If I could write a letter..

The semi-final duel with Pakistan yesterday was a top-drawer stuff

With the finals slated for the weekend, everyone – from astrologer to zoologist – will get an opportunity to guess and give a pre-match verdict. Some have already started invoking the calendar factor to say India will win – 1983 and 2011 have the same calendar they say and India won in 1983 (what is the big deal – the calendar repeats every 28 years). Sterling fell from 1.70 to 1.05 beginning 1983. Hope this also happens.

With so much at stake for global economy on the back of this clock-stopping event, I thought of writing a letter each to some key people involved with the game that just got over at Mohali. This will help to separate the grain from the chaff and the milk from the water. These letters are a vital link between the past and the future and therefore time sensitive in nature. Here they go…

To MSD:

I am a big fan of your luck. You may have had a mediocre run with the bat for a very long time, may be regularly dropping catches or bungling when the batsman meanders out of the crease or enjoying a liberal quota for conceding byes, but who can complain as long as you are successful. You may have disappointed me by dropping Ashwin but Nehra did a superb job. So credit to you. I don’t know if it is in your hands entirely but if it is, then request you to be lucky only once more when we take on the Lankans in WC finals. Since I am a compulsive fan of something or the other, please give me an opportunity to be your batting fan for some length of time

To Sachin:

It may not have been a lively knock, but you did enjoy many lives. It is ok – I consider it as nature’s tribute to a genius. I virtually bit my nail out off my thumb in sheer tension because everyone around me was grumbling “if sachin scores, india will lose”.  Undeserved ignominy i thought. You not only proved them wrong but also demonstrated that there is no substitute for talent and hardwork. You will leave behind a difficut question:  What will Indian cricket look like without you. We may someday be all out in a 20-20 game also (if that has not happened so far). Whatever, wish you all the best Sir.   Yes that reminds me, you surely deserve to be knighted.

To Yuvvraj:

No, I am not a nameologist trying to add a ‘v’ into your name. It is just an expression of my anger at what you did. I am not complaining about your first ball duck –it happens and should always be seen against other valuable contributions. I am pissed off at what you did when you took your first wicket. No need to show the batsman where the dressing room is, unless you are part of a match between physically challenged cricketers. For someone of your caliber, you should start moving into a Walsh mould and be graceful in whatever you do. Anyway, you have made a very strong and telling comeback and silenced all your critics (no dearth of them) with your performance in the WC. Knowing you,  I am sure this success will go to your head in the soon to be played IPL and we all will be treated to another bout of superciliousness.  Until Sehwag hits you for 24 sixes in the 4 overs you get to bowl. I was taught to accept eccentricity and arrogance among talented. I am willing to live all my life in acceptance mode if you score a century in the finals of the WC.

To Zaheer/Nehra/Munaf:

One of you has always turned up with laurels and done a good job with the ball so far. However, there is no rule that all three of you should not do well together (if you get to play together). And please examine this request – whenever destiny forces you to go to the batting crease before the 40th over, please stay there until the last ball. No need to pretend that the pitch is very difficult to bat and show hurry in returning for that hot tea in the dressing room. Because we soon discover the pitch was a batsman’s paradise. Anyways, good luck boys.

To Raina:

The country despised Greg Chappel for calling you a gifted cricketer. Maybe he bracketed you alongside that dancer boy Sreeshant and therefore the national fury. Honestly, you remind me of Michael Bevan of yester years. But what keeps you out of the team so regularly? I would spend this weekend analyzing what is the dividing line between becoming a great alrounder and perishing as a good fielder fit enough only to be a permanent twelfth-man until superannuation.

To Afridi

Hats off Shahid. You built a team from scratch and did a wonderful job. Some bit of better planning after losing 4 wickets could have seen you through. Why didn’t you gamble by sending Razack as opener? You surely deserve a place among the best in this edition of the world cup. You led the team from the front and a victory in the finals  here would have been resurgence for the country’s cricketing politics. It didnt happen. It's ok - Wish you all the best.

