UDRS

2011 edition of world cup has seen a lot of action till date. England beating the contenders while getting beaten by two of the weakest teams in the group and almost losing with the third, a tied match, a blitzkrieg innings by Ross Taylor to sink the Pakistani ship and of course two great innings by the batting maestro. But one of the major factors which have affected this world cup has been the UDRS referral system. One of the proponents of the UDRS system Duncan Fletcher has few thoughts on how stupidly the system has been used sometimes and how ICC keeps tinkering with it all the time. One needs to understand that the referral system is essentially meant not for the 50-50 chances but to avoid blunders and shockers which can change the course of the game. The high ratio of on-field umpires' withheld decisions to reversed decisions is a testimony of the fact that on field umpires are doing a fine job.

From the spectator's point of view, UDRS has taken away the imminent unadulterated joy from the dismissals. You feel like a kid who goes to collect his grade sheet, comes to know that he has topped the exam and is suddenly told that his papers would be rechecked and after a while same result is declared again. Though this subtle emotional aspect due to involving technology in the game, will neither make any difference to the ICC policies, BCCI's opposition to the referral system nor will it matter to the broadcasters. It will just remind the viewers of the era when the dreaded finger would have the last laugh.

Update (13th June 2011): It will be interesting to see how Duncan Fletcher deals with India's constant opposition to UDRS when he is the coach of Indian team and when BCCI continues to rule the global cricket scenario. 

Goggles

Goggles are nice. They provide a tinted view of the world. Change the colour of the glass and the world changes. No-colour brings excessive clarity. Eyes can't take it. They find solace in the stained sight.

Eyes on the opposite side of goggles, not covered with any goggle, try to push their vision beyond the glass boundary of goggles. But the real eyes are not visible. When they stare hard enough, all they get to see is their own reflection. Looking at themselves, they think, is this a pleasant sight? Eyes can't decide. All they decide is to wear a goggle.

Now either eyes, when stare at each other, can only see goggles - the other goggle and a reflection of own goggle.

Objects Shift, Humans Move, Languages Transform

I love languages. The romance is very much a part of daily life - observing the dialects, varied pronunciations, use of pin-point synonyms, clarity and brevity. Over the years one of the most enjoyable activities I've found is to figure out the impact of Indian languages on English and the other way round. A Hindi poet Kumar Vishwas joked, pointing at the weird ways in which English is mixed with Hindi in Uttar Pradesh, 'to avenge the British, they have been doing to English what British did to Indians'!

Coming to the title of the post, in strictest sense shift should be used in the context of objects whereas move should be used for humans. So 'We moved to Mumbai' is more appropriate than 'We shifted to Mumbai'. So the point of this post is that, I've found in most of the cases in Hindi or in Marathi, the word shift to be more 'Indianized' than the word move. So I've frequently heard Hum log shift ho gaye or Amhi Shift Jhalo whereas I've never heard move being used in Hinglish or Minglish. The reason for the more Indianization of shift and less of move still remains unknown to me. So the impact of this imbalance becomes imminent when somebody speaks English in a translated-from-mother-tongue manner, which happens in most of the cases. In the other direction, I've frequently heard my sister saying Ye combination theme ke sath jata hai. This is a direct translation of 'This combination goes with the theme', although it doesn't make much sense in the native language. I love to find the roots in such cross-lingual mix ups.

I watched an Interview of Shobha De in which she claimed to be the first journalist to introduce Hinglish to the Indian English Press. Anti purists who support such mingling of languages defend it by the fact that historically, anything averse to change underwent extinction and languages were and will be no exception. I'm not much of a supporter of the intermixed languages and try to avoid it as far as possible. But, I was simply in love of the philosophy by another showbiz person Bharat Dabholkar regarding Hinglish. He said, 'Pepole resort to Hinglish because they aren't proficient in English speaking yet they want to be seen as 'cool' while not speaking in Hindi alone'. Ideally linguistic fusion should be treated as the mixture of two correct languages and should not be used to shield the lack of proficiency in either language.