Bye Zak - Thanks for those yorkers!!

Being an Indian cricket fan in the 90s was a really frustrating experience. There were problems aplenty

1. Sachin was our solution to all of India's batting woes (occasionally bowling as well). Dravid and Ganguly did chip in later on this front.
2. Our best spinner hardly turned the ball, while our biggest turner of the ball hardly took any wickets!
3. Azzu bhai was probably our only best ground fielder, but reflecting now I can't be sure how much of that was genuine!
4. However, the most frustrating part was that we lacked a genuine pace bowler! 

Yes, Kapil was great, but in the 90s, he was already past his prime. Srinath had to endure tremendous pressure for too long, and his strictly vegetarian diet wasn't good enough to york batsmen out! It still embarrasses me to state that we opened the bowling with Venkatesh Prasad. Yes, his slow ball was good, but when you bowl six of them in one over, batsman won't take too long handle it! Then we had bowlers like Dodda Ganesh, Debashish Mohanty, Ajit Agarkar etc. They were all erratic, more like someone attacking with a spray gun and hoping at least one hits the mark! Indian pace bowling was subject of a standing joke in cricket commentary involving Pakistani commentators. You could hear Ramiz Raja, Zaheer Abbas, Imran Khan frequently stating on live TV that Indian pace bowling unit is a joke and all I could do at these times was to hang my head in shame!

Then one rainy afternoon in October, things changed. India was playing Australia in ICC Knockout quarterfinal. Srinath was out of the tournament with an injury and India opened the bowling with a rookie left-arm pace bowler Zaheer Khan. Australia was chasing 265 and was well within reach of the target with Steve *Iceman* Waugh and Damien Martyn at the crease. Zaheer produced a brilliant yorker to dismiss Waugh! I was pleasantly surprised to see that. I can still visualize the ball. A yorker by an Indian seamer!! This was unheard of!! At first, I thought that was a fluke! And then he did it again and again in the same match (wasn't successful, but at least they were genuine yorkers). I was suddenly elated. India had finally found a bowler who could york and york at will!

Things then started to get better. *Reverse Swing* was a word that you generally associated with Pakistani bowlers, in the 2000s this word was frequently associated with Zak!! All Pakistani commentators now started to compare Zak's reverse swing with those of the Pakistani bowlers. Zak then started to develop his own bunnies!! Mind you, he had many! Haydo, Graeme Smith, Sangakarra etc. Whenever these batsmen were at the crease, India always brought in Zak and he almost always took their wicket!! I suddenly started to feel an inch taller and walked with a spring in my step!

You could now almost always state India's chances in a game, by looking at Zak's rhythm. In the final of 2003 WC, you knew from the very first Zak over, that something was wrong and India was in for a difficult time, similarly, in 2011 WC quarter-final, you knew that Zak was still in his rhythm so India was still in the game! He was probably India's best aggressive fast bowler, whose aggression matched his bowling skills and I can never forget those yorkers! All of those balls are still etched in my memory, they were all poetry in motion!

Visual Information Retrieval Under Siege!!

Over the past few weeks, I have taken a liking to Visual Information Retrieval and have read few papers on the concept, algorithms etc behind this. Also I've been recommended few good libraries on Python which support CBIR. Those interested can read on the same on Wikipedia. Apparently there are many proprietary algorithms used in this field, however its still not clear where and how do these patents are enforceable?

I also came across a good Java library called LIRE which is open source and provides most of the features that one would require to implement a good CBIR system. Apparently the LIRE library also provides open source implementations of SIFT and SURF algorithms, so its still not clear how a patent is enforceable when there exists an open source implementation for the same!

However this isn't a technical blog, nor does it document my experiences in using LIRE for CBIR tasks(which warrants a separate blog by itself, IF and WHEN I complete my research)! I document here, the reason behind my liking to the concept. Well, many of you might consider this blog boastful (but again in a blog titled "Memoirs", what else did you expect ;-) ??). For long, I have prided on my ability to recognize faces and other objects that I've registered in my memory. Many of my friends would agree that I have surprised them(and the person in question) quite so often by recalling a face or a location so vividly when they could hardly recollect or recognize the same(even-though all of us would have seen the same thing/person at the same time)!

Mind you, by no means to I claim to have eidetic memory!! That would be absurd, I only claim that I seem have the ability to register and recall few images better than the rest. I am not sure if this is an inherited trait or an acquired trait. However, I do know that my brother too has similar ability and he had found a better uses of this ability to memorize hard to pronounce Sanskrit slokas in Class IV (Chayagrahini Rakshasi) by just registering a mental image of the page containing the unpronounceable words :-D.

