Indian cricket fans need to mature
The International Cricket Council (ICC) could not have found a better place to host the 2011 World Cup than the subcontinent, with India playing host to the bulk of the matches..
It is understood that India matches will be played to packed stadiums. The real challenge is to fill up stadiums for the non-India matches. Only if there are sizeable crowds for these games can we claim to have matured as a cricket-watching nation.. Take the FIFA World Cup: not only were matches involving South Africa well-attended, but most matches were played to sizeable crowds across the country in June-July 2010.
Unless India's public embraces the Cup in totality, filling venues across the spectrum, it is difficult for us to push home the argument that India is world cricket's true centre of gravity. Certainly it is the hub of cricket finance and also perhaps of new age innovation as in the IPL. But a mature cricket-viewing public, as we find in Australia or England, is still to be a reality in India.
The non-India clashes like England versus South Africa or Australia versus New Zealand is important and cricket fans in India should throng the stadiums for these matches too. Unless this happens, the event can hardly be labeled a successful spectacle and India as cricket's true home.
Interestingly, Indian cricket fans are faced with stiff competition from their Bangladeshi counterparts. Once tournament tickets went on sale in Bangladesh on January 2, the entire nation went into a tizzy to buy up passes. Within 48 hours the entire inventory of tickets was sold out, indication enough of the cricket craze across the border.
In India, on the other hand, organisers have found it difficult to sell inventories of non-India games and have resorted to innovative ways of filling up stadiums. The most obvious of these techniques is to hand out free tickets to schoolchildren, a practice that has almost become a norm at the VCA stadium in Nagpur, one of the country's best cricket venues. Even when India played South Africa in a much-awaited Test series in February 2010, VCA officials were forced to distribute free tickets in schools to ensure the stadium was at least a third full. This was because during the first two days of the match there were no more than 1,000 spectators in a stadium of 55,000 capacity.
This gives rise to the question as to when will India's cricket-lovers mature?
India can win
For cricket fanatics in the subcontinent the greatest show on earth has kicked off. For the next month and a half, the cricket World Cup will be omnipresent. All the cricket lovers in India are hyper excited. This is India's best chance to take home the trophy in a long while. In the years since its dismal performance in the 2007 World Cup, it has successfully achieved what few teams manage - a gradual, careful renewal, bringing in new faces, striking the right balance between precocious talent and experience. The selectors have really done a wonderful job. This time they indeed have behaved responsibly. It is clear that they are in a mood to see India win this World Cup. They have done an excellent job by including Gautam Gambhir, Virat Kohli, Yusuf Pathan, Suresh Raina in the ODI line-up, all. The bowling did appear to be our weakness, with excessive reliance on Zaheer Khan. But if the warm-up games are anything to go by, we might manage to become the winner. Our players displayed terrific form in the warm-up games. India played exceedingly well in the warm-up games and hence the expectation from the team has peaked. It is clear that our players are both physically and psychologically prepared to give their very best in the World Cup.
This World Cup is vital. It is hosted in a region where cricket has the most followers - and whose market, therefore, is the economic engine of the sport. This is probably Sachin Tendulkar's last opportunity to hold aloft the trophy.
M S Dhoni and his boys certainly go into the World Cup as one of the favourites. Fans, who till recently had expressed apprehensions, have now started to feel otherwise. They are looking forward to seeing India clinch the Cup. Will our cricketers live up to their expectations? Let's wait and see!
Can robot replace human warmth?
The Japanese are thinking of building advanced robot that will take care of the elderly people. This is tantamount to shirking one's responsibilities towards senior citizens. Taking care of the elderly cannot be left to a machine no matter how sophisticated and interactive it is. There are some people who are of the opinion that robot cannot replace the warmth of human companionship.
With the advent of industrial societies and disintegration of the joint family system, caring for the elderly has become a highly impersonal affair. An entire industry has emerged for providing old age services. Nursing homes, condominiums specifically designed for old people, professional caregiving services, etc, all give a sense of support. But the ugly truth is most people today do not have the time or the inclination to take care of the elderly in their families. The robot stems from the mindset that taking care of senior citizens is more of an obligation than a responsibility. This only represents a debasement of moral values.
The emphasis should be on devoting time to the elderly, not creating interactive robots for the task. Senior citizens should not be made to feel like social pariahs. Counting on a robot to provide companionship to the elderly because no one else has the time is downright insulting. These are not the values we would want to pass on to our children. Technology definitely has its uses, but it is hardly desirable to let it replace human interactions.
