An old friend and an unreal neighbour.

Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose once said, you are not a real blooger until you get a really good blogreader. Well maybe blogs werent around then, but so what.

All I am trying to say is I need to start using a good blog reader.

Well there was this guy in high school from whom I learnt some neat tricks for cracking language classes. He will make up random quotes, embed them in the essays and attribute them to some famous personalities. Like in an essay on say the importance of sports in life, he would start "Gandhiji once said that we should play football which maintains good health which is necessary for non-violence". Well maybe that didnt sit too well but you get the idea.

Ashish got me into playing tennis for veritas team today (level 3 or something). I was probably not gonna go but the team capt calls me at work around 6.15 pm to come play or we default. So I played and our team won 3-2. we celebrated over some beer. This another guy from veritas was there who I had been misplacing as some other guy from my childhood neighbourhood for around 3 years now. He cleared that up by declining any association with Indore whatsover. Thats one more puzzle cleared up in my life. Good.

Eleven O'clk. Time to get into bed with ZATAMM. Later.

New Laptop, ZATAMM and wierd baby tigers.

So I have got this cool new laptop from work. I am actually not a laptop person, I like sitting on a table and working better. So I am trying to put the laptop to use somehow. Well one good thing is you can sit in front of the TV and do work or chat (or write blogs :-) ). One can probably guess the lifetime of my infatuation with this new toy by noticing when my blogging frequency goes down :-)

Reading ZATAMM (that Zen and the art of Motorcycle maintainence) again. Had read it around 8 years back (damn! the length of my past remembrances is getting so long, its starting to freak me out ) when I was still in India. Just rereading it to see if relate to the book in some different way. One thing is for sure that I can understand much more of the american stuff about the novel having been here for a while now.

Lots of time when I revisit a book/movie after a long time, I find that I have a totally different opinion about it then the last time I saw it. Some movies which I used to find absolutely hilarious 10-12 years ago and considered them timeless classics then dont amuse me anymore. Wonder if the stuff I think is classic now will meet the same fate 10 years from now.

Finally I saw this incredible photo in yahoo of baby tigers suckling a human mom !!!
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/050424/photos_od_afp/050424151918_k4gr49as_photo0&e=4&ncid=1756

Crazy world.

Cricket

Sometimes I think it might be a good idea to ban cricket in India. For good reasons. People would not waste so much energy and time over it. We would not have grand ambitions from a spectacular team on paper. And our spirits would not be crushed by a bunch of eleven people crumbling like matchsticks in front of weaker teams. More sponsorship money can be diverted to other games ie hockey, soccer, tennis etc where we have plenty untapped talent. And cricket is so intolerably long a game to watch in either form, it wastes a LOT of productive time of the whole nation. Add to that the demoralization at the end when we loose to weaker teams, it just gives a defeatist mentality to the whole nation.

Another line of thinking is why would a talented team regularly loose to tough games . Is that our national character ? Or is it that once the players get plenty of endorsement money they loose the motivation? If that is so then it wouldnt matter which game you funnel the sponsorship money into, in the end we will keep loosing the BIG ones which are mostly always won on mental toughness and not talent.

Having played whatever sports I have against people of differnt nationalities, I personally feel that we have as much fighting character as sportspersons of other nations, if not more, at least at amateur level. So it looks like there is a break somewhere going from the amateur level to the professional. Maybe we are just not a professional bunch yet. Maybe its the fabric of life in India which really does not encourage sports beyond an amateur level. But we seriously need to do something about it. Its really shameful for a nation of a billion people to perform such poorly in competetive sports.