To Fans-India:

Success and Failure are the two sides of the same coin. It could be your bad luck that your coin has failure etched on both sides. But don’t despair. If we win, we had home advantage so let us be modest in our pride. If we lose, let us be happy we lost to the best team.  In our living memories, we have lost more than we won. Many a sentimental Indian cricket fan has been turned into a drunkard by taking on the tension of watching india suffer defeat. Even in victory, Indian cricket has killed some. They will win a totally impossible match in such a fashion that the weak hearted would die of excitement.  I am not asking you to be prepared for disappointment. Just that the hype is consuming us.  We have a very balanced team and a very committed skipper. Consistency is the only ingredient missing.

Murali deserves a grand farewell as much as Sachin deserves. A century by Sachin and a 5-wicket haul by Murali will be justice to their great caliber. Much before the tournament started I wrote elsewhere in this blog that Srilanka are the favorites. And I am now pushed to a situation where I wish them being second-favorites.

Someone told me that TV audiences in India get to watch and hear Sidhu. On a boring day, some humor is guaranteed.  Unlike here. where we get to see serious discussion on cricket!!

If required, I will write the next chain of letters on Sunday - until then, have a very nice weekend.

Miscellaneous Sundries

It’s been some time since I wrote anything here. Been quite busy for a variety of reasons and the only thing that has a continuum in this memory-chain is the fear of being disappointed in the semi-finals of the World Cup 2011. Well, here is what I would have written on various issues if I was regular.

CRICKET: A commendable performance against the Ozzies. Raises expectations and makes me believe that the law of averages will not apply this time. The three heroes who i expected to deliver in the World Cup, have done it in style. Ponting scored a century in possibly his last WC match. Tendulkar is going great and Murali, remains the real maestro. Both Tendulkar and Yuvaraj are in awesome form while the rest too are – in failing to perform. Ashwin – was he a secret weapon and kept away for key matches or was it a case of media becoming part of selection committee. Whatever, this guy is really talented. And deserves to come ahead of Harbajji in the batting order. Wishlist includes Sehwag getting his rhythm atleast once again, Dhoni keeping wickets well and we playing the same that team that played in the QF. Whoever wins the cup, richly deserves it. If there is a commercial need, then India. If it is an issue of the most remarkable effort, then Pak (what a team-effort despite losing three-secondth of the real team.. hahahah, that fraction is not a typo), if it is alround talent and class, then SL and if is none of these, then NZ…

DREAMS: That has become life now. From uncorking a champagne bottle after winning the F1 to making a simple but neat 30 percent gain on my nifty shorts overnight, the range is exhaustive.

MOVIES: I saw a few recently-released Hindi movies. Nothing worth writing about. Except a reiteration of my long held belief that even such classics like ‘Sholay’ or ’Gone with the Wind’ would be a bore if you watch it from a DVD.

BOOKS: I have given up reading any form of printed material, for quite some time now. And that continues. I didn’t read any book in recent times

FRIENDS: Same story – apart from a few mails, smses, telephone calls, skyping and periodic visits - nothing much (what else does anyone do besides these????). Unable to remember my passwords properly, I have created half a dozen Facebook and Orkut IDs and nothing works now. As a precaution, I created a spreadsheet of all my IDs and the corresponding password. And mailed it to a few of my mail IDs. It was a healthy and safe method I thought, until I realized those spreadsheets also had a password and I haven’t stored that anywhere. As a last resort, I am planning to change my name, if I can’t change my face.

WEEKENDS: Since work-days were always busy for me, I had decided to join a gym, a yoga class and then regular cricket at weekends. The trouble is all of these require waking up early so I am Googling hard to find out if there is anything that could be achieved without having to disturb a lovely sleep. Suggestions welcome.

