Monday, November 27, 2006

Breaking News: The Great Indian Conspiracy!

India sits up and listens anxiously with eyes glued to the News Channels – the “Great Indian Tamasha” has begun! This festival has a speciality – no one knows when this would flare up, announcing its arrival on stage. One fine day, the average Indian wakes up to it and realises this is already underway!

This usually involves two main parties – and a lot of others jumping on to the bandwagon, cruising along in the spirit of the gala. One of the two parties is a permanent player and the other one is selected on a rotating basis. The permanent one: Board of Confusion and Controversy in India, the BCCI. The opponent that has decided to entertain the public this time around is the Parliament, also called the Body of MP’s, also known as the Body of the Mentally Perturbed. The two warring parties have joined hands to entertain the bored Indian citizen. In this gala, as per the rules, something needs to be held at stake. A “stake” is an object that is hit from one party to the other, very much like the Tennis ball hit vigorously between the courts. A very magnanimous Mr Greg Chappell has volunteered to take the role of the ‘Stake’.

The gala begins this way: The Indian cricket team (it is actually not a team but just a group of people working with totally incongruent goals aimed at maximising each one’s personal fortunes), which is basically composed of some boys picked from the side walks of different towns of India, fails miserably in the second One Day game. (The rain Gods of South Africa lent a badly needed helping hand to the yet-to-mature kids in the first game). As if to reconfirm the ‘team’s’ terrible state and to project an image of consistency, the kids buckled under absolutely no pressure to dig a trench all for themselves and settled comfortably in it, piling up one over the other.

That did it. The Mentally Perturbed hit the ‘stake’ and the stake gave a weird sound out on being hit, that let the billion dollar secret cat out of the Parliamentary bag into the open – that the MP’s were very good commentators and deserved to be travelling with the cricketing kids, rather than locking themselves up within the old, decaying walls in the Capital City of India. (What Harsha, Sunil Gavaskar and Ravi Shastri would do then if the MP’s took positions at the commentary box is a totally different issue altogether – Clearway would look at the issue at a later date in a special episode). Now, the BCCI, very true to its name, protects the stake on one hand, appeases the MP’s on the other hand and is actually confused on its third hand. Thus began the Great Indian Tamasha in South Africa!

However, there is a conspiracy to the whole issue that Clearway has unearthed with its Secret Intelligence Bureau! As in most detective stories, the culprit happens to be someone who has not been suspected at all, but one who was brutally hit earlier and is on an avenging spree! The culprit comes on the scene, but only along the sides and shows the least involvement in the proceedings to create alibi. And the culprit is . . . the former Indian Captain, Sourav Ganguly!!!

Clearway has learnt from totally unreliable sources that Sourav had a series of telephonic conversations with Master batsman (and Super Model) Sachin Tendulkar. From the records, Clearway has found that the two conspired to throw two people – the Indian Captain Rahul Dravid and the coach (the ‘stake’ in this case) Greg Chappell - out of the Indian team. Sachin has made the necessary arrangements in the ‘team’ so that they perform really badly (a not-so-difficult proposition for the Indian kids anyway) to put Chappell and Rahul in a spot. And when Chappell is busy facing the Mentally Perturbed, Sachin, with the rest of the team, somehow managed to get Rahul’s finger fractured (and how they did it is still being investigated by Clearway). With a fractured finger and a beleaguered team, Rahul is out of the competition now. That was the plot in Phase 1 of Plan A.

With Chappell cornered and Rahul out, it is child’s play to guess what Phase 2 is all about: Sachin has conspired with Saurav in making a grand entry of Saurav into the Indian team possible, this Festive Season!

Whether the twosome succeeds in their ulterior intentions, remains to be seen in the days to come.

Whatever the outcome, the Indian public is always at the forefront of any festival and the average Indian citizen is bound to benefit immensely from the proceedings. And as for the Mentally Perturbed, they did need something to keep them busy this winter – the Speaker of the Parliament (who so very often develops a sour throat shouting at the unruly gang in front of him) was always chiding them for sleeping and snoring on the floors. At least now, they have an opportunity to give their opinion to Television Channels. And having an opinion on Cricket is a basic criterion to be an Indian, after all.

For the sake of the average Indian, Long Live the Great Indian Conspiracy!