The Indian Chhakke Pe Chhakka League

Raju Korti

The "chhakka" -- as it is understood in cricketing terms unlike its derogatory connotation -- was never so trivialized as it is today, thanks to the Indian Premier League. More than half a century ago when Gary Sobers clobbered six consecutive sixes -- never mind it was a County match -- and as late as in 2007 when Yuvraj Singh  did an encore, the sixer was the cyanosure of all eyes. Today even a tailender can send the ball packing beyond the ropes with a wild swing of the bat and the crowd erupts in collective orgasm.

In the languid and longer version of the game, sixers came pricey. I recall in my school days there were cavaliers of the likes of Salim Durrani who would cater to the demands of an exuberant audience and hit sixes. But such players and instances were very few and very far between. The batsmen chose to go with the finesse and preferred to let the ball sprint through the ground than travel in the air through helicopter shots. Most aerial shots happen when  bats are used like slingshots.

Watching sixes in the Indian Premier League has turned into a terrible bore but the commentators and the loyalists of the Slam, Bang, Wham version go berserk with bizarre descriptions. Replays of the shot are sexed up with delirious praises of the batsman. A graphic tracing the long, aerial trajectory of the shot is followed by an animated discussion on how many meters the ball flew in the air. With the game moving at breakneck speed, the commentators keep torturing their vocal chords as sixes come thick and fast. The "four" is reduced to being their poor cousin.

Someone among the scorers is probably a man who is employed only to beam on the screen the number of sixes being hit in the tournament. By the time the edition comes to an end the number soars to well over 600 or 700. Causing enough indigestion in you to pop a few pouches of antacids! That is if your patience lasts enough to go into the farewell ceremony that ends with predictable cliches.

The players laugh all the way to their banks. Imagine getting paid Rs one lakh for each such wild slog that takes less than a minute to execute while lesser mortals break their lumbers and sweat it out in liters to eke out a living. A six is a six even if the the ball connects with the bat by fluke. The fringe benefit comes from admirers jumping from their seats with clinched fists while the only sad person in this euphoric scene is the ill-fated bowler who can only wipe his forehead and watch the ball disappear in the stands. 

The pitches are deathbed for the bowlers. What do they do when the game opens with the concept of "power play" and field restrictions? Conceding 8 runs in an over is healthy economy rate in a game  where almost 450 runs have been scored in 40 overs. Every match looks like almost an action replay of the earlier ones. Hats off to those who remember these matches ball-by-ball and shot-by-shot.     

I suggest IPL goes more hi-tech in future with some fielders given space in mid air to stop sixes. Better still, name the Indian Premier League as Indian Sixes League or a funkier Indian Chhakke Pe Chhakka League. The cheerleader girls can do their jig mid-air as the spectators would anyhow be watching the ball flying all the time.

Since the IPL began in 2008, 7303 sixes have been hit excluding the ongoing one. Multiply the number with 100,000 and you know the peanuts Board of Control for Cricket in India spends on this penurious show. 

By the way, look at the picture accompanying this blog. It shows the eccentric Billy Bowden doing his familiar jig while signalling a six. I am sure if he were to officiate in all IPL matches, he would have become a professional Bharat Natyam dancer by now.
 

Loving and hating the spookiness of Quantum Physics

Raju Korti
A recent article at pains to establish how Quantum Physics and Consciousness can come together to help us understand the true nature of reality has set me back by at least 47 years. That was the time when the likes of Max Planck and Albert Einstein had just begun to stir and torment my abstract imagination. Quantum Physics, true to its spirit, took me -- and I suspect many others of my ilk -- on a long journey of love-hate relationship with the subject. The simplicity of the theories I had been grappling until then was getting shaken at its roots with the advent of these two gentlemen along with co-conspirators like Satyendra Nath Bose, Englert Brout  and Peter Higgs. From the apparent simplicity of Newton's Laws of Gravitational Forces to the multiple conundrums brought forth by Niels Bohr, Warner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrodinger, not to speak of many others who contributed in queering the pitch, it was a wave that encountered several troughs and crests dotting this love-hate saga. There is an inherent paradox with Quantum Mechanics. You love it and hate it for the same reason but then that is its USP.

