Are we not made of stained glass?
Shine n sparkle as we bath in sunlit grass,
But only if we light the fire within
In darkness the veil is blown
To reveal the true grace we adorn……
Sachin Tendulkar has been the greatest sports icon for India and he inspired Indians from all walks of life. I am just one among the millions who love, admire and awed by the talent of Sachin Tendulkar on the cricketing field. For long time he was the only sports superstar that we had to boast about. Saying this I am not trying to ignore the accolades of our other sporting stars like Vishwanathan Anand, Vijay Amritraj, Prakash Padukone, Milka singh, PT Usha and others. While they were great none of them achieved anything close to what Sachin has achieved in their respective sports. They were always the brides maid never the bride. We can argue at length that cricket has much more budgets, funds and support than any other sport in India, but the fact remains that we are a cricket crazy nation and that is the only sport where we compete at the highest level. Other than cricket I can not really think of any sport where we would be called a top class team. So why crib?
While there are few skeptics out there who believe that there are other who were better than him; that he only plays for records or he should have retired couple of years back, I choose to ignore them as people who speak without out facts in hand.For those who play the tune that Sachin was never a match winner and played for his centuries, pls check this analysis of his win ratio for those games he hit a century, the links are given below.
Those who are convinced that he plays for the records, I just want to add “he plays and the records follow him”. What i really like about Sachin Tendulkar is his humility. The fact that he has been humble all his live even after what he has acheived is in itself a great achievement as a human being.In the two decades we have not come come across any controversy, loose gossip or incidents that have always been associated with super stars.He is always calm, composed and always speaks with dignity that befitted someone who is not only a great sportstar but a good human too. He is someone who can be a sporting idol for current generation and generations to come.
As his innings comes to a close and and he walks back in to the pavilion one last time, I thought is is just right to compile all that he has achieved on the green circle. Given below are 200 facts about Sachin that you may like to know.
(Compiled from internet)
1. His father named him after the legendary music director Sachin Dev Burman.
2. During his school days, he grew his hair and tied a band around it to copy his idol, tennis legend John McEnroe.
3. While growing up, Sachin would ask his friend Ramesh Pardhe to dip a rubber ball in water and hurl it at him to see the wet marks left on the bat to know whether he had middled the ball!
The King in exile
The dictionary is filled with strange and wonderful words that are scandalously underused. Open at any page and you’re likely to find a gem glistening in the corner, whether it’s gongoozle (to stare idly at a watercourse and do nothing) or zwodder (a feeling of drowsiness). We see it, and think to ourselves that we absolutely must use it in conversation. But by the time that you actually see someone staring idly at a watercourse and doing nothing, you can’t quite remember what the word was, and of course you’ll never be able to find it again. It’s lost, hidden away among the much more boring words. Why do dictionaries insist on defining words like “and”. And why do they have to be arranged alphabetically?
We all have moments when we’re lost for words, or when we struggle to describe the-little-plastic-bits-on-the-end-of-your-shoelaces (anglets), but it’s usually too much of a hassle to run off and read through all 18 volumes of “the Oxford English Dictionary” searching for just the right term. There was a guy recently who read the whole thing cover to eighteenth cover, but it took him a whole year, and if you did that every time you were looking for the right word, you might come back to find that the conversation had moved on.
That’s why I decided to pick out all the best and most useful unused words in the dictionary and put them in a book. But I wasn’t going to arrange it alphabetically. I decided to arrange them by the hour of the day when they might be useful. So antejentacular (before breakfast) is in the chapter for 7 AM, and curtain lecture (a telling-off given by a wife to her husband in bed) is saved until midnight. Ultracrepidarian (giving opinions on a subject you know nothing about) is saved for office hours, and gymnologising (having an argument in the nude) isn’t.
