Spotted Shame: RR’s Prodigal sons revealed
Spot fixing menace 

Hannah Arendt's famous phrase, the banality of evil, may not be out of place in the context of the popular Indian Premier League (IPL) and the mephitic cloud of corruption under which it has prospered. Three cricketers from Rajasthan Royals viz., S. Sreesanth, Ankeet Chavan, Ajit Chandila were arrested in the wee hours on 16 May 2013 charged on the grounds of spot fixing. 

What is Spot fixing?
Spot fixing is an illegal activity wherein a player plays his part of the game in a pre-decided arrangement. The banned sports betting and bookie system in India flourishes with spot fixing embedded in its roots.
The recent drama unfolded that Chavan received Rs 60 lakh while Chandila and Sreesanth were paid Rs. 40 lakh each by the bookies. This act stirs a Déjà vu of the late Hansie Cronjo spot fixing case back in 2000 when the South African cricketer caught by the Delhi police, confessed to his crime and was banned for life by the South African Board. In both cases, sleuths chanced upon the nexus while scrutinizing electronic media to keep tabs on the mafia. In the current scenario, the Investigation Bureau passed on the information to Delhi Police while tapping the phone records in an illegal foreign cash flow case. After recording 100 hours of conversation Delhi Police arrested 14 persons including the 3 RR cricketers. Codes like wrist band, hand towel, locket, warm ups were used to indicate the bookies that the settlement would yield result in that particular over.

Corruption and Cricket
The utter lack of transparency in the IPL did come to light a few years ago when the BCCI took punitive action against Lalit Modi whose brainchild the league was.
The black history of corruption in cricket engulfs:

• May 2000: Pak’s Saleem Malik and Rehman banned for life after being found guilty of fixing. 
• Dec 2000: India’s Mohammed Azharuddin and Ajay Sharma banned for life and Jadeja for 5 years by BCCI. 
•  Aug 2010: News of the World expose of Pakistan’s Salman Butt, Mohammed Asif and Mohammed Amir who were bribed to bowl no-balls on demand 
•  May 16, 2013: Rajasthan Royals’ players S. Sreesanth, Ajit Chandila and Ankeet Chavan arrested for spot fixing.

Digging the Cause
RR’s contract for the players Ajit Chandila,  S. Sreesanth and Ankeet Chavan in monetary terms was approximately of Rs 10 lakh, Rs 2.2 crore and Rs 30 lakh respectively. This brings back the widely used rhetoric question, “Is there an end for greed?”. Experts say a discarded player is prone to fixing while some blame the naïve age of the young cricketers. The bookies lure the cricketers with an extravagant amount which the budding players like Chandila and Chavan see a shortcut to grab riches overnight. It is their insecure position in the game that they succumb to fixing. Well the irony of this theory elates when players like Cronjo and Jadeja fell prey to the bookies.

Hall Of Shame
The recent sensational case evoked criticism from all the top notch players with Lalit Modi terming the scam as the tip of the iceberg. The playing dirty revealed the cricketers lust for green paper bringing disgrace for the whole cricket community and a sense of betrayal upon all its fans.  The RR’s owners stand on zero tolerance of corruption and misconduct will pave way for due course of justice but would leave a blot on Indian and International cricket. 

A major clean-up operation is required if cricket in India is to retain loyalty of its fans. And the passivity and inaction on part of men who run the game in this country may turn out to be worse than active collusion.  The legalisation of  Betting in India can be a way out to stop the furthering of this menace and can even empower the government in revenue generation. As its said the Dark side always seems catchy , so why not throw some light in the dark?

The Spot fixing scam has taken away the limelight from the Railgate scam, Coalgate scam , Coalgate cover up scam and even the perennial rape cases, taking the noose off the involved Ministers and Delhi Police Commissioner Neeraj Kumar (though for a short duration), who was among the few men who seemed happy about the revelation of the scandal. :P

Google+

                            GlOating GooglePlus

Late 20^th century marked the rise of the search engine Google…its just not a word, it became a verb in our life…Googling became the latest buzz !!!

And now sitting here in the early 21^st century , am the proud witness of Google+.

Well I personally believe that google’s reputation and its popularity will surely give Mark Zuckerberg a joggling jolt.

Features of Google+, the latest social networking site introduced by Google, includes not only data sharing but also data hiding i.e. we can take back all the information while we are offline. This feature imposes plus’ power on facebook and is called as Data Liberation. The project is just in an initial stage but still it has aroused speculations about it being the new FACE of social networking!

Larry Page and Sergey Brin are surely on the roll with all the enigma associated with the launching of their latest product Google+! The addicts of Google are dying for the invites as signup is only possible through it.

The critics are calling it the Panacea of networking and the pomp and show is hyping it further. Hope that FACEBOOK doesn’t become the new Orkut in this netrace…

Maybe someday our children will say FORKUT were the ancestors of GOOGLE+!!

BLEED BLUE

BLEED BLUE!!!

