So what does a type of grape have to do with a great football (soccer) player of a bygone era? Argentina maybe? Well, perhaps, but that is not what I am talking about.
Malbec is a grape varietal that is yields some very good red wines. Malbec has its origins in France, but in its homeland, has been a bridesmaid rather than a bride. In Bordeaux, you will find malbecs blended with other reds like Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet franc or Merlot, but rarely as a single varietal. It is only in Argentina that malbec finds true expression, and is finally ushered to the altar! I became interested in malbecs some ten years ago, and they have only grown on me since - to my uninitated taste buds, they feel lighter and less dense than merlots, and have more body and substance than pinot noirs.
There is pre-Sideways wine writing and post-Sideways wine writing. Sideways, of course, was an era-defining film that turned every slob into a wine snob. And its unabashed championing of Pinot Noir has resulted in a substantial decline of the Merlot cult. So basically, if you asked a random person on the street as to what their favorite wine is, in the pre-Sideways era, she would say Merlot. But in the post-Sideways era, if you admit you like anything but Pinot Noir, you're in danger of being lynched. And the person on the street most likely has never even heard of malbec.
Now clearly, everything that I am saying refers to people who dabble in sub-30 dollar wines. I cant speak to the glories of a '47 Cheval Blanc or a '96 Corton-Charlemagne. All the same, there is something to be said about the accessible wines - wines that the proletariat can enjoy. And in this context, malbec is virtually unknown! Pinots and Cabernets and Merlots rule the roost here. Malbec? What is that?
Recently, Eric Asimov of the New York Times gave malbec a backhanded compliment by touting its unpretentious nature that lent it a distinct individuality untainted by the polish of more upscale wines. A compliment, even one that is grudgingly and reluctantly given is welcome indeed. Not long ago, I asked my friend Mike (who has lived near Napa, and is an oenophile) what some of his favorite varietals were. To my surprise, he said without hesitation, "Malbec!". OK, so Mike is a great guy and I respect his opinion, but why would you? So here is the opinion of Robert Parker, that oracle of Winelandia, whose taste buds shape the products of vinters the world over. In Robert Parker's world, if a wine can rate 95 points, then there surely must be something to it.
So what does this have to do with Di Stefano? Chances are you havent ever heard of Alfredo Di Stefano. If you ask a person on the street who his all time favorite players were, odds are that you would hear the word "Pelé", you might also hear "Maradona", or from someone with a shorter memory, "Zidane" or "Ronaldo"...If you mention Alfredo Di Stefano, you might hear "Alfedo who?". But if you asked someone who had read about the great football players of the past and had watched some of them in action, someone...say like that peerless football writer Brian Glanville... then you might also hear him mutter "Di Stefano"! Why? Born in Argentina, he plied his trade as a football player in Argentina first and then with Real Madrid and Spain. His sensational play was instrumental in Real Madrid winning five successive European Cups from 1956 to 1960. And those who have watched him play have always lamented that due to the cruel machinations of fate, he never was able to grace the World Cup.
And that brings us to the question - what does malbec have in common with Alfredo Di Stefano? Other than the Argentina connection, it is that they both live well hidden in plain sight....scratch that surface a little, and see them in full glory!
Monday, August 18, 2008
Monday, August 11, 2008
An Olympic Lament
Now that we have finally won an individual Olympic gold medal, we are in the unfortunate predicament of actually having to pay attention to the Olympic games in Beijing. Until yesterday, we could easily just turn our collective attention to the discombobulations of our batsmen facing the great Sri Lankan whatchamacallit tricksters. We could easily claim to be disinterested in the Olympics - and who could argue with that attitude? After all, we are the reigning 20/20 cricket world champions, are we not?
Now alas, everyone is asking the question. THE QUESTION. Why only now? Why just one? These are discomforting queries that will not go away no matter how many free 1st A/C railway passes or Air India tickets are grandly awarded to Abhinav Bindra. There will be the obligatory interviews with the Suresh Kalmadis of the world, who will crow about how this solitary gold medal represents the new India, and the aspirations of its people. There will be many more Chief Ministers of states that have no connection to Mr. Bindra, who will throw hard earned taxpayer money at Mr. Bindra in the hope of some reflected glory. Why I should vote for the Chattisgarh chief minister because a competitor from Punjab has just won an Olympic medal, I have not quite fathomed. Mr. Chidambaram and his colleagues, envious of the attention lavished upon China by a naïvely fawning world media, have already foolishly started making noises about hosting the Olympics in 2020. What a thought! Why would we want to draw more unwanted attention to our "Khel Samrats"?? (By that I mean the babus who run the sports ministry. Which -come to think of it- why do we need a ministry to run sports?)
