Month: September 2020

In The News, My Take

Tewatia’s Triumphant Turnaround!

To many avid cricket fans like me, Rahul Tewatia was just another name. I knew he was an all rounder of sorts, primarily a left arm spinner who could also hit the ball hard. He had been with different franchisees during varying seasons of the Indian Premier League ( IPL). I remember him with the King’s XI Punjab and the Delhi Daredevils. This year he has gone back to Rajasthan Royals (RR) where he started his IPL career. Yesterday he played the game of his life for them!

Thanks to Mayank Agarwal and K L Rahul, King’s XI Punjab seemed at one stage all set to reach 250. To their credit, the Rajasthan Royals (RR) bowlers pegged them back in the second half of their innings and the Punjabis finished with 223. A very good score considering that most teams who batted first had won matches. Indeed when Steve Smith chose to field on winning the toss, many felt it was a wrong decision by the RR captain- one of several where he was to prove people wrong!

Thanks to Sanju Samson, RR got a good start and were making a fight of the match. Tewatia was sent in to bat at No. 4. Obviously his brief was to hit out and accelerate the scoring. Unfortunately for him the opposite happened. Try as he did he could not get the ball away. Doubt turned to scorn and anger as he crawled to 8 in 19 balls, when the acute need of the hour was to press on-regardless.

They say that the never say die spirit sets some people apart. We saw it in Rahul Tewatia yesterday at Sharjah. His team needed 51 runs to win in 18 balls. In the 18th over of the RR innings, he hammered 5 Sixers off the bowling of the West Indian quick Sheldon Cottrell. This equalled Chris Gayle’s record of the most Sixers in an over! After 17 runs off 23 balls he blasted an astonishing 36 runs off the next 8 balls!! He deserved to stay till the end but he fell in the 19th over but his batting had brought his team to the cusp of victory.

This was an amazing turnaround for the fortunes of RR- and for Tewatia of course. Those who were cursing him a short while ago, now praised him to the skies. Those who criticized his skipper Smith’s decision to send him at No. 4 were now saying that was sheer genius! It proved beyond doubt that there is so much truth in the old adage- one over can change the game.

RR won with three balls to spare and King’s XI suddenly found themselves having lost two of their first three games. Indeed the first game against Delhi Capitals should have been won easily by them. They bothched up the Super Over and now this!

Rahul Tewatia has established himself as an accomplished hitter of the cricket ball. I dare say his fortunes will change for the better thanks to that one over which got him and his team 30 most valuable runs. His team created a IPL record – the highest total chased down – scoring 224 to win the match. The millions watching the match all over the world were treated to some amazing cricket yesterday. In the heat of the battle, West Indian Nicholas Pooran of the King’s XI did some extraordinary fielding which will be remembered for a long, long time! He had scored a duck in the Super Over in the last match!

The low profile Tewatia suddenly finds himself hitting the headlines every where. He will now have to live up to this reputation. I wish him all the best in his future career.

He has shown he is a young man with a depth of fortitude and very high on self-belief.

In The News, My Take

Indian Premier League (IPL) 2020: Records To Be Broken!

Fingers crossed! If everything goes off well for the next 53 days, we can say that even the pandemic Covid 19 -also called the Wuhan Virus- could not halt the triumphant march of the Indian Premier League (IPL).

The 13 th edition of what is arguably the richest cricket tournament in the world is being played in the UAE this year. From September 19 to November 10, 2020. Being one of those die hard cricket fans, I must have seen most of the matches- on television of course- since the inaugural match at our own Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru way back in 2008.

For the statistically inclined cricket fan , the IPL is a delight. Records are created and records are broken with regularity. Every year the standards of the game go up, especially in the fielding and catching. The batsmen and bowlers too strive to master something new and innovative to beat their opponents.

Today’s blog post is written with the millions of record tracking cricket fans in mind. All data is taken from the IPL website . Let’s see how many of these records will get beaten in this year’s IPL, even without the customary roar of supporting crowds to egg on the players!

