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Nishant S wrote:
The Aussies are the best team in the world now
Naaaah, India is! We beat Pakistan.
Regards,
Rohit Sinha
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Kant,
Where did you get this article? In a mail? Or some website/journal/magazine?
I agree with the author completely.
Yes, beating Pakistan is the end all and be all of our meaningless existance. And yes, India is all about Cricket, curry, Yoga and Kamasutra, and nothing more. There is no Cinema, there are no festivals, no culture, no dance, no music, nothing to identify ourselves with. There is nothing to be proud of in the technology, industry and education fields either. No research has been going on. The indegenous satellites, Param Padam, the Light Combat Aircraft that we made are all figments of my imagination. The nuclear power plants are to be found only the Sci Fi books. That our foreign exchange reserves are on a record high is of no significance. That the AIDS vaccine that has been developed (yet to be tested fully) is a blatant lie. And you can forget about the IT sector. It's not there. Rights? The right to education has not been made a fundamental right just now, I am just making it up. The people of India just won a fight in the Supreme Court and got the right to information about the candidates contesting the elections restored. Sorry, I had to strike that off. That didn't happen either. And I can't come up with any more examples so I'll move on to the next para now.
Yes, I agree with the author that we should forget about Kalpana Chawla and stop being proud of her Indian origin. The US paid her salary after all. And provided work facilities we can't dream of at the moment. And also, we should stop chanting Kalpana Chawla too in all the gatherings. Because that's what we have been doing all along since the tragedy. Because there is nothing else we can be proud of either. And when the author's daughter gets married to a handsome young man and goes off to stay with him, he'll stop being proud of her too.
Yes, I agree that we should all read the book of Yadda Yadda Yann Yann Yingo Yingo Martel Fartel about Pi and his eventful life, and bring our butt out of our asses. It is indeed a shame that the whole of India doesn't have the same passion for books that the author has. And we have no good authors in India either. Not in the present, not in the past, and certainly not in the future. Rabindra Nath Tagore, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Premchand, Khushwant Singh, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, and many others were aliens from some other planet. And not counting many others who write in Indian languages. Many of them win the Jnanpeeth award, the Saraswati award, and many others in Hindi and regional languages. But that doesn't count. They don't write in English. The Jnanpeeth award is not Pulitzer. Real authors write in English. And educated people read only English books after those books have won the Pulitzer or the Booker. Never mind what people want to do or read. Never mind that an author will write to express himself, to let out her creativity, and not to win a Plulitzer or a Booker or a Jnanpeeth. Never mind that reading Chattopadhyay or Premchand or even porn literature or nothing at all even doesn't make me any less of an intellectual than the holier than thou author, because his shelves are lined with English books written by phoren authors.
And we should stop getting excited about our wins in Cricket matches too. After all, the Aussies almost murdered us the other day. So we should all put our heads in our butts like the author and keep mourning the loss for all eternity.
Kashmir? Yes, indeed it is our fault. We are the ones sponsoring and training the terrorists. We are the ones being self righteous. And what about the "Human Touch" wave going on in Kashmir? The militants of Indian origin are being let out of jails, and provided jobs and shelter, in a bid to win their hearts over and gain their confidence. NOT. We are just making it up. There is no attempt to hold elections there to withhold democracy. In fact, the Chief Minister there has not been elected, he's an usurper, a tyrant. There has been absolutely no attempt to improve the instrastructure, basic facilities, tourism, etc.
I agree whole heartedly with the author on all these counts. He does not need to open his eyes and look around a bit.
I also agree with him that maybe he's just not a good writer. Minus the maybe.
But what do I care? We beat Pakistan!
Regards,
Rohit Sinha
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Source : site is very slow to access, so copied and pasted here
The reason for posting: Worldcup Cricket starts in 10 days
Cricket: Indian game discovered by British!
Excerpts from the conversation follow:
The trend in the game of cricket today is to make the game fast, dramatic and action-a- a minute spectacle. That is why the accent on One-Day cricket.
Though every one mouths the slogan that Test cricket is the “real” thing, there is no doubt that the trend is to treat it like Western Classical music. It is fashionable to be seen at the concert because that is more prestigious. but rarely does it create the excitement and adulation that is reserved for Pop or Rock music.
Test cricket is also slowly acquiring that status. Play it once in a while for the sake of records. In fact it can be argued that Test cricket has survived because some dramatic elements of One day cricket has been imported into it. Like the drastic improvement in fielding and catching skills, the propensity of the batsman to score runs faster, the mandatory over rate etc.
Cricket: A game of fate
There is the strive for making cricket more attractive and emotive. And then, there is this artificially generated nationalistic hype. If you observe closely the end-game analysis stresses not on the fact that a team has lost because it is inferior but because it failed to show guts, bad captaincy, bowlers did not live up to their jobs, batsmen did not show resilience etc.
