India's foray in alternative sports

Alternative sports? Alternative to which sports? Well, most people in India follow only cricket and almost nothing other than cricket. But, there are people such as myself who are now tired of watching cricket matches. Since around seven years back, a lot of cricket matches take place throughout the year between teams of international level, every year. Only about twenty-thirty players from the cricket-playing nations play cricket at the top level, so the set of players participating in such international matches remain constant over a time. That should be pretty tiresome for these players. This makes it doubtful whether these players remain motivated enough to give their 100% in so many matches. Also, as far as competitiveness is concerned, Indians have a different frame of mind as compared to Australians. Typically, in a 5-match series, Indians lose interest in the 5th game unless it is nicely poised at 2-2 by then. This lack of interest happens with most Indian viewers and the Indian media, even the players would know about this. So, that surely reduces the degree of competitiveness on the part of Indian players. Even the selection committee as well as the captain and the coach often let some in-form players sit idle when team has already got an unassailable lead in a series. Whatever. The fact remains that I am not interested in watching cricket matches or reading match reports any more.

There was a time when we used to win gold medals in hockey at the Olympics. But now, our game is not at par with the best teams in the world and it will take years to catch up with the better teams. Now, at the best, we deserve the bottom position among top 12 teams at the Olympics. There are some attempts from certain quarters to popularize Hockey by organizing national level tournaments, but without much success. Very few schools in India have equipment or a suitable field for playing Hockey, and so there is low chance that Indian people will show more interest in Hockey. In comparison, football is popular among school students and its played in almost every school here. Even though there is a sizable number of Indian viewers of world football, of the European leagues and tournaments and the World Cup, we have very low rank in the football world, and we have pretty limited success in this game so far.

In other team games such as volleyball, basketball etc., India is not rated among the best in the world. In individual sports and athletics, we had a few good sportsmen who could be compared with the best in their time. But, most of them failed to win a medal at the Olympics. One exception was Prakash Padukone, who was one of the top badminton players in his time; but badminton was not an Olympic sport during his career. Badminton became a regular Olympic sport only from 1992, one year after Mr. Padukone retired. Till 2008, the other exceptions, who were able to win an Olympic medal, were K. D. Yadav, who won a wrestling bronze in 1952, Leander Paes who won a Tennis bronze in 1996, Kannan Malleswari who won a weightlifting bronze in 2000 and Rajyabardhan Singh Rathore who won a shooting silver in 2004.

During 2008, the expectation of common people was high on improving in medal tally at the Olympics; this was mostly due to media hype. The TV journalists kept on taking interviews of Indian contingent. This probably increased pressure on the participants as they had to face interviews even before their events were completed. We got three medals in 2008 Olympics, a shooting gold by Abhinav Bindra, a boxing bronze by Vijender Singh and a wrestling bronze by Sushil Kumar. I remember, when Bindra came back to India, one not-so-young journalist asked him, "What next?" I think this shows how low-level the queries our journalists can pose.The officials in Indian contingent could not do anything to prevent participants from being interviewed by over-enthusiastic Indian media.

I can understand that a common person can wonder why a country with so many people cannot win a decent number of medals at the Olympics. But people in media should be smarter than common people, they should know that its not about quantity, its about quality. If we have a number of participants who can reach the heats and the semifinals in track and field events, and if we have participants reaching quarter finals and semifinals in knock out formats at the international level, then only we will have higher benchmarks at national level, and then only we should expect more medals. Also, some wins at World Championships or similar events does not necessarily translate into medals at the Olympics - there the competition gets even tougher.

In 2012, though the media hype was more than ever before, I guess the sportspersons this time got less perturbed by it. Some credit for this may go to the cricketers, who often show how to talk diplomatically during the interviews and how not to get pressurized by constant reminders from journalists about what their countrymen are expecting from the sportspersons. Not only that we own more medals this time, our participants got better ranks in the specific events this time as compared to our teams at previous Olympics. In track and field events, Irfan Thodi secured rank 10 in 20 KM walk, Vikas Gowda got rank 8 in Men's Discus Throw, Krishna Poonia got rank 7 in Women's Discus Throw, and Tintu Luka reached semifinals of Women's 800m sprint. All these are good for the future of Olympic sports from India's point of view. In Badminton, Saina Nehwal won bronze in women's event, Parupalli Kashyap reached quarter finals in Men's event and women's doubles team did put up a very good show - who became a victim of the match fixing scandals among other countries. Kudos to coach P Gopichand, who himself was a national champion few years back, for mentoring both Saina and Kashyap and producing praiseworthy results.

In Boxing, a lot was expected from eight male boxers, but they failed to win any medal. Only Mary Kom, who was a women's world champion in another category, won a bronze medal here. The archery team who usually get high positions in indoor world championship, they failed to meet the standards in outdoor events at the Olympics. Its a shame that the coaches and the officials could not help the participants in understanding how to modulate in windy situations, even though prior information about such situations were well-known.

