The ‘psychological advantage’
As I walked in to office this morning, a young lady reporter on one of the TV news channels was doing a ‘spot report’ as part of the channel’s preview of the game, later today, between India and Australia at Mohali.
She seemed very taken with the notion of ‘psychological advantage’, to the point where in course of a typically breathless one minute monologue she repeated it thrice. The track has some grass on it apparently and Mohali ‘traditionally’ supports pace and bounce, but India has the ‘psychological advantage’. Gautam Gambhir and Virender Sehwag are doubtful starters and India will miss them, not simply because of their experience and ability but because of the ‘psychological advantage’.
TV anchor: Gambhir and Sehwag are doubtful starters, and that could be a big blow for India as it seeks to build on the psychological advantage of having a 2-1 lead.
Reporter: Yes, Gambhir and Sehwag are doubtful, and that is a blow not just because of the experience they bring to the side but also because India wants to maintain its psychological advantage.
TV anchor: Yes, India has a 2-1 lead but the injuries to Sehwag and Gambhir are crucial as they could cost India the psychological advantage.
And so it went, back and forth…
And then, thanks to Cricinfo’s surfer, I found this piece where Greg Baum is extremely critical of the Aussie touring party for gaming the Indian media.
THAT was a bit of a wrong-’un that the Australian cricket team sent down to the media in India this week. You can read about it in coach Tim Nielsen’s blog on the Cricket Australia website. ”The boys tried to have a bit of fun with the media day,” he writes. ”As I’m sure you can imagine with so many interviews you tend to get asked the same question over and over and we had a bit of a competition running to see who could work the most sporting cliches into one answer.”
…
There’s also the one about their ”concern for the image of the game” and a ”need to give something back”. Something, but nothing that was truly meant, not anything from the heart. The message from Australia’s cricketers to their supporters is simple: don’t take anything we say seriously, because we don’t.
…”Walking out from the press conference with Rick [Ponting], we left about 70 cameras and another 150 journalists, which I find amazing every time we are exposed to it,” writes Nielsen. ”Although when you consider how many people are over here in India that follow the sport. I suppose it’s fair enough.”
But not so fair enough, evidently, as to dignify questions with anything other than the pretence of considered and worthwhile answers. Not so fair enough not to put on a charade. Whatever Australia was up to that day, it just wasn’t cricket. Ho, ho, titter, titter, slap thighs.
Far from feeling shame about this tawdry exercise, Australia’s cricketers boasted about it, via their coach’s blog.
The offending paragraph has since been deleted from Tim Nielsen’s blog, Baum tells us.
Whether such behaviour is apt for a team that is increasingly so enamored of the riches of Indian cricket that when its stars are not making money in our proliferating leagues, it has plans to play India home or away every year for the conceivable future is a question for the Australian captain, its media, and its board to consider.
Hopefully, we won’t now witness a paroxysm of righteous indignation from our own media people – the fault, dear Brutus, lies with us.
Amit Varma is fond of telling this story dating back to when he was covering India’s tour of Pakistan. Virender Sehwag appeared before the media, and almost immediately confronted this question: ‘Aapke is century aur pichle century main kya farak tha?’ Sehwag being who he is, responded with the straightest of faces: ‘Bas kuch thees run ka farak tha’.
That’s the kind of inanity that characterizes our ‘press conferences’. The point should be clear: if the touring Aussies are treating our media with contempt, it is because we deserve it — if we insist on asking the most inane of questions, we shouldn’t be surprised if we get canned, cliché-ridden answers.The irony is, these responses are then carried verbatim, with breathless commentary on television and/or hyperbole in print.
The surprising aspect of this affair is not the Australians gamed us – it is that we didn’t know we were being gamed, and that is as eloquent a comment on the state of the cricket media as any.
Begging the question
Take Out The Trash day
The above is the reaction of my friend and colleague Uttam Ghosh to this story:
The Indian capital will be made beggar free in the run up to next year’s Commonwealth Games, the authorities said on Tuesday while launching two mobile courts to prosecute beggars.
To begin with, citizens who spot beggars can reach the mobile courts through a control room. The courts will reach the spot and take away the beggars, Delhi Social Welfare Minister Mangat Ram Singhal said in New Delhi.
Go away and hide!
Make no mistake, this is one determined minister. “Before the 2010 Commonwealth Games,” he says, “we want to finish the problem of beggary from Delhi.” How? By depositing them elsewhere — the suburbs, jails, wherever — as Uttam pertinently suggests?
Garibi Hatao — hamare nazron se seems to be the reworked slogan of the Indian National Congress-Indira.
Elsewhere, P Chidambaram and Sheela Dixit are concerned about New Delhi’s chronic bad behavior.
