End of an era!!

Surely one of these great  feats in modern sports leave alone tennis. Is it going to happen. Nadal has just saved on of the 5 match points..you never know.

Moving on

Go  Mumbai Indians

Instant Analysis

Following comes to mind:

1. I think congress gained cos of NREGA and farmers loan waiver. Its not good economics but its atleast good politics

2. There seems to be a welcome trend of consolidation of National Parties in UP, WB etc

3. At some level, there seems to be a failure of leadership opn Advani's part to motivate his state leaders. 

4. I think a very good model for BJP would be to go for Bihar Model. Rebrand themshelves as a centre right economic party but give strong signals that social amity will be maintained and social security for the extremely backward.

Moo Point

This is what happens when u have shadow communists in ur think tank :)

Practice Management

"Practice management as a tool is one of the smart tools that all the tools in the practice must manage"

circa 2009

A Riddle

Once, i was riding on a truck. Open convertible truck that is. Now the truck had to pass under a very low bridge. But the truck with me was a few inches too high. I thought a lot and decide to use my large sharp nails to slice off the top two inches off the truck. But, then a kid suggested to take the air out of the tyres. That's called good lateral thinking....coming to thinking, there was still a problem..my head was too large..and i thought a lot on a possible solution and dint seem to help at all....

and then i stopped thinking.

Bad Calls

Sometimes, you are in a dilemma. You keep thinking about the call you have to make. Today was like that. After much internal struggle, calculations of my work in office, my energy level in the morning, whether i ll be late again for office etc, i finally decide that let me be awake to see the start of the day 5 of the test match. And what do i see. Gambhir struggling like anything against patel and sachin getting out in the 5th over of the day. i ahve switched off the tele now. Let me wake up in the morning and see the result. Hope we survive the day.  And as i say- Recalse.

Update:-  It turned out well after all

Post of the Month

You gotta do what you gotta do

The Republic Day Debate

I have been partial to the idea of India being a presidential system of democracy since childhood. The notion that generally a presidential system of government will be good for India was more a reflection of the fact that the parliamentary system of government did not yield the proper results. Mark you, those were the days of Gujaral and Devegowda so I was not that far off the mark. However, the more I read about the presidential form of government, the less convinced I am about the merits of the system. For example, for one of the most developed economies, US has one of the most underdeveloped governance mechanism. I think that is because of the transition issues arising primarily out of presidential system of executive appointments for apolitical jobs. West Europe on reasonable parameters of governance seems ahead.  I have personally seen the side effects of this kind of practice in Sri Lanka where the governance system is quite weak again political appointees playing a helping hand in the same. One other factoid that we must keep in mind is this. You realize that, while the presidential system may bring additional stability, does India has a civil society which could keep the executive in check. India doesn’t seem to have the wherewithal to handle petty goons of MNS or Ram Sena, let alone withstand the assault the presidential system. So all in all, I say lets stick to the Parliamentary system as of now.

Obama Part Deux

Sorry to carry on about Obama. For the last few days, more in jest than anything else, i have been asking people around that who is India's Obama. People more often than not, realise that its an arbit question and refuse to answer directly. However, some names do crop up such as Mayawati, Rahul Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi's fellow traveller, Advani, Laloo, Devegowda, Nitish etc. Turns out, all this was nonsense and courtsey HT, i come to know that, we have finally managed to find the answer. Its none other than our own Sanjay Dutt. Course his recent examples of poltical acument has been blogged about by eminent indian bloggers such as Greatbong and Indiauncut

The New US administration and India

Ideally if you want to read about this, you should just wait for Acorn to write about it, which i am sure he will in due time. Still here are my thoughts.

Overall, while i think Obama would e a better choice, i think a competent (Cos incompetent US presidents make life difficult for many more) republican administration under McCain would have been much better. Primarliy because of the Foregin policy and Outsourcing policy of the democrats. While Obama is explicitly anti outsourcing which should have an adverse effect (marginal but anyway adverse) on the Indian services industry. Also, in terms of foreign policy- Democrats tend to restrict themshelves and thus they will soon start making non proliferation noises, will want to deal china independently (thus no props for India to counter China) and the vague feeling that i get is that the foregn policy of Obama vis a vis India will be Pakistan Centric rather than China centric. So all in all, i am not very optimistic about Indo-US relations given the Indian bureacrats to be overly sensitive about insults and not trying to find out work arounds.

The only saving grace is that the better PR of Obama admin will once again empower the americans to do something good in the neighbourhood which is needed.

Use of Analogies

I agree with Matt yglesias here that analogies have limitations in a good debate and if you actually want to enter a debate, analogies are best kept away. Use of anlaogies in intense debates lead to people countering the main point by looking in incosnistencies between the analogy and the actual situation. It will be like going into a 20-20 match with dravid and chanderpaul as openers. You know what i mean, this too was a bad analogy with results like what royal challengers got.