Indiaaaa Indiaa, jo bole sonihaal…sastriakal, zor se bolo….jai mata di….sachinnnnnn sachin(clap 3 times)…….WELCOME TO THE MINI STADIUM OF SRM GIRLS HOSTEL J!!! The mini stadium sans chairs roared with the female ooh’s ,aah’s and hau’s whose source of energy was the 10 m wide screen held in front of k-block. The newspapers, mattresses and bedsheets were all spread in the compound and the boundary was demarcated by spreading slippers all around.

Cheering and jeering, F’s and ‘mlm’ can be heard and seen from all corners of the compound. With every Indian wicket the mouths hung open and with every boundary the hands clattered, the FINALE between India and Sri Lanka was literally ‘BREATH-TAKING’!! Even the bees and insects, the ruthless heat and the harsh humidity failed to hamper the spirit of CRICKET.

The projected screen became the magnet to which all eyes were glued. With the initial falling of wickets of sehwag and sachin followed by big awwwwww’s and again succeeded by consoling optimistic comments, the fingers found each other to make a cross and the lips robotically joined in a prayer. It was like a default synchronizing software was activated in the body.

Then when we thought that the prayers were being answered, the commendable partnership of Gambhir and Kohli was doomed by Dilshan(the man who resembled Danny). After malinga and jayawardene he became the 3^rd most hated man in our stadium (though they were paid right by the thunderous boo’s that came from the mass at the time of presentation). But then a plane passed above and the winds of change started flowing. The dhoni-gambhir’s calculated and scrupulous partnership drove our team towards the most coveted cup! Then finally there arrived the final bang by the captain himself-a super six and the crowd applauded with tears of joy. The 28 years of wait was over at last.

At that moment there was a sudden surge of pride in being an Indian which dominated every emotion we ever had. The multitude of girls swarmed towards the big screen unanimously to get a closer look of the super stroke. It was like history was being created and all witnesses of that glorious moment were a part of it.

An amalgam of diwali, holi, id, baisakhi and Christmas, such was the birth of the new festival called WORLD CUP 2011, or better say OUR CUP 2011!!

MACROGRAPHY OF MUN

         MACROGRAPHY OF MUN

Imagine the feeling of transforming from a normal student to an international diplomat in a split second? Sounds weird eh? Then you surely need to attend Model United Nations my friend.

It was my first MUN and to describe it in one word- fantabulous!!

It was a 3-day conference where actually I understood the somberness of the term ‘CONFERENCE’. Though I admit that the initial excitement was due to the dress code-FORMALS!!... It sounds simple but believe me finding formals for a supposedly international conference was not a child’s play…and with my roommate it was like ‘pleasing the devil’! ;)

I bought a trouser which still lingers on my pocket and after the miraculous discovery of my roomy’s formals we were all set for holding the clout as delegates of Brazil and Namibia respectively.

And the much awaited day arrived i.e. 4^th march. We were still conscious of our clothes and feeling a little underdressed as the other college folks were breathtaking. Well that’s a common girls problem I guess, we are never satisfied when it comes to dressing!! It’s like finding a suitable match, always available but never PERFECT! :D

Anyways I’ll not sway away from the topic…so once the preliminary formalities of registering and collecting the delegate cards were over, we reached our final destination, room no-702, biotech block: the venue for our conference hall.

Whirling wind, spinning steroid and turning time was all that, that happened as we entered the room and here we were-the official, abstemious, earnest representatives of our countries respectively who had to carry the weight of their countries foreign policies all the time!!

We were allotted the UNHRC (human rights council) and our agendas were:

A. Integration of the Human Rights of women and the gender perspective: violence against women with special focus on the protection of the rights of women during armed conflict. 
B. Arbitrary arrests, Extrajudicial Punishments and Enforced Disappearances. 

Grave topics indeed! Our 1^st day session started with the roll call where the exact words from a delegate’s mouth should be ‘Delegate of XYZ country, present and voting/ present’. Present gives you the advantage of abstaining from voting later. India chooses just ‘present’ most of the time. Then the first agenda was taken up and the delegates of over 20 countries started debating on the sub-topics by raising motion for it. Here again the motion can be raised by saying ‘the delegate of XYZ country would like to raise the motion for a moderated/ unmoderated caucus for p minutes with each individual speaker time being q seconds’. Like it or not you have to dig in the details ‘Dear Diplomat’. Yeah I know the jargons can really give you a tough time but as soon as you start feeling comfortable with them you’ll experience the mammoth power that rests with you. It’s an indescribable feeling. It’s a charge of emotion in which the power of changing the world rests with you! Well not to go into the details, the subsequent discussion was informative and the research that we did on our respective countries was an eye opener on the endangered species-women!! The most striking points were that women till now dint even have the right to vote in Saudi Arabia and in Iran the women are still being stoned and strangulated. It made us all realize that the world we live in is no less than hell and we the future generation has a great responsibility on our shoulder to make this a better place to live in.

The 3 day conference passed in a whoosh and there we were left with the influential and potent memories of our college’s first mind blowing-MUN! J