The Cricket Blog -1

Its always interesting to see almost everybody in India being hyper active when it comes to cricket.

The audience cannot take anything peacefully be it a victory or defeat. Victory  and immediately some cricketers become demigods. Defeat and immediately the demigod is reduced to a useless weasel.The amount of hype a media gives some cricketers has spelled the players' doom. In spite of a number of doomed cricketers the experts (who probably have never played cricket) commenting on strategy, analyzing a player's mind and capabilities.

The current captain of Indian cricket team, i think, is the result of one such hype. The poor chap seems to be a nice guy but the way the media is treating him, chasing him and writing him, it would be a time for him to worry about his career in cricket. A couple of failures everybody will write him off.

And finally, it is the team by itself. I wonder if it is the public and media pressure, they keep trying to do something new to win a game and end up in disasters. The current series with Australia proved this.

a) There was verbal aggression which ended up looking silly and childish when it was not backed by substance. Suddenly, when they realized there is no substance, the aggression ended abruptly.But there was no display of aggression in what mattered the most, the game.

b) There were desperate changes in the batting order without allowing any batsman to settle down in one slot. This was also pointed out by a senior player in the opponent team. The surprise in this was that a batsman who had proven himself for over 10 years in a particular slot being shoved around in the order and finally even dropped for one game.

c) The team's thoughtless use of bowlers in not using the bowlers who have been the best on the day to bowl their full quota of overs.

All this proves one thing, the team is run by a bunch of unprofessional people who also lack common sense. Can someone take their brains back from their home and start using it please. The need of the hour, from a common-sense perspective, seems to be professionalism, confidence and mental strength which should automatically increase the aggression in the field.

It is not a big deal to lose a match or a series as long as a professional outfit displays their competitive capabilities and gives the opponent a run for their money. Neither is it a big deal to have one or two bad days at work but it is important that people get to see a consistent good effort.

Wow!!! another long blog that nobody but me is going to read :)

The Search Scare

I read an article in Reuters which talks about what are top search topics by country. This article is based on statistics published by Google. This has increased my recent fear about Internet and privacy. The more you search in some search engine, the more the search engine, the more they know about you. It is possible for the search engines to know more about yourselves that you yourself do.

One of my friends called me and told me that he tried to use windows xp's "Find" feature and one of his monitoring software reported that the search is trying to reach some IP which belonged to Microsoft. Strange, I thought!!

With the increasing use of Internet in almost every walk of life like shopping, banking, food and searching information, it is inevitable that our privacy will be completely compromised.

As in everything there are both good and bad in Internet but it is possible for any of these popular search engines to compromise your private information. Even if they put in a small program in your machine which tracks your daily work and reports it to their database, most of us casual users are not even going to be aware of this.

Scary!! But I guess we will probably have to live with this unless we take some small steps like not using the same search engine over and over (at least scatter the information till the search engines merge and share data), using some security tools to know which software is trying to send what information outside your computer etc.

Gotta go now..i have a to google up some information :(

Insha Allah

I am in Dubai on work now. I had a conversation with one of our vendors regarding some work that he had to help me finish. Just to give the readers (if in the unlikely scenario of someone reading my blog) the context, there was a part of my work that depended on he completing his part. So, the conversation was simply about when he would be able to come and complete the work.

Literally in every sentence he spoke, he goes like "Insha Allah, i would be able to do this", "Insha Allah, i would be able to come there tomorrow". It is not just this gentleman but also a few other people who I spoke to spoke the same way. Two things stuck me on this, one on a serious note and the other a funny part.

Let me write the funny part first. Btw, if you are a Muslim and you are reading this blog, let me first assure you I am NOT making fun of the religion nor am I making fun of Allah-The God.

So, here goes the funny part. If someone was incompetent at work but always said "Insha Allah, i will be able to do it"; I wonder if the person would be blamed for his incompetence and removed from his job or would that be, Allah did not so desire and hence the work was not done. I would probably say "Insha Allah, you are fired" and close the story.

On a serious note, it was amazing to see how he believes in that supreme power. If not for HIM, nothing would happen. If HE so desires everything would happen. The consistent stress on the fact that anything he does is because Allah makes him do it. I am simply amazed by the belief these people have in God and their respect to God. Awesome, truly awesome.

HappIness

It was fun watching the celebrations of India's victory over England in the cricket test series. It was really nice to see the happy faces of the poor cricketers who have been bashed so much by every Tom, Dick and Harry. I have noticed, in my career in the IT industry, how a team's victory brings joy to everybody. In that moment of victory, people forget all their interpersonal issues and just savour and enjoy the moment. Some victories also end long standing animosities.

A team's victory is a great feeling overall and the happiness is clearly reflected and while relishing the team's happiness I forgot some Indian cricket bashing questions myself, which is a good thing.

To me, it was another realization how someone's happiness, even if it was on a stupid TV screen, made me happy. I like being around people who are happy. I want to be happy so that other people around me can feel my happiness and become happy themselves.

The goal, finally, is to try and be happy as much as possible and keep everybody around me happy. Most of the times it is in hind sight we realize mistakes or inevitable circumstances which create unhappiness. But the only way I think is to move ahead just seeing what positives you can take out of it. This Indian team seems to have managed to do it after an almost certain defeat in Lord's.

