I am nothing but a realist, and it’s now safe to say that it’s over for this season. Liverpool are struggling very badly right now and can’t seem to buy a win. They have gone from a manageable 6 point deficit not long ago to now being 14 points out. the turning point to my mind was the 1-0 loss at home to Man U.

It’s amazing how quickly things can turn sour, and besides the poor run of results, there is now all the speculation about the club being sold. Alan Hansen is absolutely right that the next few weeks will be critical for Liverpool’s future.

Silver lining – Liverpool is very much alive in the Champions League as well as the FA Cup, so there is some silverware to look forward to this season.

A very interesting development if this is already happening. On my last few visits to Bombay I have noticed subtle changes whereby slums are being cleared or ‘re-developed’. A great example is the shanties that used to line Tulsi Pipe road (see my previous post on this), which is a vital artery that runs largely north-south from Mahim to the Race Course. They are no longer there…they have been cleared the entire length of Tulsi Pipe, a continuous wall has been erected to shield the railway lines and the road has been widened.

If they are doing similar work to free up desperately needed land for the airport expansion, it is a welcome trend. However, I’m not sure I completely agree with the policy of resettling the evicted to the outskirts or in Navi Mumbai. For one simple reason, traffic and increased congestion. All of these people will have to come back into the city, and with no mass transit system viable for years if not decades, all this will do is to add more pressure on the BEST network and commuter lines that are already bursting at the seams. There is nowhere to go but vertical in Bombay, so I see some merit in the argument by the activist in the article who talks about building high rises right on the cleared land. Of course, this is easier said than done, as any available land after resettling which doesn’t go to the airport will be sold off to the highest bidder. If the authorities continue this route, that is, resettle to the outskirts, then they need to focus on more entry points to the city and a mass transit system that is both affordable and works.

There are no easy solutions for a city like Bombay that has been systematically neglected and milked for decades. However, urban transformation has been achieved in several other cities with similar geographic, demographic and policy challenges. Firm political will and an activist citizenry were always the common thread in all those cases.

Right out of the bottle and ready to drink, this is a young wine, but I was surprised that it had a texture and the tannins are noticeable at the end but not overpowering. I could taste cherry I think and some other berry but couldn’t figure which one. As for smell, that is much harder for me, so I wont even hazard a guess. This can be drunk straight out of the bottle, but I actually prefer it with food. I tried it with an Indian curry I had cooked up, and it was great.

Scrabulocalypse Now: The Scrapping of Scrabulous

Say it aint so. Scrabulous is the one Facebook application that I really loved. Okay, I admit, I loved the World traveler IQ app as well. At least I played a few games of Scrabulous (and lost most of them…).

Seriously though, this is a great example of the single biggest challenge to the Web 2.0 vision. Two brothers from Kolkata come up with a real bit of code and then tweak and tweak into the cool widget it is right now…the world is flat, and presto! You have the most popular Facebook application which translates to many thousands of downloads and games played.

The ‘Empire’ (represented by toy maker Hasbro in this story) has struck back, however, and the ol’ bricks and mortar brigade have pulled the plug on Scrabulous because it appears that neither the Agarwalla brothers (creators of Scrabulous) nor Facebook themselves thought there might be copyright issues!!! Seriously, how did this come to pass? Intellectual property is a major issue across many sectors today, and in an increasingly connected and Web 2.0 world, it is that much easier to first discover ‘infringement’ and then shut things down with an injunction.

While the users of the popular app may be very unhappy right now, there is a simple way forward. Hasbro and the Agarwalla brothers need to figure out some kind of licensing agreement, or Hasbro should buy the application outright! The sooner the better as it would be a shame to allow the huge fan following to fragment in search of the next cool thing and then rapidly disappear.

Imagine my surprise though when I logged onto the Beeb and saw this link!!!

Liverpool 8-0 Besiktas

Not that Besiktas are among Europe’s elite by any stretch of the imagination, but this is the kind of score you hardly expect from Liverpool anymore…I am not complaining!!!

