SBI… IPL… Hockey…

April 2008: That was the month when began the greatest sporting championship the country had ever seen, The Indian Premier League or better known as the IPL.

Based on the concept of the hugely successful and popular English Premier League for football in England, the IPL broke all the traditional barriers to embrace the latest, shortest and the most exciting form of one of the oldest field sports recorded in the history of mankind. The formation of the IPL was something similar to the story of State Bank of India (SBI) eventually embracing ATMs in India. Well, the story goes something like this:

SBI initially criticized and ridiculed the concept of ATMs, saying that in a country with so many illiterates, people living in villages, lack of lawlessness in many parts of the nation etc, a person using a card with protected magnetic strip, interacting with a machine to withdraw money, and that too safely, is definitely going to be a flop show. But other banks thought otherwise and started setting up their own ATMs in various parts of the country. Yes, there were isolated incidents of loot outside ATMs, people not being comfortable dealing with the machine etc, just like the problems faced initially when a new system is introduced. Slowly and steadily there was a rise in the popularity of the ATMs and banks having more ATMs started becoming more profitable as well. This was when SBI realized its folly and found itself lacking in terms of the competition with other newer and smaller sized banks and thus accepted this wonder invention and how. Today SBI by far has the maximum no. of ATMs in the country and is one of the few govt. owned institutions in the country to be hugely successful and giving other private banks a run for their money!

Indian cricket too treaded on the same path. After the wonder invention of the T20 cricket, the board dismissed it as a too-short-for-cricket format and a diluter of the traditional 5-day game, the TEST cricket which still remains the ultimate test for a cricketer. It was 2007 and the mood of the most spectacular event in cricket was about to start, the ICC World Cup. India sent a decently strong team under the leadership of Rahul Dravid. But India’s hopes of making it to the knockout stages were dashed in the very first match itself after losing against Bangladesh. It was a big flop show from the Indian cricket team and which in turn flopped the whole of WC itself considering that even Pakistan crashed out unceremoniously. But the team got a great chance to heal its World Cup wounds by doing nothing but performing better in the upcoming World Cup, only that it was different ball game (not literally!) since it was the T20 WC which the Indians neither had favored since its inception nor did they have enough experience in the format. The experienced players took a back seat and withdrew their participation from the tournament and a young team under a young leader was sent to the competition. And rest as they say is history and one which no one expected. The T20 WC came home and opened the eyes of many people against it and showed the potential it held in this country.

In the mean time came the Indian Cricket League (ICL) as well. The ICL went against the all powerful BCCI to start a T20 cricket league of its own. BCCI used its entire mite and even threatened the people who showed interest in being associated with the league that they would be banned for life from playing matches for their country or their respective domestic tournaments. Still the ICL happened, defying all the warnings and threats from cricket boards. It made a lot of noise and had its fair of success in terms of viewership but more importantly it sent a message to the BCCI that cricket without it can happen! Suddenly the young lot Indian cricket started getting lured by this new league and undermined the threats issued by the board. National prospects quit domestic cricket and participated in the league. This was the state not just in India but even outside. Former and current overseas players too started giving up their desire of playing for their nation by accepting the lucrative offers of the ICL. Kerry Packer was again back to haunt cricket since he had treaded on a similar path back in the late 70s which ruined careers of many bright cricketers like Tony Grieg. This was too much for the egoistic BCCI to be mum and meekly accept defeat. And to merely teach the ICL a lesson for its deeds, BCCI came up the concept of IPL. Loosely based on the functioning of the English Premier League for football in England, it was an instant success amongst the players, team-owners and fans all around the world.

April/May 2011: IPL is still alive and kicking in its 4^th season. Just like the SBI, the BCCI too took time to realize the potential of a new invention. But after the realization the invention was taken to an altogether different level in terms of its reach!

Now where does hockey come into the picture? Once the pride of our country, hockey today has been relegated to merely being called the national game in different school text books but not living up to the name and benchmarks set by the predecessors in this beautiful and enthralling game. The game is definitely not getting its due and it is high time we started taking it seriously and bring back the lost glory. Hockey needs a large scale revamp to match to the popularity that cricket has managed to garner. And IPL is one great model which the hockey authorities can emulate and create a league of its own. Yes, it was tried previously and didn’t succeed to the expected levels but the way it organized can be changed with the IPL model coming into the picture. 2 things about hockey that need urgent attention are: improving the image of the game and attracting youngsters pick up the “stick” and not the “bat”. Short sports have always been more exciting than their longer-duration cousins. Still cricket has managed to become popular amongst the young and the old alike in this country. Surely the quality of cricket and players playing has improved for which the credit should be given to the various cricket boards for having a sound domestic set up to nurture young cricketers. This surely can be done for hockey too. But as all of us know the ever efficient Hockey India, if wished, would have sweated it out done that long back. So this option no more remains an option. Then what is the way out? Commercialization of the game is one way that comes to my mind. So many youngsters are today attracted by the fame and name that T20 cricket gets along with it for the players, which makes them take their game seriously and not just as a hobby. This in turn churns out talent from the lot. Any day, having more options to choose from is better than having few. That’s what the case with the advent of IPL is. So can’t we have an HPL for hockey too, where corporates can be asked to pick up teams and players and have a tournament among them? What will this ultimately do?

a) It will serve as a great platform for young players to showcase their talent and be recognized

b) More youngsters will take up the game seriously as a career option since they can see a bright future in the game with the corporate bigwigs involved.

c) Better playing facilities (which ideally should have been provided by the hockey board, but... never mind!) from the team owners.

d) The game will again get a chance to connect with the people since they can catch it live on the television.

