Down the memory lane with World cup and Ind-Pak matches

Harry Potter books among several neat magical concepts had something called Pensieve. For those
who dont know it is an object to store/retrieve memories. For me World cup in general and Ind-Pak matches in particular is something similar. Majority of Indians watch/follow cricket but thats a very loose terms associated with being aware of the game and having a general idea of whats going on. There are a lot of us who follow the game passionately and  most of us follow almost all matches played by Indian cricket team but given the fact that India plays 40-50 matches an year most of the action is forgotten very soon.

However World cup is one of the events that is remembered for a long long time. Among my earliest memories of cricket has been watching the Benson & Hedges World cup in 92. Thought I do remember catching some action in the tri-series prior to it, the 92 WC was the first time I followed an entire cricket tournament, we all caught up with everything available, read the newspapers caught the action on TV whenever possible and spoke about it with friends in school and neighbourhood and had our own reenactment of those matches in gully cricket!

You sort of pick up general vibe from your parents, neighbours and coloumns in newspapers and Pak was a country we really wanted to beat and mostly fell short in close battles until then in ODIs and it in 92 WC we were meeting them for first time. As such defeats in Sharjah were fresh in our minds then and this match with More-Miandad clash and Kapil and Sachin scripting a good win was athe lone bright spot in an otherwise not so memorable tournament from Indian perspective. But South Africa , Jonty Rhodes, NZ team with Dipak Patel opening and Crow and Greatbatch and Inzy, Wasim , Lara  and of course the rain rule is what I remember even now from that edition.

By the time the next world cup arrived I was in 9th standard and had become a huge cricket fan reading up all I could find about the game which meant newspaper and Sportstar magazine. This was around the time my dad had decided that I was wasting too much time in non-studies related activities and had banned cricket from tv for a while .I still managed to find a transistor radio and caught up with action is another story but even his resolve to keep away melted as the World cup fever heated up and I ended up watching most of the significant matches. Ofcourse the most memorable match indeed was the Ind-Pak QF game of 96 which is perhaps the best Ind-Pak WC game that ever was given the stakes involved and mental baggage. I think we were batting well and looked set for a good score and then all of a sudden Jadeja ( that meant Ajay then) went berserk and ripped apart fearsome Waqar. But Pak reply was equally good with Sohail and Anwar batting really well and then that Venkatesh Prasad moment happened which I do believe was sort of thing which ensured the 'mental edge' and swagger Pakistanis had (atleast in mind of Indian fans) dissapeared and our heroes seemed to be an even match for them. Another enduring sight was Miandad struggling and looking hapless. From WC perspective it was last time the mighty WI showed their dominance and Aus also impresed and pulled off a brilliantly heist in semis, but the Lankans were the team of the WC and eventual winners but the way they played their cricket was something else. My dad termed them 'unprofessional' and was convinced such crazy batting cant be maintained and indeed many others who had seen the game for a while could not understand what was going on as Lankans threw old theories of batting steady aside and forged a new way to win matches which got adopted by almost all teams in the next few years and sort of changed the game itself! That Eden defeat to SL was very painful indeed. Sri Lanka made a powerful statement to the world with the WC win


The next world cup arrived in 3 years and this time I had completed board exams and was preparing for Engg entrance and with high performing cousins securing marks in high 90s and admissions in colleges of choice there was added pressure from parents. This meant no TV at all, but I do remember watching the Ind-SL match with my cousins and a score like that was unbelievable. I couldnt watch most games  was only able to catch up on newspaper next day on what exactly happened. The only exception made was the Ind-Pak game and somehow I dont remember much about this match at all except that Prasad took a lot of wickets. The best match of course was the semis when Australia pulled of yet another heist like previous WC

2003 WC was in my college final year and this time I was in hostel and there was a general cricket fever and a big group used to sit together and watch and discuss during matches. The India-Pak clash was another memorable one, I cant remember why there was a huge hype around this one perhaps because we were hardly playing Pak at that time. This was billed as Shoaib vs Sachin and Pak put up a huge total. The reply from Sachin and Sehwag is something that I will remember for a long time the entire TV room in college hostel erupted with joy with every big hit. There were lots in the initial overs as Sachin went after Akthar and Sehwag also smashed Wasim and Waqar and there was a huge silence and Sehwag and Ganguly got out immediately. But there was still Sachin and boundaries kept flowing almost every over and huge chase was achieved. Another thing I remember from this world cup was performance of Zim and Kenya and the fact that they could not help these two teams make it to big league given their promise and performance in 2003 should rank as one of the major failures of cricket. Of course the WC final was a match all Indian fans would like to forget as it was a savage mauling by an extremely strong Aussie team that we watched/suffered through. And what an Aussie team it was!

