It's the latest craze in Junglistan. The Cricket Premier League -- a Twenty20 tournament that gives a Fifty50 chance to all teams. Anybody could win on a given day, a bit of luck can make up for lack of skill. The success of the CPL, more importantly the socialist nature of the capitalist game, had prompted the Junglistan Hockey Federation chief Kill Bill to explore the possibilities of a Twenty20 World Cup in hockey. He could see no other way of Junglistan winning a world cup berth. The Kuttappa Stadium, Junglistan's biggest, now famous as the Royal Challenge stadium, was packed to the last chair for the Yuvaraj XI versus Sachu XI match. Thousands had turned up, the rich and the poor, the carnivore and the herbivore. The millionaires had their seats on the Antiquity end, others on the Bagpiper end. Yuvaraj won the toss and elected to bat. The toss of the coin and the call by Yuvaraj were greeted...

Ittooppu had prepared a new concoction for the occasion. The Junglistan cricket team had won a one-day tournament in Australia, a land beyond the seas where kangaroos hop mad, on and off the field. It called for celebration. The chief minister of Junglistan, Tortoise Kunhiraman, who also heads the BCCJ, had already reached, so had other board members. The dailies had hailed the victory as second only to the World Cup win in 1983. They had drawn comparisons with the heroics of Kapil's Devils, but had to decide finally that the World Cup triumph was probably bigger because it was after all the World Cup. All except one, the dissenting voice coming from the Junglistan Telegraph. It was more worried about what could and would happen to Maharaj, who was till two years ago Junglistan's Gaurav. Kunhiraman raised his head, putting aside the newspaper he was reading. He was visibly elated, actually ecstatic. Things were falling in place right before the elections....

My friends ask me why I don't write anymore. I don't know if they are asking out of anguish, or relief. They have woken up the writer in me, and they only have themselves to blame for their misfortune. I am yet to decide what I should write. A novel? It needs a lot of work, it can't be written in a day, and I am too lazy to write one. A poem? It can be short, sweet, and yet be full of pain. But it takes a genius to write one, you would notice there are so many Indian novelists in English, but not many poets. A short story? That is quite in the realms of the possible. But writing a blog is so much more simple, and easy to post. And I love the philosophy behind blogs: 'ere any thing gos. But still I have to write about something. Or somebody. I want to write about Bollywood. About...

One by one, editors trooped to the conference room. It was time for the morning news meeting at The Delhi Diary. The tabloid claims to be the city's most read daily among those between 20 and 60 years of age and earning above Rs 40,000 a month and spending more than Rs 30,000 a month and borrowing not less than Rs 5,000 a month. In short, if you are an advertiser, you should not bother looking any further than The Delhi Diary. The Editor looked around and saw some empty chairs. "So, where are our freedom fighters? Celebrating Al Gore's Nobel, I suppose," he said. The Green types had always irritated him. He had questioned the logic of having an environment editor in a tabloid several times in the past. Ecology has made it to the front page of the Diary, but only when western actresses shed clothes to voice their disapproval of global warming. And one doesn't need an environment editor...