In the end, I found myself describing a complete day, but a day based around the finest words in the dictionary. That was my rule: they all had to have been recorded in at least one English dictionary. These words are beautiful. They remind us of why English is the greatest language on earth. They tell us stories about lost worlds. They make us laugh and sometimes shock us. But most importantly, they deserve to be brought back. They’re all still usable. Some of them are nearly new, with just a few citations on the clock. So come on, expand your word power. Here are ten beauties to get you going.
Quomodocunquizing is “making money in any way that you can”. It’s almost the same as the modern word “hustling” except without any of the gangster-ish overtones. It’s listed in the Oxford English Dictionary, but they only have one recorded use of it from 1652 where the Scotsman Thomas Urquhart complained about “Those quomodocunquizing clusterfists and rapacious varlets.”
A whiffler is somebody who walks in front of you through a crowd, waving a chain or an axe in order to clear your path. Back in Medieval times kings and aristocrats would have whifflers to walk through the town square in front of them pushing away any peasants who might have got in the Royal Way. However, I think that whifflers could make a comeback. They could hire themselves out in busy airports and shopping malls and blast your way through.
Mind you, whiffler can also mean “a smoker of tobacco”.
Though the words in “The Horologicon” are all old or strange, it’s amazing how easy they are to use, and how people understand you straight away. To smicker is to “look amorously after somebody.” It’s one of those wonderful words whose meaning is obvious the second you use it in the right context. “Stop smickering at that woman! It’s so embarrassing.” Or “Why is Brad ignoring me? I spent hours on this hair-do and not even a smicker.”
It’s a lovely little detail of anatomy that the muscles used to move your eyes sideways are called the amatorial muscles, because they’re the ones that you use to give amorous glances.
Deipnophobia is “a morbid fear of dinner parties.” We all have it occasionally, especially when the in-laws are involved. The Oxford English Dictionary lists it alongside deipnodiplomatic, which means “inviting people round to dinner in order to patch up an argument.” They both come from the Ancient Greek deipnon, which just meant dinner. But one of the joys of the hidden corners of the dictionary is all the words that English has constructed from ancient languages. The next entry is for deipnosophist, which is “somebody who talks wisely over dinner.”
Uhtceare is an Old English word for “waking up before dawn and not being able to get back to sleep because you’re worried about something.” Uht (pronounced oot) was the hour before sunrise and ceare is the same as the modern English care. Sometimes the joy of discovering a strange word is the realisation that other people have experienced that. It’s not just me who lies there waiting for the alarm clock. People have been suffering from uhtceare for over a thousand years.
Sometimes a word tells you about a time and a place that’s gone forever. Sprunt is an old Scottish word meaning “to chase girls around among the haystacks after dark.” It’s recorded in an old dictionary of the dialect of the Roxburgh, but it tells you so much about what Roxburgh must have been like. Imagine a time and a place where chasing girls around among the haystacks after dark was such a common activity that people said “We need a single-syllable word for this.” It beats staycationing any day.
Going to Siege
People can never say what they mean, especially when it comes to the bathroom. The English language is full of strange ways of telling people that you’re off to fulfill the needs of nature. In the eighteenth century people talked of “taking a voyage to the Spice Islands,” in the nineteenth century gentlemen would “ease themselves.” but back in Medieval times a knight would tell people that he was “Going to siege.” There’s something so poetic about it, so military and noble! But it also firmly implies a dose of constipation.
To fudgel is an eighteenth-century term meaning “Pretending to work when you’re not actually doing anything at all.” Modern offices are full of it, largely because when somebody is staring intently at a computer screen and typing it’s hard to tell whether they’re busily putting together this year’s accounts or busily updating their Facebook status or buying something on eBay. “Stop fudgelling” should be the catchphrase of every efficient office manager.
A Wheady Mile
The wheady mile is the last mile or so of a journey that, for some reason, seems to take much longer than it should. It’s an old dialect term from rural Shropshire, but it still applies to modern journeys. It feels as though you’re about to walk through your own front door and collapse into a chair, but instead there’s still the twists and turns and then, even when the wheady mile is complete, you’ve got to find somewhere to park the car. Mind you, a wheady mile is better than a Pisgah sight, which is when, like Moses on Mount Pisgah looking at the Promised Land, you can see something whilst knowing that you’ll never get there.
