1983 & Jersey - Sports As A Means To An End !

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

- Margaret Mead

I was 9 years old when India won the world cup in 1983.  Everyone in my house were sleeping; I was watching the match with someone who was visiting us. I think he was my mom's relative. That is one of my oldest memories. I don't remember how jubilant I felt that night but there are glimpses of me walking to the refrigerator and drinking ice cold water (which meant I was happy and needed a drink).

That victory changed confidence of Indian people. It was the seed which lead to the growth of Tendulkar in 1990 who single handedly responsible for boasting confidence of India. Timing was impeccable as the economy opened up around the same time. I am pretty sure, this generation doesn't have any idea what it meant and hence, they have no gratitude for what they have now. 

I also met Kapil Dev near my house before I moved to US. These two cricketers are great human beings who have a big hand in changing a fate of nation which was stuck in the past even after 4 decades of independence. 

The English game of cricket was the biggest catalyst for India to come out of the shadow of English imperialism. 

I don't watch cricket anymore nor any other sports. I think, it was very useful tool for me during my younger days. Sports inspired me and I moved on to other things as I grew older. It's pity that most people use it as a passive entertainment and wasting hours everyday sitting in front of the TV. It's worse in US. 

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumble puppy. 

As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions."

In 1984, Huxley added, "people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us".

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Jersey is a heart warming story. It's inspired from the life of the late cricketer Raman Lamba. I don't remember much about his career but the kid in me was thrilled to see him come out to bat and he was the fittest person in the team. 

When I read the review of the movie, I thought it was the story of Robin Singh. But this is a story of thousands of talented Indian cricketers and other sportsmen who lost their dreams because of omnipresent bureaucracy. This hasn't changed even today. 

Movies like Jersey are a remainder to younger generation to see the reality as it is, stop using cricket to fuel nationalism, be persistent to fight the system and change it. One can dream. 

The song Maiyya Mannu is soothing.

After a long long time, I got to watch not one but two soulful Hindi movies.

Sachin A Billion Dreams - A Movie

Concussion

They're terrified of you. Bennet Omalu is going to war with a corporation that has 20 million people on a weekly basis craving their product the same way they crave food. The NFL owns a day of the week, the same day the Church used to own. Now it's theirs. They're very big.

Will Smith's accent, enhanced darker skin, hands and everything fit's perfectly to the character of real life Nigerian born and now American Dr. Bennet Omalu.

If repeated blows to the head in a football career spanning 18 years can give CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy); can you imagine how much benefits 18 years meditation could bring?

Sorry, I could resist inserting the inverse mental model here. As far as playing football; stupidity will always prevail as long as the age old economic rule of supply and demand are in tandem.

Brain Changes in College Football Players Raise New Concerns

And there were differences, as it turned out. As a group, the football players had less volume in the hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in memory and emotional processing, than did the nonplayers. Among the players who had no history of concussions, hippocampal volume was as much as 16 percent smaller than the control group’s. And the difference in size was even more striking among the players who had experienced a confirmed concussion, whose hippocampal volume was about 25 percent smaller than in young men who’d never played.

“That was a greater differential than we’d anticipated,” said Patrick Bellgowan, a faculty member at both the Laureate Institute and the University of Tulsa and the study’s senior author.

The results are particularly baffling for the players with no history of concussion. Interestingly, those athletes in each group who had played the most seasons of football tended to have the least hippocampal volume, suggesting that, at least potentially, cumulative playing time and repeated tackles might affect the brain, even without a formal concussion.

Of course, the findings, although provocative, do not in fact show that playing a contact sport shrinks hippocampal volume. “This is a single snapshot” of the players’ brains, Dr. Bellgowan said, and reveals nothing about changes over time. Indeed, the results could indicate that, in some indeterminate fashion, having a smaller hippocampus predisposes someone to enjoy or excel at football — meaning that the anomalous brain structure predated the playing.

- More Here

Are athletes really getting faster, better, stronger? - David Epstein

David Epstein is the author of The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance

Changing technology, changing genes, and a changing mindset. Innovation in sports, whether that's new track surfaces or new swimming techniques, the democratization of sport, the spread to new bodies and to new populations around the world, and imagination in sport, an understanding of what the human body is truly capable of, have conspired to make athletes stronger, faster, bolder, and better than ever.

What the Fox Knows

Nate Silver today launches the "new" FiveThirtyEight - good luck Nate; give them hell!!

