Anish Kumar - Deewana Deewana (2023)

It's a golden age for music

The Dwarf - Nº10, an Oily Chutney Mary & The Strange Tale of the Collapsed Carrot Halwa Soufflé

Chutney Mary turned 33 years old this year... 

Tempus Fugit when hedge funds implode...

You won't want to miss this one. You might wanna share it too if like me you can't stop cracking up when Russell slips into American accent mode. I tried to track it down and ended up on nasal plosion videos.

It's a thing and it's exploding all over the flat earth web. I can't stop sploding either hah 🤣

ऋषि SANSKRIT & RISHI

You are the watching the destruction of the old guard. https://t.co/UgYMzywoJb

— CFX (@7CYA7) October 23, 2023

The credit goes to the man who is actually in the arena. Trump explained to me that he misjudged those who would stand by him or turn away when he was down on his luck. He said you just cant tell. Those you think would be solid are gone and some he thought were fair weather friends stood by him.

Music credit Not the BCFM News with Tony, Martin and extraordinarily informative guests.

Image credit for the Sergeants Affair Alamy Pictures

Massive Props to BBC News for taking on the thankless task of of standing up to the censors as best they could during these harrowing times.

And with dignity

Monobina - Unity 101.FM - Gold

I'm pretty sure you've never heard an Indian song as good, or a Bollywood production that exceeds this video.

"Gold is a historical sports drama inspired by India’s first Olympic gold medal. The film traces the “golden era” of Indian hockey through the journey of Tap Dance, a young assistant manager in 1936, who dreams of playing for an independent nation."

I caught it on the local ethnic and South Asian radio station Unity101.FM

Beatrice Dillon & Chris Menist - NTS Radio

Southampton Water and Docks from Weston Shore

There's so much terrific music available on Mixcloud and Soundcloud. I tried out Spotify recently in the last few days, but it seems to peddle the mainstream jokers the Illuminati*  like to push on the consumer classes, and which they call artists.

*Or whatever trash-on-humanity-group controls the popular music business.

The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten - Part One of Twelve | The King's Ships Were at Sea

The.Life.and.Times.of.Lord.Mountbatten.01of12

Like most people it would be difficult to give Mountbatten a solid thumbs up or down. He had some good things (for himself) and a lot of bad things (for others). I've yet to find credible testimony corroborating accusations of child abuse, though I know credible people who are sure he did.

In the late 60's Mountbatten wished to leave a TV legacy of his life which by any measure was quite extraordinary with or without the fuck ups, like his ineptitude over the Dieppe Landing that cost 1380 mainly Canadian lives with a further 2000 captured from a force of 5000. In those days a toff could just say 'we learned valuable lessons for the future' and nobody questioned it but now we know he made a huge mistake when pressing forward with the landing despite the Germans being alerted.

Mountbatten never thought he did anything wrong and you can see from this TV series that he's a completely solipsistic douchebag, though he does have exquisite manners.

That doesn't mean he didn't have what it takes for other tasks in his life. He was promoted for his failures, and eventually seemed to emerge as a born organizer but he was never very good in battle. He had that ability to tell the chaps he was in charge during an age where leadership was ordained rather than earned.

By the time this 12 part television puff piece had been produced, the bright young things at Thames Television could see he was a pompous fool with many chapters of shame to his history. They pummel him with damning praise  through polite questions that you can see over here. 

It's worth it to see how the most high are lost to hubris, and fail to see the times they are a changing.

Jay Weidner - Chomsky, The Puranas & Verbs Versus Nouns

A while back I was listening to a Coast interview where the alignment parallels of the Indian Yugas and Mayan calendar were outlined. I posted on that subject here. The subject is peppered with too many different opinions to take more seriously than a general overlapping observation give or take a few hundred years for the end of the Kali Yuga and the Mayan 9th Wave. 

However their is mention of the 2012 end of cycle with the appearance of Kalki in the Vishnu Purana around May next year. The Vishnu Purana is a primary sacred text of the Vaishnava branch of Hinduism, which today probably has more adherents than any other. 

