May 5, 2011

Listening to Harsha Bhogle's inane and faux cheerful prattling has always been an ordeal. I finally figured out a way to handle this (other than using the mute), based on a contrived answer to the question "Why is Harsha Bhogle so happy?" The real answer is, of course, that Harsha Bhogle is so happy because he makes shitloads of money, he's a celebrity, he's got a nice rug, and so on, but that's not the road we are going to go down. What if the reason for the overdose of cheerfulness is that he's not really happy at all, but that His Bubbliness' behaviour hides a dark secret? A secret never revealed to anyone, a secret that festers in his mind every single waking second, a secret that can only be kept at bay by focussing solely on the shining happy things in life, like the way the sunlight dances off Danny Morrison's shiny pate, like the significance of the fact that the number of stumps on both sides of the pitch are wonderfully symmetrical and equal, like how quaint and innocent is the fat lady screaming her head off in the stands when the camera is on her, like how wonderful it would be to have Kiss Cams in the IPL so we can catch geriatric couples expressing their undying devotion for each other before the entire world...

Sorry, I got carried away a bit there.

Anyway, getting back to the dark secret, if you listen to Harsha Bhogle with this backstory [*] in mind, your irritation vanishes completely, to be replaced by a tender pity for the poor man, and you almost want to pull him close to your chest, a la Robin Williams and Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting and repeatedly whisper "It's not your fault" (I said 'almost' because, you know, you don't want to get too close to the rug, considering that it will be just below your nose, with Harsha Bhogle discharging copious amounts of tears on your clean new shirt).

On second thoughts, maybe it was his fault -- I can picture him as a small child saying, "Uncle, do you think stars are God's puppies? Isn't it wonderful the way they twinkle 'Woof! Woof!' all night long? Uncle, why are you looking at me that way...?"

Man, I can't wait to watch the match today and put this theory to test.

[*] Since this is a family blog, I don't want to speculate on the dark secret, but being the sadistic bastard that I am, I'll just throw in the words 'uncle' and 'broom handle'.