Who said test cricket is not interesting anymore ?

Although this may not be the best of times to post this article especially after India's humiliating loss to Australia in Melbourne I'm choosing to post this article believing that India would possibly fight back in Sydney ..

The pleasure of watching test cricket in a stadium with the right kind of company is immense. I was there on the 4th day of the test match between India and Pakistan at Bangalore. This was the day when Ishant Sharma picked up his first 5 wicket haul only in his second test match. Fortunately, I could get to see the batting and bowling performances of both the teams.

We were sitting right below the Nimbus camera man holding a banner "We bunked office along with our Manager to see India win" prepared by one of my colleagues. Occasionally we turned towards camera man (holding the banner) hoping that would show us on the TV

We witnessed the steaming pace of Shoaib Akhtar and some glorious strokes by dada who took the opposition with some good counter attacking shots while Dravid was batting in his own shell defending almost every ball like they were bowling to a dead wall

The audience was making as much noise as they probably could and believe me its difficult for the batsman to concentrate in the midst of all the hullah-gullah. I can visualize how difficult it would be for a one day match if its this way for a test match …

To all those cricket lovers who think "Test Cricket" is not interesting anymore think again ! I bet that you'd surely enjoy the test match cricket experience in a stadium so i'd suggest you to grab the next opportunity that comes by you ...

PS: Sorry for the blurred images.. This is what i could manage with my 2 M camera on my cell phone.

@ IIM B

I have been wanting to write this for a while now but it just dint happen …. !! I happened to attend my friends convocation ceremony @ IIMB about a month back and it turned out to be quite good ...

"I wish I were 27 today…." was pretty much the gist of Mukesh Ambani's address to the graduating students of IIM-B, thus emphasizing the growth potential of the Indian Economy.. What impressed me most was the clarity with which he put his ideas and opinions forward.. He talked about the future of entrepreneurship and the scope this generation of entrepreneurs have …. say 10 years from now when compared to the scope the entrepreneurs had say 10 years ago .. !

Things are looking more promising than ever although there is still caution if India is going through its purple patch now and things might be the same say a few years from now … !! Everything said and done from my perspective India is going to outgrow the rest of the world … if not as quickly as some of the analysts predict (say by 2025) but by atleast 2050.

Here are a few points that make me feel so ….

• the FDI coming into India
• Look at the consumption increase in the middle class .. They are able afford more … so the demand-supply equation changing drastically …
• Reliance the largest Pvt. firm in India showed the way when its owners upped their stake in RIL by share buy back which is a good indicator of things to come … !!
• Railways made a profit for the first time in its history … :) wow ….
• The increasing activity of Private Equity firms in fostering new generation entrepreneurs … The growth of the micro credit domain … and the list goes on and on …. !!!
  

Forgot to mention that there was one more speaker at the convocation ….Nandan Nilekani… but his speech was at best "bad" if not worse .. He seemed to have put his sentences together on the stage or his speech writer must have given him his pages in the wrong order .. He picked out exact sentences from "World is Flat" by Thomas L Friedman .. I know Friedman's book mentions Nilekani's name quite a few times but that doesn’t mean he needs to pick up the sentences straight from the book that too in a random order .. ! To be frank I was quite disappointed with his speech and so too were a couple of my friends ….

Lionel Messi vs Diego Maradona

Here is the comparision video with Maradona's goal. I still feel Maradona's goal (goal of the century) was slightly better not technically or anything but just because it was at a much bigger stage (FIFA WC).. but this is by no means too far away !!

Lionel Messi Vs Getafe GOAL 18th April 2007

Truly spectacular. He is probably one of those kinds who was born just to play football

Investor's Paradise

Found this website while reading Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. Really good book if finance interests you.

Btw Benjamin Graham was a professor at Columbia University and only one student ever received a A+ in his course called "Security Analysis".. !! Guess who ? … Warren Buffet… Buffet owes it to Benjamin Graham for his investment philosophy called "Value Investing" ..

(PS: According to imdb this is the same book given to the students in the movie "the pursuit of happyness" when Chris Gardner joins the Internship program at Dean Whitter)

Champions League

Roma got a drubbing from Man-United in the second leg of UEFA Champions League at Old Trafford. Michael Carricks two goals were the highlight.

Score 7 - 1

ManU's weekend loss to Portsmouth in EPL must have instilled the vigor …Now they just have slender 3 point lead from Chelsea. The ManU - Chelsea match on May 10th at Stamford Bridge (good for Chelsea :) ) would be worth a watch as they may be fighting it out for the EPL trophy there !!

