Radheya's feet

Having recently re-watched all of B R Chopra's Mahabharat, I was fairly disappointed with this Doordarshan classic. The performances were wildly over the top, the chief culprits being Mukesh Khanna as the venerable Bhishma unabashedly channeling a very overdone Dilip Kumar, Puneet Issar with his tendency to break into wicked grins and thunderous laughter at every opportunity and Girija Shankar's Dhritarashtra cutting an even sorrier figure than you'd expect. But what bugged me more was that so much of the epic that has a lot of impact was left out of show.

I can understand some of the sideplots like Kachchha-Devayani being edited out, which though terribly interesting do not bear a direct relation to the central plot. But there were several details which added a lot of impact to the main storyline which find no place in the televised series. Yudhisthira's chariot touching the ground after he utters the half-lie, for instance was a defining moment in the build-up of the character of Dharmaraja.

There is another small bit during the game of dice which I have always loved. Draupadi is being humiliated in open court and even Yudhisthira, that most equanimous of men is seething with rage. At that moment his eyes fall on Karna's feet and he struck by the uncanny resemblance they bear to his own mother, Kunti's feet. This immediately calms him down, to his own surprise. It's a beautiful little detail in an otherwise sordid scene.  

Where I wax existential about the nature of Test cricket

I haven't written anything cricket in a while. India managed to beat Australia in 3 days and one session. Are we that good or is Australia that bad? And if things continue in the same vein in this series and we win four-zip, what does it prove? Is Australia as rubbish in playing in the sub-continent as India is playing on bouncy pitches with lateral movements? Or is it that the creaking terminators in the Indian team, all but one (he who I have taken a policy decision not to discuss) have been replaced by youth, energy and exuberance? 

Has Ravichandran Ashwin evolved since the drubbing down under or as he claimed back then that he didn't really have a dismal tour, he is doing pretty much the same thing, aside from having inherited something in the vicinity of Laxman's ghost when he plays a back-foot off drive ever since Laxman traded the whites for the blazer and the sublime strokeplay for awkward analysis? Does Australia have truly no replacements for Ponting, Hayden, Langer, McGrath, Lee, not to mention Warne or this generation merely needs to go through what teams (even the Australian ones) routinely did while touring India in the 90s? Can Murali Vijay bat on a seaming Mohali pitch, let alone at WACA or Wanderers?

In a cricket as in life, there are a few near certainties. Cheteshwar Pujara is clearly the cat's whiskers in the current crop young men wearing whites. He is not quite the new Rahul Dravid yet, for one he looks a bit like a snake and is nowhere as pretty nor is his strokeplay as ornate. His hook shot requires some work before he jets off to bouncier foreign shores. But two double hundreds and an average of close to 70 clearly indicate that he is going to be around in that No. 3 spot for some time to come. Ravindra Jadeja is still not much more than a hairdo on any pitch where a flat trajectory won't turn and jump like it does on Indian dustbowls. Plus triple hundreds in the Ranji notwithstanding, we are not convinced he can really bat at the Test level.