FIP is back to make history with his book ‘Gamechangers’ being brought out by Harper Collins which will be released on March 11 2010 ! You can buy the book @ 36% off from IndiaPlaza.in, India’s largest Online Bookstore!
India's premier T20 Cricket league is all set for its second edition. With the hard cash that it spins around, the league is as much about cricket as it is about the personalities that play a part in it - both on the fiels and off it. Kings of Bollywood, cricket administrators, Cricketting demi-gods, film starlets, business tycoons - everyone has something to gain and a lot to lose during this thirty-five day extravagenza. With big bucks, bigger personalities and fraglie egos battling for supremacy, can politics, one upmanship, insecurity, envy, lust, conspiracy be far behind?
“Three hundred years ago, it was spices and gold that brought the world to India. In the twenty-first century, Bollywood and cricket will take India to the world” – quote from The Gamechangers.
The sports world is starting to provide us more thrills off-the field than on-the field. The fast blurring line between the showbiz industry and sports has made T20 cricket look like just another prime-time reality show. At the opposite pole, it takes one vertically challenged man to lift the game, from a recreational jig to the highest plinth of meditation with a super-human 2oo* not out. Notwithstanding its recent blemishes, the game is an integral part of the Indian soul and has hauntingly got under our skin like A.R.Rahman’s music – to borrow FIP’s words.
Do you know which the most entertaining spectator sport in the world today is? It’s not football or motorsports or even beach volleyball. It is called “SPOILSPORTS”! Lo and behold! And there descended the superstar of SPOILSPORTS – The Fake IPL Player, who was more entertaining than any other REAL player in IPL 2 (The Indian Premier League!). He saw, he blogged and he conquered! Every newspaper and TV news channel in India covered his blog and its revelations in detail throughout the duration of IPL's second edition. It was front page material in England, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Pakistan.
Sensational, scandalous, funny, scathing, irreverent, imaginative, entertaining, poison pen – the endless adjectives different people used to describe the blog, depending upon who they were. While the blog had a disclaimer in fine print, ”All characters appearing in this work (blog) are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and unintentional”. The caricatures were so real that any coincidence seemed to be only coincidental.
In The The Gamechangers, the FIP is back with more inside stories; trademark tongue-in-cheek humour and his refreshing irreverence for the demi-gods of cricket, which had both the common man and the cricket lover eating out of his hand, and catapulted his blog to the second spot next only to Aamir Khan’s blog.
Evolving from a blog dismissed by one irate official as “poison pen writing of the dirtiest variety”, the book turns out to be thoroughly mocking, mostly humorous and even manages to be insightful in parts. The FIP has tweaked and fine-tuned his cynical nicknames for the players, staff and owners of the IPL, most of which are already legendary. Appam Chutiya is up there with Augustus Caesar! And no one involved in the tournament, from the ball boys to the ICC, has been spared in the book!
The plot moves at a feverish pace through 35 days of the Indian Bollywood League (IBL) Season 2 with the author and the smart detective PMS, who is hired to expose the FIP, taking turns in narrating the story. The FIP blog is used only as a focal point to further the plot: that consists of off-the-field drama during IBL 2 and the suave detective’s efforts to expose the FIP, with the blessings of Sadde Guru Sherlock Holmes. As in any detective story, everyone from Lalu to Gautam Sarkar to the ICC , qualifies to be a suspect! The sub-plots involving the Indian cricket captain’s love interest and the power equations in the cricketing world, add the right masala ingredients to make it a Bollywood potboiler! ( A movie deal might not be far ahead, I guess!)
It appears that the FIP has consciously changed some of the facts and names to escape likely legal cobwebs or maybe the plot demanded the changes. Nevertheless, the book is a light read giving a humorous account of the IBL circus off-the-field and comes across as a tad opinionated at certain places. Nevertheless, episodes like the one describing the “Tire and Fire” Project tried out by the Phoren Babas are hilarious enough to throw you off the chair!
FIP talks a lot about himself but reveals nothing at all. The mystery is whether detective PMS nabs the culprit or the FIP gives him a royal slip to remain an enigma! (We won’t play spoilsports spilling the climax!)
Verdict: Go ahead and give it a read. The Gamechangers is a creamy serving of baby corn soup to warm up your appetite for the three-course IPL (3) feast!
P.S: Junta who liked the blog will love the book!
P.P.S: Junta who have not read the blog will be googling for it once they read the book!
You can buy the book @ 36% off from IndiaPlaza.in, India’s largest Online Bookstore!
Note: Every review on Indiaplaza.in is written by a person who has read the book. While we strive to provide a fair and unbiased verdict, every review will have a personal touch and opinion to it. After all, every book experience is a personal one to the reader.
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