The end of 2014 must go down as one of the worst months ever, at least for me, personally. How do you come to terms with the freakish manner in which a young cricketer who was just about starting his international career had to say goodbye to the world? How do you even begin to internalise the death of a couple of hostages at Sydney? A mother of three children, what wrong did she do? Or the death of the manager of Lindt Cafe - how does that make sense? December 2014, what have you done to us? What made you take the lives of over hundred innocent schoolchildren in Peshawar, all mercilessly gunned down? What about their families? What do the parents have to look forward to? December is indeed the cruellest month. You took away a former colleague of mine, an honest man who worked hard, who was also a very good friend to me ten years ago. I think of his wife, his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter. What will life be like for them from now on? How do they deal with their loved one's absence? December, you didn't stop. You had to take the life of a former colleague and friend's young son today. The little boy was battling dengue for the past two days. I cannot even begin to imagine what my friend and his wife must be going through. He was a proud father, and I remember him telling me earlier this year all about his little son over a cup of tea. I don't know how to internalise all this, or to make sense of all this, except by writing. I hope there is some peace and healing for all of them. I wish that the same power that took away their happiness also gives them the ability to live on, to hope and to experience life positively soon enough.
Every now and then, we all need to tell ourselves to be Rahul Dravids. Don't gun for glory. Get down to the basics, and do the simple things well. I have always tried to keep it simple: Keep your head down, just score the singles, keep the scoreboard ticking. This philosophy makes things easy. It is only when I act against my true motto that things tend to go wrong. A Rahul Dravid innings, the way he has conducted himself in his professional life has many lessons in there for us. In fact, 'Keep the scoreboard ticking' brings back many happy memories because it was my first ever blog. Back when no one had even heard of what a blog was. It was when I was a struggling journalist that I started to watch Dravid carefully. This was way back in 2002/03. The way he planned an innings was the way I was beginning to plan my years in the newspaper I worked for, back then. Keep it simple, and the big runs will come later, I would tell myself as I slogged on the moffusil desk, doing ni...
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