Author: SK

Mohali vs Mumbai – pertinent observations

Some pertinent observations from yesterday’s game between Mohali and Mumbai

  • The new Mohali outfit (supposedly designed by Provogue) is a rip-off of the Chennai SuperStars outfit. That garish pink and grey. Though, one must admit that the new outfit did help turn luck Mohali’s way. And it’s definitely much better than the old one
  • They got their team also almost right. They rightly dispensed with the bits-and-pieces hopes and brought in three specialist foreign batsmen. The only guy i didn’t really know in the line-up was Sunny Sohal. Haven’t seen too much of him on domestic cricket scoresheets.
  • Bringing in VRV for Mota was another positive move. Yeah, VRV got taken to the cleaners in one over by Pollock and Tiwary. But he has performed well in domestic cricket this season, and also has good pace. One of the few fast bowlers to do well in Ranji this year (most of the others were just a bit quicker than dibbly dobbly)
  • I was multitasking with The Long Tail while watching the post-match proceedings. One moment, they show Preity Zinta hugging Brett Lee. The next moment, they show Sreesanth crying. Having heard about Sreesanth’s geelapan, I was wondering if the two incidents had anything to do with each other. Now it turns out that Harbhajan punched Sreesanth.
  • Thanks to Harbhajan’s punch, Mumbai might go down below Punjab in the fair play rankings. Again, it’s a Punjoo who has been responsible for it.
  • Mumbai is slowly getting their team right. Tiwary for Yeligati was a positive move. The only thing left now is to get rid of that Brave Rat (isn’t that what “Musa vir” translates to?) Khote and replace him with another batsman. Tendulkar if he is fit, or Rahane. If they want an all-rounder, they could try Gaurav Dhiman, who had opened the bowling along with RP Singh during the U-19 World Cup in 2004
  • This has nothing to do with this particular game, but the boundary lines need to be pushed back. Things are way too much loaded in favour of batsmen now.

chemical brothers and biological sisters…

I was just going through the program list of the classical music season at the Fort High School grounds. What strikes me is that whenever two siblings in the same family are good at this kind of stuff, they pair up and advertise themselves after their town or something.

I don’t know who was the first pairing that started this, but now artistes naming themselves in this way has become way too popular. It almost seems like if one person in the family is good at carnatic music, he/she forces his/her sibling to take it up too – so that they can become a duet and give themselves a cool name.

The interesting thing is it’s always “X Brothers” or “Y sisters”. It’s never a brother-sister combination. Maybe “Velachery siblings” doesn’t sound that good. Other relationships, too, are taboo. There may be say a couple who always perform together, or a father-son pair who are usually a team, but they don’t usually advertise themselves as a team, and prefer to go by their individual names instead. Maybe the lack of elegant names (such as “brothers”) prevents them from doing so.

This trend of brothers and sisters is catchign on so much that soon you’ll have people deciding to become each other’s Rakhi brothers or Rakhi sisters or rakhi brother of a rakhi sister so that they could give themselves names such as this. Maybe the quest for interesting names might even bring in the band culture to Carnatic music (on a more serious note, one of the thrills of Carnatic music is watching people who’ve never met before getting together and creating music). Interesting times lie ahead.

Anyways here is a list of all the siblings that I found on the program list:

  • MALLADI BROTHERS
  • MYSORE NAGARAJ & DR. MYSORE MANJUNATH (sometimes they call themselves Mysore Brothers)
  • HYDERABAD BROTHERS
  • MAMBALAM SISTERS
  • PRIYA SISTERS

Ok. There aren’t too many. But we are getting to a stage where the whole program sheet will be filled with names like this.

On another note, certain entries in the list read something like “WOWCTB and party”. This kind of nomenclature is extremely unfair to the “accompanists” (which is again a derogatory term). The violin and the percussion are as much a part of the concert as what is known as the “main instrument”. Just pick any singer. Any singer. And imagine him/her singing alone without any instruments.You get it right?

Something fishy with the Indians

Mumbai Indians I mean. Their team selection so far has been inexplicable, and their tactics while bowling even more so.

