Cricket - A Funny Little Game

Tonight, I was watching a cricket match (I prefer the term - keeping abreast of the score) on CricInfo (not paid to publicize them, but just a way of thanking them for keeping me in touch with the game, still). The game was a seesaw kind of a match, and at last, to my content, India won.

So, I was just browsing the CricInfo site and came upon this funny article (anecdote, to be exact) about a match and thought to share it with all. It went on like this (the funny part)...

The pair had added four when Robertson-Glasgow drove the ball to long-on, fielding in front of the Pavilion, and set off for an easy single. Despite having taken the first one rather slowly, the pair decided to come back for a second. Raikes, running back to the danger end, was less convinced but after hesitating, set off. "Then," Robertson-Glasgow later recalled, "strange things happened".

The two of them crossed mid-pitch, at which point Robertson-Glasgow (according to the Times) or Raikes (according to Robertson-Glasgow) had a change of mind and direction and the pair ran side by side towards the Pavilion End.

After a few yards Raikes realised that this was a recipe for trouble and turned round to try to get back to the safety of the Vauxhall End. At the same moment, Robertson-Glasgow did exactly the same, so both were again heading in the same direction. "I followed him," Robertson-Glasgow wrote, "but, thinking the crease was overcrowded, I set out for the other end."

To the amusement of what the Times described as a "now thoroughly interested house", the hapless pair turned almost simultaneously for a third time and resumed their side-by-side pursuit for safety. "The Old Carthusian beat the Old Wykehamist by a short head," noted the newspaper dryly.

The situation was allowed to reach a near-comic state by the dreadful fielding of the Surrey side, who were "driven temporarily insane by the goings-on". The initial return from long-on was poor and was then fumbled by mid-on. As he picked up the ball he was confronted with loud shouts from both bowler and wicketkeeper to throw the ball to their end. Confused, he dropped the ball for a second time before returning it to the bowler, who took the bails off, only to see both Robertson-Glasgow and Raikes standing in their ground, albeit exhausted. He duly threw the ball to wicketkeeper Herbert Strudwick, who whipped off the bails.

You can read the full article here.

It was hilarious, to say the least. I could just imagine how it would have looked to the spectators and those poor guys out there...

Be sure to read the entire article though...

Finally A Human Error

Today I tried googling something and came up with a list of sites flagged as malicious. I tried googling "Google" itself and it too showed up as a malicious. :-)

So, as thought, it was indeed a bug in Google. They have claimed it as "Human Error".

BBC News
Computer World
CNet
Guardian UK

Finally, we can sleep peacefully knowing the big guys out there too make errors, that we "The lesser known Software Engineers" are generally prone to.

Nobody's Perfect

Life has a strange way of bringing out our fallacy, one way or the other. Frankly, we human beings are never going to be perfect. But we may start improving upon it.

I am not going to shy away from owning up that I too am in the process of identifying my mistakes and trying to find a solution.

One thing I have noticed is that I keep expectations from friends, not that I find it a vice. My friends too keep expectation from me, which is natural. Still, there are times when it really leads to the odd ill-feelings when expectations doesn't materializes.

Live life, "bindaas" type. Trying to imbibe this new motto. Let's see how successful can I get.

Of Slumdogs And Millionaires

After hearing the hype, I watched the movie (Slumdog Millionaire) yesterday. The movie goes from innovative story to pathetically Bollywood-like screenplay. Haven't read the book "Q & A" on which it is based, but a crispier narration would have done a lot of wonder.

I had heard about the low light this movie shows India in. My take is a bit different. It does shows what is truth, but gets stuck with showing only the single side of a coin.

The other contentious part is that a boy from the slum (agreed, he worked as a chai-wala in a BPO), still he speaks English with an accent. The Inspector and the Constable are speaking with Indian accent. Also, many a times the host speaks in Hindi, but this boy replies in his accented English. Doesn't look like he is from the slums, does it?

This is my opinion, but I would have liked the movie to be either made in Hindi and dubbed in English or vice versa. This kind of experiments (this is far from Hinglish genre movies we see now-a-days) is really bad.

All in all, a nice movie. Could have been much better if handled in a different way. A nice cliched Bollywood movie, I can say. The end songs is typical Bollywood.

Events shown are definitely improbable, if not impossible.

A New Beginning

"A new year, a new beginning."

Thought of starting a blog which will contain my, so called, "Random Thoughts". The original blog has been moved to http://lifeonthesinecurve.blogspot.com/. Hope the followers will continue to visit it.

That's it, "short and sweet" :-)