Delhi’s Chief Minister, Shiela Dixit, readily agreed and said plans are afoot to teach Delhi folks to be “more caring and sharing.” She indicated that a Beijing-style program of civic education, like the one rolled out before last year’s Olympics, would be launched soon.
What fun! Delhi to go to charm school, where La Dixit will play Ms Manners. [Speaking of going to school -- this story also on beggars supports my lifelong contention that studying is a waste of time and effort].
Ironically, China was concerned not so much with the behavior of its own citizens as with that of the foreign tourists — but we clearly have our priorities right. Just to be helpful, however, I’ll throw up this link to how foreigners should behave in India — the earlier the better, since some of these moves require long hours of practice. Like, so:
The acceptable way to beckon someone is to hold your hand out, palm downward, and make a scooping motion with fingers.
What baffles me is, why is all this dependent on the Games? One section of the national capital begging while the much larger section behaves like boors is not, apparently, a concern — the problem is someone else catching us at it.
It is interesting that Dixit is looking to China for examples — though clearly, not every Chinese example needs to be rigorously followed; besides, Maneka Gandhi and her son Varun, currently in political ICU, might get a fresh whiff of the oxygen of ‘issues’.
Meanwhile, to return to priorities — I’m sure P Chidambaram will want to take a cue from the Chinese, and ban terrorists for the duration of the Games.
In the run up to the Beijing Games, the world’s media was preoccupied with China’s ‘repressive measures’ [A very small sampling from LA Times, Guardian, US News and dozens more if you do even a cursory search]. Heck, never mind the foreign media, even the Indian press was very upset:
At the same time, Beijing has largely ignored foreign opinion on its human rights records and continued its repression of free of speech, even as it has run a successful Olympics. China’s harsh rule in Tibet has been downplayed, political dissidents locked up, beggars pushed out of Beijing, and journalists covering protests roughed-up.
From that article, more tips for Ms Dixit [And a bonus tip applicable also to this blog]:
Beijing became obsessed by image in the lead-up to the games. Anything unsightly was deemed offensive. Neighbourhood food stalls were covered up by roadside barriers showing pictures of ancient Chinese-style curved rooftops or Olympics motifs.
We will doubtless do all this and more. In fact, we already are, per this story in Open magazine [scroll down]. Here’s the WTF passage from that story on how Delhi will use bamboo screens to keep poverty out of the public gaze:
“We thought of putting up cloth, vinyl or even natural screens like bushes in front of slums. Then we thought, why not bamboo?” says Rakesh Mehta, chief secretary, Delhi. As of now, authorities are sourcing the lathi bamboo from Rajasthan, but talks are also on with the Mizoram and Assam governments.
“We are enlisting the help of National Mission on Bamboo Technology and Trade Development in order to find out whether the varieties from Mizoram would be able to survive in Delhi’s climate or not,” says KK Sharma, principal secretary, PWD Delhi.
That’s more thought and effort — and money — going into hiding poverty than ever went into alleviating it. While on which, I really really loved the ‘bushes’ idea. Take a leaf from Macbeth, do — get the slum dwellers and beggars to squat in front of the unsightly huts; Delhi turned Dunsinane. Solves two problems in one shot, by hiding the slums and their unsightly inhabitants in one shot.
The irony is that China claimed then, and India will claim tomorrow, that this is being done so the foreign visitors can see the ‘true face’ of the country — much like a woman hiding zits and other blemishes under an inch of pancake when the prospective groom comes ‘girl seeing’.
Note the fullness of the swing
You will meanwhile be delighted to know that preparations for the Games are in “full swing“. Suresh Kalmadi says so [What does Randhir Singh know?]. Sheela Dixit the schoolmarm for charm says so. So how could it not be so, when Brij Mohan is working his butt off?
Talking of how well work is progressing, did you know that the Municipal Corporation of Delhi has stopped work on doing up footpaths, upgrading streetlights etc because of the Games. The Comptroller and Auditor General can’t stop laughing about it. [Search the PDF for Commonwealth Games to jump to the relevant bit].
So work is happening, through commission or omission. Hence ignore, please, the alarmist idiot Commonwealth Games Federation president Michael Fennell and his SOS to the PMO; equally, ignore those panicked idiots the PMO and its calls for an ‘urgent review’. Add to the ignore list carping editorials like this one, and new minted magazines like Open that are out to make a name for rabble-rousing. While on rabble-rousing, trust those perennially rabid folk at Tehelka to add fuel to this needless fire.
As Sports Minister MS Gill so pertinently pointed out:
As you know, I took charge as sports minister last year in April [Editor's note: But your party-led government was in office the four preceding years, no?] . There were a lot of delays, work had not started on several projects and various things needed to be tied up. But let’s not talk of the past… the fights, the blame game. The decision to hold the Games was taken by the NDA government and was duly endorsed by the UPA government. We are going to ensure that work is completed on time. That’s what I’m fighting for.
