It's a Teeny Tiny World

What’s the difference between being in at adjacent room and being on the other side of the globe? Is it the distance? Is it the time taken to send a message across? Is it the proximity or the 3000 miles that separate them? Or is it all just psychological?
With the internet around and mobile connectivity reaching the farthest nooks and crannies of the once huge world, it has virtually shrunk it to the size of, well… a mobile phone??? People know places even before visiting them. We even get back from our visits only to check them out on wikipedia! It's also so weird how people make friends over the phone and on the net more easilythan they might in person!!!
Is there a concept of home sickness? How far is far if we can speak to anyone we want to in the blink of a eye or reach any place on the earth we want to in just about 20 hours? Now, ‘so far removed’ from my family I feel no home sickness. I have not spoken to them, I have not met them but they every small thing I’ve done since I landed here in Atlanta. Not only them, the whole family and the second circle too are up-to-date as well.
With the internet, we don’t have to remember anything. There is no need to remember the Avagadro’s number. We can find out the capital of French Polynesia in a matter of seconds. And oh... the most brilliant of all you needn’t remember the thousand complicated recepies that mom taught you before sending you to the ‘ghar ke bahar’.
As I write Navin’s calling up his friend in the other room to say he’s fine after the thunderstorm. Later, he calls India to tell his mom that he’s doing fine...

Photographie

Long gone are the days where we bought new Colour Film Roll 400's before we went out on excursions. No more AA batteries. We don't have to wait for ages before we view the snaps we'd taken. All this courtesy: the power of electronics. Digital cameras have made photography available to the masses. The USP of most networking sites are their photo managers. In fact they are the very essence of portals like Orkut, Facebook and Flickr.


Photography has become so ingrained in people's lives that they now look to buy cameras that can be used as mobile phones rather than vice versa. The time spent posing for the camera has obviously increased many fold. They are great memoirs of our past actions, they record every detail, every action; good or bad. Nonetheless, there comes a point when you wonder whether posing, or acting, and sometimes missing the real event to capture it on screen is actually worth the effort. I was in this dilemma before my trip to Shimoga last weekend. Having clicked close to 7000 snaps with my Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ5, I was beginning to loose the motivation I had when I had started off.


Hoping that my love for this hobby wouldn't end so early, on Friday I read all I could about photography,cameras, aperture controls, shutter controls, DOF (depth of field) and decided that my main intention of the trip would be to spend time experimenting, while donning the role of a shutterbug. The initial experience with manually setting up the aperture and shutter speed was a bit taxing but as I got the hang of it, came to realise that I wasn't actually doing justice to the camera all these years. It opened up a whole new range of possibilities that I could experiment with.


This tiny bit of learning has made photography so much more interesting, and has thus given me that much more motivation to learn about it. It is a very intriguing hobby. Now, this has also given me an air about myself that I am no longer junta (that I was too, till last Friday). Now, I've attained Nirvana.

Click on the pictures to see what I mean

































Notice VIBGYOR.

















































I almost overlooked the most important aspect of all. Patience. I might not have enough to catch fish, I might not have enough to crack CAT but I did have enough to wait for the right moment, and that's what made all the difference!

Failure Fallout

It's quite sometime now since India was knocked out in the first round of the Cricket World Cup '07. (If you haven't noticed by now, most of my articles are on cricket) The whole country was reeling under the tremendous pressure of loosing to Bangladesh, was it, it's so long ago my memory fails me.

There was lot of talk in the media about cricket not being given enough impetus at the 'grass root' level. All the channels, experts panels, came out with the same conclusion. The aftermath of this debacle was almost the same as any other: get bitten, analyse factors that can't be changed, chit chat on screen, analyse a little more, fill the media and newsprint, forget, and get bitten again to complete rounds of the same cycle.

Reversal of this trend needed something out of the ordinary. Kapil's polarised views with the BCCI, resulted in a rift and hence a conscious effort on it's part to regain most of it's lost players to the ICL (the breakaway group initiated by the former skipper). BCCI, with all it's monetary muscle and influential clout was able to rope in the biggest stars of the country to promote this new league. For the record, Indian cricket earns ICC 75% of it's global revenues. The SRKs, the Mallya's and even the starlet Preity Zinta have been in the news in the past few days, not for their acting skills, not tabloid controversies but for promoting a sport!!! As shocking as it may sound, they was invested more 150 Cr between them to buy, yes buy players for the teams they represent. I wonder what happened to all the controversy of the BCCI ordering King Khan against appearing for matches that India played.

Let's come to the chunk of the whole imbroglio. Dhoni: $1.5 mill, McGrath:sold at base price, Yousuf Pathan: $0.475 mill, Ponting: $0.400 mill, Manoj Tiwari: $0.675 mill (who the hell is he)............. (this has been intentionally left incomplete and is to be figured out by the reader).

Cricket is becoming more of a business than ever before. It has stretched the limits of professionalism to business. Looking back in retrospect, it doesn't seem wrong that Sachin, Dravid and Saurav were getting this money with their ad campaigns, that they were reprimanded and lambasted for. After all, why are professionals called so? To earn money. It so happens that India is so passionate about this sport that it fails to look at these people as professionals.

But in the end, this move, that I credit to Kapil Dev, has done everyone a world of good. It gives young cricketers in India a chance to play with the likes of Ponting, Lara, Pollock. It gives the oldies a chance to play the game they have so loved. The money invested helps keeps the economy going. The cricket grounds will be in better shape. The hospitality industry will improve and so will tourism. The fallouts are numerous and, I'm glad, are also positive.