FakeIPLPlayer

For the uninitiated I would reccommend to go through the ingenuous blog located at http://fakeiplplayer.blogspot.com/ .

This entity has been a find for the second season of IPL. I call it the entity as its identity is left to anyones imagination. Whether its a male, a female, a group of people or for the more imaginative, an extraterrestrial or an autobot?!!

It gives a statutory disclaimer to be a fictitious character, which to conspiracy theorists make it a more real and an inside person kind of thing. In its avatar as a fictitious member of the KKR (Kolkata Knight Riders, or Knight Riders) team and posting under the name of IPL Anonymous (henceforth referred to as IPLA in this blog), it posts on the inside life of the IPL players and other staff in the camp in South Africa, especially of the KKR camp. What has caught the people's imagination is its ingenuous and hillarious nomenclature of the key persons in IPL. I do appreciate its sense of humour and the lucid account of events going on in S. Africa which appear quite credible for an outsider.

People have likened it to the Deep Throat of Watergate scandal providing inside information to Bob Woodward of The Washington Post but I feel it is more like the Big Brother show of more recent times. Each of his post is like an episode of the Big Brother show. It contains gossip, humour, controversies and masala making it an instant hit among the spice loving Indians. People are waiting with baited breath for the next episode. They are fed with what happens before a match and what goes on after the match and then they can relate it to what they see during the match (like the rising hemlines of Sandy Baddy Babe in the most recent post) and so it sort of completes the story for them. Its like entertainment without limit. They are getting more of IPL albeit not from BCCI or Multi Screen Media. Whats more, unlike the broadcasting media, the online blog has given the pseudo Big Brother show a two way relationship. People are expressing their feelings, comments, appreciation, theories about IPLA real time. The target audience has been given a voice.

One interesting issue which has come to my notice is the cropping up of related blogs from the IPLA's post. People are posting their views and analysis about IPLA, IPL in general and the related members. Due to the incognito state of IPLA's blog, the popularity of it and the potential of turning it into a revenue generating blog, the more ambitious blogger(s) have started posting as IPLA in other networking sites like Orkut, Twitter forcing IPLA to issue a public release on its blog that the Real FakeIPLPlayer exists only in his blog and nowhere else. The others are Fake FakeIPLPlayers. Some disgruntled readers have voiced their opinion about the correctness of the posting of the blog itself and the motives of IPLA.

As far as I am concerned, I am lapping it all up and considering the posts of IPLA as a humorous creation of a skillful blogger. I am loving it!

The Sweepstakes of IPL

With the baby of Lalit Modi sailing through all obstacles smoothly everyone wants to rake in the moolah. It seems too good to be true for some of the junior players getting to showcase their talents and also getting handsomely paid for it with the prospects of making a name and more money in future.
O Boy! what a moneyspinner it has turned out to be. Marrying off the two main Indian entertainment business segments. Hats off to Lalit Modi. Bollywood and cricket have been long eyeing each other, albeit shyly, Lalit Modi turned out to be the matchmaker and its a win-win situation for all three.
But every success story in India has their own masala and IPL specifically IPL 2 is no different. SRK, KKR, KR, Ganguly, FakeIPLPlayer, Real FakeIPL Player and Fake FakeIPL Player....you name it it is there.....
SRK probably did not think while doing Chak De India that he may have to live out the role of Kabir Khan in real life. But it seems he is headed that way with him being blamed for bringing in Pakistani players and all his planned out strategies falling flat. KKR has lost 2 of their 3 matches played so far, SRK supporting coach Buchanan's theory of multiple captaincy and taking on mighty greats of Indian cricket like Gavaskar and finally stripping controversies' child of Indian Cricket Sourav Ganguly unceremoniously of his Captaincy of KKR are all mounting against him. With both his home-team supporter and home-state supporters gunning for his misadventurous decisions I feel I see the face of Kabir Khan of Chak De India in him. Can he take the pressure now? Lets hope so. IPL is relatively a new concept and decisions may fall flat and the best step in such situations is to learn from the mistakes. Criticism, passion are all part of the game and he has to face them. But one shortcoming he has to tackle is his PR strategy. Sacking of Ganguly from Captaincy was uncalled for and at minimum what he could have done was to take people into confidence before going to S Africa for the matches. The entire episode has been handled very shabbily. Buck up Mr. Khan. Being the owner of a car is not enough, you also should know how to drive it.
One cannot help but feel for Dada. This man has shown grit and determination in the face of all odds. People hate him, people are crazy for him, people do not care a shit for him....he has to face all three kinds. Decisions going against him, fate going against him, yet he is there the next time when opportunity comes fighting to regain the lost ground, fighting to redeem himself. He has been blamed for failure, he has been blamed for politics he has been blamed as a selfish player....well my take on all this is one point: the only way to escape blame is to shirk all responsibility. Even Mr. Tendulkar found it difficult to balance both performance and captaincy and had to forego the latter in order to keep the former. Ganguly maybe a slow cricketer, he may have found it difficult to negotitate fast bowlers in the past but one cannot deny that he is the one who galvanised the famous paper tigers into a strong cohesive unit willing to go for the kill. Yuvraj, Harbhajan, Sehwag all have something to thank this man. People who know him from close quarters know what passion and fighting spirit this man carries along effortlessly. This Maharajah or maybe the Royal Bengal Tiger is still fighting odds without blinking an eyelid, still leading his team from background, still trying to generate commitment among team members. One cannot help but feel for Dada.
More on another find of IPL2 the FakeIPL Player in my next post. Stay tuned.

The start

Hey!

If you are here by chance I must say you will be wasting your time going through my posts and if you have again lost your way, probably pressing the back button on your browser may be a good idea. That is because I will be ranting here about random thoughts of mine as they strike me and may not be very appealing to your senses. I was notorious for my boring (pun intended) posts at the college forums and must give the statutorial warning to all green browsers and potential victims. If you are above 15 please leave!

Its past 3 in the morning here as I am starting off with this blog and do not really know how coherent I am likely to come across to you. Well if you think you have nothing better to do, you may as well bear with me.

To give a brief initiation about myself, I happen to be from a laid back city called Kolkata in India. I have sufficiently educated myself to be still wondering about my future plans and with the current recession having given the jitters to quite a few worthies, consider myself well-placed with no plans at all.

Talking about looks, I consider myself to be a hunk although I am the only one around who considers so, but hey! as long as I am happy the worlds a paradise. Hence I wont go into the details of my physique.

Most of my time I am glued to the laptop of mine, a cool M1530 Dell XPS which cost me a fortune but is worth it I must say. I hope Dell is listening and acknowledges my publicity with some lavish endowments. During the college days I have mainly been a cockroach but now since I have to get up early for my job every painful morning, I have become a mixed-breed between a cockroach and a crow. Gee, that sounds creepy. Never thought of myself like that before, but to think of it, that is an apt description of my lifecycle.

So here I am now, posting this introduction in the avatar of a cockroach. Since tomorrow is a weekend, I wont feel sleepy in the morning. I think that suffices for an intro.

Staying up late does make you hungry mate. Sometimes I do empathise with the roaches. Time for a quick bite.

GB, signing off for now.