Killed in a "Gentleman's Game"

Phil Hughes collapsing after being hit by Abott bouncer

Raju Korti
The death of promising Aussie cricketer Phil Hughes after being felled by a short-pitched delivery from Sean Abbot in a domestic match should make all people who claim to have a passion for this game -- touted as Gentleman's Game -- sit up and take notice of the needlessly fierce competition completely smothering the fun in the sport.
There is every reason to believe that Phil, just 25 and in contention for a Test recall for the series against Indians now in Down Under, has fallen not to a bouncer but to this vicious facet of a game which has degenerated with the obscene amount of money rampaged on cricketers for whom nationalism is only an offshoot of their flourishing bank balances.
Presumably, my refrain will find several specious arguments, one being bouncers are part of the game and are a perfectly licit and accepted weapon in the armory of a fast bowler. That contention, however is not without a semantic riposte in where does one draw the line in gamesmanship when it comes to competition.
Way back in 1962, I vividly recall how Nari Contractor was knocked down by a vicious bouncer from Charlie Griffith, considered by many, including West Indians themselves, as more dangerous than his counterpart Wesley Hall. Of course, the Indians were warned and Contractor couldn't escape his share of culpability of misjudging it and taking the blow bang on his head. Even as a child who was fixated on the game like most at that age do, I had joked that Griffith didn't have to bowl at that destructive speed to get the Indians out since the Indians were never comfortable playing the fast stuff anyway. Contractor survived an emergency surgery and lived to tell the tale of how a penitent Griffith shed copious tears by his side till the time he was in hospital. That remorse was never seen in action though as Griffith butchered the Indians like he was in an abattoir.
Fourteen years later in 1976, the Indian batsmen of the likes of Sunil Gavaskar, Mohinder Amarnath, Gundappa Vishwanath and Anshuman Gaekwad touring the same West Indies were not exactly lambs to slaughter. If anything, these names were reverentially mentioned as the best players of fast bowling. But Gavaskar recalls in his book how in that Kingston Test, speedsters like Michael Holding and Wayne Daniel were egged on a by primitive spectators to the call of "Kill him maan" and "Tear off his head maan". Even the rival skipper Clive Lloyd, clearly rattled by the Indian response, was believed to have asked his bowlers to aim at the Indians instead of the stumps. A brave Anshuman Gaekwad had actually bared his black-and-blue chest to show how manfully he had taken on all that marauding stuff. It was not a game, it was hostility and bloodshed to put it mildly.
It was so Calypso in character when a sports magazine had put Holding, Roberts, Garner  and Croft on its cover and had described them as Dogs of War. Croft was later thrown out after he threatened an umpire with a stump. He was deadly anyway.
If you thought that the game had turned cruelly competitive in the days of Holding, Roberts and Lillee, Thomson, please go back in time to the late thirties when Douglas Jardine gave a new euphemism to gamesmanship by coining the word "Bodyline." The underlying message was clear. When you couldn't get run machines like Bradman out, you always had the superior option of aiming at his body -- stumps be damned -- because that would get him out for the whole of the series.
Not everybody is a Roy Fredericks. As was the won't in those days, the 1975-76 series between mighty West Indians and equally mighty Aussies was preceded by a war of words and just how ferocious the game had become, got clear from the word go. In a bluster and bravado so peculiar to most fast bowlers, Thomson had claimed that he would smash Fredericks' skull with the very first delivery that would be the fastest bouncer. Fredericks, amused by that braggadocio, said he would dispatch it for a six come what may. Both kept their promises but the series which West Indies lost 5-1, showed barbarity was becoming the name of the game -- all in the name of intense competition.
If this way of testing a batsman's skill could be rationalized for Fredericks, how does one do it for a tailender like Ewen Chatfield who was almost killed by a short-pitched delivery from Peter Lever? It is an irony of sorts that the Kiwi fast bowler, a hopeless Number 11 batsman by his own admission, feels for Abbot and hopes the guilt doesn't weigh on his mind in future. Implicit in this apparent sportsman's spirit is the acceptance of a dangerous attitude that has crept into the game. Fast bowlers the world over seem to believe that with a batsman wearing a helmet, he has every license to aim at his head. Hughes was not a tailender and was wearing a protective gear. Gavaskar is often commended for having played the best of fast bowling without ever wearing a helmet, and rightly so, but the Hughes incident should make us believe that he was lucky to have gotten away without being harmed because players with even the best technique can falter at times and that one mistake could be fatal.
The move by Cricket Australia to organize counseling -- whatever that involves or means --for its players is a proverbial case of putting the cart before the horse. It also raises a tricky question whether players will (care to) remember the counseling in the heat of the moment and if they do so, whether it will inhibit them from playing with their inbred attitude. There will be arguments for and against. I am inclined to believe that self counseling is always the best and if the game is played like a sport, it retains its old world charm.
During that epoch-making series against West Indies skippered by Sir Garfield Sobers in 1971, Captain Ajit Wadekar had said that "good batsmen are never afraid of good bowlers." The question, rhetorical though, is how good is good enough.
                