It is one of the canonical Puranas, a branch of post-Vedic sacred literature which was first committed to writing during the first millennium of the common era. Like most of the other Puranas, this is a complete narrative from the creation of the current universe to its destruction. The chronology describes periods as long as a hundred trillion years It includes extensive sections on the genealogy of the legendary kings, heroes and demigods of ancient India, including those from the epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana. There are fascinating descriptions of ancient Hindu cosmology and geography. Of general interest is a collection of stories about the boyhood adventures of Krishna and Rama, whom the Vaishnavas believe to be avatars of Vishnu. There are also references to Buddhism and Jainism, which help establish the date of composition of the work.

This is the first time that this work has appeared on the Internet in any form. H.H. Wilson was one of the first European scholars to produce a scholarly translation of a major Hindu sacred text. His translation employs clear English which modern readers will find very readable. There is very little of the pseudo-King James style, loved by 19th century orientalists (and loathed by modern scholars). The footnotes are extensive and very helpful, with comprehensive notes correlating the Vishnu Purana with other Puranas and Hindu texts. Unfortunately, good editions of this translation have largely been unavailable in print for many years. There are some re-typeset and heavily edited versions printed in India, of dubious quality, which I can't recommend. The copytext for this e-text was a very expensive photographic reproduction of the original 1840 edition. This is part of a reprint series which may be obtainable from some larger urban and academic libraries.

Gandhi - The Salt Marches

In the 2005 movie War of the Worlds directed by Stephen Spielberg and starring (though not shining) Tom Cruise, it takes under twelve hours to reduce the mobile TV crew from studio cosmetic aficionados to wrecked plane scavengers hauling the ready meals off an open fuselage and scoffing away like they were auditioning for Lord of the Flies in a lean period. 

I mention that movie because it's done so badly yet the point is still concrete. When push comes to shove humans or their institutions will react dramatically as in the Gandhi movie when a country that runs on salt and water is immediately threatened by the very people who need it against those who control it. Here the people choose to ignore their colonial masters and take charge of the salt business themselves thus rejecting the taxation of salt. It's a classic example of strategic and effective protest but not without its pain.

If there's one scene in the Ben Kingsley movie of Gandhi that has remained with me from the moment I first watched, it's this scene for it's approach to non violent action that overcame greed and unfairness by the British, in a manner that is brutal and hard to forget.  

Pakistan & Jinnah

After rewatching Gandhi I was recommended to take a look at Christopher Lee's Jinnah. I like its narrative premise of a life review, which oddly enough is a near death experience (NDE) that transcends religion and geography, the subject of the film. I think I remain unchanged from my stated position that the British left a lovely divide and rule ticking time bomb between the two countries in order that they could be subject to outside influence. 

It's called Kashmir.

Gandhi (reluctantly) and Jinnah agreed that partition would take place between India and Pakistan, and the British through Mountbatten made that process unfair given the ethnic make up of the Kashmir region. 

Divide and rule, problem reaction solution, Hegelian dialectic are all as old as the hills. The stupid monkey needs to wake up to the elite string pulling that has kept the human house divided since the Mesopotamian civilisations. I say human because the blood lines that run things are of the blue blood variety as opposed to our red. 

As Princess Diana repeated over and again before her murder.

"They're not human".

Gandhi, The Occupy Movement & The Amritsar Massacre

I've been wanting to watch Richard Attenborough's movie Gandhi again for a couple of decades. The recent Occupy movement has really impressed me by not responding to police violence. I really don't know if I could control my temper if I was attacked by a cop and obviously it would be me that would suffer in the long run so it's probably a good thing that I'm putting effort into other areas like writing and social media.

If you haven't mentioned it yet in social media ask yourself why.

I'm posting the scene above because it's the definitive evil-of-empire massacre part of the story. The film goes on to outline how the Muslims and Hindus killed each other before and during partition of India and Pakistan though it doesn't mention that the British set up much of this conflict as a leaving gift. More than even Gandhi ever new.

The film is excellent and so long I was caught by surprise because it's one of the few films to have a five minute intermission half way through and so I took a screen grab of it. There's a lot I could write about this movie and I took inspiration from Gandhi again and again from it. I will probably write about different parts at a later time. In the mean time I urge anyone with Occupy on the mind to watch the entire movie (I think it's all on Youtube in parts) and take time to consider what non violence really means.

Without a question Gandhi's way is even more relevant today than ever. I urge people to watch it and learn a thing or two about changing the world. A truly remarkable man and unlike any other we experienced in the last century. Is it only me that wants our leaders in loin cloths?


Update: The entire movie is below.

