Cricket Poetry

There is some excellent cricket poetry on the net...of course, people in India are well familiar with the Gavaskar Calypso and there is some beautiful Cricket prose from the legendary Sir Neville Cardus.
Check Arthur Salway's side-splitting Cricket poetry...veeery funny. Another excellent Cricket poem is by my dear friend, Sorab Bhathena. He wrote this in the immediate aftermath of the match fixing revelations and I faithfully reproduce his masterpiece below:

Let's play cricket, said a pal of mine
Being a gentleman's game, I said "fine"
So let me explain how this whole mess started
How events took place when my pal departed.

I was approached by a stranger, totally unknown
He had in his hand a bag and cell phone
By way of intoduction he said to me
For some information I give, he'd give me a fee.

What sort of info do you need, I queried,
He looked around, and he got me worried,
I was just here to play my game
Not looking for glory or for fame.

Just tell me how many runs you'll score
To which I replied "I'll try a hundred, maybe more"
No, no, he cried I've got a present for you,
A hundred thousand, to get out in "two".

I thought he was joking, this stranger was mad,
I better get moving and put on my pad,
Just then he made a call on his phone,
Thank God he and I were alone

For I dread to think what anyone would say
If they heard his phone conversation that day.
He said all was done, and I was party to crime
And a whole lot of rubbish and garbage and slime.

And as he left, he dropped the last shocker
By placing his bag inside my locker
Now that I finished with you, he cried,
I'm off to fix the other side.

The next day's headlines read in the press,
Our country's cricket's is in a royal mess,
For none of our players scored more than two
But you know how it happened, between me and you.

Now eagerly awaiting the next big match
Where I'll be paid to drop a catch,
In the end it's the public that would be the fool
They don't know cricketers graduate from "acting" school.

BRILLIANT!!

Indian Travels

I was mindlessly surfing the net and happened to come across a fantastic site on this guy’s travels through India and a few other countries. It’s quite fascinating to read someone else’s take on India and Mark writes well. Some of his stories really cracked me up.

Atlas Shrugged, Vedant bugged

Anyone care to express their opinion about Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged'? Personally speaking, I think it's trash, but I know many people who swear by the book. It appears that one either likes Ayn Rand or dislikes her writing...no happy medium about it.

Justice and the Shariah are compatible

For all those who have been following the stories of Mukhtaran Mai and Imrana Bibi, here’s my two bobs worth.
For Mukhtaran Mai, it has been a long wait but it seems that justice is finally finding a way. However, the eight members of the village council who ordered her rape have not yet been taken to court. In my eyes, they are guiltier than the men who actually perpetrated the crime.
Regarding Imrana Bibi, a crisp synopsis of the case so far can be found on Gaurav’s blog. I have spoken to a few of my Muslim friends in Dubai and this is what I have gathered so far. The Shariah is based on the Quran, the Sunnah (deeds of the Prophet Mohammed pbuh) and the Hadiths (his sayings, discourses etc.). These three put together serve as a guiding light to Muslims on how they should lead their lives. Based on these three sources, everything is divided into five groups, 1. Things that are compulsory for Muslims, 2. Things that are recommended for Muslims, 3. Things that are permitted (neither encouraged nor discouraged), 4. Things that Muslims are discouraged from doing and 5. Things that Muslims are forbidden to do.
The three sources named above are inviolate and incontestable but interestingly, many people, and that includes Islamic religious scholars interpret these sources differently. Going by this, I do not think the decision taken by Darul-Uloom is incontestable because it is their interpretation of the Shariah.
Imrana Bibi has said that she will follow whatever the Shariah says, even if it means living with her father in law as his wife and treating her current husband as her son. Considering her faith in the Shariah (and the faith also of so many rational, educated Muslims), I am convinced that the Shariah is just and an Islamic religious scholar with a broader vision can interpret the Shariah in a way that punishes the rapist and not the victim.

PS - By the way, shouldn’t all this hoo-hah about Muslim Personal law be invalid? I mean, rape comes under Criminal Law and therefore under the Indian Judiciary and NOT under the personal law of any particular community.