Season of Intolerance

-
Suddenly there has been a surfeit of acts of intolerance. Rationalists are killed for questioning ideologies, people are butchered over choice of food, ideologues are smeared with black paint for assisting a 'traitor'...and the list goes on. What I am worried is that the younger generation suddenly has 'role models' that no society needs. We have become a nation of 2-minute quick-fixers, who have an answer for everything. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Back to the Drawing Board or Square One

-
After coming a cropper against spinners who normally struggle to find a regular place in the New Zealand Test squad, the media-hyped Indian batting line-up flopped against pace barring a few exceptions in Australia. The abrupt retirement and return home mid-tour by Ravichandran Ashwin and Rohit Sharma getting dropped (or whatever you may like to call it) from the playing XI in the last Test, rounds up the story. To sum it up in two lines - you cannot entrust to a failed politician the reins of India's cricket team, and the star system has to give way to actually deserving players if Test cricket in India has to survive, or shall we be kinder - go forward. Not only was not Rohit firing, but also others like Kohli and Gill were struggling, when Rohit chose to 'stand down', why no opportunity was given to Sarfaraz or Easwaran? The batting returns of Rohit and Kohli are diminishing, more so in the last few months. They cannot play spin at home or pace abroad. That should be eno...
Read more

The Kiwis tame the Indian Tiger in their backyard

-
T he men's Indian cricket team has been used to winning Test matches at home on rank-turners inside three days. They have just been handed-over a reality check by the New Zealand cricket team. Two successive defeats in three days each on different pitches and weather conditions, saw the Indian cricket team succumb to both pace and spin. The top two - skipper Rohit and Virat batted like novices in three of the four innings, trying to let their egos come in between them and the not so celebrated bowlers. New Zealand have not really been a force in Asian conditions. Their two losses to a resurgent Sri Lanka prior to the India series did not suggest what was coming. The star-crossed media had already declared a 3-0 victory margin for India in the series. This could at best be 2-1 or worse 3-0 for New Zealand now, as things stand after the Pune disaster and the Bangalore fiasco. I have been advocating in my previous posts the primacy of domestic cricket for red-ball cricket to survive, ...
Read more

We are what we are - the Lake Wobegon Effect

-
The Lake Wobegon effect(1) is the human tendency to overestimate one's achievements and capabilities in relation to others. It is named after the fictional town of Lake Wobegon from the radio series A Prairie Home Companion , where, according to Garrison Keillor, "all the women are beautiful, all the men strong, and all the children intelligent"(2). Keillor’s 1985 novel Lake Wobegon Days describes life in the fictional town situated in the US state of Minnesota. According to Keillor, Lake Wobegon is the seat of Mist County, Minnesota(3), a tiny county near the geographic center of Minnesota that supposedly does not appear on maps because of the "incompetence of surveyors who mapped out the state in the 19th century". The town's slogan is Gateway to Central Minnesota(4). The town’s motto is mentioned on its crest – sumos quud sumos – we are what we are(5). In a similar way, a large majority of people claim to be above average; this phenomenon has been obse...
Read more