Recession – (foot) Balls to you

Final sequel to Champions -- Game Changers

Nothing derogatory about the heading, but pure play economics that is making even the shrewdest of businessmen look ordinary and their company’s balance sheet even worse. Let me throw some figures that have been paid to some footballers in the last few weeks. £80 million was the amount paid by Real Madrid the Spanish football club to buy Christiano Ronaldo from Manchester United. Close to £50 million paid by the same club to buy the Brazilian footballer Kaka. Where is recession, I can’t even smell it.

Ronaldo was voted the best English Footballer, the Best European footballer and the World footballer of the year, all three in the same year in 2008. The record transfer makes him the richest transfer in footballing history and has certainly changed the rules of the game, in context to what a player need to be paid for a transfer from another club. Mind it, he does not get even a penny for the deal and all the money goes to his older club. So what does he get – rumours are that he might be paid upto £ 3, 00,000 a week plus bonuses and please don’t forget the bucks he makes from endorsements. Let me do some math for you and convert them into Indian rupees. Real Madrid paid a whopping 640 crore rupees to buy him from Manchester United and pays him a salary of 2.5 crore rupees a week to play for them. Another news I read today that an English club, owned by Arabs were willing to pay an English footballer £4, 00,000 a week if his transfer deal goes through.

The amount Real Madrid have so far spent in the transfer window this year alone is £200 million, translating into 1600 crore rupees. The recently opened Worli sea link in Mumbai was built on a budget of 1300 crore rupees – Man!!, no wonder we are a poor country. We can’t even spend money on our infrastructure, in comparison to the money that gets spent buying football players in Europe.

Children across the globe want to become a Ronaldo or a Kaka, fanatics rush into stadiums to watch their games, TV viewership is astounding, the memorabilia sales of their clubs are unbelievable and all this because they are true champions. To add to this, I try and watch every Manchester United game, am a true fan you see (There is a saying in England – ‘You can even divorce your wife, but do not change the club you support’) and I have even bought memorabilia of the top 4 footballing clubs in England.

Mind blowing how champions become game changers in their field and influence the Junta.

Champions – Game Changers

This blog is a sequel to the previous one.

In the last one we read about Roger Federer, his successful and illustrious career and how difficult it is to decipher the functionality of a champion’s brain. In this blog let’s look at individual superstars from a team game and how they have changed the game on its head, both from a fanaticism and a financial stand point.

Ideally like any Indian am starting from cricket and certainly my favourite Sachin Tendulkar. All of you reading this blog know, how cricket in an undefined religion and one religion that unites this glorious country. Till the beginning of the nineties, crickets was just a game and only if you had the real talent were you allowed to play the game against education in India. The majority of the cricketers came from north India and the big towns and majorly dominated by, then Bombay. Education was always first to the middle class Indian, than cricket till a little wonder, a genius called Tendulkar arrived onto the big stage from the same cricketing city – Bombay.

He then really turned the rules of the game and is certainly, one big game changer not only for cricket in India but for Cricket and cricketers across the globe. His genius and his game, not only got him fame but financials the sport never imagined. If my memory serves me right, transworld international a sports consultancy headed by the lat Mark Mascarehnas signed him up for a record 960 crores, for a 5 year deal in the mid nineties. He pulled in crowds to the stadiums, TV viewership sky rocketed (Thanks to Cable TV) and the BCCI were raking in the moolah. Not that India was winning every major tournament, infact they won hardly a handful, but he re-christened a sport once called the gentleman’s game – more a pass time sport created by the royal English, to one where you had to compete to be the best, which helped to cash in for sure. The prize money of matches grew significantly and what, the victorious world cup winning Indian team made, was now being paid for Ranji trophy matches. Middle class families in India looked at an opportunity to push their boys into the sport and spend on them, and education, was now not the real front runner it used to be, at least when compared to the eighties. Boys just wanted to be a Tendulkar, parents wanted the moolah and viewers now want entertainment, thanks to T20 rather than cricket. Even if you hate him, you must salute this genius for changing the game to what it is today.

He certainly is a champion in my book.

In the next blog you will have a feel into international Club Football and what champions are made of.

Champions – Winners and Game Changers

Champions – the word resurrects and resonates POWER. The intent of this blog is look at how difficult it is to interpret what champions are made of and what could be inside their head, which separates them from the ordinary. The field am taking on in this blog in is international sport – an area of keen interest to me.

Let’s start with the latest headline to hit the sport’s fraternity – Tennis and Wimbledon. By the time this blog hits your mailbox, am certain you would have read about the remarkable win, Roger Federer had last night in the Wimbledon men’s finals beating Roddick. The win catapults him back to world No. 1 which he had for a consecutive 250 weeks plus – phenomenal for any individual. But that alone does not make him great, but to win 15 single’s men’s grand slams, making him the only one to achieve this feat makes him the greatest. This feat was achieved in front some of the best tennis stars the game has ever witnessed, for the likes of Sampras, Borg, Laver, Becker, Edberg and others, and in front of superstars of other sports like, Sachin Tendulkar, Micheal Ballack – the German football captain and Chelsea Midfielder and of course Sir Alex Ferguson of Manchester United.

