India has failed to develop a cricket culture!

Winning international cricket matches is important for a country like India but a sustained long term development of talent is imperative. It was on June 25, 1932 that India started playing international Test Cricket and during these 77 years it has achieved a lot. Currently India is doing rather well in Twenty20 cricket as well as the ODIs but not so well in the more traditional Test cricket. The reason for this is the heavy hand of the BCCI and their selectors. The Board of Control for Cricket in India has a history of picking winners or losers for short term gratification. It has failed to cultivate good cricket culture throughout the length and breadth of the country. Indian Cricket has also been a victim of the ‘Star Culture’ that destroys young alternative talent. There are plenty of examples of that throughout the history of Indian Cricket. What is tragic is that we seem to learn nothing from it. We are making the same mistake right now! There is no transparency in our selection process.

Mahendra Singh Dhoni is a fantastic captain for the India Cricket Team. He is developing into a good middle-order batsman but his wicketkeeping is nothing to brag about. The problem is that he appears to be following in the footsteps of his predecessors like Sourav Ganguly (another very successful Indian Cricket Captain) and others before him. He is becoming too cautious in terms of trying new talent or using alternatives when main-line attack looks tired or unfit. The case in point is Ishant Sharma, an extremely talented fast bowler but who is being used without any reasonable break. He might soon burn-out like Irfan Pathan or Shanthakumaran Sreesanth. Dhoni himself is over-exposed and over-played. He must encourage reasonable rest and recuperation period for himself as well as his top talent. India is too large a country with too long a cricket history to over-play its front-line attack all the time. We must have multiple choices in all areas of international cricket!

Dhoni is the Obama of Indian Cricket!

Mahindra Singh Dhoni has transformed Indian Cricket the way Barack Obama has transformed American politics. This 27 years old young man from Ranchi, Bihar is as cool as Barack Obama under pressure. He is a rare all-rounder that Indian cricket has seldom seen. Kapil Dev is the only other Indian cricketer that comes to mind. But here is the big difference, Dhoni is a wicket-keeper and has a much better sense of the situation than Kapil Dev ever had being a bowler-batsman. But the bigger implication is Dhoni’s personal background. Kapil Dev came from a relatively affluent background and a much richer state. Mahindra Singh Dhoni was born in Bihar, the poorest state of India and with least amount of sports infrastructure. To compound the problem Ranchi became a part of Jharkhand State an even poorer entity.

When Kapil Dev led the team-India, it was an urban sport dominated by Bombay-Delhi cricketers. Dhoni has inspired the rural youth of India with his unpretentious small-town disposition. I have never been to Bihar or Jharkhand but still it is not difficult to imagine the boost that Dhoni’s elevation as the captain of the Indian Cricket Team must have provided to the youth in those states. Bihar, Orissa and now Jharkhand have not produced too many national cricketers since the Indian Independence. It is not the people’s fault that their political leadership has ignored the development of these and many other North-Indian States. Every Dhoni and Mohammad Kaif would become a development symbol of their respective state in the time to come. Dhoni is an unusually aggressive cricketer because of his State.

Not so shy Dhoni in a Pepsi Ad

Indian poverty is uplifting not demeaning

India does not hide its poverty like China or Pakistan. We just accept it the way it is. This does not mean we are happy about it. People like Amitabh Bachchan should stop being defensive about it. He belongs to the ‘Indian Elite’ that has no concept of real India. Poverty does not mean people are necessarily unhappy, they just hope for the best and wait for their chance! My wife and I visited 28 districts of Rajasthan in November-December of 2006. We planned to photograph the story of Rajasthan including its people. We shot over 45,000 photographs and not one picture was demeaning or depressing. We took hundreds of portraits and everyone gave us a bright smile irrespective of their material conditions. People of India are temperamentally happy and contented. In time they would work their way up like the current Indian Cricket team. Bachchan should chill-out and watch India Rising!