To groke is an old Scots term meaning “to look at somebody while they’re eating in the hope that they’ll give you some of their food.” Originally, the term was only applied to dogs, and any dog owner will know that look of plaintive groking that comes whenever you’re eating sausages. But groking can be applied to humans as well. Just try opening a box of chocolates in any modern workplace and watch as your co-workers come by to groke and ask you how you are.
If you’re finifugal you’re afraid of finishing anything and… Oh God… I can’t… I can’t.
Microsoft acquisition of Nokia phone and device business brings to a close a remarkable period of high tech leadership. If you looked across the mobile landscape a decade ago you saw Nokia, Ericsson and DoCoMo of Japan, not Android, Apple and Samsung. Since 2007 Nokia has been hacked mercilessly by a tide of competition that it should have been well able to withstand, after-all it was the grand dad of the market. Even more amusing is the fact that Apple and Google has no prior expertise in the telecom market and Samsung was fiddling around with the extremely competitive consumer electronics landscape trying to find a footing for itself. The big daddies of the market were Nokia, Motorola and Ericsson. None of them exist any more in the handset market. They shut shop or meekly allowed to be taken over.
There was a time when I vouched that there was no phone that was better than Nokia. Even in my wildest dreams I could not have imagined Nokia being bought by Microsoft at a paltry 7.2 billion dollars. In comparison,* Xiaomi… a Chinese handset manufacturer, (6th in china based on sales revenue) is valued at 10 billion dollars. It is 3 years old and pre- IPO . Similarly Motorola was sold to Google for 12 billion couple of years back.
But this is Nokia, the largest mobile phone manufacturer and that brand that believed in connecting people,somewhere down the line the connection dropped and the call got disconnected.
What went wrong for Nokia?
While there will case studies harassing students at business schools trying to answer the above question, I think I can summaries it in three key heading.
Missing the Big Picture: The telecommunication landscape was changing. It was not the voice that was connecting people it was Data. Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, Skype…. the list goes on. Nokia missed the picture and was trying to provide devices that offered superior audio quality.In the era of downloaded music and pirated cam prints, quality was never the highest priority. (Remember Apple antenna) It was being connected by data that was important. Apple recognized that and created a whole new business vertical to tap into that demand. Rest is history
Ecosystems: In the new mobile landscape software ecosystem is the game changer. Apple recognized it and invested in technology and infrastructure to help terraform the new emerging landscape. It understood the disadvantage of being on the wrong side of the application space, it has faced it in its PC business. Apple replicated a model in mobile space what Windows did to it in the PC market. Develop the ecosystem and leverage both software and hardware side of the market.
Mobile ecosystem is a delicate balance between technology and application space. When it comes down to offering users highly accessible and relevant content, IOS and Android wins hands down against Symbian. With Android and IOS, the critical availability of core applications that fulfill user needs is such that people will equate their phone usage with the operating system and what it gives, ignoring the subtle differences in the physical media and the software layer above it. Nokia found itself on the wrong side, unaware.
Nokia made a mistake to stick with its own unique operating system for its brand of devices, which might have become the limiting factor for its growth. It was unable to leverage the huge potential it had with when more than 80% of the phones in the market were on its platform.
Innovation Paralysis: For a company that had pioneered GSM technology, developed Symbian and all those early innovations the company seem to be in a state of paralysis from the time IPhone was launched and android followed. With the released of IOS Symbian got outdated from day one. Even for someone with no tech background like me, Symbian looked drab, i was disenchanted with Nokia the moment I saw an IPhone.
I thought Nokia will bounce back with an even better OS but that never happened. They stuck on to Symbian. After the agony of dwindling sales and profits Nokia finally decided to dump the Symbian OS and create a new smartphone OS that would be distributed as an open-source. It was called Maemo and ran on the Linux platform. It was a disaster.
