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Golf and the fine art of wasting time

THERE’S an old saying that runs thus: old golfers never die, they only lose their balls. Speaking as one who had his first walk around a golf course, I must say that balls are not the only thing that golfers seem to lose.

Golfers lose count of time – they are obsessed with getting a shot right and can walk around for a while before they get down to the business of driving the ball down the fairway. They also get obsessed with the game to the extent that it becomes some kind of life analogy. They talk about strategy, execution, and planning as though golf were akin to the battle of Hastings. In short, there is a certain loss of a sense of perspective.

The only pressure on a golfer to play and move on is the person(s) behind; on a club course, it is considered good etiquette to be one stroke behind. Else. others get held up, and on a busy day this can be quite annoying.

I took a walk around the course at the Judgeford Golf Club in Wellington recently during a trip I made to attend a technical conference. Were it not for the fact that the journey around the course was taken in the company of a close friend, it would probably not have been made. But then one can’t turn down a close mate.

My mate plays golf regularly and, in fact, is quite obsessed with the game. He talks about it constantly, likening it to many other things in life, and treating it with much dignity. Out on the course one can see why he and countless others are so much in love with this game: they address the ball as though it were a loved one, they exult over a good drive, they lament a chipped one.

There are some good points about golf from the point of view of one who is unlikely to ever play a round. The walk, about six kilometres in all, is excellent exercise and given that a fair number of middle-aged people work in jobs that call for sitting on one’s backside for eight hours a day, this is a very definite plus.

The course that I walked around is scenic and beautiful, like most of New Zealand. At 9am, it is quiet enough to aid a stream of thought and even though a motorway runs through the course — one crosses by means of an underpass as some part of the course is on either side of the motorway — the noise is not much of a disturbance.

This again was a plus for me – in this busy world of ours, we rarely take a moment to stop and smell the roses. One never hears the birds, one never feels fresh wind on one’s face. Out on the course, there is time aplenty to experience all this and more.

Golf is a game meant for males to network. If women are on the course, it is just an accident. The men play their round, the one who wins feels a mite superior, they all share a drink after the round is over, and a good deal of business takes place around the game. It is not a game for those who are in straitened circumstances – a set of clubs costs something in the region of a few thousand dollars and club membership is close to a thousand.

One needs to have a good amount of time to play regularly as a round can take anything from three hours to eight, depending on how many people are playing and the skill level of the golfers. Par for the course is 72 strokes but most of the golfers I saw in action on the day I went around would not have got through in anything less than 100. A few may have come in in the 90s.

Golfers, thus, form a very exclusive club. They are mostly rich or middle-class males, who have reached middle-age and have grown-up children. Even so, their wives do not take kindly to the idea of a man using a piece of metal to swing wildly at a small round white object – no woman I have seen is actually happy that her partner is spending the better part of a day at the course.

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How governments deceive the public

IT’S interesting indeed when government policy is thrown open to the public, ostensibly for a debate to seek feedback on how the policy in question goes down with the masses. Most people misinterpret this to mean that the government is serious about wanting input from the great unwashed.

This is one of the great myths that is prevalent even today.

It’s something like the various ombusdmen set up in some countries to provide an outlet for the public to complain when they feel shafted by companies in some sectors – telecommunications and banking, for example.

Giving a person a chance to vent their frustrations provides a form of release. The ombudsman makes a pretence of listening – a very good imitation, I may add.

In the end, one gets little or no redress unless there is something really wrong going on and the original decision stands.

The same happens with government policy. Some bright spark decides on some policy to garner votes for the next election from a section of the populace which normally does not vote en masse for the party in government.

The best way to pretend that it is being done in consultation is to ask some other person in the party to invite a discussion – these days, that is done mostly on the internet. In years gone by, it was by issuing a white paper and then inviting people to write in with their suggestions, support or objections.

The original policy always includes a little wiggle room, concessions which the government is willing to give anyway. If the public do demand some concessions, the government then gives in on ground which it never wanted to enforce.

The public feels quite good about its activism and celebrates the ground it has gained. The government laughs all the way to the poll.

