The West Indies Players' Boycott

By all accounts, the West Indies Cricket Board has completely mishandled the situation, and over-estimated the need for cricketers to represent the West Indies in international cricket. The basic fact of the matter is that professionals need to be paid in accordance with a contract that is acceptable to both parties. In the absence of such an agreement, it is not practical for the employer (in this case, the WIBC) to expect its employees (the players) to actually serve the contract's terms. Especially when alternatives such as English county cricket and the IPL exist as far more lucrative and less demanding options. The WIBC has managed to delay the inevitable by fielding a second-string lineup against Bangladesh, and threatens to use the same players for the ICC Champions Trophy. Jimmy Adams thinks this is placebo, and eventually, even these youngsters will realize that not all is well with their employment situation, bringing all involved back to square one. He's right. The WIBC has to step up and get their act together, and the sooner, the better.

Saurav Ganguly In Cricket Administration

On the face of it, Dada looking to enter the CAB is a good move for the game. As a proven leader of men with an understanding of the game and the people who play it, he brings a unique perspective to administration, which has been mired in ennui thanks to self-serving politicians and businessmen treating it as a personal fiefdom. And yet, cricket administration is a political game, an arena where one must constantly jockey for power and watch one's back lest a rival steal your leverage. Ganguly is no stranger to this game; as captain, he has had to play it to ensure that his team was cast in the mould he desired. In the office, though, his play will have to be different. The straight bat will rarely lead to runs, and the balls will always be short and aimed at the ribs. Once he learns to play that game, he will have to discard the straight bat in order to survive. And that will mean that he will be little different than those who came before. Power corrupts, as they say, and Ganguly is a man who has already walked that slippery slope for a long, long time.

The Ashes Are Here; Can We Burn Them Again?

It is a series that has little going for it except nostalgia. The ECB dispensed with tradition and chased the money, so that excuse is gone. England hasn't been a relevant Test side for over a decade, with 2005 being a blip in that sorry record. Australia has conquered everything there is, except for the same 2005 blot. And yet, in Cardiff, these two teams drew a Test match. Australia, the masters of the kill, failed to administer the coup de grace after dominating an English side that didn't seem too interested in playing five full days. This begs the question: why does anybody care about this series? When it isn't hopelessly one-sided, it is irredeemably mediocre. The English sports media, God bless them, are a bunch of slavering dogs after a washed-up bone. They're welcome to it - just leave the rest of us alone.

Is It Really Good To Have Pakistan Playing Cricket Again?

After watching them play Sri Lanka, I'm not so sure. The T20 World Cup win should have been a sign of resurgence, but all the Pakistanis have done is fritter away any modicum of respect it might have won them. The team has gone about this Test series against a very accomplished Sri Lankan team with all the discipline of a schizophrenic who has lost his medication. By showing up under-prepared both mentally and technically, they have made a mockery of the game, and Younis Khan's excuses about a young team are eyewash. This is a middle order in which all the batsmen from three to seven have close to ten years of Test experience. It's about time they started to play like it. If we wanted a club side, we'd rather have the Lahore Badshahs playing Test cricket.

In the alternate stream of reality known as Twitter, I chanced upon this blog entry by Penelope Trunk (via @thinkmaya), in which she explains why she thinks conflict of interest is irrelevant in the blogosphere (a word that I hate, but will employ in the interest of brevity). To wit, bloggers get readership because they produce quality content, not because they expect objectivity.

(. . .) I’ve made a lot of money selling posts. For example, when I wrote a post about PayScale, I was getting paid $5000 a month to talk about them. (I considered not revealing the true value of the contract, but then I thought: Well, PayScale is the poster child for transparent salaries, so how can they complain?)

But readers don’t need to know that I was paid to write the post. Readers should just want the post to be useful and interesting and all the other things you want from any post. Who cares how I get paid as long as I write well? The post got about 100 comments, and it got picked up on 20/20 and in the New York Times. That means it’s a good post. In fact, it probably means that PayScale has good ideas and that’s why I chose to work with them. You should just trust me to take money from smart companies—if I take money from stupid companies then I’ll write stupid posts. [Links removed, italics mine]

It appears that Ms. Trunk is saying, "Trust me, I won't take money from companies who suck and write good things about them, because I know you'll catch me out when you use their products." She also says that disclosures are 'boring', because fewer people read her disclosure about LinkedIn sponsoring her blog. The questionable conclusions aside, this trivialises the creator-consumer relationship in the content domain. The blogger now claims a position of influence in the online world that rivals newspapers and television. It is therefore asinine to not expect them to observe the same standards of disclosure and objectivity in their content creation. Especially those who have large readership and are aware of their influence. To brazenly defend the compromise of the content with a statement like "I'm not lying, trust me" is to belittle the readers' intelligence and disrespects them greatly.