But there are some senior citizens who don't mind the company of robots instead of humans. Just as some elderly people are willing to be taken care of, many are unwilling to accept that they require help or too proud to be helped or just plain embarrassed when it comes to personal matters. In such situations, a robot could not only perform such functions but the very fact that it is not human could be an asset. Robots would provide a constant watchful eye and permit the old to live on their own, free of the demands of caregivers or a sense of indebtedness to their children.
The benefits could transform all our lives. Robots would give younger family members the choice to not invest in costly caregivers and to actually maximise the quality of the time they spend with their elderly relatives.
Thus the subject whether robot can be a substitute for human warmth is a debatable one.
Is India prepared if Pakistan attacks?
While India's economy is on course to rival or surpass China's growth rate this year, our neighbour Pakistan can lay claim to a rather different statistical feat. It now possesses the world's fastest expanding nuclear arsenal - and probably already has more nuclear weapons than the UK.
Indian attention has typically focussed on Pakistan's 100 or so deployed nuclear weapons. Pakistan - and its ally, the US - has gone to great lengths to reassure the world that the country's weapons are safe. The British had dispatched their nuclear safety technicians to Pakistan and they had voiced concerns about Pakistan's security controls.
Pakistan is now trying to build smaller, 'tactical' nuclear weapons for battlefield use to supplement its array of strategic weapons aimed at human settlements. We have special reason to worry about their having accumulated nuclear material because of the condition of state and military institutions in Pakistan.
When we think of Pakistan, we have our fixed reference points: entrenched generals, conspiratorial ISI, fanatical mullahs, jihadi extremists, corrupt and feeble civilian politicians.
Vulnerability of undemocratic or weakly democratic systems such as Pakistan's should be a thing of concern for us. It is the Pakistani state's vulnerabilities that pose the greatest danger. Its incarnation in terrorist forms should be of concern to Indians.
In recent times, Pakistan has suffered from sectarian violence as well as from natural disasters. Their economy has proved susceptible to global downturn. With more than half the population below the age of 19, unemployment is estimated at 15%, with much higher rates of underemployment. Although some of Pakistan's recent celebrity terrorists, such as David Headley and Faisal Shazad, are members of the elite, neither poor nor products of madrassas, a large, young population with time on its hands generally does spell political trouble.
If we have our Sangh Parivar, Pakistan is spawning a jihadi biradari. Both the Pakistani army and terrorist groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), for instance, recruit new members from the very same villages and areas in Punjab.
What if some of Pakistan's fissile tonnage were to slip into the hands of a group like LeT and, afloat a rubber dinghy or slung across a camel's back, make its way into an Indian city. Upon its detonation, what should - and could - our response be? Our military options are limited. To what extent are our leaders working to prepare public opinion, and build political consensus about how to respond?
What is to be done about Pakistan?
Pakistan is "the most dangerous country in the world", in the words of Bruce Riedel in a memo to President Bill Clinton back in 1998. Riedel is a former CIA officer and security affairs adviser to four US presidents. Now a Fellow at Brookings Institution, his latest book 'Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America and the Future of Global Jihad' is perhaps the most hair-raising tract on Pakistan written to date by an American.
What is to be done about Pakistan? Riedel offers a familiar list of steps needed by the US to continue engaging Pakistan, including encouraging democratic forces, helping strengthen its civilian institutions, and even making a case for Pakistan to get the kind of civilian nuclear deal that the US signed with India. But Riedel also buys the Pakistani argument that nothing can be done unless the Kashmir issue is resolved.
Such a resolution would make Pakistan a normal state that is not preoccupied with India. "It would also remove a major rationale for the army's disproportionate role in Pakistan's national security affairs," he asserts. Yet, in earlier pages he has himself elaborated how every time a solution to the Kashmir problem has been in sight some misadventure has been initiated from Pakistan to scuttle the process.
If a solution of the Kashmir dispute would indeed remove the rationale for the army remaining in power in Pakistan, why on earth should the army, benefiting fabulously as it does from exercising that power as Riedel notes, want a solution in Kashmir that allows peace to flower between India and Pakistan?
The last time an opportunity was in sight was in 2007 when back-channel talks between Pervez Musharraf and Manmohan Singh came within a whisker of a lasting solution. But along came the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. It was like the time when Musharraf himself had initiated the Kargil war while Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Nawaz Sharif were signing the Lahore accord in 1999 to facilitate peace.
