This made my morning. I'm no Aussie hater and I have a lot of respect for them. But every pre-match sign they gave out spoke of a lack of interest and maybe a sniff of over-confidence. This should get them to "start respecting the game ". They might have been rusty and over-confident but I wonder if they were smart enough.

I grew up in a sizable colony with a lot of kids my age which meant every evening saw an army of us playing cricket. Every now and then we would be chased off the streets by somebody who had enough of us breaking windows or trampling their garden, snooping around the crotons, searching for tennis balls. And we would shift to a new street with a totally new set of dynamics. If the earlier "pitch" was long and narrow, the new one would be short and wide. More often than not, one had to develop new strokes to utilize the spaces in the new "ground" and also shed old ones which no longer fetched optimal returns. The bowlers had to rethink their areas and the lengths they would bowl. More importantly, in the first few matches, the captains never knew where exactly the balls would go to place their fielders and what scores to set if they batted first.

Those first few matches were when you needed to be tactically capable and adapt quickly. It no longer made sense to have a good long-term strategy in place. Rather, a clutch of tactics became strategies for the time-being. It made you streetsmart, literally and metaphorically.

Point is, the T20 promises to be entertaining. Although the format appears to be more swashbuckling than scholarly, what will be interesting is the kind of tactics the teams use when they know that they have a whole new set of simultaneous equations to solve. This is as short-term as short-term can get. Australia have always been strategically strong -- have the best bowlers, fielders and batsmen and play the game hard. But the T20 is like hit-and-run guerilla warfare (although that might be stretching the metaphor too much). Strategic strength might not be as vital as it is in the other forms of the game. Each side has more resources than it can spend. It looks like an interesting couple of weeks.

Sun Tzu would have had a field day, I imagine. As would have Garry Kasparov.

Dil Se

Yesterday being a holiday, one sat around revisiting Bollywood favourites, namely Dil Chahta Hai and Dil Se. As a few friends know, the next best thing to the Chinese Water Torture is to hear one talk (endlessly) about DCH. Hence, in all magnanimity, one has decided to spare you that ordeal.

Dil Se is a totally different matter. What a screwed-up movie. One wishes one was in close proximity to Mani Rathnam when he was shooting the script; one would have promptly kicked his rear end every time he messed up the screenplay.

But then one likes it for a few reasons -- Ladakh in Santhosh Sivan's eyes, Manisha Koirala (yes, yes, one can be irrational) and one scene that loiters in the mind, long after SRK and MK (sound like a pair of monkeys, don't they?) blow themselves up (Spoiler Alert! Spoiler Alert! One always wanted to say that).

This scene is the one where Meghna (MK) comes to meet Amar (SRK) at his office, asking him to get her a job at the All India Radio station in New Delhi. This is right after, as the world knows, Meghna walks into Amar's house in the middle of his engagement with Preeti (Preity Zinta) and he decides to accommodate Meghna and her crony in his house without any questions.

Moving on, there they are, standing in a dimly lit corridor, with people going to and fro. Amar, after having postponed his conflicting feelings, confronts her and asks her why she's there, what she expects from him.

That's when this door at the end of the corridor opens and shuts as people pass through. The camera focusses on Meghna, an eerie light from outside the corridor illuminating her face one second and the door swinging shut, eclipsing her in its shadow the next. This keeps happening, the door opens and shuts. Amar feverishly asks Meghna if she ever had any feelings for him; Meghna's face goes alternately from light to dark as she evades Amar's questions, refusing to answer.

And in that precariously balanced moment, when you feel like thwacking Amar on his head and drilling some sense into his skull, when you want to shriek out and remind him of Preeti and her endearing dimples back home, in that eternally oscillating moment, as Amar's voice pleads, cajoles and threatens Meghna, you understand; you understand the pain of a doomed love, of how the mind questions because it can't do anything else in its desperation when the heart has already lost; you understand how Amar will not learn the truth about Meghna until it's too late; you understand how it feels to be trapped in the temptations of twilight.

Finally, when Amar gives in to Meghna's evasion and accedes to getting her a job, one can only curse and shake one's head in disbelief.

What a screwed-up movie.

India Vs England, 2nd ODI, Bristol, 2007-2008

• England's bowling looks healthy even without Harmison and Hoggard. Anderson appears to have sorted out his rhythm problems and is carrying on his fine form from the Tests. I particularly liked the way he bowled at the death; yorkers and slower balls, disguised between just-off-a-length deliveries. Stuart Broad seems to have a good head on his shoulders; he just needs a little more experience. Tremlett had a bad game yesterday but I like what I've seen of him so far -- hard-working and sincere. And what can one say about Flintoff? Even on a pitch like yesterday's, even on a ground like Bristol, it was tough to get him away. If he continues to bowl like this and stays clear of injury, he's all set to become one of the finest defensive fast-bowlers ever of this generation. Though one Mr. Mcgrath would have something to say about that, I imagine.
• There is a warm feeling that I get whenever I see the Ganguly-Tendulkar pair in full steam in a ODI. There's something about the way they build partnerships that makes me want to believe in marriage. They seemed to be very conscious of the run-out at Southampton and were keen to not repeat it. Tendulkar seemed to sense that Ganguly was having a bad day and took on the responsibility of scoring. What was nice about Sachin's 99 yesterday was the way his feet moved -- swift, twinkling and purposeful, like a samurai; made all the difference. Two paddles for four off Mascarenhas had me grinning. And did you notice those bat-twirls? Looked very deliberate.
• The most significant statistics, for me, were -- Flintoff 10-0-56-5 & Powar 10-0-43-1. I personally thought Powar would be taken to the cleaners, but looks like he came good. Powar comes across as very gritty, but I don't think he'll last long in this side. Dravid is just looking out for a younger, fitter off-spinner to come along.
• Dravid's 92 will go down in my memory as one of the finest ODI innings I've seen by an Indian batsman in recent times. I'm not taking anything away from Sachin; he was very good and showed that he still has it in him to go back to his old ways, if he wants to. But Dravid was imperious, like a tall, Mathematics professor, strutting about, expounding on geometry; his batting was all subdued straight lines and acute angles that frustrated Collingwood's field placements. And he kept running his runs all through. He drilled his drives, flicked fine for fours and in one memorable moment, splayed his legs, made room and sliced one over the point boundary for six. You could see that he knew India needed more runs, that he preferred a 340 over a 320. In the end those runs of his seemed to make all the difference. One other shot that stood out was how, having moved to leg and seen the ball pushed wide on the off, he loosened the bootom bottom hand, and played a left-handed backhand slice to sneak the ball past short third-man for four. Simply brilliant. The next time someone accuses him of being slow, they're going to get it in the face.