a mARTIAN dIARY

(Sorry this is not a blog by an expert cricketer on T20 strategies for that I suggest this)

I think plenty has already been written in the blog-sphere, some gushing out their exhilaration at the “World Cup” win and others frustrated at the monumental importance that is being attached to something, that is in their opinion, not deserving of such high praise.

Coming from the heart of “mallu-land”, I could be forgiven for being in the second group, but I have also been infected with my share of this disease that’s congenital to most Indians during my time in Bombay and Lucknow. And if you ask me if I am not happy about the win, I would without hesitation say yes, since I was also one of the cores of Indians who were recalling long forgotten mantrams during the see-saw of the final.

But probably the reasons that fuel this euphoria in me would be different from my fellow Indians.  This is partly because its not winning the “world cup” that’s important to me. Not just because the “world” in the “Cricket World Cup” (any format) consists of 8-12 counties, but also because T20 is a new format and I feel that lady luck had a lot more of a say in our win. Of course you could argue that luck is an inherent part of any game, but with people just coming to terms with ground rules and strategies of the new format, she had a much larger say and had she changed her benevolent gaze from us for even a minute at umpteen occasions, we could have been sitting at the wrong end of the cup.  To draw on an analogy only my CAT taking friends would probably understand, it’s easier to imagine luck playing a larger role in earlier years of CAT where the strategies etc where not this well discussed and documented.
 
But this is not to discredit the achievement of young Indian team. To put it in context, I would like to compare this win with our “loss” draw at third test in England. Rahul Dravid, my favorite from our current bunch, lion-hearted as he is, fell a in my eyes lot that day for I admire people who take the risk and go in for the kill. This killer instinct, not fueled by just passion, but more by careful planning and calculated risk taking. This also reminds me a well written article by the fraud mallu Shashi Tharoor critiquing the same test match and comparing it with another mallu , Sreeshant’s , attitude in the Johannesburg test
Now Sreeshant is a very controversial character, with this issues ranging from on-field to off field, but he does represent a new kind of Indian, ready to take risks and for the playboy nonchalance he displays on the outside, I think a lot of it comes out as the result of careful mind game strategies (if not, that’s at least how I feel it should be)

Coming back to the euphoria surrounding our World Cup win, I do not want to tow the oft-repeated cliché of other games not getting their due, since people like what they like and you can’t change that. But I would like to say, enjoy the moment, savor it but take the right lessons from it not the wrong lessons like blocking roads and giving the world in "Cricket World Cup" a different meaning.

Edit: Yes I know it’s a LAMMEE heading, but what to do…creativity is a precious commodity these days for me

(No aliens were harmed / got hurt during the events mentioned in or writing of this post)

Recently going thru the list of referrers to my site, I happed to glance upon an entry “www.google.com/reader”. Among other things, it also meant that I was not the sole subscriber to one of the least used feature of this blog, the RSS feed. To be honest, it was an exciting thought but the titillation wore off soon and I got on with other “real” things that end up filling my stomach.

It was next morning while driving to office that something stuck me. Even though it was too much for the cat to take, there was this sudden need in me to know how many people would have actually subscribed to the RSS, however low it would be. With Statcounter and Google analytics, I get some statistics regarding the WEB 1.0 visitors to my site the site but this was WB 2.0. And so my morning started with a quest for finding a similar service for RSS feeds.

To be honest, one part of me desperately wanted to find such a service so that I could quench my curiosity fast but the other part, the veiled entrepreneur, hoped that such a service was not there, since I thought that this was a very marketable idea. So it was with a mixed feeling that I clicked my way through to feedburner.com. So to cut a long story short, I got my feeds burnt and in the process added another feature that I had once given up on, email subscription to the comments feed.And whoever that *wonderful* soul is, who has me on his/her google reader, please do update with the latest link so that I can satisfy my petty ego by seeing a 2 on my subscriber count