I wonder whether these wise souls have pondered about the fact that at the moment I write this, the much touted "new India" that this gold medal supposedly represents, actually stands on par with (the presumably "new") Azerbaijan and Thailand! And trust me - that status will be fleeting. Once the action shifts to the weightlifting and boxing events, most impoverished banana republics will be among the medals, and we will be left with a tally that even Robert Mugabe could afford to purchase with his toilet paper currency! (Incidentally, even Zimbabwe already has one silver medal, and one world/olympic record that will likely translate into gold or silver within the next day or two)
Fear not, my friends. This discomfort will also pass, like many others previously (remember Prakash Padukone and P. Gopichand of All England fame?). Only 6 more days remain before the ODI series with Sri Lanka - Dhoni's boys will take the field, and we (appropriately relieved) will go back to our collective slumber.....until London 2012!
Now alas, everyone is asking the question. THE QUESTION. Why only now? Why just one? These are discomforting queries that will not go away no matter how many free 1st A/C railway passes or Air India tickets are grandly awarded to Abhinav Bindra. There will be the obligatory interviews with the Suresh Kalmadis of the world, who will crow about how this solitary gold medal represents the new India, and the aspirations of its people. There will be many more Chief Ministers of states that have no connection to Mr. Bindra, who will throw hard earned taxpayer money at Mr. Bindra in the hope of some reflected glory. Why I should vote for the Chattisgarh chief minister because a competitor from Punjab has just won an Olympic medal, I have not quite fathomed. Mr. Chidambaram and his colleagues, envious of the attention lavished upon China by a naïvely fawning world media, have already foolishly started making noises about hosting the Olympics in 2020. What a thought! Why would we want to draw more unwanted attention to our "Khel Samrats"?? (By that I mean the babus who run the sports ministry. Which -come to think of it- why do we need a ministry to run sports?)
I wonder whether these wise souls have pondered about the fact that at the moment I write this, the much touted "new India" that this gold medal supposedly represents, actually stands on par with (the presumably "new") Azerbaijan and Thailand! And trust me - that status will be fleeting. Once the action shifts to the weightlifting and boxing events, most impoverished banana republics will be among the medals, and we will be left with a tally that even Robert Mugabe could afford to purchase with his toilet paper currency! (Incidentally, even Zimbabwe already has one silver medal, and one world/olympic record that will likely translate into gold or silver within the next day or two)
Fear not, my friends. This discomfort will also pass, like many others previously (remember Prakash Padukone and P. Gopichand of All England fame?). Only 6 more days remain before the ODI series with Sri Lanka - Dhoni's boys will take the field, and we (appropriately relieved) will go back to our collective slumber.....until London 2012!
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
On Cricket and Ramachandra Guha's sociological thesis
I have a problem. As they say in the part of the world my ancestors came from (the most recent ones at any rate..), Arambha shUram khalu keraLiyA - "it is truly a Keralite trait to begin something with gusto". Of course, that means that this blog will be resting in peace for eternity within a few days. We shall see whether that comes to pass. So for now the problem remains.
In the meantime, I have just finished reading Ramachandra Guha's phenomenal history of Indian cricket. I will confess I had never read anything by him before, so I was pleasantly surprised. It is an interesting exercise to look at cricketers through the prism of class barriers - especially in India. I recall a long time ago reading that the great Australian opener Geoff Marsh was a farmer. To my teenage mind, this was a bewildering concept. I had a tough time imagining Sunil Gavaskar going back home and wearing a ragged dhoti and yoking a bullock to his plough.
Guha eloquently reminds us that there were significant class barriers (there still are) in India, and that our efforts should be to eradicate them from all walks of life. One thing did puzzle me though. He describes at length the various arguments for and against the communally drawn Bombay Triangular/Quadrangular/Pentangular. And he (correctly) gives more play to the argument to abolish a communal tournament in communally sensitive times (the 1930s-40s). In a manner befitting a postcolonial, he presents the arguments of the British (ie. that cricket can only generate goodwill between members of different communities etc.) as the bias of an empire that seeks to continue to dominate the natives by dividing them. Then, surprisingly, towards the end of the book, he looks at the issue of India vs. Pakistan test cricket in the 90s in a completely different light! (You might recall that during this period, many on the right had campaigned for a complete stop to cricket contact between India and Pakistan because of Pakistani support for militants waging war against India). Now, in Guha's scheme of things cricket had become the great healer of the pain of partition! And he rubbishes suggestions that cricket should be subservient to the politics of the day as rantings of right wing lunatics (which, in a sense they were). So now we have a conundrum. When Gandhi urges us not to play cricket between communally drawn sides, we should listen to the great man. But in the 90s, we should play cricket with Pakistan despite a raging battle up in the mountains because cricket will bring us close together? Were the British correct after all?
