Ides of March ~ T20 WC Super 10 starts ~ Priya Rajnikant movie

15^th of March ~ today ! 

The World T20 WC extravaganza begins with Men in Blue taking on Black Caps. Forget that the action in fact started sometime back ~ this infact is 13^th match.

It is  Super 10s - says big billing. Considering the World T20 began with fingers dangled at the organisers for their ticketing strategy and the collective anger of the Associates over an unforgiving qualifying round, a blockbuster match between two Full Members at a jam-packed Jamtha cannot arrive sooner.  The Indian team has been on a roll in T20Is in 2016: in ten matches, they have won nine and lost one. That one defeat was on a seaming deck against a young Sri Lankan pace attack.  So we will sit glued to TV for more time from now on !!

 “We have always enjoyed playing in India and have been loved by Indian crowds more than crowds back home in Pakistan,” Afridi said and criticism strung sharply from his own backyard.  Javed Miandad said Pakistan had gone to India to play in the World T20 but it didn’t mean that the players should pander to the hosts. “What have the Indians given us? Speak the truth even while in India. For the last five years what have they given us or done with Pakistan cricket. Having served Pakistan cricket for so many years I am shocked and hurt to hear such comments from our players,” Miandad’ words of intolerance.

Remember seeing Singapore in ‘Priya’ the blockbuster of 1978  starring Rajinikanth, Sridevi and Ambarish.  The storyline was that of my favourite writer  Sujatha, who was to remark a couple of years later that he had heard that ‘cinestory’ somewhere !

15^th March is also ‘the Ides of March’  -  a day on the Roman calendar that was  marked by several religious observances and became notorious as the date of the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. The death of Caesar made the Ides of March a turning point in Roman history.

Although March (Martius) was the third month of the Julian calendar, in the oldest Roman calendar it was the first month of the year.  On this day, Caesar was stabbed to death at a meeting of the senate. As many as 60 conspirators, led by Brutus and Cassius, were involved. According to Plutarch, a seer had warned that harm would come to Caesar no later than the Ides of March. On his way to the Theatre of Pompey, where he would be assassinated, Caesar passed the seer and joked, "The ides of March have come," meaning to say that the prophecy had not been fulfilled. This meeting is famously dramatised in William Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar, when Caesar is warned by the soothsayer to "beware the Ides of March.”

Caesar's death was a closing event in the crisis of the Roman Republic, and triggered the civil war that would result in the rise to sole power of his adopted heir Octavian (later known as Augustus).  Caesar’s killing is not the only event related to 15^th March.

In 1889, a cyclone wrecked six warships—three U.S., three German—in the harbor at Apia, Samoa, leaving more than 200 sailors dead.  In 1941,  a deadly blizzard struck the northern Great Plains, leaving at least 60 people dead in North Dakota and Minnesota and six more in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. In 1988 NASA reported, that  ozone layer over the Northern Hemisphere has been depleted three times faster than predicted and in 20013, after accumulating reports of a mysterious respiratory disease afflicting patients and healthcare workers in China, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Singapore and Canada, the World Health Organization issued a heightened global health alert which came to be known  under the acronym SARS (for Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome). [source : www.smithsonianmag.com]

The Ides of March is a 2011 American political drama film directed by George Clooney from a screenplay written by Clooney.  The film  featured as the opening film at the 68th Venice International Film Festival and at the 27th Haifa International Film Festival and was shown at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival.  ….and the link to Priya movie – Rajnikant acted as Julius Caesar in a drama inside the movie  but would hastily conclude that important scene.

With regards – S. Sampathkumar

15^th Mar 2016.