One day I was chatting with my friends and someone pointed out that we (India) stand nowhere in soccer. Someone else made a point that cricket is not as famous as soccer, for e.g. there are around 200 countries having soccer teams but only around 20 countries playing cricket. Someone also said that cricket was once included in Asian games but again dropped after that. What can be the reasons of cricket not making it to the masses?
I will not be presenting any facts in this blog to support the reasons I have thought of. So before you comment that the blog is not factually supported , I want to tell you that I do not (generally can not) remember the important historical events/facts that will help the cause called ‘cricket’.
Well I know cricket was invented in England (I hope I am correct here). The other big nations playing cricket is India, Pakistan, Australia, Sri Lanka, New Zealand Bangladesh etc. All these nations were once the colonies of British Empire, so you can sense the origin of this game in these countries. But then why it did not spread like soccer?
I can think of the reason as the game time rather ‘play time’. It takes a complete day to end a single match of cricket as compared to soccer that takes max 2 hours. We know it was only the test match format with which cricket came into existence. Over the period of years people saw ODI coming into play. The ODIs also started with 60 over per innings, gradually it decreased to 50. Now we are seeing the Twenty20 format reducing the complete play time to 3 hours. So the format of the game is gradually shifting towards what people want rather what people can afford. ‘Afford’ here I mean, not in terms of money but in terms of time. Do we have enough of time to watch a game of cricket a complete day, probably we (the cricket playing nations) have but can we think that people in a country (which do not play cricket) will push for a game that takes a complete day to end. I think no!.
The point I am trying to make here is Twenty20 is here to stay and as it stays it will make the cricket a new fever not only in the cricket playing nations but also in other countries as well in the time to come. I guess this year Asian games have already included this format in their games list. Let us see how long this 20-20 fever takes to become a full endemic disease.
Monday 24 September, 2007
Monday 2 July, 2007
Fun but flawed
This is regarding a TV ad, so if you don’t get time to watch TV then this blog will not be interesting to you. Fevicol, has been very innovative in bringing up TV Ads and I find those Ads very funny, anyway the Ads are able to get the viewer’s attention.
The specific Ad I am talking about is the one where two aliens, standing on their spaceship, land over a village. They then announce that they will make everything fly in the air. Some four hose arms then come out of the spaceship and dig into the ground. Slowly everything seems to be flying like there was no gravity at all. And this everything involves cow, men, household equipment, radio etc. Then one of the flying man grabs a flying Fevicol can and pour the fevicol into a well. Suddenly, everything that was flying comes down to earth; finally gravity takes over the alien force. Well, that is the complete Ad and a very good one, I will say.
There is one more thing to laugh in the Ad, logically; you see a flaw in the Ad. Let us assume that the aliens can make everything fly and let us assume that the Fevicol is a excellent Glue that can even undermine the alien forces. However, if everything is flying up in the sky, how can someone pour “DOWN” the glue into a well, what made the glue come down towards earth.
The next time you see this Ad, smile for a different reason!!!
The specific Ad I am talking about is the one where two aliens, standing on their spaceship, land over a village. They then announce that they will make everything fly in the air. Some four hose arms then come out of the spaceship and dig into the ground. Slowly everything seems to be flying like there was no gravity at all. And this everything involves cow, men, household equipment, radio etc. Then one of the flying man grabs a flying Fevicol can and pour the fevicol into a well. Suddenly, everything that was flying comes down to earth; finally gravity takes over the alien force. Well, that is the complete Ad and a very good one, I will say.
There is one more thing to laugh in the Ad, logically; you see a flaw in the Ad. Let us assume that the aliens can make everything fly and let us assume that the Fevicol is a excellent Glue that can even undermine the alien forces. However, if everything is flying up in the sky, how can someone pour “DOWN” the glue into a well, what made the glue come down towards earth.
The next time you see this Ad, smile for a different reason!!!
