Monday 15 August 2011

Indian Cricket's 'artificial turf' Moment???

While a billion+ souls in India argue about the cause(s) of the present annihilation of Indian cricket at the hands of the magnificent Strauss & Co's England viz., the illogical scheduling by the BBCI, the over-the-top old legs or the Men Vs Oldies argument, I wonder, if technological change and the resistant to it has anything to do with the future of Indian Cricket?

Once upon a time, in the good old days, Indian Hockey was at the top of the world. Hockey was played on grass and the Indians led by the Legendary Dhyan Chand & Co, won everything in their sight. Then came the 'Western Conspiracy' to overthrow the Indian hegemony. This was 'achieved' by introducing the 'artificial turf'. No matter what the Indians say, the fact is that, the Indians just couldn't or didn't adapt to the new platform and are still playing the catching-up game.

I wonder if the same is true for Indian cricket now? In the longer version of the game, Indian batsmen's technique to survive is to bring the legs forward and block the ball with the pads. The umpire cannot rule LBW because the batsman is too far outside the crease. But now with the introduction of the technology like hotspot and hawkeye, the trajectory and direction of the ball can be accurately projected in time thus negating the front-foot blocking technique of which the Indian batsmen are masters. Now, they will be forced to play every ball on merit. That needs the re-adjustment of technique and they need to un-learn and re-learn pretty quickly.

This 'artificial turf' moment is the real reason why Indian cricketers and BBCI has been resistant to use the hotspot for LBWs. Only after the present crop of veterans including Tendulkar, Dravid and Laxman retire, we will know if the Raina's, Kohli's and Sharma's have it in them to adjust and adapt. That is where the future of Indian cricket lies and not in the present fiasco, whatever the cause for that maybe.

Pradeep Kabra

Thursday 4 August 2011

Re: China crashes into a middle class revolt

Dear David,

Thanks for this article in today's FT.

Don't you think your article smacks of the western double-standards when dealing with China.

Especially your interpretation that after 40 people were killed in a rail accident in a country of 1.5 billion, will the banking system or the management of the economy to be safe is a stretch.

If you compare the same with India - which is of-course West's darling democracy - more than 40 people die virtually every day in rail accidents. But nobody bothers about it. I haven't seen any articles in any of the Western newspapers including FT when thousands die in major rail accidents in India every year. Why? Because India is a 'democracy' so the Western firms from News Corp to GM can easily do business in India.

But in China, the West and it's companies find it difficult to deal with the Communists who keep them out or in line. That is the real cause of grouse and not the accident.

Four months after the nuclear disaster, the contaminated food is still coming out on super-market shelves. How come there is no major articles on that in the Western press. If it was in China, you guys would have wrote zillion of articles criticising the communist party. I don't see how the democratically elected Japanese parliament is doing a better job than say what the communist party is doing in China managing 1.5 billion people.

Instead of becoming a mouth-piece of corporate interests or be overtly political, why don't we empathise with the tragedy and the affected people, suggest expertise from our experience and help to prevent such disasters in future and move-on instead of displaying such sycophancy?

Regards,

Pradeep Kabra

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China crashes into a middle class revolt
By David Pilling in Financial Times - published on 04-Aug-2011

When a student asked Sigmund Freud about the meaning of his cigar-smoking habit, the Austrian psychoanalyst is said to have replied: “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” By the same token, sometimes a train crash is just a train crash. But the recent high-speed rail accident in China is not one of those.
For many Chinese, the crash and its subsequent mishandling – including what looked to some like an attempt to bury the evidence – have been a revelation. An outpouring of anger has exposed a profound cynicism about how China is governed.

The death of at least 40 people on a high-speed rail line that had become a totem of China’s sleek progress towards wealth, modernity and national prestige is symbolic on many levels. If the trains are not safe, what of the banking system or the management of the economy itself? The tragedy has become a public relations disaster for a Communist party leadership dominated by engineers and technocrats. Just as Mao Zedong sought to create an industrial revolution by force of will in the Great Leap Forward, so China’s present leaders seem to think they can leapfrog technology through modernising zeal alone.
China’s high-speed rail network, built in less than a decade, is the world’s longest. Its trains were supposed to travel at speeds that would put Japanese technology to shame. Instead, the crash has exposed hubris, incompetence and corruption in a single, tragic crunching of metal. Perhaps not since Tiananmen Square more than 20 years ago has the Communist party looked so naked in the face of public contempt.
Certainly, previous scandals have exposed the rotten governance lurking beneath economic success. In the past few years alone, Chinese people have seen their children crushed by poorly constructed schools and poisoned with tainted milk. Both tragedies resulted from corruption and lack of regulatory control that the state subsequently sought to cover up by suppressing press stories and imprisoning the parents of affected children. The train crash is different in at least two respects. First, high-speed rail was explicitly a national project. The leadership took great pride in China’s ability to “digest” and “improve on” foreign technology. Officials had already laid out ambitious plans to sell the Chinese system to Malaysia, Brazil, the UK and the US.
The national endorsement has made it difficult to pin the problems on local officials. Even before the fatal crash, the government sacked the rail minister on suspicion of corruption. A subsequent decision to lower the maximum speed from 350km per hour to 300km was a tacit admission of dangerous technological over-reach. We don’t yet know the reason for the crash. But pushing the system beyond its technical capacity and cutting corners to free up slush money are plausible factors.
Second, many of the crash victims must have come from China’s new wealthy elites given the, much-criticised, high price of tickets. When school buildings collapsed in Sichuan in the 2008 earthquake, the victims tended to be the children of poorer families. Melamine-tainted baby formula affected a broader cross-section of people. But wealthy urbanites would have had the knowledge and money to buy foreign formula if they chose. That made it slightly easier to quash the story, particularly in an Olympic year when the country was in celebratory mood – or else!
Partly because the victims of this tragedy are members of the new middle class, it has been impossible to keep a lid on the story. Users of Weibo, a Twitter-like microblogging site, have produced an outpouring of contemptuous comment. One posted photos of the rail minister’s fancy watch collection, an indication of his less than modest lifestyle. Weibo alone boasts 140m users, mostly from the urban middle class that the Communist party is supposed to have co-opted into its modernising project.
A middle class revolt is particularly dangerous for the Chinese leadership. It undermines a recent truism of Chinese analysis, sometimes referred to as the Beijing consensus. This contends, among other things, that people don’t worry too much about democracy, freedom of expression and free markets so long as they have a technocratic leadership capable of delivering economic progress.
The cult of GDPism appears no longer to hold. China grew at 10.3 per cent last year, and should clear at least 9 per cent this year. But while taxi drivers riot in Hangzhou over low wages, the revolt over the train crash has been over the more abstract concept of governance. China’s middle class wants a leadership that can contain corruption, ensure safety and not put pride above engineering principles. It wants, in the arresting words of a commentary in the People’s Daily – of all places – economic growth that is not “smeared in blood”.
The anger appears to breathe life into an old argument, all but abandoned in the face of China’s relentless economic progress, that a rising middle class will demand more accountability of its leaders. If that turns out to be true, then, alongside the people who tragically lost their lives on the tracks outside Wenzhou, the Beijing consensus itself may also have perished.

david.pilling@ft.com