The genius of Murali?

There has been a lot of talk during the world cup of whether after the world cup Ricky Ponting would continue (we know now he will but not as captain), whether Sachin Tendulkar would continue (we still don’t know but I suspect he might continue only in test cricket) and we got to know during the world cup that Shoaib Akhtar would not continue playing any more. But the one person we always knew would bow out after the world cup was Mutthiah Muralidaran.

That Murali has tremendous figures goes without saying. I suspect however that most people are not aware just how tremendous they are. Have a look at this article written four or five months ago by Ananth Narayanan (http://blogs.espncricinfo.com/itfigures/archives/2010/12/barnes_and_muralitharan_at_par.php) which gives a perspective into how amazing Murali’s figures have been. To me, based on figures and things which contemporaries had to say about him, Barnes has always been the finest bowler ever – he’s the Bradman of bowling to me. And to see Murali at the same level and arguably higher was an eye opener to me.

So, why is it that when discussions about the best spinners happen, generally Warne tends to get just a slightly higher billing than Murali? It’s Warne who gets into Wisden’s top 5 cricketers of the century with 27 out of a possible 100 votes a player could get while Murali did not get a single vote – I repeat not one vote (as on 1^st January 2001, Warne had 366 test wickets in 84 matches compared to Murali’s 308 in 58 matches and 230 ODI wickets in 149 matches compared to 211 in 150 with very similar averages and strike rates). Warne got picked in the cricinfo all time test XI way ahead of Murali (Warne was a unanimous choice of every jury member) though Murali made it to the 2^nd XI (along with Barnes – rather ironic isn’t it – the 2 bowlers with the best career stretches and among the top 3 in career wickets per match and they are in the 2^nd XI). Warne gets credit for having revived the dying art of leg spin but people generally don’t mention that Murali practically created a new art (the wrist spinning off spinner) and took another to rarefied heights (the “doosra” which, though invented by Saqlain Mushtaq was really made something big by Murali and Harbhajan)

So, what lies behind this inconsistency? Is it just plain simple discrimination against an Asian by the establishment? Is it that the more flamboyant Warne scores over the quieter Murali because Warne makes for better copy for journalists the world over? Does the fact that more of Murali’s wickets come against Zimbabwe and Bangladesh than for Warne have something to do it (even though if one removes those matches Murali still has a better wickets/test record than anyone other than Barnes and Lohmann; and is the best for all players with more than 200 wickets)? Or does it all have to do with the controversy over the bowling action (which of course is linked back to the discrimination)?

Let me give my view point up front- I believe Warne is the better bowler. Having seen both Warne and Murali on many occasions, I truly believe that Warne had more variety and could make the ball do more. Murali too has prodigious spin but somehow I rank Warne just that bit better. The “Mike Gatting delivery” remains perhaps the best ball I have ever seen in any form of cricket. And Warne has bowled such deliveries very often. I have often seen Warne change games single handedly with a ball that spins viciously, though to be fair Murali has done that too. If one tries to get anecdotal with both these players, one will get enough anecdotes on either side…but after having seen them both over long periods of time - I just feel Warne was the more complete bowler with greater variety and able to bowl the unplayable ball more often.

But the bigger issue remains the elephant in the room - Murali’s bowling action. Like it or not, that is an issue – And I do believe that there was something suspect with his action!

I realize this is a highly controversial thing to say – especially with all the water which has flown under the bridge. I know that Murali has bowled under cameras in test conditions and eventually everything was cleared. And yes, it is not cricket to now comment on this. But I can’t help it – every time I see him bowl it looks like something is amiss. And this is not now but a feeling I have had for over 15 years. When Darrel Hair called him in 1995, I remember thinking that this was waiting to happen. And for all that’s happened – with the tests and the change in laws, the hyper extensibility of his elbows and wrists- the doubt remains. It’s sad…but true.

