Linus the genius

I am usually reminded of my first story, when my grand-dad insisted I get creative. It's quite a joke in the Pip household, and there have been suggestions about passing on this work of art to future generations so that my stupidity is preserved.

My story always was: "There was once a dog that lived in a town. One day, the dog died. End." Needless to say, my grand-dad cried out in anguish and gave up all hopes of me being a great writer.

Today, I was jobless enough to surf through some old Peanuts comic strips.

Linus is trying to wheedle Lucy into reading a story to him. Having had enough, she grabs a book at random.

Lucy: “A man was born, he lived and he died. The End!”

Linus: “What a fascinating account. It almost makes you wish you had known the fellow.”

Genuis!

Happy Heckler

There is a thrill in walking into a sporting arena that's jam-packed, buzzing with energy and eager for the game to start. There is another sort of thrill, which very few people understand, in walking into a deserted stadium. Everyone watches the big games, everyone knows the days when their team scaled those mighty peaks but there are people more interested in the depths, when athletes perform in empty arenas and hear echoes of their own voices.

It's often said that an athlete reveals himself under pressure, when a sell-out crowd is roaring him on, cranking up the expectation levels. I think athletes reveal quite a lot even when no-one is watching. In fact, it must be really difficult to simulate pressure in empty stadiums, to know you're career is on the line amid this silence.

Often in these silent times, a spectator will take the opportunity to liven up the day. In Mumbai you're likely to hear of Vijay Gaundalkar, the umpire who lost his head and turned into a traveling supporter. Gravy and Chickie were very much part of games at the Antigua Recreation Ground and there are tales of Kojak in Cape Town, hollering away during South Africa's sporting isolation the '70s. And then there was Yabba, the legendary barracker in Sydney.

The best part about these guys is that they're always there. Through thick and thin, they're by the team. They have plenty of advice and abuses to hurl but usually, heart of heart, they really care. They land up every morning hoping that some time in the distant future the dark days will pass. That some day in their lifetime, their team will lift the ultimate prize.

If you're one of those who enjoys the silent times, you'll enjoy Ashby Jones' piece in WSJ. The deck sums up the story well: As Tampa Bay Rays draw a noisy throng, Robert Szasz gets drowned out. This was the Rays' first home game in a World Series. Szasz was very much there but, for once, in a really sweet irony, his voice wasn't heard.

A game divided

Not too many great cricket pieces off late (of whatever I've been reading). But here's the Age's Greg Baum in full flight:

The ICC has its head in the sand, which in Dubai is not so surprising. So does the players' body. Test cricket draws crowds only in Australia and England, and that is not enough. In television terms, one Test used to be worth four one-dayers. Now, two Tests are worth one one-dayer, hence England's skewed schedule in India. Test cricket is screwed.

More such pearlers in the piece. Read the beauty.

No tipping point

I'm not talking Malcolm Gladwell here. I'm talking about the final act in a restaurant or bar. Yes, I know you're thinking about the final trip to the restroom after the big slosh but get over it. I'm onto the question of tipping waiters.

The discussions around tipping, in my circles at least, can get tedious. "You're actually thinking of 15%? Are you out of your mind? We're not earning here, we're students." But there's always a counter: "What goes around comes around, it all evens out. Socialism has its values." I've even had emotional blackmail thrown at me: "Some day you may take up a part-time job as a waiter, surely you'll want to make some cash."

Somehow I've never bought these theories. There is a person here doing a job. He or she is getting paid. If he does a great job, I would commend the restaurant for hiring this guy. I'll definitely recommend it to people. I'll surely come back again. So everyone is benefiting. If he does a bad job, none of the above will happen and if many people feel that way, the place may not exist anymore.

When I was employed, I didn't get paid for every article I wrote, however good it might have been. I never expected readers to pay me 10% of the amount they spent on reading the article (which would include the cost of internet, electricity etc). If I wrote a good piece in a magazine that cost 50 bucks, I didn't get even 1/100th of it as a tip. I just made do with my salary. So how does the logic work differently here?

OK fine. "Sitting in an air-conditioned room and rattling off 800 words is way easier than pleasing a hundred hungry people." But what about the ones who make your bills in retail stores? What about the guy at the bookstore who patiently ferrets out the edition you want. In fact, what about the guy who's cooked all the food you're eating? He's surely done more work than the waiter. Why do we leave these guys out while tipping?

Of course, my stern tipping policy is also usually linked to my shoe-string budget. The Spanish waiters must still be cursing the Pips after what happened a couple of months back. Every place we went, we paid by rounding off to the nearest Euro. So if the bill was 9.97, we ended up paying 10. If it was 9.01, we still ended up paying 10. My logic was, it's evening out anyway. Someone was gaining more, someone was gaining less and we were losing anyway.

But we probably took on sensible decision on that trip. We never visited any place more than once. Never.

Read more about the tipping phenomenon in Neal Templin's Wall Street Journal column.

Campaigning across platforms

The U.S. presidential election is being fought on newspapers, TV, radio and the internet. But Barack Obama is going way beyond. The Obama campaign is flooding videogames, Twitter, iphones and text messages. Chris O' Brien has more in Idea Lab.

