Cricket,Blogging and Morons

The Fake IPL Player (FIP) saga finally came to an end with the blogger posting a 'shadow video' but refusing to reveal his identity as he had promised earlier.

The comments on the blog in response to this final post make for interesting reading.Most people are livid with FIP for the anticlimax, but as he himself said in the video 'It was all a shadow play'.Its rather amusing because FIP has managed to make everyone look and feel like a bunch of morons.But more of that later.

There is lots of speculation by people who have commented on the blog as to the identity of FIP.The most popular guesses are

1.Aakash Chopra (as he had his tournament cut short by the KKR management and has written cricket columns before)
2.Rohan Gavaskar (because of the Bengal Connection,and because he is part of the ICL)
3.Sreeram Veera, Cricinfo Journalist (I don't really know why)
4.Rahul Bose (because the profile of the person in the video as well as voice and intonation are uncannily like Rahul Bose)

I don't have an opinion on any of these speculations, though I must say that when I saw the video, I immediately thought of Rahul Bose.

The evidence seems to suggest that only a group of people as opposed to a single person could have come up with a blog like this.And its very difficult to say who they are.

If we look at the quality of writing and the brand of humour and wit which the blogger has used used,its quite clear (with due apologies to Kolkata Knight Riders(KKR) team members in particular , and cricketers in general) that the blog has not been written by a member of the KKR.Articulate cricketers from the sub continent are as rare as English batsmen who play spin well.But it does not rule out the involvement of KKR players or insiders as sources of information.A different person with the writing skills could have written and posted the blog.

Whether the whole thing was an elaborate fake or not,it was certainly entertaining (some of the pseudonyms are really good!).It also served a more useful purpose in highlighting some facts about show business and cricket which Indian society already knows but feels embarrassed to admit because it shows us up as the real morons in the whole scheme of things or exposes our idols in a bad light.Two of these facts worth noting are :

1.Whether its movies or cricket, all those massive amounts of money ultimately generated come from our pockets,because we spend time in front of the TV or both time and money in cinema halls.We don't earn a single paisa.If that does not make you feel like a moron, I wonder what will.
It follows that people in the entertainment business will always try to manipulate our minds and our eyeballs so that they can cash in.One of the things I suspected from the beginning while watching the IPL coverage was echoed by FIP in a post : he claimed the producers are only showing the crowded parts of the stadium and the 'atmosphere' and 'excitement' which is gleefully pointed out by commentators in every game is usually staged.For me, that is only a few steps away from orchestrating the entire match (I did not use the word 'fixing'!).And the mid innings strategy break would certainly be a great help in doing that.

2.You can make rubbish films and still make money from them because we the Indian people,being morons,give so much adulation to the Bollywood crowd that we go out and watch any bilge they throw at us. But cricket is a different matter.It is a sport,and in a sport there are winners and losers.And even morons don't like losers.
So you can throw the money ,buy the best bunch of players (KKR is an excellent team on paper), throw some more money,go for a massive media blitz and still end up at the bottom of the table.Why ? Because cricket is a sport.Its not a three hour Bollywood film which has had the same simple formula for success for decades : stars + plagiarism +marketing = HIT!
Let that be a lesson to KKR and Mr Shah Rukh Khan.Fittingly by now all three teams with the Bollywood connection have been booted out of the tournament.

The last post from the blogger was entitled "FIP RIP".Now that the IPL is almost over, the blog will indeed rest in peace, and whether it was a fake or not, one hopes that after reading it all of us morons become a little smarter.

Lies,Damned Lies and Election Issues

Let us rewind for a moment to the aftermath of the ‘Monkeygate’ incident during the Border - Gavaskar trophy in Australia last year. As the media started going to town about the scandal, I received one of those SMS jokes, which I thought was quite funny. It said that Harbhajan didn’t call Symonds ‘monkey’; he used the common North Indian pejorative, ‘Teri ma ki….’. This joke was doing to the rounds much before the Indian team made its official stance on the matter. To my complete surprise, Sachin Tendulkar gave the exact explanation of the incident during the hearing. Is it possible that someone in the Indian Team management saw the joke and identified it as a wonderful opportunity?

A similar thing has just happened with L.K.Advani going to the press about colossal amounts of illegal Indian money that is supposedly sitting in Swiss banks. Read about it in The Hindu and Zee News

Why do I compare this with Indian Cricket’s ingenious excuse for Harbhajan?