There is a high probability that 3 English teams will reach a European cup semis after a very long time !! (if liverpool goes through tonight playing at home to PSV ....) after leading 3-0 in the first leg. ACMilan or Bayern will be the fourth team !

Steve Jobs at Stanford

Most of you must have seen this video of Steve Jobs already…

"… you cannot connect the dots looking forward... you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."

"....you've got to find what you love, the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it".

Last but not the least …

"..stay hungry...stay foolish."

This reminds me of one other talk I attended… "foolish and crazy people are the source of all the innovation .. consensus is the source for all the evil .. Fight it out …" when someone tries to rub his/her opinion onto u .. You might not win but people know that you have an opinion … youv'e atleast put your point across … "I argue because I care .. If you don’t argue you probably dont ..." makes lot of sense .. doesn't it ?

'He held up a mirror to Indian cricket'-Manjrekar

Although his commentry is not very interesting his thought process seems to work well:

We get very emotional about our cricket, our players. We sometimes over-rate our cricketers because we are so obsessed with them - we don't look around too much. Greg Chappell has shown us, in black and white, what is wrong and what is right with our cricket.

I somehow have a feeling that this is what is going to happen: India will tour Bangladesh in May and defeat them hands down and as someone pointed out the news papers and channels reports will read "India takes revenge......" and everyone will start behaving as if all the woes are resolved ...

Harsha Bhogle's article -- Will some honourable men please step forward?

Here's an interesting article by Harsha Bhogle

My father had a very interesting approach to people who came to him for, for want of a better word, “tuition”. He had two conditions. “I will accept no money and you will come at 6am” he used to say and we often wondered why. Much later I realised that this was his way of ensuring his independence. By not accepting money, he was not beholden to these students, and didn’t have to put up with them, and by asking them to come at 6am, he ensured that only the truly committed came to study.

I remember this story for two reasons. Indian cricket needs help but first, it needs to find people who are not beholden to it and who are committed to it. When you have a financial stake in Indian cricket, your honesty can be threatened; your voice can be stifled. But if you have nothing to gain, and only integrity, pride and commitment to offer, you can speak up for what is right. The BCCI needs such people but I am not sure they are searching for them.

Instead the BCCI waits while Indian cricket burns; it waits for this rare configuration of elements that will take place on the 6th and 7th of April. For the last four days Indian cricket has been lying wounded with attack after attack made on it. But there has been no attempt to douse the fires, no damage control.

If ever you wanted proof that an organisation cannot be run by committees, here it is. If you find worms in the chocolates you sell, you don’t wait for five days for people to arrive from different parts of the world to decide what to do. A leader, somewhere, takes ownership of the situation. Who then, leads Indian cricket?

That is why I believe the various vice-presidents and secretaries and holders of other currently irrelevant titles have let themselves down. Not just because they did nothing but because they fanned the fires themselves by making statements all over the place. The obsession with the media, with the thirty seconds of fame and two days of notoriety, will be the eventual ruin of Indian cricket.

And so we need a dictator, a benevolent dictator, which is really what the head of a family is. Many years ago I had suggested that Indian cricket is a “poor little rich kid” desperately in search of parents. Little has changed to cause me to alter that opinion. The kid is hurt at the moment and has stumbled but is there someone to give it a hand, a warm embrace; is there someone to take ownership of the kid?

So then, who leads Indian cricket? Who is it whose chest puffs with pride and who says “this is my baby”?

And till we find this benevolent dictator, all these meetings will have little value. If, on the 6th of April, many captains and many vice-presidents and many secretaries are going to sit around a huge table wondering what to do next, they might as well call it off now and save everyone a lot of time and money. One person has to decide where Indian cricket goes. He can seek help, advice, opinion, comment, whatever, but one person has to decide. Alex Ferguson decides for Manchester United, Ali Bacher did for South African cricket and, at a vital moment, Indira Gandhi did for India in December 1971. Fifteen people talking together in a room will mean, at best, thirty cups of tea and coffee and five packets of biscuits. No more.

There are immediate issues to be decided. The coach, the captain and therefore, the future of many senior players. There are reports to be discussed and the perpetrators of leaks have to be identified and put on television as villains. And someone has to ask: why are the nine players, including, presumably, Sachin Tendulkar and Sourav Ganguly so worked up? What does an admirable person like Rahul Dravid has to say? And most important; even if the manner of delivery of the coach’s message was unpalatable, was the message wrong?