In Shooting, Gagan Narang got a bronze medal, Vijay Kumar secured a silver medal and Joydeep Karmakar got rank 4 in another event. In Rowing, both participants secured rank among top 20. Among wrestlers, Sushil Kumar improved his performance and got a silver medal this time. Yogeswar Dutt impressed many and secured a bronze medal.

After the medalists returned to India, they have received awards and honors from various organizations including government. Coverage of these sports in print media and televisions are now getting more noticeable than before. Hope this increases number of common people interested in Olympic Sports and at the same time raises the bar at national level events too. All these developments should inspire more sportspersons from India to perform their best at the highest levels. A similar progress in India's presence in the field of Chess happened, as a number of players were inspired by the consistently high performance of the World Champion Vishwanathan Anand. Before 2000, when Anand became World Champion for the first time, India had only 3 grandmasters including Anand. Now, we have 25 grandmasters in total.

Searching web pages by an image

  It was 1999, when I came to know about Google search engine. Prior to that, I used either Yahoo or Lycos engine for searching web. Gradually, Google added many features to the searching mechanism, and rarely I tried any other search engine since I started using it. Among these features, the ones that I often used is 'site:' for searching at a particular website, searching in other languages, quotes for exact search, and '-' for exclusion in search string. All these are now explained in the advanced search page.
  However, till last year, I never though that it would be possible to search by an image. One of my colleagues taught me how to do that: using tineye. Now, Google Images page also has this new feature: where we can search by an image as opposed to searching by some text. Not only that, I can even drag an image to the search box. If dragging is not possible, e.g. for an image shared in Facebook that is not public, it can be saved to hard disk and then searching by image is possible by upload the file in Google Image: using the camera button/icon in the search box.
  I tried searching with my 2006 image, when I used to keep the mustache. Though Google Image search could not access any web page where this image is used except my twitter page, it displayed pictures of few people who look alike myself. I was impressed with that output: I believe I have some visual similarity with these people.

  I started shaving off the mustache one year back from now. At that time I realized, I had very close facial similarity with my father. And I never realized that before even though my mother mentioned it once or twice. Funny thing is that when I searched using this image, which is used in my Google pages, it included a pic of Barack Obama among my lookalikes. I am elated.

Stereograms: Why many people cannot view these?

The first time I came to know about stereograms was in 1997, when a friend stumbled upon one with Einstein's image in it. I couldn't see Einstein among all those patterns of pixels of various colors. I didn't know also how to discover the image among those pixels.

But, I remembered the name of the picture: stereogram. Later, over the years, time and again, I tried to view images hidden in stereograms, with little success.

Sometime around 2008, almost 11 years after I was shown the first stereogram, I could see few pictures, thanks to the Wikipedia page on it. I could see the 3-D image of the Asiatic hybrid Lilium and some images with pictures in multiple planes in the wiki page on autostereogram. I got some help on viewing these from the web pages of eyetricks. My favorite among the 3-D stereograms is this image of statue of liberty. These images are somewhat easier to view, simply because these are images rather than patterns of pixels as we can see in most of the stereograms. BTW, these stereograms which shows a high number of pixels of different colors are called "random dot autostereograms".

I got stuck at unearthing the shark at this image, this wiki page shows another pic below the stereogram that shows the shark in white with black background. Since I could see the 3-D images by this time, I was expecting to see another plane behind the random dots where the shark lies. This wrong anticipation was the main reason, I guess, of my inability to spot the shark for a long time. Once, I cracked it, I was able to see similar hidden pictures behind other similar random dot autostereograms.

So, how to visualize this shark? Imagine that there is some dough, and somewhere in the middle of it you have made a pothole-like depression that has got the shape of the body of a shark, as if the shark is just lying at the surface of the dough - half of its body is above the dough. Now imagine the dough having the random dots on all over the surface of it - so, naturally, these dots are also on the visible surface of the depression on the dough. This is exactly what you can see from this picture if you focus in the right way.

Coming back to the stereogram of Einstein, which can be seen here. Now, I can see Einstein here: its just outline of his face, nobody could identify him without the hint in the background of the image. I would keep the shark image that appears on the stereogram page in Wikipedia as a better example of a random dot autostereogram.

Life in Bangalore: Passport office

Had to get my passport reissued to update some data. Waited for more than a year to get this done, as I had to gather an address proof of one year at the present address.

These days, we need address proof for almost anything, unless some major document such as the passport contains the current address. The first time when I applied for the passport at my hometown, I held the ration card as proof of address, but it was not much important then to prove that one had stayed at the address for one year so. In 2008, when I got it reissued at Bangalore I had very less proof - just rental agreement - and somehow it worked, though I was asked to provide alternative proofs, both while submitting the application and during the Police Verification.

In 2008, I submitted the application at a Bangalore One outlet. Things have changed from 2008 and now reissue of passport can be applied only at the new centers called Passport Seva Kendra (PSK) - Bangalore has two offices of this. And one cannot go there directly (without booking an appointment) unless there is a document to support the urgency for a 'Tatkal' mode of application for reissue of passport - only way to submit application in case of a 'Normal' mode is via its website.