To whom it may concern!

Pic representational

Raju Korti
For someone whose writing in recent times is born out of un-gainful unemployment, I can vouch for the fact that writing an "open letter" is the work of a super-unemployed mind. Utterly disengaged as I have been, it has never occurred to my idle senses to write one so far but being on the threshold of attaining the super-unemployed status (my own coinage, of course), I intend to do so soon. The targets of my affection or disaffection would not be the Obamas, Modis, Bhuttos or celebrity stars of the Sunny Leone kinds. They would be those who have the time, patience and the self-elevating mind to write "open letters."
There is a certain self-deceptive charm and accredited advantage about writing "open letters." They are read by all and sundry except those they are addressed to. The reason is not far to seek. The people at the receiving end of "open letters" don't live in the same world as lesser mortals do. So there is never any fear of reprisal, backlash or retaliation even if the piece goes viral on a social networking site. And the proverbial icing on the cake comes with the smug feeling that you wrote your piece of mind to a person in public domain.
My sudden interest in the issue stems out of the recent "open letters" written to Bilawal Bhutto who has understandably roused a section of super-patriotic Indians with his outburst that he would take all of Kashmir from India. He followed it up with a threat to hack the Facebook account of Mark Zuckerberg, no less. The second threat had me more worried since a threat to Facebook would mean a threat to my existence, or whatever silly little has remained of it since that is where I place my blog links.
My first brush with an "open letter" came thanks to literary critic William Hazlitt whose letter to his son was a chapter in school English. At the time, I didn't understand the head or tail of what he wrote, nor his provocation to write. All I could gather from the tone and tenor of that letter was the exaggerated sense of counseling in it that probably must have bounced off his son, presuming of course, he read it. Today, I must be almost as old as Hazlitt must have been then minus that highly embroidered and overstated wisdom.
Now that I am grappling with the temptation to shoot off "open letters" to all those who write them, I am also bracing up to be chewed out for the misdemeanor. Sample this first paragraph:

To All Open Letter Writers
First of all, a 'Hello'. I have never met you before, nor do I wish to bump into you in future, but I have been reading a lot of your "open letters" lately. I want you to know that I do understand, if not appreciate, why you write open letters and I sympathize with your motives. I'm saying that because all "open letters" begin with this false sense of intimacy and the bogus claim that the writer really wants the best for the person he or she is addressing.

This sample, if anything, will tell you that I can make a Chetan Bhagat look like an apprentice in blending speed and lack of substance. I am told all anonymous letters are despicable, but you just have to put some etiquette in them. They become "open letters."





    

