The Day of a New Era

Its been three days now since we emphatically won the test series against Australia, but not surprisingly, the excitement has not died. Some cynics argue that the victory is not quite so special because it was on home ground, some others say that Australia came home leaving behind formidable players like Mcgrath, Warne and Gilchrist. While both statements have substance, I (and perhaps many more people) do not think the series victory was special only because we beat Australia in two games (for the Aussies it is, they have not lost so fantastically since they played Viv Richard's team). It is special to me because for the first time in years my faith in Indian cricket has been refurbished. For the first time in ages, I regret not having watched a match fully...for not being in India discussing the finer points of the game (and the politics) with my father or my friends through the night. I have been reminded why cricket is as popular a game as it is.

We did win on home ground, but the manner of victory this time was different. We still prepared spin favoring pitches, but our pace bowlers lived up to and beyond the challenge. We were playing on familiar home turf and if statistics mean anything we would have probably won the series by pluck or luck, but we still dared to try something new. We have shown the cricketing world that we have become a force that is now more difficult to deal with...Kumble and Harbhajan did their job as spinners are expected to, but Ishant and Zaheer have given us a right to expect from them too. Their mastery in producing reverse swing by the 10th over unsettled the opponents and has raised unknown fear in others, not even the Pakistani greats who invented the action would have anticipated this...from India. The signs this time are unmistakable, we will surely in future add more names to the list that started and ended with Kapil Dev. Nothing is possible without an effort, and the efforts have finally begun to show.
Indian cricket is no longer like the time when I first developed an interest in the game, it is now more worth my time. Those were days when fans were justified in switching off their TV sets after our top 4 batsmen were out (then known as the three musketeers and D'Artagnan), because no body wanted to watch our tail play. Our tail was not meant to bat or to bowl. We were widely acknowledged as the world's worst chasers because we rarely won while batting second. Any match victory could be easily attributed to any single man on the team. Winning abroad only happened in the wildest dreams of the most enthusiastic fans. Indian cricketers going for the kill did not happen even there, we not only preached but were virtuous enough to practice our doctrine of ahimsa. All this changed...somewhere, somehow...people who did notice did not understand the full impact of what they were witnessing, Because it was all eclipsed by a more interesting spectacle. The side show has finally ended and people now see what happened behind the scenes, like it so much, and wish that they had not called for the curtains to close on the side show ( I was a part of this band wagon for a brief while) . It is a paradox, but true...the man behind the show got his worth only when he bowed down and quit. I believe it all started with one man...the prince of Calcutta.
If India has today learnt to play and win as a team, it was under him. If we are today not surprised by an abroad win, rewind and remember when it was that you stopped being surprised. He was accused of being a bad captain because he apparently played the divide and rule policy. Even if it were true, it does not matter because we were winning more than usual. He was accused of favoring new young players over the old (give me a break!) and that meant he was jealous and insecure, not far sighted. He reminded his team mates that they were young blood and not old cronies and taught them to aim a blow in return for one rather than dodge them one after the other. The result, he paid for everything in not flesh and blood but in spirit. We squeezed out every last bit from the king of comebacks. Of course he was aggressive against the aussies, give him one good reason why he should'nt have been. A refresher course..Steve Waugh and team openly declared that India had only three formidable players..Sachin, Dravid and Laxman even when Saurav was the captain. In retrospect, what goes around comes around...It was the Aussies who showed Ganguly the way to go and he led India to this path of rebirth, and it hit them before anybody else. Today Harbhajan's statement that Ponting needs to go back and learn some batting is ironic...History has a strange way of repeating itself, Bhaji has proved Ganguly right, again. Ganguly has a lot to be proud of apart from his personal statistics. He created a team from a bunch of men who met regularly to play a game. He awoke the passion within his people (Its not his fault that Harbhajan and Sreesanth get carried away at times, calling people monkeys and showing monkey faces :) ) although I wonder if he did ever point out in his defense that we crossed limits only against the kangaroos and provoked people to see a reason behind that...His only fault was that he was not a born genius like Sachin, but if that is a sin, then every batsman today is doomed to hell.
We missed the dawn of cricket's new era in a plethora of controversies surrounding the king himself, but the day ahead looks long and sunny. The ride can only be more exciting with Dhoni in the drivers seat . He has shown himself to be a player and a man of character. I do not know if his gesture of asking Saurav to captain the last few overs meant as much to either of them as the rest of the cricketing world, but that gesture showed that we were about to say good bye to a man who deserved more than he got...and, got more than he deserved. As Saurav returned the cap to dhoni, I felt he was giving us a final message and I think he is right..: "The future is in good hands, this time please trust them".

