It was an unusual role for me. For some reason, which I don't recall now, I featured in the second-half of the batting order (instead of the usual two-down). A brilliant 12-year-old all-rounder with a name quite absurd for a Tamilian, Raja Singh, had just turned around the game with a fantastic cameo. He couldn't continue his exploits for long and I soon found myself in the middle (as the expression goes) with the propect of undoing whatever good Singh had done in the past 30 minutes if I played my natural game, which was looking for the ones and twos.
I was by no measure an aggressive batsman. My USP, if at all there was one, was holding on to one end. And my Kashimir willow bat helped me achieve that without much fuss. But the situation of that day demanded a different approach, and also a different bat.
Singh handed me his Symonds (which by virtue of its English willow make was at the top of the bat hierarchy; and it was heavy). I don't remember the minute details of my innings that afternoon in plus 40 degree Celsuis temperatures (and I don't mind that) but one of the things that I do remember vividly is an uncharacateristic slog over mid-wicket that fetched me a boundary.
I have never seen a coaching manual but I am pretty sure you won't find that shot there. What made the four even sweeter was the fact that the left-arm medium pace bowler, representing another summer camp team, though talented didn't earn himself many fans. His own teammates considered him a snob. And his upright gait (people used to make fun of that) and a general aloofness possibly helped enhance that image.
So, to get back to the replay, I swung the ball pitched just short-of-a-good length on leg stump wildly and it just about managed to reach the boundary. Actually, the fielders chasing it weren't convinced as to whether it actually crossed the boundary but our entire team had camped there and that helped settle matters in our favour.
The left-arm seamer had the last laugh, though. The next ball was on good length and directed at the middle stump. I tried repeating the shot, this time over the bowler, only to get a top-edge. I was out, caught and bowled by the bowler, Kartik M. That was how Murali Kartik, India's hero in the just-concluded series against Australia, was known then.
Ever since Kartik made his debut some seven or eight years back, I have been telling this story to my friends and relatives (good timing, isn't it!). There are three essential components in this story: that I played alongside Kartik; I hit him for a four; and I got out. The first two ensure people are aware of my cricketing skills. The third is to make sure it doesn't sound boastful.
I think not long after that Kartik's father got transferred to Delhi, where the medium-pacer converted to spin. And I think he has been quite an impressive spinner, having the gift of beating batsmen in the air, and could have achieved much more till now had Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid given him enough chances. It's great that Dhoni's backing him now.
Friday, October 19, 2007
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Nassim's take on journalists
Nassim Nicholas Taleb isn't surely a fan of the present-day journalist. Below are lines from his Fooled By Randomness. Actually, makes sense! Or, does it? (This last line has been added after debating this issue with a couple of friends!).
1) "On the rare occasions when I boarded the 6:42 train to New York I observed with amazement the hordes of depressed business commuters (who seemed to prefer to be elsewhere) studiously buried in The Wall Street Journal, apprised of the minutiae of companies that, at the time of writing now, are probably out of business. Indeed it is difficult to ascertain whether they seem depressed because they are reading the newspaper, or if depressive people tend to read the newspaper, or if people who are living outside their genetic habitat both read the newspaper and look sleepy and depressed. But while early on in my career such focus on noise would have offended me intellectually, as I would have deemed such information as too statistically insignificant for the derivation of any meaningful conclusion, I currently look at it with delight. I am happy to see such mass-scale idiotic decision making, prone to overreaction in their postperusal investment orders - in other words, I currently see in the fact that people read such material an insurance for my continuing in the entertaining business of option trading against the fools of randomness. (It takes a huge investment in introspection to learn that the thirty or more hours spent 'studying' the news last month neither had any predictive ability during your activities of that month nor did it impact your current knowledge of the world. This problem is similar to the weaknesses in our ability to correct past errors: Like a health club membership taken out to satisfy a New Year's resolution, people often think that it will surely be the next batch of news that will really make a difference to their understanding of things.)
2) "The problem with information is not that it is diverting and generally useless, but that it is toxic. I will say here that such respect for the time-honored provides arguments to rule out any commerce with the babbling modern journalist and implies a minimal exposure to the media as a guiding principle for someone involved in decision making under uncertainty. If there is anything better than noise in the mass of 'urgent' news pounding us, it would be like a needle in a haystack. People do not realise that the media is paid to get your attention. For a journalist, silence rarely surpasses any word."
3) "To be competent, a journalist should view matters like a historian, and play down the value of the information he is providing, such as by saying 'Today the market went up, but this information is not too relevant as it emanates mostly from noise.' He would certainly lose his job by trivialising the value of the information in his hands. Not only is it difficult for the journalist to think more like a historian, but it is, alas, the historian who is becoming more like the journalist."
1) "On the rare occasions when I boarded the 6:42 train to New York I observed with amazement the hordes of depressed business commuters (who seemed to prefer to be elsewhere) studiously buried in The Wall Street Journal, apprised of the minutiae of companies that, at the time of writing now, are probably out of business. Indeed it is difficult to ascertain whether they seem depressed because they are reading the newspaper, or if depressive people tend to read the newspaper, or if people who are living outside their genetic habitat both read the newspaper and look sleepy and depressed. But while early on in my career such focus on noise would have offended me intellectually, as I would have deemed such information as too statistically insignificant for the derivation of any meaningful conclusion, I currently look at it with delight. I am happy to see such mass-scale idiotic decision making, prone to overreaction in their postperusal investment orders - in other words, I currently see in the fact that people read such material an insurance for my continuing in the entertaining business of option trading against the fools of randomness. (It takes a huge investment in introspection to learn that the thirty or more hours spent 'studying' the news last month neither had any predictive ability during your activities of that month nor did it impact your current knowledge of the world. This problem is similar to the weaknesses in our ability to correct past errors: Like a health club membership taken out to satisfy a New Year's resolution, people often think that it will surely be the next batch of news that will really make a difference to their understanding of things.)
2) "The problem with information is not that it is diverting and generally useless, but that it is toxic. I will say here that such respect for the time-honored provides arguments to rule out any commerce with the babbling modern journalist and implies a minimal exposure to the media as a guiding principle for someone involved in decision making under uncertainty. If there is anything better than noise in the mass of 'urgent' news pounding us, it would be like a needle in a haystack. People do not realise that the media is paid to get your attention. For a journalist, silence rarely surpasses any word."
3) "To be competent, a journalist should view matters like a historian, and play down the value of the information he is providing, such as by saying 'Today the market went up, but this information is not too relevant as it emanates mostly from noise.' He would certainly lose his job by trivialising the value of the information in his hands. Not only is it difficult for the journalist to think more like a historian, but it is, alas, the historian who is becoming more like the journalist."
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