1. What can you say about a batting line up where the absolute bunny Ashish Nehra (the only runs i’ve seen him score was the four to win against New Zealand in New Zealand in 2003. That game where Sehwag scored century and rest buckled chasing 199) bats at 9?

2. I’ve been regularly following first class cricket in India for some 2-3 seasons now. At least, I follow the ranji trophy super league, Duleep trophy and deodhar trophy. Who the hell are Musavir Khote, Dhawal Kulkarni and Vikrant Yeligati? What the hell are they doing in the Mumbai team?

It seems like there is some instruction either from Sharad Pawar or from the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena to include a certain number of sons of the soil in the team. Even then, there are sons of the Mumbai soil who deserve to play much more than these jokers. People like Ajinkya Rahane were on the bench while these jokers played.

3. Bhajji’s captaincy was shocking to say the least. He bowls just two overs. Pollock bowls one over short of his quota. And you have people like Khote and Yeligati bowling and gettign smashed to all corners. Clearly, there seems to be some directive to make these guys bowl also.

4. The best thing I can think of is that this whole thing is an elaborate ploy by the team to show that playing just a few stars along with a large number of useless people can do the trick in T20. Yes, Sachin or Jayasuriya might singlehandedly win the odd match for them. But then there are 12 overs to be bowled outside of Pollock and Bhajji. And this is assuming they complete their quota – which may not be guaranteed.

Just so that this doesn’t become a Mumbai Indians bashing post, I’ll also add that it’s a disgrace to the IPL that Rajasthan Royals are playing a guy who won a reality show (Salunkhe). I always knew that team was a bit of a joke but this is too much even by their standards. And I read that ticket prices have had to be slashed by a large amount in Jaipur because no one is turning up. I told you Jaipur doesn’t have a cricket culture.

Flyover to Flyover: The First Bangalore Photo Walk

The first Bangalore Photo Walk (ok the first that I’m doing, I don’t know if any others exist) will be from one of Bangalore’s most popular flyovers to one of Bangalore’s least popular flyovers. As mentioned earlier, it is going to happen on Sunday, the 27th of April 2008. Since this is the first walk that is going to happen, I’m not sure about the speed in which we will walk. Hence, I’ve chosen (what I think is) a short route.

We meet in front of Apsara Theater in K R Market at 8 am sharp. We start at the walls of the Bangalore Fort which is nearby, and then move on to photographing the hospitals – Victoria and Vani Vilas. Then, we continue to move south on K R Road. We go past the Kote Venkataramanaswamy Temple, followed by two places which have been key in the promotion of Classical Music in Bangalore – the Fort High School grounds (ok – there isn’t much photogenic stuff here) and the Gayana Samaja. During the course of the walk, we also pass by a few old colleges (Bangalore Medical College, Vani Vilas College, etc.) which some people might find photo-worthy.

After we are past the Bangalore Institute of Technology, we take a little detour just to visit V V Puram. We look at (and photograph) the Subramanya Swamy temple and the Sajjan Rao circle and then turn back towards K R Road through the Jain College road.

The walk will officially end under the flyover at the National College circle. Tentatively, i expect us to end at around 10 am, but since this is the first walk, the variance of time taken is high. In case we reach too early, and people still have energy, we can continue the walk down K R Road (there are a number of old houses on this stretch which might be good for photography) and maybe end at the Nettakallappa circle.

The initial plan was that at the end of the walk, those of us who were still interested could walk to the Vidyarthi Bhavan (which is situated close to where the walk ends) and have a round of Masala Dosas. Unfortunately, the restaurant has currently shut down for renovation. Hence, this won’t be part of the plan. If someone has any other good suggestion for breakfast, let me know.

That said, it’ll be around 10 am by the time we finish. And it’s going to be a long and tiring walk. Hence, I request you to have had one round of breakfast before we embark. Also, you might want to bring some water bottles with you. And a camera of course – though you are welcome even if you just want to walk along and aren’t interested in taking photos.

The response to my first post on this seemed decent, and there were a few comments on Aadisht’s post about this also. If you are still interested and haven’t let either of us know, just drop in a comment. Even if you decide at the last minute that you want to join, you are welcome.