From China with love

Pic courtesy pmindia.gov.in

Raju Korti
If there is one thing that you got to give it to the ruthlessly pushy Chinese, it is their clear perceptions in not mixing bilateral trade with security issues. So even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi carries forward his investment caravan by hosting the incumbent President Xi Jinping with Khaman Dhokla and Won Ton soup for the starters, there is a reasonable sense of optimism that the country's creaking infrastructure will get a much needed boost from this new-found engagement.
Naysayers will, of course, be quick to harp on China's past record in treachery as also its meager investments post-2000 but much water has flown under the bridge since the visits of President Jiang Zemin and President Hu Jintao where diplomacy had taken precedence over bilateral trade. One should not be surprised if Jinping has come with a baggage that aims at arresting the growing trade deficit against India. Modi actually deserves a pat for making it implicitly clear to Beijing that the only mutually beneficial option was trade investment rather than tariff concessions. While investment per se may not be a conduit for bringing down the trade deficit, it could help the country's manufacturing sector through imports from China.
I have few doubts that given his astute Gujarati business mind it is not beyond Modi's ken to put investment from Japan and China on a fast track mechanism while subtly impressing upon the Chinese leader the Gandhian ethos that flows off the tranquil Sabarmati.
To me, Modi's three summits with three of the world's most powerful leaders in Tokyo, New Delhi and Washington will provide some impetus to the dormant diplomacy in the Manmohan Singh's decade. Obviously, Modi is nursing a two-pronged approach. One, shoring up the economy to achieve an annual growth rate of 8% and two -- and also the more obvious -- that will see him firmly in the saddle. The investments from China, United States, Japan, Germany will be a concrete step in that direction but one needs to look beyond the apparent to realize that Modi's meetings with Xi and Barrack Obama within a fortnight's span have been smartly timed. If the feelers from Beijing are to be interpreted correctly, China is not investing in just India but also in the new Prime Minister by confabulating with him in the land of his roots.
Although both the countries have done well to keep contentious issues relating to the border and Tibet by the wayside, Modi will have some political balancing to do and his handling of the Xi and Obama visits are certain to come in for close scrutiny and comparison. Dealing with the Americans, I suspect, won't be as easier given the hiccups that accrue between the two countries besides Modi's battered ego in the wake of denial of a visa. Modi isn't a person who is likely to forget that kind of slight. But then it will also be a chastening experience of sorts for the American President to entertain a no-visa politician to a dinner-table-Prime Minister. Speaks volumes about what massive public mandate can do to the relationship between two countries. From all available indications, the past seems to have been buried and Modi might pass the US test with Washington acknowledging his innocence in the 2002 riots although there remains a sizeable number of critics who are not prepared to give him a clean chit.
Reports emanating from the American capital suggest that the Obama administration is all geared up to welcome Modi since the argument now is the denial of visa was more of an ethical issue than a political one. The winds have blown favorably with the Japanese and the Chinese. Xi, who also happens to be the General Secretary of the powerful Communist Party, is being accompanied by over 40 media persons. It is but some indication of the significance the Chinese attach to this visit when you take into account the state-controlled Media there.
There are friction points as well. Business back home is not going to take in kindly if the Prime Minister opens umbrella industries like retail and banking. That could open a Pandora's box that might injure some of the economic advantage that he seeks to garner. As for Amdavadis, they would not mind a few traffic restrictions as long as the China Development Bank offers loans at lower rates.
A point in passing. The business sense that I am trying to put forth over here is patently Gujarati. Modi happens to be incidental to that cause.

Morning sickness!

