India Beats Pakistan in the World Cup Again.

Watching #INDvPAK at #IIMCAAconnections with 500 alumni, students pic.twitter.com/998eiJ6Iq3
— prasad sanyal (@prasadsanyal) February 15, 2015

Tri colour rules at #IIMCAAconnections #INDvPAK fever on the campus pic.twitter.com/xRBLC8fsAI
— prasad sanyal (@prasadsanyal) February 15, 2015

Campus cheers Virat Kohli century #IndiavsPak #IIMCAAconnections pic.twitter.com/48dtPk7y3R
— prasad sanyal (@prasadsanyal) February 15, 2015

Cheers for Suresh Raina as India cross 250. #IndvsPak #IIMCAAconnections pic.twitter.com/Il4IFNqdJy
— prasad sanyal (@prasadsanyal) February 15, 2015

Member of the 1983 World Cup winning team Madan Lal at #IIMCAAconnections says #IndiaJeetega pic.twitter.com/i18nA8kwHc
— prasad sanyal (@prasadsanyal) February 15, 2015

All seats in the house taken. #IIMCAAconnections #IndiavsPak pic.twitter.com/sCK3r5JaUJ
— prasad sanyal (@prasadsanyal) February 15, 2015

India finish on 300 for 7 after a late match middle-order collapse. Will it be enough? #IndiavsPak #IIMCAAconnections pic.twitter.com/WM60glfpsF
— prasad sanyal (@prasadsanyal) February 15, 2015

The OB vans at #IIMCAAconnections for #IndiavsPak - it doesn't get bigger than this pic.twitter.com/cjVZdMLal4
— prasad sanyal (@prasadsanyal) February 15, 2015

Cheering the fall of the 2nd Pak wicket. Ashwin sends haris sohail back #IIMCAAconnections #indvspak pic.twitter.com/TLlYa0opr7
— prasad sanyal (@prasadsanyal) February 15, 2015

Crowd cheers hard as Afridi falls. India almost there? #indvspak #IIMCAAconnections pic.twitter.com/Yl815txOf0
— prasad sanyal (@prasadsanyal) February 15, 2015

That's it folks. That man in Karachi must wait for his fireworks. At #IIMCAAconnections celebrations as #IndiaWins pic.twitter.com/SbIIF3MzgJ
— prasad sanyal (@prasadsanyal) February 15, 2015

India 5 Pakistan 0: Yeh Dil Mange More!

An India-Pakistan cricket match is more than a contest. It's a test of patriotism and nationalism. Here's how an Indian fan measures out his life around such high-octane encounters.

A last ball six - and my brother cheering a Pakistan win wildly. Circa 1986 - that's my first memory of an India-Pakistan match. 

Patriotism and nationalism aren't virtues we are born with. Those are instilled later. To my 3-year old brother, every wicket or boundary needed to be cheered -- a shot well-played needed to be applauded.  Having walked the earth for a few more years than him, I knew a Pakistan win couldn't be cheered.

A year later, the World Cup came to India and we made the semi-finals. But it went by in a flash. As defending champions, India took on the best in the world and as far as I could comprehend from the reactions friends and family, we gave a reasonable account of ourselves.

And then in 1992, I started bleeding blue.  Kerry Packer's pajama dream had become a World Cup reality. And I must confess to this day, that remains my personal favourite as far the myriad hues of India's ODI blues go... My recollection of watching India  in 1991-92 centered around the buzz generated by Sachin Tendulkar. On that long trip down under, I remember India losing but Indians marvelling at a 20-year old's batting prowess. Waking up at the crack of dawn to watch the tests -- the quality of TV coverage -- Channel 9 to DD was a comparison between a mature Cognac and locally-brewed hooch.  

That almost endless tour culminated in more disappointment - India's dismal performance at the World Cup. The only bright spark there was we beat Pakistan - the team that eventually went on to be world champions. Oh the sweet joy of our intrepid Mr More getting Miandad's goat, that Miandad who had so 'cruelly' hit a 6 off the last ball years earlier at Sharjah...

And we basked in Tendulkar glory till the tourney was back in India. 1996 it was - and I'd moved to Kolkata from Delhi by then. I had been exposed to watching cricket at the Eden Gardens and was hooked.  My excitement at the opportunity of being able to watch a semi-final live at the Eden Gardens was exacerbated with the joy of Venkatesh Prasad giving Amir Sohail the send-off of the tournament. India had beat Pakistan again. We had made it to the semi-finals - and they would play at the Eden Gardens. What happened after that was an anti-climax we'd all want to forget. Again Tendulkar stood out and we cheered -- our small victories.