I have made a rough map of the route that we are going to take.

View Larger Map

Importing a concept

The concept of a photo-walk was probably started by

[info]chandrachoodan

in Madras some six months ago (the credit for this idea, he says, should go to Monica). Since then, it has become a monthly feature, and of late, has started attracting participants from outside of madras also (such as

[info]sw_aadisht

).

I don’t know if such a thing is being done in Bangalore. I know that there is a group of photographers who meet up every weekend and take photos at markets. This seems like a completely photography-oriented endeavour. There is also a Bangalore Walks, where for four hours on a weekend morning, if you pay four hundred rupees, you are taken around a fixed walking tour of Bangalore (two of the tours are in the M G Road area, and one in Lalbagh). There are also several “birding expeditions”, as I learn from

[info]deponti

‘s blog.? Then, there is Arun and a couple of his friends who walked around Lalbagh and a couple of other areas for a few weekends and called their photo sets as “bangalore photo walk”.

Since my survey (able aided by chandroo and aadisht) doesn’t reveal any photo walk (in the way that chandru does it in madras), I propose to fill the gap in this market. I propose to have the first photo walk on Sunday, the 27th of April at 8 am. The tentative route is between K R Market and Gandhi Bazaar, along the K R Road (we will start from the end of KR Road, and just keep walking. I get the impression that the market itself has been covered by sufficient number of groups so let’s leave that for now). I will confirm and put more details about this route in a day or two.

Just to refresh you people about the concept, it’s just “photo” and “walk”. We meet at a point (say point A) and walk from there to point B along a pre-specified route, taking photos as we go along. And then we disperse. And maybe meet again in a month’s time at a different point.

Now, there is one important difference between Madras and here. Chandroo has decent fundaes both about Madras and photography. I think I’m fairly competent when it comes to knowledge about Bangalore but I don’t know much about photography. I use a simple Kodak aim-and-shoot digicam, and generally churn out not-so-good snaps (you can see some of my snaps here). I have a special interest in photographing unusual signboards. Coming back to the point, I would hope to draw upon the experiences of more experienced photographers who might choose to walk with me in order to improve my own skills.

Why am I doing this? It’s been a long-standing aim to just walk around the streets of Bangalore and randomly take photos. So far, I’ve been too lazy to do it. Basically, NED has been happening. Now, if i set a time and place, and also promise several other people that I will be there, it will be that much more difficult to put NED. And I’ll get down to doing the task.

Oh, and by the way, this thing is going to be free. The only thing I’m going to ask for is your time. And hopefully, in this time, I can share with you some of my fundaes about Bangalore, which might prove to be useful. Also, this opportunity of going out as a group and taking pics might draw you out of your NED.

I shamelessly admit to being a copycat. However, i think it’s a good thing to copy good things. Let me know if you’re interested by leaving a comment. I’ll be back soon with the route details etc.

A couple of requests. Please leave a comment here if you want to attend. Not that I’ll cancel the walk if not enough people respond, but it would feel good to know how many people are interested.

Also, if you like this idea, I request you to give more publicity for it. Maybe post a link to this on your blog. Or if you blog at one of the more popular blogs (such as metblogs), you could put a link there. Thanks in advance.

It’s not cricket

I’m writing this in the innings break of the first IPL game between bangalore and calcutta. I’ve just witnessed what might have been one of the finest innings in limited overs cricket. Absolutely mindblowing stuff from McCullum. Yet, if at all I’m feeling something, it’s irritation. Despite having watched such good cricket from this man, I feel quite incomplete. There’s something definitely missing.

Continue reading “It’s not cricket”

The met department and randomness

Ok. Nothing unusual about the title of this post. There is intuitively a lot of randomness where the met department is concerned. This post is about an editorial in the Business Standard.

Now, the Indian Met department used a new process for forecasting the monsoons last year. Now, this process yielded good results in the north-east and north-west in terms of forecast accuracy. In the center and south, however, it was a disaster. The process had predicted a small shortfall in rain in these two regions, and it turned out the rains here were more than a quarter more than normal!

