My Passion for Cricket ... has the end come ???

after Indias dismall performance in the carribean there was a recent discussion with friends and fellow cricket buffs ... , many were of the view ... wht a waste of time following cricket .... especially the way we follow .... ball by ball till the last ball is bowled :) .... the general view was that cricket is for retired ppl who dont have anything better to do !! ..... logically speaking sounds pretty true ... who in this fast paced world can afford to put in 8 hrs often bunking work ... sitting in the canteen or even goin to the extent of taking an off from work ..... to watch this stupid game !! ... and in that respect India crashing out from the super 8's has indeed been a blessing in disguise for a atleast a few who can now do that “somethg better”.
After that discussion which led to a surprisingly unanimous conclusion ....i just thought for a while ..... what can that “something better” be in my case , which i'll do instead of watching the next India Pak ODI whenever that happens or even the 17 or so ODI' s India is supposed to play against Aus this year of which I am pretty sure we will lose a min of 15 ...
Only then I realized that if there is anything near what ppl call “passionate about“ .... cricket beats the 2nd second most by miles ... and it has been that way atleast since 1987 when I was 7 years old ... my big bro told me that India will play pakistan in the finals of something called a cricket world cup .... I didnt know much about cricket then ... just that India was the world champions having won the last world cup and also the world championship .... off which I have faint images of seeing Shastri winnig the champions of champions trohpy and along with that an Audi ..... with the complete cricket team on top of it after the presentations ..... India never played pakistan in that final with both losing in the semis .... and Inidia been done in by one Graham Gooch century ... that was the first time Australia won a world cup and for sure it wudnt be their last !!
actually cricket was not the first sport to have captured my imagination ... it was sometime in the summer of 1986 when we had recently got a new - second hand color TV ... my bro and father were quite excited about the prospect of a 16 or so yr old lad taking on one Ivan lendl whom i distinctly remember my brother calling him the best in business at that time .... I really had no real idea what this sport of tennis was all about .... but since my entire family was glued to the TV set that evening .... i was witness to history, I still distinctly remeber the setting that day ... in our pali hill flat , with the TV at one corner of the drawing room and me lying on the diwan at the opposite end , and believe me I had just turned 6 then ! I have imgaes inscribed in memory of Boris Becker flying all over the court taking impossible volleys and generating non geometric angles on them .... that very day i fell in love with the sport and Boris becker was my hero and he still is .... I remember playing against the wall with piece of wood and a tennis ball .... something I quite later realized resempled squash more than tennis ... but for me I was then the invinsible Becker and the wall were all his comtemporaries :) ... my love for the sport later bloomed following another great ... steffi graf , her calm demeanour and composure and that deadly forehand over the excrutiatingly noisy Arantxa Sanchez Vicario and later monica seles ... whon i hated from the bottom of my heart !! .... and this love affair culminated at the wimbledon of 1989 when Boris Becker and Steffy graf won the singles titles in the same year ....
But once my heroes were gone .. i hv never been as passionate about tennis as i was once upon a time ... and the sheer dominance of federer has further eroded the charm ...... my Passion for cricket has lasted longer and today if I lose that, there will surely be a void .... difficult to fill .... and the dominance of Australia over the last decade akin to that of Federer ... and Indias reluctance/inability to move ahead .... has all the ingredients to bring an end to what can easily be said as my only love today !! ...

Survival ... the Basic instinct

Being in the place I am, among all its constraints and restrictions, is my compulsion to watch CNN world endlessly.... there isn’t another English language channel around :( ,

Of what i had heard of CNN ... of its being a US propaganda mouthpiece is not far from wrong.. you find most of the reports bragging about what the US is doing ... on the War on terror in Iraq ....or how will the highly advanced missile defense system can track a north Korean missile launch, inform Bush about it within x secs , get a decision in y secs and shoot it down in z secs :) ... i cant comment on how biased the reporting actually is …. as there aint any way to verify out here ....but for sure CNN takes pride in being American and I see nothing wrong in that … now looking at the positives .... Which I have started doing more often than not since landing in this god forsaken place J ..... my knowledge on international affairs is better than it has ever been ...

It was one of those days .... back from another hectic day at office ... i reluctantly switched on the tv having nothing better to do .... And as usual it was preset at CNN.... but this certainly wasnt like any of those days.... the face that appeared was our very own Rajdeep Sardesai ... and the coverage wasn’t a normal CNN world coverage .... what i was seeing was a Breaking Story … a live coverage on the very familiar CNN-IBN ... the story of those 11 minutes that rocked Mumbai .... Leaving around 200 dead and more than 700 injured..... and more importantly once again reinforcing the uncertainty of life.

