If you are a avid cricket fan, you must realize that Indian cricket is going through the worst of phases. 8 overseas losses in succession. This may sound like just another random rant about the state of affairs but for someone who is particularly interested about the tiny bits and nuances of Test cricket, this would definitely hurt. I used to wake up at 5 AM just to watch McGrath bowl and rattle the opposition back in the days when Steve Waugh led Australia had seven slips as the fielding setup. Ah ! What a glorious age for tests that was ! Even though now Australia are all but void of that aura of invincibility, we Indians are masters of making champions out of second grade teams. Let’s face it.

We  were able to win the series 1-0 in West Indies out of 3 test matches, against a very weak Carribean team, coming into terms with its own board and player disputes, the situation getting comical when Gayle jokingly offered to play for the Indian team following its dismal show in the current series down under. Click here.

Let me just think of 3 things what India must be doing:

1.Prepare players for all kind of pitches, not just Indian ‘rank turners’ and flat dead unexciting ones

When was the last time the Indians lost a test series on home soil ? No, this not an appreciation. But sadly, we are baby fed champions. We like to bring all the other teams here and defeat them and then us pride ourselves in doing so. I still doubt whether we could have pulled a World cup victory had it not been in India.

We must prepare pitches in India that emulate all kinds of surfaces. Like the swing friendly English pitches or the pace friendly Aussie ones. Send more players overseas to play in english and australian counties instead of playing in the cash-surplus IPL. The IPL never did any good to anyone except making people more richer and display some exuberant shots. No classic cricket there, sir, no thank you. Make players accustomed to all kinds of surfaces so that it won’t be a huge difficulty when playing overseas. Lets look at it. It will be a win-win situation. Say, a natural swing bowler would have performed very well and played according to his natural game in a swing friendly pitch instead of adapting to the spin friendly flat Indian pitches. A spinner would have been rendered useless in pitches like the Australian ones (how many wickets did Ashwin take in the current Aussie series ? Heck he scored more runs than many of the top order batsmen !). The Gambhir Interview couldn’t have come at a more inappropriate time ! Instead of focusing on the issue in hand, he had to diverge from the whole topic. A frustrated attempt I must say !

2. Rest players periodically and cycle and experiment changes

We still have no clue as to why we retained Laxman and did not go for the occasional gamble in Rohit Sharma. Rohit has had an excellent series in India and the West Indies and the test break would have been a appreciation of his consistency. But Heck no, we had to include the so called ‘Aussie terminator’ Laxman who has been in and out in a flash, much like a warmup for the Oz bowlers. We should also not be afraid to put to task the senior players. The situation is so worse that even Michael Clarke had to comment on our policies ! Perform or perish. The same could have been said of Ishant Sharma( A sehwag favorite mind you !). No idea why Varun Aaron was not in the playing eleven, when clearly he had performed well on provided opportunities.

3. Take responsibility and act sensibly

We are amazing at bringing out the hidden potentials in players. hey, wait a minute, not our own. We made Stuart Broad a national hero in England when we toured them this summer 0f 2011. Oh yeah , the same Broad whom Yuvraj pulverized for six 6s. We brought out  an awesome bowler in Peter Siddle, who was previously just another bowler in the Australian ranks. The Sehwag comments are really surprising. (Now if you struggle against a team like this, the team who lost to England in the Ashes not long ago, just imagine what would have happened if McGrath and Warne were still playing !!) All test matches would have ended within 3 days ! and an individual score like that of Ponting’s or Clarke’s would have been a daunting task to chase down for the Indians ! The post match interviews after each defeat are also nothing short of irresponsibility

We were so obsessed with figures and statistics that we are waiting for the 100th hundred, something that has been the topic of media frenzy for quite some months now, instead of realizing that even a genius like Sachin is also a human. The media must be constantly pressurizing the BCCI and the team selection panel.

                                                In a way, we hope this paves way for the thinking that cricket is just another sport that has been glorified unjustifiably. Focus on more sports like soccer( The indian team lost to Bayern Munich 0-4). Get a major revamping in media focus and sponsor other sports and be alive and kicking ! Not just that occasional silver or bronze medal every 4 years at the Olympics. We need to take a leaf out of our neighbor China. But will something happen at all? No. In a few months some cricketing nation will tour India, and we will win and everything will go back to normal. Amazing memory we have ! No ?

