Monday, December 31, 2007

The fate of 31st

2008 is not blind. He has eyes and he can see. He can see how people are treating the poor old 2007. Also, in his mind, he can look back and see the day when the same people had cheered and welcomed 2007. They had decorated their homes and greeted one another on his coming. They had thrown parties when he had arrived. It was not long back when they were running towards him with outstretched arms, hugging him and kissing him. How precious, how special, they had made him feel that night! And barely an year after that night, they can't wait for him to leave!

2007 will leave anyway. And he wouldn't ever come back. But it hurts to see people deserting him in the last moments. And they have not taken any effort to hide their impatience. It hurts to see how people carried other's luggage into his room while he was still packing. He wanted to scream - 'I am still here, I am not dead yet', but these things can not be said without looking ridiculous. And he doesn't want to look jealous either. He doesn't grudge a welcome party for 1st, but deep in his heart he did expect a few kind words of farewell for 31st.

But such is the fate of 31st that even his flowers seem to cause a delay the arrival of spring. He feels like an actor whose dialogs have been given to someone else, and who still has to stand on the stage for the time allotted to him, sweating in uncomfortable silence, freezing under unsympathetic gaze. As soon as he arrives, he is made to realize how eagerly people want him to leave! And when he departs, he hears the sound of crackers behind his footsteps.

2008 knows very well that it is not him who they embrace. It was not 2007 who they had embraced and it will not be 2009 who they will embrace. They embrace whatever is 'new' and he knows well no one has remained 'new' for long. He knows that he will also be sent like this - unceremoniously - wrapped in an ominous quiet, amid noisy wait for someone 'new'.

Friday, December 21, 2007

On Ambition

It's good for you if you like it, but do remember it's not there because you like it.

Economic growth is no longer a matter of choice. It's no longer optional. It's a political imperative. Similarly, and consequently, ambition is not optional for individuals anymore.

A tree that bears fruits is a good tree. An animal with a bulging udder is a good animal. The more fruit, the better the tree; the more the milk, the better the animal. 'Good' is a purely utilitarian concept, which reduces existence of a living being to mere usability. By the same token, if I don't have fruits, flesh or milk for others, and they tag me 'bad'. But why must it bother me? Do we live to please others? Perhaps yes. That's why we die to be good student in institutes, good employee in organization, and good consumer in market.

Do ambitious people live a better life? Or a more meaningful life? I don't think so. I don't think Alexander was great, and I don't think his life was meaningful. Ambition is just an acceptable and a more sophisticated term for greed. Fathered by a complex, it further fathers complex. It spreads like a communicable disease. That's what ambition is - a communicable disease.

Besides, I often feel that the ambition that we call ours is not really ours. We carry out someone else’s ambition like our own, and worse - at expense of our own. The question to be asked is – whose ambition is my ambition?

Coming back to growth, it's like love making or rape depending on the consent of the other. One is led to thinks why someone would be so much interested in others' growth? Whose growth is it?

Sunday, December 16, 2007

The Resurrection of Dada


I love Saurav Ganguly for showing this gesture. Look at the joy on his face at his teammate's success. Each one of us knows in her/his heart that it takes a character to tolerate, let alone celebrate, your neighbor's success. Not everyone can achieve that character, that strength, and that peace of mind. This man indeed has a Lion's heart; and he wears that heart in his sleeves. Perhaps that's why he gets carried away; takes off his shirt, runs into the arena like a little boy and hugs his boys like an affectionate father. Perhaps that's why Dada is loved like no other cricketer in India, passionately, and unconditionally! For skill and technique can command respect and awe but not what we call love. Love is bestowed upon those who, once in a while, do get carried away by it. This post is a tribute to the spirit of Dada - the beloved Prince of Kolkata, and to the most inspiring comeback in the history of Indian cricket.