While referring to the Bible of Applied Physics by Robert Resnick and David Halliday when pursuing my Engineering, Quantum theory fascinated me no end. I found the underlying theoretical constructs riveting and I would often marvel how it was driving modern scientific discovery and delivering tangible, life-saving applications in the world. This love was partly jilted because of the now-I-understand-now-I-don't Heisenberg and Schrodinger. Heisenberg was still within the physical grasp of the mind but Schrodinger took my breath away with his theory that had more mathematics than theory in it. I particularly liked Heisenberg because his understanding that "Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think," gelled with my confused mind.

When you change the way you look at things, the things you look also appear changed. It is absolutely impossible to read any popular account of Quantum Physics without running into the words "probability" or "uncertainty". That makes it a tricky cud to chew on when you know that probability is a human concept that has no real application in Mother Nature. May be that makes it an even more interesting fodder for thought.

Until Physics explained to me the nature of the particles that make up matter and the forces with which they interact, my boundaries of wisdom were restricted to the three physical dimensions of Mass Length and Time. The fourth dimension of Time-Space Continuum began to upset the apple-cart. It compulsively took one to the Einstein's later theory, the General Theory of Relativity which describes how gravity affects the shape of Space and flow of Time. My rather flimsy understanding of the subject notwithstanding, I was propelled into the surreal world of Higgs Field which hypothesized the field had a carrier particle called Higgs Boson. All the consternation over this particle being named as God particle vanished when it was learnt that Nobel laureate Leon Lederman had actually poked fun at at it calling it as Goddamn Particle because it was too difficult to detect its existence. If it was beyond Lederman, what could someone like me do than to give it up as a bad joke?

The beauty or trouble with Quantum Physics, depending on the way you look at it and how much of it is within your comprehension, is there is no single theory. There is Quantum Mechanics, the basic mathematical framework that underpins it all which came from the stable of Bohr, Heisenberg and Schrodinger. It made out a case for how the position or the momentum of a particle or group of particles changes over a period of time. The handicap of the Quantum Mechanics got crutches from Einstein who established that to understand how things work in the real world, Quantum Mechanics must be propped up by other elements of Physics. Multiple quantum theories made it more interesting, esoteric and befuddling at the same time. It took years to realize that these theories in their ramshackle condition were given a semblance of order through a "standard model" of particle Physics held together with a make-shift tape but giving a comparatively much accurate picture. The God particle emerged from a tumult to give all other particles their mass.

At a basic level, Quantum Physics predicts very strange things about how matter works that are completely at odds with how things seem to work in the real world. How they appear seems to depend on how we choose to measure them. Only that before we measure them, they seem to have no definite properties at all. That leads to the fundamental conundrum about the basic nature of reality. I am inclined to think that there must be some better or more intuitive theory out there that humans are yet to stumble upon. The world is at some level quantum but whether Quantum Physics is the last word about the world remains an open question. 

If you find the Quantum Theory hard to swallow, you are not alone. Schrodinger himself did not like it and was sorry he had anything to do with it. You may hate it or love it but you can't ignore it. In a book gifted to me by a researcher, Einstein has been quoted as saying " If it (the Quantum Theory) is correct, it signifies the end of Physics as a Science." And how I would hate that. I would rather let Quantum Physics remain in the realms of a relentless ferment and its romantic abstract. The book also quotes Max Planck, the father of Quantum Physics: "I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness. To me that's the real Planck's Constant.  

