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March 2020

Review of The Test: A New Era for Australia team: Season 1

-Karthik Gurumurthy

 About two years back, Australia’s Test cricket team became entangled in a ball-tampering scandal during the third Test of a series in South Africa. Captain Steve Smith, vice-captain David Warner and batsman Cameron Bancroft were the key figures involved in an incident dubbed ‘sandpapergate’ and one which would cast a dark shadow over the sport. Steve Smith was stripped of captaincy and handed a ban along with David Warner and Cameron Bancroft.  The Australian cricket authorities were forced to make changes in personnel. Justin Langer, a retired top-class batsman, was brought in as head coach and Tim Paine was made team captain.

For all cricket lovers, who are in desperate need of some decent viewing during this time of isolation and lock-down, the newly released Amazon Prime"  "The Test: A New Era for Australia’s Team" is worth the watch.  This  is an in-depth, behind-the-scenes, eight-episode examination of a cricket team in crisis. It chronicles 18 months in the travails of the Australian national team, from the squad’s all-time lowest point to its return to relevance in the 2019 World Cup.

Review:

Born in India I have been passionately following the game as much as I can from the late 1970's and 1980's and it continues to provide non-stop entertainment and excitement. Australia has been one of the most successful cricketing team and been a dominant force for decades winning multiple World Cups  and other ICC trophies. I always admired Aussie team for their fighting spirit but  never liked them as a team as most of the team members were arrogant, offensive and knew that these players would do anything to win and I strongly felt that what happened in Capetown was something they totally deserved.

 With regards to this documentary..Where do I start?

The series takes a deep look at coach Justin Langer’s ruthless yet humble characteristics and attributes, both as a former player and as a potential manager of a team that had hit rock bottom in 2018. Coach’s vision was also quite clear and obvious from the start – " that is to build a team that will earn the respect, not only of their own country, but of the cricketing world once again".

This documentary showed all the raw moments of the players and coaches and this showed you the person behind their own titles. It brings forward the real people, real emotions and real drama that unfolded after what happened. The series was thoroughly enjoyable, it's rare for outsiders to see inside the inner sanctum of a test dressing room and that was great.  Everybody in the Aussie dressing room was very passionate and charged up and not afraid to show their frustrations. The camaraderie was almost tangible and the way the team stuck together through thick and thin was amazing to watch. The behind-the-scenes footage shows all the drama and emotions of winning and losing matches all before Australia departed for last year’s World Cup and Ashes series in the country of their biggest rival, England. After watching two of the episodes,  cricket fans will have a completely different perception of the Australian cricket team. First time in my life I will use the word respect and Aussie cricket team in a sentence.  It was great to see what Aussies thought of Virat Kohli and the Indian Cricket team. However, I am surprised that they didn't include the part when Virat Kohli  pleaded to the fans to stop abusing Steve Smith when the crowd booed him constantly during the India-Australia World Cup  2019 game played at the Oval.If you're a true lover of the game, if you can put aside team loyalties and just applaud the 'Rising from the Ashes to win the Ashes', this series is for you. 


How to deal with new kind of situations?

-Karthik Gurumurthy

We have heard of the word 'pandemic' but never knew the impact of what it could do a society as a whole. Most of us have not encountered this new situation. How can we survie in the unknown long enough to do amazing things, tell inspiring stories, and craft lives of deep meaning and impact? 

We need to train ourselves to find grace in the space. To cultivate the ease needed to first survive and then thrive as you move through the abyss and into the extraordinary, we need to be mindful, and should be on the movement. We should be having a quest to befriend uncertainty. The doubts that fill the space of uncertainty can paralyze or even make you ill. Mindfulness teaches you to to zoom the lens out so you're able to more easily identify when you are spinning doom and gloom and when We need to know how to let go. This is a good mindset to practice. The process of dropping the stories that shut you down and coming to back to the space of possibility becomes the default setting.  Once you get there, it is much easier to maneuver around comfortably.

What else can we do? Walk. The angst and anxiety that often accompany action in the face of uncertainty can be greatly diminished by walking. Walking eases your mind. 

The other thing that happens in our mind when we enter a place of uncertainty, we tend to start spinning stories that predict failure endlessly in our heads. We need a way to hit pause button in our head,and reconsider a different story. That story should fuel a possibility than a defeat.

It is up to us to envision the story of a success as vividly as we have spun the story of failure.


Embrace the uncertainty

-Karthik Gurumurthy

If I look back, I always chose a path different from the people around me. Right after high school, everybody around me went for medicine or engineering. I was interested in learning and pursuing a career involving Chemistry.  Most of the times, I try to choose a path which is mostly uncertain. Most of my friends and family always put their kids in the best public or private school. My wife and I chose to experiment our kid with homeschool. 

