Settling into a new year – compilers, coats, cars and cricket

April 1st, 2007 admin Posted in Events, Experiences | No Comments »

It took me till April Fools’ Day to make my first post this year. Among several reasons and excuses I can come up with the main one is that the compilers’ class I am taking at NCSU. The class kept my weekends busy with all the project work it involved. However, since I am learning a few new things, I guess that’s alright. Another reason, now that I think about it, is that Kavita and I took up the grand challenge of painting our house on the inside. We have as of now only completed painting two rooms, one of which was a half-bath that originally had wall paper. The wall paper had to be removed first, and then the two coats of paint went on the walls. As the compilers’ class picked up steam, the painting adventures subsided. Also, it took a while to get used to our new life, now that Kavita and I are living together for the first time over the last few months. The adjustments, the catching up with life, which does not wait for you, took its toll on my ability to spend time with my webpage. Happy to report that we did accomplish a few minor milestones this year. The big one of course was Kavita getting a job. Then she bought a Pontiac Vibe after much research. We both love that car. Then we sold her old car, the Infinity G20. That took some effort with the repairs, the ads and the title transfer. All in all this post is a testimony to my return to some semblance of normalcy. I sense a brief and temporary settling-down at a phase of our lives where unsettling will likely be the norm.

The Cricket World Cup is going on in the Carribean islands. After almost four years I chanced to watch a couple of cricket matches live on TV a few weeks back when we visited my cousin, Raghu, at New Jersey. He had gotten installed a satellite dish that received live coverage of the Cricket World Cup. The two games I watched were India playing Bangladesh and Pakistan playing Ireland. It was fascinating that the two games I watched in so long, turned out to both be massive upsets. Bangladesh beat India and Ireland beat Pakistan. These games threw the teams’ expectations, betting odds and the statisticians’ calculations into relative disarray, and ended with both the losing teams, two cricketing giants, being eventually eliminated in the opening round of the cup. The defeats brought great outbursts of emotion from the fans (the lights and pretty much everything Indian and Pakistani). Weeks of introspections, evaluations, shock therapy and retirement announcements later, one thing that is clear is that an era of subcontinental cricket, one that I can relate to the most, is over. The defeat and the ouster from the competition, though surprising and disappointing, does not worry me a whole lot. If this provides a dose of practicality to the millions of sports-starved fans for whom the only sport that exists is cricket, it would be a welcome change. Maybe it will bring with it a dose of professionalism into a game. Professionalism into how the players perform indifferent to the pressures and expectations they are subjected to, and, more importantly, professionalism into the spectators and fans who need to realize that it is a game all said and done. The basic problem in a sports-starved country where sports has always taken a back seat to getting through life’s other challenges is that the few sporting events India does participate in take on an intimate and overly emotional dimension that cannot be dissipated easily through other avenues.