All content creators are held to the same standards: if you write about a company's services or products, you need to be unbiased, because people will take decisions based on your opinion. It is immensely naive to imagine that this is not true, or to believe that readers will trust your integrity blindly. If you are known to conceal information in one regard, there is no reason for your readers to believe that you have concealed information elsewhere as well. If it has hurt traditional media houses to not disclose commercially motivated opinions, then it will surely impact bloggers as well. The impact may be more visible amongst higher-profile bloggers, but it will be visible. Most conspicuously by a drop in readership. Whether Ms. Trunk will suffer this fate remains to be seen, but many a tech blog has suffered for its overt bias in reporting.

Shefaly responds to the Penelope Trunk post with much disgust:

What I can’t quite stomach is unsubstantiated ‘opinions’, prejudices and bigotry and biases – wrapped up fancily as “expertise”.(. . .)

Yet something bothers me deeply about the tawdry combination of amorality and hubris in Miss Trunk’s post. And the presumption that somehow the readership just “wants good content” not necessarily the assurance that the opinion is not coloured in any way. [Emphasis in original]

Much fury also vented on Twitter by @nixxin, @neo_Indian and @vboykis. Thanks for inputs, folks!

1. I love walking in the rain. I don't mean the crazy downpours that come with the monsoons, but the steady shower that lasts an hour or so, with winds that don't blow you off your feet. I miss that these days. It was easier to do in college than it is now.
2. One of the greatest things in the world is to watch the sun rise over anything that's not man-made. Mountains, lakes, oceans, whatever. As long as there's no building obstructing the view.
3. Violins.A well-played violin is the best sound in the world. Me playing the violin isn't quite there, despite close to a decade of training, but I love the sound of violin music.
4. Finishing a good book in one sitting is the most satisfying feeling I can imagine.
5. A good discussion on any old topic. The ones I have with Anand top my list these days.
6. Single-malt whisky. There's something enchanting about cracking open a new bottle of Scotch and inhaling the smells. Almost mystical.
7. An idea perfectly executed is a thing of beauty, and in turn, a joy for ever. Sadly, there are precious few of these going around these days. Compromise is the death of creativity.

I have lived nearly half my life outside Madras, my hometown, if one included a year of elementary school and a year of college in Bombay. Of course, they call it Chennai now, though us old-timers still find it somewhat awkward to use that name. I'm not really an old-timer, either, but I grew up in Madras, and I haven't lived in Chennai very much.

...but bullets can't pierce my breasts. At least, that's what our genius Bollywood actresses seem to think.

Consider, for a moment, the following scenario - it's not too far-fetched. After all, that's why these ladies want the jackets. So, the scenario:

Hot starlet meets dashing gangster in some sort of social do. Dashing gangster sweeps her off her Blahniked feet and starts a furious clandestine romance, for which she is compensated by means of several leading roles in B-movies. All is well in Bollywood, until some nasty competitor in the gangster business decides that our leading man must pay. Preferred mode of payment - hot starlet shall lie in an awkward pose in a pool of her own blood. So, enter super-successful hitman with his high-powered rifle, with which he can shoot the wings off a fly from a few miles away. Hitman spots starlet in tight-fitting dark jacket, which on closer inspection, turns out to be an original Rahul More design from Magnaera.com. Maybe his bullet could pierce it, who knows? But why bother, he thinks, when he can simply shoot through that ample, exposed bosom?

He lines up his shot, which is easy enough, since there's plenty of exposed cleavage. And he shoots, which is easy enough as well, just like flicking a switch. And then, the twist in the tale! The hitman is dead, with a hole in his head the size of a bullet from a high-powered rifle. Forensic experts are called in, and they quickly determine that the hitman has shot himself, thanks to the incredible flexibility of the hot starlet's implants. "Who needs to cover up these things? I'd rather protect parts of my body that aren't nearly as invulnerable," says the hot starlet as she totters off with her gangster boyfriend. Lots of media reporters scribble these words down as the new mantra in fashion design.