Back in October/November 2008, a similar story about Indian money in Swiss Banks was going around on newsgroups, blogs and chain mails. Read a sample here and here.

The main thing which was wrong about the chain mail is the fact that there is nothing called the Swiss Banking Association. There is a Swiss Bankers Association and it has not published any report dealing with illegal money

This however, did not prevent the BJP and Mr. Advani from picking up a figure ($1400 billion) from the chain mail and making a lousy attempt to create an election issue out of it.

Inexplicably, when speaking to the press, Mr. Advani claimed that the figures were from Wikipedia, describing it as a ‘most credible’ source of information. However Wikipedia does not have any such information!

Since the borrowed figure from the chain mail had to be supported, two of the members of the committee set up by the BJP to look into the issue came to the fore to explain it. Prof.Vaidyanathan from IIM Bangalore and S Gurumurthy, who is described by The Hindu as an ‘RSS ideologue’. S Gurumurthy’s article is basically a rehash of Prof Vaidyanathans interview.

In this interview, he explains how he arrives at the figure, based on findings of the Global Financial Integrity study ‘Illicit Financial Flows from Developing Countries: 2002-2006 authored by Dev Kar and Devon-Cartwright Smith.

Lets take a closer look at what the learned Professor says (His comments are in small font)

1. This report shows that the average amount moved from India annually during 2002-06 is $27.3 billion. This means, during the five-year period, the amount taken away is $27.3 billion x 5 = $136.5 billion.

This is correct, and we will agree with the professor, even though the annual figure is closer to $25 billion (The data is presented as a bar chart). But let us not split threads.

2. The share of Swiss banks in this dirty money is a third of the global aggregate; some $45 billion out of the 136.5 billion stashed away from India would have been hoarded in these years in Swiss banks. This appears in page 30 of the report mentioned above.

Really? A third of dirty money goes to Swiss Banks? Just how Professor came up with this proportion is mystifying. Secondly, unless the professor is talking of some report other than the GFI study that is available in the public domain (link given above), page 30 of the report mentions nothing about Swiss banks. It gives the profile of Raymond W Baker, Director of GFI. In fact, the words ‘Swiss Bank’ do not appear even once in the report.

3. The important point is that this is only for five years. More amounts were stashed away during the Nehruvian socialist regime. So the loot for 55 years would be several times the amount. In fact, in those days, the Indian rupee commanded a better value per US dollar, so fewer rupees could get a dollar. Hence the estimation that Indian money stashed away may be of the order of $1.4 trillion.

Since he is a professor of Finance at one of India’s premier business schools, we expect Prof Vaidyanathan’s basic math to be correct, and the magic number of $45 billon derived mysteriously above multiplied by 55 years will give us about $500 billion, the lower estimate quoted by Advani. That’s nowhere close to the $1400 billion figure quoted in the chain mail and used as an upper estimate by Prof. Vaidyanathan. Isn’t there a difference of $900 billion? Simple – blame it on the evil socialists and the exchange rate!

So what’s the story? The most simple explanation is given by this blogger in a comment on his blog “The fact is - these boys simply took a figure from a chain email. When the press release came out - there was no mention of GFI or Raymond Baker. All they said was Wikipedia - which does not have the info in the first place. When their hoax was caught - the IIM-A professor quickly juggled his figures - like multiplying GFI approximates by a factor that fitted in (55 years or 60 years) and simply brought the figure to match the hoax email”

Bibek Debroy has written this article, which effectively dismantles the hoax and exposes the arguments of both Vaidyanathan and Gurumurthy.

Let me end this article with a reference to another SMS joke. This joke attributed the collapse of Bear Stearns to the large number of IIM graduates recruited by it prior to its collapse. Given that Prof. Vaidyanathan is professor of Finance at IIM Bangalore, his inept jugglery at trying to arrive at the chain mail figure raises the possibility of this SMS joke, like the Harbhajan joke, coming true. Lets hope it doesn’t! And let’s hope that we will see politicians talking more about real issues and not about Internet hoaxes.