Jesus Life In India

The story of Jesus' time in Tibet and India first came to me by way of a fascinating and good  hearted young Spanish man I met travelling around Prachuap Khiri Kan a few years ago. He left a handful of very distinct impressions that have remained with me. The first was about being humble. I wasn't ready for his message then but I never forgot what he showed me was a genius lesson in the advantages of humility.

We hung out for a while as we were in the same small beach town, and  he talked about his life working as a dancing and singing stage performer in Spain and he burst into a  bit of song from his last performing role in the musical Hair before he became too ill to work. It was the 5th Dimension's Aquarius/Sunshine come in.

I always got the impression there was a lot more to him than he was letting on. As I write this post I see even more synchronicity unfolding in front of me in ways that could only have worked for me now, and not then. Weird, but good weird.

It takes 26000 years for the cosmic cycle to complete and so the age of Aquarius was indeed coming very close back in 1969 when the song below was recorded. For us, it's about 3 minutes to midnight now on the cosmological clock.

Ayasha and hooked up last night after last meeting in Dubai and San Francisco. It was heartening to hear that we both agreed it's not a  case of if the world is changing because it's changing already. The world is separating into two groups. Those who are awakening and the mind bombed materialists consumers who are blind, drugged, plasma screened and asleep at the wheel of opportunity clinging on to the illusory joy stick of predictability.

Change of this nature doesn't come round every day. Look at the signs around you. The coffin pictured doesn't exist. You're an immortal being. You just don't know it.

Rural Telecom - India

View more presentations from Futurescape.

My friend Syamant has written a nice ready reckoner on the India rural telecoms landscape. A part of the world that culturally and geographically I'm fascinated by primarily because there's so much unspoiled strangeness and mysticism (unlike China's uber-rational homogeneity) which I think makes for a fascinating ethnographic topography as it collides with the 21st century. 

There are many who bemoan India's irrational  contradictions and yet deep down I view those same frustrations as a much more meaningful organic flowering of humanity for the future. 


I've no evidence for this and I also am probably guilty of varnishing some tough realities such as poverty and health indices with some sort of Caucasion cultural posturing though I mean it with the best of intent.

Chomsky

I purchased this in Delhi between travel from Chennai and on the way to Mumbai a few years ago while doing some work for a French multinational that had nothing to do with advertising and yet called upon much of my experience as a planner to figure out a way of developing a market entry strategy as well as developing a nationwide network. No small task given India's size, and that in rural places a cart and oxen will take the place of the more modern services we're used to, and which India is naturally capable of providing in larger cities.

India is the most challenging country to the senses. Not even Burma or Laos comes close. I like it immensely though I find Mumbai less compelling and lean more towards the pregnant haze of spirituality in Madras over the unmistakable scent of gargantuan power in New Delhi. I still find it odd that the most British place I've ever been to in my life was the New Delhi Gymkhana Club. It's straight out of an E.M Forster novel, we had a full on three course dinner with my amiable Indian host, including Spotted Dick and Custard with cigars for the gentlemen afterwards. Lots of really interesting people from all over. People I couldn't figure out what they did or why they seemed so different from the expat crowds in other parts of the world.

This book doesn't take long to read. I just finished it a few minutes ago after two grazing sessions. There's not much that Chomsky can teach me historically these days as I've devoured most of his works over the last few years. He's a great teacher. 

However, this book still pricked my conscience about the historical revisionism that has taken place with regard to Indonesia in the 60's. What the British, the U.S. and the Australians sanctioned through Suharto is possibly one of the worst genocides we've had a hand in and I really don't understand how there's only been one Bali bombing there or why I was I've always felt reasonably safe on my trips to Jakarta, including a stay at the Marriot which took a hit a few years back, and now has a large veneer of safety wrapped round it. I say veneer because all the waving of hand detectors in the world wont stop a determined person and in some ways this book is all about why some people are so determined to hit back and make up for history.

It becomes increasingly evident that the complexity of running a Hyper-power (notice how that word has slipped in the last few years) is extraordinarily complex and yet it's people like Chomsky (and Arundhati Roy who gets a few mentions) that are our real moral compasses; the people who should have got some airtime for every mention of 'weapons of mass destruction'...or was it delusion?

