The aftermath of the "IPL snub"...

The "IPL snub", as Pakistan likes to call it, has come back to haunt India again. I mean, what were those private franchisees thinking, not spending thousands of dollars on players who may never show up. How can they refuse to just give away money to Pakistanis?  They never thought their actions would have such serious repercussions. How naive one can be? A nation, whose entire economy is based on receiving charity from others, was deeply hurt.

The first big causality was, wait for it, kabbadi; when Pakistan's kabbadi team refused to tour India. You would think that should have taught us a lesson. That decision by Pakistan alone should have convinced all those IPL bosses to apologize to them. But, Pakistan had moved on. One of their ministers, I forgot which one, while speaking to a news channel said that the time of saying sorry was over. India should send a delegation, personally apologize to the cricketers and take them to play in IPL. I thought that was a very fair ask. I mean, sure, the two countries may not be willing to send delegations to share information on terrorism, help in investigation; but when it comes to such important matters as IPL, how can you not send your best and brightest representatives to sort out the issue.

And now, just when India was about to recover from the "kabbadi snub", comes the killer blow. Pakistan's national cycling federation has decided not to invite Indians to the biggest athletic event on the planet; an event, which completely overshadows the Olympics or the soccer world cup in terms of the fan following; an event, which every Indian child, growing up, one day wants to be a part of; an event known as Tour de Pakistan. The secretary of the federation showed tremendous clarity of thought and rational decision making when he said "As a protest for the IPL auction we have decided not to invite Indian cyclists for our event,"  

To understand what our countrymen are missing, you have to picture a 12 day journey that goes from Peshawar to Karachi; a journey that takes you through a great land full of suicide bombers and terrorist training camps. Indian cyclists miss the once in a life time opportunity of getting up close and personal with the Taliban leaders, the Al-Qaeda members and who knows, if they were lucky, they might even have been at the receiving end of a drone attack. Name another sports event in the world that provides so much adventure and learning experience. 

The critics might point out that the Sri Lankan cricket team got attacked while touring Pakistan. But they only stayed in the high security hotels and traveled, escorted, only between their hotel and the ground. How can one even compare that to the safe environment of the Tour de Pakistan, where the participants have to pass through the mountains and forests of the Pakistan on their cycles. And particularly if the participants are from India, a country against which Pakistani terrorists have never even raised a finger.

I guess this "cycling snub" has demonstrated what the scientists called "the butterfly effect". I'm sure Lalit Modi and the IPL owners never saw this coming. They all should be held responsible for the disastrous effect it would have on our nation. Let this be a lesson for all of us. If you are a corporate, forget making profit for your partners and shareholders, forget the sentiments of your customers; if you have money, give it to Pakistan. Else who knows, may be the great game of kho kho is next in the  list of causalities.

IPL is India's most innovative company

Fastcompany.com just released its list of most innovative companies across the globe and across multiple industries; and surprise, surprise IPL is at number 22. It's the no # 1 Indian company in the list and it's the 2nd among all the sports companies. I am not aware of the criteria used in coming up with the list and I'm sure most of the readers would disagree with some of the rankings (For example, what exactly did Facebook do in the last one year to jump from 15th position to 1st?). But the point to note is that from India IPL made it to the top-50, not the infosys-es or the TCS-es ("process innovation", anyone?). IPL finds itself in the company of Googles and Apples of the world and they beat Microsoft and twitter by some margin (ok, "Microsoft" and "innovation" are two words that are generally not uttered together, but still they are on the list). Let's appreciate them for what they have achieved so far.

More on this later..

Under-pressure Bangladeshis and the unlucky Pakistanis

Bangladesh is once again staring at one of their customary test defeats and for some reason, which is not clear to me, their coach, Jamie Siddons, is angry. Siddons says "I'm not sure what went wrong, whether the boys felt the pressure of the big occasion or if they thought they could go out and actually get the runs, but it was certainly not in the plan". What big occasion? Is Bangladesh taking on New Zealand in a test that would ultimately decide the world no #1? No, wait, that's the other match that just ended. Or may be Siddon's is referring to the fact that Bangladesh is batting in the 4th innings of the match. Generally, matches involving Bangladesh don't enter the 4th innings, so this must be an overwhelming experience for them. Only if their No # 7 and #8 hadn't spoiled the first innings, they all would have been relaxing in their rooms by now. And yeah Siddons, the real problem is that your batsmen thought they can get these runs, since they have been chasing the 400 plus scores in test matches so frequently.

