Posted by By being on the receiving end of an agonisingly protracted lecture from Nita Ambani, of course!
Regular readers will be well aware of our morbid fascination with Nita’s breath-taking commitment to interminable public speaking.
As soon as we realised that Mumbai were going to win, our thoughts immediately turned to Nita’s victory talk and whether or not it would be powerful enough to entirely drain away all of the positive feelings arising from becoming champions.
We have all experienced these sorts of bosses.
“I just want to say a few words,” she says… before STEALING A SIGNIFICANT FRACTION OF YOUR LIFE FROM YOU.
Look at these faces.
These are the faces of people who have just won the IPL.
Look what she’s done to them.
And this isn’t even halfway through the celebratory lecture.
By the end of the monologue – when Nita has finally finished listening to her own voice saying stuff about family and connectedness and whatever the hell else welled up in her mad self-possessed mind – these people are empty husks.
These cricketers and random franchise staff have just won the very thing that they all worked together to win. They were full of adrenaline and elated and happy. Now they are awkward and uncomfortable.
It finishes with them forced to hold hands like kids in a nursery.
At least by that point they are starting to get happy again because it is slowly dawning on them that maybe Nita has finally stopped talking.
Similar deliveries:
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Shouldn’t you change the title to ‘Nita Ambani’s path to the ruination of Mankind’ as that seems to be what she is slowly doing.
Maybe the reason why they are incredibly good is that they are constantly getting rid of pent up anger in the games. The anger naturally coming from the loss of a chunk of their lives that Nita has used up.
Can someone please explain the emotional journey that the woman behind Nita on her left is going through
This is a credible angle we hadn’t considered. It does depend how much you believe the fire of righteous anger is beneficial to cricket performance though. You can definitely have too much pent up rage.
At work last week I had to make an agonisingly difficult announcement and tribute, as one of our longest-standing colleagues had died suddenly and unexpectedly on Wednesday.
My colleagues faces on that video conference looked a little like the faces of the listeners in the above photograph.
Sorry to hear that Ged.
I can honestly say I’ve seen more cheerful-looking funerals than this photo…
According to Wikipedia she’s a philanthropist. Is her main philanthropy exposing relatively wealthy cricketers to her bullshit as opposed to anyone else?
I think it is a form of “levelling up”, or at least “levelling down”, that professional sportspeople be exposed to the same crud that office drones have to face on a daily basis. The team are taking one for us, so to speak. Having said that, so much management-speak – with due apologies to our resident management consultant types – seems to have been lifted from poorly understood and likely irrelevant sporting analogies, that perhaps Nita Ambani’s own goal is merely passing the baton full-circle. From the looks on the faces of her team, I reckon part of their dread is the fact they know all too well she believes it’s a marathon, not a sprint, and it’s best not to pull any punches.
Jarrod Kimber now prefaces his articles by saying “ I’ve worked for franchises around the world, as analyst, general manager and consultant. I’ve written reports, plans and advice for how teams, players and coaches could get better in T20.” Maybe this is because he is not rude about the likes of Nita Ambani.