Back to the Pavilion

A couple of years ago, it would have been difficult to imagine the cricketing world without the greats of Lara, Warne, Mcgrath, Ganguly, Kumble, Gilchrist, Pollock etc, but they all have bid goodbye to international cricket. Announcement of retirement by another great Matthew Hayden recently triggered my imagination as to what factors drive this tough decision for any great sportsman.

I believe the way an investor would like to time his exit from the market when the value of his holding is at an all time , a sportsman would want to leave the game at the high of his career at his own terms. However, two complexities arise - 1. When and how do you know you are at your peak & the way forward is downward sloping and 2. if you are indeed at your peak or thereabouts , is it really worthwhile to let go all that comes in abundance with the position you are in - money, fame, adulation etc and rather play as long as you can even if it is likely to be a bumpy ride ahead.

It may be helpful to analyze the behavior using the following framework laid out in the chart above. While all these greats have apparently announced their retirement of their own volition, Y-axis measures the level of discretion actually exercised by these players in such decisions.

• Players high on this measure, use proxies like age, associated wear & tear, strength of the bench (its all relative after all) etc to time their exit and then try and make it as graceful as possible. Warne and McGrath timed it to perfection and chose an ideal setting in Ashes-2006 to retire from test cricket. Similiarly, Gilchrist chose India-Australia series in 2008 for his final moment. Lara chose world-cup 2007 at home ground, though as expected Windies werent up there in terms of team performance.


• Low down the Y-axis, it indicates a situation where an exit is forced by circumstances like absolute underperformance (Hayden in the current SA series), relative underperformance (Kumble vs Bhajji in the Australia test series), big event loss (world cup-07 losst for the Skipper Inzy) and hence such exits are sudden and often contradicts the previous public utterances on retirement.

Some players like Pollock, Ganguly and possibly Dravid next try hard to make a come back so that they can gracefully retire on their own terms.

Other considerations depicted on X-axis like financial (match fee, sponsorship), setting records often drive the decision making and force players to prolong their careers as much as possible. Personal reasons like family issues on the other hand force to cut short the careers. (eg. Mcgrath's decision to retire could have been accelerated by her wife's disease)

Players from sub-continent tend to give-in more to the financial and record-setting considerations because probably more money is chasing them and also because in their culture records hold more importance than in other cricket playing nations. Past performance is also given more weightage in the sub-continent as compared to say down-under and hence more conducive setting to pursue and realize the other goals. So Murali can be expected to keep playing till he feels his record of most wickets is humanly unreachable (not in a way undermining his undiminished enthusiasm to continue to contribute to Sri-lankan cricket)

So, what does one take away from the chart - Warne who was in prime form and was also in race for taking most wickets in test cricket with Murali and had several sponsorships, left it at a real high while letting other things go. On the other extreme, Hayden had little choice with signficant loss of form and still not in the top bracket in terms of sponsorships and records. Though I have spilled the beans above, leave it to the readers to read between the spaces to rationalize the positioning of each of these greats!

With that, I call it a day!
Cheers, Jampak

Hullabu.com - First Take

I hereby take liberty to write an uncensored review of my old school friend's maiden internet venture http://www.hullabu.com/.

While I don’t know what hullabu means, I can only appreciate the objective it sets out to achieve. In this age and time of myriad options on internet fighting for millions of internet user’s eye-balls and surfing time, many have actually developed a successful business model aggregating the content wherein all alternatives are available under one roof or under one URL, if you will. Travel portals like travelguru.com aggregates all flights and stay options from different vendors and make them available to potential travelers, bookmyshow.com does the same with movie options, bankbazaar.com does the same for financial products and I can go-on endlessly. I know few are trying to apply the aggregation concept to hitertho unexplored verticals like jobs, education as well.

I am not sure if any there is any other web property out there which does what hullabu seeks to do. It puts all the regularly visited portal segments of a typical user under one URL so that one need not put effort in trying to remember the URLs and browse them through different browser windows. It can make one’s web surfing experience much more efficient and structured. A typical user in a web session will check out a few

• News portals – to satiate his hunger for breaking news


• Financial news portals – to know how more or less wealthy he is


• Job portals - if he/she is in the market


• Matrimony portals - again if he/she is in the market ;)


• Shopping portals - if he/she doesn’t like going to the markets


• And search engines for all other one-time needs
  
  Some specific features of http://www.hullabu.com/ which I could figure out are


• One can add or delete categories to suit one’s needs


• One can add or delete websites within a category depending on one’s liking


• Recently visited websites are captured in the tabs at the top, which makes it easy to revisit them and also in a way summarizes the surfing journey for that session for the user
  
  A not so-sophisticated user like me so far relied on favorites, piecemeal measures like RSS feed for blogs etc, but now would seriously consider http://www.hullabu.com/ to approach surfing in a more organized fashion.
  
