International Outsourcing......is BCCI listening ?

Justice Hansen of New Zealand, himself, also the president of a Cricket Club, has said his piece.

A somewhat predictable end to a cricket field fight (having nothing directly to do with cricket, but everything to do with bad behaviour); a fight between players from India and Australia, respectively incensed and thrilled by the abominable umpiring by chaps from West Indies and England; a kachra level performance by a chap from South Africa, myopically functioning as a match referee. Finally a judge flies over from New Zealand to rap everyone on their gloved knuckles. Who have we left out ? Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh ....?

The game which started out as that played by the gentry in the Queen's land, folks in the pavilion gracefully applauding between bites of cucumber sandwiches and tea, (with a trip to the pub later), is now played in a modified cultural milieu, replete with spicy and alcoholic repasts..

Far removed from the time when Aussies and English verbally duelled on the pitch , in what my school teacher would have classified as gutter language, today, selective deafness, and advanced family and anatomical abuse seems to be a required qualification, in a game where , clean strokes, magical wristy flicks, spinning cherries, mighty sweeps, and asymptotic dives to block the ball, should have been the norm.

The advent of non-English speaking countries, the popularity of the game in these countries, and the rise of great players from these countries, has now introduced a factor, that the ICC with its stiff-upper-lip, loftily-perched -Anglo-based policy, needs to take a fast look at.

Once sledging is officially allowed under the guise of "playing hard and fair", you need umpires who understand what is tolerable and what is not. It will not suffice to have neutral umpires. Besides the rules of cricket, they will have to be well versed in choice abuse from all the countries.

A single match referee will not be enough. You will need a panel of chaps acting as match referees, so that there is one person from every country. Along with umpiring qualifications, folks will have to undergo multicultural sociological training. A comprehensive look at whats OK and what's not OK, depending on where the game is being played, between whom, during what part of the year.

This is where we folks from India are uniquely qualified .

With our amazing, unparalleled diversity of religions, languages, political parties, cross cultural understanding, and sometimes, purposeful non-understanding, as well as our capacity to live in a state of dynamic ,religious, economic, and cultural balance, we are uniquely set up to offer training to all the cricketing folks "who decide"..

The ICC should outsource this to India.

The BCCI can set up an International Institute at the Wankhede stadium, for the fine training of umpires and match referees. Now that doing things through video links has been successfully tried out during the monkey episodes, BCCI can even offer distance refresher courses, to those who forget all the bad words.

The trainees can then be taken on surprise tours of various vidhan sabhas where the speaker "umpire" has to often deal with non verbal communication in the form of flying microphones, chairs etc.

Situations that require facing dicey and unrelated reasoning can be handled by some folks from BCCI who specialise in confusing questions with answers .

One more source of income for BCCI. One more reason for some folks to gnash their teeth and crib about India's money power". One more somersault for people like Peter Roebuck.

And one more reason for someone like me,to hark back nostalgically, to her schooldays in a co-ed school, where school bullies always existed, rules were flouted, tearful and brave complaints were made, and the entire problem was successfully dealt with by the teachers, who used tough discipline, great understanding , and the active co-operation of other students to handle it, without making a song , dance and court case about it.

Shakespeare's loaded question : Whats in a name ?

No-Name-Calling week, was declared and celebrated this year in January. Early next year it will becelebrated from January 21-25, 2008.

Why ?

Words hurt.

The younger a hurt person is, the more of an effect it has . In schools, it is routine for some students to be the target of frequent taunts based on their weight, height, intelligence, and sexual orientation/gender expression. Paticularly, in British schools, bullying, by the seniors , was the norm, and you were supposed to emerge, unscthed, and "bloody but unbowed" , as they say, through that.

Sometimes this resulted in a permanent scar on the person's psyche. It affected the students studies, confidence, self respect and attitude towards the world.

"The Misfits", written by James Howe, is a novel about four best friends who band together to face seventh grade in the face of such name callying and bullying. It describes how they formed a group and fought school elections on a no-name-calling platform, and impressed their principal so much, that they initiated a "No-name-calling-Day" at the school.

First celebrated in 2004, the No-name-calling week has been celebrated every year since then , and has consisted of educators, parents and schools working together and discussing and implementing ways to reduce and remove bullying in the community.

While young children today may learn , it is inetersting to note that "name-calling" in some form, as always existed, the world over, historically speaking.

Calling people names, or Name-calling has absolutely nothing to do with knowing somebody's name and calling out to him and her. But it has everything to do with calling out to someone in a very offensive way, so as to be hurtful.

In the olden days, people did not sport easy names like Bill, Al, Dick,Rajiv,Deepak, Arun or , for that matter, George. They had impressive sounding, multisyllable names like Cornelius, Olivio, Marlborough, Spencer, Abraham, Venkatraghavan, Solapurwalla, Setalvad, Figueredo-de-Albuquerque, Boutrous-Boutrous-Ghali, Mountbatten , and such which basically made it difficult to get up and abuse the person easily.

The Greeks and Romans, not to speak of the Egyptians , were very fond of names that nobody could spell or pronounce, but then most people did not take English 101 in those days. You had names like Persepolis, Polyxena, Atridae, Philoctetes, Neoptolemus, Telamonian Ajax, Laomedon, Tyndareus,-just to name a few.