The Starbucks stops here

The more Starbucks a country has, the bigger its financial problems, says Daniel Gross in Newsweek.

Like American financial capitalism, Starbucks, fueled by the capital markets, took a great idea too far (quality coffee for Starbucks, securitization for Wall Street) and diluted the experience unnecessarily (subprime food such as egg-and-sausage sandwiches for Starbucks, subprime loans for Wall Street). Like so many sadder-but-wiser Miami condo developers, Starbucks operated on a "build it and they will come" philosophy.

Gross starts his piece by citing Thomas Friedman's McDonald's theory (where he posited that countries where the middle class could afford McDonalds could be expect to resolve disputes). It seemed revolutionary until Lebenon and Israel decided to disprove it.

Now it's Turkey's turn to disprove Gross.

A first for the Trib

Never in its 161-year history has the Chicago Tribune backed a Democratic nominee for President. Until now ...

It may have seemed audacious for Obama to start his campaign in Springfield, invoking Lincoln. We think, given the opportunity to hold this nation’s most powerful office, he will prove it wasn’t so audacious after all. We are proud to add Barack Obama’s name to Lincoln’s in the list of people the Tribune has endorsed for president of the United States.

When SRT woke India up

Eighty five years from now whichever one of us is alive can tell the martians (who will no doubt arrive) about a cricketing god called SRT. The Martians may be far superior to anyone else in playing the game (as they will be in anything else) but we can proudly stare them in the eye and say: The boy woulda creamed ya.

I always wished SRT's voice never cracked. There were days when I hoped India would get themselves in a deep hole, so that he could do the impossible. Hours and hours of class were spent figuring out how much he had to score in his next series to get the average towards 60. Televisions were shut when he got out, irrespective if whether India were winning, losing or drawing.

If there's one image I cannot forget about him, it's that morning. Groggy eyed, I tiptoed to the television room, immediately turned down the volume and tried to find out the score in Auckland. The Indian run-chase had just begun and SRT, opening for the first time in a one-dayer, was simply flying. Suddenly it felt like I was back in bed again, drifting into a dream, seeing the boy smash a quite unbelievable 49-ball 82.

There were several more accomplished innings - and I remember crying after that 136 in Chennai went in vain - but for boyish exuberance, for for an innings of unbridled expression, for a mad adrenalin-fueled excitement, we'll never forget Auckland. In cricketing terms it was the day when "India awoke to life and freedom".

Zook and the art of reinvention

If you haven't picked up a book titled Unstoppable by Chris Zook, do it now. You don't have to read the rest of this post but here's the abstract if you insist.

Over the next decade, nearly three out of four companies will face the challenge of their corporate lives: redefining their core business. Buffeted by global competition, facing an uncertain future, more and more executives will realize that they must make fundamental changes in their core even as they continue delivering the goods and services that keep them in business today. Unstoppable shows these managers how to look deep within their organizations to find undervalued, unrecognized, or underutilized assets that can serve as new platforms for sustainable growth.

Stages in evolution

Yes, dear friends. I'm happy to announce that this blog has an audience now. Just one person but every drop ... And trust me, this is a really, really important drop. So dear Mrs. Pip, welcome.

Blog psychology

Andrew Sullivan analyzes the blog as a medium.

On my blog, my readers and I experienced 9/11 together, in real time. I can look back and see not just how I responded to the event, but how I responded to it at 3:47 that afternoon. And at 9:46 that night. There is a vividness to this immediacy that cannot be rivaled by print.

Read the full piece The Atlantic. Sullivan, a blogger since 2000, says blogs are changing the way we think, the way we record and the way we consume news and information. He says a lots of other things of course in a lengthy article that doesn't seem so lengthy at all.

Which also reminds me of a point Gideon Haigh made in The Monthly recently, while discussing the "essay" as a form of writing.

Two thousand competently executed words in a newspaper often seems too many and yet 6000 words of superbly executed non-fiction narrative writing in New Yorker or Atlantic somehow seems not quite enough. It seems to me that subjects, perhaps at the point of 5000 words suddenly become exponentially more interesting and they're more satisfying for a writer to explore. You're suddenly moving out of the cliche sphere and the subject sort of develops a texture and it begins to exhibit those paradoxes and contradictions that make life interesting.

Because it's home

I remember one of my friends in college posing a question in our final year: "Why do people continue to stay in Kashmir despite there being such a danger to their lives?" And another one of my friends, without even a blink of an eye, shot back: "Because it's home."

We recently had this discussion about university towns in the U.S. Educational institutions don't have to pay taxes, so it's the others in the town, in many cases people with absolutely no connection to the university, who shoulder the burden.

So the city needs money to provide protection for the people, it needs to ensure a good police network, drainage facilities, community parks, pools etc but ends up taking those funds (and more) from the same people. A university or school, which charges its students, are considered non-profit organisations that cannot be taxed.