Raju Korti
I detect a voyeuristic streak in film journalists when they free-wheel their fertile imagination on whether an actress is in the family way. The latest to get caught in this speculative web is Rani Mukherji who is believed to be sporting a baby bump before or after her marriage with film-maker Aditya Chopra.
Pregnancy or the rumors about it are an integral part of most film stories. In the seventies you often saw the father informing the daughter of her pregnancy with the clichéd "Beti, tum ek bachche ki maa banne waali ho" and the daughter would look shocked beyond her wits because the motherhood was often the consequence of some misfired love affair. At the time, we thought it must be some miracle of Science that the father would know about his daughter's pregnancy while she herself did not. This inadvertent humor would be followed by a gut-wrenching song about her life of shame and ignominy ahead.
From Kajol to Shilpa Shetty and Aishwarya Rai to Rani, every actress has gone through this gestation period of chewing and conjecturing by the Media until the next round of intense guesstimates begin on what would be the probable name of the new arrival.
Shutterbugs, of course, have a field day trying to click the celebrity from different angles, trying to produce some photographic evidence of the pregnancy while the latter is supposed to hide it worse than a state-kept secret. Everyone partakes of this hypothesizing because its not their baby anyway.
Earlier, the celebrities would occasionally add grist to the rumour mills by making vague and ambiguous statements but now the Media does its own diagnosis. In Rani's case, the grapevine was fertilized by her request for help while climbing the stairs and her co-star Madhuri Dixit lending her a helping hand on the sets of Jhalak Dikhla Jaa.There is a strong reason to speculate (!) that Madhuri's gracious gesture was born out of similar predicament she went through in her years of pregnancy. I say years because the Media is known to spend a couple of years "expecting" the child and a year "confirming" the pregnancy before the new born actually descends on the scene. That's carrying the contemplation to its test-tube gestation!
Some embedded journalist also concluded that Rani arrived on the sets of the show late because she had an appointment with the doctor and she had a mild bout with Flu. So the next time a celebrity visits a doctor with Flu -- before or after marriage -- the signals are clear: The stork is about to visit.
Rani herself added to this pregnant pause by saying she "expects soon." When asked if she was looking to start a family, she said "that is why I and Aditya Chopra are married." That clarification -- unless it was a subtle barb -- makes sense in an age when even children understand the repercussions of a pregnancy before marriage but gossip mongers interpret it as her "grand confession." It absolves them from the charge of prying into her personal life.
A celebrity's pregnancy, real or purported, is an opportunity for the Media to "educate" us on the "afterglow and radiance" evidenced on her beautiful face. Wonder where all the feminists go into hiding when they read this; as "afterglow and radiance" are not known to have spared lesser mortals as well. I remember actress Jessica Simpson as saying that "People always say that pregnant women have a glow. And I say it’s because you’re sweating to death."
If you ask me, a woman doesn't get pregnant to give employment to doctors or media persons. Giving birth is an ecstatic jubilant experience not available to males. It is a woman's ultimate creative experience of a lifetime.


 

Musharraf's new warfront

Raju Korti
Military dictatorships in Pakistan make for interesting and intriguing case studies. Starting from Gen Yahya Khan to Gen Pervez Musharraf, the evolution is punctuated with chicanery, machinations and collusions. Gen Yahya, the stocky Pashtun, who in many ways led the roadmap to the carving of the country into Bangladesh, was -- by the country's standards -- the fairest and therefore also the most naïve. He set the precedent of sacking democratically elected governments, ejecting his benefactor President Ayub Khan who had paved the way for his promotion to the country's highest army post. Gen Zia, the scheming Punjabi on the other hand, was wilier but he never made secret of his dislike for then President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Rationalizing his elevation as the President on the Doctrine of Necessity after what is believed to be a "judicial murder" of the rabble rouser Bhutto, Zia cleverly Islamised the country to remove any misgiving the world community had on the Two-nation Theory. (That in India it continues to spark an animated and fierce debate is another story). The Delhi-born Gen Musharraf seemed to have learnt his lessons from the experience of his predecessors. The feisty man turned out to be the most insidious and greasy. Even as he trampled democratic institutions, turned the judicial system into a kangaroo court, he brought a PR polish to his administration. While systematically getting his detractors out of the way, including the "reasonable" Nawaz Sharif, he made out a specious case of how his elevation and presence at the helm was fundamental(ist) to Pakistan's turbulent existence. Unlike, Yahya and Zia, Musharraf had an air of sophistication to him, what with his frequent claims of Kemal Ataturk of Turkey as his idol.
There is a, however, a common chord in this long story of  deviousness and subterfuge. The reign of most dictators eventually comes to an end with not-so-happy ending. Yahya and Zia didn't exactly die in very graceful circumstances and Musharraf, who is still fighting like the true blue army general, has now the mortification of seeing Sharif at the helm again while the courts that he once used as his dummies now hounding him out. Nemesis catches up and how.
When the tide turned against him, Musharraf "exiled" and fled to London only to return and profess his love for his motherland where detractors Zardari, Imran Khan and Benazir are sharpening their knives against him. By all accounts, Musharraf is a survivor if the balancing acts that he did at the domestic and international levels are any indication. The Sharif government seems to be a little soft on him and doesn't want to rush into his exit. Not surprisingly therefore, reports are emanating from the neighbouring country that he might get a safe passage but astute that he is, Musharraf wants to fight it out with the support of the outfit that he has floated and begin on a clean slate. For Sharif, it seems to be a case of once-bitten-twice-shy. One suspects a stage-managed farce being enacted to push Musharraf into leaving the country but the all powerful military establishment seems to have other ideas. Musharraf, the first military ruler in Pakistan's history to be tried in court, has expectedly rejected all the charges levelled against him, including treason and the pitch is queered by the fact that the country's civilian and army establishments stare at the prospects of being at loggerheads again.
In my blog dated April 11, 2013, I had written:
For his sheer propensity for the holier than thou, one needs to hand it to former president and general Pervez Musharraf. If you ignored the man's chameleonic character, Musharraf, who fled Pakistan to return after four years of "self imposed exile", has proclaimed with his usual bluster that "I am among those people who think of the country and the citizens." His precise timing to return to his troubled homeland shows just that, albeit in a contradictory manner.
Behind the army demeanor, there lurks a hard-core politician. Aware of the rebuffs that dot his path, he has already met with a few. His nomination papers were rejected for his acts of "reason and corruption", a clause Indian electoral system could well draw from. But howsoever Musharraf wants to propagandize his love for Pakistan, no one is hoodwinked into believing that and the man has landed back on his home soil because he hardly had any option. He is obviously trying to make a virtue of his compulsion.There are a string of cases lined up against him. Having trampled all institutions during his cleverly manipulative regime, he is everybody's burden. Elevating such a man at the helm again is fraught with the consequences Pakistani people may not try to experiment with.
Take it. This is a do-or-die battle for Musharraf. He will be consigned to the dustbin of history if his outfit fails to come to power.

