The best decade of Indian cricket

What a night! I am so incredibly proud today. The world cup victory is the talk of every Indian communique, every Indian gathering and the most positive news emerging out of India today.

There were so many beautiful aspects of the victory

• A captain's innings by Dhoni who thumped an awesome six (perfect to burn into our memory) to seal an emphatic victory.
• We defeated the last 3 world champions en route to bliss
• Sachin finally wins a world cup, on his home ground nonetheless
• Virat and Raina made it count when it mattered most.
• The heartwarming scene when everyone hoisted Sachin on their shoulders and ran a lap of honor.
• Virat's statement of an era: Sachin's carried the hopes of an entire nation for 21 years, I think it's time for us to carry him on our shoulders.

Having played a lot of cricket when I was younger, I was tired of seeing us reaching the edge and falling off, instead of flying up. We always lacked the character and the fighting spirit. The real change in Indian cricket happened with the historic Test win over Australia at Eden Gardens. Laxman completely turned around a 5 day game over the strongest ever Australian and world teams. It was a seemingly impossible win, showing off a spirit that was never seen before. Harbhajan Singh bowled magically. Ganguly was the first radical Indian captain who dealt with the responsibility like a majority shareholder in a company - all he wanted to do was make India the most successful team in the world.

Dhoni seems to have acknowledged and inherited all the good things that Ganguly did - not afraid of rotating bowlers in unconventional ways, pick the player he felt was needed for India to win irrespective of which region the player was from, manage the men in the dressing room, plot a plan for every game, encourage and back young players even if they went through bad phases. In addition, Dhoni was able to add and override (using OOP terminology again) other important aspects like acknowledge the weaker points of the team and not afraid to make the playing 11 flexible and most importantly - the dressing room atmosphere is one of respect, love and positivity.

One of the most amazing things about Dhoni is that he trusts his team to do the right thing in every game. For eg., he was never visibly upset when Harbhajan threw 5 wides against Australia in the end or when Munaf and Nehra didn't bowl any yorkers. During a game, he never micromanaged. I think that's an extremely difficult thing to do. The ability to trust your men for the job and make

Cricket is a marvelous catalyst for unity in a country which is vast and incredibly diverse. No matter what, that fact has to be acknowledged and every Indian cricketer needs to remember that and understand why it's tied to patriotism.

Where can I get an Indian team jersey?

Why not to use automated translators

Someone picked this up while in China. What does the sign say in Chinese on the left you ask? Does it matter? The poor guys own a "Restaurant"!

Moral of the story: Do not use a web-based translator. 

Netscape support stopped

The pioneer of the dot-com era has finally decided to stop all dev and support for Netscape and hand over reigns to Mozilla by encouraging existing users to download Firefox. For more info:

http://blog.netscape.com/2007/12/28/end-of-support-for-netscape-web-browsers/

After much research and debate whether I should go for the iPhone or the HTC Touch, I finally purchased the latter with Sprint. What finally tilted the decision in it's favor is Sprint, which offered me an amazing deal (it's quite unbelievable) which also implied i'll have the faster EV-DO network.
The Good:
- Slick form-factor
- Excellent IM and Emailing capabilities.
- The Touch-Flo technology is very impressive
- Very good voice quality
- Superb speakerphone
- Superb music playback capabilities
- Good speed on data transfers and nice browsing experience
- The overall package when purchased is very classy .
- High quality stereo headphones supplied.
- MicroSD slot (box comes with 512 MB card)

The Bad:
- Pocket Internet Explorer is a piece of crap.
- Soft keyboard is a bit small
- The clock and alarm seem a bit buggy.
- Substandard camera for its class, even though it's 2MP
- Lack of a tactile feeling on the dialpad.

As you can see, the pros clearly outweigh the cons. But the fact remains that this is not an iPhone. With it's multi-touch screen (which renders the 'pinch' capability possible), the iPhone clearly kicks as* and once you start your honeymoon with the phone, you can kind of understand why Apple took a few decisions it did, like locking down the phone. However, on the flip side, there are so many super-cool apps for smartphones nowadays, like Google maps and Opera Mini (which is a full fledged browser unlike the pocket IE).