And so, Murali will always remain the second among equals. I suppose the key remains to remember that it is equals who are being discussed. But nonetheless, it’s been a fabulous career which has finally come to an end. All said and done, Murali has produced some magic on the field – many times - and as he walks away into the Valhalla of cricket, let us take a moment to rejoice in his achievements because he has been a truly great player.

What hath Facebook wrought?

I have never been the most technologically advanced person but I am not uncomfortable with technology. I am certainly not an early adopter of things but I am fairly comfortable with many of the changes which have been wrought over the last decade or so.

What however stumps me is the way this changes some of the other things we normally do. When I did my MBA (98-00) most of us did not have a PC in our rooms (though we had a pretty decent computer centre) but I think from the batch after we passed out everyone had one in their rooms - it was part of the course material practically. When I went back to campus a few times (within a couple of years of graduating) I found that the PC’s had basically created islands of individual rooms; and people had even their group meetings via net meeting rather than sitting together and talking the case out. But the limit has to be what a batchmate told me he came across when he went back to his dorm - a guy went to his room , logged on to the network to “chat” and then shouted out to the guy in the next room – “oye, come on to the chat” !!!!! Why couldn’t he have just strolled across? That’s not what chat was invented for. It’s like husband and wife speaking to each other on the phone from the living room and bedroom respectively.

We have changed our behaviour in so many ways that it’s weird. Sometimes I think- how did I meet people at assignations while at college, and indeed a couple of years at work, without a mobile phone. The mobile phone certainly makes it amazingly easy. However it is now taken to the other extreme. You plan to meet someone at xyz at 6 pm. At around 5.45 you get a text saying “will be there in ten – fifteen minutes.” Well, why bother texting at all? Equally strange is the text which comes at 5.50 – “have reached- standing outside”. Well, if you are outside, I will see you when I turn up… at 6 pm.

Let me be fair- I am not taking a moral high ground here. I do exactly the same things which I just mentioned above in the earlier paragraph (not the one before that – I do not chat over the net to someone in the next room). But doesn’t it strike you as a little strange that we do such things?

Let’s take another example – when I was in college we used to give each other birthday cards –it was fairly common practice. Came email and with it e-cards. I have stopped sending birthday cards to people for years now –it’s just an email wishing the person. That’s fine…but now with facebook it’s not even an email anymore. It’s just a “post on the wall” which inevitably is a standard “happy birthday…have a great day.” And if the poster is feeling mighty cheerful then a smiley gets added. I must admit I am not a great fan of that – I try, at the very least to “send a message” on facebook but again, to be fair, I too have done the “post on the wall” bit.

And of course, manufacturers have been ingenious in converting real life activities into online ones. You can play monopoly online, you can play scrabble online, you can build a farm online (Honestly- I have rarely come across anything more asinine than Farmville – I am sorry if you are a fan of it but that’s the way it is. I would strongly urge you to reconsider) …you can even ‘have sex’ online. And after the Wii you can perhaps play almost any damn game online - even real physical ones.

But for me all limits were breached when I saw some friends playing Antakshari over facebook. One song at a time! In the words of Sir Humphrey – it was the thin end of the wedge; the end of civilization as we know it! The most surreal bit was that some poor unsuspecting soul joined in at some point and put in a song…and he got a very stern response from one of the “early adopters” – “Dear …. agar tumne poora thread padha hota to tum jaante ke ye gaana ho chuka hai!” (translation - if you had read the entire thread you would realize that this song has already been played). I felt genuinely sorry for the guy.

But while it might be the end of civilization as we know it, it certainly won’t be the end of civilization. So, I wonder what else could happen through Facebook posts and comments in the days to come- and for all i know these might already be happening

• Chess matches played online- or perhaps Bridge. Maybe even Ludo or Snakes & ladders.

• Online parties – where you all gather in your own houses, play the same music or watch the same film and talk through the facebook comments. Oh, and of course, it has to be virtual food – though something tells me that people will not be quite so sanguine about that.

