Sunday, September 26, 2010

All is not well

Cricket is going through a tough time - again. As if the placid wickets, the one-sided matches and the half-filled stadiums were not enough, we now have cases of ball tampering and spot-fixing, in newer ways that could make any out-of-the box thinker proud. While we may go on cracking jokes on it (like I have done here), the truth is that it is upsetting for a cricket fan. While the Pakistani authorities have accepted ‘Ignorance is bliss and deny to stay in biz’ as their tried and tested mantra, it would be foolish to imagine that the plague has been confined to Pakistan only. Thanks to the ICC Anti Corruption Unit (ACU), for a moment the CWG organizing committee can perhaps celebrate because they might not be the most inefficient body after all.

Talking about the CWG organizers, their attitude hasn’t been something that one can be proud of. Check out this still from the movie Prince (it’s showtime) – the greatest movie ever made (ain't it Ankit, Ashish?). The greatest tragedy and the difference between Vivek Oberoi and Manmohan Singh is that while the former can’t act, the latter just refuses to do so. It is worrying that no one in the administration is even worried about it. The icing on the cake came from Lalit Bhanot who said that Westerners have a different standard of hygiene than the Indians. Yeah right. Perhaps the Congress headquarters has two bathrooms – one for Sonia Gandhi and another for all the Indian members.

All said and done, like every Indian, I pray that the event would eventually be remembered for the right reasons and that the organizers are not the only Indians who walk away with gold.

Moving on to something else, Google came up with a ‘new’ feature (which was actually started by Yahoo! some 5 years ago). I don’t want to start anything on that because that would trigger a ‘Being First’ vs ‘Being Best’ debate, But I happened to read the following statement by their PR – ‘If every Google user around the world switched to Instant, we'd save 3.5 billion seconds a day, or 11 hours per second.’ Now, if there was ever a moment where one particular acronym perfectly summed up a statement, it is this - WTF!!! So what’s next? I guess Kayam Churn coming with a line that will say, “If every individual around the world had Kayam Churn before sleep, they would have quicker motions which would save ‘googols’ of seconds per second”. Ah, this would give us enough time to organize a Common Wealth Games Event every second.

Coming back to the cricket fiasco, I am devastated not because they cheated, but because it would be difficult to trust them again.


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