Kaustubh Dudhane > Recent Status Updates

Sometimes, the stuff we all hate ends up being the only way to do things.

I guess my lizard brain has made its peace with the fact that gravity comes and goes. 😄

Human suffering is often an abstract concept to kids. But animal suffering is something else entirely.

Sporting achievements are often expressions of a country's society!

In sports, politics and everything else, Sri Lankans tend to veer between jungle law and Victorian morality. Ari, for instance, litters, drives drunk, jumps queues, bribes policemen, but refuses to cheat at Monopoly, Omi or 304. 😄

Will the curse of drink never leave me? When I couldn’t write, I drank in desperation. When I wrote well, I drank in celebration. I drank when I was bored and alone. I drank when I was surrounded by loved ones. I drank on the hilltops of Badulla, in the backyards of Kurunegala and in the verandas of Colombo. I drank when I was an angry young man, a petulant father, and a sad old bastard.

People think it’s bravery that wins wars. It’s not. It’s cruelty. But even that’s not enough. You need to be cunning.

Unlike our subcontinental brothers, we do not throw bottles or light fires. We save our barbarism for the north and the east. 😂

The café walls are adorned with cricketing memorabilia. Autographed bats, framed newspaper cuttings, photos, caps. The furniture is varnished wood and the menu is laden with pub food named after cricketers. Sometimes the links are obvious (Allan Lamb’s Lamb Chops), sometimes tenuous (Augustus Logie’s Caesar Salad), sometimes unappetising (Merv Hughes’ Meat Balls).😂

Your children’s faults are always magnified in the same way that yours are invisible.

"Jonny has a theory that South Africa are doomed to choke in every major tournament for the next fifty years as payback for apartheid." And this was in 1996.😂

Procrastination is as much a group activity as watching cricket.

Apartheid was responsible for many tragedies. Somewhere at the bottom of a long list would be the short careers of Graeme Pollock, Barry Richards and Denis Lindsay. 😓

My beloved wife is making me sweep the kitchen. The last time I held a broom, Diego Maradona was a thin, teetotalling teenager.

Choice is meaningless without consequences, and a privilege we do not deserve if we will not face them.

He’s always been an effective man, Nethgalla. A man who wins. But I think he knew that wasn’t enough.

That has always been your curse, Tal. You enshrine those whom you have lost, whom you have killed. You raise them above the living; their voices drown out all others who try to reason with you. They are your gods.

Every time our lives touch yours, Tal’kamar, we are left poorer. And every time, it seems that we have no choice. You are always the lesser of two evils. But never by much.

We learn from mistakes, not perfection.

Asar once told me that they did it because nothing is truly beautiful unless it can be lost...

Thirty years can weave strange patterns in the tapestry of fate.

"Kindaichi suddenly became very interested. As was his habit when thus aroused, he began enthusiastically scratching his head."
This scratching quirk is amazing. 😂

You can take the boy out of grade cricket, but you can’t take grade cricket out of the boy. Having spent years surrounded by utter fuckwits, I, too, had become a fuckwit. I was a product of my environment.

As a kid, Dad used to throw balls at me for hours. But as I moved into adulthood, he began to throw insults at me instead, such as ‘stop wasting your time’, ‘get a job’, and ‘when are you moving out?’  All I ever wanted for Christmas was a set of throwdowns from Dad. And for him to say that he loved me. This Christmas, however, he was gifting me a public humiliation. 😂

So your missus still doesn’t understand why you spend your whole weekend playing cricket? Imagine how an umpire’s girlfriend must feel. Seriously, imagine being an umpire’s girlfriend. He’d rather officiate a shit game of cricket than spend a gorgeous Saturday afternoon with you. 😂

The trick was to throw the ball against the wall and quickly get into position to face the rebound. Not a lot to it, in retrospect, but I loved it. I’d dream up real-life cricketing scenarios, which almost always involved Australia chasing a daunting total. I was the debutant tasked with saving a crucial test match after a top-order collapse. I’d be up against the West Indies, with Curtly Ambrose & Courtney Walsh.

That we were a transitional generation and that gave us several advantages. We had been given the freedom to choose how we want to live and behave. We were lucky to have parents who felt blessed in having children and were willing to take all the responsibilities that came with it. And so our sense of freedom is only a rehearsal. The next generation will have to pay the price.

How did I acquire those habits? Perhaps that’s what happens during the forging of a relationship: if nothing else, you adopt some of the other person’s habits. It makes you feel those small adaptations, those adoptions, make him one of you.

Many of the things they were treating so savagely were mine but they didn’t know that. The upstairs room is still that way: books on the floor, canvases shredded. Blue paint has dried on the floor where a bottle broke. The lampshade you fashioned out of handmade paper is torn. I sometimes go and sit there. It is my museum of broken things.

The true evil is always in the reason and the excuse, not the act.