If the government is unable to get the policy through parliament because it lacks a majority of its own, then it concedes certain things to the opposition and certain others to the public. The wiggle room is always built in to the original draft.

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Indian deaths in Melbourne continue unabated

A TWENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD Indian student was stabbed to death in the Melbourne suburb of Footscray a few days back. He is just the latest statistic in a grim tale that has gone for the last 18 months or thereabouts, with one Indian victim after another being attacked.

The police in Melbourne still refuse to accept that there could be a racial angle to the string of attacks and are yet to catch anyone responsible. Australian politicians are keen to try and use spin to convince people that the senseless violence is due to anything but an underbelly of racism in Melbourne.

There are some plain truths which people just refuse to understand. More and more countries are becoming heterogenous in terms of populations; as more and more people join a population, it is obvious that everyone will not like everything which the others do. Hence, a sense of restraint develops, a sense of being willing to let the other do his thing, as long as he lets you do yours.

If it were not for this pattern of behaviour, there would be pitched battles on the streets of every major city every single day. We would all be out there fighting like dogs over scraps of meat.

Much as each of us claims to be his own man or woman, the things which we learn to abhor, the things which we come to acknowledge as being harmful to social cohesion are defined solely by our leaders, those in authority and those who can influence public policy – politicians, religious leaders, social leaders, academics, the media, police, the army and so on.

A simple example: two decades ago, it was dangerous for gays or lesbians to even hold hands in public. Gay-bashing was not frowned upon and homosexuals were treated as though they were social pariahs. That kind of sentiment has largely gone away – due to public utterances by those in authority and a constant driving home of the message that they should be accepted as people with an alternate lifestyle.

In the case of the violence against Indians, we need educated people to stand up and condemn the racism that is fuelling these incidents. Instead, the politicians and police are in denial. They just refuse to say it out loud. Nobody has been arrested for any incident. The police must be about the most incompetent in the world, considering that they always say they are investigating the hundreds of cases that have piled up over the last year and a half.

And the irony is that right here in Victoria we have a sterling example of how some plain speaking can quell racist rhetoric and drive it underground. In the late 1990s, a woman by the name of Pauline Hanson started spouting hateful racist drivel against Asians. Her ravings were not criticised by the Liberal prime minister of the time, John Winston Howard. Instead, he chose to treat her utterances as some kind of view held by a section of society.

The Victorian premier of the time, Jeff Kennett, a Liberal too, took the right stand. He condemned Hanson’s statements in no uncertain terms, calling her a danger to society and a loony case who needed to be driven underground. He said her attitudes had no place in a modern society like that in Victoria and that they would damage business and the economy.

At every opportunity, he spoke out and did not mince his words. In large part due to his efforts, Hanson disappeared from public life after a few years. He had the balls and the conviction to call it as he saw it and he was right.

If he was still in politics and leading the Liberals, I would even go so far as to vote for the party in the state elections which are to be held later this year. Labor, which is in power, is the party of spin and media management. The situation will get worse if they come back to power but one has to see what the Libs offer before deciding to back them.

Meanwhile, more Indians will continue to suffer in Melbourne.

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Catches win matches. But then you knew that…

WHAT do you say to a wicketkeeper who has just cost you a Test win against Australia in Australia? If you are a good diplomat, you take the blame for the defeat yourself.

Australia won the second Test against Pakistan by 36 runs in Sydney yesterday. Michael Hussey, who made a gritty 134 not out, was dropped thrice – on 27, on 45 and again on 52. Even if he had been caught the last time, that would have saved 82 runs.

In all three instances the culprit was Kamran Akmal, and the bowler to suffer was Danish Kaneria. For good measure, Akmal gifted 13 runs to tailender Peter Siddle who hung around with Hussey in a partnership of 123 for the ninth wicket – he was dropped on 25 and went on to make 38.

After Australia won the game, the Pakistan captain Mohammad Yousuf took the rap himself, saying that his dismissal – he charged down the pitch and hit a ball back to Nathan Hauritz at a million miles an hour – was the turning point as he was the most experienced player and should not have gone after the bowling in that manner when it was not needed.

