Sayontan Sinha's Page » Eloi and Morlocks

Sayontan

Plagiarism, Copyright and Licensing

Random Rants, Web Development No Responses »

Aug 202010

I recently received a message on FaceBook that quite literally horrified me. It said that I was using Steve McCurry’s picture of the Afghan Girl in my WordPress design and that since it was a copyright violation the least I could do was to acknowledge who the photographer is. So I immediately responded with the background: I had written a very laudatory post about a year back called Haunting Photos on this very blog, complete with references of who took the photos, where it was originally published etc, and provided links to all the original articles.

I explained that what had happened is when I provided a screenshot of Suffusion to WordPress, there was a screenshot of the original “Haunting Photos” post (which had proper crediting) and unfortunately the credit information did not appear on the screenshot. I immediately apologized and within a day got the screenshot for the theme changed on the official WordPress site. Steve understood that this was an honest mistake and appreciated the fact that I had always had the credit information on the post and gotten the image removed from the screenshot almost immediately when notified of the copyright violation. So I could breathe easy.

When I was introduced to Linux, the GPL and “free software” in 1997 I always wondered how it was possible to make money in such a model. After all wasn’t the software free? Somebody explained to me that the software was free, but you could charge for support. It seemed like a rather foolish business model because a smart guy could always look into the code and figure out what to do, and wouldn’t need to pay for support. But for the lack of a better explanation that is what I went by. A few years later I learnt that the word “free” had an intention that was quite different from the interpretation. To quote from the Free Software Foundation’s definition of the term:

“Free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.”
Free software is a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it means that the program’s users have the four essential freedoms:
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
A program is free software if users have all of these freedoms. Thus, you should be free to redistribute copies, either with or without modifications, either gratis or charging a fee for distribution, to anyone anywhere. Being free to do these things means (among other things) that you do not have to ask or pay for permission to do so.

And further down it states:

“Free software” does not mean “noncommercial.” A free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. Commercial development of free software is no longer unusual; such free commercial software is very important. You may have paid money to get copies of free software, or you may have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your copies, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell copies.

From the page on Selling Free Software it states:

Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible — just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.
Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.
The word “free” has two legitimate general meanings; it can refer either to freedom or to price. When we speak of “free software”, we’re talking about freedom, not price. (Think of “free speech”, not “free beer”.) Specifically, it means that a user is free to run the program, change the program, and redistribute the program with or without changes.

So there you are. Mystery solved. I could essentially write my own software, release it as open-source and charge a fee for it if I liked.

Hence it was with more than a hint of amusement that I followed the now beaten to death debate between the founders of the Thesis WordPress theme and the founders of WordPress itself. The amusement came mostly from the fact that people in general felt that if Thesis went GPL it would have to give away the theme free of charge – a ridiculous supposition if you read the definition of “free” and the philosophy of GPL above. What’s more, even the founder of Thesis, Chris Pearson argued passionately in a head-on debate with Matt Mullenweg that if Chris made his theme GPL others could steal his work and severely undercut him. As Matt pointed out, that could happen with or without the GPL license.

Even after the debate settled with Thesis being released with a “split GPL license” (PHP is licensed under GPL, CSS and images are not), several self-appointed aficionados speculated that Thesis would now have to be given away free of charge, which is not what this debate was about at all! As an aside there is actually code comparison done between Thesis and WordPress by Drew Blas to prove that Thesis lifted code from WP and was hence in serious violation of GPL. But that is a story for another day.

While we are on the topic of free software, I recently received a very interesting email. As you probably know, I am the author of Suffusion, a WordPress theme that is both free like “free speech” and free like “free beer”. I sometimes like to gloat about Suffusion, so here is a little snippet: Suffusion has close to 30,000 lines of code. If you do the mental arithmetic you will see that written over a period of 1 year, this amounts to close to a 100 lines of code a day, which is about 15-20 times the industry average for coders!! Of course, I rarely write 100 lines of code a day and I do a good bit of copy-pasting with my own code, but this is a very very impressive figure nonetheless, particularly in the backdrop of the fact that this has mostly been churned out while I am traveling, after completing my regular job each day, as a means to curb ennui. But I digress.

The email was from a theme reviewer at WordPress and the body of the email said:

Your theme was recently submitted by someone else into the wordpress theme directory.
http://themes.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/724
Refused obviously, just thought you might like to know.

Well, I knew that imitation was the sincerest form of flattery, but I found this tough to react to. Obviously I was amused that somebody had thought Suffusion was good enough to be copied. The smart folks of Geek Infos, who actually did the plagiarizing simply replaced the author URL that you define for the theme as something pointing to their site, while leaving everything else intact, including the footer of the theme that says “Suffusion WordPress theme by Sayontan Sinha”! Obviously they found it easier to steal the code but were too incompetent to figure out where to edit the footer! So I would get the support queries, while they would be linked from WP’s official site. Interesting business model

If you have followed the post so far, you might be wondering why they weren’t in their rights to do plagiarize Suffusion. After all my source code is available for change. That is where the difference between copyright and license comes in. You see, I am the distributing the theme under a GPL license, but I still hold the copyright for it. Again, it is best explained in the FAQs about GPL. That is the distinction that most people failed to get in the Thesis vs. WP argument – Chris Pearson still would hold copyright over his creation, charge for his theme and go after people who infringed; none of that would change. Just the license and the terms of redistribution would.

PS: I am a novice when it comes to legalese. What I have written here is based on my understanding of stuff I have read at different places. So it is probable that I have gotten something wrong – feel free to correct me if you spot errors.