• Play book cricket online - you have a random number generator in facebook and each person keeps generating random numbers and you just look at the last digit as per the rules of book cricket. In a given thread the person who scores the highest wins. Alternately you could even form teams and set up a time. One person announces the start of the match via a post. Players then go one by one using the random number generator till they get out. You could even play test matches (When one team gets all out the other team goes) or limited over games (If the first team does not get out in say 30min…or better still, say 100 random numbers, their innings is over and the other team gets to play for the same interval).

• Twenty questions - this game is made for facebook, isn’t it?

• Write a short story – one paragraph at a time. You must number the paragraphs and you can’t comment again until at least 10 more paragraphs have been added by others.

• Perhaps one could do cryptic crosswords via facebook – one clue uploaded every hour or some such thing.

• Explore strange new lands, new civilizations – and boldly go where no one online has gone before - invite people home for a get together!

• On a more serious note, couldn’t you actually explore new worlds as a “space trader” in an online star wars sort of thing and trade space credits with people and inhabit new planets, etc.

• Passing the parcel – you keep tagging another person till the judge (whoever it is) says “time” and whoever has the tag at that time is out. Then you continue. You probably would need to form a set of players who will be playing and have all of them agree before you actually begin playing. Again things could be made more exciting by including a random number generator into the process which can be configured to be the judge.

• Online sex seems to be in the news nowadays but for the adventurous – on facebook would be the equivalent of dogging.

Come to think of it, it may after all be the end of civilization!

Why Sachin Tendulkar can never win!

After the recent loss against South Africa there were the usual recriminations (mostly justified) against a lot of the team – Munaf and Nehra for their bowling, Dhoni for his captaincy and the Indian batting for their stellar 29-9 performance. As was to be expected however, there were also the comments and articles about Sachin Tendukar’s role in the loss with some people criticizing him for going slow in the middle overs, others for getting out when he did (the implication being that the 29-9 was all his fault) and others pointing out how India never wins when he scores well. There’s no way out for him, is there?

I feel when it comes to Tendulkar there are three categories of people. One, the vast majority of non Indians and very small minority of Indians – who consider him a great player and just that. Two, the type for whom he is God and they don’t care about anything else – whether India does well, poorly, loses, wins, etc. If Sachin scores a 100 all is forgiven. They perhaps believe in Neville Cardus’s famous prayer about Victor Trumper (“God let Trumper score a century in an Australian total of 137 all out”) but only in the first half of it (“Let Sachin score a century, yaar…baaki sab bekaar”). Three, the type for whom he is the epitome of selfishness – “how can one achieve as much as he has without being selfish” seems to be their thought process. And unfortunately nothing the man can do can ever change their mind.

So, I was thinking how else could these people criticize Sachin in various scenarios during the rest of his career

• India wins the world cup and Sachin plays a blinder in the final

“Let’s not forget that cricket is a team game. Would Sachin have been able to play that innings if “Sehwag/Zaheer/ Dhoni” hadn’t done so well in the “QF/SF” and got us to the finals in the first place?”

• India wins the world cup but Sachin gets out cheaply

“See, come crunch time he never delivers. Finally it was because of “Gambhir/ Harbhajan/Pathan” that we won – what did Sachin do?”

• India loses in the world cup (at some stage) in spite of a heroic effort by Sachin

“Sachin can’t finish, yaar. He can’t get you over the line. He’s not like Brian Lara. Once again he couldn’t deliver.” (Why an opener is expected to finish has always been beyond me. And as for Lara’s much vaunted ability to finish please have a look at http://gauravsabnis.blogspot.com/2010/12/lara-crunch-innings-urban-legend.html)

• India loses in the world cup (at some stage) with a poor effort by Sachin in the final game

“What’s the point of scoring all these centuries in the group games? He never delivers in the key moments.”

• India wins the world cup and Sachin retires from cricket

“He’s so selfish – just because he’s won the world cup now he doesn’t care about the team anymore.”

• India does not win the world cup and Sachin retires from cricket

“How petty! Just when India needs his experience after not doing well at the world cup he’s decided to quit. Just shows that he was only motivated by the thought of winning the world cup for himself and not concerned about the team.”