TELEVISION: I love to watch pulp and nonsense. The decrees of fate are so wayward that I hardly get an opportunity to indulge on that favorite pastime, now. We don’t get almost 99.9 percent of the channels that I used to watch in India. As if to hurt me further, I am getting to watch the same Tamil program every day for the last 4 months. It is very similar to DD coming up with a news bulletin just when Zaheer has appealed strongly for a first-ball wicket.

ADVICE: I hardly believe in taking one. Call it God’s gift to me in some ways, packaged as arrogance. And hate to give any (I don’t believe in giving something that I don’t take!!) as well. So this one appealed to me to post it dispassionately : Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines practiced daily and failure is nothing more than a few simple errors repeated daily.

INFLATION: Have spent most of my time trying to understand if this recent one is from the supply side or from the demand side, if it is just commodities or it is from crude and food prices in addition to commodities.  Is it the QE2 from the Federal  Reserve that is fuelling easy liquidity and therefore inflation, or is it for want of a credible asset class that the common man, having access to easy liquidity at almost no rate of interest, is buying commodities and metals and wheat futures. Whatever, in this deep and tireless research I have forgotten to pay some important bills and the penal rate of interest for such non-payment reminds me that the world is far ahead of the rate curve!!  It is the beauty of investment science that whenever I have large surpluses interest rates are almost negligible (thankfully my bank never asked me to pay for depositing) and whenever I borrow to invest, the interest rate is prohibitive enough to get a value from investment. No economist ever created personal wealth I suppose.

PS:  Part 2 in this series will cover more important issues like my food habits, the T-Shirts I liked, the journey in my building-lift, difficulties of standing in an ATM queue etc.

A Dusk-time Picnic

Damside Dusk

The Wise Man

‘It was poetic justice that England had to be the eventual winner in yesterday’s match” said the Wise Man.

I wondered what was so poetic about this victory except for the swing of fortunes but I suspected he was possibly not happy with the third umpire’s judgment of that on-the-line catch. Don’t you think even the third umpire is a human being and prone to errors, I asked. The wise man had his own theory. And he beat me down with his impregnably strong logic. Toggling between technology and philosophy, he made me realize that anyone asked to function as a God should never go wrong. In this exposition, I was also taught how ‘could’ was different from ‘should’ in the world of supreme beings.

The wise man was a different character in many ways. He had a view about everything on earth. He refused to believe he could be wrong or ignorant. “If only in real life we had a review system like the one in this World Cup, how nice it would be” he started. “There won’t be any wrong doers. The wrong doers will be rightly punished and the wrongly punished will be rightly rewarded. A seemingly guilty culprit will be elevated to the role of a judge and… ”. He had a dozen other examples – all aimed at conveying the same point: The world will be a safe place if there was a referee system for all decisions on earth. 

I was happy to hear this and wished that life really had such a mechanism. I wished I could appeal to such a mechanism and implore for justice in all places where I have been wrongfully punished. I also wished even if it was not available now, I should get a retrospective justice whenever this ‘Referee of Life’ was put in place. I quickly resolved to go home and list out in black ink all the instances where I was deceived, cheated, tricked, swindled (little did I realize they all meant the same thing). I also wondered if I should write down what I have done to others but quickly erased such an idea as the mechanism did not provide for introspection / self-appraisal.

I countered the wise man by saying that even in the world cup, the review system was based on an appeal. And there was a limitation on the number of such appeals. Given my needs and greeds in life, I would have long back exhausted my quota and would have started trading in a secondary market for such a quota. He said, “No, in real life, the RoL will be a permanent feature and he will intervene even without a petition for justice.”. That was egregious to me. I wanted to ask if there would be a referee for every locality and what would happen if my referee had some disagreement with the perpetrator’s referee. Will we have a fifth umpire then? With very few things right and very many things wrong between the sky and the earth, the superman called RoL would be an overworked imposter and would soon turn a monster – preferring to kill the errant than punish. Which meant, if someone chose to pick me for treachery, he would be condemned to death after I declare myself ‘the affected’.   By that reckoning I may have vanished long back, I dreaded.  In any case, that was a good idea I thought.   I richly deserved justice, I self-pitied.