Share:

Beautiful Numbers

Pinched It, Random Rants No Responses »

Jul 272010

While reading the The Da Vinci Code a few years back, I came across this passage:

He felt himself suddenly reeling back to Harvard, standing in front of his “Symbolism in Art” class, writing his favorite number on the chalkboard.
1.618
Langdon turned to face his sea of eager students. “Who can tell me what this number is?”
A long-legged math major in back raised his hand. “That’s the number PHI.” He pronounced it fee.
“Nice job, Stettner,” Langdon said. “Everyone, meet PHI.”
“Not to be confused with PI,” Stettner added, grinning. “As we mathematicians like to say: PHI is one H of a lot cooler than PI!”
Langdon laughed, but nobody else seemed to get the joke.
Stettner slumped.
“This number PHI,” Langdon continued, “one-point-six-one-eight, is a very important number in art. Who can tell me why?”
Stettner tried to redeem himself. “Because it’s so pretty?”
Everyone laughed.
“Actually,” Langdon said, “Stettner’s right again. PHI is generally considered the most beautiful number in the universe.”
The laughter abruptly stopped, and Stettner gloated.
As Langdon loaded his slide projector, he explained that the number PHI was derived from the Fibonacci sequence – a progression famous not only because the sum of adjacent terms equaled the next term, but because the quotients of adjacent terms possessed the astonishing property of approaching the number 1.618 – PHI!
Despite PHI’s seemingly mystical mathematical origins, Langdon explained, the truly mind-boggling aspect of PHI was its role as a fundamental building block in nature. Plants, animals, and even human beings all possessed dimensional properties that adhered with eerie exactitude to the ratio of PHI to 1.
– From the Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown

That passage set me thinking about other numbers considered pretty or at least very interesting. As an Indian I can point to quite a few numbers that we can be proud of. At the top of the list is Aryabhata’s invention of the most famous number of them all – 0, which by helping establish the place value system and the decimal number system made innumerable mathematical and scientific discoveries possible and practical. Just imagine having to write a number like 999,999 in the Roman Numeral system. You would need to write CM XC IX CMXCIX. And if you weren’t aware that adding the “overline” multiplies a number by 1000, then you would have to struggle significantly more to represent a number such as 999,999.

As an ex-IIT’ian I have had a fascination for numbers and so have many of my classmates. Both during and after life at IIT I have seen my friends use one particular number quite often – 1729. I myself used 1729 as my page id when I was building my hostel’s website back in the days when you needed to sign up for a free web-page at sites like GeoCities. A few years after graduation my friend asked me to unlock his bicycle. The code – 1729. A few more years later another friend sent out an email saying that his previous email id had been handed out to several mailing lists and he was receiving a lot of spam. So he changed his email id to something that had the number 1729 in it. If you are not very mathematically inclined you might think of 1729 as a very weird number to be fascinated with. But there is history behind it. 1729 is in fact called the Hardy-Ramanujan number, following a very famous conversation between G. H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan.

Hardy used to visit him, as he lay dying in hospital at Putney. It was on one of those visits that there happened the incident of the taxi-cab number. Hardy had gone out to Putney by taxi, as usual his chosen method of conveyance. He went into the room where Ramanujan was lying. Hardy, always inept about introducing a conversation, said, probably without a greeting, and certainly as his first remark: “I thought the number of my taxi-cab was 1729. It seemed to me rather a dull number.” To which Ramanujan replied: “No, Hardy! No, Hardy! It is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.”
That is the exchange as Hardy recorded it. It must be substantially accurate. He was the most honest of men; and further, no one could possibly have invented it.
– Foreword by C. P. Snow, to G. H. Hardy’s “A Mathematician’s Apology (Canto)”

For those trying to figure out what Ramanujan meant, 1729 = 12³ + 1³ = 10³ + 9³. Not only is this number an Indian favorite (Ramanujan was Indian), but mathematicians worldwide recognize it for the brilliance and simplicity of the discovery. This number is also referred to as a Taxicab number due to the associated incident, though the unique property of this number was actually discovered by Bernard Frénicle de Bessy.

There is another number that piqued my interest, however, when I was preparing for the Indian National Mathematics Olympiad in 1994. I came across a number that was referred to as the Kaprekar Number – 6174. In later years I came to know that the information was inaccurate, because this number was called Kaprekar Constant, and Kaprekar Numbers referred to a separate category of numbers. A Kaprekar Number is a number that is thus defined:

A Kaprekar number for a given base is a non-negative integer, the representation of whose square in that base can be split into two parts that add up to the original number again.

As the Wikipedia article states, 45 is a Kaprekar number because 45 = 20 + 25 and 45² = 2025. These numbers were discovered by another Indian mathematician Dattaraya Ramchandra Kaprekar, who had a penchant for discovering several results in number theory and was very well known as a recreational mathematician. Funny what people come up with during their free time!

But back to the Kaprekar constant – 6174. Again, this falls wholly into the category of an unremarkable-looking number. But there is a lot more to it. Arrange the digits of the number in descending order: 7641. Arrange its digits in ascending order: 1467. Subtract the two: 7641 – 1467 = 6174. This happens to be the only 4-digit number that exhibits this property. If you think that is surprising, there is more. Take any 4 digit number with at least 1 digit different from the rest. Repeat the operation of subtracting the ascending order of digits from the descending order. After a finite number of iterations you will hit 6174!! I was so impressed with this number that I couldn’t rest till I had established the proof of this. Yutaka Nishiyama has a well-documented proof, which is much more rigorous than what I came up with (plus I am too lazy to type out my proof in HTML here).

