Arundhati Roy and the politics of democracy

*Sigh*

Remind me again — why do I find her shrill, scatter-shot denunciations so infuriating? One example of the many sweeping statements that rest not on fact but on the shaky foundation of her choler:

So, you know, you have a situation where more and more people are just outside the barcode. You know, they are what you would call “illegible.” And we have a very, very serious situation here, where now they are planning, you know, once again, to make a—what do you call it—a electronic ID card. Of course, once again, to people who don’t have water, who don’t have electricity, who don’t have schools, but they will have ID cards, and people who don’t have ID cards are not going to exist.

Ah well. My friend Amit Varma [Twitter, blog] recently pointed me at this 2002 article by writer/academic Ian Buruma — as measured a dissection as any you could wish for.

Back where we came from

When I read the headline ‘Kumar Sangakkara apoplectic about fielding’, I wondered for a moment why the Sri Lankan captain was taking India’s shambolic effort so much to heart.

We missed a caught and bowled because the bowler stayed back and preferred to take it on the bounce rather than dive forward and try to make a catch out of it. We missed a catch at point when the ball lobbed off the shoulder of the bat because the fielder there reacted late, and then froze. We missed a run out because the bowler — who, incidentally, has made a habit of this throughout his career — took up position between the ball and the stumps. And all of that happened in the first six overs — after which it only got worse.

With Indian cricket, you can never tell how, and when, it happens — but it is axiomatic that just when matters seem to be looking up in one particular department, there is a precipitous slide that leaves us back where we started from, or even further behind.

The need to up fielding standards was the initial argument for jettisoning the veterans and getting youngsters in, and for a brief while it looked like the team was improving. Suddenly — and damned if you can put a finger on the how and the when — the team is if anything worse in the field than it was during the early part of this decade.

On date, there are at least four fielders you need to hide – and then there’s Virat Kohli, who oscillates between brilliant stops and shambolic muffs. Hide? Scratch that — hell, at one point Ashish Nehra [whose chronic inability to bend beyond 15 degrees makes you want to wheel him into the nearest operating theater and surgically remove the stick up his ass] was stationed at point; the graceful way he turned as a ball drifted past him, and ambled along in its wake, made you forget the pain of the runs he was giving away and laugh at the old-world amateurishness of it all.

There are a couple of statements those who write on cricket get a lot. One is ‘It’s easy to say…’. The other is, ‘If it were so simple, don’t you think the captain/coach/team would have seen it?’. I’ve had my share of these, and I’ve never known how to answer. Still, consider this:

The safest thing for a batsman to do on a cricket field is to play the defensive push with the straight bat, correct? A batsman resorts to this when the ball is good and he can see no opportunity to score? And when you play that stroke the ball goes, depending on the line, to mid off or mid on? Granting all that, why do we invariably station our mid off and mid on halfway to the boundary, so that every single time the batsman plays the safest of shots, he is guaranteed a single? [Compounding that is the fact that spinners work best when luring the batsmen to try and go over the top; bring the fielder in and the tactic is on, push him out, and you remove one of the main weapons of the attacking spinner.]

Ricky Ponting and Mike Hussey scored 132 runs between them. That included 60 dot balls — and 76 singles, besides 7 twos. 25 of those singles were scored through mid off [16] and mid on [9]. That is 25 runs added to the total for free during that phase of the game when the bowling side looks to check the scoring; 25 times the batsman turned the strike over and forced the bowler to work on a different player. [By way of contrast, Pakistan is not the most electric of fielding sides, yet India managed just 98 singles in its innings of 248 the other day].

We don’t take them when we bat; we give them away with generous prodigality when we field — in other words, we get it coming and going. And for me, it is deja vu all over again: it was simple when we talked of this in 2002; it is simple now, so how come the team doesn’t collectively get it? You tell me.