Friday 22 June, 2007
Scratch Pad – Theory of Default
Why some things are the way they are! I call it Theory of Default. This theory is not limited to any particular field of study. It is a general notion of acceptance of all the events that happen in our daily life as they happen.
I do not want to counter the belief of questioning “why” because if we do not question we will not “learn” and consequently we will not “improve”.
I was recently reading a news that scientist have discovered a planet far distant to our galaxy but it is found to be rotating a star. Then there was another statement stating that scientist believes its atmosphere has gas. The important question that remains to be answered is whether the planet has life, and if it has what kind of life, single cell microbes (the most basic of life form), or more complex ones. Now there seems to be billions of possibilities of the life-form on that planet. So how do we get to trickle down on may be thousands of possibilities as compared to billions. Let me share some understanding of our solar system. The temperature on the sun’s surface is around 6000C (refererence 1). The earth is at the right distance from the sun to sustain life. Any closer or farther, I wouldn’t have been here to write all this (there would be no life on earth). Every day there are some 4 billion meteors striking earth(reference 2). But it has the gaseous atmosphere to completely burn away almost all of them before they could reach the surface. Also it had the right composition of the gases in the atmosphere to sustain life. I have just listed few, there could be many more threats to life on earth. But all I want to say is if after all there numerous odds life exists on earth, then should be the only way life could exists any where. Hence, only in this form, the life (on earth) was able to counter every threat from outside universe. So here comes the theory of default, that if there the life should exists in the complete universe it should be exactly the same as it is on earth, the only difference we could observe is that it would either be less developed or more developed than us. So in other words it would be either the past or the future of our own existence.
I can see it in day-to-day life also. For e.g. a very small company (organization) seems to be working with best efficiency (I am talking of the internal functions executed by the HR and Administration dept.). But as they grow in size, the same employee star complaining about the bureaucratic nature of the same internal functions. We fail to consider the fact that this way of working may not be the most efficient but still the big companies across the globe follow the same structure. If there would have been something fundamentally wrong in this structure then this kind of structure could have been outdated till now. Though the processes and structure keep changing day by day, and time will show us whether this bureaucratic structure is the best, but for the time being I will just end the draft by assuming that this is what a big organization was supposed to function by default!
The only way we could improve upon the things(as they are currently) is by adapting in the right manner towards them. Now this “adapting” and “right” are again very subjective so I leave it to you :).
Sunday 10 June, 2007
Life in Mumbai
“Life in Mumbai is on a fast track”. Everyone listen/tell this to their friends. I say it differently. To me, it’s on fast track because Mumbai's traffic moves slow. If you are affluent enough to have your house near your office or you are lucky to have your office near your house (both are different!), it is a luxury.
I used to travel 1.5 hours to my office and then 1.5 back to home, that makes 3 hours of traveling time a day. Coupled with your working time and then you are left with near sufficient time for sleep. Hence, you find your life is on a fast track. Still people wonder that no one in Mumbai has time to meet friends!
Once I was discussing on the same with one of my colleagues. He said the traveling time doesn’t seem too much to him. BTW, he was working in Mumbai for the last 12 years. I just told him that taking an average of 3 hours of traveling each day; he has spent 1.5 years in just commuting to office back and forth. One would have loved to see the expressions on his face then. To an extent, one can understand the reason that people cite infrastructure problems as one of the roadblocks for big MNCs opening offices in India (Mumbai). Probably they do not want their workforce to spend (waste) a third of their working time in traveling and then have an adverse impact on the productivity.
Infrastructure is changing in Mumbai but it is not paced enough to cope up with the influx (of people) Mumbai has. I do not understand whether our planning is wrong or execution is wrong. It seems we plan for future, the execution takes too long to finish that the future become present and then when the plan finishes, the complete project seems to be outdated. Now as an outsider, I and you do not know what is going wrong. One thing is for sure, the first thing that comes up with an unauthorized building (or slum) is temple/mosque. Doesn’t this seems obvious to you now, I do not need to give any reason for this, do I?
