Twenty-20 Foresight

As every other inactive Indian blogger, this moment would serve as an opportunity to get over the blogger's block, and I too, am making the best of this opportunity.

However, this post would be different (I hope) from the countless other posts that might get into the nitty-gritties of the Twenty20 tournament, the Final match tonight or Indian team's performance, or probably even how each team performed throughout the series.

This post is rather about my thoughts as a bystander to this exciting event.

Similar to what happened when the One Day International format was introduced, this format too faced the initial criticism from the purists. But at the end, as many articles and blogs have said, everybody is happy with this format. And almost everybody's sure that this would add to, and not replace, the other formats.

In hindsight, the reasons for these seem quite obvious. We were trying to measure the advantages and disadvantages of the Twenty20 format with our understanding and experience of the ODI and Test Match formats. The reactions, hence, were:
- It would be crunching it too much for it to remain interesting
- It would simply become a slog-fest, and the resultant runs would be so much, it would be very frustrating for the bowlers.

Overall, while some of the disadvantages are true, the format has its advantages too:
- It is long enough to keep things exciting, but short enough to hold everyone interested throughout the match.
- While compared to the other formats, the batsmen's strike rates would be higher and bowlers economy rates would be lower, the T20 records would simply get their own life, just the way ODI scores are no more compared to Test scores.
- As more of this format is played, the strategising would evolve and we would have similar analyses and planning in the matches and series, the way we currently have going in the Test and ODI.

But my gut feel is that the game would still be plagued by the current vices. There is enough money and not enough emotions riding International cricket (when compared to Football) to boot out the bookies.

I can only hope that the game comes out clean soon.

Mobile Manners

I haven't travelled outside India, or even to a lot of places outside Mumbai. So I can't really give a perspective on this opinion. But being within a small place in this big world, I have come to realise that the human race has got a lot of things it doesn't really deserve.

One of them is the mobile phone.

Imagine this. You are going in a local train trying to reach your office on time. The train is packed like crazy and the air is hot and humid. You have probably been through two quarrels already from your way to this place in the train. You are trying to relax a bit.

And then rings loudly the phone of the person standing next to you. He answers it and then for some reason, starts talking as if he is living in the distant past when trunk calls were hard to hear. A minute into the talk, everyone in the coach knows what the conversation is about.

Now imagine this happening almost every alternate day in your real life.


Life does not stop there. If you are thinking it is only the people travelling in local trains who do this, galat jawaab! These incidents happen at all levels across social gatherings, be it office meetings, or people sitting on the dias, or people in the cinema hall. And I am sure I am not the minority when it comes to being on the receiving side of such incidences. Mobiles have become one of the biggest sources of rude behaviour in public.

Some time back, Hutch had started an ad campaign on mobile manners.
My opinion - PLEASE RESTART!!! We desparately need some teaching!!!

Competence vs. Change

Recently read an article by Seth Godin in Fast Company.

Here, he says "In the face of change, the competent are helpless."

To say that I was confused would be an understatement. Wasn't winning and being the market leader all about building competence? Wasn't core competency the most important edge a company could have?

On the face of it, it starts making sense after pondering for a while. Competence after all is a person's ability to be quite good at doing a particular job. And since he is good at doing it in its current form, he is resistant to any change with it.

This 'sense' is shortlived, though. Because the understanding of the word 'competence' is incomplete. Looks like even Mr. Godin got it wrong.

Competence, as defined by Wikipedia here, means it is about skills and abilities and knowledges. In other words, competence is not knowing just one successful formula and applying it everywhere. It is actually about knowing a full range of formulae and also knowing which one to apply in what situation.

Given that, a competent person might embrace change, not resist it, because he is constantly looking at better ways to do it.

In that sense, change = better competence!!!