Bloggers block is back

As i wrote in one my earliest posts, its a strange phenomenon all too common on the interwebs. My friend is suffering from it too.  He is looking for ideas. I think, blogging is a difficult medium. One needs to find a right balance of taciturnity and story telling. Now the difficulty is that this balance depends upon your mood which varies inter temporally (over time i mean)..so there is also this need for consistency over time.

Here i think having a blogging style like mine helps as much as in its not very easily classifiable. so consistency is not that much of a problem. I am thinking of being more blogtastic in near future..so keep visiting the space.

2009

Its like looking into the future and seeing a new you and and a new world...its good that i am good at prognostication, otherwise it would have been arbit.

Greetings everyone!

The Meta Narrative of Movie Stars

I think the meta narrative across SRK's career has been quite strong.  I think it had a lot to do with his choice of earlier movies. One of the major reasons of SRKs fame in early 90s was his Deewana charactwer, where basically he did much more than normal heroes to get the girl. The same happened with Darr and Anjaam where his character was insanely in love but couldnt get the girl. THis sort of made SRK a sympathetic character and he got a lot of media mileage out of it. This sort of predisposed SRK towards the advantage of a solid meta narrative for movie actors. He must have learnt from a similar narrative of Akshay Kumar about action hero and how AK gained even though Akshay hardly did stunts better than others.

On the other hand, Aamir it seems has avoided the meta narrative thing and has focussed on each movie as a single entity. And thats why i think Shahrukh is a bigger star evewn tho Aamir is the better star. 

A deal is a deal

Here. Its like this many a times, when the apparent reason is not enough. But if only there was information symmetry, then many of things which remain unsaid, need not be said. :)

Emphemeriality of the Medium

This is the kind of subject matter that deserves a special blog post. so here it is

The Trumpet Blows

I guess I overstimated the Indian Foreign policy thinkers response time

The Other Champion

90s was the decade of Sachin. Frankly, Indians hardly tried to maintain an equivalency between the batting and fielding side of its growing cricket fascination.  Kapil was famous in the early part of the decade but everyone understood that the main bowling weapon India had was kumble. I think the years 92-95 kumble was at this peak. I can remember ODIs where batsmen just played out kumble and kumble figures will be something like 10- 2- 29-2. Those were the days when reputed players like Andrew Hudson were afraid of kumble and new players like Richard blake’s reputation was destroyed.

The one bane of Kumble came was the South African players Cronje and Cullinan. They suddenly learned how to play Kumble and then the reputation was destroyed by Aravinda, jayasurya, Mahanama etc.

As you must have heard, Anil Kumble has retired from international Cricket.  This has sort of more that anything started the drumbeat which should soon drown out Dravid and Laxman. But all that for later. Lets focus on Kumble

Kumble  about 5-6 years to become the bowler he was in 2006 when I thought he was at the peak of his second coming. But this second coming was more the evidence of his grit and cricketing acumen. He fin ally developed a ball which actually spun…his googly which actually deviated from the pitch. This delivery more than anything else Kumble to have his golden summer where he is past 600 wickets and captained India to wins, notably against Aussies in Perth.

From all this, what I want to arrive at is…Kumble was a world beater for around 7-8 years but unfortunately in India he was eclipsed by Batting starts such as Sachin Ganguly, Azhar etc while the world saw two better spinners in Warne and Murali which sort of made the title of this past “The other champion” rather than “the champion” which may have been the case in some other country or some other era

News for tomorrow

I believe this is going to create a bit of news tomorrow morning. Here is US presidential candidate (practically president-in-waiting; see 538) talking about Kashmir

Working with Pakistan and India to try to resolve, and Kashmir, crisis in a serious way. Those are all critical tasks for the next administration. Kashmir in particular is an interesting situation where that is obviously a potential tar pit diplomatically. But, for us to devote serious diplomatic resources to get a special envoy in there, to figure out a plausible approach, and essentially make the argument to the Indians, you guys are on the brink of being an economic superpower, why do you want to keep on messing with this? To make the argument to the Pakistanis, look at India and what they are doing, why do you want to keep n being bogged down with this particularly at a time where the biggest threat now is coming from the Afghan boarder? 

Now, I am pretty sure, this is a shift from the current US policy. India has in the past strongly objected to the presence of a special envoy for Kashmir. My take here is that Obama is being lazy. He understands that the issue is much more complex, but he thinks he can strengthen his pragmatic image here by trying to showcase some opportunity of movement in Kashmir. I am sure, Obama himself will realize is that his current proposal sounds like giving candy to the nuisance maker so that he may keep quiet. I am sure he will realize that this strategy seldom works.