Maruti Suzuki

Suzuki of Japan have a patnership in India called Maruti Suzuki. I did some consultancy work a few years back running around India for a multinational looking into the auto market and specifically car networks so this ad resonates quite a lot with me as some service centres are little more then an few oxen and some rope to rescue a stranded vehicle through to the usual highly trained professionals that run large dealerships. Pretty good no nonsense guys in my experience when it's a big outfit.

This ad is both powerful and lovely. As good as it gets in advertising, and came to my attention via Bhatnaturally who I think is a must have Indian Advertising blogger you need in your RSS feeds if you're serious about keeping an eye on what's going on in the subcontinent. It's up to a very high international standard in both frequency and quality of content as well as professional viewpoint. I haven't found an equivalent yet in China but will let you know if anyone comes up to speed or indeed you may first. Let me know please.

More Indian Pantomime

See why Y&R India are backpeddalling mightily to delete all evidence of this scam ad over at Rob Campbell's always lively blog Opinionated Sod.

Food of the Gods

I first came to live in London via Norbury, and so in a whimsical way even though I've lived all over the capital, including Belsize Park, Bloomsbury, Shepherds Bush, Camden, Clapham and more, there's a piece of me which always be a Sarf London boy. Recently its the massive South Indian community in this part of London that is pricking up my planning barometer trend antenna.

On my last business trip to Chennai (formerly Madras) in India I wandered around the back streets trying to observe and breath in a bit of the culture in a way that might contribute meaningfully to a market entry strategy report that I would later be writing for a multinational client. I've found that luxury hotels are the same all around the world, good for networking but awful for grasping how a country ticks and so on this particular sortie I found myself hungry for food but completely at a loss to even describe what may possibly have been a Tamil script menu in a clean but simple, open-front shop house. I plumped for the tried and trusted method of food adventurers around the globe and pointed vaguely at a bunch of ordinary Indians, indicating I'll have a bit of what they're having; and that's when my first dosa was brought to me.

Really good food should be simple and delicious. That's not actually as easy as it sounds and so ever since my first dosa I've been a proselytizing this simple but astonishingly tasty South Indian Fare. Its the "food of the Gods" as Mohammad Iqbal of Bangalore and I like to say. On my latest return to London I was really pleased to discover that a 'fast food format' of dosa food was available in my locale. When I say fast food, I'm sure the owners of this briskly expanding chain of restaurants would be a little annoyed at the term but what I'm getting at is an unfussy way of ordering and eating. The Chennai Dosa is a no nonsense, food-from-heaven kind of joint that I probably like to dive into and out of quicker than most of its patrons. The south Indian community in particular are some of the best and most welcome immigrants this country has ever had - and their cuisine is practically worth body-popping over, as its a little different from the Punjabi cuisine that most people associate with Indian food. Although this is a little like saying that European food is pretty much represented by Italian pasta and pizzas.

Southern Indians I find are hard working, family focused, low key and modest people. There's nothing I like more than dining at my local Chennai Dosa and studying this ethnic group of people who for me bring nothing but welcome diversity to this country. I've since worked my way through the Chennai Dosa menu and buffets over many visits and I think they've accepted me as a fan boy. Their food is inexpensive, tasty, healthy and all importantly; freshly made. Pretty much everything that Western (fast) food has moved away from and I pity the blinkered folk around these parts for whom the height of eating pleasure is either a Subway (sub way. I always think thats ironic) or other junk food fare, when world class eats are dotted all over the map in this neighborhood.

By complete coincidence, shortly after my discovery I thought I'd do a twitter search of my area and came across someone plugging the exact same Chennai Dosa I'm fanatical about, called Rory Sutherland. I thought I knew the name from somewhere and while adding him to my Twitter discovered that not only did he blog but that we were also in the same game - I've since discovered that he's a really top thinker in our business but more frequently Rory writes commercially dispruptive pieces for Brand Republic now, than the crafted and more literary posts I first came to enjoy . We've since had some twitter banter along with Giles about great Indian food spots as we're all Indian food fans but interestingly, Rory believes as do I, that the dosa food could quite possibly be on the cusp of something larger.

So I'm unashamedly plugging and suggesting bigger things for The Chennai Dosa Group. You heard it here first (think McDosa) and I believe their next outlet is opening in Tooting. Try also their Idli or the Idiyapam) and more importantly for UK planners I'll be wrapping this up later into a broader post about third millennial cultural observations and trends that I've found both provocative and inspiring this time round in these parts of London.

