uthappa beats him purely because of prior international experience.

A Friday in the life of a Copywriter

1.Park yourself on your comfortable chair, in front of your system

2.Read a magazine or a book lying on your inspiring work-desk(the more untidy the table, the better)

3.Log into gtalk, facebook, twitter, youtube, wikipedia, cricinfo, stumbleupon, and the rest

4.Carefully go through all your mailing lists, forwards and the works

5.Sign into your office id, go through your joblist

6.Attend the first briefing session of the day, completely geared up with clip board, paper and pen

7.End the session with, “we’ll get back to you after we’ve thoroughly understood the problem.”

8.Get back to your browsing. Bookmark or note down all the interesting stuff

9.Sit with your creative partner (Art Directors and Copywriters)

10.Discuss the movie you watched last night

11.Decide to discuss the brief over a game of pool or PS2

12.Discuss a great new ad that you watched on youtube

13.Decide to discuss this brief over a cup of coffee

14.Discuss our collective social lives, or the lack of it

15.Decide to discuss the brief in an isolated room (conference room for instance)

16.Discuss your personal lives, and try to figure how different it is from your professional ones

17.Decide to carry on this discussion over lunch

18.Discuss your love lives in brief, or most likely your brief but futile attempts of having one

19.Decide to carry on this discussion over a smoke

20.Discuss the new bar in town, and how you should head there to celebrate a great idea

21.Decide to shoot yourselves in the foot by asking the Creative Director for more time, but put all your feet in your respective mouths instead

22.Decide to work more seriously, and sit with a pile of advertising books

23.Decide to work separately, and start chatting online with greater intensity

24.Read the brief again carefully, and call the Account Executive

25.Give him/her an earful for a brief that had as interesting as the life-cycle of a goldfish

26.Stare at the wall and ceiling, looking for ideas

27.Carefully read some of the product’s technical manual, with a hope of finding ideas

28.Peruse a telephone directory, searching for ideas

29.Read the latest Chacha Choudary, for some inspiration to get the brain cells to work like a 486

30.Draw a few scribbles, write a few lines and go have a look at the Art Director’s progress

31.After shrugging shoulders and patting backs, get back to the system

32.Indulge in favourite creative exercise, coming up with a new FB status message

33.After success in step 32, indulge some more and write a new blog entry

34.Oh Hell, what do you know? It’s dinner time already. So go to the new bar in town to mourn the loss of another Friday night

35.Get back to work

36.Have a serious meeting at 12:30 am, where it is decided that you sleep over the brief

37.Update joblist, and head back home

38.Come to office at 11 am, Saturday morning

39. Repeat step 2-5

40.Encounter the Accounts Executive and remind him that, unlike his job, the creative job is not a postman’s job. Delivery times need more flexibility

41.Repeat step 8-16

42.Finally come up with an idea when repeating step 17

43.Build on the idea while performing step 18-20

44.Head back to the system with new found confidence, and start playing Mafia Wars

45.Write down some copy while revisiting the previous days crossword

46.Sit with Art Director and look for references, while repeating 12-13

47.Art Director works on the layout while you write copy

48.It’s time for dinner, and this time you decide to celebrate a good idea (which may possibly get shot down by your CD, his client, or even his grandmother) with a drink. If you’ve come from Step 51, then it's probably late, so settle for the Pepsi in your office fridge

49. 11pm on a Saturday night, sigh! Get back to business

50. Go back to step 47

51. It's 2 am. Art director gets a new idea. You get excited. Go back to step 46

52. It’s possibly 5 am Sunday morning. You decide to sleep over the brief, but this time, literally

53. 9am, you wake up wondering what just hit you? It’s the Art director who’s finally done. Decide to head back home to enjoy whatever is left of the weekend. And pray that next friday, you can simply perform step 1-5 and end the day with step 37. High Hopes!

Conversations in Rhyme part 2

Small Wonder and I tried to get it started once more, but our attempt, very aptly, remained a small wonder.

S: Oh! how much do i miss,
Our conversations in rhyme,
But cant we try those now?
It takes neither skill nor time.

F: I simply beg to differ
I'm not as good as you!
It takes quite an effort
to write a line or two!