India is on the verge of getting knocked out of the Champions’ Trophy, barring a fairly improbable concatenation of circumstances — and on current form, that is a fair result. The team, minus the explosive threat of Virender Sehwag at the top and Yuvraj in the middle [for all his recent sins, I'll add Rohit Sharma to the list of players we are missing], plus the calming influence of Zaheer Khan with the new ball, is looking a shadow of itself; it certainly is nowhere close to champion material.

It might seem a cop out to blame all of it on singles — but IMHO, the runs we leak in the field and the runs we don’t make with the bat are contributing immensely to the deterioration of the bowling effort. Harbhajan and Ishant are admittedly shadows of their best selves and clearly have work to do, most of it in the space between their ears.

Bajji for instance needs to remind himself that it is the job of the part-time spinner, not the attacking spearhead, to spear the ball down on indeterminate length; his brief is to bowl the attacking lines, to look for wickets. [While on Bajji, the team needs to get over this 'seniority' hang up and start picking players for form, not for how many years he has been part of the side -- this business of automatically picking Bajji as the first spinner is past its use-by date. Amit Mishra impresses whenever he gets to bowl; so does Pragyan Ojha. Yet both these bowlers are reduced to sitting on the sidelines during their best years, simply because someone carved on a stone somewhere that if we play one spinner that has to be Bajji, form or no form].

And likewise, Ishant Sharma needs to remind himself that he is a fast bowler, not a medium paced trundler — and therefore, even if he only gets to come on first change and finds a defensive field set for him, his best bet still is to charge in and let it slip as fast as he can. That return to his basic skill set — and not sex — will give him the testosterone high he is clearly lacking just now.

That said, the worst thing that can happen to bowlers is to find runs flowing off defensive pushes to good deliveries, because they then are forced to try different things. A bowler works best when he can find a tight containing line as the stock option; he can then use it to probe the batsman, and use the variation to work him out. The way we are in the field, the stock ball is a free single; this forces the bowler to constantly vary, and in the one day format with its non-existent margin for error, that is a prescription for disaster.

All of this is why I don’t think India’s problem is one of team balance; it is not about four bowlers or five. It is far more basic than that — and basic problems demand a return to basics as the solution.

Random thoughts on a lazy Monday

‘Lazy Monday’ is such a luxury, no? Happy Dussera all — in a few hours from now, India will look to slay the Australian Ravan to keep its hopes alive… okay enough already with the festive metaphors.

We seem to have a positive genius for finding ‘solutions’ to problems that don’t address the problem. Take for instance the case of the number three in the Indian batting lineup.

‘India can’t play the short ball,’ someone said; the cry got amplified and the selectors promptly picked Rahul Dravid to “step into the breach”.

Which breach? This is the 50-over format. A bowler can send down one short ball per over, max. And that is the huge bogey forcing us to rethink our batting strategy? [A corollary problem with our publicly voiced fears is that it has given the opposition a handy fright mask to scare us with -- vide Mitchell Johnson's comments here].

While on that, memo to writers of cricket reports:  “holding one end up” is not an absolute, but a qualified, good — it works only if something constructive is happening at the other end.

It is not fashionable to question Dravid’s inclusion in the side, or at the least his batting position, after he top scored in the failed chase against Pakistan — but while watching the game, it was hard to escape the thought that his taking root at one end [literally, since he was for long stretches unable to place the single and turn the strike over] was turning the screws on Gautam Gambhir, Virat Kohli and Suresh Raina in succession. We picked a player to solve a non-existent problem, and in doing that appear to have created other, more crucial problems.

The tragedy is the problem was predictable [Harsha for instance said as much in a chat some three weeks earlier], hence avoidable.

Here, on the basis of what we saw in the India-Pak game, is a list of things I’d like to see today:

First, the team in batting order: Tendulkar, Gambhir, Raina, Kohli, Dhoni [any higher, and he tends to go into a shell in the name of controlling the chase], Dravid [this low down, you take away from his mind all thoughts of defense, and give him the space to return to the finisher role which is the only time he has excelled in the one day squad],  Pathan, Bajji, Amit Mishra, Ishant, Ashish. With the proviso that if we get a good start, I’d like to see Pathan floated to the number three position with the brief of producing a momentum-providing flurry of big hitting.

