Monday, October 04, 2010

The Games Have Begun

The spectacular opening cenremony for the Commonwealth Games have shown once again the power of the last minute work. There were fears that the games may not take off at all, nothing was ready. Once the ceremony had begun, all such fears proved to be unfounded. The old philosophy of doing the waork at the very last minute prevailed.
Here are my thoughts on the opening ceremony.
1. The show looked good, or rather would have looked better if not for DD's coverage. The show began live and turned out to be deffered live as ad breaks came in between. Other "breaking news" & twitter were far ahead of the "Live Telecast".
2. The highlights of the program was definetely the aerostat (blimp's big brother).
3. The march past of the atheletes. Here is a confession.Apart from Bindra I had not heard of even a single flag bearer before. The cheers when Pakistan marched in was, well, amusing. We love to hate them. And it was a great feeling to see the huge Indian contingent march in. England's Nehru coats were also interesting, as were the Kiwi's angavatrams.
4. Speech time. Kalmadi booed. President, Prime Minister & Prince Charles - nobody cared. Huge cheers for India, Sheila Dixit & APJ Abdul Kalam. Couldnt have been a better popularity index for our leaders. It was nice of kalmadi to mention Atal Behari Vajpayee in his speech though.
5. Gandhi, Indian Railways, Folk Dances, the many drums, the tiny tabla player, Hariharan's welcome song and Rehman's Jai Ho to finish it. It was a perfect showcase of India without trying to Bollywoodize it.

In the end the Games got off to a rousing start. Twitter & Facebook timelines also suggested the same. Lets hope for a fantastic games as well (on the field).

P.S. In the euphoria of the spectacular opening ceremony, lets not forget all the corruption scandals. The guilty better be punished.

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