S: Your modesty I see,
To reply in rhyme,
In just a day,as I say,
It took you no time.

It ain't me, babe.

There was a time when I dreamt of writing for Rolling Stone. Those were years of innocence; of confidence in your own abilities, and of believing that the world has faith in you. But that little shining bubble of mine vanished the minute I heard this prick of a song -

You might be a rock 'n' roll addict prancing on the stage,
You might have drugs at your command,
Women in a cage,
You may be a business man or some high degree thief,
They may call you Doctor or they may call you Chief

But you're gonna have to serve somebody,

That's the kind of influence Dylan exercised on his fans. He'd make you believe in life with one song and then present a complete volt face with the next one. Lift your spirits with one song and then play turncoat while talking about it. Talk about being a two-faced Gemini.

And how many deaths will it take till we know,
that too many people have died?

The answer my friend is blowing in the wind,
the answer is blowing in the wind.



It supposedly took Dylan about 10 minutes to write this one. He put words to the melody of an old slave song called No More Auction Block. The following evening, Dylan took the song to a nightclub in Greenwich Village, where he was due to play a set. Before playing it, he announced, "This here ain't no protest song or anything like that, 'cause I don't write no protest songs."
This was getting caught off-guard of Everestine proportions. Very much like computer teachers in the 90s, when they demonstrated the use of the internet and keyed in www.whitehouse.com

So long, honey babe
Where I'm bound, I can't tell
Goodbye's too good a word, babe
So I'll just say fare thee well
I ain't saying you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don't mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
But don't think twice, it's all right.

And here's what the man had to say, "A lot of people make it sort of a love song - slow and easygoing. But it isn't a love song. It's a statement that maybe you can say something to make yourself feel better. It's as if you were talking to yourself."
It sure made me feel like I was on the top of the world, just after getting dumped.


She takes just like a woman, yes, she does
She makes love just like a woman, yes, she does
And she aches just like a woman
But she breaks just like a little girl

This song sent women's groups on a critical overdrive, because of its disparaging lyrics. I wonder if he tried to point out the difference in being old enough to have a child, and being old enough to be a mother.

I believe no other artist had garnered as much fame in denial, as Dylan had. When he was knighted the king of rock, he quietly turned to country. When they believed he was the voice of the anti-establishment movement, he let big establishments use his his music for commercials. Without his influence, the Beatles would probably have been held in as much regard now, as Backstreet Boys will 30 years from now. And yet, he chose not to speak of those days in his memoirs, like Bill Clinton would in a Cigar Convention.

I guess it takes a Bob Dylan to be what everybody dreams of becoming, and turn astray. To get his fans swear by him, only to betray later. To put it in his style of denial, if he hadn't believed in himself, Bob Dylan would've been an atheist.


Who will promise never to part,
Someone to close his eyes for you,
Someone to close his heart,
Someone who will die for you an' more,
But it ain't me, babe,
No, no, no, it ain't me, babe,
It ain't me you're lookin' for, babe.

What do you name your child?

I believe Brian Lara named his child Sydney, because he scored his first century(277) at Sydney. I wonder if Sehwag would name his daughter Bloemfontein or his son Multan for similar reasons. Or can you imagine a Faisalabad Singh Dhoni? Or a Chennai Sachin Tendulkar.

Now that brings me to my own kids, when I have the honour of Christening them. Should I name them after my Favourite Holiday spots? Blair Pai sounds good, after Port Blair. And then come Hampi Pai, Gokarna Pai, Palolem Pai, Pondi Pai. But why only after Indian Places? Taipei Pai sounds interesting. Or Fremantle Pai. La Paz Pai sounds uber-cool. Wont say the same about Harare Pai. Or Timbuktoo Pai. My kid would surely disown me if he were named Addis Ababa Pai.

Probably I should name them after my favourite authours or books. Somerset Pai? Holden Pai? Moriarty Pai? Corleone Pai (as opposed to Zynga Pai)? Joseph K. Pai? Jerome K. Pai? Harper Lee Pai? Alan Moore Pai? Actually Osamu Tezuka Pai sounds perrfect!

That does it. It's either Osamu Tezuka Pai, or it's Calvin Pai (of Calvin and Hobbes, not Klein.)

A banker's life.