I used to travel 1.5 hours to my office and then 1.5 back to home, that makes 3 hours of traveling time a day. Coupled with your working time and then you are left with near sufficient time for sleep. Hence, you find your life is on a fast track. Still people wonder that no one in Mumbai has time to meet friends!
Once I was discussing on the same with one of my colleagues. He said the traveling time doesn’t seem too much to him. BTW, he was working in Mumbai for the last 12 years. I just told him that taking an average of 3 hours of traveling each day; he has spent 1.5 years in just commuting to office back and forth. One would have loved to see the expressions on his face then. To an extent, one can understand the reason that people cite infrastructure problems as one of the roadblocks for big MNCs opening offices in India (Mumbai). Probably they do not want their workforce to spend (waste) a third of their working time in traveling and then have an adverse impact on the productivity.
Infrastructure is changing in Mumbai but it is not paced enough to cope up with the influx (of people) Mumbai has. I do not understand whether our planning is wrong or execution is wrong. It seems we plan for future, the execution takes too long to finish that the future become present and then when the plan finishes, the complete project seems to be outdated. Now as an outsider, I and you do not know what is going wrong. One thing is for sure, the first thing that comes up with an unauthorized building (or slum) is temple/mosque. Doesn’t this seems obvious to you now, I do not need to give any reason for this, do I?
Monday 4 June, 2007
Wind Power in India
I was reading that India is ranked fifth in producing wind power and I was overwhelmed with the ranking. Then I did some googling (thanks to google) and found that the countries with the highest total installed wind power capacity are Germany (16,629 MW), Spain (8,263 MW), the United States (6,740 MW), Denmark (3,117 MW) and India (3,000 MW). Another link posted below claims India's current capacity to be around 6000MW and that India is fourth largest producer of wind power in the world (refer source 4 listed below). Yet, India has a mere 6% share in global wind energy generation as compared to Germany leading with around 35% of global share. The total wind energy potential estimated in India is staggering 65000MW (I hope that the calculations are done correctly). So that leaves a good pool of wind energy still to be tapped.
Sometimes I wonder the challenges that are faced while coming up with a wind power project. In terms of incentives there are great incentives by the Indian government. The fiscal incentives extended by the Indian government to the wind energy sector include
- Direct taxes – 80 % depreciation in the first year of installation of a project.
- Tax holiday for 10 years.
- No income tax to be paid on power sales to utilities.
The government’s share in India’s wind power generation is still 3%, a figure again I hope that it is calculated correctly, refer the link 4 below. I think that the Indian government should have taken the lead in wind power than the private industry. I know that many of Indian villages still do not get the minimum share of total electric power generated in the country. Many farmers do not have electricity to irrigate their field, many hospitals (of course the rural ones) do not have electricity supply to carry out the operations, so do many of the school and houses. I do not see that acquiring land is the challenge faced in India. Clearly, it will not be difficult to convince a farmer to lease his 1 acre of land for installing a wind turbine, in return of some rent, power for his field and house. Then where are the roadblocks?
Well I did some more googling and couldn’t find any so I will keep wondering the meager state of wind power generation in India. It may not be meager as compared to world but I will call it meager when it comes to Indian needs and the current Indian scenario, only because there is a lot more potential available in India.
While writing this complete draft I was thinking in other direction also, is wind power absolutely free? May I will write something in my next blog.
World Environment Day!
I was browsing through the newspapers today morning; the day celebrated as ‘World Environment Day1’ and was happy to see full 4 page coverage on environmental degradation. Knowingly or knowingly we cause damage to our local ecology in various ways.
