Waking up to India, finally !!

A lot of movies have been made acknowledging the presence of the huge number of software techies in the West though most of these acknowledgments came from the Desis themselves. There have been a few instances where this fact has been portrayed by the Westerners, though very seldom.

Google has been feeding off our intelligence for quite some time now and it was expected that this would be visible in their PR exercises soon. A brilliant example of this is:

It was about time that either of Rakesh, Ramesh or Vivek (in this case) replace the till-now-present Marys, Ted, Rosss and Susans. How long would it take to see a Ted in the demos created by say indiatimes.com?

Ground Reality

Sanjay Bangar writes here about the state of the varied grounds used for Ranji Trophy matches. Here are a few intriguing excerpts:

There is a ground in Guwahati where a busy railway track runs right behind the sight-screen. The game has to stop on a number of occasions when a train is passing by as the players don’t want to be disturbed by a moving train when they want to concentrate on the moving ball, nor do the umpires want to miss a faint tickle because of the sound of the train.

The GSFC Ground in Baroda where we played the Ranji final in 2000-01 is located amid thick forestry. Players were often reluctant to go in search of the ball once it crossed the boundary rope because there we had loads of monkeys for company on the periphery and nobody was keen to invite the monkeys’ wrath in case they suddenly found a liking for the red cherry.

I am sure there would be so many more interesting stories in Indian first class cricket which don't reach our ears. And, it is a brilliant idea to get first class 'struggling' cricketers to write columns. This gives the aspirants an estimate of the steep climb before the glamorous peak and some sound-bytes to people like me who are suffering from the writer's block.