I would never have launched FiveThirtyEight in 2008, and I would not have chosen to broaden its coverage so extensively now, unless I thought there were some need for it in the marketplace. Conventional news organizations on the whole are lacking in data journalism skills, in my view. Some of this is a matter of self-selection. Students who enter college with the intent to major in journalism or communications have above-average test scores in reading and writing, but below-average scores in mathematics. Furthermore, young people with strong math skills will normally have more alternatives to journalism when they embark upon their careers and may enter other fields.

This is problematic. The news media, as much as it’s been maligned, still plays a central a role in disseminating knowledge. More than 80 percent of American adults spend at least some time with the news each day. (By comparison, about 25 percent of Americans of all ages are enrolled in educational programs.)

There are some handicaps that conventional journalism faces when it seeks to move beyond reporting on the news to explaining it. One problem is the notion of “objectivity” as it’s applied in traditional newsrooms, where it’s often taken to be synonymous with neutrality or nonpartisanship. I prefer the scientific definition of objectivity, where it means something closer to the truth beyond our (inherently subjective) perceptions. Leave that aside for now, however. The journalistic notion of objectivity, however flawed, at least creates some standard by which facts are introduced and presented to readers.

But while individual facts are rigorously scrutinized and checked for accuracy in traditional newsrooms, attempts to infer causality sometimes are not, even when they are eminently falsifiable. (The increased speed of the news-gathering process no doubt makes this problem worse.7) Instead, while the first two steps of the process (collecting and organizing information in the form of news stories) are thought to fall within the province of “objective” journalism, explanatory journalism is sometimes placed in the category of “opinion journalism.” My disdain for opinion journalism (such as in the form of op-ed columns) is well established, but my chief problem with it is that it doesn’t seem to abide by the standards of either journalistic or scientific objectivity. Sometimes it doesn’t seem to abide by any standard at all.

And he will be sharing the data and code on Github:

Our team also has a broad set of skills and experience in methods that fall under the rubric of data journalism. These include statistical analysis, but also data visualization, computer programming and data-literate reporting. So in addition to written stories, we’ll have interactive graphics and features. Within a couple of months we’ll launch a podcast, and we’ll be collaborating with ESPN Films and Grantland to produce original documentary films. You’ll find us on television and radio, and on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. We’ll share data and code on Github.

What I've Been Reading

Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion by Carol Travis. It's the best book on psychology of anger ever, period (I was suprised to find only 17 reviews on Amazon so far) - A must read !!

The Anatomy of Anger:
To understand anger, the dualist approach beloved for centuries will not do. Anger and its expression are a result of biology and culture, mind and body.

For society's sake, as well as for the thousands of people who are being taught to think of themselves as helpless victims of life or biology, it is time to restore confidence in our abilities of self-control and self-determination. I think that biological research help us to do this, for it shows that while anger is a normal physiological process, it is one that is generated, and can be reduced, by our interpretations of the world and the events that happens to us. It shows that very act of defining an ambiguous emotional state as anger may create anger where none previously existed. It shows that while we may not be able to control the fight-or-flight response that protects and defends us, we can control what we do about it - express it, deny it, defy it, transform it, use it. Most of all, biology teaches that we need not be hostages to our emotions: We are restored a measure of responsibility for how we act on them. We can't the devil (or Henry) made us do it.

Myths of Suppressed Anger:
The connection between anger (expressed or suppressed) and high blood pressure depends on your age, race, sex, social class, and primarily on the reason you feel angry.

Which Type As are not Vulnerable to Heart Disease?
Those who are ambitious and energetic, but who are motivated by challenge and intrinsic instead of by external pressure and anger. They tend to feel in control of their work instead of controlled by it,  but they also know when to accept the inevitable. They have close friends and good relationships. The coronary-prone elements of Type A, in contrast, are chronic, intense anger, social isolation, and a continuing feeling of frustration and fury about events that are our of one's control.

Myths of Expressed Anger:
When you permit children to play aggressively they don't become less aggressive, as the catharsis theory would predict, they become more aggressive. What reduced the children's anger? Not talking about it. Not playing with guns; that made them more hostile and aggressive as well. The most successful way of dispelling their anger was to understand why their classmate had behaved as she did (she was sleepy, upset, not feeling well).

The point is that aggression, in whatever form, is an acquired strategy for dealing with anger, not a biological inevitability. It is no use telling placid, pacifistic, and rational people that they ought to "let go" and ventilate their rage with a violent display, throwing saucepan or bitting pillows. They will only feel worse if they do.

If you can't say something nice about a person, don't say anything at all - at least if you want your anger to dissipate and your associations to remain congenial. But if you want to stay anger, if you want to use your anger, keep talking.

Angry Divorce:
They made a point of never physically or verbally attacking one another and keeping anger within bounds and not use children as scapegoats or allies. Among all the things that people can do to protect their children in the wake of divorce, this is one the hardest and on of the most important. It is, unfortunately, one of the least common.