By the time next WC arrived we were suddenly very sure of Indian team being able to cross the final hurdle as Sachin, Sehwag, Dravid and Ganguly were complemented by a solid middle order of Yuvi and Dhoni and we had changed from poor chasers to a team which can chase any target. But it turned out to be the worst ever performance maybe the format can be blamed but net result was that from a fans perspective this was one of the least memorable World cups. I was working at Infosys and  no longer had to contend with exams and other distractions but with India crashing out and the matches starting late evening there was not much incentive to sit whole night and watch the matches. Ofcourse Ireland and Bangladesh would be summary of the World cup from subcontinental fans perspective, that and that squash ball! Again Aussies were unstoppable and they completed yet another comprehesive WC campaign and were hardly troubled while defending it and my fervent wish throughout the WC for some nation to upset Aussies remained a wish alone until ...

2011 WC was in India and I had taken up an offer from Cognizant to join their Business Development team and with WC in mind negotiated with my previous employer to reduce notice period and release me early and had asked Cognizant for a later joining date and created a gap of 1 month which was when bulk of World cup happened. This meant home food and viewing world cup matches without any kind of disturbance and this was indeed the only WC where I could watch almost all the matches fully. The match of the world cup for me was the Ind-Aus QF when India finally stepped up and stopped a strong aussie team ofcourse the final was a great win and the win against Pak in semis were also really crucial but in terms of strength of opposition and how scared we as fans were it was the QF that really mattered. The Ind-Pak match was a semi-final and as such a high pressure one without baggage associted with usual rivalry. But as Indian fans we were lot more confident of our team and it was the Pak team which seemed to have lost the mental resolve and swagger and looked very nervous and fumbled around and lost. That was the match which sort of confirmed the trend in the rivalry for a while and it perhaps began in mid 2000s as India stopped being nervous about meeting Pak and routinely coasted to wins. That ending in Mumbai was the moment fans of my generation will keep talking about or atleast thats what we thought that time!

2015 WC being in Australia and me living in North West US had made it hard to follow first there was the matter of getting the matches on TV. Lot of discussions with friends and searches on net later the package was identified and purchased 30 min before start of Ind-Pak game and then several other NRIs seemed to be doing the same as the website's server crashed with everyone trying to activate subscription. Luckily just as the toss finished and teams were lining up for National Anthemn the link came up and gave me Sky Sports HD coverage. Since WC 2011 this was the first match that I saw entire innings, I have ranted a lot about the length of ODI format ad nauseum and for a while I have been only watching first 15 overs and last 15 overs and catching the rest on cricinfo or chekcing score occassionally. But this being WC and Ind-Pak out of nowhere came this desire to not miss a ball, I couldnt watch the entire Pak innings but went to sleep confident that this Indian team had their opposition's number. This might perhaps be the weakest Ind and Pak squads to have clashed in a WC but under high pressure Indian batting really stepped up and Pak bowling struggled before coming into their own towards the end. Sadly their batting couldnt put up similar fight. This might be low intensity group stage clash but the effect an Ind-Pak clash in WC has on fans and ultimately the teams themselves is something to be seen to understand. Due to various reasons mostly attributable to form of Indian cricket team most of us were not really looking forward to the World cup but now that it is here and has kick started hoping to catch as much as possible despite the hurdles imposed by timezone

2014 - List of books

Again yet another year when finding time to read was very hard but still managed to still carry on at least read enough to put up a list of sorts. No excuses this time as it was plain laziness and lack of time management. I started using the wonderful county library here and also got a Kindle towards the end of the year ( more on that in another post ) which considerably bumped up the number of books read.

