India Down Under 2007-08

Yet another Indian cricket series has started and this time it is the much awaited series India Down Under (Down Under is a colloquialism referring to things Australia, because in a world map the country Australia is situated down south under all other countries and hence the expression.) A cricket tour by the Indian team to Australia has always evoked great expectation and interest among the masses for various reasons. There is always a great pleasure in finding out how the great Indian batting line up face the all powerful Australian attack. Most often than not a test match between India and Australia is considered as rendezvous where there will be a great competition between the Indian batsmen and the Aussie bowlers. Even the players consider this as a perfect venue to test their playing skills and mental abilities. Also, of late, there has been a common perception that India is perhaps the only team in the world who holds the strength to challenge the Aussie domination in cricket. Two of the recent Twenty20 wins by India over Australia has strengthened such a view as well.

This series is undoubtedly a historic one because of one most prominent reason and it is that this is going to be the last series down under for not only one of the greatest batsmen of all times - Sachin Tendulkar, but also for the other greats of the game like Anil Kumble, Rahul Dravid, Sourav Ganguly and the Very Very Special (VVS) Laxman. So the series is watched closely by the cricket lovers all over the world. It had always been a great feeling to watch all these great players fighting it out at the MCGs and the SCGs and the WACAs. But as all good things have to come to an end at some point of time, this has also reached the final phase. It is quite disheartening to understand that we wont be able to see these great men at work again there in Australia.

This is also a golden opportunity to the cricket fraternity in India to gauge the efficiency of some of the young members of the Indian Cricket team like Yuvraj Singh and MS Dhoni. These young men are going to be the torch bearers of Indian cricket for the years to come. Australia is a place where the technique and skill of a player is tested to its fullest and it is more so when we consider the case of a batsman. It has to be seen whether the technique and batting skills of these young guns match with that of their elder team mates.

When this article is being written, the first test at MCG has already begun. It is the customary Boxing Day test match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in Victoria, which is incidentally the home ground of the legendary leg spinner Shane Warne. We are certainly missing this genius Victorian this time around and this series can certainly be called the beginning of the post-Warne India-Australia clash down under. Decades and centuries are often named after legendary human beings who had written their names in the annals of the history and Shane Warne is undoubtedly one of the legends of the game and therefore it is only appropriate to to term this as post-Warne era.

The second and third tests will be played at Sydney and Adelaide respectively and Adelaide is certainly the ground where the Indians are having good memories of the win in the last series played during 2003-04. The wonderful innings played by Rahul Dravid gave us a great victory to cherish and the Indians would do good to reiterate that memorable performance. Also, one could scarcely forget the Sydney match of that series which incidentally was the last match of another great player Steve Waugh. Sachin Tendulkar's very hard fought double century is still quite alive in the minds of all cricket lovers.

So altogether this series is expected to be yet another cracker of a series with a lot of things at stake for the Indians especially the senior pros of the team as this is going to be their last tour down under. Let us all keep our fingers crossed and wait for a great series with a lot of fair fight, flair and fire.

I Mourn the Death of Benazir Bhutto - The Daughter of the East

Benazir Bhutto
21 June 1953 - 27 December 2007

I mourn the untimely death of former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. 'The Daughter of the East' bravely fought a battle to restore democracy in her country and to bring back lost human rights for her fellow citizens and has attained martyrdom. My heartfelt condolences for the bereaved family and the democracy loving people of Pakistan and the world.

An Excellent Product Idea

Train travel is quite a beneficial form of travel especially for a person like me who has got a personal blog and therefore is always on to the look out for new subjects to write about so that the blog is always up to date and running. For the past month or so I have been a frequent traveler plying through the railway lines of the state twice in a week and this journey is certainly not in search of a subject for my blog, but often gives me some food for thought and sometimes some really good subjects to right about as well. One such recent travel had given me an occasion to get acquainted with a person with a rather smart new product idea. He was a train vendor and he has got a very unique and sensible product with him. While writing this piece, I hope he will pardon me if I borrow some of the words that he himself has used while marketing his product.

We all, at some point of time or the other, would have been a participant in a long queue to obtain some application form from some Government offices. And we all pretty much know the agony we have to face to get that simple piece of paper and, as if the long queue alone is not enough, there are also different issues raised by the officials there, as if their sole intention is to deny us the easy access of that application form. More than that most of us are absolutely oblivious about the places from where we would get a particular form. So to sum up, to obtain a form we have to first know the place from where we could get the form and for that you have to ask a multitude of people who would certainly give you multitude of answers, get to the place by traveling some distance since some forms will be produced only from one center throughout the state, then stand at the queue, then have a verbal scuffle with the officials there and of course wait for the officialdom to take pity on you and finally give you the required form. This is a real ordeal which most of us have faced sometime or the other. This is where the product that we are going to discuss about comes into play.