Pathan clearly lacks the confidence to finish games — an act that is not merely about hitting the cover off the ball. Free him of the pressure of having to calculate the later stages of a chase and let him free higher up with an uncluttered brief, and you likely will get the best out of the bloke. Plus, Pathan coming in early will force the bowling side to delay its Power Play, where with Dravid at three they will tend to take it between 10-15.

While on power plays, I’d like to see India take its batting PP somewhere between the 20th and 35th overs. A batting lineup without Yuvraj in the middle lacks the batting muscle to delay its batting PP right to the end — deploying it in the middle ensures that qualified batsmen can use those five overs to provide a boost just at that point when the game is drifting into a holding pattern; the additional plus is that it disrupts the bowling side’s option of sneaking in some non-regular overs and thus saving top bowlers for the death.

The news out of Centurion is that India is set to go into the game against Australia with five bowlers, “putting the onus” on its batting lineup. I’m a huge fan of playing five regular bowlers more often than not, but IMHO this batting lineup without Sehwag and Yuvraj is not the sort of form where it can absorb the added pressure.

Besides, Sambit Bal has a point when he says spin, not pace, will be the ideal weapon against Australia — more so as the wickets thus far have shown a tendency to aid spin more than pace/seam. Three seamers are an unaffordable luxury for this game, and in any case RP Singh in his current form is more handicap than help [his presence means India is forced to waste Ishant Sharma in the first change position where ideally he should be bowling with the new ball].

I’d like to see Ishant open with Nehra; Bajji to come in first change [with his head screwed on right], and for India to use Raina [not using Raina was among the glaring errors in India’s first game} and Yusuf in brief bursts at one end while Bajji rotates in the attacking role with Amit Mishra at the other.

One final item in my wish list for the day: during the middle overs, when spin is being used, I’d like to see the fielders within the ring come right in to where they can stop singles. Throughout their partnership, Yusuf and Malik routinely stroked pressure-free singles to point, cover, mid off, mid on, midwicket and square leg, though most or all those fielders were in the ring.

There has to be a definite point to where you place a fielder — he is there either to stop singles, or defend the boundaries. A fielder on the edge of the circle does neither — the fours come through the gaps anyway, and there are too many easy singles on offer. Block the singles with a tighter, closer ring and force the batsmen to take risks going over their heads, would be the final item on my wish list.

A win against an Australia on form and on a winning streak would be close to miraculous, more so for an India missing three of its key players. A more likely result would be India’s premature exit from the Champions’ Trophy — but what the hell, it is Dussera, time to slay demons.

For the duration of the game, will be on Twitter. See you there — and back here tomorrow.

Bait and switch

Am I the only one growing progressively tired of this Kashmir-Afghanistan bait and switch? [From Foreign Policy, the latest in a long line of examples].

Boiled down, the argument goes thus: Islamabad is unable to bring the full might of its armed forces to bear on the war on terrorism in the SWAT region and on its western border with Afghanistan.

Why? Because it is ‘forced’ to concentrate a sizable chunk of its army on its eastern border, to counter the ‘threat’ it faces from India.

Ergo, runs the argument, if India and Pakistan resolve the Kashmir ‘dispute’ [with the US helping], Pakistan will be in a position to shift the bulk of its army into the terrorist hot zone on its western side. Ergo, too, India needs to go the extra mile to urgently resolve the ‘dispute’.

Very useful, for Pakistan to throw its hands up and excuse its less than 100 per cent participation in the ‘war on terror’ even as it seeks ever more funding to prosecute that ‘war’.

Also, very flawed.

Here’s the question that is not being asked and answered: What exactly is the ‘threat’ Pakistan faces on its eastern border, that requires it to station a large section of its army on that front?

No one responds, because the question is never asked. If it were, the answer would be, none.

There is no conceivable prospect, there never has been, that India will unilaterally invade Pakistan; with a notional mushroom cloud looming over the region in the event of conflict, that prospect is even less foreseeable now.