Some thoughts about Adv Bhushan's "voice of conscience"

Raju Korti
The problem with over-reach of activism is it makes people lose sight of rationale. Adv Prashant Bhushan, considered by a lobby in the country as a legal luminary, is a stark example. The public interest lawyer has in the past often got away by cocking a snook at the decisions of the apex court but this time nemesis has caught up, although I would like to believe that he has scraped through with a token Re 1 fine. True to his nature, he has made an absurd and strange statement saying that he has paid the fine but that does not mean he accepts the verdict. He has resolved to file a review in the same court that he has derided earlier in his considered wisdom.

Anyone who has a fair hang of the law should know that Adv Bhushan is trying to make a virtue out of necessity and has actually no choice. The fact that he has ended up paying a fine itself can be interpreted that he has accepted the verdict. Even if he were to be sentenced to imprisonment, he would have had no choice but to enjoy hospitality of the state that he so abhors. The climax is the public interest lawyer wants to file a review petition with the same institution that he has been at loggerheads all along. Having said that, it makes little sense to stop him from practicing law when he actually doesn't do much of it. Activism doesn't leave him with any time.  

Adv Bhushan is three years younger than me. I completed my post graduation in Constitutional Law before he did and with better marks. While he chose to become a practicing lawyer, I chose to leave my legal knowledge by the wayside to pursue a career in the media. I haven't seen Bhushan argue any of the 500 cases that he proclaims to have taken up for "good causes". However, I do know for sure that he expends little time on paid cases while branding others of his ilk as "amoral".  His real stake to fame is his relentless activism that has pitchforked him into situations that have done little to enhance his standing.

As someone who has tagged with social activist Anna Hazare, Adv Bhushan has been advocating vociferously for judicial accountability, and to be fair to him, it was because of his crusade that the judges of the courts had to declare and post their assets on the court websites. But somewhere in this over-zealousness, Adv Bhushan took upon himself the cause of "cleansing the Judiciary" and began to transgress the boundaries of law.  In one of his interviews, he openly called as many as 16 former chief justices of the Supreme Court as corrupt. It resulted in an expected backlash with Adv Harish Salve filing a contempt plea against him. The Supreme Court ordered him to apologize but Adv Bhushan instead launched himself into a lengthy harangue why he felt the judges were corrupt. It didn't occur to his mind that there was little or no way of getting any documentary evidence because the judges are immune to investigation.

Adv Bhushan then decided to strike at the very roots of what he believes is the malaise. Since then he has trained his guns on certain provisions of the Contempt of Courts Act, which comparatively is a recent law compared to most of the antiquated laws framed during the British rule. He has just stopped short of scrapping the act that the Supreme Court will never do as the Constitution leaves the sanctity or merits of any law to the discretion of the Judiciary. It is like handing over a razor to someone and asking him to cut his own throat. To expect that any Tom, Dick and Harry will be allowed to file an FIR against any judge without the permission of the Chief Justice of India is surreal to say the least. His fight for the Jan Lokpal Bill had some merit but what gave away was his penchant to file PILs in what he believes are cases that call for government accountability. The gloves were off with his open defence of Naxals where he even embarrassed the Congress.

A couple of years back I had posted, more in jest than any seriousness that there was one way Bhushan could wriggle out of the spate of contempt pleas against him. All he had to do was to tell the Supreme Court that he was absent when the Contempt of Courts Act was being taught in the class. He did nothing of the kind. His run in with the top court ended when he was found guilty of contempt for two tweets he made. One where he criticized the role played by previous four chief justices, and two, where he made a snide remark on the Chief Justice of India posing on a motor-cycle without a mask. The tweets were thought of "shaking the public confidence in the Judiciary."   

It is not for me to comment on the merits of Adv Bhushan's opinions on the conduct of courts and judges but he has certainly ruffled feathers with his political beliefs. He calls it as voice of conscience little realizing that each individual is open to define conscience as per own understanding. His conscience doesn't seem to match the conscience of the courts. Yet, it tells him to fight the Supreme Court decision by filing a review plea in the same court. Some optimism and dichotomy that!  