As Gill says, forget the past, forget the blame game. Take heart. Shed pessimism. And any time optimism flags, keep this image firmly in mind and you’ll be okay:
In fact, Sheila and I are holding hands and marching forward. We are two sides of the same coin.
If the image of two sides of the same coin holding hands and marching forward doesn’t inspire you with the belief that all will be well that ends, well or ill, then maybe these images below [lots more here] will:
Hard at work by night....
...and day [Look close to find the hard working bloke
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.
Beggars, choosers
Back when he was in the final leg of his campaign for the White House, Barack Obama put forward as one of the differentiators between his candidacy and that of Senator John McCain the fact that he alone was talking of the perils of Pakistan.
There was the statement that he would follow al Qaeda to the gates of hell. Then the even more famous statement that the Bush administration had been lavishing money on Islamabad, with no accountability, no strings attached — and that Pakistan was using that money to prepare for war with India.
The Bush administration added to the fun. Its officials found massive misuse of US funds; they found too that much of aid meant for anti-terrorism efforts were being diverted towards beefing up Islamabad’s anti-India arsenal. So what did the Bushies do? They went ah fuck it, why give Islamabad the trouble of double-entry bookkeeping — let’s just make the damn thing official and divert ‘anti-terror’ funds sanctioned by Congress to Islamabad’s real goal.
Obama, of course, wasn’t having any of this:
So Obama the candidate defined the problem: Pakistan is misusing US aid. Obama the President has now hit on the perfect solution: give more aid. [There is a huge difference, as Obama-ites will point out: Bush was just giving money; the Obama administration is pursuing an Af-Pak strategy. Not the same thing at all.]
Thus, somewhere in the corridors of the Capitol, a bill authored by Senators John Kerry and Richard Lugar is wending its way through the process, and will sooner, not later, reach the desk of President Barack Obama for his signature.
The bill, which provides for US aid to Pakistan to the tune of $1.5 billion each year for five years, was the brainchild of then Senator, now Vice President, Joe Biden acting in tandem with Lugar — for which a grateful Pakistan named the two lawmakers for the civilian award Hilal-i-Pakistan [Kerry missed out at the time because he was junior to Biden on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; he is now its chair, so he can look forward to getting his gong soon].
While this bill was being prepared in the House and Senate committees, Congressman Howard Berman among others warned of the danger of handing over large sums of money without attaching conditions relating to how it could be spent — concerns that were bulldozed out of the way by Kerry and Lugar, with the Obama White House throwing its clout behind the two Senators and getting Berman to remove the bulk of the conditions he had sought to impose in the House version of the bill.
An administration has changed, but nothing much else has. Pervez Musharraf routinely bluffed the US by pointing at Pakistan’s imminent economic collapse and arguing that if the US did not pony up, Islamabad would not be able to prosecute the war on terror. Musharraf is gone, Mr Ten Percent Zardari [who rewards jokes at his expense with a 14 year prison sentence] is in power, but the tactic remains the same: through a spate of opeds, Zardari repeatedly argues that (a) Pakistan is the greatest victim of terrorism; (b) The terrorists were actually created by the West, read US, as part of its anti-Soviet policy and (c) It is therefore up to the West to now open its purse strings and come to the aid of the party [Opeds in the New York Times, the Washington Post, WashPost again, and the Wall Street Journal, as exemplars].
What to say? Actually, Bush said it best, in a speech in Nashville in 2002 that has since made it to the list of top of Dubya’s pops:
“There’s an old saying in Tennessee—I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.”
Here, watch — the thing is best savored direct from the horse’s mouth:
Turns out, you can get fooled again. And again. Question though is, is ‘fooled’ the right word to use when successive administrations know exactly what is happening, but chose to play blind? Bush’s officials spoke of massive misuse of
funds, but the Bush administration went ahead and provided more funds. Obama spoke of misuse of funds, but is going ahead to provide more funds.
Which is fine — your money, your idiocy [yeah, at some point India will pay a price for all this, but we'll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it]. Musharraf last week admitted to misuse of US funds [before he admitted that he had never made that admission].
The Harpoon
Shortly before Musharraf spun like a top, the New York Times reported that Islamabad had made illegal modifications to the Harpoon missile to expand its anti-India offensive capability.
The administration’s response, and that of the current and future Hilal-i-Pakistans [or is that Hilals-i-Pakistan] has been hilarious in the extreme.
Aides to Kerry and Lugar told my friend and colleague Aziz Haniffa that the two Senators were “studying the report” relating to the Harpoon modification and “waiting for the investigation to be completed”. But, added the aides, they did not expect that the revelations would prompt any changes in the Kerry-Lugar aid bill.
