The Knights in the dullest armour

The Kolkata Knight Riders are at the bottom of the table.

Hah, who would have thought! Sorry, KKR fans and Shah Rukh Khan die
hards, I did.

It's no secret. The first thing about the KKR, is SRK, not cricket.
He couldn't stop showing up till the slide was beyond arrest, and now
can't show up to support the hardest time for his team. It means one
of the two things - either it really doesn't matter whether he shows
up or not, or even worse, his team loses focus with him around.

We can read all kinds of connections between one and the other, but to
a bunch of professionals getting paid astronomical sums of money, it
really shouldn't matter who is around to "support" them or not.
They're earning their keep, not fighting for their lives! If they are
so emotionally fickle that they need an actor who doesn't know a rat's
arse about the game, certainly not at a professional level, then
they're doomed anyway.

It is that Mumbai movie industry mentality of fitting in parts to try
and make a whole that stinks all over the selection of John Buchanan
as coach. It is also that mentality of getting some "foreign" touch,
just like people in poor countries wanting to buy imported cars. The
"Indian" Premier League has recruited foreign cheerleaders, without a
thought on whether we could have put up a lovely show with all the
kinds of dances and dancers we have in our country. The rest of the
world would have thoroughly enjoyed our Kathakali dancers in full
costume, no doubt.

Lalit Modi is not evolved enough or visionary enough to think about
being so Indian, but his stunt of donating money to South African
schools would have won him a few fans. You can bet the move will win
him some political leverage, but that's another feather in a beggar's
cap - he wants to kill the Indian Cricket League but wants to have
goodwill with South African school children!

What is our obsession with foreigners? John Buchanan, the fool,
wouldn't have dared suggesting rotating captains if he was coaching
Australia, but doesn't mind messing around with our poor Kolkata team.
Ganguly was and is a respected name, and there is nothing even now to
show it was Dada's incompetence that cost KKR their performance.

That's what happens when you bring in a mercenary who makes money even
if his team loses. John Buchanan is known for being ruthless, and a
guy who is hired for being ruthless as his top billable quality is not
going to go very far in any field of work. Whatever can be the reason
for a sports team doing well or not, at this level, it cannot be
discipline, and it cannot be structure.

Shane Warne doesn't even have a team meeting or a strategy meeting
until the toss is done with. The Rajasthan Royals are the defending
champions. So much for planning every detail. But Buchanan probably
knows no more about this new format of the game than his tried and
trusted discipline approach. It's easy touting your militant methods
when you already have a dominating bunch of cricketers under you, but
nobody is scared of Makhana Ntini because he can run ten kilometres at
a fast clip. Ramesh Powar, of portly carriage and rumbling movement,
is equally capable of getting your wicket with his tossed up ripper.
The truth is, there is no formula to an extended run of success in a
skill sport.

Once in a while, there will be a combination of players that will do
the job exceptionally well. It takes a very clever person to ride the
wave when it comes, and to sense opportunity in potential barely
spotted. MS Dhoni is exceptional at this job, in reading the game
from moment to moment, and quietly enforcing his team's will on the
opposition till they reach their breaking point. Under him, nobody
feels pressure and they react well when they have to, because he is
the guy who can go out and say openly that his batting has been
"pathetic" only to come up with a blistering Man of the Match knock
the very next game, choking off fancied opponents. And then he talks
about how consistent they have been (with a smile) with dropping
catches!

On the other hand, Buchanan wants more foreign players in his side.
The clown needs to be reminded of this being the INDIAN Premier
League, not his grandmother's colonial slave plantation. It is a
clash of mentalities, and he has reacted very typically. The process
oriented disciplinarian will always blame something in the process
when something goes wrong. The worst losers always blame the system
working against their scheme of things. People who are so obsessed
with discipline and process are usually the empty shells when it comes
to ability, especially when it needs a touch of creativity. Control
freaks never make good coaches.

It was very ungainly seeing Shah Rukh Khan climbing on and hip humping
Shoaib Akhtar during one of the presentation ceremonies in the first
edition of the IPL. Shah Rukh Khan wants so much attention, it is a
surprise there is even a game on when he is around. Then that
exchange with Gavaskar, telling him to mind his own business when the
senior pro made a comment about the rotating captaincy not being a
good idea. None of this translated to the bottomline, and it isn't
Shah Rukh Khan's fault that his team isn't performing, but he can
certainly make it look better by staying away.