Amazing that people are still writing about this story. I’ll always remember the moment I saw the replay of the head-butt…I was sitting at an improvised open-air theater by the pool area of the Colossae Hotel in Pamukkale, Turkey. Why was I watching the biggest sporting event with a motley crew of Italians, Germans, Turks and Japanese tourists? Because I had to…and I couldnt bloody well watch the match in the comfort of my room as it was a dodgy hotel with no cable and obviously masquerading as a 5-star!!! But that’s another story altogether…I loved Turkey but just had to get this one out of my system.

Back to the story…I was the only one rooting for France in that whole audience. The Japanese senior citizen sitting began snoring, and I dont blame for after dominating for much of the match, the Italians went into a defensive shell. Suddenly the French were on the rise, and had several chances to go ahead, including a sublime Zidane header that Buffon just tipped over the bar. I had been calling my dad in the US at nearly every break and exchanging SMS regularly…both jubilant at the French rise. It was glorious indeed, watching the French Musketeers of Zidane, Thuram and Makelele play out of their skins. Predictably, the hotel’s TV screen then froze for an interminable 3 minutes, and the action resumed, there was the replay and a collective “Ohhhhhhhhhh” buzzed through the audience in multiple languages. I’m still horrified when I remember the moment I saw the replay, coz that was the match!!! All I wanted to know was what had happened…this after I emerged from a short spell of near complete cognitive dissonance. And lo and behold, there was the red card.

20 minutes later, Italy were holding aloft the World Cup. I was numb!!!

Let’s get a few things out of the way first:

1. What the f@*$ was Zidane thinking????????????????????????? He single handedly cost France the World Cup, betrayed his team mates and country and tarnished his legacy, all 10 minutes away from a fabulous conclusion. Nothing he can say will ever justify the head-butt. Then again, I will argue with anyone that Zidane was one of the best that ever played the game, and he was the architect of France’s improbable run to the Finals, as he imposed his will on a fractious and uninspired side and teased, prodded and coaxed them all the way, one pass at a time.
2. Even today, the very fact that Materazzi flopped to the ground and lay there for 10 minutes as if someone had hit him on the head with a sledge hammer bother me. One of the most thuggish players on record, even for Italy, he deserved an Oscar, over and above the medal he won as a victor.
3. In the end, that is the verdict. There is no doubt in my mind that Materazzi and Italy won this round. I will always question the means, since anyone who kids themselves that the Italians play clean, attacking and flowing football are just deluding themselves. I don’t doubt for a second that Materazzi was instructed specifically to play the Dennis Rodman card, and get under Zidane’s skin. No one was tracking his actions throughout the match, although his not so subtle nipple squeeze/pinch and the jawing was caught in the same infamous replay. Was there serious provocation? Absolutely. Does it justify the head-butt? Absolutely not.

I am puzzled about the responses, particularly from Americans. Lets leave aside all the partisan responses from both the French and Italians…but this article and I have read others suggest simplistically that Zidane should come listen to the trash-talking in US sport and learn a thing or two about self-control. Oh really? Yeah there is a lot of trash talking particularly in American football…with one big difference. No cheap shots required in that sport…if you don’t agree with something, you get to knock the living daylights out of the guy on the next play. How’s that, punk!!! Secondly, and most importantly, there is a world of difference in the trash talk in US and European sport. Trash talk of the “Yo mama…” variety comes mainly from black athletes in the US directed at other black athletes. Ok, ok, now everyone does it, but noone can argue the origins. Trash talk in European sport, and football in particular, is laced with the kind of racism that the Americans have all but forgotten. Good for them, but then again, they have adjusted far far better to te modern realities of multiracial and multicultural societies than their European cousins!!! How many times are black football players in Europe heckled, harassed and abused in Europe by other players and fans? Stuff thrown at them, monkey chants and so on…all of this while struggling to assimilate into their new European homes where the social and economic decks are still stacked seriously against them. This kind of thing is particularly acute across Eastern Europe, Italy and now increasingly, Spain.

