Subhajit

(Photo Credit - Getty Images) You got big shoes to fill in, if you hail from the lands of Garner, Greenidge, Haynes, Marshall & Sobers. Contrast to the Caribbean aggression, Jason Holder is a calm & quiet character. At the age of 23, when he was barely recognised as a future talent, the selection Panel headed by Sir Clive Lloyd appointed him West Indies' ODI captain in 2014. A year later, he took over the Test team too, indicating how much the WICB and men in the know believed in this man. In the history of Cricket, only extreme world situations have forced Cricket to stop in the past. The most recent being the Pandemic of 2020. Cricket came to a halt for over 4 months worldwide. Cricket enthusiasts would know what it means to lose 4 months of International Cricket for a player. Jason Holder kept growing through the multiple defeats as well as few shining in his first 3 years of captaincy. When he took over, the West Indies team had many senior players including Chris Gayle...

(Image Source : Google) Recently, while going through articles on how Swiggy & Zomato will see marginal growth in their business after hiking tariffs (from membership costs to packaging to surge fees). But what amused me is that a large number of people are literally dissing these ventures. Some common outbursts/keywords are: Start-up bubble will burst They will lose business if they do not give discounts Their future is dark if they stop freebies Such companies are not innovations, because we always knew eateries around us, so no big deal Let's take one point at a time. 1. There is nothing like a start-up bubble, there are some great start-ups which have made a positive impact on society. But there are also many who burn investors money & vanish. Mr. Ratan Tata, a regular investor in numerous start-ups, spoke only yesterday that startups that burn investor money and disappear won't get a second chance. Remember, not just a start-up, any organization which is badly mana...

(Image Source : Google) Watching movies together have been one of three things I have been used to do since childhood with my family, other two being watching Cricket and having food. If I stretch my memories, I could go back to movies like Anari (1993). For the next several years, we four in the family used to go to a theatre on the bike ably driven by father to the nearest Ganesh Talkies in a small town in Odisha. Then the access to VCRs reduced theatre visit by family but the movie bug always remained. Then I started going to the theatre with friends. I picked all kinds of movies, but the choices were not much. Smaller movies never made it to all parts of the country in the early 2000s. But I was keen on watching the non-mainstream movies. Hence, movies like Dil Chahta, Lakshya, Swades, Rang De Basanti & Munnabhai series were few movies which was a marriage between commerce and content. Then I entered the phase where I was exposed to World Cinema (mostly English,...

Alarm. Wake up. Brush your sorrows. Shave off your sleep. Prepare yourself for the commute. Run, scamper and reach on time. So you reached on time, that is like half the brownie points scored. Is it similar to half the battle won? Hell no. Absolutely not. The battle only begins after after you feel like clearing a big milestone, punching in on time that is. Then begins the real stuff. Some folks literally live for it, they just love the drama that unfolds, by them or because of them. Because that is all that they have, that is all that they know. The social and family life is non-existent for them, for there is no room for antics there. No friend of yours would like to see your artificial self after office hours. No one has time or patience for that. We meet people who can be honest with after a day of putting a mask on. Okay, let us move on from the morning punch, you know how it sounds. It actually is a punch on all our faces. We now enter our desks, that is our little go-...

On the midnight of 2nd of April 2011, I wrote this piece . What followed the next day was known to all, as they say, it went into the history books. Gambhir played a superb innings and Dhoni finished the match. Today, 8 years later, while I type this, Federer is one set down against Nishikori at the Wimbledon. But I am not sad for him, even after being a fan of him since more than a decade and half. Because something bigger has happened. I left office, still unable to process what had just happened. I entered the Metro Train, then the local train, trying to see of others around me are equally sad. But I was not able to guess anything. May be, I was not in that state of mind to judge anyone. 1992 was when I started understanding and watching Cricket. And as a kid, who grew up in the 90s, I am familiar with the heartbreaks that the Indian team gifted us, time and again. It was just one man in the team performing while rest were resting on his shoulders. As if 1996 was not enough, we...

"I do not like travelling, I do not like noise, Italian food, crowd, crabs, honking, spontaneous plans at midnight, people on social media, selfies, people getting married." "What do you like?" "I like mountains, chocolates, bikes, beaches, Mughlai Chicken, the smell of coffee, picking up a nice shirt to wear in the morning and I like you." The conversations between June & Sydney never stopped. They meet to talk and talk about almost everything under the sun. They were friends, more than friends and less than what people usually loved to term them as. They never cared what others thought, except for the times when they had to lie, a rare for them. Life has changed quite a lot between them in all these years, ten to be precise. They studied together, started working together and then moved cities, separately. But the chemistry never died. They always started from where they have left. It has been close to a year they are in the same city a...

Not that I am complaining, but seeking some time with the people I know is the only take away I look forward to. When I seek time, I seek happiness, nothing more or nothing less. Being an introvert till date, I have to fight my fears for public speaking which I have to do regularly. I also find it very difficult to say 'no' to someone. I feel equally arduous to start a conversation even though my profession requires me to ask questions to people I have never met as if I have a right to know everything about them. But those who know me closely, often complain that I speak too much, sometimes without allowing them to complete their stories. I change into an extreme extrovert from in no time at all. Anomaly, isn't it?  I have never breached the privacy of anyone while seeking some time from them. Friends are an integral part of my life and I devote quite sometime for them. In the growing up years, my family was not quite in favor of the time my friends used to consume fro...