• Sachin continues to play after the world cup and keeps scoring

“He’s so selfish – is not letting new talent have a chance. Does he expect to keep playing till the next world cup?”

• Sachin continues to play after the world cup but his form drops a bit

“He’s finished now – he may as well do the honourable thing and retire.”

• Sachin finally decides to retire and announces it in advance

“This is all a media strategy – just to make sure that everyone focuses on him for one last time. How demotivating for all the other players.”

• Sachin finally decides to retire and announces at the end of a series that it is his last

“How can he suddenly spring this on the entire team? Surely, they needed more time to plan out a succession strategy. How selfish of him to just want to go out in a blaze.”

• Sachin retires and then takes up a media role with ESPN/Sky/Channel 9

“The game has given him so much – why doesn’t he give back to the game by coaching or something? But no, he just wants to make more money.”

• Sachin finally decides to retire, tells the team management in advance but announces it to the world after the series; and then says that he will take the next couple of years off to spend time with his family before deciding what to do next

I must admit that I really cannot think of how this can be construed negatively.

But I have full faith in the detractors of Sachin Tendulkar - when new depths of absurdity are found they will sink to them!!

The Bicentennial Man

I am not the most emotional person in the world- I have always had a slightly more rational rather than emotional bent of mind. And I very rarely get sentimental about fiction – A live play could still perhaps tug at heartstrings but a film or a book almost never. I do remember feeling a bit sad during the end of Great Expectations as Pip’s great expectations go down the drain but rarely anything else. I have even seen Lady and the Tramp without getting all overwrought. But there is one story which gets me every time I read it – if you have read the title of this post, it’s fairly obvious – The Bicentennial Man, by Isaac Asimov.

By the time Andrew actually says “Little Miss” at the end of the story I almost always have a lump in my throat and am slightly moist in the eyes – every time I read it. It’s a bit difficult to understand why a story of a robot should be so emotional. And as you read the story it doesn’t initially hit you as very emotional. Most Asimov’s robot stories are not emotional at all. In fact, the short stories are often based on word play or hard, cold reasoning. And as Bicentennial Man proceeds it follows the same route- you can see the rational steps in the story as it progresses. But somewhere towards the end it begins to change. Is it the fact that a robot is trying to make himself (itself?) human which is so emotional? Or is it the fact that the robot embraces a human life? After all, when Flint no longer remains immortal in “Requiem for Methuselah” (Star Trek – TOS), it doesn’t create the same impact (even though when Spock learns of Flint’s mortality and that he would die he says that “on that day he shall mourn”) Why should this be different?

Or is it simply Asimov’s genius in narrating the story? Asimov himself has said that this is perhaps the best story he has ever written. But the narrative style is not very different from other Asimov stories. So, what makes this so heart- wrenching? I really don’t have an answer to this question. But it still gets me every time.

I suspect that many people would not have read the story but watched the Robin Williams film. That was a disaster! They completely ruined it and actually had Andrew ending up marrying Little Miss’s grand daughter – Portia (played by the same actress as Little Miss)! They created a female Andrew in Galatea and generally messed up the entire emotional feeling of Andrew wanting to be human.

Which brings me to another point- why has Asimov been so badly brought on to screen. I can think of only two of his books on screen – Bicentennial Man and I, Robot (Fantastic Voyage was an original screen play which Asimov adapted into a book) and both are disasters!

Now, let me rephrase that - If you have never read an Isaac Asimov and indeed, not read the stories which go into I, Robot (the film) you might conceivably like these films. They are well made, slick productions and certainly in the case of I, Robot contains pretty decent action. But the films go so much against the grain of what Asimov stood for that they qualify as disasters on the adaptation itself.