The captain of the 1998 World Champion French squad, Didier Deschamps, attributed Zidane’s combustability to his “Meditteranean nature”. Translation, here is the son of immigrants who escaped from arguably the world’s worst ghettos to rise to the very top. He still has plenty of chips on his shoulders though reserved for enemies…within and without, real or imagined.

People will always remember this incident, mostly tagging it with Zidane. But a lot of people with Materazzi as well. FIFA sentenced him to a 2 game ban, just one less than Zidane!!! Guess he wasn’t such a victim after all. In the end, I just wish we knew what the dude really said…the only reason I care is that the lout robbed me of the result I wanted for that final. Well done Italy…now they get to go back to their monster match fixing scandal back home. We’re through the looking glass…

Ok, so bad old habits keep resurfacing, like a smoking habit that takes years to kick. It’s been a ‘while’ since the last blog…but I had to write about the little Prince of Kurukshetra. For those in the know, all of India was glued to their TVs last week for 2 days as the story unraveled of little Prince (actually, that is the kid’s name…I swear) and his rather freakish tumble down a shaft not wider than 1.5 feet but nearly 60 feet deep. Apparently, the little guy was playing with friends (?), fell through and his plight was mercifully alerted to parents and anyone who would listen by his friends.

Now, I know TV is exploding in this country, and the numerous channels are strong evidence of this. Springsteen comes to mind – “57 channels and nothing on…” but I digress. Virtually every news channel in the country was tuned into this story with regular, and I mean regular updates. They may as well have been beaming live and not so exclusive. Of course, that got me thinking on the paucity of ‘worthy’ news in India, but digressions…I know. Between regular updates and news ticker flashes, I began to get the story. Of course, so many people were talking about Prince that it was hard not to think of his plight.

A word or two about Kurukshetra…a small town in Haryana that is now only really famous for being the site of blood and carnage from the epic Mahabharata. A modern day Prince was staring untimely death in the face centuries after scores of Princes crossed swords on this battlefield. What would be his fate?

A word or two for all the people who “couldn’t believe…” that it was taking so long to get the kid out. Let us please pause to consider that no adult would ever fit through such a narrow shaft, neither would most kids. The latter is moot since thankfully no one was exploring sending another undersized child into the same shaft to get Prince out!!! Let us pause to consider the logistics involved…it is not a simple matter of dropping a rope into the shaft and dragging the kid up. Neither could the shaft be widened for fear of cave-ins. So the only logical solution was to dig a tunnel to him. But from where? Despite his ordeal, turns out that Prince is only lucky little man, as there was a well not too far away. Of course, which sleepy small town in India has the heavy machinery required to drill proposed tunnel from the bottom of the well to Prince’s shaft? Then there is the small additional complication of drilling accurately and against the clock since the boy was only being kept alive with oxygen tanks and scraps of food lowered down to him.

In the end, and it was a happy ending this time around…the much-maligned and taken for granted Indian Army was called in and apparently brought in the heavy equipment from Ambala, which I’m guessing was the nearest (need to check Google Earth) cantonment. In the end, after 50 hours, little Prince was out, looking mightily disheveled, dirty, dazed and downright traumatized). I wish he wasn’t 5 years old, or he would have understood that this was his 15 seconds of fame!!! His celebrity was already apparent with all the offers of help, including financial, that have poured in for him.

All’s well that ends well, but just how big was this story? 2 days and constant updates on the news…? While one feels for the boy, how many people and particularly children are maimed every month across India due to missing manhole covers and other criminal and negligent acts? No reality-TV like news coverage for them!!! Even the Chief Minister of Haryana mobilized a huge amount of machinery in record time for an Indian politician. Of course, it left me wondering what political windfall he hoped to gain from this generosity.

Final words…I hope that Prince lives a long and meaningful life. I hope people spare a thought for the Army engineers and sundry others who helped get him out safely.