So, again, what ‘threat’ does Islamabad face to its east? None.

Why then does Islamabad feel the need to concentrate its army on our shared border? The honest answer is, to protect it from the consequences of the actions of its own principals.

The only time there has been talk of war was when terrorists based, trained, and equipped in Pakistan attacked India’s Parliament and more recently Mumbai, to name just two incendiary actions.

Equally, consider two recent news stories: (1) Intelligence sources speak of a build up of terrorists on the Pakistan side of the LoC and (2) Pakistan troops have been shelling Indian border positions. Taken together, the two clearly spell infiltration.

Clearly, the Pakistan army is concentrated on the eastern border to (a) make mischief and (b) protect Islamabad from the consequences of that mischief, and of the doings of its ‘non-state actors’. ‘Solving’ Kashmir [assuming the weak Asif Ali Zardari can sell any kind of solution to the people] has nothing to do with it — unless you buy the Musharraf argument that those who blast a bloody trail across India are actually ‘indigenous freedom fighters’ looking to overthrow the ‘Indian yoke’.

Stop using the ‘strategy’ of terrorism to bleed India and you have no reason to fear it, and to post your troops to ‘counter’ the ‘threat’. Simple, no?

From the Foreign Policy article:

It is quite striking that framers of the metrics have avoided the merest mention of Pakistan-India relations as a factor in understanding which way the wind is blowing in Pakistan’s security environment. While the Obama administration has every right to wish that Pakistan delink its rivalry with India in the Kashmir region from its policy towards Afghanistan (and consequently in Federally Administered Tribal Areas), one cannot ignore the prevailing ground realities. Rather than continuing to evade the relevance of the India factor to AfPak theater, the Obama administration must energetically facilitate and monitor the India-Pakistan peace process (which is lately showing some signs of life courtesy resumption of back channel diplomacy).

Actually, the reason the framers of the metrics avoided mentioning Pakistan-India relations is that they are not taken in by Islamabad’s bait-and-switch; they recognize that a ‘resolution’ of Kashmir has nothing to do with operations in the Af-Pak theater; they understand that Islamabad is merely using this as a fig leaf to cover its inaction or, at best, limited action taken under duress. [As Dubya would say, fool me once...]

In passing, there is one way to ensure the total breakdown of any India-Pakistan dialog — and that is for the Obama administration to be seen to ‘energetically facilitate and monitor’ the process. There is not much the various sections of Indian polity agree on, but they are unanimous on this: that they will vigorously reject any attempt by any third party, no matter how friendly, to inject itself into this issue.

While on the ‘war in terror’ and Pakistan’s role therein, here’s the NYT.

American officials say they believe that the Taliban leadership in Pakistan still gets support from parts of the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s military spy service. The ISI has been the Taliban’s off-again-on-again benefactor for more than a decade, and some of its senior officials see Mullah Omar as a valuable asset should the United States leave Afghanistan and the Taliban regain power.

Eye Browse

1. Did you know of the Indian restaurant called Vagina Tandoori? Would you fancy a meal at the Bung Hole? [Link courtesy Mental Floss]. [In comments, Siddharth points out that it is actually a photoshopped joke]

2. Journalist/author Ron Rosenbaum [a byline that will resonate with readers of Esquire, Village Voice, Vanity Fair

The 138 index cards that contain 'Laura'

and the magazine section of the New York Times] was largely instrumental in the upcoming publication of The Original of Laura, Vladimir Nabokov’s posthumous publication. In an article for Slate, Rosenbaum writes of the secrecy surrounding the book in the run up to publication, and on the fascinating insights Nabakov’s revisions/excisions offer into the author’s creative process.

No, the indecipherable scrawls moved me for a different reason. I’d known about them from the photos in Die Zeit, of course, but this time they struck me more deeply. They were evidence of the drama inherent in the creative process, a process whose heart is revision. I devoted a substantial portion of The Shakespeare Wars to the scholarly controversy over whether Shakespeare revised his play scripts. Ben Jonson famously said that Shakespeare never “blotted out a line,” but a substantial case has been made in recent years that he did rewrite on occasion, sometimes altering single words or phrases, sometimes making more substantial edits.