The attempt is to showcase cricket as a scientific game based more on skills rather fate, which it actually is. Everyone is made to believe that it is more like a game of chess where everything can be worked out scientifically to the last detail.
Cricket basically is a game of fate in its most serious sense. Because you are not only playing against fate as an external entity but you are gambling against your own fate.
Unlike Football, for instance, all the twenty-two players are not in the filed at the same time. One team can play in broad sunlight and when the other team comes to bat, it can be overcast, where the ball starts to swing and seam, the conditions can be very different. So Cricket is not a game which balances out the weights equally. Much is left to chance and fate.
Each team is not dealing with the same or equal adversities, but distinctive adversities, the weather conditions, the change in the state of the pitch, the condition of the ball; all these are in a constant state of flux which, in turn, may lead to fluctuating fortunes even if both the teams are equal on paper.
But, somehow all this leads to the charm of the game, the ‘glorious uncertainties’, the uncertainties of fate.
Maybe this is why cricket appeals to the Indians. Fate does play a very huge role in our cosmology. Our lives are supposed one long battle against fate.
That is why I call cricket the ‘Indian game accidentally discovered by the English’.
Cricket: India’s new religion?
Cricket is followed in India with an almost religious fervour. There is much media hype and mass hysteria. I would put this down to the urban Indian’s response to the vacuum created due to the decline in religious faith. Family gods have become defunct. Family priests as an institution has declined. Mass urbanisation and migration has led to the death of the joint family and roots etc.
Therefore, there is search for a more generic form of religion to conform to, and a search for, a pseudo-community to which you can identify passionately. And the community of cricket lovers is a community which can identify passionately, which is generic, and one can take refuge in and sublimate one’s passions and prejudices and produces a false sense of community and releief from anonymity that urbanmisation engenders.
Therefore, while I will not say that cricket has become a religion, I would say it would be appropriate to call cricket a cult. A cult which allows you to live and participate through the eleven players in the field.
It is almost what the failed system has not been able to deliver, what our politics and political leaders of this country have not been able to, this country of a billion is hoping that the eleven players on the cricket field will be able to do.
It is as if the nation is hoping and praying that cricket team will redeem their self-esteem as an Indian, by winning every time.
Many of the problems of recent times like crowd behaviour is all due to these high aspirations of the Indians in the cricket team.
Cricket Hype: It is all about money
Once, it becomes a matter of national pride, plus the media hype, there is tendency for a lot of bitterness to float around the cricket ground. The high passions and nationalist fervour generated in the games with Pakistan, for instance, is point in case.
But the paradox is that this very heightened nationalism is encouraged by those in charge of the game, the corporate, the media houses etc as this is what directly results in the higher turn out at the gates. More eyeballs on TV, therefore, the high premium paid for television rights and consequently bigger advertisement revenues.
Other than the reasons I have talked about for the heightened interest in the game, money has a lot to do with this seemingly undying passion for the game.
An Indian game accidentally discovered by the English
Cricket has many elements, which are congruent with Indian life. Other than fate, cricket is also a game where nothing much happens for a long periods of time, between balls and over, for instance. What these spaces enable is for the personality and individuality of the cricketer to unfold, creating characters. Which seems, in turn, to appeal to Indian sensibilities.
Like the Hindu ideology, for a losing team in cricket the loss is never total. Many reasons can be found as to point how fate intervened, dropped catches for instance, for why a team lost. Cricket is one of few games, where the man of the match may be from the losing team. There is a high premium for individual records even from the losing team. For instance, completion of 500 wickets or a century etc.
This gels with the understanding in the Indian cosmology that victory and defeat are akin to two sides of the same coin; there is no decisive black and white.
When I say Indian I am talking in the framework of a culture. It is not co-existent with religion alone. I do not think things are any different in Pakistan or Bangladesh or Sri Lanka. I am talking of a worldview of the sub-continental cultures. As told to E Jayakrishnan
Kant
Sonork-100.28114
Don't and Drive.
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This tutorial explains how to add a menu item that runs a Microsoft® Windows® application or that runs a script to the Tools menu or Help menu in Microsoft Internet Explorer. If you also want to create a toolbar button for the Microsoft Win32® application or script, see the Adding Toolbar Buttons tutorial.
MSDN[^]
Kant
Sonork-100.28114
Don't and Drive.
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Test
Kant
Sonork-100.28114
Success is only a matter of luck. Ask any failure.
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It always amazes me that people will "rate" test posts in somebody's personal message board.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
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Navin wrote:
It always amazes me that people will "rate" test posts in somebody's personal message board
I didn't even notice it.
Kant
Sonork-100.28114
Don't and Drive.
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ACK! They got me too! Now my whole life is ruined. I have a post that got a rating of 1.0!
You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friend's nose.
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