Homerun!!!

This is a highly biased narrative of my first experience at a baseball game. So, baseball lovers please donot read further. Last friday evening, I went to watch a baseball match live. It was the day I was mentally relaxed after a long time, so I did go in the hopes of enjoying myself. I made one important mistake though, and that ruined my enjoyment. I believed all those who told me that baseball was like cricket. I would have probably enjoyed it if I had attended the game with an idea of watching an entirely new game. That way, I would not have made mental comparisons between the two games all the time.
Baseball is nothing like cricket except that the game also involves a bat and a ball. The game is much shorter(this match lasted 3 hours) but lacks causes for emotional outbreaks, killer strategies and mental exercises. If cricket was anything like baseball, players would never hug each other on the ground for the loss of a wicket, Shoaib Akhtar would have never invented the aeroplane dance, Muralitharan would have never been called a chucker , Mark Waugh would have never had to take money to reveal pitch information and Sachin Tendulkar would not have the distinction of being out on '90s' the most number of times.
Most of what I am talking about revolves around just one thing..the thing that put me off baseball the most. A batsman getting out has no meaning. Its not a big deal. If a person gets out once, they can just come back again and bat after a certain interval called an inning. No wonder then that emotions among audiences and players dont run high even when the 'star' batsman got out. This astros player 'Berkman' is supposedly so poplular that toys with his face were being distributed to the first 10000 entrants, but his becoming out didnot evoke as much as a sigh from the crowds!!! I tried counting the number of times I would not have switched off the TV just because Sachin was out. All those memorable moments created in cricket at the loss of wickets chased each other in my mind. Pakistanis kissing the ground, all fielders rushing to hug the bowler ,the bowlers themselves performing a variety of gimmicks and the crowds erupting into drum beats and dances. Yes, I missed that , I wanted that, and when I did not get that, I began to look down upon the game, not caring for the fact that this game was supposed to achieve different ends.
The game seemed to me to lack the need for thinking. The field is one eighth or lesser than the size of a cricket field with 9 players on it. So there is no need for field placement. The field is crowded enough to remove that necess. Neither does the captain have to strategise nor does the batsman. Its the same field setting, ball after ball after ball by both teams.Also, there is just one pitcher for each team unless he says he is tired. The guy just throws the ball with varying speeds. I thought there was no more variety until one friend told me that the ball swings a lot more than the cricket ball. Granted, but still, there is not enough variety in the type of ball, like pace, spin, swing, etc. The change in the pitch during the day and the way some bowlers exploit gives one reasons to admire cricket and scorn at baseball. Its just full toss all the time.
There were sudden bursts of enjoyment from the crowd that released them partly from the sin of appearing for an important match without banners, painted faces, masks or drums. They would all stand up and applaud whenever there was a home run, a sixer in cricket would qualify as a home run.Music would be played and an overhead to train would run across the length of its rails once.There was on epoint in the game when it started looking for certain that the Texan team would win, and that point all the texans stood up together and sang a Texan song, "The spirit of Texas". That was really fun to watch and definitely increased my enthusiasm for the game.
All said and done, in spite of the home runs and the spirit of Texas, I vote for cricket as the better game. The next time I go to watch baseball I will try watching it with less bias.

Lessons Forgotten...

It has been a month since I started work. It has been interesting for more than the usual reasons. Once or twice a week, we have seminars, either in house or hosted by architects/vendors or other people in the industry to talk about interesting or 'latest' things that are currently happening. One such seminar today made me lose my focus on what the speaker was saying. I was busy remembering my grade 3 science text.
This man was talking about the 'new' method of storm water harvesting..its cheap, bio degradable and aesthetic. Can you guess what he was talking about? Stripping out all the technical jargon, he was talking about planting trees! I was at first amused, on introspection aggravated. In all the pace of modern developments and the race to build more and more, we forgot how it all was before we butt in. Dont get me wrong, I am not hinting that we live in jungles, but probably this is the time we should start thinking about a more responsible and channelized mode of development. Development needs more planning, not just in terms of resources, time and finance but to see how nature can be best preserved. I know there is a lot of "green construction" these days and a lot of input from environmentalists, but I say we go a step farther. Why deplant trees and then plant new ones elsewhere? It amuses me to think that architects cannot work around existing nature. They who come up with mind blowing architecture including all shapes that god ever invented...making lives of engineers as miserable as possible, cant they put imagination to more useful uses?