Shakespeare’s revisions (and Nabokov’s) matter for two reasons. Revision indicated that even these writers shouldn’t be considered godlike figures from whom the muse poured forth perfection on the first try, but writers who are—in some ways—like other writers, in at least this respect: They were subject to second thoughts. And distinguishing what those second thoughts might have been and why they focused on rethinking this or that word or phrase or scene offers a window into the meaning of the work.

But—and this is the second but not secondary meaning of the blottings out—revisions also offer a window into the humanity of the author. That even the greatest of geniuses (and yes, I believe the term is valid for these two) were not superhuman; they live in the same world of error and doubt that the rest of us inhabit. The fact that they think they’ve made “mistakes” makes their work even more perfect than it would be if they never blotted a line or scratched out a word.

From the archives, a Times Online article of a year ago about the book and the burning debate on whether or not it should be destroyed per the author’s own wishes; Dmitri Nabokov on NPR [and on BBC] about why he decided to go ahead and publish;  and the original Rosenbaum piece in Slate that first made the case for the publication of the book. Also read, my friend Salil Tripathi’s superb essay in Mint on the book, and on the dilemma Nabakov placed on his son. Clip:

Burning a book is different from burning minutiae of our quotidian lives. Books are often burnt in anger, and when they are, they presage evil. On my first visit to Berlin, I walked away from the Brandenburg Gate, along the avenue of imperial grandeur, Unter den Linden. To my right, I came across an open quadrangle. There, a part of the floor was made of glass. Inside, you could see stacks of bookshelves, all white, glowing in a yellow light. The bookshelves were empty. There was a palpable stillness around that quaint monument which was eerie. It was meant to be: It was the monument to the ritual book-burning the Nazis performed once they seized power in Germany in the 1930s. They targeted troublesome authors: Jews, homosexuals, anti-fascists, or those otherwise sympathetic to communism or leftist ideas.

…

The link of creativity between the written word on a printed page, the thought that goes behind it, the imagination of a mind that gives it shape, is what makes us human, and it is what expression and humanity are all about. Destroy the work, and you destroy the thought behind it—and the thinker.

3. The ‘parents’ of Web2.0 have moved on — to Web Squared. [Ever since Bobilli Vijay Kumar, in his Times of India obituary, called Raj Singh Dungarpur the 'uncrowned grandfather of Indian cricket', I haven't been able to mention such notional parentage without an involuntary grin].

In this sense, the Web Squared era is an era of augmented reality, arriving (like the sensor revolution) stealthily, in more pedestrian clothes than we expected. Our devices can tell us what we’re seeing (like the Wikitude travel guide application for Android which uses the camera, location data, compass and image recognition to tell you what monument you’re looking at), what we’re not seeing (like Darkslide, which shows you photos of what’s near you), what we’re hearing (CDDB, the database that recognizes music tracks by the sequence of track lengths on a CD), and what we’re not hearing (looking up recent Tweets near you is like incredibly powerful eavesdropping). Our devices can also tell us what our friends think of what we’re seeing: the folks at GraffitiGeo, which combines restaurant reviews with social gameplay, are working on an iphone app that will allow users to point the phone’s camera at a venue and see an overlay of relevant comments about it from other users. That means our world will have “information shadows.” Augmented reality amounts to information shadows made visible.

There are implications far beyond uber-convenient restaurant reviews. As sensors become ubiquitous, they will create new business opportunities and transform existing businesses. We are already seeing new classes of applications for health and fitness, from NikePlus, Phillips DirectLife and Fitbit on the consumer end of the spectrum to real-time outpatient monitoring.

