Year: 2007

One of the most popular pastimes when a major tournament is on is in terms of super selectors or fantasy leagues. In this, you create your own team drawing players from various teams participating in the particular tournament, and get points every day based on the performance of the players in your team. This kind of a game is especially popular for games like cricket where the contribution of each member of the team can be quantified, rather than for say something like football.

Now, what can be really irritating when one takes part in these games is loopholes. Most of these games seem to have some inbuilt loopholes and the person who exploits these loopholes usually wins. And you usually realize that after the tournament is over, when you realize that despite your best tactical acumen you’re not in the leaderboard.

For example, during the Cricket World Cup earlier this year, people in our office organized a fantasy league. The problem there was that there was only 1 match a day in the world cup and the cost of making substitutions in the team was really low. So what does the winner (incidentally the same guy who organized the tournament) do? He changes team every day depending on who is playing. It’s australia today? Put in Hayden, Gilchrist and Ponting. Sri Lanka tomorrow? Drop these 3 and put in Sangakkara, Jayasuriya and Muralitharan. And the guy had made the rule that 3 substitutions would be allwoed every day so it became a question of betting on who are the 3 best performers in every game rather than betting on who are the best performers in the tournament.

Then, another common loophole is to give too much money to the managers. Usually, players’ costs and money given to managers are such that every manager is forced to include 2-3 not-so-well-known faces in the team. Now, you have these tournaments where the money you have is no constraint and you just end up picking 11 proven studs. Takes the whole fun of it. There needs to be a tradeoff!

Now, cricinfo has introduced a fantasy league for the ongoing 2020 World Cup. A well designed league in most aspects. You are forced to bet on 2-3 unknown faces. Number of substitutions is limited (11 after the tournament begins). However, as usual, there is a loophole. Now, when I started writing this post, I wanted to write aboutt he loophole. But now I think I want to exploit it all by myself. So go figure out!

Don’t you think TIPS got the ordering on the Gupt tape horribly wrong? Isn’t the normal ordering something like all the good songs on Side A and the rest on B? And the side A songs are the ones that usually make it to Philips Top 10 and similar shows. Forget the title track which (justifiably) occurs thrice.

And what do we have on Side A? Duniya haseenon ka mela and Mere khwabon mein tu. And on Side B? mere sanam… yeh pyaar kya hai… yeh pyaasi mohabbat.. (some of you might have never heard these, blame the ordering for that ). and anyone who has watched the movie and seen kajol in these songs will be able to appreciate how awesome they are…

the album saw good sales anyways but wouldn’t it have been better if they’d shown a sensuous kajol in yeh pyaasi mohabbat rather than bobby deol dancing in a club in duniya haseenon ka mela?

is there anybody else in here who feels the way i do?

Yesterday I was suddenly reminded of this wonderful game that kept our mornings, lunch breaks and any other free time busy – Kalla Police. For the uninitiated, Kalla is the Kannada word for thief so this translates to “thief police”. So the game is obviously about catching thieves etc. Anyways this post is not for you so you can move on to the next item. Or maybe to the comments on this post (once they happen).

Coming to the initiated, who have played and have a good idea of what the game is all about. Basically I’ve forgotten the rules. Yes, we did have a set of rules (were fairly constant i think) and there was strict enforcement. I tried googling for it, but to no avail. I even did a google blog search, again without much luck. There were a couple of passing mentions but nothing that explained the rules.

So, I want you to remind me of the rules of Kalla Police. I know it varied from school to school, and even class to class and section to section in the same school. I know there are various versions. But please do write in with your version. I hope to soon have a repository of Kalla Police variations, with which I can recollect the version we used to play.

And oh yeah, I’m referring to the “physical version” of Kalla Police here, the one which involves running around and catching the thieves etc. Yesterday i made the mistake of asking a girl from my school for the rules and she started talking about some game which you play with chits (oh yeah, she happens to be from another section. my section girls would remember the real thing i think – they used to play with us.). That’s not something I’m looking for.

I’m waiting to hear from you people.

Then	Now
Pencil	Pencil
Rubber	Eraser
Scale	Ruler
Mender	Sharpener
Gum	Glue
Gum Tape	Cello Tape

you know any more examples?

Finally there seems to be a counterbalance to all the traders’ protests against organized retail. As I had almost predicted three months ago (it got lost in one of the drafts in this post), farmers’ unions have started taking sides with organized retail. Business Standard reports:

The Bhartiya Kisan Union (Ambavat faction) today submitted a memorandum to Chief Minister Mayawati and the district magistrate of Lucknow, demanding an immediate reopening of the Reliance stores in Lucknow and other places in UP.

I think it’s only a matter of time before such protests will start gaining ground elsewhere. And thus will begin the farmer-trader battle that I’d talked about three months ago. I had predicted then that the farmer, and thus organized retail, will win. Only time can tell what will happen.

???? ??? ?????? ?? ????, ??? ??? ???? ? ???
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Strong stuff. For more details check http://www.google.com/transliterate/indic/

Hope a similar thing comes in for other indian languages soon. Chatting with relatives will be so much more peaceful then!

as for what I’ve written here, it’s my favorite doha. and quite strong also…. like at IIMB when i used to get a “you there? how are you?” message from people who usually didn’t message me, i knew that they required some help wiht some assignment!

Try eat congress with raw onion pieces sometime. Unmitigated combination. Soopar taste.

(for the uninitiated, congress is a variety of masala roasted peanut, so called because they use split peanuts rather than the whole. the congress split, remember?)

that people continue to invest in UP… check out maya didi’s latest antics

Mayawati, who on Wednesday hailed the new policy as a “boon for farmers of the state”, explained, “earlier I had ordered a survey on the impact of the new?farm policy and intelligence reports submitted to me last night revealed that farmers were unhappy with the new policy, so we have decided to withdraw the same with immediate effect.”