I have already mentioned a bit about The Bicentennial Man where they needlessly introduced a romantic angle (which completely misses the point that Andrew remains a robot and cannot fall in love) …and if I remember correctly wanting to marry Portia is one of his motivations in wanting to be declared human – which goes against the very basis of the story of wanting to be a human for the sake of being human. They also brought in Galatea, a female Andrew – when the uniqueness of Andrew is one of the key points of the story.

But I, Robot is worse. It uses ideas from Asimov’s collection of short stories I, Robot but eventually ends up as a “robot as a menace” story when the entire thrust of I, Robot (the book) and indeed most of Asimov’s robot stories, was to move away from the “robot as a menace” concept. To that extent, the movie is a complete betrayal of Asimov’s ideologies as shown in his books.

It’s not that good science fiction can’t be made on the screen. Both Star Wars and Star Trek (TOS) are pretty good. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells have been adapted quite faithfully. And of course the 2001 series from Arthur C Clarke is good. But for some reason Asimov has not been shown well on screen.

But then, when he writes stories like the Bicentennial Man, who cares about the screen? Magic in prose, is all I can say!

Quizzing - a personal reminiscence

Like many other Indians growing up in the 80’s, part of growing up was Bournvita quiz contest on the radio and Quiztime onTV. I guess that sparked the interest in quizzing.

The earliest quiz I can remember taking part in was at school in Kharagpur – probably in class 6. We had an inter-class quiz competion in school and I was part of the team from Class VI-B. There were 12 teams from Class V to Class X and 24 people on stage- that’s a huge lot. I remember very little about the quiz except that there was a question asked to us about Plimsoll lines which got passed along till the Class IX or Class X guys managed to answer it.

I moved to Pune at the beginning of Class VII, in 1987 to Bishop’s where in my later years I did represent the school a few times. However, when I look back, the big quiz event in those years was the inter house quiz competition in my class X. The results of the quiz went towards the house championships. And the number of points for the winning house (7) was the same as you would get for winning the athletics after months across all sorts of events. The quiz happened on January 26^th by which time the race for the winning house was hotting up - so it was fairly vital.

The teams were chosen on the basis of a written exam which the whole school took in December. I hadn’t come to school that day (I was recovering from jaundice and had a doctor’s appointment) so didn’t take the exam. But my house masters at Harding House(Mr Highland and Mr N D’Souza) wanted me in the team – I was one of the four or five people from Class X who regularly represented the school at various quizzes- Bala, Nabar, Manish Kaul being some of the others from my batch. So, they wanted the best team for the house. I believe Mr Highland had a chat with Mr Beaman (who organized the quiz every year) and convinced him to let me participate (my jaundice clearly helped).

I think most people expected Arnold House to win, as they had both Bala and Nabar in their squad- and they were both good- but we had a decent team (me, Nikhil Datta, Sumit Pokarna and Rishad Dalal) and in the finals we beat Arnold. I remember very little of the quiz - there was a question on Camelot and something on Kuldip Nayar…but we won! That I remember. And those points certainly helped Harding to win the house championship that year.

Like most good Indian students I spent the next couple of years studying for boards and in coaching classes, etc . So no quizzing at all.

I started quizzing again seriously in second year of engineering. I shan’t write much detail about my quizzing years at college as I have written a much more detailed post about it at http://notesandstones.blogspot.com/2005/11/history-of-bc-quiz-club-v-sancho-joins.html . I will just say a couple of things –

One, surprisingly to me, I turned out to be above average and indeed, in my final year at college, I was probably one of the better quizzers in the whole of Pune. I use the word surprising for 2 reasons - firstly, there was almost a 4 year hiatus in which I did no quizzing. Secondly, unlike many quizzers I saw and knew, I had no specialist knowledge of any sort and I knew nothing perfectly. I just knew a little bit of a lot of stuff (This, incidentally is the reason why I never bothered to go for Mastermind –I simply could not imagine doing a specialist round). But I still managed to do okay!

