Why thank (just) Muslims around the world?

At the presentation ceremony of today's Twenty-20 finals, Shoib Malik said: "First of all I'd like to thank people back home and the Muslims around the world." I really don't understand why he has to thank people of a religion particularly. Does he think people of other religions never support Pakistan? Why is that so? BTW, India is home to nearly as many Muslims as Pakistan itself!

South Indian = Madrasi

North Indians have always been poor at differentiating between the people from the four southern states and appreciating the difference between their languages, cultures and ways of life. Any south Indian is referred to as a "Madrasi". With the vast movement of North Indians to cities like Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai in recent times, I was expecting that the situation would have changed by now. I was expecting that at least TV channels would be able to make this distinction very well.

A few days back I was watching a discussion on CNN-IBN. English news channels live on hype and they had a mouth-watering topic that day - the controversy related to the Sethusamudram project. One of the participants was a historian from Tamilnadu, I don't remember his name now. The discussion was moving on the lines of "Is Lord Sri Ram only popular in the North India? Is he relevant in the south?". The anchor asked the historian if he could elaborate. The historian said something on the lines of "Ram is not worshipped in Tamilnadu. There are hardly any temples for Ram in Tamilnadu. In fact many believe that worshipping Ram brings ill fate" At this stage, the anchor concluded something like this: "So worshipping Ram is limited to North India. Since South Indians don't worship Ram, we can't say that Ram is an integral part of Hindus in India." These are not the exact words she used, but pretty close.

Now, I really don't know whether Lord Ram is worshipped much in TN. This is a far too controversial topic to write about. What irked me is, how can Tamilnadu represent South India completely? Of course Ram is worshipped in Karnataka. Of course there are temples for Ram in Karnataka and AP. We surely don't believe that worshipping Ram brings ill fortune. Ram may not be as popular a god in South India as he is in the north, but saying nobody worships Ram in the south is too much of stretch. Come on folks, South India is not just TN. While at it, every South Indian is not a Madrasi!

My ADSL modem and router configuration

I bought my Linksys WRT54G wireless router in the US. It is a bit sensitive to voltage fluctuations. On some days the quality of power supply in my area is poor, which results in the router rebooting all by itself. When this happens, I am forced to remove the router and connect directly to the ADSL modem. The modem, having been made for Indian conditions, is much better at coping with voltage fluctuations.

Typical modem-router configurations recommend setting the modem in bridge mode and using the router to talk PPPoE language. However, in my case, when I remove the router and connect directly to the modem, I will have to change the modem from bridge mode to PPPoE mode. This is a surely extra work and is not nice. So I needed a setup in which I could either connect to the modem or to the router without making any change to settings anywhere (except of course restarting networking on my laptop).

Now I have got a setup that does exactly this. This is how I have done it:
As you can see here, I have my modem in the default PPPoE configuration. Modem's IP is 192.168.1.1, which is the default. I have enabled DHCP server on it, giving out IPs between 192.168.1.2 and 192.168.1.33.


Moving on to the Linksys router, I have configured it to be in "Automatic configuration - DHCP" mode. I have set it's IP to be 192.168.1.36. This can be any IP outside the DHCP IPs provided by the modem. I have disabled the DHCP server on the router, because I don't want to have 2 DHCP servers in my network.


I have connected the ethernet cable from the modem to the one of the router's 4 regular ports, not the "Internet" port.

I have enabled DHCP on my laptop. It gets it's IP from the modem. The router acts just as a router, forwarding all packets to the modem. When I disconnect the router and connect directly to the modem, it still works perfectly fine without needing any configuration changes anywhere.

About Twenty-20 cricket

I watched parts of the first ICC Twenty-20 match yesterday. I believe it is in line with the trend of the time and is bound to succeed. It is good that ICC has formalized the rules of T-20 to make it a mainstream game. I don't know if the dresscode of cheerleading squad is 'official', though :-)

As batsmen get used to the T-20 format, they will learn that it is possible to score runs of many balls that they used to just defend all these days. This will have an impact on the one-day cricket as well, just as the one-day cricket had an impact on test-cricket. More and more one-day games will see scores above 300 now.

The idea was simple. People don't have patience to spend a whole day watching a game of cricket, so the game has been shortened to meet people's tastes. Purists obviously don't like this experiment. They argue that T-20 makes the game lose it's character, skillful batting becomes irrelevant, the game is demoralizing to bowlers and so on. However, when one-day games were introduced, a lot of people opposed this 'dilution' of the game, but slowly got used to the idea of a game that finishes on the same day as it begins. Of course, there are people who still believe test cricket is the only 'pure' form of cricket, but such people are bound to be extinct in a few years.

Been a long time

It has been four and a half months since I blogged. I don't know how it started, I guess I became very busy for a few days and slowly blogging ceased being an important activity. However, I have started missing it, so it is surely time to get back to it. Hopefully I will keep up to it from now on.