Afghanistan in Sports

I came across this link.

http://ia.rediff.com/cricket/2006/mar/27deep.htm

Afghanistan doing well in sports is an encouraging sign. Given a chance I think they will come good in Cricket/Hockey/Squash due to thier close proximity to Pakistan and many north west frontier pakistani's are in fact of afghan orgin (The Peshawaris). Time has to answer if this will continue.

It happens only in Tamil Nadu

One news in a tamil website says that Rajnikanth fans are forcing him to come to politics, after his announcement that his fans can vote for any party they like and he will not influence them. The reason the fans give,

"Other lesser popular actors are already into politics and the fans of Rajini cant face the fans of other actors already in politics."

This happens only in Tamil nadu. Looks like nobody is interested in getting a better governance. All they want from Rajnikanth is just come to politics so that the fans can answer Rajini's critics. Nobody respects Rajini as an individual and at the end of the day he has the rights to do what he wants. If he is not interested in politics that his decision. Only in Tamilnadu people see stars as GODs and when they do something which the fans dont like they start cribbing that the stars are not interested in people's welfare. They never realise that all these things look idiotic for an outsider.

Technology Startups in India

The last two years lot of software and chip design start-ups have sprung up in Bangalore. Glad to see India slowly moving in the direction of product development from the Services sector. But it would be interesting to see a statistic of how many such start-ups suceeded and compare that with the success rate of Silicon Valley start-ups in the late 90's. Something tells me that India's supply of quality talent in the technology sector is very less. Though we have so many Engineering colleges churning out young graduates every year I doubt if 10% of them are coming out as quality engineers that the industry demands.

For start-ups to be successful, in my opinion, they need to have really good and dedicated people who dont get bogged down by failures and fight till they succeed. The next few years will be interesting to see how the product industry and SMEs develop. If we can fight against the odds and bringout products from our country it will be a major leap in-terms of projecting India as a country capable of producing technology products of international quality rather than just be a services garage.

What is going wrong with Team India?

Just before the Pakistan series I told some of my friends(when we went to Coorg for New year) that Team India will no longer be Team India without Daada. I am not a Bengali and am not a Rahul Dravid hater. In fact am a great fan of Rahul for his batting. The reasons I told were that

1. The youngsters will no longer get the kind of support that Ganguly gave them and hence that will lead to a feeling of insecurity.
2. Dravid is a gentleman cricket. Captaincy requires a different character. You got to be agressive and be a person who stares at the opposition straight at the eye. I love Ganguly for this character itself. The way he tackled Steve Waugh in 2001 series in India by deliberately walking late for the toss showed that he is quite a character.

Now the results are showing up. And I found it interesting when Times of India came out with the same reasons. Read this link.

http://cricket.indiatimes.com/quickiearticleshow/msid-1462632.cms


One thing is sure. Appointing Chappel cost India dear. He is expecting to bring in the Australian work ethics in Indian team. That will work in Australia but not in India for the following reasons.

1. If a player doesnt perform in Australia and he is shown the door there are dozens of quality players waiting in the reserves. But in India we dont have that many quality players. So we got to live with whatever we have and we need to slowly nurture them and build a team which Ganguly did a really great job.

2. Indians are emotional when compared to Aussies. So if a player is dropped he feels emotionally drawn back and he gets a sense of insecurity. This further affects his performance.


All I could say is that Kiran More, Chappel and co did the greatest dis-service to Indian cricket by dropping Ganguly. He should have been persisted with a little longer though his personal batting performance was bad. He would have atleast made sure that he created a core Indian team for the future before he left. With Sachin, Dravid and Laxman already nearing the end of their careers India hasnt identified the core team for the next generation. Hopefully we dont go back to the dark days of the pre-ganguly period.