Two, quite unknowingly at that time, I was playing a part- and a fairly key part, even if I say so myself- in setting up something that has become quite institutionalized in an informal way via the boat club quiz club. We used to quiz every Saturday in our college’s boat club (my college was on the bank of the river and has one of the oldest active boat clubs in india) and somewhere down the line it has outgrown that and become something bigger and self sustaining. The credit for that goes to later years and people like Ramanand, Niranjan, Anand SivaSankar and many others I have never met. But in a small way, I have contributed to that and it makes me feel good. The boat club quiz club is the one of the things in life I am proud of having been part of and having contributed to its growth.

Once my engineering was done, I moved on to IIM Ahmedabad to my MBA. Didn’t quiz too much there but I did meet perhaps the finest quizzer I have ever known – Ravikant Avva (I have in later life met and have indeed quizzed against Kevin Ashman – who has won the world quizzing completion 4 times in the last 7 years and is currently runner up. And of course, we all know of Gail Trimble but I don’t really know either of them). Ravva knew so much, it was either scary or hilarious. How could one person know so much? I remember having some discussion with him about the Dasha avatar and he actually told me how one of the Purans actually mentions 24 avatars of Vishnu (and he rattled them off) and the Dasha avatar are just the principal ones. He also had this debate on one of our notice boards on the number of aunts Freddie Threepwood had…and it was scintillating to read it. I don’t know if Ravva is reading this but if you are…it was a privilege to know you and I hope you still quiz.

Once I started working I more or less stopped quizzing. I used to follow quizzing online via quiznet but almost no actual quizzing. Most of the corporate quizzing used to be business related and I was never too great on that. In any case, I was discovering theatre and urdu poetry those days and had many other things to do. So again, there was a huge hiatus.

In 2007, I moved to London and was introduced to pub quizzes. These are written quizzes – much like the elimination rounds in most Indian inter-collegiate quizzes – but while the entire crowd is having drinks, food and so on. It’s pretty good fun.

While in London, I met Shrirang again- Shrirang was my senior at engineering college and we used to quiz together in Pune. It was he who figured out the existence of the Quiz league of London and took me along for the initial meeting. The Quiz league was very different from quizzes in india as it was a four member team with questions asked to individual team members.

We decided to form a team (Wharfside) and pulled in people from office to get a complete team in the second division of the league. The league is played at pubs in a home and away fashion (each team having a home pub). It has meant that I have travelled to all parts of London and met all sorts of people I would never have met otherwise.

2008-09; our first year in the league was a disaster – we knew nothing of local Brit history and pop culture. Also, there was a lot of focus on classical music, paintings and so on. So, as to be expected we came in last. But towards the end of the season we had Colin join our team- who was good- very good.

In 2009-10 the league pushed a few other good people to our team – Emily, Den and Mike- so we didn’t end up last. But we were still in the bottom half of the division.

A number of new teams wanted to join the league in 2010-11. Also, some of the existing teams split up so the league got split into 3 divisions. And we were pushed into 3^rd division. But our team also split up. Ravi was going back to India. Emily and Den were travelling out of the country for during most of the league session. Mike wanted to form his own team with some of his friends so he told us that he would prefer to start a new team. That left Colin, me and Shrirang- not really enough to have a team. Then Colin was asked by Telstar (a division 1 team) if he would be willing to play for them. He asked Shrirang and me if there was any chance of us actually forming a team but that seemed really unlikely; so we told him to go ahead and join Telstar – after all he would get to play in the first division. That left Shrirang and me and we went back to the league and they put us in touch with Mark who was starting a new team – The Flutterers.

It was a pretty good team with Ian, Jan, Mark, Stephen, Angela and Johny being other team members. At the halfway stage of the league we were third or fourth in the table. We then had a loss to London Scottish (who were bottom at that point) by 1 point. But after that I don’t think we lost a game. Going in to the last game against Colin Campbell we were at top of the league four points clear of them. If they won the game they would catch up with us and would win the league because of better points scored during the league. So, we needed to win! The final score was 40-39 in our favour – and we had won the league!

So, now it’s back on to division 2 next year –let’s see how we fare.