Asiad in Delhi ? No No No

After defiance on the issue of term limits and retirement ages in NSAs, Randhir Singh is now requesting the government to approve IOC’s bid for 2018 Asian games in ...you guessed it... Delhi!!! Poor guy has been left alone after his close ally; a Mr. Suresh came under rough weather. Now aside from the fact that no procedural change has come about to rectify the mistakes of CWG 2010 (Construction delays, Corruption, too many seats to sponsors etc.) and also that hosting such events are glorified ego trips which are no big a waste of money than Lavish weddings and the blowout-preventer of the Deepwater Horizon, there is another strong reason that I personally oppose the bid for Delhi.

Why does Delhi always get to host big Sports events? Not just multi-sport events, F1, Golf … the list goes on

Now, the supporters of Delhi (usually residents of the city) come up with only one argument:

• Delhi has had the advantage of building a lot of infrastructure. Shouldn’t we save a few billion dollars to the nation by staging this in Delhi?

There is of course an unspoken-yet strong and valid argument

• All the decision makers (senior central government and sports officials) live in Delhi and want easy access to the events in addition to the free passes/invitations they will get. Not to mention easy oversight (they will not be easily cheated of their share in the kickbacks) of the projects.

There is no doubt that, as of now, Delhi is the best equipped city in the country to host such international events. Countries less vast and diverse than ours have had event hosting shared between different cities. Still, Delhi continues to be a pampered city, because of the 2^nd argument mentioned above.

Rs 70, 000 Crores (~15.5 Bn USD) were spent to host CWG 2010 in a lot of infrastructure Delhi .Beijing 2008 cost 36 billion USD even with it’s infra (which gets a lot of medals). So is there any validity in current infra argument? Also, in case there are any savings, the powers that matter will find ways to spend money e.g. Grander ceremonies; Big ticket performers, larger screens, louder fireworks.There is no saving coming out of hosting such events. If we are doing them ,w e might as well spread the development around.

So in conclusion:

India should decide; no more hosting for at least a decade. Money is better spent in building infrastructure: Stadia where locals can play and improve their game long after they are built. Even if we do host any event, keep it outside Delhi. Delhi is the capital of; and not the whole of, India.

And then of course, there is still the second argument…

Mouse

Some days ago, my dad came to me with a complaint.

“I have been telling you take more care of your laptop. You have never listened, now see it is spoilt”.

Now even though I agree that my laptop needed more care than it got, my father would always find my effort less than desirable. He wanted me to treat a laptop like a desktop with its own proper place. So when he said it was spoilt, it was with doubt and surprise than I came over.

I - “What happened?”

Father – “Look nothing is working”

It turned out that the USB mouse was not fully responding. Flexing the wire revealed that there was some problem with the wire near where it went into the mouse. So the solution was easy; open the cover, cut the damaged portion and reattach the wires. So a 20~ 30 rs fix would put the mouse back into action.

But when I went to the electronics repair guy near my house, there was a shock awaiting me. The shopkeeper said that the work was pain and suggested I buy a new one instead. I imagined that he wanted to sell me a new one and make more money. So, I asked him if he had a new one. He did not and suggested that it is cheaper to buy anew one. That left me with lot of questions.

1. This guy is not a part seller and is exclusively a repairer. If he sent me away, how does he make money?
2. Did he really expect me to take his advice? Do people take such advices?

Almost everyone with a portable music player has gone through a new head/earphone every year. Sometimes I suspect whether the manufacturers deliberately design them to fail with weak connections and thin wires. The internet reveals that they can be easily repaired by anyone with a solder gun. But they are still thrown away due to lack of will and lack for repairers. We criticize “the western culture” for its “use and throw” behaviour. Lacking the income of those countries, what justification do we have for this wasteful conduct? Or is it another example of the haves –have nots difference in India?

PS: If anyone knows of a repairer in South-west Bangalore who will repair my USB mouse (and broken headphones), please leave a comment with the contact.

FIFA world cup 2010 : opinions and lessons

 Yesterday, the FIFA world cup 2010 as an event one is part of, finished. The Vuvuzelas have fallen silent. While 3 more matches are held to decide the Winner, they do not matter to the Spectator in my dad and me. Those who read my previous post will know that we at home cannot watch any late night matches and hence, the remaining part of the tournament will just be a statistic picked in the newspapers. So the play have been played and seen. After nearly a month of football, the 32 teams in the FIFA World Cup 2010 have been whittled down to just four. Here is Vinay wishing good luck for the teams and emotional strength to the Fans. Snejder and Robben decided to do bulk of the work after half time against Brazil. Schweinsteiger shut down the middle against Argentina yesterday .Germany, Netherlands and Spain will be hoping to be the first European team to win a World Cup outside of Europe while Uruguay struggle to keep alive South American interest in the World Cup. In a convoluted way, if the Dutch win, they can be claimed to be playing on home turf of a past colony. May there be more interest in the ball and less on the kicks and falls than the Brazil-Netherlands match. Paul the Octopus has picked up quite a big reputation. 2 more right guesses and Paul will become a huge urban legend. I do not know which species Paul is and hence, if he will survive till the next cup, but 2 of the 4 teams now remaining, which have to end up on the opposite end of his pick, will have additional pressure. Even though, there are 2 previous winners in the match-up, it will be nice to see a country who wins the world cup for the first time for a change. The world cup was good overall for a general viewer. Along with shock upsets I saw high-quality football.  We saw politics too with Angela Merkel passionately supporting the German national team in a bid to divert attention from her problems back home. If only Blatter and friends were to allow technology use. Sigh!

