What Next, For The Associate Nations?

Imagine you’re a cricketer from an Associate or Affiliate (one level below Associates) cricket nation. You firstly take to cricket in a land where people think it has something to do with insects, or the kind of land where you have other pressing concerns like bringing food to the dinner table. You wend your way through eight divisions of the ICC World Cricket League, playing in locations as varied as Fiji to Uganda to Nepal, to the ICC Trophy, the quadrennial qualifying tournament for the quadrennial World Cup, to take your rightful place alongside the big brothers at cricket’s showpiece event. You have nowhere near the resources they command. Yet you pull enough and more punches of your own, holding your own, and in fact toppling a few apple carts along the way. That’s a month and a half of cricket in the big league, staying in plush five-star hotels, playing cricket in front of 60,000 screaming fans, having your pictures beamed around the world in high-definition.

And then, zap! It’s all over. The carnival is done. Now go back to playing second and third division teams in Kampala, Kathmandu and the like, watched by (if you’re lucky) a few hundred schoolkids taken out for a weekend picnic. Why would you feel motivated to continue? For the few crumbs from the pot of gold that the ICC will throw at you, at the end of four years? That way, a Kenyan or Ugandan would rather take to marathon running than cricket. A young Dutch kid, would rather take to football or field hockey. Nothing exemplifies this more than Kenya in 2003. They got one free ticket against New Zealand, but managed to beat Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe and Bangladesh, all Test sides, and to an extent, justified their presence in the semi-final, having given a Super Six scare to their eventual conquerors, India. And then what became of their lot? 30 one-day internationals in four years with India (1 game), Pakistan (2) and Sri Lanka (1) being the best ranked opposition that they faced in this period. They had to be content with 6 games against Bangladesh, and 20 games against fellow Associates, across four years! Hardly the best preparation for a World Cup, in one of the most lop-sided sports! Is it any wonder then, that Kenyan cricket fell away and we do not see them at this year’s World Cup? Would a Kenyan marathoner prepare for the Olympics and hope to do well, with absolutely no quality competition in the intervening four years? Why then, are we seeing that in cricket alone?

The answer, for the ICC is to provide a roadmap and opportunity for top flight cricket, for the Associates. They’re well on their way to that. The ICC had in 2014 expressed a desire to give more countries the opportunity to play Test cricket, by having the winner of the ICC Intercontinental Cup (therefore the best Associate First-Class team) play the bottom ranked Test side home and away, for a four-year right to play Tests. If things stand the way they are, we could see England take on Ireland (by far the red-hot side at the Intercontinental Cup) in a Lord’s Test Match as early as 2018!! Surely, the incentive to be the best First-Class Associate, and try and topple a Test side, could be the prize that could spur the Associates to do better! And that, would also mean that the race for the bantamweight title between 8-9-10 could hot up, as who would want to have their Test status on the line? The bottom side will have to buck up, and if they don’t, it is only fair, that as a natural consequence the best Associate shall come snapping at their heels. This promises to make things a little more competitive as there are huge incentives on the line.

One other way could be to have Associate countries neighbouring Test sides play tour games against every visiting team. Teams touring England could play one of their side games against an Ireland or a Netherlands (again, the right to which, could be determined by the Intercontinental Championship placings). Every “proper” Test side (omitting of course, Bangladesh and Zimbabwe) could tag an Associate side. Pakistan could tag a UAE along (they play there anyway!!), South Africa could tag a Kenya or a Namibia. This is not without precedent. There was this practice a few years ago where Australian teams travelling to England would halt at Colombo, probably for the ship to refuel, and play Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in a side game. Sri Lanka in their formative years also gained a lot from the much-loved Gopalan Trophy (SL v Tamil Nadu), that featured many Ranji and Test stalwarts. Ireland and Scotland do play side games when teams tour England and have even run them close on occasion. However those games are few and far in between and the ICC could do well to institutionalise this for every team’s home series.

However, the biggest benefit to an Associate side would be, in taking part in the national competition of the Test side thus tagged. This too has been experimented with, sporadically. Ireland and the Netherlands have on occasion played England’s 20 and 40 over competitions. Namibia takes part in South Africa’s provincial three day competition, as also in Zimbabwe’s Twenty20 tournament. Even the normally averse to experimentation BCCI has tried this in the zonal Duleep Trophy, albeit with youth sides from teams like England and Bangladesh. What could be better for an Associate team than to take part in the English county championship, with potentially 18 games against the most eclectic mix of top-flight international cricketers thrown in? The experience should surely stand them in good stead.

