Vivek’s Blog

As I promised, here is part 2. Part 1 was about my trip here. So let me tell you what happened after I got here.

Now, like you read, I got back Sunday evening. The house is pretty nice. The city is *all right* and I would stay at home most of the time anyway. Nothing compares to Bombay and New York so I won’t bother talking about the city. The first problem here is electricity, or rather, the lack of it. It disappears as and when it wants - on Wednesday and Thursday all day from morning to evening. Surprisingly, today there were only 3 times when the electricity went out and that too for less than 15 minutes. But other than today, it’s been bad. And it is particularly annoying when it goes off while I’m watching Scrubs or surfing the net. And if it happens during web-surfing, then it brings it’s own issue. Read on.
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Now I know that I failed to follow up on my “Broadband Farce India” entry but hey! I have a better chance now that I am using DataOne. I’ll write that part 2 once I get back to NY. For now, let’s move on with the horror stories series. It has 2 parts

So I got on board my flight at JFK on Thursday, December 22, 2005 at 9:35pm and the plane took off around 10pm. It landed at Frankfurt Aiport (Fraport) pretty much on time despite light fog. I was sitting around waiting for them to announce the boarding. They announced that the flight will be delayed by around an hour. I hated that. International Travel sucks as it is and delays make it worse. So the plane finally departed Fraport more than an hour behind schedule. Our pilot informed us that this was because they were expecting low-visibility conditions in New Delhi and so they had to switch aircraft. The one designated to fly to Delhi has issues with its low-visibility landing gear hence the delay. That was cool. The delay was just to ensure that we didn’t have landing problems.

So at around 2am, our flight approacjed Delhi. But I noticed a curious thing. The flight data showed that we were still at our cruising altitude and were just circling around Delhi airport. I thought maybe we don’t have clearance yet. And then our captain tells us that due to heavy fog, elhi airport has been shutdown. I was pissed. They wouldn’t let us land even though we had CAT 3B landing equipment - this was the reason for our delay!! We circled around for another half an hour hoping that conditions would improve but they never did. What happened next? We flew to Chennai. Apparently that was the closest airport that we could fly to.
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Ok, let me admit straight up that I think the selectors were wrong in dropping Ganguly. He deserved another chance after making 79 in the 2 innings at Delhi. Give the man one final run - if he flounders, that’s the end of his career; if he gets runs, well, then good for the team, right? And mind you, he has been kept in the team for like 2 years just for captaincy - his last 2 years have yielded hardly anything meaningful from his bat.

Now coming to the real issue at hand: politics in the BCCI. Right. Like it’s anything new. The BCCI has always had people who were politicians along with being administrators. Dalmiya has always been one and now we have Sharad Pawar. Guess what, he is a POLITICIAN!!! Surprise!! People seriously have nothing to do it seems. First protestors took to Kolkata’s streets to voice their disagreement. Agreed that Ganguly shouldn’t have been dropped, it was the selectors’ decision and you ought to respect it. Ganguly never said anything about the issue - it’s just people with nothing better to do shouting slogans. People from Kolkata have always been a passionate bunch. They love their cricket but at the same time, they cannot stand anything that doesn’t go according to plan. Remember the 96 World Cup semi-final? The India-Pakistan test match? And recently the India-SA game? Yes, Ganguly has done great things for India in the past. But it is time to move on. One cannot keep riding on past performances. Now before you start saying that others like Sachin aren’t as good as they were earlier, please check the stats. Sachin has done way better than Ganguly and is more than capable of producing scintillating and/or meticulous innings fairly often. And also, nowadays, when Ganguly gets runs, he gets them at painfully slow strike-rates. He is fighting for survival but he cannot jeopardize the team’s chances. And now Somnath Chatterjee says that he will bring up the Ganguly issue in the Parliament. You want to keep politics out of cricket? Well, raising the issue in the Parliament is great way to do it - what with 500+ politicians sitting together. Or better yet, why not let Sharad Pawar & Jagmohan Dalmiya be elected? They’re great people to keep politics out.

While many past cricketers have expressed their support for Ganguly, it’s only Bengali politicians that have supported him outside of cricket. Regional bias anyone?

Furthermore, Mr. Sharad Pawar doesn’t even know all 15 players. Does he even know what cricket is all about? Why did he run for BCCI President? Perhaps to embezzle some of the truck loads of money that the BCCI makes each year. High time that past cricketers and able administrators took control of the BCCI. Do away with 5 selectors from 5 different regions.

I might add more here as the issue develops. Right now, I’m too tired and need to sleep.

So we went to watch Syriana today. Good movie. Really good. Gotta appreciate the guts and sensibilities of the film makers.
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The Need For Speed series has, over the years, given games such as Hot Pursuit (NFS 3) and NFS Underground (NFS 7). EA’s Canada division churns out a new game every year. While each game gets graphical updates that make it look better, gameplay is constantly modified to try and provide different gaming experiences. So how does EA’s latest effort rank? Do the modifications make this a good game?
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