Insider News

Picture by holyfucking shit

I've long been a fan of Mohammed Iqbal of O&M Bangalore. Not just because he's bright and writes really interesting papers such as the origin (and resiliance) of aphorisms or the long tail of brand communication, but because there's nothing more exciting than when an agency hires some top thinking talent outside of Europe or the States for rapidly growing markets.

Well, more than this, Iq has just posted a vertical Google search engine for all the blogs on the plannersphere which means that I can now find those posts that I failed to bookmark. I've already checked it out and it worked a treat for some posts I was hunting down about Nicolas Taleb's Black Swan. Well done and thank you Iq for doing something really useful. Go check it out, add your blog if you're not listed and make time to read his blog archives too!

Switched On Kid

Kate Priestley

Yuvi Panda just kicked ass on the internet. He's a 16 year prodigy techno guru geek from Chennai (formerly Madras) on the East coast of India who is wired to the nines and blogs about IT stuff on a wobbly bandwidth-restricted internet connection. Some time back he did a post about the former Microsoft supremo Robert Scoble's blog presenting a lot of statistics gleaned from Technorati. He's just done the same for the mother of all tech-gadget blogs called Engadget which has a huge readership. I came across Yuvi through Scoble's 'shared' items blog feed as we both use the same Google Reader for zapping through RSS feeds (although incredibly Scoble does up to 600 a day, down from 1400). Scoble shared this pretty exciting post from Jason Calacanis one of the founders of Weblogs Inc and former GM of Netscape which offers Yuvi a job for project X on the spot.

If you do a google on this enterprising young man you can see there aren't many digital stones left unturned and his entrepreneurial side shows through wonderfully . He realises that by delighting the digital blogging A listers he may get just that little bit closer to achieving his dream of working at Microsoft. I like this story, it's representative of how democratic the internet is which is a post I've touched upon but have lined up for more in-depth examination in the future.

The White Album

Here's one I wrote earlier while running around Chennai, New Delhi and Mumbai last year during the World Cup. It's about football and yet it has nothing to do with football. I originally wanted to leave it as a post hoping to win the world record for a comment. But it will do just fine for the first post on Punk Planning, as it has nothing to do with planning, and yet that's all it's about.

---------------------------------------------

England’s strongest side since 1966 they said. The newspapers did, mates who actually watch football and know a thing or two constantly reminded me in the run up to the tournament. It was all over the interweb, the TV pundits sang victory in unison, and even the Go-Go dancers at Long Gun on Soi Cowboy knew that England had a chance of raising the cup and for a fleeting second, wink at the world and say, ‘see, told you we’re the best’.

Well anyway, we’ve still got our sense of humour. I mean its official, now that we lost on penalties again. We can just come out of the closet and say it with pride. So here goes: “We haven’t come close to raising the world cup for 40 years have we?” But anyway, it doesn’t matter because we’ve got the most expensive players in the world, easily the most loved teams on the planet and Becks is soooo good looking.

Once every four years whether I like it or not, I take football quite seriously. The world cup neatly synchs with me on this one, and I really love the opportunity to call up my mates, who think I’m a bit gay anyway, and say ‘did you watch the footy last night?’ I really enjoy the banter but now it’ll probably be 2010 before you catch me being a real lad again. I’ll be over 40 too.

Anyway it’s a real opportunity to bond because most of the time I’m either waffling on about geo-politics or psycho-babble nonsense such as how football enables lots of men to get together and talk to each other with passion, without anyone getting suspicious or a bit nervous as to intent. Apparently we used to get well revved up on politics and religion in the olden days, but just you try getting a conversation going about those things and people will think you’re plain weird. Honest they really do.

Where was I? Oh yes; our strongest team since LBJ arranged for Kennedy to be shot in Texas. Well I kept quiet in the build up to the tournament about England’s form, because I hadn’t watched a game for four years and frankly, for just a little while, after that first goal in the first seconds, of our first match of the world cup, by David Beckham (he’s so handsome) I thought we might be up for it. The goal was awesome and felt a bit like an early omen, a taste of things to come. Maybe we had what it takes to go all the way. This could be our time, and even if football wasn’t coming home, at least the cup was and that’s what counts.

I wasn’t impressed though when I watched the strongest side since the Second World War struggle to convincingly demolish a team that allegedly are a dab hand at playing the pan pipes when chilling out after a hot and sweaty game of footy in Ecuador (is that near the equator? Nobody seemed quite sure). I said it then and it didn’t go down well in the semi-quasi hostess bar we piled into to watch the match but my early observation was, I thought the England team looked a bit crap!