Managing anger depends on taking responsibility for one's emotions and one's actions: on refusing the temptation to remain stuck in blame and fury or silent resentment. Once anger becomes a force to berate the nearest scapegoat instead of to change a bad situation, it loses its credibility and its power, It feeds only on itself. And it sure as sunrise makes for a grumpy life.

Sachin Tendulkar Farewell Speech

Sachin Tendulkar's Final Innings...

The magician called Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar on Friday ensured that it was a farewell that each and every Indian will remember for posterity as the country's greatest sporting icon walked into the sunset with a knock which exhibited just why he is the greatest of this era.

In his 200th and last Test match, Tendulkar showed how a genius can keep overwhelming emotions under control as he scored a majestic 74 in what will probably be his last international innings.

The numbers mattered for the uninitiated but for those who loved the man for the last 24 years, each and every stroke that came out from that blade was a celebration. His 74 came off 118 balls with 12 boundaries.

A deft late cut off Shane Shillingford, straight drive past Tino Best, a shot off his hips off Shanon Gabriel, it was India's most loved hero's way of saying 'Thank You' as he completed 24 years in international cricket.

The cobwebs were off his mind, 40,000 odd at the Wankhede and the millions in every nook and corner of India may have felt the pressure, but the man himself had a sage like presence at the crease. Nothing mattered to him apart from the bowler and the release of his delivery.

The second day's innings was a vintage Tendulkar, who made everyone sit on a 'Time Machine' as he rolled back those years. What no bowler has done successfully in 24 years, Tino Best was trying to do -- sledge Tendulkar. But predictably, it didn't have an effect. Best tried to intimidate Tendulkar with short-pitched deliveries. It hardly bothered him. He appealed fervently for a caught behind but the umpire negated it.

Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan's sigh of relief was there for all to see.

Best walked up to Tendulkar on his follow through, asking "why doesn't he hook?" The Master just smiled back.

But then Tendulkar showed that if the bowler is 'Best', the maestro from Mumbai has always been 'Better Than the Best'.

The Indian's answer was copybook bowler's backdrive that took him past the half-century mark. The 50 came off 91 balls with nine boundaries.

As Tendulkar raised his bat to acknowledge the applause from a packed Wankhede, wife Anjali made a nervous gesture with her hands, probably to say "Just stay on".

A few overs later, Best had his hands on his knees, a signature of surrendering to a genius. As he walked past Best, Tendulkar just patted his shoulders as if to say "Come on young man. You will have better days but it's my day today."

May be 40 years from now, a 70-year-old Best will tell his grandchildren about his duel with the Master as this will be the most cherished moment of his career.

To prove a point, a backfoot cover drive off Best was unleashed in his next over as Tendulkar moved into the 60s. Finally when Narsingh Deonarine induced an edge, skipper Darren Sammy took a catch at the slip.

Anjali was on her feet, mother Rajni was smiling, coach Ramakant Achrekar had a tear in his eyes, brother Ajit was emotional and one of the ball-boys standing at the boundary line called Arjun Tendulkar was certainly pleased at what he saw.

As Tendulkar acknowledged the standing ovation, one didn't know whether he had a tear in his eyes but there were moist eyes all around as the revered Indian trudged his way back to pavilion.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Cosmologists believe that the universe, which came into being following a 'Big Bang' about 14,000 million years ago, does not have a centre. 'Cricketologists' are a different breed though. Their universe centres around Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar, who has bedazzled inhabitants of 'Planet Cricket' for a quarter of a century with his radiance.

It was no different at the Eden Gardens on a sultry Monday morning as the Maestro from Mumbai took the field along with his Team India mates to prepare for the first showdown with the Caribbeans that gets under way on Wednesday.

It was business as usual for the Little Master, who started by rolling his arm over before putting his pads on to face an odd assortment of bowlers in the nets, treating each one on merit as he looked to get into his groove for the final leg of his career. There wasn't a single false shot, no display of emotion on his boyish face as he batted for close to an hour, playing pace and spin with consummate ease even as the world around him was going crazy over his imminent retirement.

- More Here

To One-Sixth of the World, He is the Greatest Sportsman of All Time

Tendulkar’s greatness, like that of all famed athletes in any sport, is the product of both genius and application, a natural talent honed by a dogged work ethic and hunger for success. When observing his batting, cricket analysts struggled to single out a signature stroke—he was so complete, so skillful, so balanced, so precise in his movement, that every shot he played carried with it its own majesty. His commitment to the game led to an international career spanning 24 years, starting in 1989 on enemy territory in Karachi, Pakistan, when he was just a 16-year-old kid.