There are other Kaprekar constants when you change the number of digits to 3 (495) or something else.

I am sure there are several other numbers that have even more quirky properties. Having had an affinity towards mathematics in general since a young age and towards number theory in particular since I was 15, I know that I am missing out on such a huge treasure by pursuing a career in something so far removed from mathematics.

Share:

Wimbledon – My Pilgrimage

Grandpa Tales, Sports 4 Responses »

Jun 252010

It just so happened that my project and my client decided they wanted me in UK in a week when England was on the brink of elimination from the Football World Cup 2010 and when John Isner and Nicolas Mahut produced an 11 hours 5 minutes long monster marathon in the first round of Wimbledon.

I had spent close to 8 months in London from early October 2001 to late May 2002. But my main regret from trip was that I had no photographs from the more touristy places of London thanks to a rather debilitating bout of illness that killed my will to venture outdoors for the last few weeks of my trip. So when I got the opportunity to travel again, I was determined to fill up the missing pictures from London in my photo album.

If you know me well, the only sport I enjoy following more than Tennis is Cricket. Since India doesn’t have any matches scheduled in Lord’s next week, I accepted Wimbledon, the Mecca of Tennis with open arms. A couple of colleagues from work, Gaurav and April picked today for the visit. The plan was to get there after 5:00 PM when ticket prices go down. I was apprehensive, however, since today was a Friday and last year’s Champion Roger Federer and the runner-up Andy Roddick both had third round matches. I was expecting long queues.

Given that I was changing hotels today after an unsatisfactory experience at Hilton Croydon, I decided to first drop off my baggage at Hilton Euston. The journey from Croydon to Euston took me time because I had to familiarize myself with the Oyster ticketing system that did not exist back in 2001/2002. After checking into the hotel it took me some more time to top up my Oyster card so that I could travel to Wimbledon. It didn’t help that the queues were long at rush hour and my credit card got rejected for some arbitrary reason the first time I tried to buy.

Anyway, I reached Wimbledon station at about 5:25 PM. By then Gaurav and his brother Saurabh were already in the queue for tickets, which by their estimate was at least 500 people long. I still hadn’t gotten to the stadium, so this was depressing news. But I anyway decided to take a shuttle from Wimbledon station to the park. After I disembarked I asked one of the people there as to where I could buy tickets. Thinking back, his directions were eerily similar to what the bystanders at Surat Railway Station had told me when asked where the bus stop was. I walked a good amount and at a pretty brisk speed, passing the stadium on my way.

The Stadium from outside

After walking seemingly endlessly I finally reached the entrance of Car Park 10, where the queue started for the tickets. Actually the queue started at least 200m inside the car park. By the time I joined the queue, though, it was 6:00 PM and Gaurav and Saurabh were already chugging along. To give you an estimate, right about the court entrance where you purchase tickets, the queue index is A, where I was standing was K9 and Gaurav was probably around F. It had taken him an hour to get there.

Share:

The Legend of the “Interview Shirt”

Consulting, Random Rants 3 Responses »

May 132010

I grew up in an era punctuated by the liberalization of the Indian economy and India’s subsequent ascension as a power in the world economy. During the years that I was an undergraduate my peer group was comprised of people from Indian upper middle class families. So most of us, while not really starved for means, weren’t exactly rolling in money either.

We used to start the semester with a wardrobe that stayed reasonably constant, unless we happened to venture to Palika Bazaar or SN Market during a weekend and spent a couple of hundred rupees getting ourselves some T-shirts. Occasionally when one of us had an expected or unexpected windfall we went to South Ex because the shops there were otherwise beyond our means.

Once we reached our final year, of course, we had to prepare for placement interviews. A typical firm doing a placement interview had 3 rounds: a preliminary CV screen, a written test and an in-person interview. Some firms did one of the first two, some substituted them with a group discussion, but all firms had an in-person interview.

Now, people had clothes for different occasions. There was the regular stuff that you would wear in the hostel and that could range from something that looked like a dirty rag to a half-decent T-shirt. Then there were clothes you wore to class and they were somewhat better, in the sense that they did have encounters with a bar of detergent once every few weeks.

Next came “date clothes”, which were essentially an assortment of clothes that you thought looked cool on you and you wore them on those special events where a girl was probably milking you for all your pocket-money’s worth. A lot of us didn’t have the need or the luxury to worry about date clothes though, because the prerequisite of having a girlfriend, real or purported, was never met. Nonetheless I could regale you with tales of some gentlemen, who would shave only on date days, thereby never letting their girlfriends form even casual acquaintances with their raging stubbles, but that is a tale for another day.

Last came the “Interview Clothes”. This was a tricky category. Some people were dead sure that they would go into academia after graduation, so they never bothered themselves with mundane matters like their appearance in an interview, and as a result they never had anything different or unique to wear for an interview (some such people didn’t even bother themselves with job interviews!). Some were certain they wouldn’t graduate in four years, so they too never bothered. But there were others who were very, very serious about job interviews. But even here you had groups. First came the people who made several attempts at interviews, but started getting dispirited after multiple failures. Such people typically paid attention to their appearance initially, then lost enthusiasm. Then came people who made it to the interview round of their dream jobs, and they, naturally, had to look their best.

So what really comprised the “Interview Clothes”, or more particularly, what was the “Interview Shirt”? In the most general sense, this was supposed to be one shirt that you wore once a semester, if not once during your entire four years in college. Shirts hardly ever strictly met this condition – in most cases you would end up wearing your interview shirt about 5-6 times a semester. Some people liked calling it their formal shirt, but they would have been the only ones calling it that. Some people simply reused their “date shirt”, if the date involved going to an upscale restaurant. Simply put, this was the one shirt you possessed that met all these criteria – long sleeves, cleanest of the lot and most importantly, hadn’t been worn after being last ironed.