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If you're looking for a clue to what has helped Sourav Ganguly sustain his spectacular run in Test cricket since his return at the fag end of last year, don't bother looking at his footwork or the flow of his bat. Take, instead, a close look at his eyes while he is batting. They speak of a calmness that borders on serenity, and a combination of composure and resolve. You could see it in his comeback innings in Johannesburg, which fetched him an unbeaten 51, and you could see it through his epic innings in Bangalore that marked a new high in his career.
In his bowling, and on the field, we have seen the more familiar Ganguly; excitable, emotional, even fiery. He has appealed cantankerously and celebrated his wickets and catches with child-like gusto. His batting hasn't lacked his natural flair - in fact, he has been batting with greater freedom than he did in the period leading up to his temporary banishment - but the most noticeable feature about his cricket has been his poise. It hasn't left him even after he has occasionally been cornered into an awkward position by a short ball.
He has let himself go only once: it was an emotional moment, getting to his first hundred before his adoring home fans. But his celebration after he got to his first double-hundred, a landmark he sought and will cherish, was far more subdued. There was the raising of the arms and the acknowledgment of applause from his team-mates and the crowd. But then there was also a series of little pumps of the fist, and a waving of the helmet. Those were for himself. There was an air of fulfillment, of a man celebrating privately in public. His smile touched a million hearts: his struggle to regain his place, and some would say his honour, have been among the most stirring and uplifting stories in cricket.
Let's be done with the numbers first. Incredibly for a man who was given up for dead, 2007 has been his most successful year statistically. Potentially he has three innings left still, and he has already scored 932 runs at 62.13. His most prolific year to date has been 2002, when he managed 945 runs - but it took him 16 Tests back then. Put together, 2005 and 2006 yielded him only 422 runs from 11 Tests at 28.13, and that included a painstaking hundred against a hopeless Zimbabwean bowling attack.
The manner of his removal, first from captaincy and then from the team, continues to rankle with his supporters, and surely with him. But it is undeniable that from that low has emerged this high. It was perhaps a bit disingenuous for Greg Chappell to claim credit for Ganguly's revival, but in the cold light of the day, the exile, the sheer indignation of it, did make the revival possible, and ultimately far more poignant.
The credit for it must go entirely to Ganguly, for few rational observers would have seen it coming. It wasn't just that the runs had dried up; his skills, his responses, seemed to have deserted him, and he bore the look of a haunted man.
He owes his return to a change in the selection committee, but the rest of the story is about a man who simply refused to surrender to what seemed inevitable to most. Much can be said about his improved footwork and the decisiveness of his stroke-making, but in the end, it has been a triumph of spirit, of incredible strength of mind and faith.
Remarkably, in a batting line-up featuring Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid, Ganguly has been India's best batsman since his return. Not merely for consistency and the number of runs scored - during the course of his double-hundred he became India's leading run--getter this year - but for the assuredness of the manner in which he has made them. His half-century in his return Test in Johannesburg, though subdued and a bit laboured, helped India to what ultimately turned out to be a match-winning first-innings total in a low-scoring Test. And in the decisive Test in Cape Town, only he looked fluent and in control in the fateful second innings; his dismissal induced a crawl that proved terminal.
In England he had a series of vital contributions, and none better than a 79 on a challenging pitch in the second Test at Trent Bridge. Apart from Zaheer Khan's inspired swing bowling, my warmest memory from that match is of Ganguly's square-driving.
Michael Vaughan set an off-side trap, with four men between cover and gully, and Ganguly teased and mocked him by caressing, punching and guiding the ball repeatedly through that cordon: one to the right of point, then one to the left, and then a couple between the two gullies. He was denied a hundred by a wrong decision, and his response to that dismissal told a story. In an earlier time he would have left kicking and stomping; here he did so with an ironic, rueful smile. The protest was registered, but without causing offence.
Admittedly his hundreds in the current series have come against feeble opponents. The pitch at Kolkata offered nothing to the bowlers, and Shoaib Akhtar was drained by illness. But at Bangalore he was not so much up against the bowlers as the match situation. He provided the calm cushion for Yuvraj Singh to flow at the other end without ever sacrificing his own strokes.
Personally, my favourite Ganguly innings of the series is a small but vital one. It came during the run-chase in the final innings of the first Test. Shoaib had just cleaned up Rahul Dravid with a ripper; India had over a hundred runs to get; and Tendulkar was finding non-existent demons in the pitch. In this banana-skin situation, typical to India, Ganguly, who had fallen cheaply in the first innings, set about cutting down the target nervelessly, with deliciously timed fours against Shoaib, Mohammad Sami, and Danish Kaneria.
The toughest challenge lies ahead. Australia will come hard at him, and the pitches will test his skills. But he is living out a fairytale at the moment, and nothing he achieves will be a surprise anymore. There are many, me included, who believed Ganguly's time as an international cricketer was over. We owe him an apology and a salute.
- Sambit Bal (Editor, Cricinfo)

Monday, December 10, 2007

burn Bangalore and burn IT

We shouldn't expect others to stretch their tolerance for those who neither deserve nor respect it. The angst of South Indians is not at all misplaced, and is still too mild to match New Delhi brand cockiness. Anyone who has loved any place ever in his life can easily relate to their anguish. The serenity and simplicity of the garden city exists only in their memories, and is being threatened by vulgarity of heartland and NCR. The city has been virtually ravaged by IT and the IT sponsored brats. The pop-Punjabi lifestyle coupled with ample availability of disposable money causes cancerous growth of malls, pubs etc. Result - tawdriness all around the city. Enough of economic development at cost of culture! It's time the cool dudes are made to realize they will be solved if they continue to be a problem. Those who are insensitive to native sentiments better stay home.