I studiously avoided writing about Adv Bhushan's controversies because it was all too evident. So this evening I ended up writing another wisecrack, saying he reminds me of the line from an old Mukesh song: "Jalta hua diya hoon magar roshni nahi."   

 

Some thoughts about reforming India's Babudom

Raju Korti
Whether you like it or not, you got to concede that Prime Minister Narendra Modi enjoys taking the bulls by the horns. Midway into his second consecutive term he has devolved upon himself to mutate the country's notorious, euphemistically termed famed, Babus into Karmayogis. In India, Babudom refers to the executive arm of the government and the backbone of the administrative machinery of the country.

The common man, however, has a diametrically different take on the country's Babudom. The general perception is they are a self-serving, elite clique that works in silos and are not accountable to anyone except their political masters whose bidding they are generally known to do. The Indian Babudom has been conventionally known to focus more on the process than bringing about positive outcome. To make matters worse, they have stonewalled change and reforms. The Modi government has quite an ask on its hands to make this rather privileged class shed the arrogance and superior-than-thou mindset it is besieged with.

There is an archetypal story in mythology about Walya the dacoit reforming to Walmiki the sage with the only difference being this fabled character undergoing transformation through enlightenment, penance and penitence. These characteristics are alien to India's bureaucracy which has always been more firmly in the saddle than their political masters who come and go. I have first-hand of experience of some high-handed bureaucrats daring aggrieved people to go and complain to the ministers. "They are here today, gone tomorrow. I am permanent," is the disconcerting but true response.

One simple way of knowing what is wrong with the Indian bureaucracy is to see the way they draft their circulars. They have an unmatched talent for making what is simple and straight into a convoluted maze of gibberish. Initiative is not something that you associate with the Indian Babudom. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept and who enjoys appearing inept?

I am not painting all bureaucrats with the same brush. There are sterling exceptions, but then exceptions only prove the rule. I have seen bureaucrats strike a sensible balance while running the administration, working within the framework of government rules. I have also seen competent and honest bureaucrats standing up to the political class and rewarded by being tossed around with transfers. That is a price they pay for being loyal to their duty rather than being loyal to the political dispensation. Most bureaucrats conveniently skip that they serve at the "pleasure of the President of India" and their service is protected under Article 311 of the Constitution from politically motivated or vindictive action. The pandering to the political class is deeply entrenched in their psyche.

To say that Indian bureaucracy needs an overhaul is an understatement. None of the prime ministers before has dared to convulse an institution that has wielded more power than most civil services anywhere across the world. It remains to be seen what impact will the government's move to induct lateral entry of professionals into the bureaucracy have. It is rather premature to guess the ramifications of the move to parachute private sector experts in the present algorithm of Indian bureaucracy.

"Mission Karmayogi" aims at capacity building of the bureaucracy to make them more "creative, proactive, professional and technology-abled". Implicit in this initiative is the tacit admission that the bureaucracy has not performed to the strength and competence expected of it. The sanctimonious cover sought to be provided to this apparently lofty exercise, however, becomes suspect when you learn that union ministers, chief ministers, eminent HR practitioners headed by the prime minister will serve as an apex body in providing "strategic direction", whatever that means. No prizes for guessing that these will be PM's hand-picked men. In essence, the bureaucracy will still be navigated by the political class. If so, this so called biggest human resource development program in the government, costing over Rs 510 crore, looks like flogging a dead horse.

The much avowed purpose of Mission Karmayogi to assign "right person to the right role" and align the work allocation of civil servants by matching their competencies to the requirements of the post sounds good in theory but suffers the compelling risk of breach in practice. Given the expediencies of the political class this sounds Utopian despite some of the most attractive words used to promote the concept.

Bureaucracy, inflation and dandruff can never be addressed completely.