Are we saying that the attitude of the players cannot be questioned? Were players playing to stay in the team? By taking the easy way and sacking the foreigner we cannot bury the questions he has raised for he might be right on many counts. If Chappell goes and there is no enquiry into player attitudes it means we are perpetuating the star system and creating the atmosphere for further decline in our cricket.

There are no overnight answers to these questions for the process must begin with identifying a full time leader who will take responsibility for the situation.

Then you need to appoint a captain, guarantee him freedom, look for a coach, ease tensions in the team and look for a cricket committee of no more than four or five people who have passion, integrity and humility, to meet six times a year to review where Indian cricket is going. Not to take decisions but to check if the plan is on stream for decisions can only come from one leader.

And to prevent hasty decisions, the tour of Bangladesh in May must be rescheduled forthwith. We can issue Bangladesh guarantees, if necessary payments, but a hastily put together team at this stage can do nobody any good.

Oh, and as a postscript, when Australian cricket was faced with a similar situation in 1985, they appointed two honourable, proud men as captain and coach, decided that players would be picked on attitude and that if it meant some good players had to leave, so be it. It served them very well but remember it was backed by a desire to do good. Can Indian cricket take a similar call?

As Cricketing woes continue ...............

Today is probably a worse day for Indian cricket than the day they exited the WC 07 not because Greg Chappell resigned as Indian coach but from the reaction of the players and the BCCI it looks like we are interested in running away from the problems we face, wanting to live in "denial" than acknowledging the issues that will (I wish I could write "could") denigrate the future of Indian cricket.

There might be 80% of Indian fans who are happy with Chappell's decision but I'm not one among those. Chappell might have his own flaws in managing the team but I must write that my regard for him infact increased for standing up to what he believed in and putting his views across in a blunt manner.

I have one simple question to ask the cricket authorities/fans.

Can you state who is accountable for India's loss in the World Cup considering the say everyone had in team selection.
1. Greg Chappell
2. Rahul Dravid and the team
3. Indian Selection Committee
4. BCCI
5. Complete fiasco of the system
6. Others (state if any !!)

According to me Greg Chappell would come last if I had to name the culprits in order. So are we taking the easy way out by asking Chappell to leave? Lets atleast answer this honestly....

My point is are we even asking the right questions ??
Honestly, can we even confidently tell who is accountable for the loss?
Is there a point in the system where the buck stops ... i cant see one !!

I even heard in interviews a couple of coaches at the lower level point out that there are many genuinely good aspiring cricketers who are neglected due to the bureaucracy in the system. Don’t you think that India with its huge cricket crazy/aspiring base should have been able to build atleast four top notch teams?

Its all up to the dictators who run the show to question themselves about the integrity and honesty with which they run the show. Do you think they will... I wish I could answer "Yes" ... but they need to ask themselves
"If not now, when? If not us, who?" will make an effort to bring about this change.

Warren Buffett (his investment philosophy) .........

Here is a rare talk of Warren Buffet addressing the MBA graduates of Univ. of Florida giving his insights on the art of investing

Warren Buffett talk at University of Florida.

Nishabdh

I Watched Nishabd with a friend of mine on the first weekend of the release. I can still remember vividly Amitabh's expressions in various situations.. If there is one actor who could do this role it was him and RGV got it absolutely right in choosing his cast (even apart from Amitabh).

Screenplay - Direction: This is where you get to see the difference between a movie RGV produces and directs. This is the first movie he directs after "Sarkar" and this turns out to be quite interesting. Frankly speaking I never thought that RGV would direct an emotional love story ever…!! The subtleties have been take care to avoid the melodramatic trauma that you usually end up watching in Bollywood movies of similar kinds ...The locations were really fabulous and the subtleties that were taken care of was simply

Star Cast: Amitabh was simply great with his performance, I can still remember the way he sings "jiya jale jaan jale …. " really hilarious and the way he laughs while he savors the moments he spent with jiah like a mad cranky person itself shows that a lot of thought has been put in on what one goes thro ….
I've heard people say that jiya khan's character was more about beauty than depth .. I agree to a certain extent but what I liked is the way she fitted into the character of an 18 year old immature teenager.. her role was meant to be immature … !

Climax: I still remember the last dialogue that Amitabh says to Nazar and that says it all …I felt that it was probably the best way to end the movie. Given the complexity of the situation it is more of a "practical ending" which made good sense..

Given the highly debatable subject, I feel RGV did enuf justice to the characters portrayed. Don’t expect this movie to be a all out hit and I do agree that a large part of the audience will have problem with the subject he chose but I feel it will be critically acclaimed.