Anyway, give ‘em a chance I thought. Let the team coalesce naturally instead of the forced structuring of the national squad mash-up. And anyway Grubby’s new Elvis quiff-with-highlights was looking good, Ads was yelling at Sven on the telly we crowded around, for doing the wrong four-four-whatever formation while Rez lapped up having a really good reason to sink a few cleansing ales because he’s usually a Starbucks kind of guy. Oh, and I almost red-carded myself for losing it with Saggy who snagged my seat at half time unaware we’d tipped up two hours early to get the good ones. Cheeky Indians.

Which reminds me! I started to think about this piece in the Austin Healy style taxi I’d jumped into this morning from one of those painfully hip hotels on the way to Delhi airport where I was going to catch a sexy air India flight to Bombay or Mumbai as it’s officially known. The hotel was one of those Soviet architectural affairs that the Indians had a major fling with a few decades ago. Actually I loved the interior; all Indian baubles and modernist design but way overstaffed by folks in faux Issey Miyake uniforms and way under serviced in a how-long-does-it-take-to-get-the-attention-of 8 employees standing around doing nothing. But that’s got nothing to do with footy, and yet everything, when I get onto it, which is why I’m writing this.

It’s the evening and I’d better crack on or I’ll never get round to the point, but as I was writing this by pen on the plane, I felt embarrassed by my handwriting, as it is so awful these days because I rarely write. It feels all disjointed and clumsy and takes loads of effort. I predict that handwriting will go out of fashion one day. Voice to text seems the obvious way and I feel kind of sentimental for those who have really beautiful handwriting and write charming notes on lovingly selected stationary, but I bet no one is going to miss my awful handwriting. Particularly me while I’m trying to type them up.

Where was I? Ah yes the most formidable England squad since Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, partition of India and Pakistan and The Coronation. Enough of that, our first match was just awful, a real turkey of a game but the second was sheer torture because practically none of the questionable gang of assembled chums could say absolutely certainly where Costa Rica was. I’d had a few tasty Chang beers but that was no excuse for not really knowing so I was plumping for The Americas somewhere between Nicaragua and Puerto Rico. I had to play it cagey because planners have a rep to keep up and I thought it was a better pick than the Africa option that was being floated at one point. It’s tricky when taking into account skin colour, the slave trade and surely the best thing about globalisation; all sorts of ethnic groups, in the England squad. Not many Indians but more on that later.

Well, looking at our football group, I had to say that England were well-lucky. We were by far the easiest group to be in, apart from the game with Sweden that was lined up. I was semi relaxed about that one as Sven Goran Eriksson is our manager and as luck would have it (or design) we drew that match and nobody's feelings got hurt. That plus Erik didn’t take his work home or vice versa.

Anyway, after that dismal first match, I’d become a really good football pundit with loads of experience. I started to defend Peter Crouch. From what I had seen he worked harder, covered the whole pitch, was good in a tight corner, created opportunities and put the other lot on the back foot most of the time. Just because he looks a bit spastic doesn’t mean he isn’t a great football player. The boys as I’d started calling them since the start of Germany 2006 completely ignored me and kept going on about some robot dance that all real fans knew about. All I could think was we used to do that that dance when Kraftwerk unleashed Das Model on the world, and that was a very long time after The Beatles and the Swinging Sixties or say 1966.

Incidentally I once worked in 1995 as a kitchen helper at a very expensive Hollywood restaurant on Melrose with a bunch of illegal alien Mexicans who spoke no English except for two words when they found out that I was; “The Beatles" and "Hooligans”. Amazingly hard workers, they earned less dollars than me because I was a white boy, even though I’d never had any more experience than peeling onions at a Pizza Hut in Sutton in the very late 80’s and landed the job for preparing the Hollywood Bowl take-away set-dinners at 80 Bucks a pop. I learned as much Mexican as I could to show them they could pick up English too if they tried, but these days I only remember them saying ‘Mucho trabajo poco de nero’ which means lots of work and little money or something close.

To keep on top of things, all top chefs in Hollywood speak fluent Mexican if they want to run a tight ship. Which reminds me, weren’t Mexico looking a bit dangerous at one point in the World Cup? Anyway, back to England. “The finest side to be fielded since Sexy Sadie (what have you done?), made a fool of everyone on the White Album. That was a long time before robot dancing for the record.