And while on the Internet, an interesting addition to the ongoing debate about whether the Web is increasingly making us a tribe of illiterate, fact-challenged misanthropes: Rubbish, says Dennis Baron, whose new book A Better Pencil makes this case:

Every communication advancement throughout human history, from the pencil to the typewriter to writing itself, has been met with fear, skepticism and a longing for the medium that’s been displaced. Far from heralding in a “2001: Space Odyssey” dystopia, Baron believes that social networking sites, blogs and the Internet are actually making us better writers and improving our ability to reach out to our fellow man.

4. Shashi Tharoor is not the only minister in this Cabinet capable of making impolitic statements. Here’s Jairam Ramesh, on the subject of climate change:

You have also mentioned that India has not been able to educate other countries about what it is doing. In a general way, is it just the lack of education and knowledge, or is there more to countries like US and other Western nations blaming India?

The media always needs a punching bag. The world needs a villain, and India and China have emerged villains of the piece — India more than China. But I think a part of the problem is of our own making.

We have not gone out to the world, have not engaged the world and explained in a proactive manner what we are doing, what our compulsions are, what we can do, what we cannot do.

I think we should lecture less to the world; we should be less sanctimonious. We should try to engage the world in a spirit of dialogue. And that becomes very difficult for Indians because we have a sense of superiority to the rest of world.

I think a little less superiority, a little more humility on the part of India will serve us very well in the future.

5. Random Reads, the blog the publishing house launched in July, is worth a weekly stop on your surfing calendar. The latest entry is from Ashok Banker, who ‘interviews’ Ravan. [Acclaimed Hindu statesman Rajan Zed said... oh darn, this is becoming a reflex now; every time I read a news story I go 'What would Zed have said?' ]

6. Is India still uncomfortable with erotic art and literature, was the subject of an NDTV debate featuring Ruchir Joshi and Shobha De [whose overwrought descriptions of sex give erotic literature a bad name].

In the land of Kamasutra and Kajuraho and newer discoveries each year, ‘still’?

In passing, I continue to marvel at the odd places I stumble on erotic art in this country — in the brilliant frescoes that adorn the sanctum sanctorum of Guruvayur, most recently.

My best find [aide memoire to self: find and toss in the pictures and notes from that trip] was during a random bike ride along the outskirts of Chingelput district, in Tamil Nadu. I chanced on this village, stopped at a local tea shop for a cutting and a chat, and one thing led to another that in turn led to a local sitting pillion on my bike and navigating me through uncharted footpaths to a forested region, in the midst of which I found this massive tank.

Its walls and steps were colored the green of mildew; its water was a deeper, more forbidding shade of jade — but once you got past the neglect, I focused on intricate series of steps leading into it, and discovered breathtaking erotic art covering every inch, all the way down to the water line.

My guide was a bit short on details about the time period of the tank, and the identity of the bloke who caused it to be constructed; subsequent inquiries at the village produced the story of some king of long ago, name long since forgotten, who caused a half dozen such tanks to be built in his territory. The king deemed it essential, a village elder told me, that everyone from the youngest of children be totally exposed to, and conversant with, all manifestations of human sexuality. And his preferred mode of sex education was the sculptures he caused to be carved on the sides of the tanks, which back in the day was the social node where everyone gathered, mornings and evenings, for bath and gossip. [Acclaimed Hindu statesman... et cetera]

‘Is India still uncomfortable with erotic art and literature’, indeed!

7. Historical fiction was the subject of two previous posts [here, and here]. One more — this time, from one of my favorite book blogs, Jai Arjun’s Jabberwock. Jai’s subject is Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, a book I’ve been looking forward to and am yet to acquire and read. The money quote, that addresses the genre’s perennial fascination:

When we learn about history primarily through cold details set out “objectively” in textbooks, it’s possible to lose sight of the fact that the distant events we take for granted – events that now appear set in stone, almost as if they could have unfolded in no other way – were the accumulated products of the personalities, life experiences and whimsies of human beings who happened to be in a certain place at a certain time: real people with ambitions, weaknesses, dilemmas, biases and prejudices of their own. One of the things Mantel does wonderfully well in this book is to show how Cromwell’s life and character – in conjunction with those of the others around him – came to have a bearing on the vital events of his time.