Oh, and on the subject of Associates, how do we not talk about the ICC’s hare brained idea to reduce the World Cup to a ten team event? The idea is flawed from the start. Firstly, if a side is deemed fit for Test status which is regarded as a far bigger prize than a World Cup entry, (say Bangladesh or Zimbabwe), how does the ICC reconcile them being potentially deemed unfit to contest for cricket’s greatest prize ever? It goes without saying that Full Member sides do deserve automatic qualification, with ample opportunity for Associates to show what they’re worth! Four teams do seem like a lot, especially when we have the bottom two Test sides almost playing at par with them. And that, precisely is why two Associates beyond ten test sides at a World Cup seem optimal. Simply put, if the best two Associates aren’t good enough to make you sit up, the next two certainly can’t do any better!

Here’s hoping that the ICC will do what it takes to give the Associates their proper place in the sun, and allow the game to grow to newer, and potentially lucrative markets! After all, it is the frenzied celebrations that greeted Bangladesh’s ICC Trophy victory in 1997 (and consequent entry to World Cup 1999) that convinced the ICC to look at them seriously. Who knows, we may have many more such markets emerging, and newer fan bases!

If They Ran Your Household Budget…

A lot has been said and written about the Indian economy and how it is in a tailspin. But how many of us really understand the gobbledygook of the suited-booted types on national TV? You may or may not understand a word of what the pundits say, but have you ever wondered what it would be like, if this government ran your household?

This shall help you decide if you’d leave your household in their hands, let alone the country:

Gross Domestic Product	₹ 15,89,604 crores
National Budget	₹ 16,70,674 crores
National debt	₹ 10,47,460 crores
New debt	₹ 81,070 crores
Estimated cost of Food Security Bill	₹ 1,76,446 crores
Revenue foregone in the last year	₹ 68,000 crores

Now let’s take out the crore, halve it and pretend it’s a typical lower middle class annual family budget, (Yes, yes how many even earn this many in India?). This is how it stacks up now.

Annual family income	₹ 7,94,802
Money the family spent	₹ 8,35,337
Outstanding debt	₹ 5,23,730
New debt added in the last one year	₹ 40,535
Money to be spent on finally feeding a child who’s been starving for so long	₹ 88,223
Income declined by family out of misplaced goodwill	₹ 34,000

So, in their hands, a family that lives on ₹8 lakhs per year would be neck-deep in debt, over ₹5 lakhs. They would add ₹40,000 to that figure every year, and spend twice that, just to feed the starving child, when they clearly are in no position to do that.

This is how a household budget would look like if our netas ran it! Next time you hear the “fundamentals are strong” dialogue, you know this is what it is. You begin to wonder if there is a method to the madness! No household would ever tolerate or sustain such a budget but the mega-family called the Union of India seems to be doing just that!

Prisoners for life, or prisoners of life?

What did the word “prison” in the title bring to your mind? Going by what our movies have you believe, is it images of moustachioed, testosterone-charged men acting on a virtual carte blanche against cowering, stripped prisoners, who may be engaged in arduous labour? A bottomless abyss which scars you for life, from which there is no coming back, or a hope for a second shot at a dignified life? (I got my impressions more from Nelson Mandela’s descriptions in A Long Walk To Freedom, but the import is the same!)

Well, it’s not as bad as it looks, it’s worse. India had 3,26,519 prisoners in 1,140 prisons, as of 2011 (that’s 39.8% over capacity) and some of the conditions could make Mandela’s Robben Island cell look like a palace! What was surprising though was, only around 3.5% are females (even in largely misogynist settings, this big a skew is a surprise!). With society’s attitudes to prison and victims, a jail sentence is a death sentence. Many lose valuable years in the prime of their earning capacity thereby perpetuating further hardship on the rest of their family and little children, not to mention the attitudes towards them after release (if at all!). The less said about female prisoners and their post-release reintegration into society the better.

As part of the social club Make A Difference Foundation of my college IMT, Ghaziabad we realised we could attempt a significant change in the lives of these women prisoners. Our obvious port of call was Dasna Jail, Ghaziabad, the second largest in Northern India. Keeping with our intent of sustainability, we decided to follow up last year’s project on candles with solar lanterns this year. This was made possible due to help from the NGO, All India Womens Conference and Urja Unlimited who will provide the training to 18 selected inmates.