We have lived in the United States of America for more than 20 years and we have done extensive photography but it has been lifeless. There is no soul in America. We love to photograph in India, not the poverty but the colors and landscapes. It is so much fun to photograph Indian people, their dresses and features. There is so much variety and aesthetics in India that photography in the US is boring. Does it mean we want to show poverty of India or glamorize it? Nothing could be further from the truth, we are all Indians and we are so proud of India. How could we ever think of demeaning our own country? Having said that we also understand the India is a land of stark contradictions. You have a list of Forbes billionaires of India on one hand and you also have 300 million poor in the villages of India. You also have an emerging middle class of hundreds of millions of Indians at the same time.

We have not seen the movie, Slumdog Millionaire, as yet but the criticism that it glamorizes poverty is absurd. India is big enough to be featured in all its variety and form. The critics have shown their own guilt by their phony defense of India. Poor are not complaining in India, they understand that their time would come too!

We should move Bollywood over to Dollywood!

Indian Cricket has moved away from Bombay to Mohali and Rajkot, why not Bollywood? The new Film-City should be established in the ‘National Capital Region’ like Noida and Gurgaon for the IT industry. This move would create a million jobs up North and ease the pressure on Bombay. In any case most of the talent in the Indian film industry comes from other parts of the country. Bombay is also called the Tinsel town of India. It has a lot of glamour attached to it. People from all over India converge to live their dreams. Most of them fail but a few succeed. This creates a lot of unnecessary traffic in the commercial capital of India. Besides, this should also address the grievances of some of the Marathi manoos.

‘The Economist’ needs to grow up…

‘The Economist’ is probably the best English language weekly in the world. The 165 years old British publication has evolved as one of the most comprehensive reporter of the world news. Yet, when it comes to India, the old and annoying ‘Colonial Hang-over’ is all too evident. Just read the article, “Overconfident India”, published on July 9, 2008. The writer (never identified) makes an unnecessary statement like “In a country with massive energy needs, and pretensions to global-power status, that would be momentous.” People at ‘The Economist’ must understand that Indians think of the English like the bad old tenants who were evicted 60 years back, but left some sub-tenants behind. Considering it’s size and potential, India is rather too restrained and modest. The Modern India is only 15 years old. It grew from $250 billion economy in 1992 to a comfortable $1 trillion player in 2007. If the English opinion makers are feeling left-out at this stage, wait for another 15 years and they would feel like only spectators on the world stage. The English must learn to live with reality.

Unlike China, India is not just a country, it is a civilization. The world has seen and accepted the Yoga movement, the ‘Indian Cuisine’ and in some cases ‘Indian Classical Music’. That was traditional India. What the world is going to see and experience is the ‘Indian Fashion’, the ‘Bollywood Dancing’, the ‘Indian Cricket’, the ‘Indian Institutes of Higher Education’ and of course the ‘India Inc.’, to say the least. The ‘Indian Soft-Power’ is in play. The ‘Indian Diplomacy’, the ‘Indian Media’, the ‘Indian Information Technology’, the ‘Indian Design’ and the ‘Indian Technology’ are some of the areas the world is about to experience in a profound way. China is growing like the erstwhile ‘Soviet Union’ whereas India is developing like the next ‘United States of India’. Indians do not defend India as the Chinese do their country. China is organized and India is chaotic, but India is free and China is not. What would you rather have? The world in general, and the English in particular, must accept the changing world and enjoy the ‘New World Order’.

America and India are natural allies. This is not a cliché, but a fact of life. No two countries are similar, politically or otherwise. The United States is developing as a multi-cultural society in all 50 states. Similarly, India is engaged in all it’s 35 states and the union territories. India is multilingual and America is becoming bi-lingual. US national security interests are converging with India, not China or Europe. Nobody understands this better than President George W Bush and that is why he has spent so much of his political capital on the Indo-US Nuclear deal. The Economist better understand this and stop pretending otherwise, America, Europe, Japan and Russia need this deal more than India. This is a $50 billion windfall for all these countries and not the other way round. India can live without the nuclear fuel and the technology for many more years and keep burning dirty coal as usual. It is the fear of ‘Global Warming’ and the environment that has pushed the western world to offer such a deal to India, not to mention the energy crisis. For The Economist to frame the debate otherwise is intellectually dishonest and pretentious.