N. Srinivasan

Hectic days. Finished my bath, applied tilak on forehead, recited Gayatri mantra, Vishnu sahasranamam and other prayers, did nine sashtanga namaskarams before my various idols, including the newly installed Lord Karunanidhi and Goddess Jaya Amma. I need their blessings for the next two months for my beloved IPL and I think I have got it. In fact, it was a double blessing, we had to ban the Sri Lankan players registered with IPL teams playing in Chennai and that should make our job of winning the tournament easier. True, we cannot play our own two Lankans, but anyway they are not in the class of Sangakkara or Malinga. We gained everything and lost nothing.

From the age of 6 when my paati (granny) told me stories from the Ramayana, I never liked the Lankans. To have a king with 10 heads and 20 hands (how would he have played cricket!) and his brother who slept for months together...awful, aren’t they? I know there was a time when Dravidians worshipped Ravana, but then it was before the IPL days and it does not count. Even today, one of the militant Sri Lankan organisations calls itself ‘Ravana Sena’. These guys never change and that was why I was quite upset when that chucker, Muralitharan, fell in love and mar­ried a Chennai girl. A blot on the fair name of the city, I say.  

There is not much time left but I will try my best to keep more outstanding cricketers out of the IPL. How about a rumour about local West Indians attacking a masala dosa joint in Kingston and abusing Tirukkural as second-rate. This should get the various ‘kat­chis’ and ‘kazhagams’ sufficiently worked up, maybe we can even demand that Chris Gayle not be allowed to play in Chennai. That should take care of the Royal Challengers. We could then turn to our Tamil friends all over South Africa, get them out doing anti-racism morchas, and maybe it’ll all snowball into another major protest and then we can ban the Proteas boys. That would mean no A.B. De Villiers, no Dale Steyn, no Kallis though we could lose Albie Morkel who is in good form. No matter, I’ll give him one of those imported ‘duty-free’ luxury cars which I keep hidden away for such occasions. Guess this’ll be a job for M.S. Dhoni, my new V-P at India Cements. 

Some silly Mumbai politicians protested that IPL should be banned in the state because we use up 6,00,000 litres of water to maintain our cricket pitches and outfields. Idiots, don’t they know that the IPL used only champagne on all occasions and, if need be, we shall use it for our cricket pitches and grounds too. People should think before they attack us. Om...Om...Om...Om...Muthuvel, Om Jaya Mata, Om Prabhakaran. Thou shalt protect our great IPL.

The Mumbai-based satirist is the creator of ‘Trishanku’; E-mail your secret diarist: vgangadhar70 AT gmail.com