Then Nokia wanted something entirely new, something hot and decided to stick with Intel’s Linux-based operating system – Moblin. Unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned, Mobiln was later merged with MeeGo which caused further delays and Ironically it go went gone with one device. In the meantime Samsung adopted Android and there were more than a billion app downloads from the iTunes store.
While IPhone changed the landscape with IPhone it was disappointing that Nokia in the last 10 years was unable to deliver not even a single revolutionary or game-changing feature. Finally it dumped its OS plan and decided to go with Microsoft as their primary OS, that marked the end of innovation in software thereby and a tech suicide for the company. It would have been better had it just adopted Android and continued to compete with Samsung with their innovations in hardware space
Endgame to all the above : Nokia handset division got bought over by Microsoft…
Buy what did Microsoft Buy?
Why women can’t put on mascara with their mouth closed?
Why toasters always have a setting so high that could burn the toast to a horrible crisp which no decent human being would eat?
Why there a light in the fridge and not in the freezer?
Why you don’t ever see the headline: “Psychic Wins Lottery”?
Why “abbreviated” is such a long word?
Why Doctors call what they do “practice”?
Why you have to click on “Start” to stop ‘Windows’?
Why lemon juice is made with artificial flavor, while dishwashing liquid is made with real lemons?
Why there isn’t mouse flavoured cat food?
Who tastes dog food when it has a “new & improved” flavor?
Why people point to their wrist when asking for the time, but don’t point to their bum when they ask where the bathroom is?
Why Goofy stands erect while Pluto remains on all fours? They’re both dogs!
Why Noah didn’t swat those two mosquitoes?
Why they sterilize the needle for lethal injections?
Why sheep don’t shrink when it rains?
Why they are called apartments when they are all stuck together?
If con is the opposite of pro, is congress the opposite of progress?
Why they call the airport “a terminal” if flying is supposedly so safe?
Who the first first person was to look at a cow and say, “I think I’ll squeeze these pink dangly things here, and drink whatever comes out?”
Why the professor on Gilligan’s Island can make a radio out of coconut, but can’t he fix a hole in a boat?
If people evolved from apes, why are there still apes?
What do you call male ballerinas?
If blind people can see their dreams? Do they dream??
That if Wile E. Coyote from the Road Runner had enough money to buy all that ACME crap, why didn’t he just buy dinner?
If quizzes are quizzical, what are tests?
If corn oil is made from corn, and vegetable oil is made from vegetables, then what is baby oil made from?
Why the “Alphabet Song” and “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” have the same tune?
Do illiterate people get the full effect of Alphabet Soup?
Why do they call it an asteroid when it’s outside the hemisphere, but call it a hemorrhoid when it’s on the outside of your ass?
Why it is when you blow in a dog’s face, he gets mad at you, but when you take him on a car ride, he sticks his head out the window?
How come we put a man on the moon before realising it would be a good idea to put wheels on suitcases?
How important someone has to be before they can be ‘assassinated’ rather than just plain ‘murdered’?
How come “phonetically” is spelt with a “ph”?
Why a round pizza gets delivered in a square box?
Why people pay to go up in tall buildings, and then put money in binoculars to look at things on the ground?
When you get to heaven / paradise / nirvana, are you stuck wearing whatever you were buried or cremated in forever?
Why people say they “slept like a baby”, when babies normally wake up every two hours?
Why do we press harder on a remote control when we know the batteries are flat?
What would the speed of lightning be if it didn’t zigzag?
Why does someone believe you when you say there are four billion stars, but has to check when you say the paint is wet?
Why is it that our children can’t read a Bible in school, but they can in prison?
Why doesn’t glue stick to the bottle?
Why do they use sterilized needles for death by lethal injection?
Why doesn’t Tarzan have a beard?
Why does Superman stop bullets with his chest, but ducks when you throw a revolver at him?