I keep getting invited to various conclaves, meetings and summits. To help the world decide on matters of great import. It has nothing to do with who I am, or what I have achieved…not even what I have dreamed…but it has everything to do with a statistical gem that was taught to us in school and college and calls itself something random.

You see someone somewhere decided that the perfect sample of sane and insane members, from different parts of the country, with diversely different sets of opinions and with an ideal balance of sex ratios was to be found in the members of the HPS Batch of 1972 students and their spouses.

How did they come to this conclusion? Well I guess it was a random choice and nobody gave it much thought really, but since we were projected as a perfect sample, a perfect sample we became.

The problem was that among our members there were two types of people. The many who had legitimate occupations and filled agendas and a few who had nothing to do but perambulate through life with a silly grin connecting their ears across their faces.

Needless to say I was chosen to be the lead member of the latter group, and thus became the scapegoat who was sent on these junkets whenever someone in the world screamed out loud that he or she wanted help in trying to find a consensus.

The Captain of the Indian Cricket Team was an issue that raised its ugly head too often for comfort and when the call came from BCCI we all decided to meet informally at the Sailing Club and make our choice obvious.

The problem with the Club was that the accompanying drinks were designed to lead conversations astray. And so they faithfully did. So our august group which started off discussing the Do’s and Dhoni’s of Indian Cricket suddenly digressed and started debating the greatness of a man who had no hesitation in saying ‘I am sorry’ vs the impudence of a Mukher who insisted on being referred to as a jee.

In the bevy of outswingers that followed, in the midst of all the doosras and theesras that flew and in the silence between loud, raucous cheers we decided that one candidate was better suited to be the President of India than the others. For chrissakes, one of the hopefuls had not even thought it prudent to have a haircut. Another looked like a rubber stamp with a beard. There was even a lady who thought Mamata was a voice of reason.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, we decided who the next President of India was going to be. Sorry, we are sworn to secrecy and can only reveal all when the deed is done.

What I can tell you however is that we are going to meet in the next couple of days to discuss the Captaincy issues. And we have to apologise to Sharad Pawar that he could not be made a team captain whilst he was MP, but we were considering making an exception in the case of Tendulkar, unless of course Saurav also got himself nominated to the RS.