Now on the other side, 44% of the Pakistanis taking part in a survey blamed their team's defeat in Australia to poor cricket.  Let me say that again, only 44% of the Pakistanis believe that poor cricket is the reason why they lost all 9 matches to Australia in that tour; 3-0 in tests (two with margins of 170 and 231 runs each), 5-0 in ODIs (again twice with 100+ margins) and 1-0 in twenty twenty. 13% thought the team was unlucky (only if the cameras hadn't caught Afridi biting the ball, or only if Kamran had hurt is ankle during practice) and 20% of the respondents were not sure why the team lost.

However, for me, the most surprising aspect of the survey results was that, in a show of tremendous maturity, not even one of them blamed BCCI, IPL, Lalti Modi or Narendra Modi for their team's defeat. Or may be the surveyor, in a surprisingly foolish oversight, forgot to provide these options, which would also explain why 20% were unsure.

If the Internet collapses....

How Stuff Works, a website that I haven't visited for more than nine years now, has an interesting article  about what would happen to our lives if the internet collapsed. It's not clear to me at what point exactly during the last nine years, they went from their core positioning of explaining how things work to speculating about the implications of if they don't.

Now there is nothing wrong in changing one's core positioning or belief. I mean there are bigger guys than How Stuff Works (henceforth called HSW) who claimed their philosophy was to do one thing really really well, but ended up rolling out hundreds of half-baked products. Now don't even get me started on the "Doing No Evil.. " thing, but then I digress.

Coming back to HSW's article, these guys make an honest attempt, but fail way short in understanding the catastrophic effect of such an event. They waste way too much time worrying about trivial matters such as loss of jobs, impact on the economy, political crisis etc that they completely ignore some more fundamental issues. So how serious impact exactly would the collapsed internet have on your life? The short answer is "very", much more that HSW wants you to believe. Let's address some of them -

Imagine the day you wake up and realize that people can actually use more than 140 characters when they communicate? No matter what anyone tells you, believe me when I say that we are simply not prepared for such a world. None of us have any idea what that 141st character would be. But something tells me it won't be pretty.

And the worse part is, after few decades, once the world get accustomed to this fact, it will expect you to use more than 140 characters in your conversations too, and no you can't just add hashtags to sound cool.

Imagine a world where if you have to call someone an a**h*** you have to do it in their face and not as some cool, brave anonymous guy in a discussion forum. Imagine how difficult it would be to have arguments with a fellow human being or a group of fellow human beings if you have to actually be there in person to do it and you have to use your real name. You can't postpone buying that health insurance with Accidental Medical Expense (AME) rider any longer.

You can no longer have 500 friends who you have never met and have no intention of meeting, but who are always there to fertilize your farms, to send you illegal transaction record, to share all their greatest achievements; such as removing fish hooks from another friend's tank, and lastly, not to forget, friends who are always more than willing to poke you.

In a world without internet, when you go to office, you have to actually look at some applications on your computer other than the one with the blue "e" icon (or the earth on fire icon). If you didn't pay attention during that induction training 12 years back, you are screwed.

Now, if you are thinking that you can still somehow manage to get by with all these issues, I'm sorry to inform you that I've been saving the worst news for the end. Imagine the worst thing that can ever happen to you. What happens when the thing that you love most, the one thing that has been holding your life together is taken away from you? Still didn't get it? I've one word for you.. PORN

Downloading and watching pornography is what has historically separated human beings from animals. (Not sure if it has changed though in recent past. Someone should do a market sizing exercise for the porn industry among animals. Given the fact that some of the animals, with sheer determination and hard work, have made it to the industry as actors, it's quite likely that they might have developed a fan following among their species. But that topic needs a separate and much lengthier post).