It was though, not very surprising to know that people here are not even fully aware of the current situation. May be, people think that it is not there responsibility to take care of the environment and that government is solely responsible for that. This might be associated with the fact that nobody is able to see the direct effect of environmental degradation. People only blame the local governing body for not clearing the drains/sewage pipes before the monsoon, that too only when the rain water accumulates in their compound or cause disruption in traffic. They never realize that the waste they produce everyday result in all this havoc. I am not denying the fact that local governing body is also responsible for this. I remember ‘one fine day’ I was walking down the marine drive with my friend and we had a mineral water bottle that I was looking to dump in the dustbin. I could not locate a single dustbin in the 1 km stretch of marine drive. Nevertheless, I carried the bottle with me and dumped it in the lucky ‘dustbin’ kept at Churchgate station. But will everyone do the same, clearly no.
The point is not the presence of dustbin; the point is the awareness that has to be created among my fellow countrymen. Now, ‘creating the awareness’ seems to the buzzword these days. Everyone leaves their discussing by concluding that we need to create the awareness among people and this is for everything under the sun. In India specifically we need to create the awareness for Primary Education, Health, Women upliftment, AIDS and many more. If for the last 60 years of our independence and we are still not able to create the so called ‘awareness’ among people, that too on the issues that directly affect one’s life. So, we can now set our expectations regarding the “awareness” on environmental degradation.
1. http://www.unep.org/wed/2007/english/Information_Material/index.asp
It was though, not very surprising to know that people here are not even fully aware of the current situation. May be, people think that it is not there responsibility to take care of the environment and that government is solely responsible for that. This might be associated with the fact that nobody is able to see the direct effect of environmental degradation. People only blame the local governing body for not clearing the drains/sewage pipes before the monsoon, that too only when the rain water accumulates in their compound or cause disruption in traffic. They never realize that the waste they produce everyday result in all this havoc. I am not denying the fact that local governing body is also responsible for this. I remember ‘one fine day’ I was walking down the marine drive with my friend and we had a mineral water bottle that I was looking to dump in the dustbin. I could not locate a single dustbin in the 1 km stretch of marine drive. Nevertheless, I carried the bottle with me and dumped it in the lucky ‘dustbin’ kept at Churchgate station. But will everyone do the same, clearly no.
The point is not the presence of dustbin; the point is the awareness that has to be created among my fellow countrymen. Now, ‘creating the awareness’ seems to the buzzword these days. Everyone leaves their discussing by concluding that we need to create the awareness among people and this is for everything under the sun. In India specifically we need to create the awareness for Primary Education, Health, Women upliftment, AIDS and many more. If for the last 60 years of our independence and we are still not able to create the so called ‘awareness’ among people, that too on the issues that directly affect one’s life. So, we can now set our expectations regarding the “awareness” on environmental degradation.
1. http://www.unep.org/wed/2007/english/Information_Material/index.asp
Why Blog ?
I used to question myself, why do people blog and now I am writing this “blog” to answer the same. I can organize my thoughts around four dimensions. When (why), who, what and for whom do people blog.
I was almost confident that I will never get time to blog, but then I deleted some of the computer games on my PC, I realized that I wasn’t that busy at all. So, does that mean people who blog have plenty of time, the answer may be “yes”. However, the corollary is not true; people who have plenty of time do not necessarily blog. (Assumption: The term ‘people’ as used here consist of those individuals that have easy access to internet) That means the underlying reason is not the availability of ‘time’. To get to the right answer I asked myself the same question differently “What made me write all this”, the answer is “I wanted people to know that I have given sufficient thoughts to explain the origin of a global phenomenon called ‘blogging’ ”. Now that’s the answer to my question “people blog because they want to tell/share their views/opinions on variety of subjects/events that happen in their personal/social/corporate life”.