LOL for this one!

Turkey's Dy PM Arinc. Doesn't he ever smile?

Raju Korti
Sometimes crying or laughing are the only options left, and laughing feels better right now. The immediate provocation of this rather profound quote coming from my unemployed mind is Turkey's Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc who recently decreed that women should not laugh loudly in public.
That Arinc is a co-founder of the ruling Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party is less germane to this blog at this juncture. What strikes me in all earnestness is the man himself needs some mirth and laughter given the grimace he sports on his stony face all the time. His statement, a euphemism for an edict, attracted the kind of backlash that was fitting and well earned. Thousands of Turkish women chose to laugh their guts out on a social networking site in protest. I doubt history has heaped ridicule in such measures in a country which swears by its religious identity.
Arinc has since played the predictable tune all political leaders do when caught on the wrong foot, claiming his remarks were twisted out of context and that he was making a general comment on the decline of moral standards in Turkey.While he has been gifting us new theories in Sociology, it doesn't seem to have sunk into the minister that laughter has nothing to do with one's gender and that it is a reflex action of an individual.
Taking a moral high ground comes to all ultra-conservatives by default. So here was our quixotic minister again shooting off with his mouth: "There are women who leave on holiday without their husbands and others who don't have self control and can't stop themselves from climbing up a pole. Anyone can live like this. I can't be angry against you but I can just have pity for you." His new lesson in morality prompted the wife of a prominent Turkish footballer to post a picture of herself pole dancing on Instagram with the slogan "when I see a pole, I just can't resist". The repartee was brilliant for its heavily pregnant innuendo but our granite-faced minister probably only squirmed in his seat.
The heat generated by the minister's indiscrete utterances has a direct relevance to the elections the country is soon slated to go to. The incumbent Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is facing a lot of flak from his detractors who say the country's secular fabric is threatened (Now, isn't that a familiar refrain?). The government's warped ideas about morality and societal structure haven't gone down well in a country where its first president, reformist statesman Kemal Ataturk -- among other things -- gave women equal civil and political rights. General Musharraf who never hid his admiration for the once Turkish military officer, was never really in a position to replicate the latter's efforts in his perennially tumultuous nation.
Abolition of the Caliphate was an important dimension in Ataturk's drive to reform the political system and to promote the national sovereignty but the ruling dispensation has reverse-geared the heels. The Caliphate of the early centuries now seems to be the core concept of Sunni Islam.
Despite his radical secular reforms, Atatürk remained broadly popular in the Muslim world, a balancing act no other Muslim leader looks capable of in the present times.
That's no laughing matter.
 

Its the US definition of renegades!