Indeed, that is one question that has yet to be answered: Pakistan had about three and a half hours on day four and the whole of day five to score the 176 they needed to win. Why were they in such a blue hurry? Why was the target treated as though it was a one-day target?

In the first innings, the Pakistani openers had batted carefully, eschewing all flamboyance, and raised a partnership of 109 which, to a large extent, served as the foundation for their first innings total of 333. They added 70 runs in 33.5 overs on the first session of day two, going from 14 for no loss overnight to 84 at lunch.

In the second innings, they played with panache and gay abandon, maintained a run-rate of 5 – and were both out by the time the total reached 51.

It is easy to see how the abundance of Twenty20 cricket has made many players unable to stay at the crease for a long time. In the shortest form of the game, making 45 off 15 balls is enough. But in a Test, one must make those same 45 off 90 deliveries and stay around so that partnerships are fostered.

Pakistan has always been a nervy unpredictable side. They are something like the West Indies, which once collapsed from 156 for one to 202 when chasing 208 for victory against Australia in the World Cup of 1996.

The result of either series played this summer will, thus, not be reflective of how competitive the games were. The first game in each series wasn’t overly contested, but the others have been fought tooth and nail. We don’t yet know what will happen in Tasmania but it is a good bet that Australia will win again.

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Test cricket can be exciting. But the crowds ain’t there…

AUSTRALIA has just pulled victory out of the jaws of defeat to register a 36-run win over Pakistan in a fantastic Test match played in Sydney.

But there were few people at the ground to see the game even though it was gripping stuff with more twists and turns than a corkscrew. It’s all because the administrators are greedy and charge atrocious entry fees.

Last Saturday, Victoria and New South Wales played a Twenty20 game in Melbourne as part of the annual inter-state Australian tournament. The entry fee was just $10. A crowd of 28,000 turned up, a respectable number which would fill at least three-quarters of any cricket ground in the country apart from the MCG.

When it comes to Test matches, the Australian cricket authorities make a profit even before the first ball is bowled because of the money from TV rights. Thus, they are really not bothered whether people come to see the game or not. There is no incentive for them to keep prices low so that the stadium gets filled.

The attitude is that people can come and see the game if they want. There is no coverage on TV in the city where the game is played so the public really has no option. Australian radio was pretty good as far as Test commentary went but these days it is ordinary and quite trivial; many people have given up on it as the commentators are self-absorbed, ignorant and, at times, quite redneck in their utterances.

The numbers attending Test matches are falling rapidly. In a big ground like the famous MCG in Melbourne, it really shows as the ground can hold nearly 100,000. When a quarter of the ground, mostly the cheapest seats and the members seats, are the only ones occupied, then you know that the public have been driven away successfully.

Another reason why people stay away from Tests is because of the over-zealous security people. In many cases, the only thing that one has to be wary of is the security people themselves who are officious to the nth degree. The enjoyment of being at the cricket has gone.

The administrators of the game are not overly concerned. They continue to try and deny that there is a problem by employing spin of which even Shane Warne would be proud. They pretend that there is no problem and then the need to talk about it automatically goes away.

In many ways, the fact that Australia won today will serve the team badly as several problems will remain unaddressed. A spinner who does not deserve to be in the team took five wickets – not a single one by bowling well but all due to false strokes by batsmen. There will be no questions raised about him.

There are a couple of players in the team whose position needs to be scrutinised but that will not happen either. There is a captain who should not be playing due to an injury – the man is 35 and his performance and decisions need some questioning. That will not happen.

Mediocre performances by mediocre players also serve to drive the public away. Test cricket is supposed to be the pinnacle of the game but this is more like a trough. And the administrators? Oh, they are too busy laughing all the way to the bank.

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Building community in an Indian village

WHEN people talk about India these days, they talk of a modern, powerful country that has an impact on world policy. They talk of an economic superpower. They talk about a country that has a techno focus, one that can influence policy even in the United States.