So it’s not really a nice thing to say, and even though Beckham is really dishy and I don’t want to hurt his feelings, I thought England were really shit in the second game where the average monthly wage of our opponents was I think about 150 Bucks. This was the price of a couple of Hollywood takeaway lunch sets in the mid 90’s when I was doing my degree. Well maybe everyone has forgotten but Sven was definitely losing the plot, pulling at his hair from the sidelines, frantic even, and then the first sign of how England moves in mysterious ways kind of came to me.

Wayne, who loads of people say is the best player for England since George Best, was taken off the substitute bench in a sure sign of desperation, because he had a broken meta thingy, that had now suddenly miraculously healed! He came on after a few minutes of prowling on the sidelines and looking quite menacing. All of a sudden a few minutes into his game, Crouchy headed an awkward number in and even though it wasn’t a classically beautiful goal, I’m sure every English fan around the world collectively kissed him for putting us out of the misery of being pinned down to a draw in the second half, by a poor country with a population of possibly 83 people.

Quickly after this goal, I picked up the name Gerrard, who had suddenly poked a stunner in the back of the net from what looked like not to far away from the half way line. Apparently they all do these types of goals, week in and week out in the league but to me it looked like every reason to love the world cup every four years. A night or so later I was thinking about this in bed and reflecting much more than I ever usually do or even ever did about football and England in 1966, about things that we’re good at, stuff we’re not good at and about Wayne. The really nice Asian chap on BBC World News who was World Cup fever mad, and was my most trusted and convincing media pundit said something about Wayne showing all the early signs of a "legend". It was a probably said in a moment of rational(sic) exuberance but as my most trusted footy expert I had to square the circle, and figure out what he meant.

Incidentally this flight has been circling Mumbai airport for ages now and the pilot who definitely sounded like he was having a pulmonary over the PA said the weather had been too dangerous to land earlier. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard that, and we’re three hours late on a two hour delayed flight so I took a look out the window as we descended, which is usually worth doing in any new destination, and something equally terrifying caught my eye. I’ve seen the most hardcore slums, but as we dropped into the view of Bombay, something out of the Silmarillion emerged in my line of sight. Really scary and growing like black fractal trippy growths on hill after hill, and even poking out in ways that huts can only do after years and years of organic but filthy accumulation and temporary fixes of wood, metal and plastic, there’s not much concrete in real slums funny enough. Anyway, really black, really scary they were; easily beating Ethiopia’s and Burma’s worst housing. I have to get out there some day. I need to take a closer look. Yes, really scary; I quite like it when something feels so new it’s frightening. It’s like a legal high I guess.

Sorry, I’m really off on one, so back on topic. To me, Wayne, our best striker since the transistor was invented, hardly touched the ball when he came on, and when he did, it wasn’t that special. Okay so at least two players were closely marking him at any one point, but didn’t Maradona always do his stuff at least once a game? Then it occurred to me (because after all, it’s all about me) that both those goals in the second match happened when Rooney came on. Rooney the fans chanted, Sven sent Rooney on, not Wayne, and it was Rooney that the England squad got all psyched up about. Enough to score two goals within minutes, of what had up until then been an awful match with a country we couldn’t pinpoint on a map. Then a possible solution came up. Maybe a football legend was just as much about psychology as reality. At this point Costa Rica faltered and yet it was only later that it felt like Wayne was on the pitch and not Rooney. I hatched a theory that even if Rooney was not that good, or Wayne was much better than average; as long as we poked goals into the back of the net who cares if it was Wayne Rooney or not? Maybe England is more inspiration than perspiration. I mean apart from the industrial revolution and that whole feudal society gig. But we didn’t play great international football back then either. Even that notable game between the trenches in the First World War seems more poetic than tragic penalty shoot outs.

But what’s most important is that while I watched us lose in that funky Delhi Hotel, the thing I was most struck by were the Indians wildly cheering on Portugal with a vengeance. Never mind that the railways or say the civil service are two decent legacies that the awful empire slinked away from. It was England that was up for a bashing that night and I don’t know why but I feel it’s related to our multi-culti football team that has never had any Indians, ever! But one thing I know about Indians. They sure do kick English ass on the cricket pitch.

Have you read my 11:11 11/11 post?