But, no matter, Riedel has laid bare the reality of Pakistan. His book is a must read for political pundits who are interested in sub-continental affairs. Meanwhile, let's all hope that democrats in Pakistan have been watching Egypt's revolution closely.
Nuclear BlackmailPakistan has a facade of civilian rule for years while the military has wielded real power. Generals and colonels have carved out large slices of wealth for themselves and kept their fingers in as many lucrative pies as they can. Its military justifies its stranglehold on power by citing the threat of chaos that would be let loose by Islamic extremists. Opinion polls show actual support for Islamists among the people to be relatively low. It is a US ally supported by substantial economic and military largesse from Washington.
In Pakistan there is tension among ethnic groups that compete violently for space within that country. Pakistan also has major border dispute with its neighbour. Pakistan's military has encouraged radical extremism through its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) wing. Besides, Pakistan has a bomb.
Pakistan is "the most dangerous country in the world", in the words of Bruce Riedel in a memo to President Bill Clinton back in 1998. Riedel is a former CIA officer and security affairs adviser to four US presidents. Now a Fellow at Brookings Institution, his latest book Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America and the Future of Global Jihad is perhaps the most hair-raising tract on Pakistan written to date by an American.
Detailing how Pakistan's army has nurtured jihad for more than three decades, he warns: "An extremely powerful jihadist Frankenstein is now roaming the world." The monster has powerful protectors in Pakistan, "right up to the very top". It threatens not just India or the United States. It threatens the entire planet.
The Dr Frankenstein who began to create the demon was the late General Zia-ul Haq, a military dictator who was the first full-blown Islamist to rule Pakistan, says Riedel.
Meanwhile, American policy towards Pakistan has oscillated wildly between warm embrace, as under Richard Nixon and George W Bush, to more or less ineffective sanctions, as under George H W Bush and Bill Clinton. Throughout the relationship, the US has endorsed every Pakistani military dictator "despite the fact that they started wars with India and moved their country deeper into the jihadist fold".
The time has come to think the unthinkable. Riedel traces scenarios in which a jihadist takeover of Pakistan becomes possible. And then what? Such a regime will take control of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and the thing is no outsider, not even America, knows where most of them are located.
It appears as if Pakistan has held the world, especially India and the United States, at the gunpoint. Jihadi takeover aside, we are paralysed by nuclear blackmail.
The International Cricket Council (ICC) could not have found a better place to host the 2011 World Cup than the subcontinent, with India playing host to the bulk of the matches..
It is understood that India matches will be played to packed stadiums. The real challenge is to fill up stadiums for the non-India matches. Only if there are sizeable crowds for these games can we claim to have matured as a cricket-watching nation.. Take the FIFA World Cup: not only were matches involving South Africa well-attended, but most matches were played to sizeable crowds across the country in June-July 2010.
Unless India's public embraces the Cup in totality, filling venues across the spectrum, it is difficult for us to push home the argument that India is world cricket's true centre of gravity. Certainly it is the hub of cricket finance and also perhaps of new age innovation as in the IPL. But a mature cricket-viewing public, as we find in Australia or England, is still to be a reality in India.
The non-India clashes like England versus South Africa or Australia versus New Zealand is important and cricket fans in India should throng the stadiums for these matches too. Unless this happens, the event can hardly be labeled a successful spectacle and India as cricket's true home.
Interestingly, Indian cricket fans are faced with stiff competition from their Bangladeshi counterparts. Once tournament tickets went on sale in Bangladesh on January 2, the entire nation went into a tizzy to buy up passes. Within 48 hours the entire inventory of tickets was sold out, indication enough of the cricket craze across the border.
In India, on the other hand, organisers have found it difficult to sell inventories of non-India games and have resorted to innovative ways of filling up stadiums. The most obvious of these techniques is to hand out free tickets to schoolchildren, a practice that has almost become a norm at the VCA stadium in Nagpur, one of the country's best cricket venues. Even when India played South Africa in a much-awaited Test series in February 2010, VCA officials were forced to distribute free tickets in schools to ensure the stadium was at least a third full. This was because during the first two days of the match there were no more than 1,000 spectators in a stadium of 55,000 capacity.
This gives rise to the question as to when will India's cricket-lovers mature?
