Category: general

I’m writing this at the innings break of the India – England game.

Quick analysis tells me that if India restricts England to less than 204 today, we’ll only need to win tomorrow’s game. No run rate worries.

Sounds good right?

For the uninitiated, the world chess championship is going on at Mexico. And I wouldn’t be surprised if a number of you don’t know about it, given the ineptitude of our mainstream media (as I had lamented here). The tournament is being played on a double round robin format, and after five of the fourteen rounds, Anand is in the lead, having won two of his games and drawn the rest.

The games are available online on the official tournament website, and earlier today I was going through some of them. As Devangshu Dutta of the Business Standard had predicted in his weekly chess column two weekends back, because of the “winner takes all” nature of this tournament, players will tend to be more aggressive than they normally are. Devangshu had also suggested that due to this format, naturally aggressive players such as Anand stand to gain, and that has been the case so far.

One thing that strikes you while looking at the games is the choice of openings. From the games that I have seen, a large number of players have opened “d4”, which have mostly been met with an attempt to nimzo-indian kind of formation, which has transposed into a queen’s gambit kind of situation. Then, there have been some freaks, like leko playing the almost-defunct 1.e4 e5 2. Bc4 against Kramnik. It was no surprise that the game quickly petered to a draw.

Interestingly, both Kramnik and Gelfand chose to employ the Petroff (1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nf6) against Anand and managed to draw their games. The former was an exciting game, as Kramnik quickly went a pawn up and had a passer as soon as the game came down to a rook end game. However, Anand played the end game superbly and managed to draw it. From his games so far, Anand seems to be in good form, and is playing extremely aggressively, though he was forced to draw from a winning (pawn up) position following some excellent play by Morozevich.

One of the more exciting games so far, mainly due to the choice of opening, has been the Anand-Svidler game where the latter employed the Marshall Attack. Anand deviated from the best known line on the 12th move, preferring an older variation. He then defended accurately and picked up two pawns to force Svidler’s resignation.

It is an exciting time ahead for the chess-lover. The tournament has been nicely set up, though the matches are at an unearthly time here in India for us to follow. They all start at 2 pm local time (in Mexico) and are webcast live on the official website.

However, one thing I’m looking for is for annotations for the games. Looking at the games by myself is one thing. Looking at them with some expert annotations/commentary is another. Does anyone know of a good site where I can get the same?

For an out and out business daily, the Business Standard shows that their competence extends to writing about sport as well – something that a lot of mainstream white papers struggle to do. Check out this editorial about Dravid’s resignation.

The key issue in deciding who will be captain is to be able to distinguish between playing ability and managerial ability. It is rare for one player to have both in equal measure. Usually, the good players make bad captains and indeed, start playing badly as well. A good cricketing brain and a will to win along with some people skills is what?s needed in a good captain, not necessarily great batting or bowling excellence.

It’s sad that the Business Standard doesn’t publish it’s Sunday edition outside of Delhi, and hence most of the readers who don’t live in Delhi would’ve missed out on this. ?

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.