One thing I noticed over the years is every breakthrough is preceded by great uncertainty.  The only way to avoid uncertainty, to come close to guaranteed success in an endeavor,  is if you have done it before, or someone else has. At that point, why bother? You are no longer creating, you are replicating, checking off yet another largely inevitable outcome. It may be easier. It may carry less angst. But it will also matter far les to you and to those you seek to serve.

Life's greatest moments live in the space between desire and attainment. It's not the getting that makes life good, it is the seeking, even when that seeking demands not just action but surrender. The moment your object of desire becomes a foregone conclusion, the quest loses its potential to change you. Your life becomes a series of reruns and that gets old fast. 

Yes, I agree that Uncertainty may bring unease, but it also brings  a vital energy, the exhilaration of creation. Without uncertainty, there is no possibility. 

There is no perfect moment. No time when you will know enough to guarantee you wull get what you want. Still, at some point, imperfectly informed, with butterflies in your belly, you'll still need to act. Experience and emotion dance in that space. It is where possibility finds it wings. The greatest creations, the most legendary relationships, the most treasured and heralded experiences, innovations, and lives have all come from people who were willing to live and act in the face of uncertainty long enough for greatness to emerge. 


Code of conduct

-Karthik Gurumurthy

In light of COVID 19, the related crisis and challenges and the normal every day difficulties we all face, what should be our code of conduct?

I believe the question of our time is, “How can I help?”  The first and obvious answer is to take care of yourself and stay safe so that you are able to help others. 

But if you stop there, you’ll limit both your impact and your happiness. The best way to beat self-absorption is to answer the question, How can I help?

Here are  some possible good answers:

  • Share good ideas if it can add value. Just be careful you don’t spread disinformation. Focus on what you’ve learned and know from experience. (Unless you are an epidemiologist or a medical professional who understands and worked on virology, it is risky to speculate about specifics of the virus.) We can all grow through this experience if we share great ideas and learn from each other.
  • Offer encouragement. A phone call or an email with a kind word, a positive comment and whatever reassurance you can offer means more than ever now. You don’t need to offer solutions (unless you are confident you have really good ones). The goal is to lift the spirits of anyone who is down, lonely or discouraged.
  • Check in with others. Ask how people are doing. Let the person know you care for them and are thinking of them. Go deeper than the normal conversations you have with people that are often rushed.
  • Reconnect. Dust off old relationships you haven’t had time to re-establish in the past. For most of us, there is no pressing agenda or no time crunch that keeps us from doing so.
  • Donate Time. This one is tricky as nobody wants to risk exposure. That is a personal choice. But you might not necessarily have to leave your home to help if a charity needs skills you have that can be applied virtually. To find out your options, call and ask what you might do to help. It is equally important not to spread the virus knowingly or unknowingly by restricting trips outside your home (And my deepest gratitude and respect goes out to the first responders who are there on the front line for us at their own peril.)
  • Donate Money. This is the least risky thing to do, and how much you donate isn’t the point. Any and all donations are appreciated. Take care of your family’s financial needs first. But if you have something you can give where needed, consider donating. But please do your homework so you don’t become a victim of a scam.

There are no quick fixes to the problems we face. But enough people doing what they can to help will indeed make a big difference.

God bless you, and please be safe.


The New Normal

-Karthik Gurumurthy

And so we enter a new world of social distancing, people stocking tissue paper, and limitations on how we can gather. Borders are closing, airports are shutting down, and in some countries, police and armed forces are getting prepared for handling this new situation. How are we going to handle this new normal?

  • Nothing concentrates the mind more than an existential threat. At our core, we all want to survive. We will check we have the fundamentals in place and learn to live without the non-essentials we used to rely on.
  • Social distancing is vital to slowing the spread of COVID-19, but it also pushes against human beings’ fundamental need for connection with one another. Especially during difficult times, people feel an urge to commiserate, to comfort and be comforted by each other.
  • We will see the best of human behavior. We will see extreme acts of kindness as our streets connect up and we look after the elderly. Volunteer networks will spring up across the country and across the world. We will witness the selflessness of our health workers who will continue to turn up, day after day, exhausted and exposed. We will owe them our lives.
  • We will see the worst as well. Absolute greed as families hoard months supplies of tissue paper while others can’t find any. Price gouging. Thankfully, it will not stay that way for long.
  • There will be misinformation and rumors, because these things thrive in a time of crisis. Social media aggravates this and gives oxygen to sensationalism/ quick cures. If you can, counteract the nonsense that is already spreading, and call-out the worst to get it shut down.