Like most human beings I have a pretty good radar(should I call it Murphy's Radar?). This radar of mine has been able to predict to an acceptable accuracy on the occurrence of an event. However off-late, my intrinsic CBIR library hasn't functioned optimally during such instances, so my strike rate of producing accurate results has gotten poor! In the computer world, if we find the performance of a particular library is not up to the threshold limit, you can always replace it with a better library, But how do we do this in the real world??

Secondly how do we identify the cause of the malfunctioning algorithm? Has age got anything to do with it? Or I need a better index? Will I be in a position to re-achieve the optimum results out of my intrinsic CBIR library that I had come to expect from it all these years? Will I manage to hold on to one of the last few things that I have prided upon for few more years?? I guess only time will tell............

Moon(shine) struck!

You may be a teetotaller "zincoshine",
But you *still* get intoxicated at the sight of moonshine!
No wonder! Any intervention by mortal or divine,
can't help you find your sunshine!!

Reason or romance

During my school run this morning, I was listening to a program on the radio. A lot of callers to the RJ were complaining on the decision of Indian Cricket Selectors to leave out Yuvraj Singh from the 15 players selected for the ICC Cricket World Cup 2015 to be held in Australia - New zealand from Feb 2015. I was like, "Hey, be reasonable guys, he wasn't even in the 30 probable list. How then can he be selected in the 15?".

Now wait a minute! Reasonable? That word seems pretty rich coming from me! As you all know, I have always been (will continue to be a Dravid fan). I do acknowledge (grudgingly!) that Dravid's ODI career spanned in a parallel universe to that of his test career. But even I would have been disappointed if Dravid hadn't made the cut to a World Cup squad! But again, this blog isn't about Dravid, its about Yuvraj!

I have been following cricket seriously since early nineties and I can't remember many good left-handers to have played for India. All I can remember of Kambli was him crying during the 1996 WC semi-finals. Then came along Ganguly. He was elegance personified on the off-side. As Dravid so eloquently put it "On the offside,first we have God, and then Saurav Ganguly". If one had to complete that sentence, it would read "On the offside, first we have God and then Saurav Ganguly, while on the leg-side we have every tom, dick and harry and then we have Ganguly!!"

Mind you! Ganguly was excellent player against leg-spinners and left arm spinners. Can anyone of you forget him dancing down the track and carting Grant Flower over the roof in Sharjah. He did it quite too often that Tony Greig even called that part Sharjah's roof as Ganguly's roof!!  But power is not something that you associate with Ganguly. But his batting against pace didn't inspire confidence, that you would associate with most southpaws.

In late 2000, Ganguly captained a fresh team for ICC Knockout Trophy that was held in South Africa. The Indian team was still recovering from the abyss of the match fixing and they huffed and puffed their way into quarter-finals against Australia. It was one rainy afternoon in Chennai. I was in a cheap electronics shop at Ritchie Street, Chennai taking the help of my friends in assembling my first PC and we were also following the match in an old B&W TV present in the shop. There were many memorable moments in that match.  But the two that standout are:

• 18 year old Yuvi playing in his 2nd match of his career, facing a battery of pace bowlers showed what real power was! He was slamming McGrath, Lee and Gillespie all over the park. The raw power in his strokes was quite evident. Finally, we had a southpaw who could play pace bowling really well. 
• India also managed to find a pace bowler who could actually bowl yorkers in the death overs! Zaheer Khan's yorker to dismiss Steve Waugh was one such delivery!

And then in one summer evening at Lords. The 2002 Natwest Trophy final(The match that Ganguly taught us how to celebrate in style)! India were 150/5 chasing England's 325. All recognized batsman had failed. I can recollect vividly all those brutal shots of Yuvi and Kaif. Yuvi fell to a mis-timed pull shot in that match after ensuring India were well within the reach of the target. I still remember Harsha Bhogle saying at that time "this is the problem with fairy tale finishes....", but that innings again proved that Yuvi was a match-winner.

Forward to 2007, the World Twenty20 championship. India vs England quarter-final. The brutal onslaught unleashed by Yuvi will surely haunt Stuart Broad his entire lifetime. I am pretty sure he wakes up in cold sweat every now and then remembering that pasting!

Forward to 2011, the man was back in action. His performance especially against Australia again in the quarter-finals was brilliant. What followed was history. He was played the series of his dreams. He actually lived the dream in that series.

Lets face it, each of his fairy tale performances were school boy cricketer dreams! How many of us have wished for similar baptism by fire debut, a stellar performance when the chips were down that helps the team win the cup, the sensational innings in the shortest version of the game and finally achieving glory at World Cup. Hell, I would break two legs and a hand to live that dream!

For quite often Yuvi was the very the reason for his fans to romance, you can't fault them this once to romance without a reason! His fans must be happy that his fairy tale ended on a high. They need not be disappointed on him not making to the team this time around and take pride from the fact that fairy tale was great while it lasted.