Given the economic era we were in, a formal shirt would cost you equal to your entire semester’s tuition fees. You see, the market had been liberalized allowing consumerism to rise, but our families didn’t really fit into the category of the targeted consumers. Moreover our college hiked fees tenfold the year after we joined, making us the last batch to pay a total of around Rs. 8920/- (approximately US $255 those days) for four years of India’s best undergraduate education. So spending more on a shirt than you would spend on half a year’s fees was tantamount to sacrilege. Of course, some saw this as money well-spent and they not only had a designated “interview shirt”, but also had a suit or a blazer and a tie to go with it. Given the heat in Delhi, interviewers never actually expected you to wear a suit for an interview, but the people owning one felt obliged to wear it.

Wearing a suit absolved you of owning a decent “interview shirt”, because your shirt would essentially get covered by the layer above. But for people who preferred comfort during an interview, the shirt was mandatory. People were generally okay with wearing a long-sleeves shirt without lurid patterns, and which showed prominent creases from ironing. Checks were generally considered a no-no, and some people even excluded stripes from their consideration. Solids, particularly those in light colors were most welcome.

People who didn’t possess a shirt that met their own definition of an “interview shirt” usually borrowed one from a friend. Some people also wore ties to interviews, but the opening up of the Indian economy made sure that ties that were in vogue at the start of our education were considered passé by our fourth year. As kids we considered it fashionable to wear a tie in school with a four-in-hand knot, which we referred to as the single knot. Later we figured out that the formal way of wearing a tie was the Windsor knot (what we called the triple knot), or the somewhat less time-consuming half-Windsor knot (aka the double knot). Without intending to lace the statement with double-entendre, it wasn’t the length (of the tie) that mattered, but it was the thickness (of the knot).

Times have changed. In my first job the emphasis was on feeling comfortable, so wearing jeans and T-shirts to work was considered the in-thing. My second job being in consulting, the emphasis was on dressing “smart” (read Business Casual) for regular work and formally for client presentations. So my definitions have changed. What I revered as “interview shirts” during my college days is now a part of my everyday wear. But I still have interview shirts – plain, expensive, clean and well-ironed.

Share:

Saving for a Bicycle, Ending up with a Harley

Grandpa Tales 5 Responses »

Feb 152010

If the title sounds familiar, you must be watching Smallville with great attention to detail.

A lot of us, growing up have fond desires that we are never able to fulfil. As a kid I had numerous hobbies – reading, badminton, tennis, philately, numismatics: you name it. But in each of my hobbies I stopped short of having what would be uber-cool, mainly because of my upbringing. I was always taught to save money and spend with caution and never to have my grasp exceed my reach. Coming from a middle class family I couldn’t really afford expensive hobbies. To cite an example I had a Badminton racquet (a DSC Colt, to be specific) that had cost me Rs. 135, which as per the conversion rates of those days must have been worth around US $4.5. This was the most expensive racquet I had owned and more importantly, it was bought with money I had earned. I had always dreamt of a better racquet like a Yonex or a Carlton with a graphite shaft or with a graphite body, but such racquets never cost less that Rs. 1000. Heck, even the high-end models of Silver’s seemed out of reach. So it was my desire to buy one when I grew up.

Ditto for tennis, where I had a Symonds’ wooden racquet that I really liked. Tennis balls in India used to cost around Rs. 50 each, which was very expensive. Whenever I played tennis with my friends we did so on a clay court where it was a struggle to see the lines and we played with threadbare tennis balls that had been handed down by my friends’ fathers after weeks and weeks of play. But we still had fun. My dream those days was to have a Silver’s Headley, an Indian racquet that cost around Rs. 700, because I simply couldn’t dream of getting a Wilson or a Dunlop that would cost no less than Rs. 2000.

As an aspiring philatelist every kid has a dream – owning a Penny Black. Unfortunately this was an even more ambitious dream than my other ones, given that I had never come across a person owning a Penny Black, so this was the stuff of legend for me. I had no idea how much it cost, but it surely couldn’t be something that years of pocket money could afford. Philately has a sister hobby, numismatics and though I had no specific dreams there, I had a fascination for coins of the old and rare variety. Here luckily I wasn’t so hard done and I had access to some outstanding Indian antiquities thanks to my grandparents. The numbers, though were quite small.

I was an avid book reader as a kid. It never was about novels, though. I could read anything you gave me – a book on general knowledge, a book about past civilizations, a book to study, a telephone directory, anything. This bibliophilism served me very well as I managed to read all my study material while preparing for my engineering entrance examination. That was no small feat considering that I must have had to read not less than 50 books for this. But if there was something that I lamented, it was the lack of story books as a kid. I really cherished the handful that I had won as prizes in different contests at school.

And so time went by and I joined my first job in June 2000. When my first paycheck came in July, here is what I did. I went to a sports goods store and bought myself a Yonex Carbonex 7000 DX, a graphite-bodied Badminton racquet that I absolutely love even today, apart from the fact that isometric racquets came up after I purchased this. I guess it felt so much better to buy it by myself rather than have my father buy it for me!