Death off course is inevitable, but survival is often considered as the basic instinct of any living species and when we talk about ourselves.... the Homo Sapiens.... its complete evolution to this day has been fiercely driven by this very instinct.... there has been a constant Endeavour in this direction .... through developing basic tools out of stone for self defence against wild animals to developing the best of medical procedures to fight death ...predictablity is the hall mark of any develpoed society .... be it about the weather forecast or your life !!

Darwin provided us with the mantra of survival ... survival of the fittest ... only those will survive who adatp and change according to your changing environments .... newton another great told us of inertia ... a body at rest tends to be at rest until an external force is applied .... for us I believe the external force has been applied a bit too often in recent years and its overdue to get out of Inertia .... and get fitter if we need to survive as a sovereign nation.... we no longer can afford to be a soft nation and a soft target for such acts of indiscriminate violence ....

This is not the first time such a dastardly act has been committed in Mumbai .... the culprits of the 1993 blasts still roam around freely .... organize weddings at the grandest of scales under full media coverage and we and our authorities are still trying to prove that that person exists .... we need to to do an Israel or a KGB or a CIA or even and ISI ..... track each one of those associated with such acts and if need be even get them assanitaed !! ... the point is that the message should be loud and clear that no one will be spared .... if the US can ravage an entire nation to search out one person .... or Israel can launch attacks to search out one of its soldiers ... why are we so soft ..... Why the only statement that our PM can make is 'stay calm' ....

There are schools of thought that talk about motives and rationale of such attacks ... but for me killing of innocents is the greatest act of terror that is possible and beyond any kind of mercy .. and as a friend of mine says "Till the time violent groups strike at such soft targets...till the time they keep on killing innocent civilians just because every act of terror gives them 10000 rupees, they will remain to be called Terrorists...the day they get their target right they will become freedom fighters and nationalists " … read more about these views at http://tedioustedium.blogspot.com/

People today are talking about the spirit of Mumbai and how two days later those very trains are packed again ... but does that mean we don’t care ??? does that mean that this will be one more incident that will keep moving down the pages of our papers and one day forgotten till another similar incident happens ??? if things stay the way they are this is what is exactly going to happen this time round too .... the inertia of our govt machinery that has set in is too high for such "SMALL" incidents to shake ....

Why are we as a nation like this, what makes us so soft .... what makes us to accept things as they are .... When will the time come when we will learn to protect our honour .... our lives and that tooo with authority ... when will the time come when we as a Nation will assert ourselves ??? when will we have our very own CNN !!! i guess no one has the answers now .... but surely the time will come when every indian will start asking these questions and then we will see a revolution !!!! .... just hope that I manage to SURVIVE till then .....to witness the new India ...

Evolution Of Nations ....

Staying with the current theme of my posts ... and my most recent experiences , or more aptly u can say my recent observations of a society, which has transformed itself from a war ravaged, under developed nation not so long ago .to arguably a developed society today. Now I have used the word 'Arguably' cause the only people who insist that they are still a developing nation are Koreans themselves :) and that has more to do with protecting their Agricultural sector from WTO regulations of free trade ... than what actually is they would like to believe :)

For a person like me ...who gets his dal roti by keeping track of what is happening around the world of telecom , the first country to commercially launch DMB (Digital Media Broadcasting) or in simple terms TV on ur cell phone .... can't be anything but developed ... and to add to that being the home of giants like Samsung ,LG, Hyundai et all further corroborates the claim ... and if I tell u that a Hyundai sonata is used as an 'ordinary taxi' ... the very car which till recently was a status symbol in my homeland India .... I think few there will have doubts regarding South Koreas developed status....

Now this post wasn’t meant to debate whether or not Korea is developed .... but my intention here is dwell a bit more to try and understand .... what did Seoul do in the last 2 - 3 decades to completely transform itself ...me being an ordinary bloke .... and no expert on such subjects can speak based on a laymans observation ...

the first impression that I got after just a couple of days in office was that these chaps (Koreans) .... are the most workaholic race of people I have ever come across .... not that I have interacted with every race in the world ... but this observation is based on my experience of working with Europeans .... and accounts from friends about the Americans .... though I’ve heard Japanese are quite similar in nature ...... but then isn’t Japan also a relatively recent success story ?? ...

so people here in Korea put in real long hours of work ... and by long hours I actually mean long working hours ... unlike a few of us Indians .... including me .... who stay in office for 14 hrs a day .... of which 8 are spent in getting in a mood to work and the rest 6 actually working :) ... now what keeps these chaps going ?? my best guess is a real high dose of nicotine and weekend bouts of booze....I am yet to meet a single Korean male who doesn’t smoke !! ...