Optinomics

A reader of the Economist magazine while commenting on an article about the Indian economy has just coined an interesting word – Optinomist, meaning ‘optimistic economist’! (Read the article and the comments)

Will the Indian Economy suffer because of the global recession? A number of articles in the press that address this question fall in the ‘Optinomics’, rather than the Economics category. There are a number of standard points in any Optonomist argument but I would like to address the most common one, which goes something like this:

-India has a large domestic market which generates a strong internal demand
-Exports contribute to only 15-20 % of India’s GDP,

Hence growth will not be affected by the downturn in countries like the USA.

A good example of this logic is Shashi Tharoor’s article for the Daily Star (Lebanon), which is entitled ‘The global recession will stop at India's border’.

India’s dependence on the global economy is not limited only to trade in goods and services. So while it is true that India generates a strong internal demand and does not rely heavily on exports, it does rely heavily on foreign funds.

Shashi Tharoor says, “Investors are returning, and foreign direct investment inflows this fiscal year are set to exceed the $25 billion received in 2007-2008.”

That sounds reassuring, but what about Indian companies ? Apart from domestic bank credit and capital markets,they depend on ECBs/FCCBs ,ADRs/GDRs and Private Equity as sources of funds. Let us take a look at what has been happening with ECBs during the last two calendar years. RBI data throws up an alarming trend: a drop in borrowings from $33 billion in 2007 to $ 22 billion in 2008.A month by month comparison for the two years gives us a better picture

Source: Reserve Bank of India, External Commercial Borrowings

The reason for this huge drop is quite obvious: it is due to higher cost of funds, cautious bankers, and beleaguered financial institutions; in other words, the global recession.

It not only ECBs which will have an effect on growth. This article in the Financial Express based on a report by SMC Capital, tells us that ADRs/GDRs by Indian companies have also shown a sharp decrease.

The article goes on to tell us “In a nutshell, the ability of Indian corporate to raise funds via high profile instruments such as ADRs, GDRs, ECBs, FCCBs, IPOs, Private Equity has fallen from $ 63.17 bn in 2007 to $ 33.73 bn in 2008 to date, indicating a fall of -46.61%.”

With a US$ 30 bn shortfall in funds as compared to the last period, we cannot afford to swallow the Optonomist line and believe that the recession will ‘stop at India’s border’.

Voting - Right or Duty ?

Chain mails and SMSs have been doing the rounds for the past few months about 'Section 49-O',by which the Indian voter can exercise his or her right not to vote.

There some vital points in those mails and SMSs that were that were incorrect, and some more which were omitted, which are :

1.49-O is a rule in The Conduct of Elections Rules, 1961, not a part of the Constituion of India
2.There will be no re-poll if the number of 49-O 'non-votes' is more than the votes for any candidate.
3.The Electronic Voting Machines do not have an option for registering a non vote ; a person who decides to register a non vote will have to inform the presiding officer.This is a violation of the principle of secrecy of the ballot.
4.The Election Commission has made proposals in 2001 and 2004 for amendment of the Rules 22 and 49B of the The Conduct of Elections Rules, 1961 to enable negative or neutral voting,but nothing has been done so far.

Read the text of Rules 22, 49B and 49-O

The issue arising out of 49-0 is whether neutral or negative voting is simply a waste of a vote or a legitimate protest.

What does the electorate do if faced with the choice of voting in a dynastic political party with a long record of sycophancy,corruption and ineptitude on one hand,and on the other, a party which is the creation of a right wing extremist group ,capable of hold the public attention only by fuelling communal hatred ? While neither of the two are likely to come to power on their own , the next coalition government will be led by one of these parties and the choice lies between them.

On a different note ,what if one feels that none of the candidates in one's constituency (irrespective of their party affiliations) are deserving enough to represent the constituency in Parliament ?

The answer ,if there is one ,lies in whether the act of voting is considered as a right of the citizen , or a duty.

Article 326 of the Constitution of India says that a person "shall be entitled to be registered as a voter" subject to qualifications of age,soundness of mind etc. It can thus be inferred that voting in India is a right, not a duty like it is in 34 other countries where it is considered compulsory.Accordingly,the electorate in India should have a right not to vote as well.

However, as noted above, the proposals of the Election Commission are on the back burner for a long time, and that the right not to vote is non existent,or at least severely curtailed, under the current provisions.

If you want to do something about this,go to http://www.49-o.info/

About this blog

On this blog, I will be offering perspectives on contemporary issues in politics, economics,history,culture,art,entertainment, education,media and a host of other aspects from an Indian perspective.