Dhimant Chovatia

Cricket they say is a game of great uncertainties. No one would believe this more than people of two nations united by one tournament called the IPL. When it all began on 18 th of April, something told me that Royal Challengers will reach the final with Rajasthan Royals. While I had to get a lot of flack for not supporting according to me ‘hyped team’ of Deccan Chargers, I was sure they did not have the potential even to win this tourney.   Alas! The first sentence of this post proved right! But why did I not have the faith in Chargers? Well strictly personal opinion, but I still don’t see them as “MY HYDERBAD” team. All that aside, from number 8 to number one has been a story that I can put only in one single phrase… DREAM RUN.   From Hyderabad heroes being the champs of ICL 1 to Deccan being the last team of IPL 1, life for a Hyderabad cricket fan went one more full circle. As Gilly and boys prepare come back “home”, there is a buzz around the city. Go Chargers, Go Chargers,...

Kutta ko le gayi bilayi, simh charave gaayee re! Saat ajubo se badhkar yeh prajatantra hai bhai re! – Baba Satya Narayan Mourya (The cat has taken the dog away and the lion is grazing the cows! Really the Democracy is above the  Seven Wonders of the World ) What is the need for someone like me to call Democracy in  India  a wonder? If you ponder over this heading for a minute or two before reading further, you might get 10 reasons of your own to believe so. I have made an observation which goes a little further than the so called “common man” might want to think sometimes. Imagine the following scenario: Disclaimer: The following paragraphs feature an imaginary story and therefore bear no resemblance with any situation in real life. This is a story of Mohammed D’Souza who belongs to a minority community in  Warangal  town of Andhra . Read in his words. I am a first time voter and am very enthusiastic about being able to make a contribution to government formation this time around. I ha...

Impossible! That was the first word I heard when I presented the idea of a two party presidential form of Democracy to a friend. But when I sit down and think of what is happening in the country with more that 100 parties with those many agendas and 4 coalitions at the centre and countless at the state level, chaos is the only word that comes to mind. Horse Trading, Conditional Supports, Stalling of development, multiple ideologies working in different directions, money laundering and what not. A coalition government has been and seemed to have been involved in all this and much more. If a government gets elected on its manifesto and forms a coalition, there is no guarantee it will abide the same. Common Minimum Programs are more of vote bank politics and less of development agenda. Everyone should be happy! A good mantra if applied to a common man but a bad shastra if applied to political parties. Prajatantra me neta janta ka sevak kahelata hai, janata ka man janata ko raja kahkar ...

There may have been more than thousand experiments that would have made a common man go “WOW” and then were dead within no time. But there are some real good ones that see the light of the day and then go on to make a difference in the life of thousands. Indian Cricket League, which started as an experiment, or as an alternative to the mainstream cricket in India, has not made it long enough to see the light of a second season. For once this is a proof enough for the popularity of this so called rebel league. Since the last time a ball was bowled in the ICL, there have been a lot of changes in the cricket fraternity in general and people’s attitude towards ICL in particular. T20 cricket has taken over from other forms of cricket so much so that the poor ODI format has suffered like anything. A lot of national teams have practically let their players represent T20 leagues than appear for national duty. This says a lot about what the global fraternity thinks of the game’s latest format...

Monday, 2nd June 2008 (it was supposed to be 1st June but the whole thing ended close to morning), saw the end of an amazingly well fought match between the Rajasthan Royals and the Chennai Superkings marking the end of Indian Premier League. The whole of India must have been glued to their TV sets to watch the epic end. Since then I have read hoards of articles and heard unending talk shows as to what IPL meant to India and its role in blossoming India’s future in cricket. Most of them forget one thing. There would not have been any IPL if the ICL was not born. I personally think IPL owes a lot, and more to Mr. Chandra. There have been comparisons between the two leagues and the IPL has won hands down in all. Be it the TRP’s, or revenues for the teams, crowd support, star appeal or just the way the tournament has been conducted. The IPL has overtaken the ICL in all those departments. But if you are someone who likes to know how cricket is benefited overall, read on. Thanks to the maxi...

Thank goodness… it is finally over. Well, that’s what each and every Hyderabadi present at the Visaka Cricket Ground felt at about 11:30pm on 27th may. The very troubled run of IPL’s Hyderabad representation called Deccan Chargers got over with playing cricket this season. Yes, as usual they lost one more, and there I had a new slogan courtesy two friends of mine. It goes like… One and Two and Three and Four… Deccan Chargers are No more… While the first half is patented to my pen pal (keyboard pal would be apt for this age), Sunny Khandelwal, another friend of mine Robin Cornelius, who works for the Indian Multinational, added the latter half describing the true emotion a cricket fan in Hyderabad went through that night. While we shrugged it off saying a bad season, 12 losses out of 14 attempts was not as easy as a Hyderabadi light lelo yarron, for people who were a part of it. The fact that Adam ‘Churchie’ Glichrist actually apologized to the cheering crowd talks about how the guys in...

One and Two and Three and Four, Deccan Chargers Give us more … As the voice of Sunny Khandelwal (I think it was him… not too sure though) rocked the Visakha Cricket Stadium (now called the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium thanks to the rulers of our nation), standing on the third floor of the Shivlal Yadav Pavilion, wearing a pink colored access card, I was wondering how much more to expect from this “Technically the Best Team in the IPL”? The loss at Kolkata was fresh in my mind. Though the newspaper run by the franchisee of Deccan Chargers screamed and shouted that it was the pitch and the lights and the umpires that did us in at Kolkata, I was sure that the KnightRiders batted on the same strip. A loss after all was a loss and had to be faced. As the Deccan Chargers (I will call them DC now… The franchisee will be really happy with that), practiced in front of about 10,000 people in the stadium (the capacity is about 39000 and growing everyday… They are on an expansion spree), a...