The Yaxis Live by Rajesh Kumar

While the cricket fans of India and Pakistan are smarting over early exits of their national teams , here is a suggestion to BCCI and PCB to utilize an excellent opportunity ahead of us.

Forget the ICC WC 2007. Organize a quickfire India Pakistan ODI series in parallel! Yes!!

Hold five matches in India and five in Pakistan.

Why does this make sense:

1. Cricket fans in the subcontinent would not just be happy, but delighted.Nothing generates more fun than India Pak cricketing encounters.
2. The advertisers would have a mighty good alternate option. Nothing generates more money than India Pak cricketing encounters.
3. Matches would happen in IST & PST. Late night would be reserved for encounters of the other kind!
4. For BCCI and PCB, there is tons of (more) money to be made.ICC would realize the power of the cricket fans inthe subcontinent. Its TRPs and ad revenues would dip sharply and BCCI and PCB would have their chance to settle scores with ICC. ICC would accept any bargain.
5. Players and the managers of brands they endorse would be delighted too, reasons are so obvious!(Okay if they are not obvious, then let me state – finally their brand ambassadors would be seen winning, for a change)

Stretch your imagination a bit and make Siddhu – Mandira Bedi duo the official commentators and think how cool this would be(or hot, take your pick).

You may feel such a series is impossible(Well, some copyrighter said something like Impossible is Nothing!). Okay, if ‘official‘(meaning ICC blessed) series is not possible, then let us organise some ‘exhibition matches‘ or Kiran More welfare matches(let us thank him for his services to cricket so that he says goodbye to cricket in all forms- finally!!).

Very few people can dream big. Even fewer can pursue those dreams to reality. A visionary, a technocrat and a project manager par-excellence rolled into one is Abdul Kalam for us.President A.P.J Abdul Kalam is one such distinguished person who has proved that dreams can be chased to reality by hard work. No wonder President Kalam is such a popular president. How popular, read on.

Few days before MS Subbulakshmi died, President Kalam visited her at her house in Chennai. It was evening post work hour and due to President Kalam’s visit, the Police had stopped traffic. I was heading home and found myself in a jam at Kottur bridge connecting Turnbulls road with Gandhi Mandam road. We were curious why the traffic is standstill and people including myself felt frustrated. Frustrated till the policeman on duty uttered the word ‘Kalam’. It was a different story that point onwards. People switched off the engines, locked their cars and stood on the road median, just to get a glimpse of President Kalam’s cavalcade, which was visible for few seconds as it approached MS house from IIT side and the closest it came to us was about a km away! The president possibly stayed there for five minutes or so, got back in the car and sped back. All we could see was the car lights. Nobody whined about this traffic delay that day. The only complaint was that we could not see Kalam.

I was reminded of this incident recently when I found a colleague of mine reading Indomitable Spirit by Dr Kalam. I ended up borrowing that book which I am reading currently. I was instantly tempted to read this book because I had the chance to read Wings of Fire(co-authored by Arun Tiwari) few years back.

What strikes most about Kalam’s writing is the simplicity with which he talks about his travails of life and the fact that he writes about his failures as much as his success. He is not afraid to talk about what gave him happiness and what made him sadness. And he does that in the most unassuming way. And unlike the politicans who talk about good of the country and never mean it, Kalam comes out as a thankful deviation. Wings of Fire was very inspiring read, and so is Indomitable Spirit which is bound touch you, because it is so easy to relate it to our own pursuits of life. See all his books here. If there is one complaint you would have about his writing is that he does not appear stiff-like-a-president but too humble and real.

Some strange things about Kalam. Like all things Kalam, the official website of the President of India has his personal impression too. The website has all his speeches, but more than that, it has a quiz for children in its Children Corner. Another unique thing about Kalam something that we all know but do not realize, that he is the President of World’s largest democracy and belongs to no particular party!

This is the email I received when I greeted Abdul Kalam on his birthday(In about four hours flat)

So whether you read business or anything else, do read Kalam’s books at your first chance. And if you have read them, please leave comments here for my benefit.We are blessed to be living in his times.

Never before in the history of ICC World Cup tournaments have so much emotions been generated at such an early stage of the tournament. The early rounds are supposed to be easy for the fancied teams and it is assumed that the ‘minnows’ will walk out at the end of this stage.Not really this time. Pakistan, a former winner of Cricket World Cup is thrown out this early(though technically they have one more match with Zimbabwe left), India, another former champion facing a prospect of the same having lost to neighbours Bangladesh, and saddest of them all, Bob Woolmer, a cricketing legend lost, perhaps to stress and sadness. To add to it, there is already a captain, Inzamaam, who has already announced his intention to step aside and possibly even retire.

Are we expecting too much of a magic from our national teams? Are we forgetting that our teams are made of human beings, and we all have our days? There is a sad picture in today’s Hindu about Dhoni’s under-construction house being vandalised by ‘cricket lovers’. That property, has been apparently been gifted to Dhoni for his cricketing achievements.I find it even difficult to believe having been born in Ranchi and spent several years of my life there. Ranchi was such a fun loving city which danced all night when India won in 1983 world cup. I was under the impression that Ranchi treats MSD as a personal treasure. What will be next? Attack on Chanchalda’s house??? Are we animals????

Why, because Inzy led a lame duck team with a weak bowling attack which was low in morale due to Shoab’s absense? The fear of a return home can sometimes be so frightening. Common guys, they are coming ‘home’ and not walking into enemy territory. And they have brought you laurels in the past.

