Category: India

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Black money drives the IPL

Back in 1967, the then Indian finance minister Morarji Desai had the brilliant idea of raising taxes well beyond their existing level; the maximum marginal tax rate was raised as high as 97.75 percent.

Desai, who was better known for drinking his own urine, reasoned that people would pay up and that India’s budgetary problems would be more manageable.

Instead, the reverse happened. India has always had a problem with undeclared wealth, a kind of parallel economy which is called black money. The amount of black money increased by leaps and bounds after Desai’s ridiculous laws were promulgated.
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Brownwash leaves Australia shattered

Last month, Australia completed a miserable cricket tour of India during which it lost all four Tests, the first time this has happened since 1970.

On that occasion, a strong Australian team went to South Africa and was creamed 4-0; the South Africans were captained by Ali Bacher and included legends of the game like Graeme Pollock, Mike Proctor, Peter Pollock, Barry Richards and Eddie Barlow.

But in India, a weak Australian team came up against opponents who were not that formidable. The one thing that was clearly observable was the fact that the shorter forms of the game have had a bad effect on the Australians’ ability to stay at the crease and grind out the runs.
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In Test cricket, patience is a virtue

PATIENCE is a virtue that Australia’s national cricket team seems to lack. And impatience does not serve one well in Test cricket as the results from the first two matches against India indicate.

Australia has not merely lost, it has been humiliated. When the first Test ended early, with India registering an eight-wicket win, it looked bad. But given the nature of the wicket, some blame could be placed on it

But worse was to come when India thrashed the Australians by an innings in Hyderabad, on a wicket which was much better than the one in Chennai. It was all over and done with after one session on day four.
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When the offenders become the story

IT COULD only happen in Australia. Two DJs stage a prank call to the hospital where a member of the royal family, Kate Middleton, had been admitted as she was suffering from morning sickness; they pose as Queen Elizabeth and her son, Charles.

The call is passed on by an unsuspecting nurse who is doubling as a telephone operator, and her colleague in the ward provides an accurate rundown of Middleton’s condition.

The DJs, from 2Day FM, play the recorded conversation without asking the hospital for its permission as they are required to do by the rules of their own station. The recording was played by several other stations and the nurse involved, Jacintha Saldanha, was made to look like a fool.
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In India or in the US, boors are boors

IT’S strange that one has to get far away from one’s own home to think about one’s roots, but that’s what happened to me on Sunday (September 23) night.

Sitting in a theatre in Columbus, Ohio, watching an Indian singer on stage, it came home to me with some force that no matter where in the world they are, expatriate Indians can be very boorish.

The night was obviously not meant for those of no means; everyone at the theatre had paid at least $US30 a seat and those in the seats from where they could focus properly had forked out a hundred big ones.
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Money does tend to blur the perspective of many

ONE can understand Matthew Ricketson’s despair over the criticism levelled at the report of the media inquiry of which he was part; after all, one never likes to see one’s work, especially when it is so high-profile, being regarded as the output of a government toady.

(Ricketson, a journalism academic, assisted a retired judge, Ray Finkelstein, in conducting an inquiry into the media in Australia recently.)

But then, Ricketson has only himself to blame. If he thought that news organisations would take kindly to the idea of oversight by the government, then his connection with journalism in the field is obviously rather tenuous.
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Afghanistan: lies and damn lies. No statistics

THIRTY-TWO Australians have died needlessly in Afghanistan. All of them were young, in their 20s and 30s, and have left young families behind. If there was some point to their dying, if they had sacrificed their lives for a worthy cause, then at least their loved ones would have some means of consoling themselves.

But that isn’t the case. They have died for nothing. They have died because one man’s vanity led to him thinking that he could do better than the old Soviet Union, the British Empire and even the much reviled Genghis Khan.

That one man is George Dubya Bush.
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Three years on, Sri Lanka still bleeds

A MONTH and two weeks from now, it will be three years since Sri Lanka won its war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, effectively ending the campaign for a separate state for Tamils in Sri Lanka.

But there has been no movement on achieving a political solution to put the minority Tamils at ease. Instead, the triumphalism that has pervaded the country has seen the government act in a manner that can only serve to remind the Tamils that during the days when the Tigers were in the ascendant they were at least not marginalised in the way they are right now.

The Tigers had ensured that the north of the country was more or less completely occupied by Tamils. Now, the army is everywhere in the north and Sinhalese people are being resettled in large numbers to change the population mix. And, to rub it in, there are signs in many places that are only in Sinhala, a language that Tamils, cut off from the rest of the country for decades, cannot even speak.
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One-day cricket has become just another tamasha

AFTER more than 20 years, I finally went to the stadium to watch a one-day international, between India and Australia. I will never do so again.

In 1989, I watched Pakistan defeat India at Sharjah in a one-day tie; apart from the headache of sitting at ground-level and swallowing copious amounts of dust, the cricket was watchable. There were no distractions in the area I sat.

But the entire thing has now degenerated into farce. Louts of both sexes who seem intent on cramming themselves full of lager constitute a sizeable part of the crowd. There were Indians in large numbers, all equally loutish, and outdoing even the Nazis in jingoism.
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Not embarrassed? India’s excuses don’t really convince anyone

PREDICTABLY, India has been whitewashed by Australia in the four-Test series. This is the second such loss abroad in the space of six months; in between, India managed to beat the West Indies at home 1-0, with two Tests drawn. In that three-Test series, India was twice outscored in the first innings by what cannot be regarded as anything other than a weak Windies outfit.

After the loss, the Indian team has been at pains to emphasise that it is not “embarrassed” by being hammered in this manner. It boasts two of the three highest run-scorers in Test cricket in its ranks, but, no, it is not embarrassed. It was the top Test nation as recently as May last year, but falling to a rebuilding Australian team — which lost a Test to New Zealand before India arrived — is not embarrassing.
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