But then such people do not know the real India. They have never lived in the country, do not understand what numbers such as a billion mean, and have no idea of the meaning of poverty in its real, stark and ugly sense.

One year in the real India is enough for a city-bred person to understand what the country is really all about. And though the example I cite is all of 29 years old, India is still very much the same. Nothing has changed in its heart, the village.

I spent 1980 working in an Indian village for a rural development agency. I went in as a wide-eyed innocent and came out with my eyes fully open, and understanding the real meaning of the word cynicism.

Access to running water is one of the major problems in India, even in the big cities. The village in which I worked was supposed to serve as the beacon for others by implementing a project to supply water for its people.

There are numerous problems in trying to implement such a project in a village. First, there is the problem of a common language; people tend to speak a variety of dialects and addressing them in a tongue that they all fully comprehend is a task in itself. This village was on the border of two Indian states and its geographical location meant that the language issue was even more complicated.

I did not speak fluently in either of the two major languages that the villagers spoke and this was a third problem. After months of patiently trying, and much coaching from my servant, I was finally able to communicate in language that could be understood.

Then there was the factor of money. Villages tend to look at outside agencies which come to work with them as suppliers of largesse. They want all the money to come from the agency and do not believe that they can contribute anything. This was not helped by the fact that the outsiders (in this case me) dress differently and have motorised vehicles to get around when all the villagers have is their bullock carts, the occasional rickety bicycle and the village bus that threatens to fall apart at every turn.

The situation is certainly not helped by the numerous Catholic priests who build huge churches in such villages and proceed to bribe people into becoming Catholics by involving them in food-for-work schemes to build their own houses – provided they adopt Christian nomenclature (Basaviah becoming Peter, for example) and attend the Sunday services.

The caste system in the village complicated things even more. I was forced to sit on my motorcycle and drink my daily cup of morning coffee – the coffee shop had two sets of seats, one for the upper castes and one for the lower castes and the owner would never let me sit in the seats meant for the latter. I did not want to identify myself with either, so I took the uncomfortable but wise option.

And then there were two types of glasses at the coffee shop, stainless steel (meant for the lower castes) and glass tumblers, meant for the higher castes. I took to taking my own mug to the shop to drink that morning cuppa!

The lad who used to come by and clean my house taught me another lesson about caste when he refused to wash my clothes; he said he was not a dhobi (laundry worker) – that was a lower caste than that of carpenter or achary to which he belonged.

I convinced him that there was nothing wrong about it by making him sit nearby while I washed the clothes myself. He was incredibly upset by this, as I, his boss, was doing work, that he considered too menial even for himself. He said he would wash the clothes but that I should not tell anyone about it.

But back to the water project: I spent months talking myself hoarse about the value of unity. About the value of combined labour. About the incredible human potential that the people had. About the fact that money was secondary to what they could achieve if they decided to work together. When you have as many castes in a single village as there are fingers on one’s hands, it is incredibly difficult to sell this idea of unity.

But after seven months of talking, arguing, brow-beating, angry outbursts and pleading, they finally came around to my side and agreed that they would hold together as a community so that the project would go through. We had about a month of talk about the location of the two taps in the village before the issue was settled. (There were umpteen arguments about why the main tap should be closer to the abode of Basaviah and not near that of Kariyappa, or why Singanna should have to walk less for his water than, say, Kurumi.)

Finally, I had enough paperwork showing the village contribution to convince the project head that we could ask our drilling team to come down from Bangalore and start looking for the best place to drill. Once the van arrived, there was a massive change in the attitude of the villagers. I guess at this point they realised that it wasn’t all talk, that this newcomer was talking about something concrete and that a supply of running water wasn’t just a pipe dream.

The drilling team was looked after well by the villagers. Maybe too well. They drank too much watery tea, ate too many roasted groundnuts, and had half the population drop in merely to wish them well. It was an exciting time for the villagers.

After the pipes were laid, the villagers had to build a little shelter for the pump that would send water to the two taps in the village. They were used to making their own bricks and promptly set to this task. The night that the kiln was fired, they invited me over and under the cover of darkness served me some of their own hellbrew and chicken curry. There was no liquor sold in the area due to prohibition.