1999 -- Not much off it since we didn't make it even to the semi-finals.  But two stand out. A belligerent Sourav Ganguly, ably aided by Rahul Dravid taking Sri Lanka to the cleaners in Taunton and us beating Pakistan. Would you believe it, we lost our other games in the Super 6 stage but Pakistan, we beat.  Pakistan still made to the finals where they got knocked over by Australia, and yes OF COURSE we had them beat again.

Thrice we'd faced them and thrice we'd beaten them... so measured in cricket matches, India beating Pakistan in a world cup was almost normative for any boy like  me growing up in the 1990s.

In 2003, we went all the way to the finals. But the India-Pakistan tie is all that I remember. Ganguly got a zero but we had Tendulkar getting 98 on top and then Yuvi and Jammy (aka Rahul Dravid) finishing with flourish as India chased down a large Pakistan total.  I also remember that World Cup for Kenya making it to the finals where we beat them. Ricky Ponting and Damien Martyn obliterated us in the finals.  Australia had won its 3rd consecutive World Cup -- and yes, we were a little gutted - BUT we had BEATEN Pakistan.

2007 was a disaster. And we didn't get to play Pakistan -- so no small joys to take away from the Carribean shores.

Back in India in 2011, and MSD&Co won the cup. Apart from Dhoni hitting a huge six to win it for us, the match that stood out for me is the semi-final against Pakistan.  Again a standout performance by Sachin Tendulkar, and our bowling held up to our neighbours in green.

Imran Khan had once said, "Cricket is a pressure game, and when it comes to an India-Pakistan match the pressure is doubled."  He played cricket for Pakistan for 20 years and has over 500 international wickets. He must know what he is talking about.

Watching it from the confines of my living or working space, I must confess being an Indian fan has been a rather pleasurable experience... Onwards and upwards to February 15 then and another India-Pakistan face-off at the World Cup - yeh dil mangey more!

This article was first published on sports.ndtv.com

 

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'Processing' My 10-Months With Jehangir S Pocha

"Do you want to write something about Jehangir?" asked my wife Rashi.  "Sure," I said. As a newsperson, who has worked for the last 14 years in maniacal newsrooms – that is my standard response – when I am ‘processing’.

So, what exactly was I processing here? The passing away of a former boss – an Editor with whom I’ve had the most disagreements with in a year than the rest 13 put together, or was I was just shocked, stunned at the suddenness of this news? Maybe, it was a bit of both.

I met Jehangir in the fall of 2009. I’d quit my job at NDTV a couple of months ago and the alternatives hadn’t turned out to be all that I’d hoped for. ‘Economic Downturn’, everyone would say in despondent tones. But not this man... Jehangir S Pocha immediately put you at ease – he wanted to know what music I listened to, and the book I was reading. I got a feeling he was sizing me up, but he wasn’t talking work.

And that was the way it was for the 9-10 months I spent at NewsX. Even when he was talking a story – he almost wasn’t. Like the time he drew on a piece of paper a map of China to explain the Uighurs were a Turkic ethnic group in China and how ethnic clashes in China were important even in an Indian context. Or when I called him ‘Mr Pocha’ at an edit meeting, and he said with a grin, “Call me, Jehangir, man”.

Edit meetings with Jehangir – even on a phone line – were like a Q&A session. Questions he asked and we answered – answers that inevitably led to the story being pegged differently. And most of what I know about India’s wonky subsidy regime or the whole hullabaloo over gas pricing is courtesy Jehangir.

But it goes beyond the Uighurs, subsidies and what have you. My 9-10 months at NewsX under Jehangir made me look at stories a wee bit differently or gave me the courage to say, ‘I don’t think it is important.’

Even today, when I’m regularly admonished for my choice of stories to play up or display – I find myself not overtly disturbed and even with the gumption to say “I didn’t think it made a difference to anyone’s life.” It is almost like that story on NewsX on record sales of liquor in Delhi that turned into how Indians were drinking more Cognac or how my defence of his dig at Bengalis was a innuendo-laden jibe at Mumbai’s ‘Khada Parsi’ – one that he took, as usual, with good humour and with a smile. Go with what you believe in and take everything on the chin!

I can’t claim to have known him well at all. Outside work (literally at the gates of NewsX), he’d sometimes bum a smoke off us... but then as I realise, I’m still ‘processing’...

(This article was also published on exchange4media.com)


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Dharna all night: AAP ka Gaana

Lyrics - Akash Bannerjee
Singing - Kandarp Relhan
Production - Pankaj and Kandarp

Sandy Storm blows Viru away

As a batsman, Sandeep Patil has a modest test record - an average in the mid thirties from 29 tests - and  two remarkable innings... one in his debut series in Australia where he smashed Lilee & Co. for a blistering 174 and another two years later in England - where he smashed 24 runs of a Bob Willis over. He was a member of the squad that won the World Cup in 1983.  Patil has been the manager for the Indian team, a rebel ICL team and the Director at the National Cricket Academy in Bangalore.  And then six months ago, he was made Chairman of Selectors - the wise men who pick the squad, on whose shoulders rest the hopes of a billion people.

