Year: 2007

cricket roundup

If you remember, an “Australia A” team played in the 1994-95 world series cup in order to “compensate” for the weak competition offered by england and zimbabwe. Surprisingly, Australia A made the finals where they came close to beating the senior team in one of the games.

Anyways, today I had a look at the team that played one of the games. Look at the batting order. Let me shuffle it around a bit and you get Hayden-Langer-Ponting-Martyn-Blewett-Bevan! Has any other national second string batting order looked so familiar? Hats off to Australian foresight/perseverance.

Then in the ongoing ranji trophy, almost all national team players seem to be doing really well. Ganguly and Sehwag have scored quickfire hundreds. Laxman and Jaffer got good 70s. Dravid’s 56 against Saurashtra pales in comparison actually! Bowlers have also not done too badly – RP Singh and Agarkar have picked pfeiffers michelles. VRV and Pathan have four in an innings (and pathan did it at an economy of 2.4!!). Only Harbhajan seems to have performed badly. (for the record, Tendulkar and Munaf are not playing because of injury; Kumble and Zaheer have been allowed to “rest; Sreesanth and Dhoni can’t play since their states haven’t qualied for the plate semis)

Wondering if this tells a story about the gap in standards of international and domestic cricket. Wonder if it also tells us what needs to be done in case a player is doing badly internationally – ask him to play Ranji! Among other things, Uthappa seems to be playing really well and is knocking on the doors of the national team yet again. Same is the case with Badrinath and Ranadeb Bose.

The five wise men will sit down this evening along with the captain and coach to name the 30 probables for the world cup and the team for the first two ODIs against the west indies. Will be interesting to see how much experimentation they will put for the eight ODIs before the world cup. My take is they will rotate amongst a small pool (of around 16-18), unlike in 1999 when they got a tournament against Kenya and Bangladesh where an almost A team played.

tam names

Two days back I received an email from my HR informing everyone that a certain “rokini” was celebrating her birthday that day. Initially i found the name very unusual for a tam (her last name gave it away that she was tam) but then realized that it was just a “different” way of spelling “rohini”. Thankfully she didn’t spell it as “rogini”, which in sanskrit based languages means “diseased woman”.

Thing with tamil, as i have explained in my first ever blogpost, the tamil alphabet is very limited and practices polymorphism. For example, a single character represents K, Kh (as in khaana, khanna, etc.), G, Gh and some vague guttural version of n. Apart from polymorphism “along the rows”, there are some other peculiarities as well. There is no H sound in tamil, nor is there a letter to represent S or Sh, which are both represented by the “ch” sound.

What has happened is due to increased aryan influences, a number of tams have sanskrit-based names (in fact most tams I know have sanskrit names). Unfortunately, many of them can’t be accurately written in Tam, and hence get grossly mis-spelt. So you get Rokini for Rohini, and Braggasam for prakasam and gobal for gopal etc.

\begin{Update}One of the most popular bloggers in India is supposed to be Kiruba Shankar. When I first heard his name I burst out laughing because in Kannada, “kiruba” means “hyena” and whoever would have such a name! Then i realized it must be “krupashankar”. Writing “krupa” in tam and then transliterating it to english would yield “kiruba”. Strong. \end{Update}

So my dear tams, in order to prevent us from laughing at the funny ways in which you spell your names, I hereby exhort you to take on purely Dravidian names only. Listen to Periyar. Remember the dravidian movement. Chuck all the sanskrit in the names. And take on pure tam names. I’m sure you can’t misinterpret spellings with “Senthil” or “Anbazhagan” right!

Postscript Speaking of spellings, I don’t think the way I spell my name (Karthik) is accurate enough, though it is the most widely accepted spelling. Something like “kaartik” might be more accurate. However, it all depends on how you want to transliterate the Ta (as in tomato) and ta (as in pasta) into english.

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Having been to two schools with a strong campus lingo, I find it difficult to talk in “normal English”, and often break off into a combination of IITM and IIMB dialects! only saving grace is that a part of it is common to a number of other campuses in India, so people do understand me.

The other day I was telling God that every new school you go to, your vocabulary expands. He counterd by saying that it could even contract and there’s hajaar polymorphism in most lingo. For example, the number of meanings “put” has in IITM can even rival “set”.

Of course, I’m extremely proud of the fact that I’ve been party to introduction of a number of new words to the IIMB lexicon. Words like “are” (means really good or really awesome), or “jai” (borrowed from RVCE which in turn is borrowed from gen Bangalore Kannada slang, but given a whole lot of new meanings). Are.

Anyways, I’ve put enough cock now, so I’ll tell jai. But wait, just have a look at this arely are MA thesis (came out a year back but don’t think i’ve linked to it yet, so doing it now):

Click to access MAthesis_EvelynRichter.pdf

PS: two of my most popular “tags” – general and arbit are campus lingo!