Alright. It seems like gazillion of years back the last time I logged into wordpress, and the sound of  fast fingers tap away at the keyboard is always something which I will embrace. If you didn’t know already, the country I am living in is undergoing a revolution of sorts. All the while, I only hope that this brings about a positive change. After all, to effectively bring about change, there MUST be revolution. There was a similar demonstration over corruption in Hong Kong in the 70s, and right now Hong Kong is one of the cleanest economies in the world.Indians all over the world are expressing solidarity with Anna over the Jan Lokpal bill, which has been the hot topic of discussion on all types of media for quite a while now, but most notably over the past week. The civil society’s bill has its own share of critics, the latter stating the reason of over vesting of powers in one body to be a reason and questioning whether the people supporting Anna have actually read and understood the bill thoroughly. All I know is this- even though the understanding the Jan Lokpal bill is not rocket science, people don’t have to be told understanding the whole implications of the bills is a pre requisite for supporting Anna’s campaign against corruption. People from all walks of life- bus conductors, truck drivers, from the tea stall owner to the enterpreneur, from the simple watchman to the industrialist, all of them have inevitably bore the brunt of corruption. And for all we know the perpetrators do get royal treatments after being imprisoned. After all, isn’t this a country where we take eons to bring justice to a criminal such as Kasab ? Saying all this, the people understand that supporting the  civil society’s bill is something which they can do.  People do realize that instead of a improbable fairytale youth-joining-politics-cleaning story, this is something that they can support. I am not blindly saying that the Jan Lokpal bill will be the solution to all our problems, it will be a trial and error method, and the transparency of its functioning is at the soul of its pulp. Sadly, I only hope that people understand a need for such a bill completely before coming to conclusions and criticizing without rational thinking. Nobody wants to pay mammoth prices for simple commodities in the future. And the current government has failed to do just that. From innumerable scams to the false promises and pretension to the poorest of  farmers from an uneducated leader like Rahul Gandhi who has come into power by virtue of inheritance. The buck does not stop there. Anyways, let me not go into further slamming the government which almost everyone actually does now a days. I am not saying that the Jan Lokpal bill will clean out corruption from the face of India, but atleast it is a giant step in the right direction.

I think of blogging to be a space where I can shout my views out. Say what is on my mind. Like having a small group of people in a circle and it is your turn to share your views on life. Apart from the social commentary that sometimes I would like to give, I also like to comment on what is eating up my life in a small, eventful way. So over the past 2 years, where it has been pretty much a on-off switch for the writer in me, I must say that writing is not a easy task. No, I am not saying about the famed writer’s block, I am alluding to the problem that first time novelists face. There are a lot of ideas swirling in my head, probably waiting to be put down on paper before it goes into oblivion. But the problem is I am also prudent enough not to make my writing sound cliche. To have written something and maybe have a reader say- ‘Hey, this looks familiar’. Believe me, that is not a pretty thing to hear, especially for a writer.In fact I want to make sure that this is not something they would have expected, to keep the reader keep guessing beyond the obvious and to make my writing far different from the usual perspective. That is what has been eating most of my time. To blend wit and imagination and make something sound different, but maybe explaining the same in a different depth- I have been working on this.I have started writing in a non linear fashion, probably from a heavy influence of movies, which I say is a sword with a double-edge. If you did understand the complications of such a sword. I have always been an ardent fan of contemporary cinema. I can appreciate Hitchcock’s thrillers to Spielberg’s sci-fi fictions, Nolan’s intellect to Martin Scorcese’s screenplay, from Kubrick’s cinematography to Peter Jackson’s rich attention to detail. But I never deemed myself worthy enough to be one capable of writing a movie review. I read many of Roger Ebert’s reviews and I say to myself maybe I should not be writing one. Somewhere, something is holding me back. Maybe telling me that I shouldn’t be writing movie reviews because I do invariably suck at it. Anyways, I do wonder when the writer in me can have a confidence perk. Like a very morale encouraging pat on the back telling me to let go. Not be afraid of the rejection waiting to pounce in on me once my work is out. I am not stuck with plots, I have a intricate set of maps over which I intend to give a plot a sub-direction. I do have a difficulty imagining names and keeping the reader interested with the protagonist’s journey. Making fight sequences and romantic encounters sound interesting is something that took me lesser time. Ahem, do not even  bother pondering the reason for that.

Contrary to many reader’s opinion that Tolkien in ‘The Lord of the Rings’ probably may have bored his readers to an extent, I do believe the build ups to his characters were excellent- Strider, Gandalf and many others. Beyond a point, I guess that is where the core of good writing essentially lies- To make the reader imagine in his/her own way the perception and the depth of the character. To have those words magically create sequences of thought from which you can play a movie in your own head. I am proud fan of Tolkien, awed with his imagination and the whole Middle earth fiction database is something which I think can never be matched. If it weren’t for LOTR, both the books and the movies, I would have never started writing in the first place. So if you are a writer/like reading fantasy novels, do share your opinions and possible difficulties. Or the parts of a novel that you may have read and felt maybe that writer could have done better- and why you think that way. Adios, this is pacific ocean signing off. Prashanth in Sankrit means peaceful. And considering I can give former English cricketer Flintoff a good comparison in terms of ‘vastness’ or rather broadness explains the the later part of the moniker

Crunchy numbers

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 7,600 times in 2010. That’s about 18 full 747s.

 

In 2010, there were 13 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 43 posts. There were 17 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 2mb. That’s about a picture per month.

The busiest day of the year was August 2nd with 131 views. The most popular post that day was Sachin Tendulkar- A divine conception.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were newsfashionstyle.wordpress.com, clpdpblog.wordpress.com, google.co.in, facebook.com, and arjunbs.blogspot.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for age of empires 2, age of empires, dolph lundgren, age of empires 2 starting strategy, and aoe tips.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Sachin Tendulkar- A divine conception February 2010
3 comments

2

Age of Empires II—-Game plan, Strategies and tips June 2007
18 comments

3

Of Academia and Rocky Balboa ! November 2009
4 comments

4

Global economic crisis and its effect on India October 2008