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. 

Meta on Comments

Hmm..Thought provoking blog post out there. Keep it up guys

Internal Team Meetings

Internal team meetings are a lot of fun..with a lot of contrasting narratives thrown into the mix. There are people who know, they are not here to contribute anything but they have to be there. Then there are persons who think that the team meetings are useful place to show off their knowledge and grasp of every issue related and unrelated. There is a person who tries too hard to attract attention to one of the pet theories and then there is the smart guy..wondering why is he in this meeting and then wonders...why not write a blog post.

Update: Jabberwock has an interesting take on internal team meetings

The need for police reforms

I completerly agree with acorn here

Dominate the battle on the ground
3. Connect every thana, every chowki (and in future every policeman) to a national database and network. Neither POTA nor a new anti-terrorism agency is crucial: connect existing intelligence and law-enforcement agencies through a common network.

4. Empower police by implementing police reforms. Use the Supreme Court of India’s judgement in Prakash Singh & Others vs Union of India & Others to generate momentum. Strengthen police-public partnerships.

5. Move internal security to the PMO. The Prime Minister should chair a Cabinet Committee on Internal Security; a dedicated internal security advisor (rank of secretary or higher) should be appointed to act as the point man covering all aspects of internal security.

Also, as i have mentioned before, police reforms can be one of the best things that can be done by the government today. We can definitely take advantage of IT and telecom technological improvements to reform the police system. This will have immense benefits, economic, political and social.

Self awareness and the natural law of conservation

Not exactly an epiphany but still, i was stuck by this thought

Self Awareness- This is a huge thing if you are intelligent enough, but it may not be very useful if you are too impatient. 

On a slightly related but unexplainable note, I do believe, there is some natural law of conservation. I mean not at the micro level, but overall i think, the natural law of conservation would be one of the key ingredients for sustainabiulity and  existence of life. Ofcourse this has theological and philosophical connotations. But that's  for some other time

Something Tangible

Well, its a blog post..so i will leave you with a couple of thoughts..

1. I think the Steve Waughs mental disintegration concept has come full circle. It was obvious from the start that the IPL money will ask the highly paid cricketers to redefine their mental makeup..and Symonds has apparently done so.....For all the arrogance about mental toughness etc from Aussies...this really is a bad sign for them. Course this is good news for indians. Symonds is one of those players who always does well against India.
2. The Indo-US nuclear deal is not an unmixed blessing...its a blessing nonetheless. I am however optimistic cos the intent will be lost..but the signed paper will remain and the indo us commercial deals will take care about the sustainability of the  deal. I am not very sanguine about the nuclear weapons programme though, give the lack of Indias institutional strenght and the ability to take advantage of ambiguous details.
3. One thing i have learnt about the skills of concentration..persitenece pays..and its a habit rather than talent. I mean..you can develop your skills of concentration with practice or mental laziness can be overcome.

Thats it for the day..catch you all sometime soon

Something Deep

The grand canyon

Two Days

It is sometimes difficult to understand the utility of a two day weekend sometimes, not today...

saturday sunday...here i come...and sleep

The one with Influential friends

This blog is not about the influence of my firends, but the influence of title of the 'F.R.I.E.N.D.S' sitcom on this blog. No i am not talking about the poor cheap jokes, but the generic headlines which i give to my blog posts such as - The testament. the promise etc.

In other news, i am glad you ignored the hadron nonsense. Its already a big waste of public money..we should atleast not waste our time on this

The Promise

With increased activity on this blog, i promise to gove more thought to what i write and take this blog more seriously. But for now, here is a joke.

"Why was God looking sleepy today- Cos he slept late last night"

catch you in a while

Overtime

Over time, i have seen this blog discussing many concepts. Today we will discuss overtime and how the concept of overtime has decreased over time.

Overtime has been one of the important sources of some additional income for government employees. but over time the concept of over time has lost some of the attraction and you will find that people have been discussing advantages of overtime less and less over time.

Going Meta

Now i have been accused recently of not writing more than a couple of lines on my blogposts. I do think that while the criticism is not completely valid but it has some merits. So in this blog post, i am trying to make amends. Ofcourse the other fairly regular criticism about my blog is that the blog lacks substance, but more on that later. Atleast this blog has more than 2 lines. It has, trust me.

Google Chrome

I am using it

The testament

How do you feel when you realise you are the smartest person in the room...tell me about it..cos i dont feel any different.. i am so used to it

Gold, Bronze and Counting

What a lovely headline. This olympic performance by India assures me that India is on a growth trajectory. Let us mark the olympic medals won as one of the indicators along with MDGs, HDI etc as signs of India shining.

Go Vijender go

Another First

Writing this blog post from inside a flight. Its not very hitech actually. Using my data card while the flight is in transit at raipur airport on my way to bhopal from hyderabad. Still worth a blog post. The connection is slow. Hope i can publish this post

The Way Out

It is a bit obvious that the BJP and its senior leadership are in a bit of a bind in opposing the nuclear deal given the fact that the deal is popular in the upper middle class of citizenry (and basically thats the only class which will make any political decision based on the deal). And currently, the argument of the BJP - is unequal partnership. I am suggesting that the BJP follows a more n position on this. Here is what i think BJP should argue.

• Concede that the deal is overall good in 'letter and spirit', but could have been better. as in specifically the deal is good in 'spirit' but bad in 'letter'. And while with the next govts in both countries, the 'spirit' will be gone, India will be stuck with the 'letter' and thus with a bad deal
• The congress should have made a concerted effort to take the mainstream parties (NDA) on board for a foregn policy deal (remind people that foreign policy deals should be consenus based)
• The failure of congress to coordinate with NDA also led to a bad deal as in the UPA failed to put in opposition from NDA as a hindrance to score a better deal

The Overreach

While it has become the established CW among the cognoscenti that this time Prakash karat overplayed his hand and thus lost his considerable influence on the polity. While i mostly agree (Mostly- cause, this close to election, and Manmohan reneging on his word, he hardly had any option). The point i want to make is, the considerable influence of karat was mostly due to the political incompetence of Mr Manmohan Singh and the congress party. In a coalition, if you are small..but vital..you get cabinet berths..but here what congress did was instead of cabinet posts, gave CPM control over the economic agenda. That was never wise as fringe ideology based party can only harm you if you allow them to set up the agenda.

So, overall it was the incompetence rather than anything else that allowed CPM to have so much influence, cause as you can see in the murky world of poltics, for political compulsions, a high brow person like Prakash karat has to anoint Mayawati as a natural PM. (That should lay to rest btw, any concept of intellectual honesty among CPM leaders....just as we have for other parties)