stumped !!

Let's go forward 60 years in time ...

It was the summer of 2067. Sunny was ecstatic. He just finished his fourth grade and was eagerly waiting for his summer holidays. The whole three months. He thought he would play some football, fly kites and learn swimming. But only one thing worried him. The assignment his Fifth grade teacher gave him for the summer holidays. He wondered what the fifth grade had in store for him if he had to solve assignments even before school started. But he thought the assignment was fun. Who would not? If it was about games. But there was one problem. He had never heard about the game. In fact, he could not pronounce it. He tried spelling it out to his watch-cum-pda for any search results the internet would give him. Nope, none he could find. How would he, after all he was spelling it as "kraikate", "chrichet" and finally he got it right. Boom popped the result on his PDA. The first result said "Cricket - Extinct game in India since April 2007". "Oh ! Was it something from the early 21st century? Then Grandpa would be able to help me", Sunny thought and added to his list of reminders to ask his grandfather about the game when he visits him in summer holidays.

A month later, Sunny's reminder beeped and he went straight to his grandpa and asked him "Grandpa, what is see--aar--ai--see--kay--ee-tee?".
His granddad was surprised. How did this kid know about the game now extinct for many years? "Tell me about the game, I gotta know about this one" Sunny said.

So the old man started telling about the great game of kings. How the game evolved from a royal one, played by select people, to a common man's game running in the bloods of every kid ever born in the late 20th century in the country, and how without holding a pen you could graduate from school, but without holding a bat and ball in your life, you would not be called complete. How all the kids used to spend all their pocket money in buying cricket balls, how they utilized the old, unused furniture turning them into things called bats, how the walls in their rooms never needed paint, because every year a new cricket hero's poster replaced an earlier one and the "new look" stayed forever.

He spoke to Sunny about how, as a kid, he bunked school to watch live cricket matches, sometimes missing meals, having to lie to teachers about sudden stomach-ache and then run back home to see India batting and applaud for every run they made and curse the opposition team for every wicket India lost.

Sunny was amazed at the kind of passion with which his grandfather was talking about the game. He had seen a movie called Gandhi once, where people had the same look on their face when India was declared independent. That same look appeared on the old man's face. Sunny thought the game should really have meant to lot to his grandpa.

The old man continued telling tales of all the heroes ever born in the cricket world and how many of them were from India and how every four years he would cancel all his appointments for a one month period to watch all the World Cup matches, live. He went on for hours before Sunny interrupted "But grandpa, how did a game with such unbelievable craze become extinct? What happened?"

His grandfather laughed hysterically and then started.. "Sunny, it was in 2007. The Indian team was enjoying Godly status, each one of the players was a hero. People worshipped them, prayed for their victory and they were equally capable too. Some of them were the best in the history of the game and eyes around the world were on them. The world cup started. The very first match, these demi-gods showed how even Gods can be mortal. Not because they were overpowered by other immortals but because they could not use their capabilities. They showed no passion whatsoever. In the third game again, the team collapsed like a pack of broken cards built on quick sand. It was shocking. The team was out of the world cup in the very first stage. A billion hearts broke. And people don't forget, Sunny, their hopes were shattered, and from that day nobody ever spoke of the game. The players returned and the democratic government that we had, made a wise decision that the game and the team were given too much importance and if only the people had shown the same interest and concentration on education, we would have had 100% literacy - instead of everybody knowing the know-hows of Duckworth-Lewis rule, they would be kowing that the English alphabet had 26 letters. So cricket was out, never to be played again. And that's how the game has ceased to exist".

Eventually Sunny completed his assignment and learnt how to pronounce the word too :-)

Coming back to present, we now know what the Greeks went through when Achilles was hit right in the heel. But the Greeks won back then. They had something to cheer about. And we? Nothing !!

the lazy weekend

It was a lazy Saturday morning and I was thinking of ways to spend my unplanned weekend when I opened my browser to start the day checking mails, a usual ritual since almost three years now. As usual, the home page google.com opened up on my favorite browser. Not many of us would have google.com as their home page, I assume. The reason being obvious. How many of us have creative things to search for, the first time your browser starts up. Obviously I am not one of them. But I chose google because of the light interface and the time it takes to come up. It is fast and also doubles up as an indicator of the internet connection speed, so I know how many mail accounts I can check in ten minutes :)

So this fine day, March 17th, as I was going through the same ritual, I observed an interesting logo with three green leaves, on the google home page. Now a new logo on Google home page would mean that the day was special in some way. Any google
holiday logo fan would know that. Their holidays logos are so famous! Intrigued by the green, simple logo, I thought I would find out what it was about. A single click on the logo told me it was St. Patrick's day.