As its such a short list have added some comments on some of the books

So without much ado the list

1. Leela's book by Alice Albinia : I really loved the previous non-fiction work by this author ( Empires of Indus) and picked this up with high expectation. That could be perhaps be the reason why I was very dissapointed with this one. This is a fictional tale set in modern India but its a sprawling epic threading so many different worlds with Ganesha as narrator and themes from Indian epics, re-incarnation, religious and class divide in modern India, homo sexuality and so many more things. Somehow the narrative lost steam very early for me and despite some good writing in certain stretches it was just not convincing enough for me.

2. Around India in 80 trains by Monisha Rajesh :  Indian railway stories is something I really love and I have devoured lot of documentaries related to Indian trains. But there is really no good book on train journeys across India. Thats a statement from this book from Monisha Rajesh an NRI from UK who comes to India to discover the country through trains. After finishing the book thats the one statement I agree completely with the author. The book is not without its merits there are few stray gems about how Indian trains and system works but its mostly average stuff with choppy narrative and mostly personal experience of a 2nd gen NRI and might appeal more to foreign readers than Indians I guess

3.The Messenger by Markus Zusak : Had started reading and then misplaced the book and recently found out, technically not fully read but planning to do very soon so will have it on this list :)

4. Myth = Mithya by Devdutt Patnaik :  This was a book I wanted to read for long and finally got around to reading this year. Hindu mythology and cultural practices and reasons behind it is a fascinating read. It was good to read about and understand so many things that are all around us as part of culture but to understand the possible origins to all these in such an easy to follow manner was what impressed me about this book

5. Skeptical Patriot : Exploring the Truths behind the Zero and Other Indian Glories by Sidin Vadakkut : Exploration of myth/history behind most email forwards with lots of humor thrown in

6. Seven secrets of Shiva by Devdutt Patnaik  - really enjoyed this one and looking forward to reading more such books

7.Goat Days ( aatu jeevitham) by Benyamin : This was translation of a malayalam book recommended by Vaidya. Downloaded the book on Kindle and finished it in 2 days. Its story of 'gelf' dream gone horribly wrong for a poor young man from Kerala. Having lived for a while in the 'gulf' and with so many of my college batchmates living there and interacting with folks there I was aware that it was not really all that rosy and so many folks have it really tough especially those doing blue collar jobs. But this was something else, similar in some sense to the book 'What is the What' ... its about story of dashed hopes and survival and ultimately its a great story about survival of human spirit. Even in presence of most adverse conditions the ability to pick oneself up and somehow survive the ordeal was really inspiring in a sense

8. The Devil in Us by Monica Bhide : Stories with Indian diaspora in east coast US, pretty dark ones involving guilt, loss and alienation

9. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn : guess everyone must have seen the movie by now, I wanted to read the book first!

10. The Martian by Andy Weir : Robinson Crusoe experience / Gravity movie type experience set in Mars, again thats just the gist but this was a fascinating read for the science involved and the general geekiness . Also a great story of survival and triumph of human spirit in face of gravest of grave dangers. Can't recommend enough!

11. Sachin - Genius unplugged by Suresh Menon : There was lot of hype around the SRT bio which seemed overpriced and possibly banal as Sachin is so non-controversial, so in spirit of things picked up this book which was compilation of articles/essays on SRT by lot of cricket writers

12. What if ? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Questions  by Randall Munroe - This author is creator of xkcd - enuff said!


So thats the list , 12 ... not bad considering I had read only 3 books by Dec 2nd week, so there was lot of activity  towards the end of the year like Dhoni - ODI innings!

As part of our annual tradition looking forward to the lists from my more well read cousins : @Vaidya  and @Indu .. over to you guys!

What time is it?

One of the major lifestyle changes I made after moving to US early 2013 is giving up on morning newspaper. When I used to talk to my friends living here earlier I found it strange they did not get a newspaper. I thought everyone started the day after reading newspaper and could never imagine a start to the day otherwise. So after coming here I found it very hard to adjust and indeed started a trial subscription of Seattle Times and within a few days realized why people do not read newspaper ... there was nothing worthwhile in it ( its worse than Times of India! )

So I do get the days news on twitter and catch up news online through multiple websites/apps and most of the content I read is interest based so I would get to know about all events and activities related to Cricket, Tennis and most of the India news and some major global events. The point of all this rambling being that I never get real local news related to the place I live.