So what makes Federer the champion? Books have been written trying to decipher what’s inside a champion’s mind, millions of analyses have gone into find the functioning of the brain, of a champion, but none have arrived with a true cut answer – we know how infinite and miraculous the human brain can be. Let me relate to a book I had read called ‘BLINK’, by Malcolm Gladwell, where the author through significant different researches tries to find an answer to the question we are talking about. He talks about how successful ‘SNAP’ judgements, made by human beings are, in comparison to the one’s we logically arrive at. Let me illustrate this with an example from a lay man’s life – do we logically probe ourselves before we propose to guy or a gal, its instinctive and that what blink is all about. To put the same into perspective, with respect to last night’s match, Roddick flinched twice – leading 6-2 in the second set tie breaker, allowing Federer to win the set and last game of the match. Both time Federer blinked to be successful. The second set win nearly demoralised Roddick out of the match. He was nearly mentally disintegrated by Federer’s play. Mental disintegration – a term very synonymous with the Australian cricket team and Steve Waugh.

Commentators and analysts often speak about the champion’s self belief in his abilities and self confidence. Let me throw something at you, totally out of the box, for you to chew – I believe, self belief in one’s own abilities, comes from not succumbing to one’s fear of failures, which is a direct relationship of being in the present and not relating to past events of one’s life. We have often heard commentators state a player being “In the Zone” – what does that mean? In pure terms, one being with oneself in that very moment of life as life happens, and not even contemplating a nano second about the past or the future.

Now let’s look at self confidence. It’s totally the reverse of what you just read. Self confidence arises from the fact that you had done a good job of the same event in the past. Putting it into perspective, Federer’s confidence arises from the number of wins he has had under his belt in the past years and hours of practise he has put in. It’s so paradoxical that, even ontology can be given a run. But to look deeper, we can argue that self confidence come from looking at the abilities that you have versus the task you have to render. If you look carefully, I have not used the word capability, as, this word arises from the comparison of your abilities to either your own past, or with a friend, a peer, a relative etc. So capability becomes an evil and does not allow you to be in the present or be in your zone, but be in the zone you are comparing yourself with.

So when we can’t decipher on how a champion illustrates his self belief or confidence or for, matter of fact, we can’t decipher the ideal meaning of self belief and self confidence how are we going to look into the functioning of a champion’s brain.

The struggle into this investigation continues and champions keep arising every moment.

The next blog will look at how these champions become game changers.

Kerala – The Monsoon has certainly arrived

It’s been a few weeks since the met department had signed off the arrival of the monsoon into Kerala, but I believe it was not until a few days earlier that the impact is being felt. There are two things about a monsoon. First is a no brainer – rains and thus cooling the temperature around you and giving a boost to the ecological and economic environment. The second is what am going to blog – the experience.

Monsoons are caused by the larger amplitude of the seasonal cycle of land temperature compared to that of nearby oceans. Strengthening of the Asian monsoon has been linked to the uplift of the Tibetan Plateau after the collision of India and Asia around 50 million years ago. Timing of the monsoon strengthening of the Indian Monsoon of around 5 million years ago was suggested due to an interval of closing of the Indonesian Seaway to cold thermocline waters passage from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean which is believed to have resulted in an increased sea surface temperature in the Indian Ocean. I guess this defines what a monsoon is and why it occurs on the Indian Ocean. To read in-depth about monsoons, you can visit the following website – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsoon.

It’s been a couple days since the rain has been constant and persistent, cooling the temperature and killing the humidity, allowing the inner temperature of your body to be constant and certainly keeping your mind calm. You might be thinking, I have lost it – Keeping your mind calm. The answer is yes, thanks to the serenity and the tranquility, the experience created by the rain when it falls and hits the ground over gods own country.

Let me share the wonderful experience I had this morning driving to work. Trust me, I have not had this pleasure so far – especially while driving to work. It certainly was overcast as I drove out my parking lot, of my flat complex heading towards NH 4, the driveway to work. As it should be, it started to drizzle, softly, quietly and so non-chalantly that the wipers in the car were not required but surely the petrichor certainly was filling up my nasals. The sky turned grey from white or light sky blue and within seconds opened up to what was now a downpour. I hit the junction on NH 4 to turn right towards technopark (You can’t define it as a techno – park), the climate around turned really grey and started moving towards shades of black, rain cluttering on your windshield, but the surrounding, reverberating with pastures of green. The green on either side of the road covered the surrounding, allowing the road to reflect the water droplets so prominently that you’re ‘wowed’ into a different world. It felt like the pathway to heaven opened with a black shiny carpet, interiored with greens on the side and grey on the top.

By the time I feel and experience this, the green disappears for a while exposing the greyed sky, fuming out water from the top as if the shower in a bath was broken and I suddenly feel I just walked out of a closed entity or more so a confinement. This experience is so scintillating, it can’t be written. With this experience, I can’t hear the honking trucks, feel the headlights penetrating my eyes from oncoming vehicles (remember it is dark that we need to switch our headlights on, though it is half nine in the morning), the illogical traffic sense (if there is one and sense in the right direction) of my way riders that usually make me fume and sweat even inside an air-conditioned car. It’s an exhilarating experience.

As I soak in the experience and feel the aura of the monsoon around me, I reach the gates of technopark. Technopark is just a name for all the companies situated inside, but ,no where is it close even to resembling one, especially if you come from the IT capital or other IT hubs of this country, where you can see yourself off any building as they are all concrete jungles built with glass all around them, that Saint Gobain would be proud of them. Once you enter the technopark, unless you drive into the side lanes where the buildings are located, you would have no sign of glass till you drive deep into the park to locate the other buildings. And even then there does not exist a building that boasts of only glassed environment that makes you feel that you are a specimen in a lab bottle or a worm in a tequila bottle.

The park itself is simmering green and nature is shining through, thanks to the pelting rain. The environment feels clean, smells green and you feel like a man wearing pure white that you actually don’t feel anything but yourself and the feeling of being one with Mother Nature. All dreams end when you wake and so does this experience as I turn in my car to a parking lot to get to work. The experience had to come to an end, but will live with me for ever and will be synonym with Kerala.