P.S.: Yes, I got that bit about the fly from Wanted. So? This is India, we don't believe in intellectual property. Oh, and I got the link from Prem Panicker on Twitter.

When Jarnail Singh threw his sneaker at P. Chidambaram, I'm sure he had no idea that it would turn into some kind of national pastime for India. Since then, Naveen Jindal and a couple of others have been targets of footwear projectiles. The sad part, all these guys did little more than float the damned shoe in the general direction of their targets. It's almost insulting to see a Sikh, a well-constructed specimen of the warrior race, toss his shoe underhand at a static target barely a few feet away, and miss! As someone said somewhere on the Internet (I'd link it if I had any idea who said it), if they can't hit a politician with a shoe from point blank range, how do we expect our cricketers to score direct-hit run-outs?

So, I sit at home, beset by insomnia and the white noise of television's talking heads in the background, wondering: what is the most effective way to throw footwear towards a static target and inflict maximum damage? Is it necessary to have appropriate equipment? Is one form of shoe more suited to throwing than another? Is it easier to throw underarm or overarm? Questions flew thick and fast, like arrows in Ramanand Sagar's Ramayan. Or maybe it was B. R. Chopra's Mahabharat. I forget.

My testing materials were limited to my four pairs of footwear - leather dress shoes, tennis shoes, sandals and the trusty old hawai chappal. For a target, I used a chair. It works for a static target ten feet away. So, with all necessary implements at hand, the testing began.

I summarize my results below. Limited initiative in the middle of the night prevented me from recording all data accurately, so these results are merely indicative (though they have been verified through repetition).

I tested three styles - the overarm javelin, the underarm frisbee, and the underarm slow-pitch. The underarm throws immediately threw up a problem: in the presence of obstacles between the thrower and the target, it is impossible to use the frisbee, as the shoe would definitely hit the obstacles. The slow-pitch can avoid obstacles, but does not deliver sufficient momentum to the shoe, and the toss would be mostly harmless (to borrow a phrase from a famous dead writer). Besides, the dress shoe and sneaker are extremely difficult to throw using these techniques, though the underarm frisbee works like a charm for the chappal and sandal, both in terms of force and distance. Accuracy is always questionable with the frisbee, as is speed to the slow-pitch.

That leaves us with the javelin, which is intuitively the ideal way to throw a shoe at a target located at approximately shoulder-height, so that we can skip people standing around us and send the shoe towards the politician of our choice. Because it utilizes a good unhindered swing of the shoulder and forearm, coupled with aerodynamic orientation of the shoe, it delivers a strong throw and minimum deviation from its path or decelaration in its trajectory. The dress shoe is easiest to throw in this fashion, as it provides for a comfortable grip and has a natural taper at the toe, which minimizes air resistance. The chappal is particularly hard to throw as it isn't easy to hold, and the same holds for the sandal as well. The sneaker is not much harder to throw than the dress shoe, but doesn't go as far as the latter.

Other untested styles of shoes include moccasins, boots, Kolhapuri chappals, mojris, jootis, and all forms of women's shoes. I'll bet that the dress shoe still wins. Muqtada al-Sadr Muntazer-al-Zaidi (as Rohan points out in the comments) had it right when he threw his shoe at Dubya, as the video will show. Jarnail and the rest would do well to watch and learn.
(Videos linked until I bother to expand the column width of this blog, after which I might embed them. But do click on through.)

This morning, I learnt that Mallika Sarabhai, who is contesting for the Gandhinagar Lok Sabha seat against L. K. Advani, was following me on Twitter. So, intrigued and cynical, I ventured over to the account's page and discovered that it was basically a long list of links to her comments on television and in the newspapers. As any self-respecting user of interactive social media will tell you, this is a terrible way to go about things. So I tweeted the following four 'lessons' for Mallika Sarabhai:

• Lesson No. 1: Followers on Twitter are not going to help if you don't talk to them.
• Lesson No. 2: It's good to get the word out, but putting every single video/article about you in my timeline = spam.
• Lesson No. 3: It would help if someone who's not a campaign PR hack used this account. It's called authenticity.
• Lesson No. 4: Answer questions, preferably starting with the same ones you asked LK Advani. Then the ones people ask.