and its not just their slogging like dogs that catches your eye ... its the amazing sense of self discipline which for me makes them stand out ... be it using only the Zebra crossings and waiting for the traffic signal to cross a road .... to waiting for a subway in a station .... it’s amazing to see how these ppl queue up on the designated arrows on the platform .... which mark the edges where the train gates will open .... wait patiently till every one gets down and board the subway in a queue ... it’s actually an wonderful scene ... hundreds on mini queues formed on the platform waiting for the train to come .... and then you won’t believe it .... they also have a protocol for using the escalators .... Koreans being the workaholics they are ... more often than not, there will be many people in a hurry who can’t wait for the escalator to go on its own pace .... so what do these ppl do ? ... its an unwritten rule that ppl who don’t intend to walk up/down the escalator will stand only on the right extreme of the escalator ... leaving the left for ppl who want to be on the move .... amazing !! .... every thing looks orderly here .... with processes not only well defined but also followed in the right spirit ....... I can go on and on with similar examples ..... but i guess you got the jist ..

It won’t be true if I say every Korean is the same, there is a sizeable young hep crowd around .... making merry and spending big time apparently what their parents have earned the hard way ..... but again as in most successful and developed societies .... it is just one or two generations that give the entire society a push ...and the coming generations just ride the wave ,already having a well set platform ..... it was the case be it the US or the UK or Europe .... wherein the generations of the late 1700's and thru the1800's brought about the Industrial revolution .... giving those societies a head start which they enjoy till date ....now ppl in Europe don’t stay in office beyond 5 now !!

As they say history repeats itself .... Japan saw a similar period in the 60's to 80's transforming their society ...... and Korea from probably the 80's till date .... for Korea it’s the current generation and the last one which has done the hard work .... and its time for the next to enjoy it!! .... China maybe is on its way ....

Now again ..... the question which led me to write all this is when will we get to these levels .... when will India get its generation that will make its mark ?? .... for many it’s already come .... they say that this current generation has it to take our gr8 nation to greater heights .... but I personally am still skeptical , to transform a society ... the push should come from a majority of our population .... it’s just not possible that a handful of industrialists and techies can do it ....and if this is the case the results can actually be disastrous ...creating an ever widening rift b/w the different classes of people .... What we need in my view is a revolution ... a revolution of knowledge .... of education .... of conscience .....of nationalism ....of self discipline... which penetrates the deepest of roots ..... we need to inculcate these very values which act as catalysts to growth among ourselves ....creating the will to excel among each and every Indian is the need of the hour ... and all this is possible ... primarily thru an infrastructure of effective primary education which reaches the grass roots and inculcates such values from a very early age ... only then we can actually think of crossing the hurdle ....

What stops us from doing this ??? what are the solutions to this problem ?? I still don’t have answers .... maybe with time , experiences , observations , a few answers might unravel themselves .... and as soon as I come to some reasonable understanding .... based on my average intellect levels .... will try to pen them down in this space sometime later ....

Evolving Thoughts ......

Now this has been another looong gap since I had written last .... there have been so many things that have been happening all around me ... life is moving a bit too fast for my liking .... but then if i think of the positives the learning curve for me over the last two months has been a lot steeper than it has been in a very long time .... and this is not only abt learning in the sense of what i hav been upto professionally .... but a lot more in the direction which has .... i believe made me a lot more mature as a person ..... and my active association with Bharat Uday Mission in bangalore over this period has a lot to do with this...

So i will try to start off from where I left last .....The initial euphoria and rhetoric about being part of a revolution and changing the face of the nation (a new world order ??) ...died its natural death as was expected and the realization about the actual ground situation came fast ... the challenges that lie ahead , the hurdles ... internal contradictions ... differences in opinion ...ego clashes ... there were ppl who walked out .... and then there were new enthusiastic ppl who walked in ...but what is important is ... whatever the differences in opinion about the path to follow ... the objective and the final destination among all of us is clear ....

Over the last two months I had the opportunity to interact with many people from across the country and abroad under the BM banner .... some interactions were pleasant and some not so pleasant .... but the learning’s from these have been immense .... the intricacies of group dynamics could never have been more apparent ... the realization that what you feel and what you believe will not always be what the team you are working with will agree too ... and more importantly there can be some one who has a better perspective and a point of view ..... I have been working in Teams in the s/w industry for round 3 years now .... but believe me its never the same when you work in a team which is formed, based purely on a common vision with no one in the group having anything personal to gain .... walking out on a difference of opinion in your professional career is not an option .... but in case of a group like BM it is the easiest and there lies the challenge .... to keep yourself motivated and synergize your efforts together even when you have a different view and even when you dont gain anything personally ...... that is the ultimate test of selfless work and the biggest challenge.