The vendor in the train claims that he or his family members no longer go to Government offices for getting any of the forms, instead he is carrying about 150 different types of forms with him always so that he can use it whenever he requires it. If you are thinking at the frivolousness of carrying about 150 forms with you always, then wait a minute. He is not carrying it in the physical form instead he is having a CD in which the soft copies of all these forms are there. And that seems to be a pretty good product idea, isn't it ? So anyone needing any form can readily get it form the CD and print it out and use it. If you don't have a printing facility, then just get into a DTP center find the form and take the print out. To further strengthen his case the vendor also states that many government departments accepts forms taken as print outs by the user himself and gives the example of many departments having online forms . He further claims that he had spent about a year and about one lakh rupees for traveling and collecting this much forms from different places and put them all into a CD. Checking the veracity of this statement by him is not at all something that would interest us, but the product is certainly something that would arose anyone's curiosity. Now, the vendor says that his product can be used not only by individual users but also by DTP centers by providing the service of getting lay users the form he needs and charging a price for that. The price of the product is Rs.50 but the vendor says that as an introductory price he is charging only Rs.30.

Two things have to be given utmost credit here - first is the new product idea and the second the new entrepreneur. Here is a product idea that no one had thought about before, for which there is going to be good demand as the product is worthy enough and the price is quite reasonable. Here is an entrepreneur who dared to think big, think about a new idea and not only did he thought about it, but he also transformed his thought into action and that too transformed it successfully. Now it is up to us to decide whether to buy his product and stay away from the long queues that we are so much used to, or continue squandering our time waiting in the queue believing with (waning) hope that we would reach the destination counter sooner rather than later.

You Got it Wrong Mr.Mush

Mr.Musharraf, as we are learning to call him after he jettisoned, rather, mournfully relinquished, his army uniform, had got things absolutely wrong. He introduced Emergency, proposed the Provisional Constitution Order (PCO), expelled the Supreme Court Chief Justice Ifthikar Choudhary, curtailed the human rights of the population and proclaimed himself as the sole ruler of the Muslim country. All these factors have only resulted in reducing his popularity among the masses and his credibility in the eyes of the international community. Again, speaking about his popularity, it was never quite high for him to get worried about any diminution of it, but it had got still worse and reached a level where there had been wide spread mass protest against his autocratic rule with the emergency in place.

If one would contemplate the places where Mr.Mush had gone wrong - for that matter a very close perusal of the facts is not needed, instead anyone with a little of common sense can hardly miss his failure points - it all started with his declaration of Emergency on November. This was certainly a move to counter any decision the Supreme Court might had taken against his re-election on October. With the declaration of emergency he has defeated every possible move of his critics to rule him out of his incumbent position as the Head of the State. One of the most unpopular decision he had taken is the introduction of Provisional Constitution where by curtailing the legal human rights of the people and this came under a lot of criticism from inside and outside the country. He banned protests against him, banned all private television channels, arrested people who were protesting against him, put lawyers under house arrest, anointed hand picked people as judges in the Supreme Court and so on.

Now Mr.Musharraf is speaking about lifting the Emergency and conducting "free and fair" elections. With the absence of an autonomous election commission and with the judiciary playing to the tunes of Mr.Musharraf, one could hardly expect a fair and transparent election. There are scepticism that President Musharraf would dare to do pre-election and post-election rigging to manipulate the election result to suit him and would baptize the political party that supports him , the PML(Q) to reign at the Parliament. But the pro-Musharraf administration is saying that they have done everything possible to conduct a free and fair election with election observers from different countries already present there at Pakistan.

The most significant issue about the present situation there at Pakistan is the absence of human rights. There is no law and order, there is no proper judicial system to take care of the legal rights of the people and there is no environment for the freedom of speech and expression. The international community is not doing enough to change this situation. The human rights groups in Pakistan are fighting hard to reclaim their lost right, they should be given moral support by all countries who believe in freedom and democracy, international human rights agencies should pressurize the international community to act in favor of bringing normalcy back in Pakistan, there should be enough mechanism in place to showcase the human rights activism happening in Pakistan to the international community where by this struggle can increase the confidence of all human rights activists across the world and the international agencies working on human rights viz. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, OHCHR etc. should come forward to take up this issue to the world stage.

There are a lot of things to be done to bring down the arrogant dictator Mr.Mush from his position as the President of Pakistan and also a lot of things to be done to bring back democracy in that country. Pakistanis should see this as an golden opportunity to wipe off Pakistan military's age old demeanor of usurping power from the democratically elected government. Of course one can't help but think that the end is near for Mr.Musharraf's dream run as the Chief Executive of his country and he has himself to blame for that because he always got everything absolutely wrong.