That kid is now India’s most beloved star, a champion with a World Cup to his name and myriad other trophies. A whole generation of Indians—roughly half of the country’s over 1.2 billion population is under 25—only knows the Age of Sachin, an era that began with the country mired in stagnation and economic crisis. As Tendulkar’s career powered forward, so did India’s liberalizing reforms, its growth rate galloping ahead. Decades-old anti-colonial resentments and inferiority complexes faded in the face of a newfound confidence, embodied, it seemed, in Tendulkar—all five feet and five inches of him, an Indian colossus on the world stage.

In terms of public regard, Tendulkar rises well above the glitzy celebrity of Bollywood and the tawdry muck of Indian politics. His persona is humble, honest, kind. He didn’t date a string of supermodels (or at least, not that we know); his wife is a pediatrician, shielded from the public eye. He speaks in a thin, slightly high-pitched voice, not unlike that of English soccer icon David Beckham—though it’s unimaginable Tendulkar would ever be subject to the sort of derision, cynicism and scandal heaped on the latter.

Still, there is not a single athlete, perhaps in the history of all sport, who has had to shoulder a greater burden of expectation. Cricket is all in India — a nation, which despite its enormous size, is a minnow in most other sports —  and Tendulkar was the Chosen One. For each Indian setback, he has had to bear a billion cries of disappointment. But in the last decade or so, as Tendulkar starred, cricket’s gravitational axis swung definitively away from its twee upper-class origins in the U.K. to the hurly burly of India’s slums, streets and cricket grounds. A flashy, lucrative league sees the world’s best players line-up every year for franchises in Indian cities—the former colony now the seat of the empire.

- Tendulkar to retire after 200th Test

David and Goliath - Malcolm Gladwell !!

Malcolm Gladwell's new book David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants is out today !! Bought it already but have to wait until tonight to start.

Among our tablet-toting, Foreign Policy-reading, Foucault-citing cultural elites, Gladwell’s name is rarely mentioned without a hint of ironising disdain. Everyone reads him, but it’s just not cool to admit you’re a fan.

When lists of “Most Influential Thinkers” are put together, Gladwell rarely makes the top cut. Now, this may be just because he’s considered a populariser, rather than an original thinker. Yet one can accept this and still make the case that he has been, over the last decade, our most important public intellectual. He has changed popular ideas about how ideas spread or how cognition works. He has also created a whole new cultural genre.

Non-fiction, ideas-based narratives are everywhere these days, but the space was opened up by the stunning success of The Tipping Point and Blink. Note that I said “cultural” rather than “publishing” genre, because the genre he spawned is cross-platform and multi-dimensional, and it has seeped into the very grain of our lives. Without Gladwell, no Daniel Pink, no Steven Johnson, no Kahneman-as-best-selling-author-rather-than-respected-but-obscure-academic; no Freakonomics, no Brainpicker, no TED. I exaggerate, but only slightly. Gladwell has done more than anyone else to turn ideas into one of the most valuable currencies of the internet age.

- In Praise of Malcolm Gladwell 

How Soccer is Saving Elephants, Rhinos & Other Endangered Species

The clock strikes 4:00 pm and the bell rings – signaling the end of classes and the beginning of playtime at Tigithi Secondary School in Laikipia County, Kenya.  Almost immediately, 150 boys and girls rush out of their classrooms to enjoy a game of football on the school’s pitch. What’s unique is that these young energetic students are playing with the nearly indestructible One World Futbols sponsored by Chevrolet. These balls were donated to the school back in February.

The rate of poaching in Kenya has nearly doubled in the past 24 months. Poaching has become such a serious problem in East Africa that in 2011 alone Ol Pejeta lost five of our 88 rhinos to poachers – our greatest loss in 20 years.  Elephants and rhinos are on top of the endangered species list, being slaughtered for their tusks and horns respectively. Unfortunately, some local villagers are being lured into the illegal killing of these animals in exchange for large sums of cash.  These products are then smuggled through well-connected middlemen and find their way to Asia where the market is rife.2013 through a partnership between One World Futbol Project and the Ol Pejeta Conservancy – a non-profit wildlife conservancy in Kenya supporting endangered species, tourism and community outreach.

The Conservancy is using soccer and these ultra-durable balls to engage youth living close to wildlife.  Through soccer, Ol Pejeta Conservancy is teaching students about the troubles poaching causes and giving the community at large a greater sense of the importance of conservation.