If there is a Tharoorosaurus, there will be a Kortictionary

Raju Korti

There are high wages attached to being a celebrity and if it is someone like Shashi Tharoor there are other perks as well. Before you jump to conclusions which you think are obvious, let me tell you it is not about the man's reputation with or purported weakness for women. It is more about his penchant for words that he so tellingly sums up in his book "Tharoorosaurus". I am tempted to believe that he derives a sadistic pleasure in making people scurry to the dictionary or a Thesaurus by deploying obscure and complicated words. Devil he may be, but he deserves some due nevertheless.

Much is being made of Tharoor's propensity to charm and sweep women off their feet but that's not being fair to his decrepitude for words that have become harem to his imagination. Tharoorosaurus as we predictably realize is a word play of his name mixed with the word Thesaurus and it ostensibly seeks to find synonyms for words. Published by the Penguin Random House India, it is a veritable inventory of 53 words, one for each letter of the alphabet. Dubbed the Wizard of Words, he shares these examples from his parallel vocabulary  -- unusual words that are more Latin and Greek than Latin and Greek actually are -- from every letter of the alphabets. All of five vowels and 21 consonants. You do not have to be a linguaphile to partake of their novelty, you just have to souse in how he marinates them. Perilously disposed as I am to my perennially penurious condition, I cannot even nurse the chance finding Rs 373 that the book costs but I can indulge fair guess work to know what the book subsumes in its denouement.

Having made the preamble of my harangue so luxurious with not so expansive words, let me come to the precise reason what prompted this impromptu blog. The will of my conscience here has been single-handedly forced by two reasons, both of which have their footing in two branches of Science -- Physics and Mathematics. I will skip expounding the Newton's Third Law of Motion or what is understood as Contrapositive in Logic. The intelligible point I am making here is if there has to be a Tharoorosaurus, there has to be a Kortictionary too. It is all so elementary, my dear Watson! If Tharoorosaurus owes its existence to Tharoor, Kortictionary owes it to Korti. Names do matter and words spelt by either Tharoor or Korti, are words at the end of the day.

Those who know me even peripherally, will bear me out. I have sweated in litres browsing and studying Thesaurus and the Dictionary for ever since I can remember. The words, their substitutes, homologouses, equivalents, usages, figures of speech, idioms, synonyms, antonyms, homonyms and what else have you of from the labyrinthine macrocosm of Wren & Martin. Like Tharoor, I have jealously and steadfastly guarded my paintbrush while celebrating words and treating them like clay. It amuses me no end that the permutation and combination of 26 alphabets spin a complex ecosystem of words that can be moulded, shaped, chiseled, crystallized, kneaded, polished, carved, built, embodied, minted, modeled, framed, forged, fashioned, cast, sketched, whittled, roughewed and fabricated in becoming the edifice of Literature.

People who are lesser endowed with words than I am -- and I don't say this in my self-arrogated wisdom  -- grudgingly tell me all the time that I am too overbearing with them. Their refrain: Do you have to be so extravagant and grandiose with mentally taxing words when simple words could have got your point through. My riposte is as simple as it can get. Why not make the dish more appetizing by garnishing it well! Words don't drill holes in your pockets. Kortictionary will be my tribute to words. Since it incorporates my name, my copyright is guaranteed by default. What Tharoor is to Thesaurus, Korti will be to a Dictionary. Hope you get the essential drift here. The similarity between Tharoor and Korti ends here. I do not possess the other talents which Tharoor is generously accredited with.

I have spent a part sleepless night yesterday fretting over whether it should be Rajucon (as take off on lexicon) or Kortictionary. The second finally made it because carries its trade mark, which is my surname, and sounds more weighty unlike the first that has the misleading "con" to it. Words have to be reined in and cannot be allowed to become their own masters. Once they become subservient to you, sentences have no option but to fall in line. 

Kortictionary does not aim to give Tharoorosaurus a run for its money. It only seeks to complement it and live in harmony with what I earnestly believe is a very limited edition. I have a much larger court to play on even if that means patting my own back. That indulgence makes sense when your head is full and pockets are empty.

Some day I plan to write Vocabulary Chalisa. It will take you an unending game called Word Play.