Calling out to "you XXXX XXXX Neoptolemus Ajax" or whoever, wasnt either practical or cool. And so they resorted to duels. While name calling was all about dishonoring someone, duels, (which by today's criminal standards could be deemed culturally sanctioned murder), were all about "restoring on's honor" and an inextricable part of daily life.

While Greeks and Romans could embellish duels, with human sacrifices on the side in the names of various assorted Gods (who commanded them to do that), huge wars like the Trojan War , were often conducted on a matter of individual honor and prestige, and neighboring countries joined the fracas. The more the merrier.

Closer to home, it is not unusual to realise that several prominent political figures were , through the various ages of history, often involved in duels for the most flimsiestof reasons. Abraham Lincoln nearly had to slash at a tax auditor with a saber because he claimed in print that the man smelled badly. Mark Twain , while working as a nespaperman in Nevada in 1864 challenged a rival and only escaped injury through the guile of his "second" (a supposed arbiter, or a person who might be called the dueler's "homey" in today's parlance). At "Bloody Bladensburg," an infamous dueling field near Washington, D.C., many of the country's politicians brutally mowed each other down over second-hand rumors. San Francisco , at one time had the dubious honor of being the Duelling Capital of the nation.

While its been a long time since someone went around Washington DC waving a sword , name calling continues actively to this day. Rush Limbaugh, even took on Chelsea Clinton when she was, would you believe, thirteen, and called her a Whiye House Dog. In a effort at name-calling people his own size, he then attacked Democratic leader Tom Daschle and actually called him "El Diablo" or "the Devil Incarnate", complete with the music of "Devil in a Blue Dress" wafting in the background. He evn further explained that Daschle could be Satan in soft-spoken disguise. He even questioned his patriotism by calling him Hanoi Tom, and Tokyo Tom.


While powerful rulers from the middle east often use completely unparliamenrtary language to describe Bush, Venezuelan President Chavez got into the act by called Bush El Diablo.

Recently , referring to answers given by Presidential hopefuls (2008) to questions about them meeting leaders of Iraq,Venezuela,Cuba etc, Barack Obama called Hilary Clinton, a "Bush Cheney Lite".

Talk radio host Michael Savage, announced that developing countries like Venezuela were "turd world nations"; that Latinos "breed like rabbits"; and that women "should have been denied the vote".

If this were a tennis match between the Us and Venezuela,, we would now be at deuce.

Speaking of tennis , Wimbledon and England come to mind.

No 10, Downing Street, the historical abode of all British Prime Ministers, has been at the recieving end of the name-calling slugfest, and word has it that all the 50 men and one woman who have held the job since Sir Robert Walpole took control in 1721 have been beqeathed rude names. Most have hated them.

Most recently, Tony Blair has been called Bush's Poodle,by his opponents. Then The US president complicated matters saying "He is bigger than that !"(June 27, 2007)...

It has not mattered whether the British Prime Minister was a member of ruyalty or a commoner. The sixth primeminister John Stuart , Earl of Bute, was called Jack Boot; the tenth, Augusttus Henry Fitzroy was described as "the Turf Macaroni"; the twentieth, Frederick Robinson, was nicknamed the "Blubberer"; Sir Robert Peel the 24th occupant was disdainfully called the "Orange Peel"; Benjakin Disraeli , the 29th occupant of 10 Downimg St, was often dismissed as "Dizzy"; Harold Macmillan, the 44th occupant was openly called "Mac the Knife". On generous days , he was often called SuperMac; Jobs and Wozniak probably could not ever match that. Arthur Balfour, sometimes called Bloody Balfour , was actually happy that no one called him by his earlier names, "Pretty Fanny" , "Clara", "Niminy-Pimminy" and "Lisping Hawthorn Bird". As can be expected, he never married.

Much more recently, Tony Blair referred to the current Prime Minsiter as a "big clunking fist"; Margaret Thatcher , the Iron Lady, was derided as the "Milk Snatcher", and Edward Heath, endured "Grocer Heath" , a reference to his very ordinary origins in a society where class was anecessary attribute.

Things can get very alarming in places like India, where recently the Chief Minsiter of a Southern State, while replying strongly to the opposition leader in the State Legislature , declared as to how the "opposition leaders mother must have been ashamed to carry him in her womb ". The Indian Parliament, (now a far cry from the time when debates there were a treat to watch and a lesson in oratory and behaviour)
a few years ago witnessed a Prime Minsiter about to lose a no-confidence motion being called a namby pamby, and "non-worker".

The study of English always required , at some point , a study of Shakespeare. he is even quoted to have made a loaded statement like "Whats in a name ? ", and the mentioned roses.

Today, thanks to the World Wide Web, there exist sites where one can choose adjectives and nouns fron three columns, and make up original sounding personal insults such as "paunchy claybrained flap dragon", "tottering tickle-brained moldwarp", "frothy guts-gripping whey-face", and " beslubbering dread-bolted horn-beast ", all listed under the heading "Shakespearan Insults".....

In the face of such adults who thrive and get drunk on power calling other people names, the No-Name-Calling Week comes as a breath of fresh air, in a world polluted with offensive words, accusations , fights and wars.

In a world where any schoolchildren reading newspapers are subjected to such news, it remains to be seen , what effect such a no-name-calling week will have. Sometimes, children are known to dsiplay more sense than adults.

Hopefully, seeing all these illbehaved, abusive, foulmouthed namecallers, will have a telling effect on today's children , and while politics is a lost cause in this regard, the children will grow up to be co-operative, polite yet independent citizens with a better control over their vocabulary....