I guess that that was their way of telling me that I was really one of them. On Christmas Eve, the headman invited me to his house for lunch. And the same evening, I was the guest of honour at a function held to celebrate the fact that running water was just a few weeks away.

These were moving occasions, especially when one realised that a few short months before this the villagers had been fighting tooth and nail and had been unable to see that there was a community benefit in keeping their own little disputes under wraps.

Sadly, a few months after the project was completed, I decided to leave myself due to ructions within the agency. The villagers wept openly when I called for a meeting to bid them goodbye. I broke down myself. One of them pushed a small note into my hand; I later discovered that it was a 20-rupee note, two days hard labour for him.

Building community within that village was a rewarding task then. It remains a rewarding memory even now.

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How did Nathan Hauritz ever get into the Australian team?

YESTERDAY, for the first time in his first-class cricket career, Nathan Hauritz, an alleged off-spinner from New South Wales who is in the Australian team, took five wickets in an innings.

I use the word alleged because I was used to be able to turn the ball more when I was a kid than Hauritz can.

Which begs the question: is Australia, a leading cricket nation, so short of spinning talent? Was he the best candidate among the myriad spinners in the country?

Or does the fact that he is from New South Wales count more than any ability?

The five wickets he took yesterday were mostly flukes. The only wicket in which he had some kind of role was that of the Pakistan skipper Mohammad Yousuf, the only real Test-class player in the current Pakistan team.

Yousuf played forward and spooned a catch to Simon Katich at silly point. The ball bounced on him unexpectedly. But even in this case there was a mitigating factor – the end of the innings was nigh and Yousuf was well aware that with eight wickets down, and 172 runs to get, Pakistan had no hope in hell of winning.

There were nearly two full sessions of play left so a draw was out of the question as well. Hence, Yousuf was unlikely to have been concentrating as much as he normally does.

A good off-spinner normally gets the ball to spin from outside the off-stump into off and middle; Hauritz bowled Faisal Iqbal on day four with a ball that turned a good deal. But the extent to which this was a fluke was apparent thereafter for Hauritz never managed to repeat this kind of delivery in the innings.

And Hauritz got this wicket when he had not even bowled 10 overs. He bowled 24 in all. Iqbal fell at 116 and Pakistan scored a total of 250. He had plenty of time to do a repeat.

This raises questions about Hauritz’s accuracy; he saw where the ball pitched when he got that degree of turn and could never land a ball in the same patch again.

For many years, Australia never needed to think about a spin bowler as Shane Warne was around. When Warne wasn’t fit (or was suspended), Stuart MacGill was there and he could turn the ball even on glass.

Warne retired in 2007 and MacGill followed soon thereafter, necessitating a search by the selectors.

There are plenty of good spinners in the country and the selectors picked an able man, Jason Krezja, and sent him to India last year. Bear in mind, that even Warne has not fared well in that country – his wickets have cost him more than 50 runs apiece and many Indian batsmen have hammered the hell out of him.

Krezja’s first effort was a return of 8 for 215; he attacked the batsmen, copped a bit of stick from the Indians (who are, without doubt, the world’s best players of spin) but still got wickets.

He was promptly dropped. The innocuous Hauritz was brought in. The only factor in his favour was that he is from NSW which dominates Australian cricket.

Hauritz rarely gets the ball to turn. He rarely gives the ball any air. He is, in many ways, incompetent at his trade. And yet he plays Test after Test, though he has never put in a match-winning performance.

Even the five-wicket haul against Pakistan was not a match-winning performance. It was pure chance. What he deserved was probably two wickets.

The match-winning deliveries came from Mitchell Johnson; two gems just outside the off-stump which brought him two wickets in successive balls, though one of them was a bump catch claimed (and given) by Brad Haddin. (With this, the Australian wicketkeeper added one more to his list of dubious appeals).

One more point to note is that ever since the Pakistan offie Saqlain Mushtaq developed a ball which could spin the other way (and named it “doosra” which in Urdu means “the second one”), every off-spinner of any standing has managed to bowl a similar ball.