During those days dotcom startups were the in-things. There was one rather interesting startup called Ticklewit, whose business model I never succeeded in deciphering. Ticklewit published a variety of puzzles daily – crosswords, quizzes etc. If you succeeded in cracking those you got points. And you could redeem points once you had accumulated at least 1000. The redemption was in the form of gift certificates for an erstwhile company called Fabmart. Not one to let this opportunity go, I got started and made a significant amount of money by doing something I loved – more than Rs. 20,000/- in Fabmart gift certificates. Given the type of merchandise that Fabmart offered, I built up a significant collection of books with this money. Another dream fulfilled.

Given the expense of tennis in India I held off buying a tennis racquet. Moreover I wasn’t really sure that I would get a good racquet in India. But when I got a chance to travel to London in October 2001, I bought a Wilson Europa there. Unfortunately I never got to play with it very much, so I gave it to my brother so that he could make better use of it. When I moved to the US a few years later, though, I purchased a Wilson nCode n6.1 and boy! Did I use it!

Then it came down to philately and numismatics. With some rather smart hunting and judicious spending I managed to lay my hands on not only the Penny Black, but also the Two Penny Blue, the Penny Red (perforated and unperforated), the Bull’s Eye (30 Réis and 60 Réis) and the entire Trans-Mississippi Issue, including the rare Black Bull. And it sure felt good.

So I guess it is okay to have a ton of unfulfilled desires as a child. If you want something with a passion as a kid and that passion survives the test of time, when you are finally able to bring it to fruition the results are truly sweet to savour. I never regret not having any of these as a child, because when I finally was able to get them I got more than I had dreamt of and I felt it was well worth the wait!

Share:

Hubris and the IPL

Random Rants 13 Responses »

Feb 142010

Fact: Since 26th November 2008 I have been staunchly against Pakistan’s participation in the Indian Premier League (IPL). In fact I have been staunchly against any Pakistani citizen making any money in India, be it as a player or an artist.

Fact: I wasn’t always this way. I enjoyed the Pakistan cricket team’s visit to India in 1999 and I was proud of the fact that the Indian spectators in Chennai gave Pakistan a standing ovation after they narrowly beat us in a fantastic test match. Of course, I was even more thrilled when Anil Kumble picked up a perfect 10 in the match that followed, ensuring that we didn’t lose the series.

I also enjoyed the fact that Pakistan welcomed us with open arms in 2004 in a historic series (India won 2-1 in tests and 3-2 in ODIs).

But once the cricket started getting more frequent the novelty wore off. Pakistan visited India in 2005 (Tests were drawn 1-1 and Pak won the ODIs 4-2), India visited Pakistan in 2006 (Pak won the tests 1-0 and India won the ODIs 4-1), then Pak visited India again in late 2007 (India won the tests 1-0 and the ODIs 3-2). As the cricket went into overkill the matches seemed forced, almost as if the sole reason for the matches was to get the cricket boards some money. I wasn’t alone in my thinking, apparently, and matches in Pakistan in particular were rather poorly attended.

Fast forward to 26th November 2008. In a dastardly siege of the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai and extremely well-planned attacks across all of the city over 170 people were killed (or murdered, to put it correctly). There was national outrage over India. Unlike earlier instances, this time India was swift in establishing links between the terror attacks and two Pakistani extremist groups, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM). Pakistan’s response: denial, claiming that the proof was not adequate. The lone surviving terrorist from the attacks, Ajmal Kasab claimed he was from Pakistan, but this was refuted by Pakistan. And the process went on and on. Every time India offered proof, the Pakistani administration shot it down, maintaining the facade of cooperation.

The rather minor collateral damage was that India cancelled its December 2008 tour to Pakistan and Pakistan reciprocated by cancelling its participation in the second season of the India Premier League (stating that India was not a safe place) and Pakistani participants of music reality shows in India like Zee Sa Re Ga Ma Pa were unceremoniously kicked out. Bilateral cricket tours between the two countries were put on a hiatus, for all intents and purposes. The Pakistani Government started issuing orders to all its nationals to cease traveling to India because “it was not safe”.

Pakistan’s image in the world (or at least in the cricketing world) became that of an unsafe place. International cricket teams in general refused to travel to Pakistan for any event. One team dared – Sri Lanka. This was perhaps in cognizance of Pakistan and India’s gesture before the 1996 Cricket World Cup when Australia and West Indies forfeited their matches in Sri Lanka by refusing to play there on the grounds of security (though a lot of Asians believed Australia’s refusal was more due to fearing a backlash over calling Muralitharan a “chucker” in the previous summer). What Sri Lanka got for its gesture was a terrorist attack on the bus carrying the Lankan team. While none got killed, a few Sri Lankans did get injured. The trip was terminated with immediate effect.

Some Pakistanis went far enough to blame India for the attacks, though this wasn’t the official position of Pakistan. But the bigger impact for Pakistani cricket became the revoking of Pakistan as a venue for any of the World Cup 2011 cricket matches. Rather unsurprisingly, the Board of Cricket Control in India (BCCI) refused to support Pakistan as a venue when this happened. And rather surprisingly the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) expected BCCI to support it and even accused it of backstabbing. Historically whenever Pakistan had gotten itself in trouble, the BCCI had stood by it. The biggest such instance was the unsavory match forfeiture incident between Pakistan and England, thanks to the umpire Darrell Hair.

So what changed? The political scenario did (and hence the history lesson preceding this point). I often hear the statement that sports and politics shouldn’t be mixed, and art and politics shouldn’t be mixed. As an ideal it is as noble as it is asinine and impractical. The fact is everything is tied to politics. Unless the political situation somewhere is good, nothing can thrive there. If sports and politics weren’t interlinked, you wouldn’t have the national anthems of the teams being played before a football match, and you wouldn’t have country-based teams in events like the Olympics.

