April 01, 2004
 

Cricket

A historic win at Multan, built around Sehwag's triple-century, the first ever for India in Pakistan, is hopefully only the starting phase of the upward movement of the Indian side. The aim must be to get to the #2 slot, currently occupied by South Africa, within the next year. Between August 2003 and now, Australia's rating has gone down by 2 points, South Africa's by 7 and New Zealand's by 6 points while India's rating has increased by 7 points. South Africa are currently on 112 points and in 2nd place. The difference, as of yesterday, between India and South Africa was 12 points. Surely it will not be improbable to continue the improvement and defeat South Africa and Australia at home, along with a win over Bangladesh. Considering that South Africa defeated India on its last tour here, a win for India would result in a substantial points increase. However, what must happen first is to continue the winning ways and win the series, without losing any of the next two tests. On quite a few occasions, India has let slip 1-0 leads or hasnt been able to maintain the momentum after a win. In the West Indies, India lost 2-1 from being 1-0 up and 3 tests to go. In England, the team picked itself up from the 2nd test and won the third but could only draw the final test. In Australia we let slip a 1-0 lead, handed Australia the 3rd test, did all the running in the final test but couldn't nail down the series win.

---

Technology

Google has announced the launch of its email product, called gmail. I really like their logo where they juxtapose the M in mail to make it look like an envelope. Gmail claims to offer users huge mailboxes and better mail search.

---

Politics

Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf has riled India for the second time in a month with his statement yesterday that he'd no longer be party to the peace process if there is no progress in Indo-Pak talks on the issue of Kashmir. While Pakistani officials deny it, this is what he exactly said: The foreign ministers will meet in July-August. If we don't move forward, I am not in the process. Earlier during a videoconference address during the India Today conclave, he had insisted that Kashmir was the central issue. Effectively his argument during the conclave called for both sides putting all ideas on the table and then rejecting those that do not find favour with one side or the other. While this sounds extremely sensible and sane, it'd mean that you'd have a clean table halfway through the discussion, because, in my opinion, the intersection of Pakistani and Indian thoughts on the peace process is a null set. Musharraf's bellicose sabre-rattling may be born out of domestic compulsions, especially as it comes in the wake of the military offensive in Waziristan against suspected Al-Qaeda militants and commanders. However, he is smart enough to recognize that the Indian government had committed itself to the peace process the moment the NDA/BJP started shouting from the rooftops that they were responsible for the thaw in relations, which led to the feel good factor. Now the BJP/NDA cannot force the government to backtrack on the peace process, neither can the government stay mum because clearly it has to react to Musharraf's recent diatribes. Effectively, its advantage Musharraf now!

---

Humour

Here are the top 10 April Fool's day hoaxes of all time and a chronological index of April Fool's day hoaxes.

Labels: al-qaeda, google, jammu and kashmir

Rambled @ 12:47 PM

Did you like the post? [ Subscribe to the blog feed - | | Tweet ]