St. Patrick's day?? Wow, I thought. All I knew was that there was a St. Patrick's Cathedral two blocks away from the place I stay and I guessed there would be some kind of celebration there and I was happy I had something to do on this lazy weekend. Little more googling helped me discover it was lot more than just celebrations that mark the day. The Cathedral hosts one of the biggest parades in New York on St. Patrick's day and millions of people witness it, as I understood. Wow, that would be a thrilling start for the weekend, I thought.

So, in an hour, I set out to witness the awesome parade myself. So many people. I have never seen such crowd. An India-Pakistan cricket match would have come close but I haven't seen that one either :). The Avenue was closed both ends and groups marching in the parade with music, discipline and cheering from the audience. Green was the color of the day. Irish was the theme. Green hats, Green t-shirts, Irish flags, captions, logos were seen everywhere. It was fun to be witnessing such a grand event. Various colleges, schools, offices, departments had their groups marching in the parade. The whole city was right there, playing audience to this grandiose event.

I wondered how I did not know about an event of this grandeur, before hand. May be it was so obvious, no one needed to discuss it. Now, the sale of green t-shirts the night before makes sense.

Let the pictures describe more . . .







How much would I have missed if google was not my homepage!! :)

Coming back to cricket, the world cup has started and already half of the Indian fans have lost hope. The rest of the matches are for the other half.

Which half are you in?

charts maketh us

Personality charts.

Not one, not two, but there are hundreds of these charts that tell us what kind of persons we are and what our traits are, based on the date we were born, based on our favorite color and some of them even based on how much sugar we add to our coffee. No matter what kind of person you really are, these lists have some good ones for you!!

One such chart divides the dates in the year into groups named after trees. Say, if you are born in the first ten days of June, you have fallen from the Cedar tree, and there is a list of traits associated with persons falling from Cedar trees - honest, outgoing, enjoys animals (??)

One more similar list groups people into fruits based on the birth date and with a completely different set of features.

Imagine the same guy “falling from an Olive tree” based on one list and “is an apple” based on another similar chart based on fruits. What would that mean? Is he a mismatch :( having fallen from an Olive tree but is an “apple” instead of being an olive? Which of the characteristics apply to him? What if one of the lists actually mentions that he “hates contradictions and arguments”?
Wouldn’t it be even worse that his actual classification among different charts is itself a contradiction, leave alone the rest of the traits. He is already one confused person while “confused” is not on the list of traits in any of the charts!!

If you fell from a Cypress tree you tend to fight for social causes, eat less, are keen on keeping fit and so on. And what would a believer do? Yes, he would start raising his voice over how rats are fed high calorie food in a particular household leading to high cancer in rats, assuming it is a social cause and he has to fight for it, just because it is mentioned in his “list”!! He might as well really eat less and start working out which would make matters worse :(

Not impossible!!

But preparing these lists is way too easy. I have figured two ways of how such charts are prepared.

One - Make a list of adjectives like sensitive, truthful, passionate, empathetic, independent, humorous, courageous, tolerant and all possible synonyms of these, group them and lo, you have a chart for yourself. Attach some date ranges to each of the groups. If you want a chart based on favorite colors, you just have to attach a color to a group of synonyms, instead of the date range. Wasn’t that easy?

Two - This approach is a better one, because you can actually show it is true. For a particular date range, pick the list of famous people born in the date range, get the list of their traits - hard working, athletic, born leader etc and lo, for each date range you have a list of characteristics which are actually true.

So the next time someone says you are a great speaker, intellectual and an innovator just because you are born on February 12th, don’t fall for it. It is quite possible that the list was made from one of the approaches mentioned above. Abraham Lincoln was a great speaker born on the same day, after all. Not you.

Not that I fell for that list :)

What kind of a chart do you want to make?

Charts maketh us or we maketh charts? :)

limits and numbers !!

The numbers 2 and 3 started appearing predominantly these days. Might be the movie bug has caught me, but it’s true too.

This time the numbers with a slash in between, i.e., 2/3 - tell the number of cities in the US, to which I have been to. And that count also says how many of the three biggest cities in the US I have visited :) New York first and now Chicago is on the list after the fun-filled trip this weekend.

So many hurdles to the trip, first the snow storm postponing it, then flights getting delayed, cancelled but finally I could make it there.

The trip was thrilling - to see a beautiful city in full splendor, exciting - as it was my first trip outside NY, nostalgic - witnessing college life and meeting old friends and getting lost in long chats, adventurous - going on long trips in snow, cultural - visiting temples :), disappointing - missing trains and having to wait for hours together, and last but not the least, coincidental - again with the number 23, because that was the date I landed there :) There is a word called limit but seems like that does not apply to the coincidences that happen to me!!

Over all, it was a memorable trip and thanks to a bunch of friends who made the weekend all the more eventful!

And coming to the continuation of the story from the previous post, let me add to the story something: " . . . " that's all I have now in the story so far, just three more dots!! :)