Raju Korti

PM Modi: Sketch courtesy my DNA friend Bhagvan Das.

So the man whose office is routinely advertised as the "most prestigious and powerful in the world" was clueless about the storm over the visa ban on Narendra Modi until April this year.
It now transpires, if reports are to be believed, that President Barack Obama had "apparently" no inkling whatsoever that Modi, who expectedly strode to power, was at the center of a raging controversy.
The President "apparently" caught on to the riot act only after several United States lawmakers, on the urging of their Indian-American constituents, over the past few years were writing to then secretary of state Hillary Clinton and her successor John F Kerry, calling on the US State Department to lift the visa ban on the then Gujarat chief minister, while other groups like the Coalition against Genocide convinced yet another group of lawmakers to pressure the State Department not to acquiesce to this request.
If you understand the penchant of the American administration to sauté diplomacy with PR, you will also get the import (!) of its official communiques declaring "US and India as world's greatest democracies." The only hitch in such an unequivocal assertion is a reality check.
To begin with, its is absurd to believe that Obama didn't know or wasn't apprised about a leader who on either sides of the Indian spectrum was either hero-worshipped or rabidly vilified. Surely, the American administration with all its purported intelligence -- in its own country and elsewhere in the world -- knew that a certain Mr Modi was on the verge of tipping scales.
According to reports, some long-time Indian-American fundraisers and major contributors to Obama's presidential campaigns and the Democratic Party met with Obama at a small fundraiser of a select few well-heeled donors. When they brought up Modi's visa ban with Obama and told him that Modi was more than likely to be India's next prime minister and that the controversy would be anathema to a defining partnership with India as he had always professed, Obama had said he had no idea about this visa ban. Even at that juncture, there is  fair ground to believe that the American administration was probably playing the 'wait and watch' game, wanting to see how events unfolded after the Indian elections. The tide changed only after Modi was elected with a thumping margin and it became clear to Washington that despite the former's "tainted Godhra record" it just could not afford to blank him out.
Obama's ignorance of the issue is a classic case of right hand not knowing what the left was up to. That the State Department and the Presidential office were not plugged into each other is incredible and untenable given that the US is as much tuned in to events outside its country all the time. In fact, there is every reason to believe that Obama didn't want to ruffle feathers before Modi arrived on his big moment for the only plausible explanation that it would have been tantamount to interference in India's democratic process.
The stink raised by the visa ban turned out to be worse than what the Americans anticipated. All the right noises that the presidential office sought to make, including extending an invitation to Modi for a meeting in the White House reduced the angst that built up, but only just. To make matters worse, a Congressional hearing on the issue seemed bent on putting the blame in the State Department's basket. The problem had compounded more so because the same ruse had been handed out while denying visa to Modi sometime in 2006 when the man was confronted by "liberal and leftists" from his own country.
The angst was brushed under the carpet on the perceived understanding that if Modi had been denied permission to visit US, it was on the basis of what the situation obtained then and America's policy on the issue before the country's highest court gave him (Modi) a clean chit.
The most surprising dimension to the story is the Coalition against Genocide, a ragtag bunch of leftists and liberals from 40 outfits based in US and Canada. It is interesting to note that the only cause that this organization espouses is that of Godhra when human rights are being blatantly trampled elsewhere in the world. Even if one concedes its right to be wedded to a cause of their choice, it is befuddling that the State Department chose to be led on by the protest of an outfit whose own credentials were under cloud.
If diplomacy and make-shift compulsions demanded that peace had to be made with a dispensation dominated by extreme right-wingers, the American administration could have always exercised a more practical approach in being non committal right through rather than being made to run for cover the way it had to.
When good intentions are not backed up by suitable action, theatrics is all that happens. The face-saving tactics on the grant of visa to Modi is a PR disaster. In the past, Americans have not given a very exemplary account of themselves, shaking hands with despots like Pol Pot in Cambodia and Gen Pinochet in Chile whose record in human right violations makes Modi a pygmy in comparison, and when I say this, I do not hold any brief for Modi in case there is an attempt to perceive me as his sympathizer. To the Americans, South East Asia is a gainful employment and if you zeroed in on that, you understand their proclivities as well. Modi isn't the first and he won't be the last either.