IPL and the Death of Test Cricket

So the Indian Premier League is back for the sixth edition. The players are making money and they’re happy. The franchises are making money and they’re happy.  BCCI is making (a hell lot of) money and they’re happy. Above all, we get to watch thrilling matches and a few very creative ads and we’re happy. But, what we are forgetting is that in between all this, Test cricket is slowly dying. Now, you might say, “It can never completely die away”. I agree to that. Test cricket will stay around forever. But what I’m saying is that, T-20 and more importantly, IPL has changed the way Test cricket is looked at and is played.

Who in their right mind says “No” to money? Atleast, not this gentleman who owns one of the teams in the league as well as heads the BCCI.

Before the IPL, I don’t think our national team’s captain, MS Dhoni would’ve thought of starting the innings with spin from both ends. However helpful that may be in getting the batsmen out of their comfort zone and getting them out, Dhoni right there killed the tradition of two fast bowlers running in from each end with the new, shiny ball in hand, swinging it this way and that and making the batsman edging it to one of the two slips or better still, edging it onto his own stumps.

Now that people have seen too much of T-20 in IPL, they find Test matches boring. “Who has the patience to watch a match for five days?” they say. And so, there are talks of making Tests 4-day long and making them day and night by the ICC. All these measures are just to try and make Tests more entertaining. But, as true cricket fans and purists will agree, the beauty of Test cricket is on a different level of its own. The meticulous planning, the strategies and the grit and the determination you need in Tests cannot and should not be compared to those in T-20 matches. T-20s are just for entertainment and luck plays a huge role in them. In T-20 matches, the bowler gets a measly 4 overs and before he even begins to read the pitch, he’s done. The batsmen on the other hand, have to always find the boundaries no matter what.

I’m not trying to say that the IPL is wrong or anything of that sort. All I am saying is, it has changed Test matches to a level that it shouldn’t have and there’s no turning back now. If the current trend continues (it most probably will), very soon we shall be having Powerplays in Test matches too which shall be painful to watch.

Well, I’m a hypocrite and I will enjoy the IPL contrary to what this blog might suggest. So starting tonight at 8, let us all witness this slow death of Tests called IPL and enjoy the madness it brings throughout the next couple of months while we yell at our mothers for changing the channel to their soaps! As the official ad says, “Koi nahi bachega!” (nobody can escape it. Or as I like to see it, nobody shall survive, especially the Tests)

PS: As I said, I’m a hypocrite and even after all this rambling against the IPL, almost all my blogs (however few) over the next month or so will be about the IPL. So come back soon to read a few blogs that bitch about teams other than RCB (mostly CSK and MI) and a few blogs that will make you happy in case you’re an RCB fan.

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Till my next blog, namaste!

Annoying stuff on Facebook (Really annoying)

Almost everybody I know has a Facebook account and it is great and all that. But, I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to tell you about the things on Facebook that are annoying (if you are smart, you have figured that out by now 😉 ). Some of these have been incorporated by Facebook recently and I frankly see no point in doing it.

1. Like/Share to Help/Save Dying People/Animals: I’m sure you can find a ton of this on your Wall everyday and I bet you are as annoyed as me with it (unless you are one of the people who shares/likes this crap. If you are, please leave a comment here saying “I’m one of them”. It’d really help in finding you guys.) Well if it was true, it’d look somewhat like this I guess

And then when he didn’t get those forty likes, it’d be

Just read it as “your little girl” 😉

Doesn’t really make sense does it? Yeah. That’s exactly the reason why it is annoying.

2. Game/App Requests: Let me tell you a story. A boy got 17 notifications one day and became very happy. But, his grief had no bounds when he opened the notifications, and saw that they were all “——— sent you a request in <insert some crappy game’s name here> “. -The End- Can you guess whose story it is? Yes, mine (perhaps yours too). And I seriously want to tell the people sending me the requests how I feel about them but I cannot as they’re pretty close to me. I just want to let everyone know through this blog (okay not everyone. Atleast all the people who read the blog), I’m never accepting any of those requests. Ever.

Now for the stuff recently incorporated.

3. Facebook asking me how I feel: Very recently, Facebook has started doing this

Yeah, Facebook is acting as if it’s my best friend. Well it isn’t! If the status box were two-way, I mean if I could talk back to Facebook through it, this is probably how it would go

Yeah, guess the two-way thing wasn’t the brightest idea.

