K World

Even though, all my optimist expectations on World Cup became true, I had a very pessimist expectations on outcomes of Indian win.

1. Twenty20 World Cup will be conducted once in every two years. Does that mean, once in two years, there are more chances of mobs burning effigies of cricketers or cricket board as well as state governments pouring money on cricketers.
2. Yuvi is given 1 crore as well as a Porsche 911 by BCCI for his 6 sixers on England and 70-run knock in Aussie match. India played like a team where Yuvi made his mark in 2 out of 6 matches, where as contributions of players like Gambhir, Uthappa, RP Singh, Irfan Pathan, Bajji and even Sreesanth were of greater use in remaining matches. We need to remember that Yuvi was indirect reason for the defeat with NZ giving 38 runs in 3 overs (20 odd runs in single over) runs in single over and scoring just 5 runs in the match. When each and every player played an equally important role in the series, those two giant goodies from the board went only to Yuvi which can certainly make remaining players think.
3. Goodies given to the players by their respective state governments is a different thing. But, this is made an issue by players of another game, Hockey. Indian Hockey Team, which won Asia Cup without losing a single match and with record performances like thrashing Sri Lanka with 20-0 certainly couldn’t withstand the step-motherly treatment for the national game by central and state governments and is now planning to go on a hunger strike.

When a go-straight brain like mine could see so many problems, I wonder what would those complicated brains perceive all this.

Taking all these complications into account, Indian Government either has to check all these goodies given “only” to cricketers or it should start giving bank checks with similar numbers on it to players of other games too.

Update: The complicated brains have started analysis on “Why was Team India in the back row ?” while the front row was occupied by great ministers of Maharashtra and greater BCCI crowd. Great to see that it became a political heavy weights’ meeting rather than the function to honor the World Cup winning team.

If you are sent here by a search engine when you were looking for the English Movie “Good Luck Chuck”, please click here.

Wondering whether a movie can bring Good Luck to a nation ? A definite logical answer to the question is “No”. Not Just “No”, but it’s “NO!!!”

But, let’s trace through this time line

• August 10, 2007 - Chak De India starring SRK is released
• August 29, 2007 - Football, India won Nehru Cup [1]
• September 9, 2007 - Hockey, India won Asia Cup [2]
• September 24, 2007 - Cricket, India won T20 World Cup [3]

Lets do the analysis on the above wins.

1. Football, I knew that India had a football team, but never knew that it can even win a cup. The only cup it wins is South Asian Football Federation Gold Cup participated by Maldives (165), Pakistan (179), Afghanistan (191), Sri Lanka (166), Bangladesh (175), Nepal (185), Bhutan (197) and of course India (145). The numbers in brackets are rankings given by FIFA to the national teams of respective countries. Don’t wonder if there are 197 nations in the world looking at Bhutan’s rank, there should be; atleast according to FIFA, there are 200 ranks and 208 nations. As per the above rankings, India should be the obvious winner of SAFF Cup. On the other hand, participant nations of Nehru Cup ’07 are Syria (123), Kyrgyzstan (149), Cambodia (178), Bangladesh (175) and India. Obvious finalists are India and Syria and India won with 1-0 score which no-one expected as India never reached Finals of Nehru Cup.

2. Hockey, despite being national game of India is often neglected. But this year, Asia Cup is a very special tournament for India as they entered as defending champions. India started this tournament with a very mediocre win of 1-0 on China. Later, India played at its best while thrashing Sri Lanka with 20-0, Thailand with 16-0. In final, they out performed Korea with 7-2, all the seven goals being field goals. India ended the tournament with 57 goals and just 5 goals against them without a single defeat.

3. Cricket, after the dismal performance at 2007 World Cup, no one expected India to win Twenty20 World Cup. Seniors understood that they can’t play this type of fast paced game and took leave from this tournament. Guess, this was the new beginning for the team with just love for the game and hardly any experience. Knocked out two great teams South Africa and Australia and won a thrilling match over the arch rivals Pakistan in finals. No other win can be sweeter than this.

Football, After 13 tries, Indian Team won Nehru Cup
Hockey, India thrashing Korea to defend title, not with Penalty Corners but with high quality Field Goals. BTW, Entire Chak De squad were there to support Team India for the final.
Cricket, After world cup first round exit, just after losing ODI series to England, with experience of JUST ONE International Twenty20 match, leaving seniors behind, with a captain who is leading his first tournament, with performances not by a single player, India WON the first Twenty20 Cricket World Cup. SRK was there on the final.

All this happened just after the movie is released. I’m being silly trying to convince that Movie could be the reason for India’s luck. But, I’m sure that all the three teams must have followed what SRK told in the movie.

Play for India first, then for the team, if anything is still left then play for yourself

Any Indian cricket fan can tell that this hardly happened in our team, till this tournament. Chak De India !

I always had hopes that India will reach finals of any tournament I thought I would never see them as champions. Finally, thanks to captaincy of Dhoni and God of luck; India did it.

Won final of a tournament - Made me happy
Final of World Cup - Made me damn happy
Final against Pakistan - I’m jumping with joy !!!

I jumped with joy as soon as India won, but I forgot that I’m sitting the living room where there is a fan above my head running at its highest speed. Result - India won, I had a very bad cut on my hand (I can see a nerve !!!) First thing to do in the morning is .. to consult a doctor.

Thanks to Dhoni, Gambir, Pathans, RP, Sreesanth, Jogi, Imran Nazir, Misbah for a great final. Thanks to Yuvi, RP, Irfan, Dhoni and Sreesanth for a great tournament. Thanks to Agarkar for staying outside final eleven. Even bigger thanks to Sachin, Sourav and Rahul for staying out of the tournament itself. BTW, to be very neutral, Pakistan was at its best today. They played a very good game - just, the God of Luck was looking at us.