Hauritz is still unable to bowl this ball – which would be the leg-spinner’s regulation delivery. And he is 28.

And remember this was his 11th Test. He has played against India, England, Pakistan, the West Indies, South Africa and New Zealand. He has bowled in India, England and Australia.

And yet no five-wicket haul. Krezja was dropped after taking 13 wickets in two Tests. Hauritz, with 41 in 11 Tests, including those five, is now the Australian spin bowler. It’s highly unlikely that Australia will play two spinners as long as Ricky Ponting is captain.

But the myth has been created, the myth that Hauritz is a “match-winner”. This will make it even more difficult for anyone else to get a look in. He has managed 10 Tests without looking like a decent bowler until luck smiled on him.

And I’m willing to bet that it will be at least 20 more Tests before people realise that he is a mug. Bear in mind that this is a country which has produced the likes of Ashley Mallett, John Gleeson, Richie Benaud, Warne, MacGill, Tim May, Terry Jenner and the occasionals like Bob Holland, to name just a few.

Warne has just identified a youngster named Steven Smith whom he rates as capable. And that’s praise from the very best in the trade. Smith is from NSW too but Warne’s blessing means that he has some talent.

It’s a sad state of affairs. Much like the case of Haddin. It’s the NSW factor. Something like the Bermuda Triangle.

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Cricket is no longer a team game

THERE was a time when cricket was a team game, when individual performances were all geared towards the collective good of the team. That era has long gone. But despite that, it’s only occasionally that the degree to which selfishness has come to dominate the game is on naked display.

The fourth day’s play in the first Australia-Pakistan Test provided one of the most crass displays of narcissism that I have ever seen in the game – and I’ve been following it for 42 years.

Much has been made of Shane Watson, an ordinary cricketer, who manages to look good because he comes up against mediocre bowling most of the time. Pakistan, a team which is as moody as the weather in Melbourne, has plenty of talent in its ranks but the players blow hot and cold, the latter most of the time.

Watson has played 14 Tests and is yet to make a hundred. He has come within four runs of the target and missed out. So far he has been unable to handle the pressure that comes from being in the 90s. Hence whenever he approaches the three-figure mark, there is some interest among the commentators to see if he will finally make it.

At the end of the third day, Watson was not out on 64. Australia was nicely positioned, 307 ahead with two days to go, and should have been looking for quick runs on the morning of the fourth day to give themselves enough and more time to ensure a win by bowling Pakistan out.

The 400-run target is normally some kind of a psychological point and most teams aim for this before effecting a declaration.

Australia is a bit more wary than most in this regard as both South Africa (414 in 2008-09) and the West Indies (418 in 2003) have chased down 400-plus scores to defeat them. Hence, it was reasonable to expect that Australia would look for about 450 just to be on the safe side – even if Pakistan had been dismissed for 258 in their first innings.

But they had not contended with Watson.

The entire morning session was wasted by the Queenslander. He added 34 runs to his overnight score in two hours. The others added another 47. Eighty-one runs were scored in 120 minutes on a good wicket – just the kind of thing which will attract more people to watch the game.

Watson spent nearly an hour going from 90 to 98. At lunch he was 98 not out. All the confidence he displayed on the third day – when a good many others, all more talented than him, got out – seemed to have disappeared. Which tells me one thing – he isn’t good enough to handle the pressure at this level.

The fact that the team needed a big lead – and Ricky Ponting would, no doubt, have given Watson an indication of when a declaration would come – was irrelevant. Watson scored at the rate of a snail, displaying a degree of nervousness that would have been worthy of someone making his debut in Test cricket.

The team’s needs were unimportant. His obsession with getting a century consumed him and everything else was secondary.

This is a man who has been playing international cricket for the last seven years. He has tried every trick in the game to try and project himself as being worthy of gracing the international stage. To me he looks like another Matthew Hayden, a pretender, who finds that the times suit him.