Throughout history sports events have been used to make political statements. USA boycotted the Moscow Olympics and USSR repaid the favour by boycotting the Los Angeles Olympics. Both were making political statements. Cricket had its own political statements made when Henry Olonga and Andy Flower wore black armbands to protest against Robert Mugabe’s dictatorship in Zimbabwe. And even more prominent was the total boycott of South Africa for several years due to its policies of Apartheid. I am sure there are other such incidents.

This brings me to the point of this article. Ever since the terror attacks on Mumbai I have been staunchly against India giving any form of remuneration and recognition to to anyone from Pakistan, be it their cricketers or their singers. These people are not terrorists and hell, some of them are eminently likeable, but they pay taxes in Pakistan and those taxes go into letting the perpetrators of heinous crimes flourish. I don’t want Indian money to feed people who come back to launch attacks on India.

When the Pakistan government and interior ministry kept flip-flopping on issuing its players NOCs for IPL, I was quite happy. This would mean that they would miss the deadline for filing applications and they would automatically be rejected for IPL. That would be great riddance without us doing a thing. But my fantasy was short-lived and though they missed the deadline, the IPL organizers bent backwards and got them drafted in time for the auction. That was a crying shame.

On auction day no Pakistani player out of 11 was offered a single bid. There is more to this statement, though. There were 66 players in the auction pool and 13 spots had to be filled, so 53 players would not be picked. If you follow the way the auction progressed, technically the Pakistani players actually put up for bids were Shahid Afridi, Sohail Tanvir, Kamran Akmal, Imran Nazir, Umar Akmal and Rana Naved ul Hasan, in that order. By the time Rana Naved ul Hasan was auctioned, 7 players had been bought – Keiron Pollard, Wayne Parnell, Shane Bond, Kemar Roach, Eoin Morgan, Damien Martyn and Thissara Perera. Several others were not bid for – Brad Haddin, Graeme Swann, Mohammed Kaif, Darren Ganga, Shakib Al Hasan, Doug Bollinger, Tim Bresnan, Justin Kemp, Ramnaresh Sarwan, Chamara Silva, Phillip Hughes, Wavell Hinds, Lendl Simmons, Upul Tharanga, Jonathan Trott, Jason Krejza, Johan van der Wath, Grant Elliott, Ashley Noffke, Rory Klienveldt, Tyron Henderson and Suleiman Benn. That is a total of 21 players apart from the 6 Pakistanis who didn’t attract any bids.

At this time the process was shortened since 5 overseas slots were to be filled, and four teams out of eight had no money left, so teams could explicitly ask for a player. If two franchises asked for one player then that player went into auction, otherwise he was to be sold at base price. At this point 2 players from the discard pool were bought – Justin Kemp and Mohammed Kaif, the latter actually going into auction. In addition Adam Voges and Yusuf Abdulla were bought. Since none wanted to bid on any of the other players, three Under-19 players were drafted into different teams.

Though Afridi was the talk of the town before the bidding actually started, I had a hard time believing why anyone would want him, good though his credentials are in the T20 World Cup. He was an unmitigated disaster in the first season, he tried to foster ill-harmony in his team with his acerbic comments disparaging his captain VVS Laxman, and his disciplinary track record in Pakistan is, well, dirty laundry. Surely Deccan was not going to pick him up again! Frankly among the Pakistanis only Umar Gul and Mohammed Aamer deserved to make the cut, not players like Sohail Tanvir who struggle to find a place in the Pakistan team.

The natural response to the auction was outrage, which is understandable – none likes to be told that he is unwanted. But then a rather interesting sequence unfolded. Some events in this sequence were hilarious and some were tragic.

A lot of interesting quotes came out:

The way I see it, the IPL and India have made fun of us and our country. We are the Twenty20 world champions and for me the attitude of the franchises was disappointing. I feel bad for the Indian people who, I am sure, wanted to see us play in the IPL this year.
- Shahid Afridi, the airhead captain of the Pakistan T20 team

A little later this was heard:

They have basically tried to hurt our cricket and image and this is most disappointing because I believe there should be no politics in sports
- Abdul Razzaq

I found these statements really funny and contradictory. One person above branded the non-selection of individual players of the Pakistan team in the IPL to a snubbing of Pakistan as a country. Another was concerned about not mixing sports and politics together, while his captain had done precisely that. If Afridi had drawn a line between sports and politics, he would have stopped at saying that India had made a mockery of his team, and not brought his country into it.

I was particularly pleased with this quote from the external affairs ministry in response to all the rants from Pakistan:

Pakistan should introspect on the reasons which have put a strain on relations between India and Pakistan, and have adversely impacted peace, stability and prosperity in the region.
- External Affairs Ministry of India

And this one:

Unless Government of Pakistan takes action against those involved in the heinous acts of 26/11… strong, convincing action to dismantle the terrorist outfits across the border, Indian people will be always impatient.
- Defence Minister A. K. Anthony

Then came the damp squib:

I think it is disservice to cricket that some of these players were not picked. I don’t know why the IPL teams acted in the manner they acted. But certainly to suggest that there was a hint or nudge from the government is completely untrue.
- Home Minister P. Chidambaram

What is a disservice is that this is a step the Government of India should have officially taken. We should have banned any such participation from Pakistan from our side, rather than waiting for private organizations like the IPL franchises to take a stance. Tell Pakistan that you show us concrete evidence of cracking down on terror and we will let you into our society again. Instead we had pansies like Chidambaram pandering to the egos of people of a country that has done nothing in the recent past to deserve the respect. Shame on you, Chidambaram! You are a disgrace, because you are accusing those people of disservice who have done something you should have done! Whether guided by conscience or business motives, the IPL and the franchises exercised their right. They did not ask the government for help and money and whom they picked and why was entirely their decision. What will Chidambaram do next? Accuse people of “disservice” to the country because they voted the Congress out of power?