As the script writer aptly points out in the movie "In Pursuit of Happyness", there is only an I in happiness, there is no "Y".

The Simpsons

I watched this movie "The Simpsons, the movie" yesterday. Outrageously hilarious movie is the only way i can describe it. My incompetency in English vocabulary limits my capabilities to explain it better.

The movie starts with making fun of the viewers, calling them idiots for watching something in a theatre that they can watch in TV everyday and that is the start of the Homer Simpson's outrageous antics.

From there on it takes us on a laughter filed 1.5 hours. Simple comedy and with good message. And, be careful, watch every scene and listen to every dialogue carefully lest you miss some of the wonderful subtle comedy.

I recommend it highly for a 2 hours of stress free time, the last 30 minutes to recollect the movie and laugh again :)

A sad state

I visited a temple in TamilNadu last week. This is a very old temple. I went on a Friday and there were number of visitors. The sad part was that the temple was so dirty and very poorly maintained. And what was worse? All the people who came there did not even seem to be bothered. This was my biggest disappointment. We seem to have accepted anything and everything as a way of life.

I think i should do something about it. There were a number of people asking for alms. I wonder if it would be a good idea to make them clean the temple and give them a pay and allow them to stay there. That might be a win win for everybody. Need to see if i can implement this plan.

He Goes, He Sees, SHE Conquers

A friend of mine told me this morning that he would be getting married soon and his life partner has been chosen. This blog is a result of our conversation this morning.

This is an arranged marriage. Well..all marriages are arranged in some way or the other but this is an Indian Arranged Marriage. For those who do not know...its a very simple process

Parents decide who their kids should marry... The boy or the girl, henceforth referred to as the victim, goes through the following process

Step 1: Horoscopes are exchanged between families (only in the same cast, creed etc). Nobody knows where all in the world the horoscopes have travelled. When matching horoscopes are found...the victims are shortlisted.

Step 2: The photos of the guy and the girl (victims) are exchanged by the families.

Step 3: Parents, Siblings, Grand old men and close relatives do the next round shortlisting by looking at the photos.

Step 4: One evening parents of the victim calls the victim with a huge smile on their face and present him/her with a white envelope. The entire family will now be looking at the victim, while the embarassed and shy victim skims through the photos and shortilists his/her prospective partner victim. In some cases, the victim may be lucky and may get an email with a zip file attachment containing the photographs and BioData (note: NOT CV or Resume) of prospective victims.This is an optional step and some families skip this.

Step 5: The male victim is invited to the house of the female victim or to a neutral venue (primarily to negate any advantage the female victim or her family may get) where the victims gets a chance to interview each other.

Step 6: After this the victims talk to their parents to give their consent to accept the other victim as their life partner...if one of them does not agree the process repeats either from step 4 if there are more prospective victims shortlisted or else it will repeat from step 1.

There is more to an arranged marriage ...but we have seen the process initation here and this blog is all about step 5.

This is where it happens ..He goes, He sees, SHE conquers. Some people say that SHE conquers his heart and some may say SHE conquers his life. I do not want to say what she conquers but "He Goes, He Sees, SHE Conquers" still holds good. What say, eh??

Note: This process is known to be working for straight (man and woman) relationships but there has been no recorded evidence of this process working for same sex marriages. Though i do not see any reason why it should not work :)

Acknowledgements: Mr.Saurabh Agrawal

OM Coffee

There is this small food joint called Food Days near my house. I go there for my breakfast occassionaly. The first time i went to this place i ordered my breakfast and a coffee. There is a gentleman by name Krishna who makes you your coffee. I requested him to make a cup of coffee and make it strong for me. He had an instant smile and he made my coffee. Finally signed it off with an "OM" . I hesitated to drink the coffee for a moment. I thought it was a nice art and i did not want to disturb the "OM". Bright smile, good coffee ...i think there are a number of small things that can make my day good. This surely is one of them. There are surely some nice people in this world and thank god for it.

Eighty-Sixing

One afternoon in Arizona, I had gone out for lunch with my friend. We gave our respective orders. My order was a one of those vegetarian sandwiches and i asked the guys to avoid mushrooms in my order. When the check was given to us my friend pointed out something interesting to me . My order was marked as "Garden - 86 Mushrooms". He explained that it was one of the common terms for excluding something. This term is used more often than not in restaurants. There are many stories about what is the background of using Eighty-Six. For details, please visit
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-eig1.htm

Another interesting usage in the restaurants which you may hear could be "A lonely boy on the raft".This means that someone has ordered for an egg with bread.

This takes the cake(?#$%#%%#) and the icing (#$%$#^$%#&^$&^%**&^*&^) and whatever. Imagine yourself at the breakfast table and asking someone "What is for breakfast" and the reply is "Shit on the Shingle". I am not joking "Shit on the single" means that you will get gravy with hamburger and bread, that is if you are still on the breakfast table after hearing what the name of your breakfast.

Being a veggie , i escape this superbly named breakfast while non-vegetarians you can enjoy your Shit on the Shingle :)