The Dawn of SRK

61

As the sinister laugh of the sadistic Don hit the surround sound at Inox multiplex theatre in Bombay last Friday night, at the end of 17 reels of high octane adventure, the casual disdain in that majestic, cocky mocking laugh carried the sarcastic twinge which only an imperial monarch can naturally summon. Farhan Akhtar's remake of the Amitabh Bachchan popular entertainer of the late 70s (I refuse to call it a classic and all the other exaggerated eulogies) is pure undiluted entertainment, a modern-day rehash in a contemporary format of the yesteryear thriller. It also marks the fire-cracker coronation of perhaps Indian cinema's last true-blue superstar, Shah Rukh Khan. The film reviews have been expectedly unkind; after all it is politically correct to state that the original is sacrosanct, and diplomatically appropriate to state that Amitabh Bachchan is simply incomparable. On both counts, however, the new avatar strikes a....

The Ghost Who Walks

4

The murky, mysterious days of furtive speculation on match-fixing in cricket, like the perennial Phantom on a white horse, is back. It took two totally unrelated events as segregated as PM Manmohan Singh's blue turban and George Fernandes's moment in the October sun as the Messiah of the Missile, to bring back some not so chewing-gum memories of cricket's somber days of awful corruption. Bald-pated mercurial opener Herschelle Gibbs, after several botched tours of India, at last summoned courage to face up to Delhi police inquisition on the Hansie Cronje bribery case of Y 2000, which had resulted in the game being brought close to a catastrophic collapse, like the Titanic. Since there were several South African players who had been made the rather magnanimous offer, it seems extremely peculiar as to why this major hullabaloo on Gibbs alone (I know he is still playing international cricket unlike....

Hesh and Lee can mesh

7

At the end of a super-week of outstanding tennis at the Kingfisher Open, as we braved exasperating rain interventions, and a strangely listless Bombay crowd, it was India’s Davis Cupper from time immemorial and Grand Slam winner of several tournaments, Mahesh Bhupathi, who really dropped a Hiroshima. Rounding off his doubles victory with Croatian Mario Ancic, a second successive doubles ATP title following the China Open, Bhupathi stated to a stunned nation of sports lovers that he would probably never play for India again. Reason; his old partner, now turned formidable foe across the net Leander Paes has categorically refused to play with him in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Understandably peeved and clearly despondent, Mahesh has thrown in the towel to representing his country again. I have had the enormous luck of playing doubles with Leander, both as an affable, extremely patient partner and a....