How India’s T20 World Cup Win Changed Indian and World Cricket

“I was looking at the end of my career when T20 came in. I played my first T20 for Surrey. Yes, World Cup victory in 2007 changed the entire scene. I played 3 IPLs. The first one was a major challenge. While it took me 4 overs to warm up otherwise, I had to produce results in 4 overs in IPL. It was said that the RCB (Royal Challengers Bangalore) was the best test team of the century. Everything was against us.”, Anil Kumble quipped in his inimitable style. Continue reading “How India’s T20 World Cup Win Changed Indian and World Cricket”

Perilous Interventions – The Use of Force and the Continuing Chaos

“India’s aspirations to become a permanent member of the UN security council is realistic and doable”, says, Hardeep Singh Puri, Minister of Housing and Urban Affairs during his conversation with Ambassador P.S. Raghavan at the Bangalore Literature Festival. The session was on the back drop of his book ‘Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and the Politics of Chaos’. Having had a 40 years long momentous career in diplomacy, the Minister spoke about his time in the UN Security council as representative of India and India’s diplomatic relationship with major countries across the globe. Continue reading “Perilous Interventions – The Use of Force and the Continuing Chaos”

Conversations with People not like Us

Madan Padaki, co-founder & CEO of 1Bridge, a last-mile services platform for Rural India was right when he said, “Conversations today are having a different meaning altogether. There is so much of impatience and distrust in conversations these days”. He was in discussion with Arun Maira, Former Member of Planning Commission of India and author of ‘Listening for wellbeing: Conversations with people not like us’. The book talks about how to have conversations with people who are different from us and have a different perspective.

Arun says the trigger to write the book came when his grandson pointed out that he did not answer the woman who was knocking at his car’s window begging for money. Arun had not even realized that someone was knocking. He says it was a shocking self- revelation about how he has been conditioned to not listen. Effective communication is not just about conveying your message across rightly but also about listening to the message being conveyed. Communication is incomplete without listening. Arun says, his friend who was surprised to learn that his brother was an ardent supporter of Trump was probably not listening to the conversations with his brother during family gatherings.

Arun quotes Tagore from Gitanjali,
“Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls”.

He says the consequence of not having a conversation has resulted in the divisions of the world as it is today. The structures of social media are only making the walls tighter every day. People are friends with likeminded people and are not ready to indulge with people who are different.

He quotes from Tagore again,
“Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit”

He talks about how the mind today has been trained to think fast that we have lost the ability to thinking slow. Thinking slow, he says, helps you with empathy and compassion.

Arun remarks that the media houses today are yelling at each in debates and discussion. Everyone yells and it looks like a tribal war. He wonders which one of them is listening.

Dalai Lama who wrote the foreword for Arun’s book observed that listening is first of the two wisdom tools advocated by Buddhism. The other two being contemplation and meditation. The way yoga which is about conscious breathing can help in healing a lot of ailments, something as simple as listening can fix the problems of the world.

Arun leaves his audience with a very profound message about listening. In his own words, the cultivation of skills for deeper listening begins with the listening to the stranger within us. How true can that be!

Death by Litigation – The Perils of Business Reporting

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta – a leading Indian journalist and a political analyst, quite amusingly quoted the abbreviation ‘SLAPP’, as if it were one of his favourite jargons from the Oxford dictionary. For a journalist like Guha, SLAPP or Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation is no fun actually. Now globally prevalent, it is a lawsuit that is intended to silence and even harass critics, to the point when they withdraw their voice of dissent. Lawsuits come with burgeoning legal costs and journalists often have to fight them with their own money and this can take years in the court. To add, a journalist can also lose his or her job while all this happens. Continue reading “Death by Litigation – The Perils of Business Reporting”

Festering Wounds – The 1984 Riots

While the session was titled ‘Festering Wounds – The 1984 Riots’, Preeti Gill, who is an independent editor and literary agent and someone who experienced the horror of 1984 first hand, broke ice with the panelists suggesting that to address the ‘84 violence as riots would be a tremendous mistake. According to Gill, it was a premeditated ethnic cleansing and a pogrom. She spoke of her brush with the 1984 violence and narrated how she was spared only because she didn’t wear any identification mark of a Sikh.

Continue reading “Festering Wounds – The 1984 Riots”

Silence – The Trolls are in Session

Women have always been easy subjects of harassment but the tragic death of Gauri Lankesh has sent us a very important message and it becomes very crucial to discuss the perils of being a woman journalist. The Bangalore literature festival had eminent journalists like Sindhu from Asianet news, Nidhi Razdhan from NDTV, Laxmi Murthy who works with International Federation of Journalists on issues of press freedom and journalists’ rights and award-winning journalist Ammu Joseph discuss and debate about what needs to be done to safeguard the women in journalism.

Continue reading “Silence – The Trolls are in Session”