Reservation in Indian Cricket Team

I was reading a news where Makaya Ntini destroyed New Zealand and took South Africa to victory a few days ago. The same Ntini whose first inclusion in the team had raised voices that his selection was based on his being black rather than his performance.
He proved all those people wrong and the SA cricket board right. But what if Indian govt. makes a law of 50% reservation based on caste in the Cricket Team.

Now this isn't a stupid thought without reason. With the govt planning 50% reservation in all engineering and management schools including IITs and IIMs and also in private sector jobs, why should cricket be spared. After all it is also a job that till now only few people get after going through an extremely competitive route. And it also brings pride to the country, just like IITs and IIMs have brought so far. Only so far that is.

I remember during my JEE preparation days how University of Roorkee, despite being the oldest and one of the best universities in India was losing all its reputation as compared to IITs due to almost 50% reservation in its entry system. And I was so pleased when it became IIT Roorkee as that immediately brought it at par with the IITs with similar performance based entry system.

And for all those who think that the govt is helping the poor and oppressed class by increasing reservation quota, let me tell you that being studied, and made friends with a lot many of these guys in college, I know how many actually got helped or even needed this help at the first place. I can count them on fingers.

Building up reputation takes decades, ruining it is just a matter of a couple of years. Sone ki murgi ka pet nahi katna chahiye.

The Ganga Rafting Trip

Last weekend we went for a company trip to Rishikesh for rafting on Ganga river. And what a trip it was. I have been to lots of places in the country, but most of those were sight seeing/small trekking trips. This one, on the contrary, was a truely adventure trip and I enjoyed it to the fullest. The scariest part of the trip was diving from a 25 ft cliff into water. I did it twice, but believe me, I was scared as hell. I have dropped all my bungee jumping plans for now.

If there is a trip I would recommend to everyone atleast once in a lifetime, this is it.

Playing with the sand.

Your majestic

A game of beach volleyball

Raring to go

Trying to be cool

After Rappelling moments

Kayaking in peaceful times.

The Rang de Basanti trip

Once, I and Meetu were to leave for Jaipur for the weekend. Kshitij and Nagar graciously offered to drop us till Bikaner House so that we can catch our bus. The bus tickets were bought but suddenly over talks and persuasion, they decided to drop us till jaipur :-). And after an overnight drive (done completely by Kshitij) and a memorable trip to Nahargarh the second evening, we had what I now call the Rang de Basanti trip.
Chronologically, this happened before the play event that I wrote before but It took me long time to get the pictures together and write this post.
What has this to do with Rang de Basanti? A lot of the amazing stills of the movie have been shot in the Nahragarh fort of Jaipur. We spent our saturday evening at these same spots and tried to recreate the magic that the movie had weaved around us.

On top of the world.

Socrates and Plato. Don't ask who's who ;-)

These two can replace Amir Khan and Sharman Joshi in the drinking competition that took place on the small platform in the backdrop. Again, don't ask who's Amir ;-)

Beautiful collage created by Meetu. He created another one as well but I didn't have enough space here for both.

Panaroma image created with mulitple pictures taken from my mobilecam and stitched using free software AutoStitch. It fell short a few pictures, but its amazing what technology can do these days.

Update 16-03-06: Changed the caption of the first image. The earlier caption was "Me taking on the city." This one looks better.

Accidental death of an Anarchist

Watched this play on saturday. All the actors are IITD students, 3 of them being the alumni. I have seen this play being performed twice during the college days, once as my hostel's entry in the interhostel competition and once as IITD entry in rendezvous. Pankaj had performed the lead role in those 2 performaces as well.
However, it was the first time I saw this play being performed commercially (for that matter, I haven't seen any commercial plays with all IITD actors, I wonder if there are many such plays). The performance was at a different level altogether this time around. The amount of effort that went into this was clearly visible and this hilarious satirical play had all the audience laughing their bellies out.
Congratulations to the whole crew for a commendable performance and I hope that you people do more plays in future.

P.S. Photography was not allowed during the show, but I hope no one minds these 2 photographs as my mobile camera didn't have flash/sound.

Jodi No. 1

Guys this is official. Now that Govinda is into politics, David decided to be the hero himself ;-). "Dha wan and only one" is now "Jodi No. 1". Congrats to Anuj and Riha on their engagement.
I just can't wait for another dance in front of the horse :-)
Update 20/3/06 : Added another picture courtesy David. Me, Nagar and Singla with the couple.

PS: I hope Anuj will now have better pictures to put on his blog.

Some narcissism

Its been a long time since I uploaded my pic in my profile. Hence I uploaded pics of myself for each of last 4 years. I changed a lot between 2002 to 2004, no more changes these days.

2001/2002 - Final Year in College	2003 - In Bangalore
2004 - In Noida	2005 - Still in Noida

I am using the latest one as my pic in the profile. It was shot using my Nokia 6255 mobile camera.

Computer Guys

"Shakti, my network card isn't working, please fix it."
"Sorry man, I don't know much about hardware."
"kya kahe raha hai Shakti, tu to compu stud hai, theek kar de"

If you are familiar with such conversation, chances are that you are one of those people proclaimed computer guys out there. I was reading this article today and found this real good corollary.

"Did you watch the Raiders game?"

"No, I don't follow football ------"

"What do you think of the new quarterback?"

"Really, football's not my thing. I don't know."

"I thought that you said that you're a sports fan?"

"No, I said that I watched tennis."

"Right, so what did you think of the penalty called in the Raiders game?"

"I watch tennis."

"Why would they call a penalty like that?"

Um.

Interesting Read.

Update 01/02/2006: Check out today's dilbert.