Pick your choice

Horses, originally uploaded by Sarfraaz.

India had already won the series and this last match was only of statistical importance. But, if its a match between India and Pakistan, the spirits are never less than a war cry. India rested Sachin for this match to give its other young players a chance. Except Dravid, and the comparatively more experienced Yuvraj and Zaheer, the Indian team was a full blown team of youngsters, given a chance to prove their mettle on Pakistani soil, at Karachi.

Pakistan's opening pair Akmal and Imran Farhat gave them a very good start. But Sreesanth was on song this day, and he took 4 wickets to rock the Pakistani top order. A late surge from Mohammed Yousuf, helped Pakistan pile up a score of 287 runs.

Chasing a score close to 300 is always not easy. But, India had successfully chased in the past 12 matches already, and had won all of the matches in this series while chasing. Dravid opened with Gambhir, and gave India a very good start. Pakistani fielders were all over the place, squandering the ball. Dravid was playing very cautiously, and after the dismissal of a rather reclusive Gambhir, arrived the in-form Yuvraj. Watching Yuvraj was a treat. He made batting look so easy !!! He was top notch form, and was in great nick with the kind of timing and placement he had in his strokes. The match was getting interesting and Indians were in complete command.

Just then, while surfing the channels, I came across another live match happening in Sri Lanka. It was the Under 19 World Cup Finals match between India and Pakistan again !!! Indian bowlers, especially the spinners, bowled extremely well to bowl out Pakistan for 107 runs. It was indeed a very lackluster batting from Pakistan, and the result of the match was a given, until ....

I couldnt believe what i was seeing on TV. Jamshaid Ahmed, the Wasim Akram look alike, left arm bowler, bowled a beauty and knocked off the bails off the very first ball !!! The over was full of great swing owling. Huffs and puffs all over the place with the ball miraculously missing the bat, the batsman and the stumps. In the next over, Anwar Ali, started off with a no ball. The next ball swung in deep and the batsman was caught plumb LBW. India were 2 down for 5 runs. Next 2 balls were again noballs. And then came a ball, which was like a fast bowler bowling offspin !!! The ball pitches some 3 feet outside the off stump and crashes into the stumps !!! With such great in-swinging, that too in the second innings of the match, it was not at all surprising that India were 4 wickets down for the score of 8 runs after 2 overs !!! This match was getting over really fast. The next over by Jamshed was just like watching Wasim Akram bowl. All beautiful late out swingers, just beating the bat. And the last ball, was a decieving inswinger, knocking off the bail on the off stump. The batsman was caught unaware, and was trapped well. The next over saw another Indian wicket falling in 3 balls [ one ball was another Anwar Ali no ball, but i am sure the pakistanis wont mind those no balls ]. India were 6 down with just 9 runs on board !!! It was a disaster, you could hardly have expected in any match.

Luckily for India, the umpires called in for lunch !!! Otherwise, the match would have ended in another 10 minutes. After this disastrous start, which usually happens in low scoring matches, it was no suprise that India lost the final :( I definately wanted India to get over with this low scoring match and win the finals, but the superb bowling, especially from Jamshed, really made it a treat to watch. Even, Dhoni and Yuvraj's great shots, didnt generate that much sizzle as this great bowling did. Sometimes, its just not the hard hitting batsmen, but also some really good inspiring swinging bowling, that make cricket such a wonderful sport to watch.

It really was tough choosing which of these 2 simulataneously running matches to watch.

Uneventful

Nothing eventful happened this week, when i was down with fever and cold. But yeah, one definatly noteworthy thing was that my Flickr Photostream got viewed 1000 times :)

Also, India bounced back quite convincingly in the second match of the 5 match series to level the series at 1-1. It was a treat to the eyes to watch Sehwag bat effortlessly. Poor fellow, he had a real horribly unlucky dismissal with the ball coming straight down on the stumps when it was thrown from the thirdman boundary, and that too after the wicket keeper missed to hold the ball in his hands !!! Now, thats called "destined to be out" :)

Apart from watching DDLJ [ yeah again !!! ... not sure if this was the 43rd or the 44th time i watched :p .. come on .. i dont even count it now :) ], and "Two Week's Notice", I also watched the great Muralidharan [ i hope he spelt it numerologically right here :p ] innings :) in the second of the best fo three finals between Sri Lanka and Australia. Sri Lanka undoubtedly had no answer to Australia's 368. Sadly, i didnt watch the Aussie innings when Symonds and Ponting butchered their attack. But watching Murali bat was some fun. He hit 2 huge sixes of Brad Hogg. Then i heard the commentators say that Murali had created a new world record of conceeding the highest number of runs in a limited over match. 99 - 0 for the record. He did salvage some pride by scoring 22 later on, with 2 sixes and a boundary. Mind you, all these were good cricketing shots, not just the swing of the bat, in Srinath style :)

Changing colors

Google has come up with the most elegant and the most obvious solutions to combine Google Mail with Google Chat. Read more about it here. After read about this feature, it looked so simple and so obvious !!! as if it was always there staring right in your face and somebody just had to do it. Great innovations are usually simple :)

Yahoo did have this, but wasnt very user friendly, with their Java based client. What I liked even more in Google, was that they provided a backup of the chats to store straight away into your mailbox. Thats something really cool, since we anyway use the same login creds for both mail and chats. I even tried it out today, and the format in which the chats are stored is really sleek and very good.

Gnome, with Nat's dashboard idea, had all the ingredients for this feature, but i guess the Gnome platform was in itself a limitation for the usefulness of this idea. Gnome and other desktops now a days have the presence notification of your contacts in built with various applications combining to give you a very knowledgable use of them. Something like, your mail app, integrates with the presence notification app, and your chat app, and when you find your buddy online, you could directly ping him on chat, or going a step forward you can as well, have a video conference with him !! By providing the "presence" notification of your chat buddies in your browser [ mail ], Google makes it very convenient and user friendly, and obviously crossplatform. You are sending a mail to a person, and you find him online, then better chat, rather than mail him :).

Recently, I joined my PU college mailing list on yahoo, and was reading the old mails there. These guys were all in different geographical locations, and were sending mails to the mailing list. Just by seeing their mails being replied while they were still logged on to the net, they started sending one liner mails asking ... "hey, you seem to be online, login to messenger, lets chat". I guess, we will no longer see such mails anymore with this new feature from Google :)

Another story coming up from Google, is that, they are planning to have people chat with eachother, irrespective of the service provider they are logged in to. Something like, while i am on Google Chat, i could talk to another of my friend who is logged into Yahoo chat. This would definately take a lot of time to happen i guess, but the idea is very good. This they say is the same way how the telephone industry has evolved. No matter, which telephone service provider gives you the phone, you can always call up your friend.