Anyhow, I would definitely recommend one of these 2 phones to people who are contemplating on a smartphone. I have researched the other phones too but none of them are close to the HTC touch and the iPhone.

The Prestige

I watched "The Prestige" on DVD the other day. One of the most OUTSTANDING 'non-action' genre movies I have seen in recent times. It's set in the late 19th century. It is... a tale of two Magicians. They start out together, but then something happens and they become arch rivals. Each tries to outdo the other and is eager to learn the other's secret.
The movie unravels in a very novel way. Three different periods - a flashback, recent past and present - are unravelled in a somewhat parallel way. The curiosity is slowly built up and up and up till the climax. You would have a LOT of questions with every passing minute. Up until almost the very end, you start thinking....what the heck is going on?? Not because you did not understand anything in the movie, you understand everything!! But you have about 10 very important questions you can't believe weren't answered in the movie. The last 5 minutes of the movie answer it all. At the end of it, you are sure to be wowed.
There is an interesting character in the movie, not much screen time, but is a real life character, he was one of the pioneers of Electrical Engineering. The inventor of Alternating Current - Nikola Tesla. There is also a mention of Edison (DC supporter). There was a war of currents in the late 1800's, Direct current Vs Alternating current. As you all realize, AC won. Tesla is involved in the whole picture.

Gates/Jobs interview

I watched the D: All Things Digital Conference which had Steve Jobs and Bill Gates being interviewed. It was pretty amazing to watch them talk about their past and the awkward silent moments, and the supposed camaraderie between the two :). SJ is tangily quick-witted and BG is the ever-cool guy who answers ALL questions asked of him. Sometimes diplomatic, but mostly his answers appease the interviewers and the public, as in he says what people kind of expect to hear from a guy of his stature.
At one point, the question was what they could share about their relationship in the last couple of decades. Gates said that in an industry where people just come and go constantly, its nice to have someone who's been there the whole time, from the beginning and seen the trends, the ups and downs in the industry. Jobs had an excellent comment or rather quote for Bill Gates from a Beatles song "You and I have memories, longer than the road that stretches out ahead" which was just amazing.
One of the funniest moments was when Mossberg asked them about how Microsoft (established in 1975) had a role to play(engineering wise) in the development of the Mac(77 abouts). Bill Gates immediately started out by saying how MS rolled out BASIC for 31 grand and how he and Steve Wozniak(the guy who literally built the Mac) worked together.......Jobs cut him off at exactly this point and said "Wait let ME tell the story Bill" and talked about how Woz had already built his version of the BASIC which Jobs claims was a near perfect piece of software engineered entirely on paper (as opposed to without the help of assemblers apparently) EXCEPT for one thing...it didn't support floating point numbers. Woz just didn't do it inspite of Jobs begging him to do it and they eventually licensed it out from Microsoft.

And they got a standing ovation from the audience at the end of the interview.

Akram..the best?

McGrath broke Akram's record of 55 wickets in World cup matches. McGrath is THE most accurate fast bowler, but then.....There will always be a debate over "the best ever" in any field of expertise, especially in sports. I have personally been a huge fan of Wasim Akram , someone whom any young aspirant, regardless of nationality, would dream of being like. As McGrath said, Akram is one of the finest fast bowlers to have graced the earth. Pace, yorkers, bouncers, deadly in-cutters(I'll never forget his wicket of Chris Lewis Vs England in the 92 WC), and of course the sultan of swing; all the while never sacrificing accuracy. One of the things that stood out was his passion for the game. You could see the genuine anger/happiness when he played. A true 'genius' , he had a natural flair for fast bowling.
There is no question that he was THE most underrated all-rounders of the game. He's scored 257 in test cricket!! even if it was only against Zimbabwe. Only 2 Indians have got past that score.
To add to that, i think he was the most outstanding captain in the 99 WC.
Brian Lara admits that in his 16 yrs of international cricket, Akram is the best he's encountered.