Quick Gun Murugan

Wokay. Mind it! This is not a movie. It is a 90 second ad film stretched out over 90 minutes. But once you are in an undemanding frame of mind that is willing to forgive that flaw, a frame of mind that comes naturally on long-haul flights, Quick Gun Murugan is good, clean fun.

The best thing about Quick Gun Murugan always was his style. The razor thin moustache, the comfortable paunch, the artfully arranged forelock, the green shirt, the large cooling glasses, the panache with which he lights a cigarette, his gallantry with the lovely ladies, his comfort in his own skin...Quick Gun Murugan is the style-god incarnate. All this came through in the 90 second adverts. What the 90 minute movie offers is space to elaborate on this style, and the movie uses this space well.

We find out about QGM's brother, a Grade II government employee who lives in Matunga and shares his cowboy style. QGM's lady love turns out to be a former Bulbul (Brownie) scout who resides in his love-locket and harangues him into staying on the straight, narrow and upwardly mobile. Mango Dolly, a gangster's moll with a heart of gold and a wig to match, does an item number for Quick Gun. He wonders how a nice girl from a good family wound up doing item numbers, and suggests, in all sincerity, that Mango Dolly's work is also a form of worship for the goddess Saraswati.

The plot? Quick Gun is a cowboy. He is also a vegetarian. His duty as a vegetarian cowboy is to save cows, not to kill them. And so the movie is about Quick Gun's battle with his evil nemesis Rice Plate Reddy, who want to make the world non-vegetarian.

Tripping on this cowboy's vegetarianism is not a bad gag. But it is a gag, not a plot. Nobody watching the movie is going to care about whether Quick Gun succeeds in his vegetarian quest. Sure, the point of the movie is to parody a style, not to reveal character or elicit empathy. But couldn't they have tried just a little bit harder? Or less hard, hence giving less screen time to Rice Plate Reddy and his boring flunkeys?

So sit back, relax and get set for an evening with Quick Gun Murugan, my beloved brethren, fortified with a tumbler of whisky and a masala dosa, and you will be the yenjaay! You might even cast a vote in favour of our won and wonley revolutionary leader, புறட்சி தலைவர் Dr. MG Ramachandran.

Wicked

"That's wicked! Really wicked! Thank you man. Thank you. Wicked!"

Thus spake a man-on-the-street. He wore workman's overalls. He spoke into his cell phone, excitedly, animatedly. I overheard him as I walked to Pret to pick up lunch, and thought it odd that a word that once meant bad has come to mean good. Ours is a topsy-turvy world, a world without roots or moral anchors. A sign, perhaps, that the common people can no longer tell good from bad? A sign, perhaps, of civilizational decline?

It turns out that the word wicked is derived from wicca, or witchcraft. Wicked came to mean evil in a specific medieval context, when witches were burnt at the stake for pagan or occult spiritual practices, even in supposedly secular America, which must count as one of the most horrifying traditions of religious persecution in history.

My Enid Blyton reading daughter instinctively knew this etymology. When I asked her what exactly wicked meant, the first word she associated with it was wizard. Wicked, wizard and smashing can be used interchangably to describe The Famous Five's sumptuous teas.

Wicked's reinstatement into modern English as a stylish, ironic synonym for very good has impeccable antecedents. F Scott Fitzgerald was the first modern writer to use the word in this context. This has since become common usage in both New England and Old England. Though if the global appeal of the Twilight movies, Harry Potter and even classic pop hits like "You can do magic" are anything to go by, understanding the roots of wicked will actually give the word more currency. Go wicked.

Test Cricket at Brabourne

It is great to see test cricket at Brabourne Stadium in Bombay. Not just because of Sehwag's 293, or India attaining the world #1 ranking, but for its political resonance.

Brabourne stadium represents a part of India's culture and cricketing heritage that deserves to be celebrated and brought back into the mainstream. It was built by the Cricket Club of India (CCI) in 1936, to be "India's Lord's". For my money, it is a more beautiful and charismatic cricket venue than Lord's.

The CCI website tells me of one of the founding myths of Brabourne. The Maharaja of Patiala, one of the great patrons of cricket in pre-independence India, went to the Gymkhana to watch a game. He was not allowed to sit with the white skinned Europeans, and was sent to the native enclosure. Hurt, and perhaps inspired by Jamshetji Tata's hotel that stands half a mile from the Bombay Gymkhana, he swore to create a great cricket club where such segregation did not exist. He went on to build the Cricket Club of India. He saw no contradiction in naming this great new stadium after Lord Brabourne, then the British governor of Bombay Presidency.

At the time, the dominant political forces in Indian cricket were the princelings of the Raj. The Maharaja of Patiala was the first President of the CCI, and sponsored the Patiala Pavilion. The Maharaja of Idar, a Rathore prince from North Gujarat whose clan married into Ranji's Jamnagar family, paid for the Governer's pavilion. One of the great banqueting halls at the CCI is the Cooch Behar Room, presumably sponsored by another cricket loving royal family. A more recent CCI president was Raj Singh, once chairman of the Indian team's selection committee, scion of the royal family of Dungarpur.

The aristocrats of the CCI long had the Bombay Cricket Association (BCA) as tenants on their premises. The culture of the BCA was closer to that of the Marathi speaking middle class families of Dadar, Matunga and Shivaji Park - the culture of Umrigar, Phadkar, Mankad, Wadekar, Gavaskar, Shivalkar, Vengsarkar and Tendulkar - rather than the culture of India's erstwhile royalty. Discomfort between these cultures is easy to imagine, but the relationship stayed on the rails through Jawaharlal Nehru's lifetime, up until the early 70s.

By this time, India itself was changing rapidly. India had defeated Pakistan in war in 1971. East Pakistan had broken away and formed the independent nation of Bangladesh. Also in 1971, the Indian cricket team had defeated England - the old colonial masters - at their own game, in their own country. This team was captained not by a princeling like the Maharajkumar of Vijaynagaram, but by a middle-class Mumbaikar called Ajit Wadekar. A hot-headed, curly-haired, twenty two year old called Sunil Manohar Gavaskar opened India's batting. A new India was taking shape. This India had no time for the niceties of older days. Not coincidentally, 1971 was the year Indira Gandhi's parliment abolished the privy purses that had been paid to the royal families of India since independence. The lineages that had built the CCI were no longer royalty in any meaningful sense.

Relations between the CCI and the BCA came to a head during the England tour of India in 1972. The CCI apparently turned down the BCA's request for more ticket allotments. The BCA under SK Wankhede decided to break away from the CCI and build their own stadium. Wankhede stadium, an unremarkable concrete behemoth that sits a couple of blocks north of Brabourne, was completed in 1975. It has since hosted most important matches in the first city of Indian cricket, while Brabourne lies idle.

The power struggle that led to Brabourne being supplanted by Wankhede is now over. The victors should be secure in their victory. Does that create room to restore Brabourne to some of its former glory as the home of Indian cricket? And hence, can contemporary India recapture some of that spacious, graceful, cosmopolitan spirit that still pervades the CCI?

The betting is that Brabourne will be forgotten and that service as usual will return once the repairs at Wankhede are completed. But, heck, crazier things have happened.