LDF Government’s Governing Woes

Some people have got the idea that bad governance is tantamount to no governance. But this writer feels that it is a very wrong presumption and believes that it is always good to have a government running a bad government rather than a government without any governance at all. This argument can be proved effectively by using the example of the present government headed by the Left Democratic Front (LDF) in Kerala.

The government that came into existence after getting a big majority in the legislative assembly, has failed miserably in generating any hope in the minds of the people about any good governance. More importantly the government is now mired in a lot of controversies, corruption charges, factionalism, contempt of court charges and so on. But the most important factor that had affected the common man was the dreadful condition of the roads in Kerala. It is often being said in Kerala that the condition of the roads had never been so terrible in the history of the State. Still worse was the Government’s reaction to such a shoddier state of affair. That the government is incapable of taking even a tactical decision like maintenance of roads, leave alone strategic ones, shows the inept and clumsy nature of the LDF government.

The CPI(M), which is heading the coalition government is itself now mired in factionalism that they can hardly find enough time to give proper consideration to their governing duties. The condition of other parties of the LDF front is not any different either. Moreover there are conflicts and hostilities between the parties of the front as well. The recent spat between the minister Sudhakaran of CPI(M) and the CPI Secretary Veliyam Bhargavan is a good example for the same. Day by day the woes of the government are increasing and the internal feud is not making things any better for the them. The recent controversy of the Sabarimala aravana is a shocking example of the internal fight within the LDF front. The Devasom committee members, of course from different parties, are fighting among themselves thereby forgetting the need for a better governance of the temple affairs. This has become an indelible stigma on the government about which, disgustingly enough, they are not worried about.

The latest trend of this government is to blame everything on the civil servants to hide its incapability of doing things and lack of political will. It even got to the extend of the resignation of the former Chief Secretary Lizzie Jacob. There are also political pressure on the government to remove capable officials from their present positions when they are doing something against the whims and fancies of the ruling parties. Removal of Suresh Kumar IAS from the Munnar Mission and MGA Raman from the jail DGP posts are examples of the same. These deeds of the Government haven't done any good to their credibility, if they had some. The pig-headed stubbornness of the Government is all the more evident in it's callous denial of any enquiry into any possible foul play on the same issue.

The life and property of the common man has no security in the present day Kerala. We all are aware about what happened at Changanassery, where there was a clash between the SFI and ABVP students and people from outside and a dutiful Police Officer attained martyrdom while doing his duty. There was no real probe into the issue and before the Police could arrest any perpetrators the Home Minister, Kodiyeri Balakrishnan from Trivandrum has declared that the ABVP is behind the attack. Any sensible person would know that both SFI and ABVP people were involved in the attack and the Minister had declared as he did there was just to save activists of his party from getting arrested. Worse, the Police had arrested some very innocent people on charges of instigating violence and killing the Police Officer. The sad plight of those innocent people are really worrisome and creates a big question mark in the minds of the common men about the safety he or she has in the present scenario with the LDF, headed by CPI(M), in the Government. Though the Home Minister is not interested in doing anything to maintain peace and tranquility in the state, one could only wonder what drives his inner self to bring a lot of so-called "reforms" in the different jails in the state. One cant be blamed if he/she thinks that it is only better to be at some jails rather than being in the outside world in the present day Kerala state because this ministry has done a lot of things for the betterment of jails than anything else. Kudos Home Minster, Kudos.

One single Minister who stands out from the rest, even if more often for wrong reasons, is Mr.Sudhakaran. Within a short span of time as Minister he has become notorious with his childish remarks and joker-like expressions. He is certainly the buffoon of the cabinet and always makes some issues or the other for the lay people to laugh at. Though there are less number of people who doubts the person's integrity, there is a feeling among the masses that he is not eligible for the post of a Minister because he often makes the mockery of his position in the eyes of the public and to the outside world. A state like Kerala can hardly afford such a frivolously silly Minister. He often conceals his inefficiency through his loud stupid remarks on the officers and all his critics. Such a person is not at all fit to be a minister and its a ill-fate of the Malayalees that we have to endure such a ludicrously sick person as our Minister. It would be better for Mr.Sudhakaran to resign his position as Minister and take some position in his party - CPI(M) where he might find some people who can bear with his stupidity and might even have the great heart to hail him as the greatest candid leader ever and also anoint him as the savior of the downtrodden and the voice of the voice-less common man.

This Government has stretched the limit of the endurance of the common people - there is no governance, there is no order, there is no peace, there is no development, there is no security for the life and property of the common man, and of course there is no aravana at Sabarimala. This writer, with the hope of being the "voice of the voice less", though for a very small time period, just wants to tell this government one thing - if you don't know how to govern, then just GET LOST.