Selecting the inmates for the training was one of the many significant and revealing experiences. Trawling through list after list of inmates threw up many a sidelight. Brainwashed as we are on media/movie reinforced stereotypes of the impoverished school dropout youngster who goes astray and takes to crime, this was an eye opener. Tucked away among the many names was that of Sarita, a bank manager. She was one of the rare women who did the hard yards and was able to come up, braving a patriarchal system to achieve enough progress in her life to come up to the level of a bank manager, and here she was, cooling her heels in jail for a needless indiscretion driven by greed. There were also countless others whose background was eye-popping. What was surprising was the number of white collar crimes – forgery, cheating, multi-million rupee stamp-paper underwriting and so on. This pointed to relatively high levels of education and advancement that was frittered away so needlessly. Among them, were a few older women who were doing time for dowry related assault and murder, again showing that their own educational advancement even as women was wasted!

Taking in all this while looking to select relatively younger women with about a year to go for release, as a management student I couldn’t help notice the huge human resource and economic potential being wasted! The typical Indian bureaucratic sentiment is to treat them as less than worthy of human dignity, which is why there is very little by way of structured government initiatives towards reintegration with only notable exceptions like Kiran Bedi’s at Tihar, for which she is even reported to have been victimised by higher-ups. What on earth is the purpose of a jail, if not corrective action aimed at giving a new life?! The kind of degrading manual labour including scavenging that prisoners in India are largely subjected to, points to an societal acceptance of their branding as less than deserving of basic human dignity. This does nothing towards their rehabilitation, and only reinforces those very feelings of hatred that made them criminals in the first place. Well-meaning external initiatives by NGOs concerned die a slow death because of the cynicism, disinterest and ulterior motives of officers involved. The constant mental degradation prisoners face also reinforces their cynicism in the system which means they have a deep distrust of any such initiative.

The women, as would be expected, form the neglected section of the jail system, owing both to their lower numbers and to societal attitudes. The surest way to ward off their cynicism is to give them the confidence that they can stand on their own feet, should they need it, once they are out. Most of the women we were introduced to by a senior inmate, were either wary of the “strangers” or just plain disinterested. If they used their education to acquire a skill they could use while in jail, either in practice as income generating activity, or by training fellow inmates, their life would acquire greater meaning. Initiatives like the term-rebate-for-book-reviews scheme in Brazil that concentrate on using prison life constructively show prisons for what it should be – corrective rather than restraining centres. This is where our initiative aims at not only training them to manufacture the solar lanterns, but also to put in place a mechanism for them training other inmates so that the scheme continues in perpetuity.

What left the biggest impression on me was interacting with some of them. Many of them in their orange kurta-pyjamas were milling about as attenders, cleaners, cooks and general oddhands. Casual conversation with them seemed hardly different from those with the blue-collar employees of my own college, which was unnerving considering their dark pasts as murderers, robbers, and what not. While the casual work within the prison, (mainly for the senior prisoners with longer sentences) helps to beat daily drudgery and mental stagnation while also helping them learn new skills, it also negates the need for externally sourced employment for all this. A common criminal from underprivileged circumstances who takes up the carpentry, electric or cooking work in jail has some form of dignified employment to look forward to either upon release or as daily occupation within premises while in jail, while those with sufficient education, and who are in for white collar crimes do not comparatively lack in job-related skills.

All in all this experience was a lesson in humanly possibility. Tanya, one of the “sure-fits” for the training was a soft-spoken, pleasant lady who I found endearingly shy. She seemed pretty amiable, and looking forward to the training. It was astounding to learn that hid a sordid past for this former BPO employee who is serving time for a double murder. Manish has an entire line of paintings on various mythological themes on display there, that make you wonder at the truly meticulous effort that has gone into it, in addition to the skill. And when one learns that the same hands that served such jaw-droppingly awesome ginger chai, have strangled two women, one only has one pained question left at all the disused skills, “why, oh why?”!

But the biggest takeaway from it all? Till now, I was the most vocal supporter you could ever find, of the death-penalty in principle. Sashakt made me rethink. That experience, of meeting people there, hearing of their stories, and looking at the simply unbelievable potential for dignified rehabilitation, is a learning that no classroom lecture by any distinguished professor can ever give.

(Names have been changed to protect certain identities)