Not long ago I strongly believed that the cure of all the ills of our Indian society is simple .... you just need to be ruthless .... maybe a strong willed dictator with the right intentions will do the trick in a matter of 5 - 10 years .... but that was when i was a drawing room analyst of issues .... within the comfortable 4 falls of my house and looking at issues from there ... you just need to scratch the surface and then you will realize the enormity of the issue at hand ..... India being the country is it has its own unique challenges ....the kind of diversity in faith culture, language, social and economic status you find here will be somewhat equivalent to the diversity you find maybe in the entire continent of Europe ... and that is something real difficult to handle and manage efficiently ... any solution should be equally acceptable to every class of citizens of this country and believe me that is not at all easy ...

In the last couple of months I got a chance to spend some time with children of an Orphanage / Hostel in Bangalore though i would have liked to spend a lot more time but things in my professional life had got real hectic off late ... but whatever time i could spend over the weekends was another experience for me .... I was supposed to teach the children basics of Spoken english ... and inspite of me not knowing kanadda at all and the children able to understand my English with great difficulty .... i could see the enthusiasm in them .... you couldnt miss the glitter in their eyes .... for them someone coming down just to meet them ... talk to them meant a lot ...and who better than me to understand what they feel like ....this was the period where the reservation debate was all over the place ....... I have always believed that there should not be any kind of reservation at any level .... but a few days of interaction with these children who didn’t even know what an engineer is and what he does ... i could understand that given the current structure of basic primary education in India .... we need some support for children like these .....but should it be based on caste ??? In the attendance register most of the children didnt have a second name ... if there is anyone who needs reservation then its these kids ... who dont even know what caste they belong to ...

I think will leave this account at this ..... have a lot more to write will try to get my next post soon :)

And Miles to go before I Sleep

This blog of mine has been neglected by me for quite some time ...... On asking myself why ??? there are lots of things that come to my mind ..... its been so hectic off late ... with all the travel i had to do over the last week.... working on multiple projects simultaneously ..... deadlines.... workload .... these are all reasons for sure .... and none of them incorrect .... but if i think deeper .... is this the only reason .... or did i actually had that unstoppable urge to express myself .... and kind off crib about anything and everything ..... which I had earlier ....i guess that fire wasnt there.

The last few weeks that i have been associated with Bharat Uday (refer to my last post ) ... have been revealing and truly thought provoking ..... it has dawned on me that it is the easiest thing to blame the system .... crib about the state of affairs of our country ... and write your heart out ...... the day you move out of your cozy & comfortable homes away from your comp and think of doing something on the ground rather than blabbering on the net ..... you realize “there are miles to go before I sleep” ... the last few weeks have completely transformed me as a person , changed my thought process radically .... and i beieve it has been for the better. During this period i have had the opportunity to interact with people mostly like me who are actually doing something and playing their part in whatever small way possible to bring about change , not like most who talk all the time but feel there is nothing they can do about it .

I was really touched by one such person , as a background this guy is a 25 smthg well settled working for Infosys as a Programmer analyst , which in my view (Given my exp with infy) is the coolest possible job on the planet :)) .... the thing which is different about this guy is that on a weekend you wont find him enjoying himself in a b'lore mall or a movie theatre ..... but planning marketing strategies for Jute Bags being manufactured by a Rural Plant set up by him along with a few likeminded friends ...... what had started off as a single plant employing around 15 rural ladies giving them permanent employment with earnings that dont dwindle with the change of season in 2001 to 7 plants today supporting more than 150 such families. I had a lomg chat with this guy and also visited one of their plants, the thing that struck me hard was when he said “We dont believe in Charity our aim is to empower the underpriviledged” , the main challenge during all these 5 years according to him has been to bring about a change in the way people think, to imbibe in them virtues of quality and productivity.

I have come to a firm belief that if we want to see the the rise of a great nation ..... empowerment of the downtrodden has to be the key .... we need to make them productive , rather than being protective about them and we need hundreds of people like the person I talked about to bring about a revolution, just thinking what can I do wont work ......

Talking about Bhatrat Uday mission .... there are a lot of contradictions as is in almost all organisations of its kind .... there are a lot of things which even I dont subscribe to ...... but still it is atleast a platform where coming together we are trying to do our bit.... over the weeks, we have had a few meetings subsequent to the one described in my earlier post and I have been more and more amazed looking at the enthusiasm the people have today to bring about change ... and the best part is that now the majority of guys coming are mainly young students who r in their 1st yr, 2nd yr of professional courses ...... you can feel the mood of the nation, there is for sure a revolution on the brink of eruption ... the jessica lal outcry and subsequent action is another indication towards that ..... we the people can no longer be taken for granted ....

Before Signing off .... the immortal words of robert frost come to my mind

“Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it's queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there's some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep. “

- Robert Frost