India can win
For cricket fanatics in the subcontinent the greatest show on earth has kicked off. For the next month and a half, the cricket World Cup will be omnipresent. All the cricket lovers in India are hyper excited. This is India's best chance to take home the trophy in a long while. In the years since its dismal performance in the 2007 World Cup, it has successfully achieved what few teams manage - a gradual, careful renewal, bringing in new faces, striking the right balance between precocious talent and experience. The selectors have really done a wonderful job. This time they indeed have behaved responsibly. It is clear that they are in a mood to see India win this World Cup. They have done an excellent job by including Gautam Gambhir, Virat Kohli, Yusuf Pathan, Suresh Raina in the ODI line-up, all. The bowling did appear to be our weakness, with excessive reliance on Zaheer Khan. But if the warm-up games are anything to go by, we might manage to become the winner. Our players displayed terrific form in the warm-up games. India played exceedingly well in the warm-up games and hence the expectation from the team has peaked. It is clear that our players are both physically and psychologically prepared to give their very best in the World Cup.
This World Cup is vital. It is hosted in a region where cricket has the most followers - and whose market, therefore, is the economic engine of the sport. This is probably Sachin Tendulkar's last opportunity to hold aloft the trophy.
M S Dhoni and his boys certainly go into the World Cup as one of the favourites. Fans, who till recently had expressed apprehensions, have now started to feel otherwise. They are looking forward to seeing India clinch the Cup. Will our cricketers live up to their expectations? Let's wait and see!
Can robot replace human warmth?
The Japanese are thinking of building advanced robot that will take care of the elderly people. This is tantamount to shirking one's responsibilities towards senior citizens. Taking care of the elderly cannot be left to a machine no matter how sophisticated and interactive it is. There are some people who are of the opinion that robot cannot replace the warmth of human companionship.
With the advent of industrial societies and disintegration of the joint family system, caring for the elderly has become a highly impersonal affair. An entire industry has emerged for providing old age services. Nursing homes, condominiums specifically designed for old people, professional caregiving services, etc, all give a sense of support. But the ugly truth is most people today do not have the time or the inclination to take care of the elderly in their families. The robot stems from the mindset that taking care of senior citizens is more of an obligation than a responsibility. This only represents a debasement of moral values.
The emphasis should be on devoting time to the elderly, not creating interactive robots for the task. Senior citizens should not be made to feel like social pariahs. Counting on a robot to provide companionship to the elderly because no one else has the time is downright insulting. These are not the values we would want to pass on to our children. Technology definitely has its uses, but it is hardly desirable to let it replace human interactions.
But there are some senior citizens who don't mind the company of robots instead of humans. Just as some elderly people are willing to be taken care of, many are unwilling to accept that they require help or too proud to be helped or just plain embarrassed when it comes to personal matters. In such situations, a robot could not only perform such functions but the very fact that it is not human could be an asset. Robots would provide a constant watchful eye and permit the old to live on their own, free of the demands of caregivers or a sense of indebtedness to their children.
The benefits could transform all our lives. Robots would give younger family members the choice to not invest in costly caregivers and to actually maximise the quality of the time they spend with their elderly relatives.
Thus the subject whether robot can be a substitute for human warmth is a debatable one.
Is India prepared if Pakistan attacks?
While India's economy is on course to rival or surpass China's growth rate this year, our neighbour Pakistan can lay claim to a rather different statistical feat. It now possesses the world's fastest expanding nuclear arsenal - and probably already has more nuclear weapons than the UK.
Indian attention has typically focussed on Pakistan's 100 or so deployed nuclear weapons. Pakistan - and its ally, the US - has gone to great lengths to reassure the world that the country's weapons are safe. The British had dispatched their nuclear safety technicians to Pakistan and they had voiced concerns about Pakistan's security controls.
Pakistan is now trying to build smaller, 'tactical' nuclear weapons for battlefield use to supplement its array of strategic weapons aimed at human settlements. We have special reason to worry about their having accumulated nuclear material because of the condition of state and military institutions in Pakistan.
When we think of Pakistan, we have our fixed reference points: entrenched generals, conspiratorial ISI, fanatical mullahs, jihadi extremists, corrupt and feeble civilian politicians.
Vulnerability of undemocratic or weakly democratic systems such as Pakistan's should be a thing of concern for us. It is the Pakistani state's vulnerabilities that pose the greatest danger. Its incarnation in terrorist forms should be of concern to Indians.
In recent times, Pakistan has suffered from sectarian violence as well as from natural disasters. Their economy has proved susceptible to global downturn. With more than half the population below the age of 19, unemployment is estimated at 15%, with much higher rates of underemployment. Although some of Pakistan's recent celebrity terrorists, such as David Headley and Faisal Shazad, are members of the elite, neither poor nor products of madrassas, a large, young population with time on its hands generally does spell political trouble.