8. Tim Kreider, in NYT’s Happy Days blog, suggests that life has become one long search for self-validation. The money quote:

A colleague of mine once hosted a visiting cartoonist from Scandinavia who was on a promotional tour. My colleague, who has a university job, a wife and children, was clearly a little wistful about the tour, imagining Brussels, Paris, and London, meeting new fans and colleagues and being taken out for beers every night. The cartoonist, meanwhile, looked forlornly around at his host’s pleasant row house and sighed, almost to himself: “I would like to have such a house.”

One of the hardest things to look at in this life is the lives we didn’t lead, the path not taken, potential left unfulfilled. In stories, those who look back — Lot’s wife, Orpheus and Eurydice — are lost. Looking to the side instead, to gauge how our companions are faring, is a way of glancing at a safer reflection of what we cannot directly bear, like Perseus seeing the Gorgon safely mirrored in his shield.

10. Good music, Rahman — pity about the movie.

11. Great read: The Most Violent City on Earth, from Spiegel Online.

12: Great read, to round out the dozen: Amitava Kumar’s entry for NPR’s Three Minute Fiction: Post-Mortem. If that floats your boat, here’s more. [Link courtesy Amit Varma on Twitter]

13. What the hell, let’s make it 13. Remember Asif Zardari getting on the receiving end of a fatwa for his, what’s the word, warm greeting of Sarah Palin on the sidelines of the UNGA this time last year? Now check out Silvio Berlusconi’s best imitation of Joey from Friends, vis a vis Michelle Obama.

Lovely, long weekend coming up. Might return for a brief post Sunday on the India-Pak game tomorrow if it proves to be worth writing about; else, see you all Tuesday.

Happy Dussera, all; play safe.

Cricket clips

I like quiet Fridays. Production of India Abroad is a time-consuming process, and major events cricketing or otherwise tend to be a distraction — to edit copy or blog? No such problems today, with all quiet on the cricket front. Early morning browsing threw up only two commentary pieces worth your while.

In a column that revisits his earlier argument that the verdict on the Champions’ Trophy and by extension on the future of one-day internationals can be delivered only after this edition of the tournament is over, the part that caught my attention was the afterthought:

I hope though that when the men in blue take the field, attention will be focussed on their performance rather on the content of a privately circulated note which is actually far more thought provoking in the segments that are unlikely to have made it past news editors. So now our young sports reporters have to grapple with conjuring stories on whether having sex on tour is good or bad. Their canvas seems to get broader every day! Time to redo the syllabus in media schools!

What made it into print is clearly the ‘highlights’ package with the question of sex dominating for obvious reasons, but somewhere out there is the full text and judging by Harsha’s throwaway line, it promises to make interesting reading. Hopefully, some time soon.

Elsewhere, Mike Atherton has a couple of interesting points in his piece on the one day game. First, his definition of the problem:

The 50-over game, though, is suffering from more than administrative myopia; it is suffering an existential crisis that was probably inevitable in the wake of Twenty20. Sandwiched between the longest and shortest forms of the game, it neither appeases the traditionalists nor does what it was originally designed to do — to entertain and titillate — now that Twenty20 can do those things much better. Its sole purpose is financial.

And then, his solution — not more regulation, but less:

The answer, surely, is to deregulate, so that the game becomes more like it was intended to be and therefore less predictable and less formulaic. If captains could place their fielders where they wanted to, rather than where regulations dictate, there is a chance they might start to think again and a chance that one side’s tactics might differ significantly from another’s. If a captain could bowl his best bowler for more than the stipulated ten overs, there is a chance that he would and that attacking cricket played by the best players would become more a feature of a one-day match. Powerplays dictate the pace of the game to batsmen; do without them and watch batsmen take the initiative again.

In other late breaking news, Gary Kirsten says he had no idea of the sex dossier, and dumps the onus on Paddy Upton. Revised demand from Rajan Zed expected momentarily.