Monday, November 16, 2015

Wow.

No talk, no intimidation, no octagon fright, no confusion, no panic, no kicks thrown until it really, really mattered.

Instead, assuredness, some excellent cornermen, the best angling off exhibition in women's MMA history and straight lefts thrown sweeter than I've seen for quite a while in a championship fight.

The rematch is going to be off the chain and, having seen this particular furrow of the sport in its infancy, I can't quite believe this is happening.

These are very, very exciting times.


Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Slightly under the surface, and remembering Benoit

The biggest learning for me from a slightly jagged and often frustrating June so far has been that clarity of thought isn't linear. This might not seem like a particularly spectacular conclusion but there's been a definite - if shrinking - and possibly extremely middle-class part of my mind that has always believed that chains of continuous and fruitful thinking aren't so much a matter of finding inspiration or reason but more just a function of removing the distractions and focusing hard enough on the links in the chain to the point where the solution is compelled to present itself to you.

I've found efforts in the latter direction entirely unsuccessful for the past three weeks or so. In true hard-thinking fashion, I attempted to blame it on everything around me until I was left with no other conclusion than the inevitable one - one that forced my mind to acknowledge, you know, no matter how much you try, you really aren't very good at answering these questions.

Perhaps equally surprisingly, this hasn't caused me to question whether I've lost the ability to 'switch it on again', whether I'm getting too old to dramatically clear everything off my metaphorical desk with one swish of the crook of my arm and take time off to just think or even whether, as I did through a disturbingly vacuous eighteen month spell in 2012-13, I've lost the desire to want to think - all it has really done is make me appreciate the vagaries of the accessibility of the thinking process, vagaries that, I now realise, aren't so much unfathomable as they are inconsistent in themselves.

So the process behind clarity of thought is vague, it would seem. Yeeeeeah. I'm just going to park that there. And not think about it again.  

Also: Eight years today since Benoit, and a wound that simply refuses to heal. However, with every passing year, I'm starting to accept that, while I will never be able to forgive what happened at the hands of Chris, the person, nor forget Chris, the wrestler, there doesn't have to be a personal explanation for why I feel the latter as strongly as I do the former. I'm just going to park that there, too. And think about it again and again and again.  

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Epitaph

Age is not a number - it is the piercing pain at the junction of your C4 and C5 when you wake up every morning.

Monday, March 30, 2015

The Perfect Weekend



The circle completes itself. After three Ashes defeats, 47 all out and 11/25/2014, there is finally reason to rejoice. 

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Confessions of Sins, Sharpening of Knives

There's little doubt in my mind now that making relationships work is a function of patience, maturity and a little bit of judgement. Then, of course, there's the little issue of timing - timing that surreptitiously but unerringly tugs away at the things you need the most, timing that serves as a persistent, mocking reminder for all those times when you allowed yourself to be filled with optimism thinking of an indeterminate future, timing that claws away furiously at everything you've constructed and shreds it down to a set of characterless, once-bloody stumps.

So please know that if anyone, however genuinely, supremely and indisputably wonderful they might be, starts talking as if their personal experience with relationships validates any notion of sincerity, fidelity, responsibility and love conquering all, I will want to take the conversation off the record and share with them an open secret, spoken freely on the streets but never even whispered in the repulsively smug corridors of self-congratulatory people in their late 20s who suddenly find themselves tenderly in love - that it's a big world out there and sometimes, despite all your best efforts, despite however much you honestly fulfill virtually everything another person asks of you, events get out of your control and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it, except pick yourself up, go to the back of the line and hope - because it's nothing more than that - hope that, somehow, it'll be your time at some point in the same indeterminate future that you've spent the last several years preparing for.     

I'm not sure if there's a point to this story but I'm going to tell it again.

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India
I've been wilfully caught up in the self-defeating quest to get to know myself for years. I've never expected anything beneficial to result from such a quest. I tend to evoke extremely polarised reactions from people I get to know in passing. Consequently, only those people who know me inside-out would honestly claim that I'm a person who's just "alright." It's not a coincidence that the description I've laid out above has no fewer than, title included, eleven references to me (make that twelve). I'm affectionately referred to as "Ego." I think that last statement might have given away a tad too much. Welcome Aboard.

IHTRTRS ke pichle episode mein aapne dekha...

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