We have known times of adversity before. And just as we have come through those difficult times in the past, we will come through this one. It’s who we are and it’s what we do. But before we complain too much about this new normal, how about taking time to count our blessings. Write down 3-5 things you are grateful for at the end of the day. They can be simple things like when someone smiled at you.

This is the opportunity to be more thankful for what we have ,  to show courage and kindness and act with common sense. Our example matters.

If we do that, we will sustain, survive individually and collectively. This is the time to slow down everything,  act with empathy, kindness and reflect. Not sure when we will get this again.


Superstar of my school departure

-Karthik Gurumurthy

Rajinikanth Veeraraghavan:(June 28 1974- March 6 2020)

Rajinikanth

Circa' Nov 2015: Three Quarter Chinese restaurant , Church Street Bangalore

This is my good friend Rajinikanth (also known as Superstar) from school who went to be with Almighty today (March 6, 8:10 AM IST).  Our school friends and I  are still coping with this tragic news and we are recollecting all the good memories we have had with him. I have known him from VI grade and he was one of the math whiz who did very well in academics in school. He was in the same section from VI -IX grade. I  took language classes and  he was very thorough and complete in his approach towards acads and was jovial too.  He lived in a place called Velachery which is quite far from where I used to live and thus I was not in regular touch with him. After high school, I found out from my other friends that he got admission to one of the premier institutes named BITS Pilani. 

All of us went our merry way to do our undergrad and lof us decided to come to US to pursue Grad school. While we were here, we tried reconnecting back with our school folks and tried to get back in touch with most of our friends.  Slowly but surely we finished our grad school and  got married and some of them started family as well. We got back in touch around 2005 and started writing back and forth via email. (Googlegroups). He was very quick to respond and  started sharing the funny incidents in school and always took time to correspond via email. With most of my school folks, there was always a sinusoidal pattern where all  of a sudden,  all the team members felt the need to correspond sharing their nostalgic moments  or about the birth of their son/daughter and suddenly it will soon ebb.  In the year 2014, suddenly with the advent of WhatsApp groups, bunch of school folks started reconnecting and ended up finding almost of our school friends and it was like frenzy catching up with the school folks all over again. Thanks to the initiative of my classmates Maya , Ram Pai and  other networkers we all got back in touch. After 1991, I got a chance to speak with Rajini only in 2014. I vividly remember running downstairs to call him during my lunch break and was so excited to hear his voice and we were so happy to catch up on lot of stuff. Needless to say that the lunch break was long. After that we were in regular touch and I am thankful that I got to meet lot of my school folks in 2015.  Thanks to my school friend Anu's initiative, I was able to meet Rajini in person and had dinner together. It was wonderful to meet and that was the last time I met in person.  That was the time I  captured the picture posted above. We did talk over the phone  regularly and Rajini went through lot of challenges at work and I tried my best to help him out with the best of my ability and was in regular touch till Oct /Nov 2019.  

Yesterday, all of a sudden, I received a message from a great friend of mine, GB that Rajini has been  battling a health issue and is not looking good.I was totally shocked to hear that as I wasn't aware of the same and my friends started sharing about the health challenges that he had been facing last few months. I was at first incredibly confused. “How could this happen?” I wondered. Not comprehending in that moment that life does eventually lead to inevitable death. Even our highly intelligent, self-aware species can’t grasp the idea of a guaranteed future demise. I just couldn’t process it, until I finally did. Then the shock came. I stared at my computer in complete silence as my brain began to rewind ancient memories through my eyes and into my bones at a rapid fast-forward speed. Death is always an unexpected earthquake, regardless of whom it happens to or what your relationship was.  The sudden impact of receiving this news made me aware that I had absolutely no idea he was suffering.  Our group of school friends still prayed hoping a miracle can happen which will make him live longer. Few of my friends who live in Madras decided to meet him in the hospital and today morning as they reached the hospital found out that he just departed. As soon as I saw the message from Mana (Anand) from the hospital, I  started to sob uncontrollably quietly.  I texted a couple of high school pals who I remained tight with and asked them if they knew. They did. They expressed their shock and anguish as well. Like me, they seemed to be in regret that their grief was so consuming, considering they also were not aware of his health issue. I guess he has gone from being a super star to a shining star. This poem written by the unassuming anon. sums it all.

"The angels looked down from heaven one night.
They searched for miles afar,
And deep within the distance
They could see a shining star.

They knew that very instant
That the star was theirs to gain,
So they took you up to heaven,
Forever to remain.

Look down on us from heaven.
Keep us free from hurt and pain.
You'll always be within my heart
Until we meet again."

-Anon

P.S; I  have added a GoFundMe site supporting Rajini's family kids. Whatever you could help would help his family/kids. Thanks in advance!