So a few weeks back I totally missed the fact that Day Light savings time (DST) ended and clock was changed by an hour.

These days we use alarm on the phones (which automatically recognize Daylight savings time changes) and first thing I pick up in morning for news and other stuff is ipad which was also time adjusted and on a sunday morning I was up at 6:45 and felt wide awake and hungry ( the time had changed by an hour so my body clock considered it 7:45 the time I should have finished my morning coffee) and only when my wife pointed it out later I realized that the time change had occured.

To me all this DST thing does is mild annoyance on having to change multiple convential 'Clocks' at home and also adjusting my Wrist Watches and the one in the car. This also changes the sleep patterns and hunger patterns and being someone who likes to stick to time for most daily activities, these pattern changes are annoying for the first couple of weeks and then you forget it. Then  come next match , I need to move all these  devices back by an hour again and adjust to another daily pattern. Within 2 years I'm annoyed at this so wonder how all others are in the areas where they do this are managing. My annoyance is also partly because I dont see the whole thing making much sense anymore in this age where world is no longer an agragian economy where we are sunrise influences our start of day. There seem to be equally persuasive arguements for and against DST on internet.

But what triggered off this post was discussion I had with friend  with whom I catch up regularly and this time as well we chatted causually about various usual topics like our families, weather and such and then this DST topic came up and we started wondering if DST or even timezones makes sense in country like India. We discussed for a long time peddling several half truths both of us could remember and after while decided to settle it by checking internet later!

I found that India did follow DST at some point ( during World War) and India indeed had multiple timezones at some point and eventually settled on a single time. What I did not know until now was how much was the time variation across India.

quick google search tells me that : India spans longitudes of 68° at the western end and 98° at the eastern boundary and as there is a difference of one hour for every 15° of longitude, the two extremes differ by two hours. Thus, when the sun sets at 4 p.m. in Kohima, it sets at 6 p.m. in Porbunder.

For places in North East and places on western side, I'm sure this problem will be even more acute

As type this post, when I check the time in North East India is 6:10 and the time Bangladesh which lies to West of NE India is 6:40 and the time in Lahore,Pakistan is 5:40 but some places like Gujarat which lies west of Lahore is 6:10

One more interesting info : Bangladesh introduced DST 5 years back and advanced the clock by 1 hour during winter months ... yeah really!

So there is a genuine need and there were reports of demands from several areas in India for new timzone and DST but I would assume the offices/shops and life in general might be operating based on availble sunlight and the working hours might start early ( compared to rest of India) and might finish early and same with places on western side where the starting hours of shops/offices might be slightly later in the day accounting for late sunrise ( as per IST)

So even though we are on one single timezone, we probably have already factored these things in and do not require diffrent time zones. Another issue with having 2 timezones is the amount of effort and co-ordination needed and effort needed by Railways where so many things are done manually and already we have trouble with Indian Stretchable time and having multiple timezones is going to cause more problems.  There are lot of studies and theories which blame the timezone as responsible for the lack of progress and various problems plaguing these regions

There are also interesting suggestions like bringing in a new timezone for Eastern areas and another one was for advancing the entire IST itself by 30 mins to solve problem faced by East but not creating huge problem for Western side but with business and power centered on the western part of the country I dont think that idea will work out. We remain only major country other than China which does not have multiple timezones

All in all the conversation on this topic and some digging around on internet has made me some sort of self-styled internet expert on this .... now off to pontificating on other online forums

Clearing the cobwebs

Its been a while ... since I looked at this blog let alone posted something!

I had started the blog more than 9 years back and did use it fairly regularly and had a huge list of other blogs I used to follow and folks dropping comments and discussing things, blogs actually meant quality social networking and catching up with lot of cool and interesting stuff back in those days

But times have changed, the web and social media have changed a lot 

These days 140 characters and embedded bitly URLs are all it takes to catch up with things and discuss and share stuff with folks ... yeah twitter happened and made this process much more easier and quicker and is infinitely more smart phone friendly. It didnt help that I totally stopped using my personal laptop and started relying almost entirely on my phone and ipad to track news and catch up with stuff online.

