Harbhajan's itch!

I came across something really funny yesterday. The newspapers across the World had pictures of Harbhajan Singh splashed across their pages. For a moment, I wondered why in God's name were they showing Harbhajan scratching his armpit and then I read the caption. I couldn't help but laugh! It said that Harbhajan was making monkey gestures at the Australian crowd by scratching his armpit with his left hand! This of course, says the Australian media, is racism.

Let me get this right. It was a hot, Sunny day and the Indian and Australian teams had been battling it out for quite some time. Needless to say that players from both the teams were tired, weary and pretty sweaty! It is therefore quite common place for a sudden itch to appear in one's sweaty armpit. Usually, humans and even monkeys react to this itch by scratching the affected area with their finger nails. The ensuing feeling is often quite therapeutic! So, Harbhajan, like most fellow humans reacted to an itch with an urgent scratch. Normally, such an act is done in privacy but since there is nothing private about a cricket field, he decided it was best to attend to this urgent matter immediately, rather than face the embarrassement of dropping a much needed catch due to loss of concentration because of an itch. Had Harbhajan not attended to his itch, it could have had a devastating effect on the match for India and could have led to national shame! Now as Harbhajan moved his left hand towards his right armpit, a reporter desparate for a story ,clicked away with his camera. The next day, pictures of Harbhajan's private itch was all over the newspapers!

So, to make a tall and overly exaggerated story short, Harbhajan was instinctively reacting to a primeval urge to itch his underarm area. This was construed as a monkey gesture by a reporter. One has to commend this reporter for his extremely active imagination. Tomorrow, we all will forget this story and this reporter will be on the prowl again for another clincher. Harbhajan on the other hand, poor thing, can never itch his armpit in public again.