Sometimes being right is wrong.

No one else knows this better than Darrel Hair. In 1996, he was the first umpire in the world to actually call a bowler with around 200 test wickets for “throwing”. The whole of Asia called him racist. The Sri Lankan’s wanted to make sure he didn’t umpire in any of their future matches. Basically, Hair was considered a villain in Asia and an idiot in other parts of the cricketing world.

But, ask anyone in their sane mind with decent knowledge of cricket rules, and you’ll know why Darrel Hair was right. Murlidharan did “chuck” under the old rules of throwing. Then ICC actually decided to modify the throwing rule to accommodate people like Murli who actually had a deformed arm. But Darrel Hair was still the villain. I would say Darrell Hair’s decision has reduced the number of chuckers in international cricket. Nowadays, other umpires have the courage to report suspect actions; the ICC takes chucking seriously and punishes players who throw. Is it not fair to say that Darrell Hair started this whole trend? Ofcourse a Brett Lee here and a Shahid Afridi there get away scot-free for obvious reasons.


Now , Hair has moved on to his next controversy - ball tampering. Everyone knows ball tampering always happened in international cricket. Everyone knows who started this whole trend. But not a single umpire actually had the courage to punish a team for ball tampering. Darrell Hair suspected some cheating in the Pak Vs Eng test and penalized Pak five runs. Irrespective of whether Pak tampered with the ball or not, Inzamam ul-Haq diverted attention away from the actual issue by forfeiting the match. Why is Pak so obsessed with postponing the hearing? If they are that confident they didn’t tamper with the ball, why not confidently go through the hearing immediately? Hair might have ended his umpiring career with this strong reaction to some half-baked assumption that Pakistan tampered with the ball. But this incident is definitely going to reduce the amount of ball tampering that happens in international cricket. We have already seen that "just-a-talk with the captain" hasn't made any difference.

But will Darrell Hair continue to be the villain just because he used Murli and Pakistan as opposed to Bret Lee and England to make his point? Or is ICC going to amend the rules again to accommodate teams/cricketers that cheat?

Darrell Hair is never going to get the support of the media or the ICC or any of the cricketing boards, but all that is fine. The sad part is none of the umpires are coming out in front and supporting him. After all, Hair was right in Murli’s case and we still don't know if he is right or wrong in Pakistan's case. But is the ICC even trying hard enough to find that out...

Reservations:

The whole of India is talking about reservations. NDTV, CNN-IBN and a whole lot of bloggers come up with exactly the same reasons as to why they all oppose reservations. No one’s thinking differently , the topic at hand by itself is quite old and beaten to death, I thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to discuss a totally clichéd topic in a slightly different way.

Alright, so here goes it:

Now let’s take the 2 options we got at hand.

Option 1 – No reservations. What happens? India’s population is currently around 1,000,000,000. Out of this around 50% is effectively illiterate (this is different from actual illiteracy). If there are no reservations (assuming that the rate at which illiterates and literates contribute to our population growth is exactly equal), this percentage will remain the same (if not, illiteracy will increase). It’s not wrong to assume that 70% of the parents who are literate will educate their children properly, and 70% of the parents who are illiterate will NOT educate their children properly. In the remaining 30%, people like Rahul Mahajan and Sunil Bharathi Mittal will balance out. Educated folks like Rahul will effectively be illiterate (as they don’t behave like educated people anyway) and smart people like Mittal will be very literate even though they didn’t go through any formal education.

So, if we chose option 1 – India will continue to be the same. 50 % illiteracy will continue , the economic divide will keep expanding, and we all should sit back and hope that we’ll have more and more Sunil Mittals and Dirubhai Ambanis and fewer Rahul Mahajans.

Let’s take option 2. Say we have about 25% reservations. Let’s say 80% of the people who use this 25% reservation, are actually backward (the other 20% are people who buy OBC certificates - thanks to NDTV). These people will move into the literate category. Out of these people, let’s say 80% are effectively literate, we have 16% more people who are literate. Hope you guys got the complicated math here (0.8*0.8*0.25*100). If this were a case interview, I would have said: This sounds too high, let’s make it 10%.

So, what do we have now? 10% of the people would have moved from the illiterate to the literate category. Because of reservations, is there a chance that some people can move from the educated to the non-educated category? Nopes, no way. People, who planned to study medicine, might miss out studying medicine because of the reservations but they could always study something else. Maybe they could become a journalist and join NDTV and fight against the reservations. Basically, there’s no chance that someone who would have been in the educated category will become an illiterate because of reservations. Correct?