With 5412 runs, Virat Kohli, the skipper of the Royal Challengers Bangalore, (which, by the way, is the team I support) is far ahead of the others as the man with the most number of IPL runs under his belt. I don’t see Rohit Sharma go past him this year as he is 500 runs behind. I wonder if anyone will beat Kohli’s record for the most runs in one season- 973 in the 2016 edition with 4 centuries and 7 fifties. The record for the most wickets for a IPL season is held by Dwayne Bravo, who took a staggering 32 wickets in 2013.

I don’t expect the records for sixers to be broken this time around. Chris Gayle has a total of 326 sixers while De Villiers the man next is way behind with 212! Gayle also holds the record of most sixers in an innings (17) with 13 being the next highest. The record for the highest individual innings also belongs to Gayle: 175. I hope someone breaks it this year! I don’t foresee anyone beating Andre Russell’s overall strike rate of 186. Likewise, Chris Morris’s 38 runs in 9 balls to give him the best innings strike rate of 422 will take some beating!!

The fastest 50 record belongs to K L Rahul ( 51 off 14 balls). Some explosive batting like this could well happen this year. Let’s hope so for the sake of the game. Gayle scored the fastest 100 – in 30 balls. I am not sure if anyone will better this in 2020.

In the bowling department, Lasith Malinga’s overall tally of 170 wickets could well be broken this year as he himself is not playing. The best figures for an innings of 6 wickets for 12 runs by Alzarri Joseph is up for the grabs though only two others have ever taken 6 wickets in an innings like him so far in the history of the IPL. Rashid Khan has the best overall economy rate of 6.55 in 45 matches. One record that I wish will be broken is for the most expensive spell ever : 4 overs for 70 runs by Basil Thampi, an average of 17 runs per over!

In the inaugural match of IPL 2020 yesterday, we saw Piyush Chawla don the CSK colors for the first time, after being so used to seeing him for Punjab and KKR . But in the record for playing for most number of franchises, he is far, far behind! You may know that 4 players ( Dinesh Karthik, Parthiv Patel, Ishant Sharma, and Thisara Perera) have played for 6 different franchisees. But “their baap” – as we would say in India – the eternal traveller- has to be Aaron Finch. The Aussie, who has already passed through 7, will be playing for his 8th franchisee when he turns out for RCB this year! I hope he performs better than ever before!!

So let’s get down to the game and hope IPL 2020, despite all the problems, will provide us with some fabulous entertainment!

"Glimpses of a Glorious Past", My Take, The Lawrence School, Lovedale

Remembering Mr Gupta!

A subject that I dreaded in School was Hindi. Perhaps it was more my fault than that of my teachers. To start with I could not understand , for example, why a chair was of the feminine gender and cloth was of the masculine gender. It was not surprising that I struggled all through School!

Mr Ganesh Prasad Gupta, known far and wide as “Gupu” was one of our Hindi teachers at The Lawrence School, Lovedale. He could pack a punch and I write with considerable personal experience in this matter. This was, of course, long before the days when corporal punishment was frowned upon. Masters could- and frequently did- slap us to put some sense in us. Whether they succeeded or not is highly debatable!

For reasons best known to himself, Gupu used the phrase, ” steady slap” as against the more common, “tight slap.” He once asked us to write an essay on ” Urban vs Rural” expecting us to write about the differences in outlook, facilities, economies etc. He was a sticker for exactitude. If he expected 1000 words, by God that’s exactly what he accepted. 999 was not good enough. You had to pass the magical 1000 mark.

I was on 950 words or so and the clock was ticking. We had to hand in our papers soon. To cross the much wanted finish line, from out of the blue, I made the Town Guy say, ( in rudimentary Hindi, of course! ) : ” Hey, look at that guy! ” To which the Village Guy asked, ” Where? Which guy? ” Town guy, ” There, there! ” Village Guy, ” Just look at him, ha ha!! ” Town Guy: ” Yes, look, look, ha, ha ha,” There was more along these lines and the essay finished well past 1000 words.

