Three series have gone by now, with the same side batting first.
First there was the Pepsi Cup, where India batted first in all four matches against the West Indies (the last three were when they were put in by Lara).
Next came the Hero Honda Trophy, where Sri Lanka defended totals four times in a row (including the rained out game) against India.
And now, in the Chappel-Hadlee Trophy it turns out again that Australia has batted first on all three occasions!
Interesting
Today (by Hindu standards where the day begins at daybreak and not at midnight) I celebrate my first anniversary of passing out. Awesome room neighbor Khare had decided to treat us to some excellent firangi liquor (which unlike most other liquor I’ve had, was really tasy) and after downing a few shots of that, I had bottoms-upped a few glasses of rum-and-coke.
Here are my thoughts on the following morning. Later that day we googled and found out that the right way to consume that tasy liquor was to mix it with large quantities of water and sip it slowly. And to think that I’d shot more than a dozen shots of that thing neat!
Does livejournal support google adsense? I think i get a considerable number of hits on this page and am now thinking of “selling out” so that i can make some moeny wiht this.
Can someone tell me if LJ will allow it? and if yes, how do i go about it?
A few days back I had pointed out that Duncan Fletcher is racist and should be sent back to Zimbabwe and given the harshest treatment. Maybe in response to that the England think tank has tried to make amends.
Everyone had widely tipped Mal Loye to be part of the squad as a reserve batsman, considering his slog-swept sixes of McGrath in the recently concluded World Series Cup. However, David Graveny and co have sprung a surprise by picking Essex all-rounder Ravi Bopara instead.
I?m surpised we are not having a ?Challenger Trophy? before selection of the Indian team for the World Cup. For, of late, the BCCI practice before any big tour or tournament has been to have this mindless tournament, named after yet another of those politician-administrators N K P Salve. A tournament where the ?India Seniors? team takes on the supposed second and third string teams, with the intention of providing the 33 best players in the country a chance to show their mettle.
but have never gotten down to it. however, in this post, Vamshi has covered pretty much what I wanted to write about, so I do the next best thing – link to it!
seriously. i’m twenty four. single. and have absolutely no clue as to wehre i can find a girl. people who i talk to about this say “stop looking and you’ll find one”. i’ve stopped looking long ago, but still haven’t found anyone 
sad.
no i’m not talking about emraan hashmi here. i’m talking about someone more famous who can seriously give emraan a run for his money. just check out these pics.
Thatz why it’s good to have bachelor PMs such as Vajpayee and bachelor presidents like Kalam
PS: earlier this morning i put a friends-only post
At my dad’s behest I had read Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, and was outraged when he said something to the effect of routine jobs being shipped out to India, while the smarter ones remain in the US. In fact, this was the underlying theme for most of the book, and the condescending tone just put me off.
However, of late I think there might be some truth in what he said. I work for an American firm with offshore offices in Poland, Bangalore and Sydney and thousands of other places. MOst of the software development, however, takes place in Dallas, Krakow (poland), Sydney and here.
Having interacted with a number of developers, what I’ve noticed is that in general, developers in the US office are much smarter than those here. And the difference is marked (removing outliers from both locations). In this context, what Friedman says makes a lot of sense.
Given that Indians are suppsoed to be generally smarter than firangs, was wondering about this discrepancy. One possible explanation is that in india software developers are paid much more than their counterparts in other industries while that is not the case abroad. Overseas, a career in software development is a choice that one makes for the love of development. Here, it is a choice that one makes because other professions pay much less than what IT does. And hence, there are a lot of developers here who are in it for money, for sustenance. People who may not have a natural aptitude for coding. People who may not love coding. But are in it for the money! It’s no surprise, then, that the average developer here is not half as smart as the average counterpart in America!
(Credits to Phalgun for collaboration on this post)
The other day I was wondering why I’m not as well networked as some other friends. Don’t get fooled by my orkut statistics here, for most of the 750 friends there are “acquaintances”, with a considerable number of friends and a very small set of “good friends”.
And going through my list of friends showed an interesting trend – I share at least one “affiliation group” with most of them (affiliation group typically being one of my schools or workplaces). Where I fall behind some others is in my lack of speed when it comes to “path compression”. “Path compression” is a process where a friend’s friend becomes a friend. In my case, in most cases, friends’ friends end up as acquaintances and the relationship isn’t of much “value” without the “linking friend”.
In order to convert someone from an acquaintance to a friend it’s imperative to spend a considerable amount of time with him/her (at least i’m hard to get along with, so it takes people some time before they like me). And looking back at my “socializing”, one pattern i’ve observed is that I usually go out in a clique. And end up spending more time with people I already know, thus not adding quantitative value to my network (of course qualitative value addition are there).
Maybe I should start going out more in looser groups, say with friends and friends’ friends. Or attend these large arbit gatherings. Anyways.
It’s pertinent to mention here that I’ve once been part of a party at a table in a restaurant where the “X knows Y” graph was linear! it was at Mocha in Mumbai last may. I knew
Needless to say the gathering dissolved within ten minutes.
While aadisht does a series of posts on dowry, I think the whole concept doesn’t make sense. That something as trivial as dowry should find a place in the indian constitution, so much to make it illegal and stuff!