So while, FIFA needs to learn to use technology and instant replay from its brethren associations, ICC itself has a lot to learn from FIFA. Firstly, participation, please check the following table comparing 2010 FIFA World Cup and 2011 Cricket World Cup

	2010 FIFA World Cup	2007 Cricket World Cup	2011 Cricket World Cup
No of qualified teams	32	6	14
No of matches	64	51	49
No of winners (all time) before event	7	5	5
No of Editions till event	19	9	10
No of Teams in the 10th Edition	16	14	14
No of matches in the 10th Edition	38	49	49
No of winners (all time) before the 10th Edition	5	5	5

Teams like USA, Chile, Ghana and Slovakia have shown performance in this edition and they had done that because of the opportunity given. The country men visiting the venue and sitting at home get to watch such inspiring performances increasing the popularity of the already well spread game. Now instead of playing the same ICC Full Members again and again the spread of cricket could have been increased with a higher number of qualified teams in the ODI world cup. The nature of Cricket; being the game of glorious uncertainties; creates a higher justification for allowing more teams to participate in the event. At a state, FIFA was getting more teams to play the highest tournament than ICC is doing. Instead of following FIFA, after India and Pakistan get kicked out in Group Stage, we have a less inclusive format of 2003 with 5 lesser number of matches than 2003. The reason: each team gets to play a minimum of six matches even if they are ruled out of the tournament due to early defeats. So, even with horrible performances the money-bringing Asian teams will play 6 matches and thus provide more money for ICC through Sponsorship and Television. ICC with such strong commercial focus talks of a zero-tolerance policy on corruption. It thus expects players to put the interest of the game above money while doing the reverse itself.

Football : Game with Great Players and Bad administators

I did not know that my father was such a huge fan of football. Born some time before Independence, he belongs to the generation who believed in contentment and “Early to bed…”. So all these years either there was no channel showing the FIFA world cup or I was not home to know of Dad’s interest in the “world’s favorite game”. Until, that is, around a week ago when he asked the channel number for ESPN. Some time later, my mom starts complaining about the buzzing sound which was giving here a headache. My father was enjoying the match, Vuvuzelas or not. One huge relief for mother is that the scheduling of matches means that only the earlier ones can be seen at reasonable IST times. Did I mention my father believes in the early to bed maxim? 

 Having become an armchair expert of football through the magic of TV and internet, I have to admire the players. Cristiano Ronaldo and Fabio Coentrao’s dribbling and runs with ball in the North Korea match (btw Portugal is my father’s favorite team), USA’s attitude and sharp passes and Argentina’s talent pool. The surprisingly good performance has been from New Zealanders. In yesterday’s match against the defending champions, the all whites (weird name given that their cricket team is called black caps) made the perfect start as Smeltz scored to give them a seventh-minute lead. While Italian players were moving around at different paces , New Zealand defenders kept their poise, their shape and their spirit to create what is arguably, the greatest result in New Zealand's Football history. Given that they belong to a 11 member Oceania Football Confederation, none of whom have a professional domestic league , and rarely play the more famous teams, people are increasing their praise along with the insistence that OFC should merge with Asian Football Confederation else, New Zealand should follow Australia and join AFC . I strongly support the Idea of a merger more than a quit and move, though I believe OFC should look the other way. The 10 member CONMEBOL is currently the strongest confederation but the members, all strong football playing nations, do not get enough slots in world cup due to low numbers while UEFA; whose members are yet to win a World cup outside their home continent, continues the imperial domination of the sport. A 21 member joint confederation will now mean New Zealand gets to play the likes of Brazil and Argentina at least once every 2 years .The OFC members will now have much greater football participation; players and audience alike while current CONMEBOL gets more say in the game to help reform the administration and get more World cup slotting .

 Talking of administration, what is Blatter’s and Fifa administration’s problem with technology in sport? Match officials’ manager and FIFA head of refereeing, has said refereeing is top class with some “human errors”. I admire FIFA referees. They have to work in high stress situation and 3 men are forced to decide on a situation in a game which requires a lot more. Without talking more about the well documented problem, a piece of news. The International Football Association Board (IFAB) is the body that determines the Laws of football. Here FIFA has 4 votes while the 4 countries of UK have one each. In their meeting in March, England and Scotland Football associations, the only ones with a proper league, supported “the idea of investigating experiments into the use of technology on goal-lines” while others opposed for reasons only known to god and them.  In May, the holy Grand Dukes allowed a non-compulsory trial to put 2 more additional referees behind goal line. The only possible justification FIFA could have is reducing the value of referees and creating unemployment .  

Fraud on Ebay

Pierre Omidyar started it to sell a broken laser pointer. Now a wonderful outlets for Fakes .




















Now let us see if all the corporations shouting about fakes /copycats get this fellow corporation to take of the fake sellers making money for it.