Are you watching closely? Inception reviewed.

I'm going out. It's too expensive to stay home and watch TV.

On sport...

As a heterosexual man, I am contractually obliged to love exactly three things; women, beer, and sport. These aren’t options, they’re a package. I’m not allowed to love two of those things if I don’t also love the third. If I didn’t love women, I would have nobody to lie to about being “stuck late at work” when I’m really off drinking beer and watching sport. If I didn’t love beer, neither sport nor women would ever make sense. And if I didn’t love sport, it wouldn’t matter whether I loved women or beer, because I would forever be considered a, well, fashion designer.

If you can pee standing up, you must love sport. Those are the rules. You don’t need to play a sport, but you have to watch one. And you’re not allowed to love one of those pretend-sports like “Curling” or “Lawn Bowls” or anything you can play at a retirement home between diaper changes. You’re welcome to like those things, but you cannot love them

For a sport to be loved, it needs one thing; a hugely entertaining amount of competitive violence. It’s okay to love football, but you can only *like* chess. This is because, as a guy, you know that Gary Kasprov will never lunge across the table mid-game and headbutt Vishwanathan Anand. In turn, Anand will never stab Kasprov in the eye with the Bishop. No room for competitive violence there. No competitive violence, and as a direct result, no entertainment.

Another criterion for loving a sport? You must pick a side, and then love it completely. But that’s not enough. To be a truly entertained, you must immediately and automatically hate everyone else who plays that sport. It isn’t important that you love Liverpool FC. What is important is that you prove this love by going out and punching the first person you meet that loves Chelsea. Even if she happens to be an old lady with a broken leg.

Choosing a side when it comes to cricket is easy. You support India, because to support anyone else would be wrong, and besides, if you supported anybody else, Bal Thackeray would come to your house and eat your grandmother. With other sports though, things get complicated. For example, football.

I am a Manchester United supporter, and since I don’t live in Manchester, I support them for one simple reason; my sister used to be obsessed with them. I spent my entire childhood watching United play solely because my older sister controlled the remote and she always watched in the hope that she’d spot David Beckham. “He’s DAMN cute okay!” was her Mandira-Bedi-like explanation. Then he married that boy from the Spice Girls, and she was devastated.

But now I’m in real trouble, because I’m going to be parked in front of my TV for the next six months. The new Formula One season begins soon and Michael Schumacher has abandoned Ferrari and moved to Mercedes. This is the F1 equivalent of Vladmir Putin defecting to America. And suddenly, I don’t know whom to support. Schumacher or Ferrari?

And then I’ll be stuck watching the IPL, and I need to pick a side for that one too. I’m from Mumbai, so I pledge allegiance to the Mumbai Indians. Now THERE’S a team that understands competitive violence. They couldn’t win any games and entertain their fans (me), so they made it up to me. Harbhajan Singh went and found S Sreesanth from the rival team and slapped him in the face, which in turn caused Sreesanth to weep like a lost girl-scout on live television. Colour me entertained.

And in the end, in June, I’ll spend sleepless nights in front of the TV again for the football World Cup. Luckily, I’ve had a favourite team picked out for over a decade now. It’s whatever team David Beckham is in, of course.

Too much TV, too little time.

I remember time was when you chose the noble, righteous path of the Couch Potato because you wanted to do nothing. I remember, with some fondness, a time when being a blob in front of your television was a deeply personal experience. But then it all went so wrong. So horribly, terribly wrong. Somewhere down the line, television went and became the one thing I never wanted it to be; a social activity.

It started innocently enough. About six years ago, I started watching 24, in which a counter-terrorist agent who’s made of the same material as airplane black-boxes single handedly kills every single threat known to America, from angry Middle-Eastern men to common sense. Nineteen eyeball-frying hours later, I was done with an entire season, and I spent the better part of the evening ranting like a buzzard on cocaine to my friends about what an awesome show it was.

Two days later, they’d all watched it, and the continuing adventures of Jack Bauer became the centerpiece of any and all drunken discourse over the weekend. A few days later, I met another bunch of friends and just as I was about to preach the Gospel of 24, I was informed, in a tone usually reserved for a wannabe fashionista who’s wearing a dress that’s four seasons old, that *they* were all three seasons in. So, naturally, I wasn’t part of the conversation that night, because I had no idea what they were talking about.

I marched home, rallying my DVD guy, and stumbled from my room 48 hours later, a veritable 24ologist. I went off to meet the first lot of friends, ready to show-off my research, except, they couldn’t be arsed, because they were ranting about Prison Break.

And so the vicious cycle continued. I’d be ahead of the curve on 24 but one lot of friends were beating me hollow at Scrubs. I’d put my nose to the grind to catch up on Scrubs only to find another bunch of friends ranting about Heroes. Another friend tried to convince me to watch The Wire, but I couldn’t deign to reply to him because he hadn’t worked through the complexities of season 3 of Lost. I planned my weeks carefully, spending different days in the thrall of different shows. Watching TV had suddenly become homework. I was studying for my social life. I was keeping up with the Joneses. Except there were too many Joneses to keep up with.

And it got worse when I brought the internet into things. When I was finally about to join the ranks of House MD watchers, I realized I had to social-network about it, so people would know that I was now cool and versed in another show. So I blogged it. Except by now, my friends had all migrated to Facebook. And so I changed my Facebook status. Except the really early movers had abandoned Facebook for Twitter. So I spent another twenty minutes signing up for that and then Tweeting my achievement. Then I remembered my Gtalk status, and ran off to change that. By the time I was done, the DVD store had closed and wouldn’t re-open until Monday.

As I shivered through my weekend, jonesing like a junkie for my fix, terrified of the scorn and social ostracization Monday would bring, I realized I’d hit rock bottom. This potato was chipped, baked, mashed and fried. I decided to get out of the game. I took with me only the remains of my sanity, and one sorry epiphany. And it is this; you know the world’s a sad place when you can’t do the things you used to do to relax because they’ve just become too exhausting.

For what it’s worth though, I’m still the world’s foremost 24 expert.

Office Spaced