Over 55 years have gone by but I still remember the walloping I got from Mr Gupta, much to the amusement of my classmates. They howled with laughter when he read out the last few paragraphs to highlight how an essay should NOT be written.

Mr Gupta perhaps prided himself on being a stickler for grammar as he would ( for reasons best known to himself) start with the future tense. ” Bewakoof ladka! You need a steady slap!” This was fair warning for fellows like me as to what was coming in the very near future. He shifted then, more hurriedly, to the present tense, ” I will give you a steady slap now.” That was the signal for me to take a deep breath and brace body and soul for what was imminent. Whack! There came the steady slap! Your head reeled and you could actually count the stars. Then seemingly in the distance you could hear Mr Gupta, as correct as always, summarize recent events with his customary, ” I gave you a steady slap!!!” As if you couldn’t make that out!!!

Sadly, Mr Gupta is no more. Wherever he is, if he could, I am sure he would have a chuckle on reading how his ” steady slap” – if not the Hindi he taught- is remembered even after five and a half decades.

In The News, My Take

The Keshavananda Bharati Case

I read today about the sad demise of Sri Keshavananda Bharati Swamiji of the Edaneeru Matha, Kasargodu at the age of 79. His name will always be associated with the Supreme Court Judgment of 1973 in what has come to be known as the ‘Keshavananada Bharati Case’ . This case was mentioned to us frequently by Professor K Karunakaran ( who taught us Labour Laws in XLRI in 1972-74) as being a landmark judgement. This led me today to go back decades in time and understand what that case was about.

To recapitulate, in 1960, Sri Keshavananada Bharati Swamiji became the Head of the over 1200 year old Edaneeru Matha in Kasargod. It was founded by Sri Thotakacharya , one of the first four disciples of Sri Adi Sankaracharya. In 1971 or so, the Government of Kerala sought to impose restrictions on the Matha property which led Sri Keshavananada Bharati Swamiji to take the case up to the Supreme Court. He questioned the right of the Government to alter the fundamental rights of the citizens of India.

The case was argued for 68 days before a Full Bench of 13 Judges of the Supreme Court of India. It became the centre of attraction during those times for the principles being argued before the highest Court of the land. The Government of the time ( headed by Prime Minister Smt Indira Gandhi) argued that Parliament was supreme in India and the Government of the day could amend the Constitution if it was for the benefit of the people. The illustrious lawyers Nani Palkhivala, Fali Nariman, and Soli Sorabjee represented the petitioners against the government.

The Supreme Court held by a narrow margin of 7-6 that while admittedly the Parliament had wide powers it did not have the power to alter the basic structure of the Constitution. The judges who upheld Swamiji’s plea were then Chief Justice of India S M Sikri, and Justices K S Hegde, A K Mukherjea, J M Shelat, A N Grover, P Jaganmohan Reddy, and H R Khanna.

In the decades that followed this judgement of 1973 has served to be the cornerstone for determining the ” basic structure” doctrine in constitutional law in India. It covers the supremacy of the Constitution, the independence of the judiciary etc. It was often alleged that Smt Indira Gandhi was very annoyed at the outcome of the case and consequently the judges who ruled against the Government were not given promotions due to them. It is a fact that Chief Justice Sikri retired the day after the verdict, and the Government appointed Justice A M Ray in his place. He superseded Justices Shelat, Grover, and Hegde who had ruled against the Government in the process.

While the residents of Kasargod will for long remember Sri Keshavananada Bharati Swamiji for all the good work he did for the Edaneeru Matha, students of law, politics and the Constitution, all over India will never forget him for this landmark case, settled 47 years ago.

Om Shanti, Shraddhanjali to Srimath Swamiji.