Is this fair? Can universities and schools make people pay a larger tax than they would in another town? Some of my friends didn't have much sympathy for these people. "They knew the situation always," went the common refrain. "And it's not as if the educational institutions began as a secret. So they always had the option of moving out. And for those who are new, there is really no excuse at all."

I somehow disagreed. Firstly I thought it unfair to expect people to move out just because an educational institution is being built in their town. Those residents were here first. And it's their home. So to expect people to move out of their home just because you want to run a million-dollar "non-profit" organization isn't fair. They've no doubt developed an emotional attachment to the place - the smells, the sounds - and it's silly even expecting them to go away.

I wasn't as convinced about those wanting to move in. Maybe they could have factored in the extra property taxes they would pay and chosen some other place. Maybe they really don't have a reason to complain. But again, once someone's decided on making a place home, there's little that can dissuade them.

Great Democracy = bad tennis system

Lesson for the day: I found this a year late but the Economist's Democracy Index, formulated in 2007, is an interesting one. Sweden sits comfortably on top (9.88 on 10) while Iceland, Netherlands, Norway and Denmark all clear the 9.50 mark. Read more about it in the Great Magazine.

Which brings me to a completely tangential point but one that tennis fans might spend some time thinking about. A good democracy translates to poor tennis players. OK, that's rubbish. But Sweden, a traditional powerhouse, has to settle for Robin Soderling as their highest ranked player (ATP ranked 35). Thomas Johansson, a former Australian Open Champion, currently sits at 87 and there's no one else in the top 100. And this is the country that produced Borg, Willander and Edberg. Heck even Thomas Enqvist and Magnus Larsson had their moments.

Rafael Nadal's Spain is No.16 in the democracy list and Roger Federer's Switzerland is at 10. Iceland, Netherlands and Denmark don't have anyone in the top 100. Finland (sixth in the democracy list) has just one representative, Jarkko Nieminen at No.33. Luxembourg's finest is at No.68, Australia's best (Lleyton Hewitt) is one rank lower, and Canada has no one in the top 100.

Now I'm not surprised how Serbia (No.55 in the democracy index), Russia (No.102), Argentina (No.54) and France (No.24) are producing a conveyor belt of talent. Cut those freedoms, I say.

Ganguly and the art of the piss off

Of course I'll remember him cover-driving Alan Mulally off the front foot; of course I'll remember that six off Kumar Dharmasena in 1997 when the ball, a tiny speck in the horizon, soared over the Wankhede Stadium flood-lights; and of course I'll remember him giving himself room, charging down the pitch like an enraged bull and toweling Aquib Javed past point in Dhaka. But here's why Sourav was different from the rest.

Tendulkar in his pomp was impossible to bowl to. You just stood and gasped. You were outsmarted. Just concede defeat. He could have struck that ball to any corner he chose. Just applaud and go back to your crease. Show some grace. History will remember you as someone He hit for four.

Dravid in his pomp was different. You might as well be bowling to a concrete wall. You expend so much energy running in and he simply shoulders arms. When you get the line right, he's ready. Somehow he's simply boring you to give up. Just give him the single. Get me that Gatorade.

Laxman in his pomp was different. Bad day. He's flying and you're stuck. Just limit the damage. Look forward to tomorrow. Today is his. Bowl at the offstump, don't stray down leg. That way at least the crowd is marveling at his batting instead of realizing what garbage you're sending down.

Sourav in his pomp was different. You knew you could get him out - bouncer, bouncer, pitched up - but you also knew he could caress one through the covers after looking mighty clumsy. You knew he would fish outside off, you also knew he had the eye to ramp one over short third man. You knew, if nothing worked, you could run him out.

We loved him because he pissed bowlers off. He made their blood boil. He made them lose faith in themselves. He mocked at those technique-obsessed coaches. He looked beautiful amid looking ugly. Suddenly a gorgeous square-drive, suddenly a play-and-a-miss. From woah to yuck in a flash. From sensational to stupid. From one extreme to another, he had us transfixed.

There were few more endearing sights in cricket than Sourav messing with a bowler's mind. And we'll miss him for it.

Salivating over Palin

The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg quotes Slate's Fred Kaplan:

... basically a lot of men out there salivate over Sarah because they want to bonk her. I didn’t watch CNN because I don’t want to know what’s going through the neurons of a roomful of know-nothings every second of a debate, but apparently they divided the charts by gender this time, and, so I read, every time Sarah stared into the camera, the male charts went up (along with some other things, no doubt).

Why do I suspect some reverse psychology here? Were CNN trying to make viewers think that men were perking up when Palin was on the screen, leading other men to subconsciously follow suit?

Which brings us to another point. Are large sections of the media showing double-standards with regard to scrutinizing the candidates? Why is it cool to take 'You betcha' Sarah to the cleaners and let Joe-Six-Pack Biden go largely scott free? Both have made some stupid statements - though Biden is yet to talk of sharing a border with Greenland. But why hasn't Hollywood unearthed a male equivalent of Tina Fey [in pic]? Can't anyone out there imitate Biden? Why is he not being watched as closely? Does all this smack of sexism? You betcha.