An air-conditioned memory

Raju Korti

One never knows the true value of a moment until it becomes a memory. In my idle and limited wisdom I have often labored with words to fine-tune some of them from the complex maze and miscellany congesting my mind. By cushioning those flashes of time with a liberal tempering of Teflon-coated words, I am lucky to find happenstances to celebrate them.

 

As I peeked out of my balcony early this morning to a dark, intensely wet morning in the backdrop of green hills that my sights were treated to, there was a sense of deja vu. The ambience quickly deported me to that one-hour stay in the Panhala hills nestled close to the beautiful city of Kolhapur. A cousin was kind enough to lend his chauffeur-driven car for a quick visit to the place before I returned to the monotonous and mechanical life of Mumbai. The 20-odd km distance meandered through a narrow, serpentine road that seemed to warm up to the presence of the few people using them.

Panoramic would be an understatement to describe the theater I was exposed to when I reached the hills. The human habitation was fenced by a short Gothic wall from where you could marinate your bland mind and beaten body with Nature providing all the aromatic spices to perk you up or else jump to your death if you had morbid thoughts. I chose the first more out of fear than judgment.

For from the madding crows and away from the hustle bustle of the metropolis, when you feel rejected and are left alone to steal a few moments of solitude and reflection, nothing like the Mother Nature's lap. Reclining against the stone wall of the historic Panhala fort, I soaked in its adventurous mystique, esoteric but cool climes, flitting rain drops and breath-taking imagery. The Nature stood tall and handsome, making the houses below look Lilliputian. Before you could compose an ode to Nature's disposition, it changed its temper.

As the rains started beating down faster, the scene that looked so pristine a few minutes before, suddenly turned alarmingly frightening. The swooshing high-velocity winds with rain drops as big as the size of marbles made me stagger to a make-shift eatery. Nothing was visible as a blanket of heavy fog and biting cold gripped me. I could hear more than see glasses, chairs and tables falling down violently. Never having experienced this calamitous avtaar of the Nature, I panicked and thought it was an apocalypse until a hand patted on my agitated shoulders. "Saheb, chaha hawa kaa?" (Sir, you want tea?). For the life of me I couldn't figure out how someone could locate me in the midst of this blinding mist. I just nodded dumbly. I had tightly gripped a nearby pole to escape being hurled away by the marauding winds and rains. The next 20 minutes told me what chilling fear is all about. In those horrendous moments I died several times. 

A little later everything cleared. A sixty-plus woman walked up to me with a steaming hot cuppa and a plate of pakodas. There was an amused look on her face as if nothing had happened. Seeing me shivering in my pants she steadied me saying this was routine during the rainy season. The tea calmed me down but the nerves remained frayed. The Nature had returned to its benign Bishop looks once again but I was too over-wrought to admire its concocted beauty. My one thought was to escape as quickly as possible before another assault took place. I quickly got up from my chair, paid the bill and sprinted to the car where my driver was waiting for me.

Looking back, I feel it was all so surreal. The Nature's complexion I saw this morning seemed to call out for two happenstances -- similar circumstances and experienced on the same day. They came with an education: That anger and retribution are the revenge of the Nature for the violation of its laws. I call it an air-conditioned memory. Think people, think.

Miandad-Imran Khan battle, from Cricket to Politics

Raju Korti

Pakistan Cricket, like its Politics, is full of extra-constitutional authorities. More often than not, both are known to merge seamlessly. The renewed animosity between Javed Miandad and Imran Khan shows that on both the turfs there has been no love lost between the two. Having met both a couple of times, I can say without hesitation that of the two, Javed is much more cocky, devious and shrewd than the man who seems to be cutting a more and more sorry figure as the country's prime minister.

You may hate him as much as you want but as a player he was a wily fox who with his skill, perseverance and street-urchin cunning had an uncanny knack of getting under the skin of his opposition. He was too overbearing and therefore not a very positive influence in the team but then in the Pakistan team most players acted and behaved like parallel captains. At different times he was axed by the selectors, handed in his resignation and was even overthrown by his own players.