4. The poop emoticon:

Seriously, Facebook? I mean like, are you frickin’ serious? The first thing you introduce on New Year is literally crap? So this emoticon has become a rage and wherever you go, whatever post you see, there has to be atleast one person who would have commented the emoticon. At first it was funny and a couple of weeks later, it has become annoying to the extreme.  Please take off the damn emoticon, Facebook and I swear I’ll tell you how I feel every single day! Please?

That sums up my list of annoying crap on Facebook. If you have any more stuff that you find annoying on Facebook, write it here. Even otherwise, leave a comment and tell me how you felt about the blog (please do! You don’t even need to Sign In).

Thanks for reading! Adios!

PS: And if you’d like to go back to annoying Facebook, just click this 🙂

The Blog’s Name

Hello! I’m blogging after a really long time. And when I say really long, I do mean really long. Also, I’m no expert at English so in case you are a grammar Nazi, please forgive any mistakes that you might find in the following lines.

Okay, you must be surprised or atleast mildly amused after looking at the blog’s name. If you say no, you must surely be lying.

For the blog, I wanted a name which could be abbreviated to 4A or 4B or 4C and so on. “Why 4?” you ask? “Why not?” I ask back. 3 would be too few and 5 would be too many. 4 is perfectly perfect. Anyways, I could’ve chosen “Words of Wisdom by a Wannabe Wizard” or “Needless Nonsense by a Natural Nerd” or “Tall Tales by a Terrible Trickster” (that one is indeed terrible) or even “Awesome Anecdotes by an Awful A………” you get the drift. But I chose “Random Ramblings of a Raving Rascal” out of the infinitely many names that I could’ve come up with. In case you are interested in knowing why, read on.

The thing is, as I already said, I wanted a name for the blog (which I was planning to write since forever) which could be abbreviated and was insanely whacky. I always had “Random Ramblings” in my mind. But, I decided it wouldn’t be whacky enough though. So, what did I do? I started thinking of English words that began with ‘R’ and also described me (no words in English or any other language can perfectly describe a person but I tried to think of the words that did a pretty good job). The two words I could come up with were “raving” and “rascal”. So, that completed the name of the blog and also pretty perfectly described what the blog was going to be- haphazard, confusing writings by an irrational scoundrel!

That, my friends, is how this blog got named.

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Please write in your suggestions, comments, anything else by clicking right here. There’s no need to even sign in. Please take a moment and do it!

I’m hoping to improve my writing in future blogs.

Ciao!

I am Lazy to Write a Blog

You might be wondering about the title of the blog, how can he write a blog if he’s lazy to write one? Well, I want to write a blog but I’m lazy to do it. For example, you want to eat junk food but are too lazy to go to the shop (okay, this example applies to me but I don’t know about others).

Anyways, I decided to write a blog on how I’m lazy to write a blog. Weird eh? Yup, that’s me.

So let me list out the things which don’t allow me to write the blog:

1. Too lazy to switch the computer on: My computer being an old one, takes about five minutes to cough, sputter and wheeze itself to life. But when you are waiting in front of an empty screen flashing No Signal, even five minutes seem like an eternity and I end up going back to watching TV. Even if there’s nothing interesting on it, atleast it won’t make me wait.

2. There are other things on my computer which require me to mash buttons and kill enemies as opposed to thinking and typing grammatically correct sentences which are coherent: Yeah! There are games-a lot of them-that distract me from the task at hand, writing. Now writing requires a lot of concentration on my part unlike games in which you are given a set of controls that you need to press (or mash, if that’s what you do) again and again-no second thoughts at all!

3. Facebook: Yes this is the biggest distractor. Facebook seems damn boring but once you get sucked into the FB vortex, it is impossible to get out of it unless your mom threatens you or there’s a power failure.

So that was the list of things that make me lazy to blog and my blog about why I don’t blog ends here.

Gracias amigos for reading this! Hope to blog again soon, if I am not lazy.

The Program Which felt Like Hell

So we got a homework today-a C++ program. I do like programming a lot so expected this one to be a cakewalk. How wrong I was! It ran to 207 lines. That does sound insignificant. But it is easier said than done. Hope our teacher sees this post and doesn’t give us such excruciating assignments again.

Hell! Are you even reading this?

 if(answer==ye..

Sorry my mind hasn’t adjusted to normalcy yet. What I wanted to say was, if you’re answer is yes, thanks a lot for reading my first blog 😀

I promise the once in the future will be better 🙂

Goodnight. Ciao.