We perhaps must keen in mind that at the end of the tournament on April 29, there will be only one winner. Assuming that the winner is from the subcontinent, there will be three teams from the subcontinent who would not have won. Does that mean that we will go about setting houses ablaze! So much for our ‘cultural depth’, ‘our scientific temperament’ and ‘world leadership in IT’. What message are we sending?Shame!!!

One point one must make though. The boards in this region have no clear communication strategy to connect with the cricket lovers in respective regions, where cricket is such a high involvement matter. Time to hire some world class mass communication specialists. I am sure the boards can afford them.

Let us enjoy the ICC World Cup 2007 as a sports tournament .Not as war games. May the best team win. Let’s cheer to cricket.And goodbye Bob, we will miss ya.

I recently moved this blog to my own domain.Bloggers using Blogspot and considering migrating to their own domain may like to read the impact analysis.

Next time you are making a call to your family and colleagues in US from another country, watch out for the Daylight Saving Time, which comes in early this year.

To reduce consumption of energy and to increase consumption of natural light, Daylight saving time in US in 2007 and beyond would come in three weeks early compared to 2006.

This year it comes in effect on March 11, and ends on Nov 4, which adds up to an additional one month. The travel and hospitality industry is widely affected by this change since it they now have to reprogram their systems, a la Y2K style though no major glitches are expected, since there was a fairly long notice of this impending change.

It also affects your calendars and in your laptops and desktops, which are programmed to work as per the old system.Microsoft has released an update to make the neccessary corrections to the calendar as well as setup a helpline to aid customers requiring support. The updates can be installed in easy steps from here . If you are using corporate computing device such as PDA, PC or laptop, it is quite likely these updates would be deployed in your machines by the network team, with our without your explicit concurrence or knowledge, especially those operating in LAN environments.

But if you are not sure about US local time because the whole thing is very confusing , do check out the time in Google by typing a search such as ‘Time in LA’.

I noticed this yesterday.I have so far believed that Google bots index permalinks of websites and blogs, but this time it seem to have indexed the Blog label itself.Clearly, this seems to be bug where the spider has assumed a label to be a post.Pretty curious indeed.

Read: MY VIEW:’THE GOOGLE STORY’ BY DAVID A. VISE

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s Chief Solution architect who succeeded Bil Gates for that position, did something on 27 Feb 2007 that leading executives of Microsoft are not known to do- acknowledge the succcess of business rivals. He acknowledged that Google’s success with its advertising model was a “wake-up call within Microsoft”. Many within Microsoft would possibly consider such an acknowledgement as nothing short of sacrilege but it clearly shows the yeah-they-got-it-right-we-didn’t thought process in Microsoft’s top management quarters.

They possibly acknowledged it silently by allowing you to choose your own search engine such as Google and ASK in IE 7.0 i search box rather than force MSN/Live search on you.

Another interesting development is his comment about the success of MS Office as having withstood the onslaught of the likes of Zoho and Google Docs saying they ‘compromised functionality’. Not sure if he was asked on the declining marketshare of Internet Explorer but surely his take on Firefox would be something of interest to many.

Microsoft is known to orchestrate large programs and projects which take years to mature(start with a ‘code name’, make the ‘code name’ public, build excitement over years), where most successful web comanies such as Google and Yahoo remain nimblefooted and keep a very sharp eye on promising startups which they acquire and make it as part of their services block, recent example being YouTube, which Google acquired for USD 1.6 BN, which incidentlly Steve Ballmer reportedly likened to a copyright disaster waiting to happen. They are also yet to figure out who is their competiton in the Web 2.0, merely few named companies(which if they acknowledge would be good) or the mushroom kind of evolution pattern of the internet(which if they acknowledge would be better).

Another possible aspect possibly overlooked is the service versus product issue. The service vs product line has somewhat blurred in the recent years, and Web 2.0 is dominated by things such as widgets. The internet usage itself has changed over the years, it is not just a platform where corporations run websites and users visit those sites- lot of users themselves create content, and I am not sure how Microsoft is enabling anyone other than providing a browser.

All said, Microsoft remains a great company, and a well organized one. Perhaps too well organized for the Web 2.0 era, where organizational chaos often leads to innovations.

Detailed Yahoo Report

Microsoft

ICC Cricket World Cup 2007 is all set to begin on March 11th in the Caribbean Islands with the opening ceremony. Nine Caribbean countries have come together to host this tournament. Infact the practice matches would get going from 5th March itself and there are 16 such practice matches in all, four per day on successive days. This World Cup, there are 16 teams participating and just in case you would like to refresh, they are as follows:

Group A: The mighty Aussies, equally mighty SA, and not so mighty Scotland and the Netherlands

Group B:Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh & Bermuda(yes, Bermuda, it is a speck in the Atlantic, spot it if you can)

Group C:New Zealand, England, Kenya & Canada

Group D:Pakistan, West Indies, Zimbabwe & Ireland.
No guesses, Group A & C appear very tough groups.

The tournament itself is in four stages:
Stage 1: Group Stage (Teams within the groups play each other, once). This stage kicks off on 13th March with a WI at Pak match.In all there are 24 matches in this stage which ends on March 25.Eight teams move to the next round, eight drop out and head home.Parents of kids writing 10th and 12th this year can rub their eyes in disbelief. Yes, cricket world cup is happening this time of the year. If you are in some planning function in your organisation in India, have fun because both cricket and your employer will demand late evenings.

Stage 2: Super Eight Stage begins on March 27 and ends on 22 April. This stage has the potential to make you cricket weary or to create cricket widows, depending on your liking. Office productivity will be very low and lot of employees would report sick, owing to late night matches.Four teams head home, four move to the semis.24 matches in this round.Remember, it is financial year closure too, so expect late nights anyway.