The fierce competitor from the streets of Karachi, however, has always been a big source of entertainment for his antics on and off the field. Remember the 1981 spat with Dennis Lillee and the mickey-making of Indian wicket-keeper Kiran More during the 1992 World Cup. While batting, he would entice the opponents into a shy at the stumps by continuing to stand outside the crease even when the ball was fielded and would rub it in with an impish grin. He was, as Ian Chappel said, an "archetypal champion if he is on your side and a bastard if he is an opponent."

In my blog on Imran Khan in 2012, I had said that with his crafty ways, Javed cuts for an ideal figure in Pakistan's turbid politics. He has vindicated my prophecy by taking on Imran Khan after years of cold war. It will be entertaining to find how this acrimony plays out in the country's sticky political wicket. Javed is rustic and insidious while Khan is charismatic and manipulative. Expectedly, the sparring has begun with Cricket as the ruse and Politics as the bottom line.

Javed has held Imran singularly responsible for the the ruinous state of Pakistan's cricket accusing him of appointing officials on Pakistan Cricket Board who have zero knowledge of the sport. He was obviously referring to the hiring of Wasim Khan from abroad as the PCB's CEO. But the righteous pretense dropped with "I was your captain, you were not my captain. I will come to politics and then I will talk to you. I was the one who led you all the time, but you act like the God now. It is almost like you are the only intelligent person in this country as if no one has gone to Oxford or Cambridge or any other university in Pakistan (sic). You don't care about the country. You came to my home and went out as a Prime Minister. I challenge you to deny this."

In keeping with his cultivated aloof image Imran hasn't chosen to respond to Javed's barbs. As captain of the Pakistan Imran was known to be a law unto himself. Every now and then he would shed that mask of snobbery when it suited him. Javed may have forgotten but in those days, Imran often unleashed the unrefined and abrasive Javed to get under the rivals' skin and unsettle them. I remember how he cackled saying he would appeal vociferously for an LBW decision even if he was fielding deep in the field. His exact words: "Miyaa karna padta hai." Those were the days when Pakistan had other greats like Zaheer Abbas, Sarfraz Nawaz, Mushtaq Mohammed, Majid Khan, Asif Iqbal  among others but none came anywhere close to Javed when it came to on-field antics.

After the 1992 World Cup victory Imran used his cancer hospital as ladder for his political ambitions and despite being propped by the army, realized that his charisma was not enough to deal with hardened political adversaries. With Javed, it was similar story in the sense that he wasn't any less dictatorial and when the players revolted against him, he managed to survive by the skin of his teeth because the PCB threw its lot with him. I am not sure about Imran's role in the ouster of Javed as captain but his switch from being impartial to falling in with the rebels decided the outcome.

With loyalties fragmented, Majid Khan and Zaheer were left by the wayside and the mantle fell on Imran. Javed backed him in an attempt to unite the team but things soured when during the 1983 historic partnership of 451 with Mudassar Nazar, he was denied the opportunity of equaling Gary Sobers' Test record score of 365. Imran's surprise declaration the next morning left Javed frothing at his mouth. His moment under the sunlight was gone. The rift only festered with time even as the captaincy rotated between the two and none of them being any wiser. Javed became a symbol of pride for the Karachi lobby while Imran became a symbol of Lahore lobby. Curiously, neither had any direct role to play here. They were chosen by the lobbies to voice their own cases, causes and concerns.

Now that the acrimony between the two has spilled out into the open, the ramifications can only be guessed. Puppet though he may be, Imran has (so far) the backing of Army because of the Nawaz Sharif factor while Javed could pull strings through the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) courtesy in-;law Dawood Ibrahim. As political rivals this can lead to realignment of country's political forces which have always been volatile. It will be a test match where Imran will have to bat well and Javed will have to bowl well.