Ten wickets in an innings

When Anil Kumble took 10 wickets in an innings against Pakistan at Kotla, he become only the 2nd player to take all the 10 wickets in an innings.

Watching him among the spectators apparently was a British businessman by the name of Richard Stokes. He was at Kotla after the lunch break and saw Kumble get his Perfect Ten.

So why is Stokes deserving a mention here?

Forty three years earlier, Jim Laker took Test cricket’s first first-ever ten in an innings by a bowler! Laker had taken 10 wickets against Australia in the Ashes in 1956 playing at Old Trafford in Manchester. Stokes then ten years old, had accompanied his father to Old Trafford to see Laker those 10 wickets!!!

Now what are the odds a person seeing the first two 10 wicket haul in test cricket which occurred 43 years apart in 2 different continents!!!

The Return of the "RAJ"

You can still find the traces of British Raj in India even after the Britishers left in 1947. There are skeletons in every cupboard in a government department. However, they are in a decline because the government does seem to do some work these days and the babus do open these cupboards once in a while and the skeleton fall off and is lost or in case of computerisation of departments, thrown along with the cupboard and bound to a fate of never to be opened.

 

However, a new form of the Raj is back. It is the obsession of every Indian male living overseas (and probably in India too) to shorten his name to Raj. I do not understand why this obsession, but just about everyone wants to be called Raj. The various names that have taken the abridged form of Raj include some bizarre and crazy ones.

 

Here are a few (and these are all I have known or come across):

• Rajat as in Rajat Raina or Rajat Gupta
• Rajesh as in Rajesh Jain or Rajesh Khanna
• Rajiv as in Rajiv Pant or Rajiv Gandhi
• Rajeev as in Rajeev Motwani or Rajeev Bhatia (aka Akshay Kumar)
• Rajkumar as in Dr.Rajkumar or Dr.Rajkumar
• Rajendra as in Rajendra Shrestha or Dr.Rajendra Prasad
• In fact even the Raju that you find in almost every street corner in Andhra is now calling himself Raj, which incidentally is the surname/title (like the Rao's and Reddy's) and not really the name!!!

The attempts by certain colleagues in the US to make one Rajy, which is a short of Rajyalakshmi, to Raj was met with an immediate correction that it was indeed Rajy and prefers to be called so and not Raj (only to be called Georgie the next time :)).

 

This really is the return of the "Raj". And it does scare you (when I first saw Raju shortened to Raj, trust me, it did scare me).

 

Note 1: In case you have not figured it out. All the first instances of names I have given as examples are the ones that came up when I did a search for those names on the internet and clicking on the results led to a proper website and not a dead URL. The alternate names are those of famous personalities to have donned that name. Except that in case of Rajkumar the first search result was of the famous kannada actor Rajkumar. In case you forgot, he is the same actor whose death led to violent scenes in B'lore, which only amused people living outside Bangalore, because they couldn't relate to the violence (or Rajkumar).

 

Note 2: Some might argue that I was wrong in putting Rajeev Bhatia next to Rajeev Motwani because Rajeev Motwani deserves to be treated the same way as Rajkumar (famous enough to be allowed to stay on his own) but Rajeev Bhatia being a lesser known of a famous Bollywood star, I thought let me impart a bit of a trivia to the inane readers here.

 

Note 3: In case you were wondering, Rajeev Motwani is a professor at Stanford and I think the professor who funded the first servers in Stanford university campus to host the "back rub" project developed by the students he was mentoring.

 

Note 4: Rajendra could have also been Rajendra Kumar, the actor, but I preferred Dr.Rajendra Prasad the first Indian President, for sake of Bihari pride, so what if he was the president 60 years ago.

 

Note 5: So now you ask me what is "back rub"...go figure it out.

 

So are there any Raj's that you have seen return?

London Tube - Services Disrupted

If you commute in the London Underground delays are very common. The usual reasons of these delays are things like signal failure or fire alert.

The following was given as the cause of service disruption today:

"NORTHERN LINE: Suspended southbound only from Camden Town to Kennington via Bank due to a person being under a train at Borough."

I think what they are trying to say is that either someone fell on the tracks or the train ran over someone. Doesn't "a person being under a train" kind of imply that a person is under the train and not coming out, or a person is there and we do not know where the person has come from. Somehow, that does not sound right, am sure there is another way of describing the incident instead of saying "a person being under a train". It just sounds a bit odd and strange/funny.

The "small world" phenomenon

When I was a consultant in Australia, I was working on a 6 week CRM business case at a leading tobacco company. Two weeks ago at a hotel lobby in Istanbul I met Gee, one of the persons I was working very closely with who was on the customer team helping us with the business case.

 

I could never have imagined meeting Gee ever again unless I went to Aus. but to my surprise I actually meet him in Istanbul of all the places. Gee has quit the tobacco company and now works for a consulting house. Is based in London but spends most of his time in Istanbul.

 

Needless to say we ended up saying "What a small world!!!".

 

So, when was the last time you said "it is such a small world" to someone. 

 

Here are some strange "small world" incidents I have come across or heard of:

 

An ex-colleague of mine in Aus said he had come across a university friend from Australia at a hot dog stand in New York

 

This is about a friend, again from Australia, who was from a small town in Scotland of some 100 people. One day she met a girl from her town, who used to live down the street from her house in that small town in Scotland. She meet her friend in a small non-descript lane in St. Kilda, Melbourne (no not the dodgy side ;), but by the beach).

 

As a record of sorts, in my 10 months at France, I came across 3 people all of who knew a common friend through unrelated connections (ex-colleague of husband, son of a close family friend, elder brother of classmate). It was almost like having a fan club.

 

A close friend in Australia was the high school classmate of a close friend from France. I managed to link them up because both had spoken about their high school (in Kerala) adventures to me.

 

PS: However, Cherickel, I must say, sadly the possibility of finding an acquaintance in Oktoberfest failed.