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Cricketing icon to cartoon

His detractors might lampoon him and drawn caricatures of his increasingly inconsistent cricketing abilities but in a country of cricket lovers, Sachin Tendulkar continues to have iconic status with a legion of fans who will worship him. In any form.

The man who makes at best a very awkward endorser of dozens of products on Indian television is now gearing up to become a very popular cartoon. Literally. Shemaroo Entertainment, a significant player in the industry has signed Sachin on as an animation hero in a proposed 3D- comedy series ‘Master Blasters’.

The Master Blaster series will have the cricketer, whose real-life cricketing career seems to be losing steam, train talented kids in the finer nuances of the game. “I have always been fascinated with the world of animation and have enjoyed watching it with my children. The challenge for the production team will be to ensure that some human values and learnings are imparted while continuing to entertain the viewers through the series,” he said of his decision to start off a new career, recently. “It will be a different experience to see one’s rendition on the animated screen, performing larger than life action much beyond the limitation of the real world,” he said.

Master Blasters’ Season One will have 26 episodes of 22 minutes each.

With some 3.2 million fans following him on Twitter, the animation series will lack no audience. One tweet from the man is equal to lot of MONEY spent on advertising the new venture.

Gentleman? Psy?

WHEN HIS iconic Gangnam style took the world by storm, enchanting even American President Barack Obama who did a little jig based on that on a public platform last year, we admired Korean singer and performer Psy as a true winner. The boy who everybody said was a loser turned a worldwide sensation with the Gangnam video which made him a wealthy, much admired figure.

Turns out that Gentleman Psy is not a gentleman after all. Anybody with a bit of sense who has seen his new video, named Gentleman (we are hoping that is a joke) will see immediately why he is no gentleman. Clad in smart new threads and dark glasses, Psy, the gentleman in the video, goes on to prove why he is not one. Consider the hip thrusting performer’s antics in the video: first he walks down an empty street and kicks away a traffic cone which cautions people against parking there. Hooting with laughter he then goes on to do unspeakably gross things and definitely ungentlemanly stuff like pulling the chair from under a lady friend who is about to sit down, knocking a cup of scalding tea onto another’s face, and getting together with another male friend to jeer at women. You have to see the video to believe how depraved the man’s sense of fun is and we are wondering why the video already has 150 million views on YouTube. Maybe people are just bored of normally gentlemanly people and want a change.

Be that as it may, the young man who has overnight become a very wealthy man, has now found out that it pays to be, err, gentlemanly. The Korean Broadcast Service (KBS) television has now banned the new song , insisting that the music video shows anti-social behaviour and is likely to influence and encourage others to follow in the singer’s foot steps.

We don’t know about others, but we certainly think that good manners is the first mark of a gentleman.

sudhamenon2006@gmail.com