How to improve Indian Cricket

This was written way back, when India exitted the 2007 World Cup tournament in the first round itself. Now that India performed so well in Twenty-20 World Cup, this may not be relavant.

Disclaimer: If you are looking for some serious stuff here, please stop reading immediately. As always, I am going to be sarcastic. All the instances mentioned below are pure imaginations of myself based on my experience. One can easily draw parallels between this and what my team in my office was going through few months back. If someone find it hurting, please let me know, i will erase it. I don't intend to hurt anyone.

I was holding up posting this, because of various reasons. But now that a huge hurddle is gone, I can post this I guess. I am sure most of you will not understand what I mean. This is a pure analogy and only few can understand this. If you are unable to understand, then pardon me, this one is not for you.

Lets get to the actual stuff:

I was watching this 2007 World Cup India-Srilanka match. India played horribly and lost the match and intern lost the chance of getting into the Second round. I think this the first time since 1983, that India ever failed so miserably in a World Cup. I started thinking what can be done to improve Indian team. It occurred to me that if we can do a little revamping, it might produce great results.

The first thing that I am planning to do is to establish different hierarchy as shown in the following diagram.

The team is split into various Pools and each of them were given a unique responsibility. Let me first explain each same that i have given.

Team Owner: I am the Team Owner. If I am going to do this stuff to provide great results, why should I think of another person to be team owner. I am the boss regardless of whether you want it or not. You make sure that you give me the due respect. I always think about operational efficiency and how can I perform better than yesterday, etc. etc. Some of the best things that I think explains about operational efficiency and performing better are

• If it takes 6 balls to complete one over yesterday, it should only take 5 balls to complete one over today
• If you have bowled so many matches, then if a ball misses the stumps by an inch, then I will call it a wide
• If you have hit many 6 is the last series, then you need to hit the ball even further to score a 8 in this series and even further to score 10 in the next series.

Do you know that this is my fifth game. I have played Hide and Seek, Tic-tac-toe, Sudoku, etc. This means I have seen more games than you. Even though I have never played Cricket before, I know everything.

Management Pool: Members in this Pool are responsible for management activities. They will do nothing but managing. They will shout at the members if the members don't play properly regardless of whether they are playing cricket or cards or chess. They will take care of creating thousands of spreadsheets and others will have to fill it with details whether they like or not, whether it is useful or not.

Captain Pool: Members in this Pool are responsible for doing the Captaincy. They are captains. Based on match, one person (a captain) will be picked up from this pool and will be asked to perform the role. This means there is no one fixed captain available. Its going to be totally adhoc although we call it a highly professional environment.

Expert Pool: Members in this Pool will have specialized skills like Batting, Bowling, etc. This Pool is further subdivided into sub Pools which i have explained later in this document. Experts from this Pool is picked as required and will be requested to perform the respective activities. They are responsible for performing only that activity.

Match Team: Members in this Pool are allocated for each Match. They will be responsible for performing on the given match and winning it. They will take the help from other Pools as required and play the match. If the match is lost due to horrible performance by mebers of other pools (like expert pool or management pool), the members from the Match Team will be blamed for not coordinating properly and winning the match.

'Selection Committee Owner' owns the selection committee. He performs the role of providing the selectors for each match team. He has a backup person in the team called 'Selection Committee Backup'. There is also a team under the owner and the backup called 'Selection Committee Members'. They will coordinate for the meetings amongst the selectors and the Captains and perform other selection related management. Don't ask me what else. They are basically responsible for making sure that Match Teams doesn't get what they want. Still the Match Team is expected to win. If the team loses, it is the Match Teams responsibility and if it wins, it has to be attributed to me (Team Owner). Selection Committee will say that they will not blame anyone but in all the meeting they will not forget to mention it is actually People issue from our side.

'Media Communications Owner' owns the entire Media Communication activities. Basically contacting Media Personals and talking to them. 'Media Communication Backup' is the backup for Media Communication Owner and there is also a team under them called 'Media Communication Members'. This team is responsible for any communications to the external world. They will go and promise that a particular Captain will be playing in one matches as well as in the Practice Sessions simultaneously. They take no responsibility to communicate it to the concerned Captain. Anyways the Captain will come to know by reading the next day news paper. These people will promise the media that, while chasing, the individual Match Teams will be able to score 100 runs more than the target runs and they will also be able to score at the rate of 50runs per over. They will devise certain strategies like playing from both the ends of the pitch simultaneously. They suggest that bowlers can bowl from both the ends simultaneously and individual batsman will face the bowlers. This way the time for each match can be reduced to half.
The other mentionable strategies are

• Use the same ball for all the matches so that we can save money
• Since we have played so many matches, we will be able to use just one bowler to bowl all 50 overs

There are many other spectacular strategies that these people will come up with

'Captain' is actually the Captain for the team, but there is a 'Vice Captain' also, who is basically the backup for the Captain. There will be a team of Captains called 'Captain Pool Members' which will have set of all Captains for this team. They are responsible for performing the duty of Captaining the Matches. For any given Match, the Match Team will be allocated a Captain from the Captain Pool. If the Match is lost, the respective Match Team will be blamed and not the Captain as the Captain doesn't belong to the Match Team. Even though the Captain doesn't know about cricket, everyone in the Match Team has to abide by what he says, even if that is highly illogical. This is same funda like me being the Team Owner without knowing what cricket is and you all have to abide by what i say.

