The IPL player auctions

I woke up in the middle of the night... and with nothing better to do, ended up at cricinfo.

Now, I've taken it upon myself to follow the fortunes of the Chennai team. Yeah, I'm jingoistic! :P

Looks like the we've landed Murali and Matthew Hayden. Two of my all-time favorites. And surprisingly enough, a $1.5 mill Dhoni. Stephen Fleming. And a bunch of fairly useless players.

I do think Dhoni is a very gutsy player. But $1.5 mill?

Just to get a sense of what else $1.5 mill could have bought us:

Shane Warne (US$ 450,000)
Anil Kumble (US$ 500,000)
Adam Gilchrist (US$ 700,000)
Mahela Jayawardene (US$ 475,000)
Kumar Sangakkara (US$ 700,000)
Ricky Ponting (US$ 400,000) - (If Punter travels to Pakistan, he doesn't get to play at all... that explains this number, somewhat.)
Kamran Akmal (US$ 150,000)

At first glance, I think I like the way most of the other teams look. :( Chennai has three stars, and then some.

Moving on, I think the bidding process itself is quite interesting. Auctions are places where value is decided by what something is worth to the second highest bidder.

This auction becomes somewhat more interesting because there are caps. Every team has a cap on how much it can spend in total. So what they're looking at is to form a good team within that amount. When you already have five batsmen, someone like Shahid Afridi becomes more attractive than Ricky Ponting.

The other objectives are quite obvious too... The amount spent is incomplete without countering in expected payback: Financially and otherwise.

This post is incomplete. I don't think I've completely digested what's happening. But this does seem like fun stuff.

On being sick...

Being sick can be fun... when you're just sick enough.

You remember those times when you can run a marathon if you have couple pills? But you don't, and so you can't lift your grocery bags?

That is what I'm talking about.

No throwing up. No coughing your lungs out. No Sachin Tendulkar fevers. Nothing dirty. Nothing so painful.

Just sick enough... to not show up for work. :)

Knock knock!

Indian writing in English

I was chatting with a friend couple days ago.

Somewhere in conversation, context was set up, and it became necessary to use the word whorehouse.

It wasn't.

My friend preferred "house of illness in reputation."

I couldn't help smiling. The more obvious reason was the need to use a euphemism, and the cleverness of it. Indian sensitivities...

The not so obvious reason was the realization that this is uniquely characteristic of contemporary Indian writing. The kind that we rave about.


PS: I personally don't care for Indian fiction. So I might be wrong to generalize... Please give me license :) Oh, I'm currently reading Dune, by Frank Herbert. I think it is bloody brilliant.

Of Al Gore and the IPCC

I quite enjoyed watching "An Inconvenient Truth!" I will say that it was well made, with some Hollywood lines thrown in for good measure... like the opening line, for example... "I am Al Gore. I used to be the next president of the United States!"

The following comment from a news article is thought provoking though...

Piers Forster from the School of Earth and Environment at England's University of Leeds said in a statement: "It's every scientist's dream to win a Nobel Prize, so this is great for myself and the hundreds that worked on their reports over the years. It's perhaps a little deflating though — that one man and his PowerPoint show has as much influence as the decades of dedicated work by so many scientists."

The Beach House...

This past weekend...

A wooden house on the edge of a cliff, the sound of crashing waves, thick fog, wood in the fireplace, crackling flames, the gang and a baby, birthday cake, poker through the night, silly conversation.

Idyllic. Isolated. Desolated.

The closest gas station was thirty miles away. The closest grocery store... sixteen.

The only thing missing was a killer on the loose :P

Awesome fun!

Beginner's Luck

"It's called the principle of favorability. When you play cards the first time, you are almost sure to win. Beginner's luck. Why is that? Because there is a force that wants you to realize your destiny; it whets your appetite with a taste of success."

- Paulo Coelho

Ok, I'm not one of those people who believe blindly in the power of "The Alchemist." I do think, however, that the above mentioned is a lovely quote, and possibly very close to reality.

Travel Companions...

Its amazing how our cine heroes always get to chat up these pretty young things, traveling.

I think back to all those times I've had to endure those super long journeys.

That wise looking Asian gentleman, who made me teach him Sudoku. And was amazed by the fact that I could actually finish one in under fifty minutes... (yeah, fifty! Any friend of mine who reads this must note that I was drugged, jet lagged, sleepy, *and* afraid that there were terrorists on board.)

And then there was this Indian uncle... an extremely jolly man, I thought. Till he jumped into his AMWAY spiel.

That middle aged Caucasian businesswoman, who couldn't believe that I chose Stanford for MIT. Trade sunny CA for chilly Boston, I ask? Obviously, she seemed to think.

That uncle and aunty from Hyderabad... who were quite worried about my state of nourishment. You should meet up with my son Ramakrishna Reddy in San Jose, they said. Our daughter in law makes yummy Lamb curry. Aunty seemed disappointed when she found out that I was vegetarian. She cheered up somewhat when she found out that I was a big fan of muddapappu and avakaya.

I remember filling up immigration forms for the elderly Panjabi couple who were headed over to meet their grandchildren. We don't speak a common language. But we communicate.

And all those kids. God! Entertaining for the first half hour or so... extremely extremely annoying after that. Playing peek-a-boo 14 hours straight can get tiring... however cute the sister :P

Hmmm...

There was this one pretty chick from Bombay, on one my of my trips back home...

Young, smart, cute, ambitious... she seemed to have it all. Amazing amazing conversation!!! The Pacific seemed smaller still...

As we were about to touch down, she introduced into the conversation, the subject of a husband...

Anyways... that was that.