Sit down. I have things to tell you and we should start with the racquet because the racquet has a secret.
The Wilson Burn 100LS V6 is a tour-level frame at 280 grams with a 100 square inch head, and the string pattern is 18 by 16 — eighteen mains, sixteen crosses. Read that again.
More mains than crosses, which is backwards from almost every racquet ever made.
That is Wilson's Spin Effect Technology, and the reason it works is this: with fewer crosses in the way, the main strings are free to slide sideways further on contact and then snap back, and that snapback is what puts revolutions on the ball. It increases spin without asking you to change your swing, and the ball comes off with a trajectory that lifts and then dives sharply.
So: a light, manoeuvrable frame, easy to accelerate, spinning the ball hard from the baseline and quick enough at the net that you are not caught out. It suits players who want the racquet to do some of the shaping for them. There.
That is the honest technical part, and now we can talk about Jaisalmer.
Jaisalmer Fort stands on Meru hill in yellow sandstone with ninety-nine bastions, and — and this is the part people never believe — it is still lived in. Thousands of people, inside the walls, in a working fort. There are houses in there whose families have been in the same rooms for centuries, and I will let you imagine what the neighbourly relations are like.
The Jain temples inside it were carved between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, and the Parshvanath is the one to see.
Then Patwa Haveli, which is five mansions of latticed stone raised by one merchant family — five, for the sons, side by side, each one competing with the others in stonework, right there in the street where everyone could see who was winning. And Gadisar Lake, dug in 1367, ringed with ghats and entered through a carved gateway.
The story they tell about that gateway is that it was built by a courtesan, and that the respectable citizens of the town were so offended that they planned to pull it down — and she moved first, put a shrine on top of it, and made it impossible to touch. Whether every detail holds up, I could not swear to.
But the arch is still standing, so somebody in that story was very clever indeed.
"She put a shrine on top of it, and after that nobody could lay a finger on it."
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