Today he's done something that I wouldn't normally associate with him,  or for that matter  any Indian selector. He's dropped Virender Sehwag. There I said it... DROPPED Virender Sehwag!

This comes after the exit of Gautam Gambhir - who was dropped at the start of this series. So India will search for opening 'nirvana' in  the next two tests  (and may be a few after that) with untested batsmen - Shikhar Dhawan and Ajinkya Rahane.

Gambhir and Sehwag are the only Indians to aggregate more than 4000 partnership runs in Tests - and that at average of over 52 in the last 8 years. They have gone where even the exhalted Mr Gavaskar hadn't ventured (Sunil Gavaskar and Chetan Chauhan -3010 runs at 53.75) - becoming one of just five pairs in test cricket to achieve this feat.

Admittedly, there was a huge gap between  their exploits home and away but consider these staggerring stats... In Viru,  we have a batsmen who holds the record for the top three test scores by an Indian - a man with 8500 test runs at an average that had fallen in a past 12 months just a tad under 50. A man who has played over 100 tests and has 23 centuries including two triple tons. Of the 26 batsmen to debut for India in the past 12 years, he just one of the two to have  scored a century on debut - and that was against South Africa, in South Africa. 

His partner, the dour Gauti, has played 54 tests for his 4000 runs, making 9 centuries on the way.

And we've just put them back on the drawing board -- consigned them to play Ranji Trophy for Delhi -- ostensibly in a bid to regain some form.  (Note to self: Must go to Kotla if  they're playing for Delhi)

It is a brave new world that Indian cricket must venture into when the team travels to South Africa later this year. So let me throw in my two bits for anyone who's listening -  bring back  Wasim Jaffer. The Mumbai run machine has had a phenomenal domestic season - his team Mumbai won everything in sight... And he has played 20 of his 31 tests abroad - for 5 centuries and almost 2000 runs at an average of 34 is better that most Indian batsmen overseas.

Satyendra Nath Bose: The 'god particle's' India connect

Scientists at Europe's CERN research centre have found a new subatomic particle that could be the Higgs boson, the basic building block of the universe. The 83-year-old British physicist Peter Higgs, who proposed the existence of the boson which bears his name in the 1960s, was at CERN today, and was clearly overwhelmed. "It is an incredible thing that it has happened in my lifetime," he said.

Much to the discomfort of many scientists, some commentators have labelled this the "God particle." And that indeed it may be. The Higgs boson, which until now has been a theoretical particle, is seen as the key to understanding why matter has mass, which combines with gravity to give an object weight. The idea is much like gravity and Isaac Newton's discovery of it: Gravity was there all the time before Newton explained it.

Interestingly, at CERN, there is a Chola bronze statue of Lord Shiva performing the cosmic dance called "Tandav" - the dance of destruction. Indian scientists are amongst those from 100 other nations working at CERN's atom smasher, the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss-French border, has been creating high-energy collisions of protons to investigate dark matter, anti-matter and the creation of the universe, which many theorize occurred in a massive explosion known as the Big Bang. And India has contributed high-tech equipment worth 30 million dollars and over 100 human years of expert service.

But that's not where the India connect ends. It’s much more fundamental but seems almost forgotten. The boson is named after an Indian physicist, Satyendra Nath Bose - who lived and worked in Kolkata and Dhaka - and was a contemporary of Albert Einstein.

He made important contributions to the field of quantum physics in the 1920s - contributions that changed how particle physics has been  studied ever since. Dr Bose's work on Quantum Mechanics was adopted by Einstein, who extended it to the concept of the Bose-Einstein condensate - a dense collection of bosons, sub-atomic particles with integer spin.

After his  graduation from Presidency College in Kolkata, and Masters from Calcutta University, Bose joined the Physics Department of the university in 1916. In 1921, he moved to the University of Dhaka where set up whole new departments and laboratories to teach Undergraduate and Graduate courses.

Bose moved back to Kolkata in 1945, and continued to research and teach there till his death in 1974. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan, India's second highest civilian award, in 1954.

Ironically, it was a 'mistake' by Bose that laid the foundations of the Bose–Einstein statistics or quantum statistics, as acknowledged by Einstein and Paul Dirac.

Bose wanted to show his students at the Dhaka University that the contemporary theory was inadequate, because it predicted results not in accordance with experimental results. But he committed an error in applying the theory, which unexpectedly gave a prediction that agreed with the experiment. Realising this may not be an error in fact, he fashioned his lecture into an article and sent it off to Albert Einstein - who translated it into German - and had it published in a leading European science journal.

