Today morning, i saw this feature on Rediff and all the horrors of Sony’s shrill “wraparound” programming in during the 2003 World Cup came flooding back. World Cup time and no Mandira Bedi? She appears every time India play any ODI tournament of any consequence. Now it seems theres going to be two Mandiras competing for the award of “female cricket fan of the year” – Mandira and Meerabai. (The female part is non-trivial simply because i just don’t see Sony or any other TV station hiring a male cricket fan to play the part of ignorant passionate India fan for their TV shows – and no – Charu Sharma does not fall into this category, he is basically unfathomable)
As a business decision one has to admire the Bedis’ latest film making venture. They definitely know a good thing when they see it, and they are obviously able to convince some solid people to jump on. Anil Kumble reportedly appears in a cameo in the movie. What was the great man thinking?
But then again, strangely enough, im looking forward to Meerabai Not Out more than i am to the wraparound show (its a total of 4 hours of unrelenting slaughter of all things cricketing and all things human wrapped around a cricket match which is 7 hours long – and they call it extraa innings – i wish the Referee could penalize them for slow overrates). At least Meerabai Not Out is a movie, and won’t show up during Cricket matches. Mandira Bedi further reveals that the noodle straps were her idea and takes credit for coinage of the term noodle straps – apparently they were referred to as spaghetti straps before! Then she goes on claim that “It just turned out to be something that got noticed because of the place where I was sitting.”
Err….. wasn’t that the only thing that got noticed, inspite of other unspeakably cruel practices such as tarot card reading and good old takloo? One can almost see the evil bosses at Sony rubbing their hands with glee “We’ve got the whole of India captive – they can’t see the World Cup anywhere else but with us…… so lets let em have it!!”…..
The character in the film is called Meera Achrekar, a 30 year old teacher who’s “missed the boat” (read – is still single). I wish there had been some originality as far as the name went, without invoking the famous wicketkeeper from Sassanian and New Hind. About the “missing the boat” part, lets not even go there….. further, from her description of the “character”, there are uncanny resemblances to Jassi.
That seems to be the overarching theme with every thing the lady does – flitting from stereotype to stereotype until you have a suitably mangled composite which stumbles along on screen and assaults the viewers senses like little else can.
Further, Ms. Bedi also describes some of her attire during the upcoming extraa innings…. and those descriptions plainly scare me.
For once im glad that i won’t be watching the World Cup in India. I will post exact timings of the start of each innings (NOT the extraaa variety) as a public service during the World Cup.
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