So, approx 10% of the people move from the non-educated side to the educated side (if our politicians implemented this whole thing properly- now that’s a whole new ball game). So, if we have to make a decision keeping in mind the overall growth of India, option 2 doesn’t sound too bad.

I know a lot has been said about how illiteracy should be corrected at the grassroots level and how the government should find ways to educate kids at the middle-school and high-school levels and not use reservations as a method to achieve whatever growth they are talking about. This is a point well-made, and a lot of organizations are working towards this. But thinking very carefully, reservations if implemented properly might not be a bad thing. Changes at the basic school level should happen in tandem with reservations.

There are a lot of other questions that need to be addressed. Is 25% an optimal number? We’ll be sacrificing some Sabeer Bhatia’s to gain a decent number of BPO engineers, but that’s the trade-off we’ll have to consider. There’s obviously more thought that needs to go into picking the right % for reservations, but the idea itself is not bad. The sad part is, no one – not anyone from NDTV, not anyone from Congress, not anyone from IIT/IIM has come up with some analysis on what this number should be, why it should be so etc. etc. There’s just blind opposition or support for/against reservations and that’s just very sad to know.

Update(from the comments section): Just so that more people can understand this point of view better:

Just wanted to add to that. I am not arguing for the sake of arguing here(Like in most other cases). I am just trying to assess the situation from a different angle.Take for example our class at SVCE. Say we had some 6 people from SC/ST ( rightly deserved SC/ST ) , I am pretty sure they are doing quite decently for themselves right now. Maybe SVCE helped them be in a position they are right now. Now, since those 6 people got into SVCE, some FC people went to SRM, Hindustan etc. Had they taken 7 people into SC/ST, then Murari ( who was the last person to get into EE Payment at SVCE) would have missed out and gone to SRM. Murari would have done fine anyway. He might have even gone to Stanford had he gone to SRM. But, the 7th SC/ST person might have needed SVCE's placement help to actually get the same job. Though this was added to get some comedy into the picture, hope you get my point !

India’s ‘intellectual capital’, is it really intellectual??

I recently read a blog that spoke about “India’s IT industry that uses over-skilled workers”. Here’s a link to it: http://thekingofdreamers.blogspot.com/

1) This is my take on India’s IT/BPO industry. There’s no question about the fact that the Indian economy is booming right now. The IT Services and the BPO industry contributes quite heftily to India’s GDP, irrespective of whether it is products based or services based. So no point complaining about it.

2) The over-skilled workers/engineers that ‘dreamer’ is talking about, I think is a pure over-statement. I agree with the fact that engineers at various companies like Sathyam, Wipro and various other companies get to do work that is pretty easy to do, that doesn’t kindle the brains of the ‘smart’ engineers India produces. But, what else can they do. It’s not true that, these ‘engineers’ work in IT Services companies because these are the only jobs available. Some of the world’s biggest product-based companies including Intel, Texas Instruments, Motorola and AMD, are looking to hire a lot of people into their Indian design centers, but find it extremely difficult to do so. There are just not enough people who are good enough.

It is probably true that, these engineers at software companies across the country are quite over-skilled for the work they do. But they don’t have enough skills to work in the ‘next-level’ of roles. The basic problem that India has, is not about the IT/BPO industry, but engineering education in India. Apart from the 7 or 8 IIT’s, and few good engineering colleges here and there, most of the other engineering colleges provide quite low level of skill sets which are quite useless, and cannot be used anywhere else but in the IT services sector. This has to change. Engineering education should become more ‘current’, ‘useful’, ‘challenging’ and not something that anyone and everyone can get without too much effort.

3) India’s true ‘intellectual capital’ lies in our ‘managerial talent’. These IT/BPO companies that are doing well employ some of the ‘smartest’ managers you can find. These guys are responsible for bringing in business from the US/ Europe and various other parts of the world .There’s no question about the fact that India’s managerial talent is quite solid and these guys need to be given credit to what they have done to the Indian economy.


So, here’s my point. 80% of the ‘engineers’ doing work that is “too easy” for them, are just not good enough (at least with their current skill sets) to do anything better. Engineering education in India should become “more challenging”, “more practical” and “more sensible”. Till then we’ll have to rely on our “managers” who’ll have to keep bringing in more money into the country. Of course, the other solution to this problem is that the “real smart engineers from the IITs and some other good engineering colleges” who tend to work abroad, have to comeback to serve their own country.