For starters, the hockey board can approach the BCCI itself to help them out with the whole procedure to begin with and I think the BCCI would be more than happy to extend a helping hand to Hockey India. But the initiative should come from the hockey board. The existing IPL team owners can be called for a meeting and can be asked for their opinions on it which would come in very handy, since they have vast experience in their field and also for the very fact that they might ultimately be the likely owners of the teams. Hopefully this happens and we can get to cheer our regional teams.

Finally, I am not sure if this idea is novel since I feel the IPL success is very visible and at the same time Hockey India is thinking of how to get the sports back into news for the right reasons. The question and the answer both are with the hockey board. But the big question is whether they are really looking out for the solution??? My guess is as good as yours.

PAATSHALA

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2010
ABC... PAATSHALA
(http://abc-org.blogspot.com/2010/01/abc-initiative-to-teach-to-learn.html)

PAATSHALA

3 Indians feature in the top 50 WEALTHIEST people in the world. India's GDP is supposedly the best in the world. Our country's total income adds upto more than 1 trillion dollars. The Indian Premier League (IPL) is also known as a money minting organisation. These are a few facts about our country which we are proud of and which are good to speak on an international platform.

Now welcome to the real world. Still more than half of the country is below the poverty line, still more than 35,00,00,000 (35 crore) people do not know how to read or right. Blind beliefs are still followed. Child marriages still happen. Farmers are committing suicide because of lack of knowledge bout scientific techniques to grow their crops and so on... If one were to consider all these problems and try to form an equation then it would be something like this:

ILLETRACY = POVERTY + CHILD LABOUR + CORRUPTION + POPULATION + BLIND BELIEFS + CHILD MARRIAGE + …

so why am I telling you all this? All of this sounds a li'l cliché, right? “The govt must take care of this” is what might come to your mind. This was what even I used to think about it, until we started our quest to find out WHAT is the actual problem that this has been existing in our society from the past so many decades and still we are nowhere even close to solving it. So, we visited 3 very small govt schools in our neighborhood and what we saw wasn't a great sight. All schools had the similar problems. Lack of good teachers or rather tlack of teachers at all, students had no shoes to wear (infact more than half of them didn ve any footwear to wear), children came from such poor backgrounds that they didn ve money to even buy a 3 rupee pencil or eraser, but still you could see a joy and a hope in their eyes as well as an eagerness to learn. Now then, is it right that these students are deprived of their right to get education for no mistake of theirs that they were born in a poor family?????

The next question that came to my mind was, how can I in the present state contribute to help improve this situation. The answer was right in front of me, in the students:

95 bucks per pair of shoes.
10 bucks for a set of pencil box for the primary children.
And above all,
a few hours of TEACHING.

Then a thought came to my mind, what if the 4000 MSRITians contributed their bit for this cause. Imagine,

4000 students will go with shoes in their feet,
4000 students will ve pencils to draw and write
4000 teaching hours even every MSRITian spends just one hour of their life to teach something valuable to these children.

Thats when we came about forming this organisation and try to bridge people like me and you and the poor school kids. Ask yourself, is that too much am asking from you? A pair of shoes instead of one (yes, just one) game of bowling, a pencil box instead of one (yes gain, just one) bottle of coke, and one hour of your entire life..

if you think you can manage to this little bit then PLS leave your name and contact no to support the cause.
Or
Mail back to email id: organisationabc@gmail.com

I THINK ITS HIGH TIME WE STOPPED COMPLAINING AND STARTED ACTING!

-Aniket Deshpande
MSRITian

Posted by ABC at 1:58 AM

An alternate opinion!

When I was 7 yrs. old, I wanted to become a Policeman and save the people from the vices of the world. But the very next moment I saw a cockroach and got scared like hell and my cousins who were with me laughed at me marking the end of my dream to ever wear the starred khaki uniform.

When I was 14, Samrat, our cricket team captain, came up to me and asked me if I was interested in playing cricket for the school junior team. It was literally like a dream come true since, like any other Indian, even I had idolized the stalwarts of Indian cricket and wanted to be one too. I thought that this was just the ideal start for it. Couldn’t sleep that night and dreamt happily bout hitting centuries and guiding my team home to victories. But li’l did I know that even this dream was as short lived as the sleep I got that night.

