Weird Fishes

Yeah, I’ll hit the bottom
Hit the bottom and escape
Escape

-“Weird Fishes”, Radiohead

It told us volumes about what was to happen over the span of the last three days of the third Test match at Edgbaston. And doesn’t bode well for the Oval either. On day two in Birmingham, India descended to the depths, laid siege to the nadir and comprehensively conquered the pits. For if there ever was a truly disheartening and depressing day for an Indian cricket fan, this was it and it brooks no competition whatsoever.

Oi, you alright?

“Hell yeah! But it took a while!” says a rock and roll survivor from India.

Published in Popmatters on July 5, 2011

“No Alcohol or Firearms” read a perplexing but ominous sign near the entrance. Then I remembered, we were in Arizona.

The jostling to get through to the turnstiles was rowdy, but the mood still had a tone of booze-soaked cheeriness about it. Surrounded on all sides by what looked like Hell’s Angels with their leather-clad vixens, we waited in the long line as it inched forward. An uncomfortably thorough full body search later, we were in. By this time the looks we were getting were making us uneasy.

The Eternal Pied Piper

“Free your mind…and your ass will follow” sang that zany prophet from the world of funk, George Clinton, in Funkadelic’s classic 1970s album named as such. An “experimental” album Clinton had claimed it was then. An experiment in “cutting a whole album while tripping on acid”. A mass incitement of experiments in acid was far from their minds, but retaining a firm grip on the asses of the masses was definitely on the front lobes of the whatchamacallit, the Cultural Committee this April, when the Chinese government decided to cancel the series of planned concerts by Bob Dylan in China for this year.