Err — so you are ’studying’ it why?
State Department spokesman Ian Kelly for his part redefined the parameters of ‘disingenuous’. “We’ve seen these reports in The New York Times,” he said. “We take the possibility of any potential of any violations of obligations entered into pursuant to the Arms Control Act — we take these allegations very seriously.”
Oh good. And you did what? “We have engaged the government of Pakistan at the highest levels. We recently negotiated an agreement in principle to establish mutually agreed inspections to address possible modifications to any arms that we’ve transferred, and we’ve notified Congress of potential violations of obligations entered in pursuant to the Arms Control Act to ensure that key leaders are provided information on US efforts to address them.”
Eh? The Arms Control Act mandates that you cannot change or modify in any way arms that have been provided by, or purchased from, the US. Penalties include the immediate stoppage of all further military aid to the concerned nation. The Harpoon modification is a fact verified not by the NYT but by the government itself. So why is that not game over?
Kelly was asked about the Musharraf statement. His response was a classic: “Musharraf is a private citizen,” the State Department mouthpiece said, in a supreme WTF moment. Really? Kelly likely doesn’t read the reports the Congressional Research Service puts out. Like this one — on Pakistan’s arms purchases during the tenure of Pinocchio Pervez.
One face of AQ Khan
In what is rapidly becoming the book of revelations, the latest is the Simon Henderson article in the Sunday Times yesterday. The media in India has been going nuts-r-us over the ‘revelation’ that AQ Khan’s nuclear blackmarket was overseen by Pakistan’s government and military establishment. As revelations go, this one doesn’t go a long way. Despite devoting extensive space in his self-serving memoir, In The Line of Fire, to advancing the claim that Khan was operating on his own and that the state apparatus was not complicit, no one believed Musharraf then.
India at the time went ‘I told you so’ and pointed out to the US that it had been warning of Khan’s activities and Islamabad’s complicity for years now. The Bush administration’s response was tut, tut, Khan’s been a naughty boy, but chill on Pakistan, it is our ‘foremost ally’ in the war on terror, didn’t you know?
For me, the real revelation in the Henderson article is not the Khan letter
Alt-image
itself, but the story of attempts to suppress it [Incidentally, Henderson has much to say of the West's attempts to suppress the letter; I wish he'd tell us why it's taken him two years to read a four page letter and tell its story]. Extended clip:
Hit or miss
The most used computer in recent times, according to Anand Vasu reporting out of Colombo, is the one between MS Dhoni’s ears, and it seems to be telling him that triangulars like the one in Sri Lanka where India opens today, where each team gets only one crack at every other team, is tougher than a bilateral series. His rationale:
“In a bilateral series, as the series proceeds, you get to know more things about a particular player or how he is performing at that time. Subconsciously you plan for his strengths and weaknesses,” explained Dhoni.
“In a three-team competition, specially one like this where you play each team just once, you have to be fully prepared right from the word go.
“You don’t get time to adjust. Batsmen and bowlers have become smarter. You can come up with a plan for a player but on the day he may change the way he plays and still succeed. Countering that is really tough. If Plan A is not working you have to be ready with Plan B.”
On balance, you suspect India might have preferred to play the stronger Sri Lankan team first. You get to test your sea legs against the toughest competition in the tournament, and even if you lose you still have a game against a relatively weaker side to nail your finals spot. This way, India needs to hit the ground running, because a loss today to the Kiwis puts it in do or die mode against the hosts.
Harsha had some thoughts on the lineup, that he shared during our recent chat:
Let’s look at it this way: who is going to open the batting for you? Gautam Gambhir and Sachin Tendulkar? Gambhir can play in two forms, but he is coming off a bad patch just now [NB: We were chatting last Saturday, before Gambhir ruled himself out with a suspect groin]. Tendulkar is no longer the guy who can hit over the top first ball. And then there is Dravid at three. Who is going to give you a move on?
I honestly am not sure if Rahul should bat at three or five – he has played some of his best one day cricket at five, in 2003-04-05 when he was our best one day player, he was finishing matches with Yuvraj and company, and he took that form into the T20s as well recently where again he batted five.
I would not mind seeing Raina at three because you want to see if Raina has it in him to play at three on all surfaces. You can’t have a situation where our blue eyed boys are very good at batting up the order on flat tracks and have no qualms about going down the order when the going gets tough, and saying Rahul bhai ko aane do na upar. So send Raina at three, Yuvraj at four, Rahul five, Dhoni six. And where does that leave Dinesh Karthik? Every time you pick him he scores, so what do you do with him?
Should be fun — mild fun — to see how they line up, and how they do in the season opener. It’s Friday, I have newspaper production, so watching will be off and on. As will blogging.
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