If the internet collapses, suddenly this beautiful world of free porn is taken away from us. What do we do next? Go back to buying magazines? Paint our walls with erotic pictures (an art form which, by the way, was lost when our ancestors moved out of caves)? For married men like me, it's not that easy. Where do we hide the porn? Gone are the days of saving 500 GBs of videos in a folder named "Work > Legal > Important Documents". Yeah, sure you can stuff it under the mattress. But how long before it starts piling up and your wife starts to notice the bulge (on the mattress, of course).

Thankfully, HSW assures us that the internet is a tough cookie and such an eventuality is pretty remote. But I'm not so sure. It wont hurt us to be prepared, will it? So go ahead and buy that 24 month subscription of penthouse magazines as soon as you can. That site won't be there for long.

Sponsored terrorism links by Times of India

One of the common monetization strategies used by content providers on internet is what is knows as "contextual advertising". The phrase is self-explanatory enough, it refers to a technology where ads are served based on the context of the page (Google's "Adsense for content" is the most popular product to use this technology). It works best when the content of the page is somewhat suggestive of the commercial intent of the user; for example someone reading a review of digital cameras is most likely interested in buying one. But it blows on your face when this contextual ads start appearing against sensitive topics; such as accidents, wars or terrorism.

Now here is a good example of when not to use contextual advertising. Today, I was reading an article about Pune blast in Times of India's website. Just when I was about to leave the page, my eyes went to the ads on the right hand side of the page - First there were ads on Jobs in Pune, Houses in Pune, Brides/ Grooms in Pune. Ok, so now that there is a terrorist attack in Pune, it suddenly becomes very lucrative to buy properties there? And wait, does that make you want to marry a Pune boy/ girl even more?

Now this was not the worse part. As I scrolled down the page, I came across a section called "Sponsored Links" (another term for ads). The sponsored links were - Terrorism, Terrorism and Islam, Counter Terrorism BS, Counterterrorism, FT Hood Terrorism.

Wait, it doesn't end here. If you follow any of the links, you'll see ads on life insurance, "is Jesus really God" (don't ask) and even an ad on how to plan your second wedding if you are divorced or widowed.

Thanks for being so sensitive TOI. This is exactly what we expect from our leading national newspaper. Here are the screen-shots:

From Oval to WACA ....

"I am disgusted with the way the laws have been interpreted. You cannot tell whether the ball was scratched, unless you catch somebody in the process. It's a needless controversy." This was Ramiz Raja's on air comment in Aug, 2006 during the oval test, a match in which Pakistan was accused of ball tampering and as a result they decided to forfeit the game. Now flash forward three years, a Pakistani cricketer was actually caught "in the process", as Ramiz would call it. And this time what's Ramiz's reaction? He sits back and writes a lengthy piece about how we should leave the culprit alone. Some interesting lines from Ramiz's article

".. it is also time to remind ourselves that this madness stems from a certain mindset and a background. Afridi comes from an era, a cricketing culture, where ball-tampering is considered a normal cricket activity, the done thing on flat Pakistani pitches - an art form and not a sin. It's been a part of the Pakistan team's standard operating procedure."

He then goes on to compare the ball tampering practice of Pakistanis to the sledging by Aussies and the "moaning" by England when they tour subcontinent. Wow Ramiz. So Pakistanis are justified in tampering with the ball because English players complain when touring sub-continent? What next ? Pakistani bowlers are justified in chucking, because Indian batsmen are wristy ? Asif is justified in taking drugs because Sreesanth knows how to dance (or at least claims to)?

Ramiz is not done yet.
"Calling ball-tampering unlawful and an offense is regrettable...shouldn't the authorities stop looking at the practice with suspicion and instead look to bring it into the cricket syllabus so that we can all move on?"

That's a good suggestion. Now that a Pakistani is actually caught in the act, we should legalize ball tampering. May be we should also change the doping laws so Asif doesn't have to feign injury before the next big ICC event.

Interestingly, it's suggested that Ramiz's outburst on air is what flamed the Pakistani players to protest and eventually forfeit that game in Oval. Cricinfo had the story. They should have known better to base their action on such a man's word, who at best can be called inconsistent or at worst a hypocrite.