Under the Expert Pool, we have 'Batting Owner' who is responsible for owning the batting of all the Matches. As always he has a backup 'Batting Backup' who will assist him in time of need and who will also act as a replacement in case the Batting Owner runs away. There is a team of Batsmen called 'Batting Pool Members' who will be responsible for scoring the runs for each Match. Similarly, there are 'Fielding Owner', 'Fielding Backup' and 'Fielding Pool Members' who collectively are responsible for Fielding in each of the matches. Similarly we have 'Bowling Owner', 'Bowling Backup' and 'Bowling Pool Members' responsible for Bowling and 'Keeping Owner', 'Keeping Backup' and 'Keeping Pool Members' responsible for Keeping.

The Strategy here is that, there will be a minimal set of people in Match Team. People from different Pools will perform the respective responsibility to win the match. People from Batting Pool will do the batting and people from Fielding Pool will do the fielding, Bowling Pool for Bowling and Keeping Pool for Keeping. That said, it also inherently means that since all these Pool people will be particularly well trained in their expert area, they cannot be expected to perform well in other areas.

Do you think it will work? I don't know. But I think it might work. It better work, otherwise, I will blame you all for making it fail.

All your suggestions are welcome. But don't tell me any problem, give me solution. If you don't know the solution to any problem, don't tell me the problem itself. Because, I don't know anything. All I know is, if we want to win and move to the next level, then we cannot follow the traditional approach. This new approach will work without any tweeking.

Eventually, I will blame one person for spreading 'NEGATIVE ENERGY'. Guess who is that? :)

Baggage mishandling in Air India

Probably I am not the first person who suffer these scandals. It might be happening for years and so many people might have been affected. Was there any action taken against this. I dont think so. Last year when i travelled back from USA, I had to take Air India from Newark. I kept a pair of watch (which I bought as a gift for my Cousin's wedding) in one of my baggages. When i reached Chennai, I saw that the pair of watches were missing. I also realized that there were other items like a Pen (with a USB jump drive), etc were missing from that baggage. It was evident that someone openened the baggage and took these items out. I complained to Air India through phone and also complained via the 'Contact Us' facility in http://www.airindia.com/. Nothing happened after that. I thought that it was purely a bad luck for me.

Couple of days back, one of my friends travelled in Air India via Chicago to Chennai. In Chicago Airport, she was asked to check in her cabin baggage as there was no space inside the aeroplane. She was one of the first few passangers and she was not sure why she was asked to checkin the baggage. At the end, there were lots of room in the cabin, enough to hold atleast 20-30 baggages. When she reached chennai, she figured that two used cellphones were missing from her cabin baggage. One was her old phone and other was her friend's phone which he wanted to give it to his father. There were also some stationary items like Parker Pens, etc that were missing from the same baggage.

I spoke to some of my friend's here who have taken Air India for their travel purposes. Almost all of them were mentioning similar instances where some of their items were taken from the baggage. Since all these people travel from USA, one or two items missing from the baggage is not a big deal and none of them took it seriously. But think of how much amount that would be taken on a daily basis. Say for example, if they take items worth $50 from each baggage and in all they take from 100 baggages (In Air India almost 400+ people will travel in a Boeing 747 and each will be carrying two checkin baggages and one cabin baggage). The amount approximately will come to $5,000. If not to this magnitude, the amount should be about couple of thousands or could be less. But what matters is the fact that they were involved in this for a longer period of time now and things were perfectly planned.

We were wondering why some one would specifically ask to checkin my friend's baggage when there were so much space inside the Aeroplane. Why specifically her baggage was choosen?!!! When I digged much into it, I came to know shocking things. Ofcourse it might be not fully correct, but let me tell you what I heard. When Air India does its security check for the baggages under the X-Ray machine, it will know who is carrying lots of expensive items. So at the end of the checking, they put some kind of a mark in your boarding pass. Then those people's baggages were asked to be checked in and boom, few items will be gone. The same applies for Checkin baggages. My baggage had a big (X) Cross mark in the top of the baggage. Similarly, those people who mentioned that items were missing from their baggage also noticed that some items were lost in their baggages too.

For a well reputed, established airline like Air India, this is highly unappreciated act. It is highly discouraging. One of my clients (who is an American) when travelled in Air India also lost some of his items in the Checkin baggage. He said, "Not just the Fares are cheap in Air India, but the airline itself is cheap". Is this how we want an Indian organization to be perceived by the entire world. Something to think about. I again raised a complaint with Air India via http://www.airindia.com/. Let me see what action they are going to take now. The worst thing is that, I am also travelling in Air India this weekend. I dont know what will happen to my baggage. Let me hope that I am one of those few lucky persons whose baggage is not looted. Spare my items this time Air India.