Now does this answers my next question “who”. Of course, people who want to tell/share their individual views to/with others. Does that mean that all those people who are not blogging doesn’t have any opinions/views about anything? Also, Is blogging the only way(channel) to share your views/opinions with others, wasn’t this happening before? Actually, whenever people chat they do the same, they share their views/opinions with others. This question leads me to find another more appropriate answer to “Who” question. The answer more appropriately can be written as “People who want to share their views/opinions/thoughts with the audience that is far away from them, blog”. Still something is missing in the answer? One can still email/call/chat online to do all that? So I will have to refine my answer a little bit. “People who want to share their views/opinions/thoughts with the audience that is far away from them but with the convenience, blog.” No, the answer is not 100% correct, email is still the viable option. Now I have to give my answer a finishing touch. It could be stated as “People who want to share their views/opinions/thoughts with the audience that is either known (but is far away from them) or unknown (so they have to publish their thoughts somewhere, no one would like to make their inbox public!) and with all the convenience to everyone, blog.”
Though partly, I have defined the remaining two dimensions ‘what’ and ‘whom’. But these two cannot be answered separately as they link with each other. Clearly because one never writes on the things happening on one’s personal front for the unknown audience. So, when one write something related to your life (what) like daily activities etc. one writes it for ones friends (Whom). And when one write on any other topic/subject that is a social/cultural/political (simply global) phenomenon that one writes it for everybody. So this answers my fundamental questions about “blogging” and I can just tell you that I no longer consider “blogging” as non-productive investment of time. However, I am yet to write on the commercial aspects of blogging and another sequel of this blog may release soon.
I do not wanted my first blog to be very lengthy because I too do not like reading lengthy blogs, after all no one has that much of time anyway.
I was almost confident that I will never get time to blog, but then I deleted some of the computer games on my PC, I realized that I wasn’t that busy at all. So, does that mean people who blog have plenty of time, the answer may be “yes”. However, the corollary is not true; people who have plenty of time do not necessarily blog. (Assumption: The term ‘people’ as used here consist of those individuals that have easy access to internet) That means the underlying reason is not the availability of ‘time’. To get to the right answer I asked myself the same question differently “What made me write all this”, the answer is “I wanted people to know that I have given sufficient thoughts to explain the origin of a global phenomenon called ‘blogging’ ”. Now that’s the answer to my question “people blog because they want to tell/share their views/opinions on variety of subjects/events that happen in their personal/social/corporate life”.
Now does this answers my next question “who”. Of course, people who want to tell/share their individual views to/with others. Does that mean that all those people who are not blogging doesn’t have any opinions/views about anything? Also, Is blogging the only way(channel) to share your views/opinions with others, wasn’t this happening before? Actually, whenever people chat they do the same, they share their views/opinions with others. This question leads me to find another more appropriate answer to “Who” question. The answer more appropriately can be written as “People who want to share their views/opinions/thoughts with the audience that is far away from them, blog”. Still something is missing in the answer? One can still email/call/chat online to do all that? So I will have to refine my answer a little bit. “People who want to share their views/opinions/thoughts with the audience that is far away from them but with the convenience, blog.” No, the answer is not 100% correct, email is still the viable option. Now I have to give my answer a finishing touch. It could be stated as “People who want to share their views/opinions/thoughts with the audience that is either known (but is far away from them) or unknown (so they have to publish their thoughts somewhere, no one would like to make their inbox public!) and with all the convenience to everyone, blog.”
Though partly, I have defined the remaining two dimensions ‘what’ and ‘whom’. But these two cannot be answered separately as they link with each other. Clearly because one never writes on the things happening on one’s personal front for the unknown audience. So, when one write something related to your life (what) like daily activities etc. one writes it for ones friends (Whom). And when one write on any other topic/subject that is a social/cultural/political (simply global) phenomenon that one writes it for everybody. So this answers my fundamental questions about “blogging” and I can just tell you that I no longer consider “blogging” as non-productive investment of time. However, I am yet to write on the commercial aspects of blogging and another sequel of this blog may release soon.
I do not wanted my first blog to be very lengthy because I too do not like reading lengthy blogs, after all no one has that much of time anyway.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)