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I am a real Bangalorean. I was born in Basavangudi. The greatness of Bangalore was that it allowed simplicity and enjoyment—a cup of coffee and a masala dosa at Vidyarthi Bhavan kept you happy. I don't see that Bangalore anymore. It is now an awful city. There was more poetry and music here before the IT boom. The city we have created in recent years is rotten—highly polluted, garbage strewn everywhere, including the intellectual garbage dumped on this city by the IT industry.

Bangalore was always a highly intellectual city. Though people called it a garden city, there was more science here than anywhere else in India. Nowadays, nobody talks about it. They only call it an IT city. When it all started, I thought it was a good thing because so many people were getting jobs. Over the years, it has created a large upper-middle-class population who crowd the malls. There is nothing wrong in that, but what is really serious is the influence this has had on Bangalore's intellectual content.

It is wonderful to have a lot of young people getting big salaries, provided they don't take away the essential lifeblood of other professions. Bright people at a very young age, before they are even 20, think of IT as an option because they can make quick money. Lots of intelligent people are doing jobs that are much below their intellectual capabilities. They are like coolies who are working for wages and not producing great intellectual material.

Can an India of the future afford a highly skewed growth like this? All the humours should be balanced—we must also have good poets, good economists, fine historians, quality scientists and top-class engineers. An nri recently asked me, if India is so great in IT, how come it produces only 25 PhDs in computer science per year? That's a very good question.

Right in the beginning, the IT industry should have planned their campuses in towns like Ramanagaram (40-odd km from Bangalore). They should have created IT satellite towns, but they all wanted land inside the city. They not only took away that land, they also complain about not getting enough. They say they want better roads, but why should we create them?

IT people have a responsibility that they are yet to fulfil. If they're making so much money, why shouldn't they create an outstanding private university equivalent to Stanford or Harvard? Had they done something like that they would have compensated for the other problems they have created. If IT people are making money, what do I get out of it, unless I am employed in Infosys with Narayana Murthy? The trouble is, we have given them a lot, but have got nothing in return.

Our society has created a bunch of icons and role models who are distorting not just the future of this city but of all India, and of our sense of values. Our people have lost respect for scholarship. Money and commerce has taken over. If IT is going to take away our basic values, then you can burn Bangalore and burn IT.

- C.N.R. Rao
A world-renowned solid state and materials chemist, is chairman, Science Advisory Council to the Prime Minister

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

On Sophistication

Greek gods talk only among themselves.

The excess of sophistication makes meaningful socialization as difficult as the lack of it does, though in different ways. Here I am going to talk about the excess. The 'excess' involves things like snobbery and vanity, which confines an individual in his own individuality. He interacts with others through an invisible wall of sophistication; he can't touch any of them, and none of them can touch him. He likes to impress, and loses his interest in intimacy. This excess makes a man cold and lonely, not to say fake and repugnant.

Understandably, the inhabitants of uber-sophisticated isles are usually cold and lonely even if they are not fake and repugnant. Most of them are indeed, however, fake and repugnant. Unaware of the malady deeply rooted in their upbringing, they take extreme pride in their upbringing. When awareness descends, these poor folks attend workshops to learn all sort of techniques to 'break the ice'.

Urban India goes gaga over sophistication (in its most superficial sense) but I fail to see too much value in it. You can neither feed sophistication to the hungry, nor soothe the sick with it. Ask Shania Twain if it can give her warmth in cold and lonely nights. I don't think sophistication would impress her too much.

Sophistication, if not in excess, indeed indicates good upbringing - self-discipline and education. However, it implies none of them. A man of sophistication may or may not be a man of values. He may or may not be a good friend or a good citizen. In fact he is most likely to be all appearance and little substance. And appearance is, we all know, deceptive.

Monday, December 03, 2007

Flight of Imagination

Everything was calm and quiet as I looked out of the window. But there was something equally mysterious in the scene - like watching a huge painting and realizing (with an awe) that the picture is not exactly as it was a few moments back.

I saw a sea of smoke silently gurgling, and the floating tides of clouds rolling over and gently piling on one another. So large was the crucible and so slow was the change that there was a dreamy stillness despite all the churning. A gray serenity stretched far to the borders of horizon, above and beyond which a dusty red glow rose, giving an illusion of a distant desert unsettled by march of invaders.

A golden tinge had started to show at edge of shadows. And the edges shone brighter and brighter with every passing moment. The burning dust flew higher and higher till the edges started to glow with electric brilliance. Finally, the yolk of creation appeared at the horizon.