In what may only be termed as a grave oversight, Satyendra Nath Bose was never considered for the Nobel Prize. Yet, at least 10 scientists have been awarded the Nobel for their research in the field of particle physics based on concepts like the Bose-Einstein Condensate or the boson - the last one in 2001, when Eric Allin Cornell, Carl Edwin Wieman and Wolfgang Ketterle were awarded for "the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates."

 (Some parts of this write up have been published on www.ndtv.com)

No News, Bad English and a "eureka" weekend

NEWS - that is what I live for, and by. Quite literally. It is what has driven me for the last decade and more - my source of sustenance,  my adrenalin rush, the raison d'être for my being... And  with that comes the constant struggle to put out news as correctly as possible, as fast as possible - and in this endeavour to be first, fast and accurate (in which I must admit I am routinely beaten) - my effort to speak and write correct English.

This weekend past, I learnt that both these things (NEWS and English) I could do without; that maybe I have attached so much importance to these two aspects that I've had many opportunities pass me by, many moments missed and many people discarded as 'not being up to the mark.'

A view from a hilltop at Mukteshwar, 40 kms from Nathuakhan

And all this after spending two nights at a quaint cottage in Natuakhan , a village at an elevation of 6400 feet in Nainital district - 340 kilometres from Delhi (that translates into an 8-9 hour drive).

So what brought about this epiphany?

Before I get to that , here's the company - Me, My Wife (she's known me for ten years and my aunt once told me the only reason I was seeing her was that her English was better than mine), My Cousin (the moving force behind this trip, and someone who pestered me long enough to take time off for it), Her Friend (who turned out to be an affable vegetarian and a great sport).

Since names aren't really needed in what I am about to narrate - I shall - for the benefit of all - refer to our three protagonists (sans yours truly) as Wife, Cousin and Friend.

(My) Cousin, who I think pens her thoughts down as a cathartic exercise, and carries her note book everywhere, sat me down on a lazy, idyllic afternoon - and read out some of what she had written - thoughts that were meant to be intensely private - and perhaps, all she expected was an ear with empathy. Instead I had this great urge (and I did tell her so) to edit the copy for articles, prepositions - just tighten the script, say it better.  That evening on maturer (read: whiskey-laced) reflection I realised what a jerk I had been.  I had as much right in telling her that piece needed a quick spell-check and grammar-fix as US of A telling countries around the world how to run their affairs... at least the latter has money and power - I don't.

And then there was (the) Friend - a person who I'd never met before - a new acquaintance who I was busy being polite to. I 'couldn't saw' the 'didn't went'  with a grimace and a clenched fist. At dumb-charades, Cold Creek Manor was interpreted as Cold Creek Manner...and there he strutted on as I threw wild guesses.  And then I realised what an affable and fun chap he was - easy of manner and clear of thought. No, I did not like the way he spoke in English and had the greatest urge to correct him, but yes, I could understand every word he said - his thoughts well punctuated.  The man had been  to a top B-school and cracked the Chartered Accountancy exam whilst still in college; he reports to bosses in Shanghai and Hong Kong and they seem to understand him perfectly well.  So here is the question - is the obsessiveness about correct English overrated? Isn't there a world out there ( a glimpse of which I had over the weekend) which depends on language for communication, and does seem to get on pretty well in making itself understood?  Is this brouhaha of  'oh the missed hyphen' and 'such elementary mistakes' just that - floccinaucinihilipilification (much ado over something of little or no value)?

And as I was  gathering my thoughts on the way back - it struck me ~ hadn't seen a newspaper in three days, no TV or radio either - and more importantly, hadn't missed it. No NEWS - that was a first in at least 10 years, and I really can't remember the last time I went 48 hours without looking at a newspaper, or  at least a half hour news bulletin (even if it was of the Doordarshan variety). And to wonder how that though hadn't crossed my mind in all this time. I was happy star-gazing, book-reading, chit-chatting and whiskey-sipping - almost as if all was well with the world and there was nothing that I wanted to know about. Agreeable food and company, good wine and a good book - and my (long-suffering) companion of ten years - Wife, were all that I'd thought about. The only other constant presence in my thoughts - Masha - our three-year old Labrador, who we'd had to leave behind in Delhi.

Hmmm! Stunned as I am at my own eureka moments - it humbles me to know what I do doesn't even affect everyone I know. So while I still find it in myself to strive to do better at work - I realise more than ever - that is what it is - work. Yes, I enjoy it - sometime vicariously so - but that then it hits home - it's  a part of my life (by implication - there is more to life).

So here's looking forward to a few more 'newsless' days, as I set forth to discover all that  I have buried away and forgotten, locked and left behind - my 'janus' faces - and see where  or what that leads me to...