An ode to Engineering - I: Brihadeeswara Temple

It was the first time I changed my ideas on grandeur,colorless beauty and progress in engineering.The jolt came when I had just turned into a civil engineer,cocksure of myself and ready to learn progressive engineering in a country whose noteworthy structures were all built in the 20th century, 1000 years after the construction of this phenomenal tribute to architecture and engineering.A visit to Tanjore,the cultural capital(some say Varnasi) of India is sure to be an invigorating experience of walking through history but on entering the Brihadeeswara temple, one would fail to imagine how this structure came to be.
This timeless piece of Dravidian architecture, declared as one of UNESCO's world heritage sites continues to baffle the enginnering world.What is visible to the eye and available on numerous websites is it's architectural brilliance and I shall glorify that later. I was priveleged to climb restricted areas of the temple(thanks to an influencial aquaintance) along with the maratha prince(who coincidentally happened to be there that day walking a politician) who is the decendant of the kings who ruled the greatest kingdom in southern India. He enlightened us on many mysteries of the tallest temple in the world and the stories that were passed to him through generations.
The temple "vimana" visible from a few kilometres away towers to a whopping 216 ft. This huge temple was built entirely of granite, which is one of the hardest rocks on the surface of the Earth.How did people cut these rocks when they had only soft iron tools a 1000 years ago? The Chola king Raja raja who built this temple in about 20 years moved more stone over more distance than the pharoahs who built the great pyramid of Egypt. How did he accomplish it? The perfectly spherical "shikara" or cupola on top of the vimana weighs 80 tons but nobody is still sure about whether it is a single block or whether two perfectly hemispherical blocks of 40 tons each joined perfectly. Nobody is sure how those massive solid blocks were put up there.

The ingeniousness of bygone engineers is evident from the way they could accomplish these seemingly impossible tasks. Using rudimentary hand tools, men chisseled holes trough the rocks along the required path. Having done this, wooden blocks were hammered into these holes and water was poured continously for a period over these wooden blocks. As water seeped through the wood, the blocks slowly expanded propagating a crack along the path until the pressure was sufficient to break it open! For many decades the presence of the massive cupola at that height baffled engineers until the descendant prince revealed a family story that believed the stones to have been pulled along an inclined ramp from a distance of about 6 miles all the way to the apex of the temple by elephants using a roller arrangement. The legend was immediately put to test and the test revealed more astonishing scientific facts. Firstly, elephants were made to drag 80 tons of stone placed on an arrangement of circular logs. The elephants could not drag them...they did it with ease once every single piece of log was perfectly circular in cross section! And remains of a 1000 year old mud ramp was found exactly in line with the temple vimana on it's western side ,directly oppposite the temple entrance in the east.!Nobody knows why the "shikara" never casts a shadow on the Earth.
Nobody ceases to wonder how this structure stands and will forever continue to stand(say experts, not me)even though there is absolutely no mortar/lime/adhesive that holds one block of stone to the next. Adjacent stones were alternately cut into concave and convex patterns and the sheer simplicity and accuracy of this technique hold the stones together! The central temple is a tribute to all geometric aspects of a structure that would lend it stability. The square base (symbloising Brahma) porgressively narrows to be capped by a regular octagonal storey(representing Vishnu) topped by a sphere, a symbol of perfection , a tribute to the Lord Shiva. I was lucky to have been allowed to walk through a barred passage at the top within the temple. I was lucky because I could see how the octagon was balanced by the square. This passage was created because, at this level of the temple, the structure has two layers of walls sloping symmetrically towards each other and the extra thickness of the inner layer helps balance the additional angles and slopes created by an octagon without any oddities! This vimana was built in the center of a huge rectangular complex. The top of the cupola is off by only 2cms from the center of this plot. This accuracy is remarkable and probably impossible in the 21st century with all modern technology. No wonder, this was the only temple that I have visited that has a separate sanctum for it's engineer...How much has engineering really progressed over the last 1000 years?
The obviously amazing aspects of the temple...The shiva linga is the grandest in existence, 25 ft in circumference and 11 feet high and the nandi, carved from single stone is 13 feet high and 16 feet long. The fresco paintings by the Cholas on the ceilings remain colorful and beautiful to date.

Every inch of granite on the walls, both interior and exterior are carved with pictures and forms stories narrating the king's rule. The name of even the most insignificant donor to the temple's construction is carved on it's walls. This temple is not only a storehouse of Chola architecture, but additions were made by the Pandyas and the Marathas who ruled Tanjore in later centuries. The corridor I walked through portrays on it's walls the oldest and most accurate version of all 108 bharatanatyam poses of the Lord Nataraja. It also contains the only portrait ever made of one of the greatest rulers of Southern India, Raja Raja Chola...his head bowed in submission to his teacher...the engineer.

Note: Pictures were not taken by me. I pulled them off the internet

Calvin is in everyone -I

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