The wise man, I thought, was impractical in his expectations of life. He was out to demolish the karma theory and the principle of rebirth and re-generation. The centuries old myth of ‘this birth’s good deeds passing on to next’ was rendered unnecessary by the advent of such an imposing referee I thought. But his idea triggered in me a process of thought : In what is supposed to be a sporting event where everyone is expected to behave sportingly, we have serious checks (third umpire)  in place.  Whereas in real life, where we ought to have had uncompromising dispensation of correctitude, we have serious aberrations. Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will use it, I concluded.

Nature's Fury

It was only last night that i was reading about a phenomenon called 'Super Moon' to be occuring soon - as early as the Full Moon next week (March 19th)

The sad part of this phenomenon is that it is linked to extreme weather events like Tsunami, volcanos or earthquakes.  The last time this supermoon appeared was in January 2005 when Indonesia experienceced a killer earthquake that measured 9.0 on the Richter scale. Katrina, the hurricane was also associated with an unusually large full moon.  Looking back, researchers say, previous supermoons occurred in 1955, 1974 and 1992 - in each of these years the earth experienced extreme weather conditions killing a multitude of people.

I did not believe this and only looked at the positive side of this spectacle as i wanted to see the beautiful moon, closest to earth in the last few decades.

As if to teach me a lesson, the earthquake and Tsunami in tokyo and pacific coasts this morning have devastated life and property of vast magnitude.

Without getting into any debate if this is a science or a superstition, i pray for welfare of all living and peace to the departed soul in this fury of Mother nature. Let 19th of March pass off as a normal day, known more for a spectacular moon in a clear sky.

To My Ladies with Love

Here is saluting every lady on this special day - Women's Day. What would be life like without a woman.  I sent this to all my colleagues and was warmly patted for an apt one:

‘Where shall we see a better daughter or a kinder sister or a truer friend?’ . . . … where Emma errs once, she is in the right a hundred times."  From Emma by Jane Austen

I generally hate these commemorative days - we dont need an occasion to remember a mother or a father or a daughter or a wife.  I have always thought  it was the advertiser's gimmick to create a sales pitch and therefore these "M/F/D/C/W Day" got invented. Still, every year i am moved on a mother's day or a women's day (sheer coincidence both are ladies). 

As one of the many forwarded mails of the day said it nicely:  The angel of the Family is Woman.  Mother, wife, or sister, Woman is the caress of life, the soothing sweetness of affection shed over its toils, a reflection for the individual of the loving providence which watches over Humanity. In her there is treasure enough of consoling tenderness to allay every pain. Moreover for every one of us she is the initiator of the future. The mother's first kiss teaches the child love; the first holy kiss of the woman teaches hope and faith in life; and love and faith create a desire for perfection and the power of reaching towards it step by step; create the future, in short, of which the living symbol is the child, link between us and the generations to come. Through her the Family, with its divine mystery of reproduction, points to Eternity.

On a seriously lighter vein, i may have disappointed my lady-love in some ways. But that's ok - thats what life is all about. Am grateful she understands my shortcomings and is convinced my consistency is infallible and i can be trusted to be the same for the rest of our lives!!!

Club Exclusive

I don't exactly remember the origin of this forwarded piece but if true, this should be a statement of sorts.  Please read on.

“I am sitting and writing this blog from one of India’s most sought after clubs. Membership is not exactly limited but is not easy. The selection process is often cumbersome, very often expensive though there is no fixed membership fee – some pay in crores to gain entry and yet some get in by getting others to sponsor the fees. Membership is for life,once in never out and though membership is not automatically transferable to a member of one’s family this too has been known to happen with great regularity. The food is not much to write home about but service is quick and the food is so cheap that concepts like inflation exist in theory only and do not practically bother those using the facilities.

Where am I sitting I hear you ask. It’s simple really – I’m in the Central Hall of India’s Parliament.”

And guess what.. this piece is attributed to Omar Abdullah, that rare specimen among politicians.