There were eminent mediapersons who jumped on with their righteous indignation:

Modi screeched "Availability, availability, availability" is all that will matter in auctions going forward. And so the Australians weren’t the hot picks this year as well. Point taken. But Australia are involved in a cricket series at the time. What are Pakistan doing? Nothing at all. Their players are available for all six weeks and can certainly play T20 cricket, they won the World Cup, remember?
- Gaurav Kalra, Sports Editor of CNN-IBN

What is Gaurav Kalra’s IQ? Negative? Is availability something that is determined by a calendar? If that is the case why did the Pakistani players not play in the IPL last year? It is not as if they were engaged in an international tour or had suddenly forgotten how to play T20 cricket. People like Kalra need to realize that this whole issue is a lot bigger than cricket. Even if this issue was not bigger than cricket, who compensates the franchises for the Pakistani players not playing last year? Kalra? Chidambaram?

Whether or not Pakistan plays cricket or anybody plays cricket in Pakistan is never dependent on what the Pakistani players are doing; it is intricately tied to what Pakistan as a whole is doing. No international cricket team wants to play in Pakistan. Some of the logically-minded citizens of Pakistan put this down to the fact that Pakistan doesn’t have the kind of nightlife that international cricketers like to enjoy, hence this is not a preferred destination for cricketers. They tend to forget that the political and security environment in their country doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

While we have had a few people in the media and in the entertainment industry (folks like Shah Rukh Khan, albeit for a publicity stunt of his latest movie) springing to bat for the Pakistanis, the Pakistani people don’t seem to share that kind of a feeling. A lot of people in the Pakistan team don’t distinguish between India and Hindus, conveniently forgetting that India had more Muslims than Pakistan till a few years back. Outlook India had a well-written article about what Pakistan thinks about India in general. Here is what Sohail Tanvir, one of the IPL rejects of this year says in an interview on a Pakistani channel:

Wow! “Hinduon ki zahaniyat hi aisi hai” (This is the typical Hindu nature)! Coming from the person who was the player of the tournament for the first season of IPL, this reeks of the same attitude that the journalist accuses Hindus of having, “Bagal mein chhuri, moonh mein Ram Ram” (They will stab you with a smile on their faces). Didn’t Tanvir benefit hugely from the first IPL? His stock rose and he never really had to do too much of hard work after that season – he currently doesn’t find a place in his national team, as stated earlier.

I am not debating whether there was a deliberate and concentrated effort to reject Pakistanis in the IPL. IPL and the franchises say there wasn’t, some other Indians say there was, Pakistan as a whole is convinced there was and most of the Indians don’t care, because they didn’t want Pakistan in. I am one who doesn’t care. I must admit, though, that I would be very happy if there was indeed a conscious attempt since it would have made a much better statement. With people like Chidambaram in the government we can’t really expect the government to take such a stance. So it comes down to the business houses in the IPL in such a tournament. Even if the business houses’ motive has been a potential loss of money due to no-show Pakistanis, the end result is very much to my liking.

I had initially just saved a draft of about 40% of this article about 10 days back, but following the blasts in Pune on 13th Feb (earlier today in India) I was tempted to finish this. Now imagine that the IPL picked up the Pakistani players and after the blasts today relations went further south, and again Pakistan put on a charade of withdrawing players from IPL. What would people like Chidambaram and Kalra have to say? Nothing, I am sure. They would pretend it did not happen. All talks of “availability” being a non-issue would go up in smoke. As if to prove me correct, I see that Chidambaram has already declined to comment on this.

It is one thing to have your opinion and it is another thing to lambast other people for not sharing it. I have nothing against people wanting to see Pakistan play in the IPL. But I wouldn’t like it if those people started abusing people who for whatever reason decided not to spend their money on Pakistan. I am not against people like Shah Rukh Khan, for example, who made statements on the same topic.

I truly believe Pakistan players should have been chosen. They are the champions, they are wonderful but somewhere down the line there is an issue and we can’t deny it. We are known to invite everyone. We should have. If there were any issues, they should have been put on board earlier. Everything can happen respectfully. Everyday we blame Pakistan, everyday Pakistan blames us. It is an issue.
Here is a set of people who are spending up to Rs 70, 80, 90 crore and suddenly, if you say this much to me (that a buy might be risky), I’m like, “Uh-oh, so should I?”
I am not giving an excuse and I truly believe Pakistanis are the best T20 players in the world. But somewhere down the line there is an issue and we cannot deny it. We cannot keep saying, “Oh, this was wrong”. Yes, maybe the way it was done was wrong, the way it is being carried out may be wrong. But you can’t keep on saying “Koi issue nahi hai yaar, woh aa jate” (There isn’t any issue, they could have come). There is an issue, let’s not deny it.
- Shah Rukh Khan

At least he admits there is a core issue at the bottom of all of this and doesn’t go out of his way to abuse someone. Though I question the timing of this statement a few weeks before the release of his movie, I can’t find fault with the statement itself. It is his view.

At the end of it all, forget security concerns about Pakistani players participating in the IPL. This is the time to make a stand and to boycott Pakistan fully till they act on the evidence we have provided them for Mumbai.

PS: I admit it has been long since I have posted. The truth is that my Aquoid blog gets all my attention these days.

