What we need to learn from the Aussies.

Over the past couple of years, we have had several on-field incidents between cricket players from India and Australia. There is one point that we need to carefully notice and that is the fact that invariably it has been the Indian players who have been fined and banned. Rarely have the Australian players lost any percentage of their match fee or been banned from playing in any matches. Be it Harbhajan being banned in Monkey-gate, or be it Gambhir being banned for elbowing Shane Watson, or be it Zaheer Khan being fined for taunting Hayden after his dismissal in the second test of the ongoing test series between the two nations, its always been our very own Indian players at the receiving end.

Is there something we Indians need to learn from the Aussies? I guess we need to learn one very important thing and that is "HOW NOT TO GET CAUGHT?" The Australians have mastered this art all too well. It was Shane Watson who started to flare Gambhir up, with Simon Katich also joining in. It was a sensational reply from Gambhir with a hammering pull shot off Watson's bowling on his way to scoring a dazzling double century. But on his way to the landmark, he also left a blackmark in the form of the elbowing incident.

Mike Hussey has accused Gambhir of being on the lookout for opportunities to intimidate players from the opposition. Now what he does not realise, or probably does not want to mention is that Gambhir has been made to think like that because of comments from the opposition. He is still a young player and the young blood in his veins seem to be flaring him up. Rarely do we notice the experience lads like Dravid, Ganguly or Sachin react in such a manner. They have been there, done that, and know very well how to tackle the situation.

The Australians have somehow become experts at sledging their opponents and provoking them into sayiong and doing things that warrant legal action, while they get let off with only a word from the umpires on the field. When the players are questioned about their integrity, they lack the patience and composure to answer the questions in a dignified manner- Ponting of course. They call the opposing captain's complaints unwarranted, even if a player from their team spits at a player from the opposition- Lara's complaint about Mcgrath spitting on Griffith.

If I am not mistaken I think Ponting made a comment when Ishant Sharma was dismissed as the nightwatchman in the second innings of the third test. It sounds funny does it not?! Of all the people to sledge after dismissing, it has to be Ishant Sharma, the tailender. I guess Ishant will be sensible enough to take that as a compliment to his batting skills. I think the Indian players need to learn the art of not getting caught for any aggression from the Aussies, or give up any aggression and stay calm like the seniors in the team, or do it the best way- let the bat and the ball do the talking.

An interesting final test on the cards, lets hope we bring home the Border-Gavaskar from Oz land. Its been wuite a while since we had it here.

Life's Good here...

Finally, I get some time to write something. Life on the busy lane has started for me, with classes on four days of the week, from Monday to Thursday and part-time job and Seminars taking over Friday and the weekend. I do not have any day which is completely free and I am surprisingly not unhappy about it. I guess with the weather getting colder by the day I do not wish to venture out and see the tourist locations on offer in the North East.

After the initial homesickness and loneliness life now feels very good. I guess one of the main reasons is the fact that I am enjoying my courses and class work. The teaching here is very good and more than how well they teach in class, their ability to make you work towards deadlines in the form of assignments and homeworks gives the additional push required to make you learn the subject well. Only now do I understand how all the toppers, Fundoos and so called Padips(Nerds) felt while being good at what they did best. It is actually a great feeling to learn on your own and do the assignments for the following class.

In my Statistics course, I am proud to say I am among the students who understand the subject well and do the assignments with relative ease. To my surprise, well actually to me shocking surprise, people here are using even my solutions and guidance to complete their assignments and to prepare for the weekly quizzes in class. A feeling that cannot be easily explained takes over when such a thing happens. It was not so long back that I, as a student of NIT, Trichy, used to rely upon others for the assignment and not care one bit about doing even a little part of it on my own. We used the few hours just before submission deadline to copy down from the people who had spent a night or two completing it. Sometimes we even managed to persuade the teacher to postpone the submission date for the simple reason that we had been lazy enough to not even copy the assignments.

Well, coming from that system I choose to look at the situation here in the US as a welcome change, because the primary reason I am here for is to study. Only while doing these courses do we people in the India also realise how monotonous our system in India is. Even mathematics was a subject which was made theoretical by the teaching methods and there was no effort taken to make the students develop an interest in the subject. If such a thing had been established in our system then I could have probably waived off an entire Statistics course here and taken up another course of my choice. But, the fact that I did not put in a complete effort during my under-grduation in this course has led me to take up the course and learn it properly on this occasion.

As for my part-time job, well I finally have permanent shifts at a Dining hall( The US version of our Indian college Mess) and my job involves handling anything and everything that people eat. Being a vegetarian, I initially expected that it would not be a comfortable and pleasant experience, but the fact that we handle all the stuff using gloves and also that all the food is processed and refrigerated, nullifies any odour the food stuff may have. On the whole I have no qualms about my work apart from that it does take up my weekend and also that it is a tiring job. Working in the salad bar can be fun, as some of my friends working in other universities' dining halls will agree, because it involves cutting nice fruits and vegetables and since the work involves all fresh items, the job in itself feels fresh.

Well, I have my dining hall shift starting in half an hour. Though its only a 5 minute walk from the library I am in, I will be going early so as to avail the luxury of enjoying free food in the dining hall. It is a tricky proposition because we need to figure out which stuff is vegetarian and which is not. That is what takes a while. :)