Meanwhile life also happened, moved to a new city/country and started family life and time became increasingly hard to find and blogging seemed to be a lot of effort and hard work and the lazy me just copped out!

But still there is some joy to be had in being able to type long prose without fear of running out of characters, being able to just put your thoughts out there somewhere ... so hopefully will be back here and put up something ... 

Lets see!

2013 - List of Books

Not a good year for reading, sort of gave up reading for while  after relocating to US at the start of year. Netflix, Amazon Prime instant videos, reading The Economist magazine every week and having an ipad with insanely addictive games are some of the excuses.

With the necessary disclaimer issued, let me proceed to the business of revealing the List

1.Indianomix : Making Sense of Modern India -Vivek Dahejia & Rupa Subramanya

Picked this up as I had followed the writers on twitter, turned out be something on lines of Freakonomics set in India

2.Labyrinth : Short Stories

This was part of my conscious effort to read some Indian writing esp short stories. Some interesting stories, but at the end of the year don't remember much about this!

3. The Devotion of Suspect X - Keigo Higashino

This was a Japanese book and was a cerebral murder mystery. It is different from conventional murder mystery as the focus is on how the deed is hidden from cops and was a good light read.

4.Oath of Vayuputras - Amish

I actually liked the first book in the series as I picked it up before all the hype around these books and felt the guy was on to something even though the language was very ordinary. But it has been steadily heading downhill after that. Used this book to read during long flight journey and while reading kept feeling why does he write like this! What a waste of such a good premise. I always felt we had so much good material in our mythology and history and lot of stories were there waiting to be written. But this was a colossal waste

5.Good Omens - Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

Two awesome authors getting together to write about Angels , Demons and apocalypse and all that can go wrong. Hilarious stuff, enjoyed it totally!

6.Going Postal - Terry Pratchett

My first Terry Pratchett novel, picked it up after strong recco from my sis who has a huge collection

7. Irresistible Inheritance of Wilburforce - Paul Torday

My fav book of the year, delightful read. Unravels slowly but sucks you in!

8.Food in History - Reay Tannahill

Picked this on whim, but turned out to be a terrific read. The book explores the role of food in  human life as civilization progressed from early hunter gatherer days through various ages till the modern era. In spite of this being such an obvious thing the role played by food is not very well understood or known. The book was packed with a lot interesting insights into various historical events and how food influenced it. Focus is more on Europe but effort is made to cover the entire world, learnt so many interesting things while reading this

9.The Tiger's Wife - Tea Obreht

Set in Eastern Europe during Balkan war and covers the present and past as a girl remembers about her relationship with her grandfather and some of the stories he used to tell her.I'm yet to finish this at the end of the year, hope to finish this in a week

10.The Illicit Happiness of Other People - Manu Joseph

Thanks @vaidya for this gift. Book set in Madras of later 80s and is a story of  loss but is written by a satirist.


Finishing 10 books this year was a surprise for me given the slow start. But then I actually read 3 books in Dec when I got reminded that I need to blog about my reading list. Hope to get a Kindle in 2014 and switch to reading more e-books finally.

Thou Shalt Not Pass

These days most of our transactions are doing 'online' and you seldom stand in lines(if there was one!).

For most folks of my generation at first it was Banking and train tickets, then it slowly expanded to a whole lot of other bills and shopping . But still there was the domestic help or the watchman who would offer to pay the water bill, electricity bill, gas cyclinder etc, till i left India though i did open online accounts i still used to pay for these through these people letting them have their Rs.10/20 commission. My online purchasing started with books, I had heard about flipkart through friends, but kept advocating the 'experience' factor of a real world small bookshop that i used to visit often and i did enjoy some discount there as a regular. But at some point I started realizing that the discounts online and the comfort of ordering stuff lounging on my couch/bed was too tempting and i succumbed. Books were followed by T-shirts, other stuff and gradually electronics followed. 