Update (16th Feb 2010): Quite out of the blue this post has been picked as one of BlogAdda’s Tangy Tuesday Picks. Funny how I write one article after so many days and that article happens to be truly partisan and it gets picked! Maybe I should try being opinionated a lot more often on my blog!

Share:

Rounding Up 2009

Random Rants 4 Responses »

Dec 282009

I remember last year, around the same time of the year Tanuka and Aikataan had gone to India and my client had the annual shutdown. I am not a person who gets bored easily unless I am watching a very poorly made movie. So I found myself a lot of things to do: polish my meagre culinary skills, catch up on my reading, ensure that I watched Bollywood movies in the US before my family in India got to them, lose the incredible amount of adipose tissue built up near my belly and so on. And I also decided to move into blogging more actively.

So I started / revamped a bunch of sites, chief among which was this one. I discovered open source blogging and CMS and I was pulled in. In particular I loved WordPress and Joomla. And so began my journey with trying to do things by myself. Some time in March 2009 I began something as an experiment: Aquoid. It was intended to be an exercise in in building Mac-like themes across multiple platforms. A lofty goal, indeed.

Aquoid was slow off the blocks, mainly due to the intense pressure at work those days. I had a stretch where I was forced to work weekends for weeks together. So I toned down the goals a bit and focused on getting out one simple and clean theme for one platform. I had no idea at that time that I had sown the seeds for a fun ride. Suffusion came about and would have sunk without a trace if it weren’t for a crazy desire of mine to make it just a little bit better. That “little bit” became all-encompassing, and the journey from a simple, single-layout theme to one that can legitimately lay claim to being customizable is a story in itself.

Since this is my blog, I will let myself brag and point out a few nice reviews of the theme at wordpress.org. There are a lot of great themes out there and if you ask me for an honest opinion I wouldn’t hesitate to rate them above mine. But all the same it feels good to be the author of something that people in general like.

As I devoted more and more time to Suffusion, my personal blog started suffering from a lack of attention. If you notice here, I have had just about 1-2 posts a month for the last few months. I believe I have compensated by making my updates on Aquoid a lot more frequent, though writers’ block too has had a hand in the reduction of frequency.

But enough about blogging. Professionally I started off on a new project after almost two years on my previous one. Unfortunately this project keeps me away from home around 65% of the time. Thrown in some horrible weather and coach class travel each week and you have a grumpy and weary me.

2009 was an eventful year for me personally, too. I took a true vacation in a very long time when I spent 3 weeks in India attending the weddings of a couple of my cousins. I had forgotten what a humid Indian summer felt like, having stayed long enough in the Silicon Valley to be spoilt.

And then of course, there is Aikataan. He recently started school and is beginning to grapple with English, since we only converse in Bengali at home. It is funny and amusing to see him grow – he turned three during the middle of the year and plays games on the Wii with the skill of a veteran. While he doesn’t understand when he wins at Tennis or Bowling, he does know that he gets a cup if he does well at Mario Kart.

Share:

I Want My Coffee

Random Rants 16 Responses »

Nov 052009

I have never been a fan of glaring “pay-per-click” and online advertising on personal sites because I feel it takes the focus away from the somewhat personal nature of my blogs. But I do believe that you have every right to ask for donations to support your work, particularly if you put in a lot of effort into it and generate a good product. Your users get to determine if you are doing a good job and they can make a donation if they like.

Now, I used to find it a bit corny to explicitly put a button that said “Donate” on my page, because, all said and done, I really had no expectations when I started work on Suffusion. Moreover, the “Donate” button seemed to me to have undertones of begging. Eventually, though, a few people offered to “buy [me] a drink” and that is when I thought about finally biting the bullet and putting in a link. I eventually put in a “Buy me a coffee” button on Aquoid.

I want my coffee!!

Why a coffee? I will be the first to admit that coffee only helps me to stay awake when ingested in extreme doses. For those who don’t know me well, I can get by with around 30 hours of sleep in a whole week and not show any side-effects, all without coffee. I can also get by with 80 hours of sleep a week – I am that weird, but that is a story for another day. The other options were a Pizza (unhealthy) and a Beer (I am a teetotaler). Though now that I think of it, I could have put in a picture of hot wings – something I love. Anyway, the coffee was merely symbolic and had no bearing on what I was really going to spend the contributions on (though I assure you it isn’t for nefarious activities ).

Share:

The Consultant Mixer - Procrastination Power

Consulting 5 Responses »

Oct 172009

I have been wrestling with the idea of a comic strip for a while now. However, it has been a while since I did any serious artwork. More than 15 years, in fact. The fact was amplified when I tried to draw a face from three different angles and I ended up invariably incorporating simian characteristics where I did not really need them. Eventually I settled for stick figures.

The particular installment of The Consultant Mixer is autonymous, since I started penciling it in August and I finished in October. A few words about an “autonym” – I had read in Richard Lederer’s excellent Crazy English, that an “autonym” is a word that describes itself. You can indeed search for “hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian” within this book in Amazon and find out that it means “a very long word”. The dictionaries don’t agree, though, or do not cover this definition of the word.

I am not particularly innovative with names. So I pulled an old trick here. IBM happens to be one of the largest Consulting firms today (if not the largest). In his famous 2001: A Space Odyssey Arthur C. Clarke had a computer named HAL, which people interpreted as a play on IBM (H before I, A before B and L before M), the founder of the ubiquitous PC. There is another school of though that believes, though that HAL is a “heuristic algorithm”. Nevertheless, I decided to use IBM as my source again, albeit the consulting arm of it. So you have JCN (J after I, C after B and N after M), or Jason.