  While this is beta version, there are some areas of improvement like better and more “good on eye” colorful interface, automatic removal of duplicate tabs and resequencing of remaining tabs, more customization opportunities for the user and unless the creator has good reasons to hide his identity (read shying away from creditors) let people know who is behind the effort. Hope these would be taken care of in the final launch.
  
  Best wishes and congratulations!!
  Jampak

Times of Crime and Philanthropy

I deliberated recently on an interesting article in the New Yorker by James Surowiecki, which was also referred to on a live mint blog of Sandeep Parekh. It hypothized that financial crimes thrive during economic booms and other property crimes like bank robbery etc thrive during downturns. Below is an attempt at rationalizing this behavior and also drawing parallels with the opposite human act of philanthropy.

Times of Crimes
I believe financial crimes like the Madoffs, the Harshad Mehta and Ketan Parekh stock market scams, ponzy schemes etc are triggered by a drop in diligence levels and increase in risk appetite of the investors and other parties in the financial ecosystem, which happens when asset prices are secularly moving northwards and outlook is very bullish, thereby providing a conducive environment to commit a financial fraud.

On the other hand, other property crimes like theft, robbery etc are more a function of the level of desperateness of the culprits, which is heightened when the times are bad and not necessary result due to drop in guard by the potential victims.

Hence the drivers of the two types of crimes are quite different and there occurrence is aided by direction of economic cycle trajectory.

I thought it would be interesting to see how the opposite human act of philanthropy (giving more to others than you ought to) & its variants work vis-a-vis crimes (taking away from others which never belonged to you) in different times.

Times of Philanthropy
A pure financial philanthropy would be more pronounced in economic booms when money-making is easy and doesn’t cause much pain to part with your wealth and beneficiaries may even be unrelated parties. In boom times, even otherwise not so selfless people are tempted to participate in financial philanthropic activities perhaps owing to peer pressure and to gain social mileage.

On the other hand, not-strictly financial philanthropy (bailing someone out of a financial mess, helping someone find a job etc) warrants itself more in downturns when people are in dire needs. In bad times, while there are more opportunities to be helpful, there are fewer who may be in a position to help and even fewer who would want to. Hence, a larger supply demand gap is created as compared to good times and only the benefactors who genuinely want to be helpful may come into play.

Here again, drivers of the two types of philanthropy are different, the former is driven by abundance and footage factor, the latter is more driven by genuine benevolence and hence the two manifest themselves in different proportion in different cycles.

Keep the faith
Like how most of the financial crimes committed in economic booms are finally uncovered only in downturns when the punishment is meted out, one would hope all kind deeds committed in your good times come back to rescue you in your bad times.

RNBDJ Vs Ghajini

While differences between the two of the biggest Bollywood releases of the year RNBDJ and Ghajini are very obvious right from the genre and the directors - one being a romantic plot in an unusual small-town setting executed by Aditya Chopra, who never seem to get enough of Punjab and SRK, while the other is basically a revenge story, remade and retold, by Tam film-maker Murugadoss, I thought it would be interesting to look at the amazing similiarities two releases had both in the build-up and the actual product

• SRK and Aamir sport looks very contrary to their established images. SRK as Suri is very uncool unlike Raj & Rahul of the past while Aamir as Sanjay Singhania is too macho and violent unlike Nikumbh & Bhuvan.
• Both Suri and Singhania are heaviliy relied on in the marketing of the movies and almost zero footage is given to the lead actresses in the pre-release period.
• Both movies aim to give more than two SRK and Aamir to the audiences for the cost of one ticket- SRK with two parallel roles and a song imitating past heroes in SRK style and Aamir again with two characters though not parallel and a bonus song with multiple looks.
• Suri and Singhania, thanks initially to circumstances and later by will, hide their full identities from their love interest and try and win them minus that extra factor of coolness and richness respectively.
• Female protagonists, both making their first Bollywood appearances, wear a unconventionally refreshingly look and demeanour.

Before I overanalyze the similiarities, I'll post this and start thinking about the topic for my next publication. Cheers. Jampak