When I was in my ninth grade, I joined the NCC. Thanks to it that I didn’t remain a shortie that I was till then! Trained hard for 9 months, sweated in the hot sun, screamed my throat off during the parades, withered the harsh Delhi winter and came back home looking as if I was a Nigerian. Then the thought came to my mind, how about being an Army Officer?? But alas, I was destined not be in J&K saving our borders but to be in Mangalore, Karnataka, writing this blog.

And in between I also aspire to be a cricket commentator, a pilot, an actor (which still somewhere probably I wanna be!) and so on…

But why am I talking about all this?

December, 2009: Released a super blockbuster, Aamir Khan Starrer, “3 Idiots”. It was an extraordinary movie with a very contemporary theme of “herd mentality” among today’s generation of students backed some truly powerful performances and amazing direction.

The movie spoke about how one should not just follow the crowd and instead should do something where one’s heart lies. It beautifully portrayed this with the lives of 3 friends and how 2 of them were literally forced into the college where they studied despite having interests elsewhere, just because it was a path where most of the people who walked on it eventually became “successful”. But during the course of their journey, the main protagonist of the movie throws light on how the whole system itself is flawed and it has just become a “rat-race” to say the least, without the students even realizing what they actually want to be in life and what do they need to do in order to achieve it.

The movie itself was a great lesson to all the parents - to allow and support their children in pursuing their dreams. It also was an encouragement for today’s youth to have the courage to speak up about their ambitions, fearlessly, no matter how wild and off-beat they are, and do anything and everything to achieve it. That is what ultimately happened in the movie where none of the three friends joined any MNC after their graduation despite it being every student’s ultimate aim in that college or rather the ultimate aim as per what was fed into their minds by their parents and society (even RajuRastogi (Sharman Joshi) who got through that interview, quit it later and took up a research job, publishing papers and journals relating to it). Farhan (R. Madhavan) went on to become a wild life photographer and Ranchhod das/phunsukwangdu (Aamir Khan) went on to open a school for the orphans in the beautiful valleys of J&K where he taught them pure sciences and focused on creativity and innovation rather than making them mug pots.

It was definitely an eye opener to the society and showed them the loop holes of the system that we are all an integral part of. It definitely opened mine. But what did I realize after I “opened my eyes”?

I realized that I too was a part of the same system which was mocked in the movie (yup I wanna become an MBA too despite having graduated as an engineer in Computer Science!), that I too was one of those thousands of other students who did their engineering just because it was the easiest way to get a good job and settle down in life without even taking some time out and asking myself what I actually want to be life. But as they say it’s never too late to pursue your dreams. So I began thinking, what I want to be life?? And it’s January, 2011 and I am still thinking what I want to be in life. An MBA? An actor? Cricket commentator? Policeman? Army person? MS in USA? Still as confused as I’ve always been in the past 23 yrs.

And during this period of realization I also realized few other things. First, that I am really not passionate about anything, for me to pursue a career in! Yes, I do love cricket, but I wouldn’t say am passionate about it. Yes I do love acting, (my frens curse me for always being in the “acting mode”, when sometimes am really not) but again I don’t feel that am really passionate about movies and acting either. Yes I am a Computer Science Engineer but just like 90% of the CS engineers, I too don’t wanna do an IT job for the rest of my life. I was beginning to wonder what have I been doing all these years and where do I want to see myself 10-20 yrs. hence. So I thought I‘ll ask a few people casually what they wanted to be in life. And then I had my second realization. They were as confused and clueless as I was if not more.

So what do people who do not have any real great passion or aspiration in life do? How does one find out what they want to see themselves as, in future, realistically? Do they wander all their life in search of it and in the deal ignore all the responsibilities they need to shoulder towards their parents and family, towards their nation? What is the right age to decide what u wanna do in life? 15? 17? When you are just out of school?? Are we actually so matured at that age that we can decide for ourselves what we wanna do in life?? I don’t think I was and I can safely assume that neither, the majority of the so called “herd” was. This led me to the third realization or rather a question in my mind. Is it right for us to be mocking the system??

Okay, now let us consider that everyone followed what was portrayed in the movie? Majority of the people would be without a job busy trying to find what they want to be in life and spend weeks, months and probably years in doing the same. What would have happened to those thousands of parents and families of such students? And especially in a country like India where the financial and societal problems of people are well known to everyone (like Raju’s family in the movie. Do they eat haired rotis throughout their lives??). What would have happen to the students themselves who would be feeling worthless and frustrated seeing their peers earn lakhs and crores whereas they would be still trying to find what they wanna do.

So what is the ultimate conclusion of all what I ve told till now? I think it’s not right for us to mock the system that exists no matter how many loopholes are there. Instead we should appreciate its very existence for providing so many jobs and “lighting so many homes” (as my dad always says) and making “unemployment” an obsolete political agenda for the politicians in most parts of the country. Instead we should all contribute and try to remove the loop holes out of the system and make it more transparent and merit based. And in the mean time we as individuals should continue dreaming and trying to find where our dream lays and what do we want to be. And so the confusion continues… wish I had time machine which would help me see what I would be in January, 2031. cricketer? Actor?Entrepreneur? Or still in Infosys Technologies Limited? Don’t you wanna see for yourself too???