So what does the met do now? They decide to discard the process for the center and south. And will continue to use it for the north-west and north-east. Even if you know a little bit about randomness and testing, and I assume that the people at the met department should definitely be well-versed in this, you will know that they have done is ridiculous. How can you form an opinion about something by looking at just one data point? Wouldn’t there have been a good chance that this an anomalous result? Now, what will the met do if the method fails for the north-east and north-west also? Will they completely abandon this new method?

I find the system that the met department is using no more intelligent than the one that I use to classify my shirts as “lucky” or “unlucky” (and trust me that isn’t very intelligent; I just use 1/2 data points and quickly derive an opinion).

God help us, if the met department is like this. The sooner weather derivatives (rainfall, temperature, etc.) get launched (or have they already been launched? I know they are now legal in india) the better for us. At least in that case we will get the wisdom of crowds to forecast the monsoon.

Being a jack of many trades

Earlier today, I had written that bosses are unlikely to trust employees who they think have the option of easily quitting their jobs. I had made the point back then that you shouldn’t take a job for which you are over-qualified.

Thinking about it, it strikes me that if you are versatile, you face a similar kind of problem. Suppose you have the necessary skill sets to do say four different kinds of jobs, and are doing one, irrespective of where you go, your boss will think there is a good chance you might take flight to one of the other jobs. Now, if the potential bosses think like this during the interview itself, there is a good chance that none of them is willing to hire you!

From the point of view of long-term stability, what most bosses are looking for is for focussed and committed employees. And unless your “skills vector” points broadly in the same direction of the required skills for the job, the cross product will be big enough to cause concerns over stability in the mind of the interviewer.

One option, of course, is to focus on one particular direction and forget your other skills, so that the component of your skills vector in this particular direction will dwarf the components in other directions, thus reducing the cross product when compared to the job profile skills vector. But what do you do if, at a particular point of time in your career, you are a jack-of-several-trades – like I am at this point of time? You need to be able to do something now before you are able to improve in a component.

You might appreciate the following analogy if you understand contract bridge. What do you do with a hand where in each of the four suits, both you and your partner are reasonably strong, while there is no single strong suit? You need to choose a trump, and may end up choosing the longest of suits. But due to this choice, you may not be able to use your high cards in the other suits to the fullest extent.

Bridge offers a way out for this, by allowing you to bid for a no trump contract. The challenge here is to find the equivalent of a no trump contract in the job market.

Speaking to Baada about this, we somehow thought this too might fit in with the seminal studs and fighters framework. It is likely (not guaranteed, but likely) that a stud boss may just look at the magnitude of the skills vector and the unique direction it points to and say “OK if i train this guy in my direction, i’m sure he’ll grow quickly along that and will be useful to me”. My little experience says that fighters are more likely to look for “proven track record in chosen field” and “focus” and would thus not be too appreciative of a big cross product.

simple writing, high thinking…

In an op-ed in yesterday’s Business Standard, Deepak Lal writes

Hume believed that all ideas are based either on logic or sense experience, and that our inductive inferences based on constant conjunction of particular temporal sequences do not give us secure grounds from observing instances to inferring a general rule.

Totally haemoglobin-in-the-atmosphere level stuff. I mean, it may be ok (or even necessary) to use such complicated and unreadable language in an academic journal. But in an op-ed of a newspaper? Even if it is a business newspaper whose readers are more informed in general?

I think there is a conspiracy by academics to prevent “normal people” from understanding concepts that are simple and intuitive.

option to escape

From The Logic of Life – “your option to escape means you cannot be relied upon”.

Harford makes this point while he is talking about “acting white”. That black kids who work hard at acads are discouraged by family and peers because they are now getting an option to exit the misery. It’s the old story of the crabs in the jar. That nothing will escape despite the lid being open.

From a job perspective, this factor might not help people who are seen as being over-qualified for their job. The boss won’t trust them. The boss knows it’s easier for these guys to move out when they want to. So unless they manage to project an extremely strong degree of commitment, it would be difficult for the boss to invest in them.

And two years back, when I left A T Kearney, I had thought I should get into something where I’m overqualified thinking it might help me be seen in a better relative light and thus grow…