If we have our Sangh Parivar, Pakistan is spawning a jihadi biradari. Both the Pakistani army and terrorist groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), for instance, recruit new members from the very same villages and areas in Punjab.
What if some of Pakistan's fissile tonnage were to slip into the hands of a group like LeT and, afloat a rubber dinghy or slung across a camel's back, make its way into an Indian city. Upon its detonation, what should - and could - our response be? Our military options are limited. To what extent are our leaders working to prepare public opinion, and build political consensus about how to respond?
What is to be done about Pakistan?
Pakistan is "the most dangerous country in the world", in the words of Bruce Riedel in a memo to President Bill Clinton back in 1998. Riedel is a former CIA officer and security affairs adviser to four US presidents. Now a Fellow at Brookings Institution, his latest book 'Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America and the Future of Global Jihad' is perhaps the most hair-raising tract on Pakistan written to date by an American.
What is to be done about Pakistan? Riedel offers a familiar list of steps needed by the US to continue engaging Pakistan, including encouraging democratic forces, helping strengthen its civilian institutions, and even making a case for Pakistan to get the kind of civilian nuclear deal that the US signed with India. But Riedel also buys the Pakistani argument that nothing can be done unless the Kashmir issue is resolved.
Such a resolution would make Pakistan a normal state that is not preoccupied with India. "It would also remove a major rationale for the army's disproportionate role in Pakistan's national security affairs," he asserts. Yet, in earlier pages he has himself elaborated how every time a solution to the Kashmir problem has been in sight some misadventure has been initiated from Pakistan to scuttle the process.
If a solution of the Kashmir dispute would indeed remove the rationale for the army remaining in power in Pakistan, why on earth should the army, benefiting fabulously as it does from exercising that power as Riedel notes, want a solution in Kashmir that allows peace to flower between India and Pakistan?
The last time an opportunity was in sight was in 2007 when back-channel talks between Pervez Musharraf and Manmohan Singh came within a whisker of a lasting solution. But along came the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. It was like the time when Musharraf himself had initiated the Kargil war while Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Nawaz Sharif were signing the Lahore accord in 1999 to facilitate peace.
But, no matter, Riedel has laid bare the reality of Pakistan. His book is a must read for political pundits who are interested in sub-continental affairs. Meanwhile, let's all hope that democrats in Pakistan have been watching Egypt's revolution closely.
Nuclear BlackmailPakistan has a facade of civilian rule for years while the military has wielded real power. Generals and colonels have carved out large slices of wealth for themselves and kept their fingers in as many lucrative pies as they can. Its military justifies its stranglehold on power by citing the threat of chaos that would be let loose by Islamic extremists. Opinion polls show actual support for Islamists among the people to be relatively low. It is a US ally supported by substantial economic and military largesse from Washington.
In Pakistan there is tension among ethnic groups that compete violently for space within that country. Pakistan also has major border dispute with its neighbour. Pakistan's military has encouraged radical extremism through its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) wing. Besides, Pakistan has a bomb.
Pakistan is "the most dangerous country in the world", in the words of Bruce Riedel in a memo to President Bill Clinton back in 1998. Riedel is a former CIA officer and security affairs adviser to four US presidents. Now a Fellow at Brookings Institution, his latest book Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America and the Future of Global Jihad is perhaps the most hair-raising tract on Pakistan written to date by an American.
Detailing how Pakistan's army has nurtured jihad for more than three decades, he warns: "An extremely powerful jihadist Frankenstein is now roaming the world." The monster has powerful protectors in Pakistan, "right up to the very top". It threatens not just India or the United States. It threatens the entire planet.
The Dr Frankenstein who began to create the demon was the late General Zia-ul Haq, a military dictator who was the first full-blown Islamist to rule Pakistan, says Riedel.
Meanwhile, American policy towards Pakistan has oscillated wildly between warm embrace, as under Richard Nixon and George W Bush, to more or less ineffective sanctions, as under George H W Bush and Bill Clinton. Throughout the relationship, the US has endorsed every Pakistani military dictator "despite the fact that they started wars with India and moved their country deeper into the jihadist fold".
The time has come to think the unthinkable. Riedel traces scenarios in which a jihadist takeover of Pakistan becomes possible. And then what? Such a regime will take control of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and the thing is no outsider, not even America, knows where most of them are located.
It appears as if Pakistan has held the world, especially India and the United States, at the gunpoint. Jihadi takeover aside, we are paralysed by nuclear blackmail.
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