Until this point I had only 2-3 websites which i used on a regular basis for e-commerce and there were a couple of travel websites and of course personal email and work mail/system login ...despite security concerns, laziness trumped and  I started using common  passwords both for most of  these sites invariably what i was using at that point at my workplace. At work we had to change password every 45 days. Setting a password was a fun activity and initially i took pride in coming up with smart passwords. But the trouble with password is that they are supposed to be 'secure' and of course 'secret' which is the fundamental expectation. So you can't really go about announcing it on Facebook or Twitter and gloat over the likes/RTs you get! But for my personal usage i kept myself to 2-3 passwords ( best of the lot i came up when setting passwords at work and for my bank account). Now the trouble started when one of my widely used mail accounts got hacked and thanks to being widely present on social media those days i got know instantly that spam mails were being sent and managed to wrest back control of the account. Now since i had used some of the same passwords for lot of things online, I didn't want to take any chances and set-up about creating more complex and complicated passwords and more of them so that not more 2-3 sites had same password. This was the  time the activities done online started increasing and so began the quest for unique yet tough to crack but 'remember-able' passwords

Setting smart and tough to get passwords slowly started becoming a democles sword ( ok, i'm exagerrating) ... I slowly started wondering if mundane will do, but again didnt want to lose the fun part of coming up with some interesting passwords. But after moving to the US of A, things started becoming lot tougher. I now had a couple of different bank acccounts, my workplace demanded seperate set of passwords for different applications, almost all utlity payments were online through seperate accounts with service providers, and i keep discovering lot more e-commerce sites all of which need their own ids and passwords. Since the start of this year i had to go through recover password routine for a couple of sites. But now i have reached the level where i had to recover my user id first and then get the password! I can't help thinking that there should be a better yet secure way ... I know there must be something, hopefully the widespread usage of that new thing is just around the corner. This post was triggered by a casual conversation with my mom who is just approaching 60s. She mentioned that she had to recover her mail password 5 times in last 3 months because she simply keeps forgetting and her memory is no longer what it used to be... if i'm having trouble in 30s I cant imagine what people in 60s and later must be going through and i really hope some better solution comes soon

2012 - List of Books

Finally I return to update the blog, had been struggling to put thoughts together since Twitter made it very easy to express things to the world. Anyway had started putting the year end list last year and cousin of mine prompted to do the same this year too and compare lists. So here goes...


Listing the books from Jan to Dec in the order of when i finished reading it

1.Dance with Dragons ( Song of Fire and Ice series  / also known as Game of Thrones series for those who follow the HBO TV series version) - George RR Martin

The book was just brilliant and this was the last of the series that is published as on today and with this begins the long wait for the next one from Martin in this series.

2.Boy Who Harnessed Wind - William Kamkwamba

True story of a boy from Africa who managed to overcome poverty, absence of formal education to become a successful rural inventor

3.Indian Summers by John Wright - Must read for any Indian cricket fan as Wright covers the early days of what was a Golden era for Indian cricket.

4. Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh - Thanks for the recco Vaidya, enjoyed this totally. Mind was blown :)

5. Amul's India : Based on 50 years of Amul advertising

Good fun to go through all those Amul Ads gave a sense of India as they touched upon almost all major issues/events

6.Burning Rubber by Charles Jennings

Solid book on Formula One, good read for all racing buffs

7. Rahul Dravid : Timeless Steel , a collection of articles of Rahul Dravid put together by ESPN Cricinfo

8.Adventures of an intrepid film critic - Anna Vetticad

Story of Bollywood in its entirety as a film critic decides to watch all hindi movies releasing in NCR in 2011. Not  really as interesting read as i hoped as the insights and conclusions were something most of us sort of knew :(

9.Stories by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio

Collection of short stories, yet to complete!

10.Behind the Beautiful Forevers - Katherine Boo

Easily the best book i have read this year and for quite a while, Katherino Boo brilliantly captures poverty and struggle in Urban India, hopes, aspirations and challenges along with how the system really works.

11.Cut Like Wound by Anita Nair

Pleasant Surprise this one, really enjoyed it part of the reason could be that this was set in Bangalore :)

12.Pundits from Pakistan by Rahul Bhattacharya

Thanks Vaidya for the B'day gift, very good read as the author covers not only cricket but opening up of border and hearts between two estranged nations for a brief period. Sights and sounds of Pakistan was an added bonus to the experience of reliving our best tour to Pakistan



My target at start of year was the usual 25 books, but with lot of things happening on personal front I expected the numbers to be much lower... but till i put this together didnt realise it was this low!

Hoping to do at least 20 in 2013 :)