We lost this time to Pakistan. The match was fun nonetheless. Again there is scope for improvement. Sachin’s innings was top class but failed to help India win. And it is not often that you see the Wall crumble. Balaji and Powar showed the big boys how it is done :D. However my fav today were the Pakistani bowlers. Wish we could have combined coaching camps before the next world cup. Sami was the pick of the lot and I consider that his bowling was a very important factor for tying our batsmen down. At the end of the day Pakistan and cricket (as my team-mate was saying this morning) won.
However I was more interested with the Prasar Bharti fiasco. How can a company take a free feed from someone else and still have the shamelessness of showing their own ads. Many Indians are pissed of at Ten sports for supposedly playing spoilsport. I must disagree with this view. Ten runs a business and as such they are going to watch their bottom line. It is not for them but for the government and Prasar Bharti to worry about the Indian people. If Prasar Bharti had shown last matches telecast without trying to make money by showing their own ads then they would have got the higher moral ground and Ten Sports would also have been pacified. Instead Prasar Bharti just showed what top class idiots they are by not only taking apiece of the pie but also leaving the signal unencrypted thus affecting Ten’s profits all over the world!!!
The government could have solved this issue as soon as Ten had got the rights by getting into the act earlier and convincing them to let DD also show the feed for a minimal cost with unaltered signal. I am sure that sooner or later Ten would have seen the benefit of letting their signal ride on DD thereby getting a chance to reach all oparts of India.
We Indians need to come to a decision and need to make that decision soon, do we want to take the capitalism path. If we do then we need to understand, appreciate and respect the market. A monopoly is bad but so is stealing. I am not trying to take a holier than thou position here as I am myself guilty of these very acts. However in the whole picture we need to inculcate an attitude where we either pay for what we want or else make do with the alternative. That is how the open market works and we cannot step into it half-hearted. We cannot try to use Socialistic ideas whenever it inconvenient and capitalist ideas on other days. It has to be a full push towards one or the other goal. Looking at the state of socialism around the world, and considering how Indians are more materialistic then communal in today’s age, I guess the only real approach is capitalism for us. In this atmosphere stupid acts like ones by Prasar Bharti cannot and should not be tolerated.
What do you the esteemed reader think?