There are plenty of better openers in Australia: Phillip Hughes, Phil Jacques and Chris Rogers, to name just three. Perhaps Watson should announce his retirement soon so that more team-minded players can enter the ranks and serve Australia’s needs.

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Why do people celebrate a meaningless, pagan festival?

A FEW days back I went by the local shopping centre to drop my daughter off there. This centre was rebuilt and reopened a few months ago. It now has an enormous amount of parking space. Yet on this day, every single space was taken.

There’s one reason for this: Christmas.

In the run-up to Christmas, people seem to go crazy. They run to every possible shopping outlet and buy all sorts of junk, supposedly as gifts for others. Old people, middle-aged people, young people and children, they all come out and indulge in this orgy of buying.

And it all has to be done before Christmas.

On Christmas Day itself, people eat enough to make themselves sick. The holiday is used as a way for people to get together – this can be a nice thing if you have friends and family in the place you live. But to use it as an excuse for over-consumption just doesn’t wash.

Four years ago, I began to question the meaning of all that was being done at Christmas time. I’ve known for a long time that Christmas has nothing to do with the birth of Jesus Christ and everything to do with paganism. But I just went along – the children wanted gifts, everybody else wanted to indulge themselves and I joined in without too much of a murmur.

The family had a chat and decided that we would do without all the falsehood and unnecessary stress and strain – not to mention the waste of money. It was difficult for everyone to adjust the first year. The second year it got easier and this year nobody even talked about Christmas. It is just another day and that’s the way it should be.

The children want gifts at the end of the year so they get something but it is done well before December 25. I work every Christmas Day to emphasise the fact that it is an ordinary day – fortunately, I work in an industry where some people have to work every day of the year.

The churches would do well to abandon celebrations on this day for the only individual who is cited in the Bible as celebrating a birthday was Herod, a pagan if ever there was one. And for those who continue to believe that this day, December 25, has anything to do with the birth of Jesus, it is time to realise that nowhere in the Bible is one asked to celebrate the birthday of the book’s central figure.

As with many other things, people just go along with celebrating Christmas and do not stop to question. It is high time that this meaningless ritual was given the push. Let’s have a shopping festival instead – for that is exactly what Christmas is all about.

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Shane Watson knows no shame

HIS captain is embarrassed. Senior cricket writers have poured scorn on him. Past cricketers have called his actions juvenile. Yet Shane Watson, the Australian all-rounder, is out there trying to defend his behaviour on the fourth day of the third Test against the West Indies.

Watson dismissed the West Indies captain, Chris Gayle, and then charged down the wicket to the departing Gayle and jumped up and down in front of him, snarling in a manner that the best wolfhound would find difficult to emulate.

And he justifies this behaviour by saying that Gayle had riled him up on the field, and “given as good as he got.” He even says he’s not embarrassed by the monkey act he performed in front of Gayle.

Which leaves one wondering whether he is really in the here and now, whether he knows that he can’t act like a two-year-old on the field – which is his workplace – and whether he thinks that he is not subject to society’s expected standards of behaviour.

Cricket Australia is partly to blame because it has not seen fit to levy any penalty on Watson after the ICC referee Chris Broad fined him a totally inadequate 15 percent of his match fee.

Broad has form in this regard – it would have been interesting to see what he would have fined a West Indies player who did a Watson. In the same game, Sulieman Benn was involved in an incident with Brad Haddin and Mitchell Johnson for which he earned a two-match suspension; the Australians were fined 25 and 15 percent of their match fees respectively.

You know that the chief of Cricket Australia is holding a post he is clearly not fit to hold when he says that the players should be given credit for good behaviour in several recent series.

I’m not sure why anyone should be given credit for doing the basics of their job but that seems to be part of the culture in the country. Cricketers are paid extremely high wages – Australian cricketers are about the highest paid in the world – in order to do a job. With that job comes an expected standard of behaviour; the ICC has a code of conduct and the Australian authority has one too.

When people do a job for which they have been paid, and paid mighty well too, why do they need to be praised? They have signed up to do something and merely kept to it. If a man signs up to work from 9am to 5pm, should he then expect praise because he arrives punctually for work every day?