Right now, all the clowning has gone below ground, for if KKR lose
another match, and they will, they might as well go home. Shah Rukh
Khan lies exposed, looking miserable and stupid. John Buchanan
certainly wasn't paid to show up last, and KKR, without a leader they
can stick around and rally around, wonder why their coach wants more
foreign players on the field, knowing fully well that their already
very "foreign" players like Brendon McCullum haven't done anything
impressive so far.

It's a mess. But it's a weirdly shameless smiling mess. It's a
showy, glitzy mess, like another movie from Mumbai. KKR is a clear
example of how things can go wrong when the focus is on all things
except the deliverable quantity. They're not a happy team. They
aren't playing good cricket. They have let their fans down, and
they're not picking up any new fans if they continue on this path.
But then, who can tell Mumbai cinema what kind of movie not to make?
All they know is coming up with some more s**t covered in glitz. And
Shah Rukh Khan is their top representative. He is in no mood to sell
KKR because nobody would be paying the price he thinks he should get!
Maybe he should try and sell his team to some foreign sucker.

The heady smell of failure

Most good stories come full circle. The adventurers who return to their village, the hero who comes back to his roots, richer for the ride and wiser for the experience, but essentially coming back to starting point after victory to share it with his tribe. The sense of belonging is one we can all identify with, and is used in no small measure by good story tellers. But for that, we must identify with the characters, the journey they chose to go on, and the ordeals on the way that made them better. In the very least, we must care.

Of late, Americans have shown up to be the drunks who went to the party, trashed the palace, and puked on the lawn and let it flow down the street called Wall Street. That's no hero's journey - it is a fool's parade and isn't funny when it takes 700 billion dollars to begin to fix, and most of the people who paid this in taxes weren't even invited to the party. But some people have such a hangover that they still don't realize the palace stinks to high heaven, and the neighbourhood is sick of the scene.

There was a segment today on NDTV called "A view from Wharton", which had a bunch of Indian clowns studying at Wharton Business School, offering their views on the financial crisis. The puppies all had rather optimistic views about them finding jobs and I wondered how and why any of us would give a rat's arse if any of them got jobs or not! When none of them was talking about getting jobs in India, how could this possibly be relevant to us here, apart from paying bored attention to some specimens from a well known tribe of Indians wanting to study and work abroad. Who cares if some Indian guy graduating from some school in the USA gets a job or not?

More than anything, I'd be worried if we're celebrating those who have chosen to learn from a failed system! I really don't want to hear from the losers on how it is done! I have always believed that you get expert opinions from people who are reasonably successful at what they do. If you want to talk about a formula one racing, you try and get Michael Schumacher, or if you have to settle for someone less, maybe Narain Karthikeyan has some insights. You most certainly do not ask the village idiot who crashed his bullock cart into the train you can hear two miles away.

But the amusement value, priceless! One of these puppies thought they had the best ringside view of this crisis, and it helped them learn first hand from their faculty how exactly these things came about and they were interested in seeing how this kind of crisis could be prevented from spilling over to the rest of the world, and affect countries like India that might be more vulnerable to this kind of situation! I can usually smell stupidity coming round the corner at full speed, and even the geniuses at Wharton did not disappoint!

What exactly are these idiots learning at Wharton? This financial crisis isn't a nuclear bomb that somehow spills over the border with the wind carrying deadly radiation to other countries. It simply isn't going to be felt in areas that are not vested and dependent on the American economy. It most certainly isn't going to affect countries that have long since insulated themselves from this kind of fly and crash cycle by keeping their economies slow and steady. We in India certainly know what slow is even if we may forget steady once in a while, so who exactly has been affected in our "vulnerable" country? We don't know yet, but we are not the country pissing off billions in a war with no end in sight, and we certainly aren't going ga-ga lending to people who can never pay back.

The professor at Wharton had a better view of Indian economic experts - he said they had a mindset quite different from those of their American counterparts and while they thought about building their companies, they also thought about building their countries. Quite a fascinating viewpoint, and timely. When America was trying its best to bully us to open our markets some more in the 90s, nobody quite thought about India as being correctly cautious. Our own "financial experts" were busy comparing us to the rapid growth of the Far East and wanted more and more deregulation right away. Are we in the same planet today?

So, why are we supposed to take Wharton seriously? Apparently, there is a Wharton business school alumnus who is in charge of Bush's $700 billion bailout package, which he must dispense with in the next two months. All right genius. What about the thousands of idiots schools like Wharton must have unleashed over the years to cause this mess in the first place?