Those Damnable Dutch and Indian Hockey and me.

The Olympics are upon us and after the horror of Beijing where India did not qualify for hockey for the first time ever since their first appearance, just making it to London made us Indian hockey supporters breathe a sigh of relief. Do we expect to have a podium finish? No, not very seriously . And yet, the match today exceeded everyone's expectations such that we began to expect a win and were disappointed to not, at the very least,  equalize. Against Netherlands.

Perhaps we have lost more and lost worse to other teams but Netherlands remains in my memory as the nemesis of Indian hockey. I don't recall the tournament now. India playing against the Dutch were, for once, leading 3-0 with 7 minutes left on the clock. And then the electricity went. We rushed to a radio. By the time it was brought out and the correct wavelength identified, Holland had equalized! And as we heard, they scored again and had won the game 4-3 (You can see it all here). I have disliked the Dutch team ever since; in my head, Netherlands (more than Australia) has been a big bad wolf.

My loyalty was given to hockey at a young age, heavily influenced by tales told by Dad and Chachaji of the hockey games they played in and the hockey games they'd seen during their school days. Perhaps it helped that Indian cricket was also quite at its nadir in those formative years, though I would like to believe that my heart would have been given to hockey irrespective of its competitors.

My father went to a public school that shared its hockey practice grounds with the Indian team. He fondly remembers the time(s?) the school team played against the Indian team and proudly narrates the story of Surjit Singh's frustration at letting a school kid get past him and therefore taking him down^ - apparently, Surjit Singh's philosophy was that either the ball would get past him or the man, never both.

So I grew up on tales of hockey and history (the Indian glory at the Olympics*, the golden years that lasted till the late '60s, the last of the great wins of the 1975 World Cup), the turn to astro-turf, the loss of the art of dribbling and the fall of the (sub-continental) game. Despite it all, through the horrible 90s of my childhood, hockey remained the preferred sport.

Tonight, a young team on a blue turf they've barely played on, having only a few players with any Olympic experience, played well. Certainly not well enough but though they did not win, they helped put a few personal ghosts to rest. It was one match and it is one small sign but in my imagination finally the Dutch no longer seem invincible and larger-than-life.

There are five more games to go and only two teams to make the next round and all that India realistically hopes for is making the top six. The Indian Hockey Federation and its politics are still dirty, the Indian team is still mercurial, their game still fairly slow, and how the future will play out, through the Olympics and beyond, shall be revealed in time. Yet, for today, Michael Nobbs' boys seem to have a fresh energy and a spring in their step not often seen in the Indian team. For now, that is enough.  
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*a clip of the India-Germany final in 1936, which India won 8-1
^ Ajit Singh's reaction: Kyon jawaak nuun kutti jaana hain? [Why are you beating up/going after a kid?]

Acersecomic

Brain Pickings Weekly's Unusual Words Rendered in Bold gives a useful word for me to know:

Acersecomic: A person whose hair has never been cut.  

And World Wide Words gives this further information:

"The legitimacy of this word rests entirely on two appearances in dictionaries, in 1623 and 1656. It seems never to have been used seriously and ever since has been held up as an example of an odd word, in modern times in works with titles like The Joy of Lex,Poplollies and Bellibones, Have a Word on Me, and Dimboxes, Epopts, and other Quidams.

It means a person whose hair has never been cut. Though that may appear comic to some, there’s nothing humorous in its etymology. The word is from the classical Latinacersecomes, a long-haired youth, a word borrowed from an earlier Greek one that was made up from kome, the hair of the head (which is where comic comes from in the ending), keirein, to cut short, and the prefix a-, not. Though this sounds like a aged curmudgeon’s way to talk about unkempt youngsters who weren’t like that in his day, it was actually neutrally descriptive — it was usual for Roman and Greek youths to wear their hair long until they reached manhood.

Greek kome has given us one sense of coma: a diffuse cloud of gas and dust that surrounds the nucleus of a comet. The same -comic ending turns up in two terms that, if possible, are even rarer: acrocomic, having hair at the tip, as in a goat’s beard (acro-means tip) and xanthocomic, a person with yellow hair (from Greek xanthos, yellow)."

Xanthocomic Acersecomic.

Bombay Monsoon - II

It finally reached.

Flagging a cab.

It was a Clark Gable day again today.

It's not hitchhiking but some days, willingness to pay the fare (and even extra) is no guarantee of a ride. Nothing works - not the smiling face or the long face or the crazy arm waving or jumping up and down or even the tried and tested thumb. And I can't decide whether to curse more the cabs which whizz right past or the ones who make a pretense of slowing down and raising hopes and move on before I've even finished saying my destination.

The Trams of Calcutta

Tera mujh sey hai pehley ka naata koi
Yun hi nahin dil lubhaata koi...

I fell in love with trams the first time I visited Calcutta in January 2009. Calcutta being the only city in India to currently have trams, it was the first time I ever saw one in operation or rode one. Actually, rode many. As many as I could convince my friends to take. I recently visited again and many of the routes plying in 2009 have closed. We took two routes this time, from Tollygunge to Kalighat and Esplanade to Kidderpore, and in the sweltering heat of June, the tram was the coolest way to travel.

The history of tram transport in India goes back to the 1870s when trams were introduced in Calcutta and Bombay and subsequently in Delhi, Madras, Patna, Nasik and Kanpur. Delhi and Bombay were the last to hold out, shutting down in the 1960s. The Calcutta tram survived and is the oldest operating electric tram in Asia, running since 1902.

I was most surprised (and irritated) to find that no tram souvenirs were available anywhere in the city. No postcards, no magnets, no t-shirts. (What shops do sell is the Victoria Memorial, some Howrah Bridge and lots and lots of, of all things, the Taj Mahal (Agra)). 

Oh it hurts me just to see 'em
Going dead in a museum

- Robyn Hitchcock, Trams of Old London 

Where trams go to die - Tollygunge Tram Depot

Ram Rattan Singh, who has been driving trams for 32 years

My love for trams is not an isolated phenomenon...

...and thankfully, they seem to have made a comeback in many cities around the world in the past couple of decades, including London in 2000. One can only hope that the Indian government will catch on and the Calcutta trams especially will also be remembered and cared for and regain their glory.

Now that it's over

"Well, of course, classically, gods play with the fates of men, so I suppose there is no reason why it shouldn't be football. We play and are played and the best we can hope for is to do it with style."

- Unseen Academicals
  Terry Pratchett