Update : Cut was too deep. Had to go to doctor now itself. Came out with two stitches

The following is a technology related stuff and The Darker Side of Me and a very very very long “essay” about me. Be warned.

Gone are the days when I didn’t know how to shut down a windows PC. When I use to call those so-called “engineers” to fix my PC and shell out an extra buck to get some games installed on my box. I remember the day when my cousins made fun of me for switching off that PC as if the OS was DOS. Good old days and nights of “Age of Empire”. Hours and Hours of “Road Rash” and “Need for Speed”. One fine day, which almost changed my life in a smaller sense, a friend of my dad forgot the password for a word Document he kept and asked me whether I can do anything to find it.

It was the day, I saw the darker side of the Computing World, the security world. I searched in Google (that time, its a cool new search engine introduced by my cousin. Thank You Ark) to find out how password of a word document can be cracked. I managed to find one software which can crack it, but it was shareware. Then, I saw that it was software one has to buy, but my cousin Ark told me that there is a software named “Serials2K” which will have serial number for any software. I was pretty much impressed by the software, but, being little different, I wanted to know how the guys find those keys. My question was answered by a process named “Reverse Engineering“. But, it wasn’t enough for me, I wanted to learn how to do it. Then, I found a forum where some folks claimed to know that art and are teaching guys there. That forum had over 4000 members with weird names a.k.a handles. I became one of them and started learning about computers. But, my skills weren’t improving in the skill I wanted to learn (Reverse Engineering) but at Social Engineering. I became one of the moderators of the board, then one of the administrators of the board, then administered their IRC server. When having admin access to  the board, I learned PHP, Perl and Python. As part of my curriculum, I learned C, C++, Java, VB. Then, being at a board, I saw the culture of “clans” in the board, where another board members use to come to our board and spam/flame/do_crap at our board. Our answer was a simple deface of their site, which introduced me to the lowest level of computer security skills. Then, my interests changed to VIRUSes and then I collected source codes of 1000 viruses, through which I wanted to learn coding viruses but never earned those skills or simply never tried to be malicious.

Then, the greatest turn of my life came, when I was introduced to a site named “try2hack” which dealt with so-called “hacking” simulations. This is the start of the brighter side of my internet life. I left all those kiddie and illegal things along with those boards, closed my clans, ditched those emails, forgot those net-friends a.k.a clan mates (except one) and then I solved all of them within couple of weeks and then started looking for similar sites, then I finally found the site which helped me to learn so many things - Net Force.

Net-Force is the site which doesn’t support any illegal a.k.a hacking activities but it gives a very good simulation at the real stuff. There are 8 categories (Javascript, Java Applets, Cryptography, Exploits, Cracking, Programming, Internet and Steganography) with a total of 93 challenges. Challenges of various levels from basic tutorials to very hard challenges. I managed to solve 82 of them up to now. I learned something from each and every challenge and I’m glad that I learned them. The domain of challenges is so wide that you will learn atleast a little about a wide variety of topics.

I’m what I’m right now with little knowledge about a wide variety of topics - Jack of all trades. I never mastered anything up to now. But, I want to be a master in one. I’ve chosen two topics in which I want to be more than a Jack. One of them being XSS and another is SQL Injections. I started learning about XSS already. My progress is at XSSed. It is an archive of XSS vulnerabilities in various web applications as well as sites ordered by PageRank. I wish, one day, I will be a master at something.

23 March 2003, South Africa
Finals - World Cup Cricket. Dream of a nation and prestige for a nation. Dream shattered by The Mighty Oz.

22/23 September 2007, South Africa
Semi Finals - Twenty20 World Cup Cricket. A team of youngsters with most of them playing their first international series. On the other side, its The Mighty Oz, but without their kingpin Ponting. Odds of winning for the World Champions were double than that of India as per newspapers, former Indian cricketers etc etc.

Indians started slow, but Yuvi came out with a brilliant knock of 70 in 30 balls to help India in keeping a respectable target of 189 on the board. Aussies made a decent start and were on the winning edge till 14th over. Daemon named “Hayden” was walking down the pitch to hit the balls over the boundary line. Same thing happened in 2003, when Ganguly couldn’t do anything and gave up trying something new. This time Dhoni had a trick to support his bowlers. He kept just behind the wickets even for the pace bowlers to make sure that the batsmen won’t walk down the pitch and not only just hit sixes but also hit down the confidence levels of the bowlers. I don’t know whether this worked out or not as those sixes didn’t stop, but bowlers were atleast not on their worst confidence levels. Sreesanth was aggressive, extremely good in his bowling and sent two dangerous batsmen - Gilchrist and Hayden to pavilion. Bajji was very good in saving the runs. Indians were never tensed through out the game even when Aussies were in a commanding position of the game, thanks to new skipper Dhoni. They just played a comfortable game. Finally, its the pay back time. Indians took their revenge after four years by sending the Mighty Oz out of the tournament by winning over them for the first ever time in any World Cup.

I’m sure that Aussies are no Gods but daemons but, today’s match reminded me one quote from the movie Superman

For Surely As Night Follows Day, There Comes A Time When Gods Must Die

My optimist side of brain was correct in sensing the best ever World Cup final, Cricket can have - India Vs Pakistan. Pakistan never won on India in a world cup. The max they achieved was a tie in this world cup. Pakistan is playing extremely well. It undefeated in the total tournament. But, Now, my optimist side of the brain senses the best ever World Cup win India can have - A World Cup final win by defeating Pakistan. Lets see what’s going to happen. Good Luck Team India. Still, My biased heart loves you without Sachin and Sourav.