I hold no brief for the lumpen elements of the far right, but shouldn't our principles be consistent? The Zimbabwe cricket crisis sounds eerily similar to this, and one wonders whether one should can all the rhetoric and accept that all views are by definition polemical. Maybe we could all take refuge (and save a lot of newsprint and bandwidth) in the Rooseveltian aphorism, "He may be a sonofabitch, but he’s our sonofabitch".
To nitpick Mr. Guha's excellent book (and I mean that without sarcasm or irony), what is with the comparison of the RSS to the SS? I mean let us be honest. Compare the BJP-RSS with the Republicans-Christian Coalition (or even to the Ku Klux Klan to stretch the analogy a bit) by all means...but with the SS? 6 million Jews? 3 million Poles? a million gypsies? Have we lost our bearings totally? Or is this view a concealed form of anti-Semitism? I find the latter explanation unlikely, since anti-semitism has never been an issue in India (except among certain extreme islamist and leftist types), and surely Mr. Guha is far too nice a guy to harbor such beliefs. So the most charitable explanation is that certain intellectuals (not Mr. Guha, for he is not the one who invented this analogy) have been less rigorous than they should have been in drawing parallels and comparisons. I have jewish friends, and my wife is Polish. I think the casual (perhaps irresponsible) comparison of the RSS to the SS is insulting and disrespectful to the victims of the Nazis.
In the meantime, I have just finished reading Ramachandra Guha's phenomenal history of Indian cricket. I will confess I had never read anything by him before, so I was pleasantly surprised. It is an interesting exercise to look at cricketers through the prism of class barriers - especially in India. I recall a long time ago reading that the great Australian opener Geoff Marsh was a farmer. To my teenage mind, this was a bewildering concept. I had a tough time imagining Sunil Gavaskar going back home and wearing a ragged dhoti and yoking a bullock to his plough.
Guha eloquently reminds us that there were significant class barriers (there still are) in India, and that our efforts should be to eradicate them from all walks of life. One thing did puzzle me though. He describes at length the various arguments for and against the communally drawn Bombay Triangular/Quadrangular/Pentangular. And he (correctly) gives more play to the argument to abolish a communal tournament in communally sensitive times (the 1930s-40s). In a manner befitting a postcolonial, he presents the arguments of the British (ie. that cricket can only generate goodwill between members of different communities etc.) as the bias of an empire that seeks to continue to dominate the natives by dividing them. Then, surprisingly, towards the end of the book, he looks at the issue of India vs. Pakistan test cricket in the 90s in a completely different light! (You might recall that during this period, many on the right had campaigned for a complete stop to cricket contact between India and Pakistan because of Pakistani support for militants waging war against India). Now, in Guha's scheme of things cricket had become the great healer of the pain of partition! And he rubbishes suggestions that cricket should be subservient to the politics of the day as rantings of right wing lunatics (which, in a sense they were). So now we have a conundrum. When Gandhi urges us not to play cricket between communally drawn sides, we should listen to the great man. But in the 90s, we should play cricket with Pakistan despite a raging battle up in the mountains because cricket will bring us close together? Were the British correct after all?
I hold no brief for the lumpen elements of the far right, but shouldn't our principles be consistent? The Zimbabwe cricket crisis sounds eerily similar to this, and one wonders whether one should can all the rhetoric and accept that all views are by definition polemical. Maybe we could all take refuge (and save a lot of newsprint and bandwidth) in the Rooseveltian aphorism, "He may be a sonofabitch, but he’s our sonofabitch".
To nitpick Mr. Guha's excellent book (and I mean that without sarcasm or irony), what is with the comparison of the RSS to the SS? I mean let us be honest. Compare the BJP-RSS with the Republicans-Christian Coalition (or even to the Ku Klux Klan to stretch the analogy a bit) by all means...but with the SS? 6 million Jews? 3 million Poles? a million gypsies? Have we lost our bearings totally? Or is this view a concealed form of anti-Semitism? I find the latter explanation unlikely, since anti-semitism has never been an issue in India (except among certain extreme islamist and leftist types), and surely Mr. Guha is far too nice a guy to harbor such beliefs. So the most charitable explanation is that certain intellectuals (not Mr. Guha, for he is not the one who invented this analogy) have been less rigorous than they should have been in drawing parallels and comparisons. I have jewish friends, and my wife is Polish. I think the casual (perhaps irresponsible) comparison of the RSS to the SS is insulting and disrespectful to the victims of the Nazis.
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