- More Here

Baseball or Cricket? It's a no-brainer

In one, the pitcher generally hurls the ball at the batter; it doesn’t bounce. The batter tries to whack it out of the park and if he makes contact, drops the bat and runs to first base, or, if he gets lucky, makes a home run. The fielders wear mitts in order to facilitate the catching of the ball. It strikes me as being not much more than glorified rounders (a game I played in the park last Sunday).

Cricket’s equivalent of the pitcher, the bowler, comes in many guises: fast, medium-fast, swinging, seaming, leg-spinning, off-spinning. The ball almost always bounces of course, and deviates off the pitch: the batsman therefore can’t just whack it, but has a range of strokes, defensive and attacking, at his disposal. Of those in the field, only the wicketkeeper wears gloves. Add to that the influence of the weather conditions. And then there’s the fascination of the statistics: batting and bowling averages, immortalized in the game’s annual, Wisden.

I would rather watch somebody like David Gower stroking the ball effortlessly to the boundary  – than some guy trying to slam it out of the park. And when it comes to poise and athleticism in bowling, what about the great Michael Holding in full flow.

The complexity and sophistication of cricket means that it simply has no peers. And as the current Test series between England and Australia shows, it can be pulsating over a full five days.

As for golf – a good walk spoiled as Mark Twain said – don't get me started.

- More Here

Malcolm Gladwell On "Proof"

I haven't seen Gladwell being so passionate; one of the best talks of the year!! Also, check out his brilliant 2009 New Yorker piece on college football

Quote of the Day

People are free to give their opinions. Lots of people are giving opinions about me. Some have played the game and they were giving opinions. Some have not played the game and they are also giving opinions. But I don't worry about opinions.

It's a package deal. You won't score a hundred every time you go out to bat. And like that you won't get positive comments all the time. So I can't control on what others say. What I can do is to just focus on the things I can handle, that is to play to the best of my ability.

- Sachin Tendulkar

The Death Of The NFL

In 2001 I represented the second pick in the First Round of the Draft, Leonard Davis, Offensive Tackle from Texas taken by the Arizona Cardinals. He weighed in at 375 and could break five seconds in a forty-yard dash. When an offensive lineman hits a defensive lineman to begin the play in football a low level concussive hit occurs and the brain of each player is impacted. The definition of a concussion does not require a player to be unconscious and motored off the field. It is a blow to the head or body, which causes a change in brain function. Each one of these blows jars the brain.

Simply multiply the number of plays and collisions and it is possible that a player will retire from football with 10,000 or more low-level concussive hits. What is the long term impact of this damage to the brain. Players who are not lying motionless on the field post-concussion have been left out of the discussion. And yet damage is occurring steadily. This is why I have called the concussion damage in football and other collision sports a ticking time bomb and undiagnosed health epidemic.

Parents and athletes have accepted the fact that playing football breaks down the structure of many joints in the human body–the neck, hip, elbow, knee, ankle and back. But are parents willing to accept the reality that prominent neurologists like Dr. Julian Bailes, Dr. Bob Cantu, Dr. Mark Lovell, Dr. Mickey Collins and Dr. Tony Strickland are predicting. Our conferences showed that multiple concussions trigger an exponentially higher rate of premature senility and dementia, Parkinson’s, ALS, Alzheimer’s, depression and chronic traumatic encephalopathy. It is one thing to know that years of football will make it harder for an athlete to bend down and pick up his child when the athlete is forty. What if he can’t recognize the child because of concussion related dementia?

- Leigh Steinberg

Kai Po Che !

Brilliant adaptation of Chetan Bhagat's novel The 3 Mistakes of My Life
Hindi movies can still be deliver without Aamir Khan !!

Quote of the Day

Heavy use of the word “hate” (“I hate Manchester United” et cetera) means football talk often sounds like fascist propaganda. Hysteria would be much reduced if fans and media shed the fairytale notion that a footballer must love whichever club he happens to play for. Footballers don’t think that way. Listen to their language: they call themselves “professionals” with “careers”. Football is a job – well-paid and often enjoyable, but employees don’t love their employers. A friend who supports Manchester United told me he believed United’s long-serving players Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs loved United. I asked him if he loved the bank where he worked. Obviously not, he said. Well, Scholes and Giggs don’t love United either. They just have happy employee-employer relationships.

- Why I’ve fallen out of love with football

Sachin Sachin

Growing up in India, Sachin was important as Max is to me now. I promised to watch cricket as long Sachin played and no more. I missed his retirement (thankfully only ODI) by a day. It's just a sport but Sachin made it personal by inspiring an old British colony into becoming self-reliant.

What makes me sad is that today probably will be the end of cricket being a metaphor of life and it will be just about money.

So long Sachin and please stay away from politics.