Online application was not much of a problem for me, and uploaded few scanned documents too (a max of 4 can be uploaded) - though nobody referred to the uploaded documents during the application process. The big hurdle was to book an appointment at PSK from the website, the only place from where it can be done. The booking opens at 6 PM everyday except Friday and Saturday, but the slots get filled up within 3-5 minutes. I waited for quite a few days to crack the puzzle: finally got it after trying for around three weeks. Booking can be done for the day after the next - on Sunday it can be done for Tuesday.

For me, the application process was done without any major hiccup - only issue was that it took some time to convince the personnel at counter B about authenticity of the institute where I had done my graduation. She asked me to show the mark-sheet but I was not carrying the original (as nowhere it was not mentioned that mark-sheet would be required) and I forgot that I was carrying a photocopy anyways.

Police verification was done within two days. I was asked to carry 2 photographs, address proof of one year and photocopies of old passport (proof of date of birth) while visiting the Police station. Police kept the original address proof - BSNL bill of last month and that of another month one year back. I also had to write a letter notifying that I had no criminal records against me. I was surprised at the Police personnel filling up a Kannada form all by himself with my information from the application form. During 2008 renewal time, the Police asked me to sign the same form where nothing else was filled up and I could not read Kannada then - surely things have improved in this area too.

Overall a very pleasant experience; received the passport within 2 weeks.

The tips to share:
1. No need to submit documents online - nobody refers to it.
2. For booking an appointment, the most important point is to understand when the clock strikes 6 PM at PSK :)
3. While booking an appointment, once slots are shown, no need to type the random-text image in the top half of the screen, rather simply click one of the displayed time-slot straightaway; next page another random-text image will appear. Your appointment will be confirmed once you submit information including correct random-text image in the new page.
4. Get photocopies of all documents; all in A4 size. The file which is prepared at PSK during application can contain A4 size papers; so photocopies of jumbo size certificates in A3 size are not needed. And there is a xeroxing facility at PSK (Re 1 for each page), though I did not have to use it.
5. For ECNR, though certificate of a professional course or SSLC certificate is needed, it's better to carry the corresponding mark-sheet also along with its xerox copy. BTW, if you had ECNR earlier and now while reissuing the passport, then do not expect that ECNR will be carried over to the new passport - better to submit proofs again. I assumed the carry over while reissuing my passport in 2008, and got fooled :)
6. After security check, a token number is given, the same number is used in A, B, C counters.
7. Security guard at Lalbagh PSK, where I went, doesn't allow applicants to carry cigarettes and matchboxes inside the office and points to the 'No smoking' sign to support his claim that such things cannot be allowed inside.
8. Better to get early morning appointment as delay during the day can make a larger delay for those taking appointment later in the day.
9. In case of any confusion, feel free to call Customer Service of the PSK to get things clarified before physically reaching at PSK.
10. Though I cannot confirm, some friends commented that the experience at Marathalli PSK could be better than that at Lalbagh PSK.
11. And here's the most important tip: when you login into the website, it shows the last login time on top right area. Using this, figure out the time difference between your clock and the clock maintained by the passport seva kendra. Once you have figured it out, try logging in 2 minutes before it hits 6 PM at the clock of PSK. If you try this way, then even if you do not succeed the first time, you will do in a few days.

Other info from my experience:
1. In case of my wife's passport, it was delivered before police verification was done, as she used my passport as proof of address; passport was delivered in 2 weeks. BTW, passport office has the strange rule that it cannot be done the other way round: husbands cannot use the passport of their wives as a proof of address.
2. If passport office had made any mistake in previous passport while noting down a parent's name, then it is difficult to correct it out while reissuing. the documents listed in the website (such as property documents, pension order etc.) do not work: an affidavit is needed to make this correction.
3. Passport office will typically won't allow anyone other than the applicant to enter unless the applicant is a senior citizen or a minor. However, in case you are visiting with a small baby, both parents are allowed to go inside. In case of a kid's passport, the birth certificate and photographs are needed.

PDF from a bunch of images

I faced this challenge yesterday: I had to upload a few documents somewhere: I had a few scanned images (JPG) with me, but the site accepts only PDFs, and it has a limit on the number of documents that can be uploaded.

Though I have Adobe Acrobat Reader on my m/c just like anyone else, I never used the writer - never bought it, never had it in office or university or anywhere else. Suddenly, I remembered that I had created few PDFs recently, all were via "Export PDF" feature from Oracle Open Office, which happens to be free. Most of these cases, the original document was a .doc etc.

But, I did not know that OOO can open JPGs. What the heck! Just tried opening one and bingo! It opened up nicely as a "Drawing" document. Figured out the rest of the process in few minutes.

Opened all JPGs there: each a "Drawing" document with a single slide with the image. Then created a new document and added n slides there. Copy-pasted the images from the documents opened beforehand to the slides of the new document. Just had to use "Export to PDF" feature from the multi-slide document - that's it - my PDFs were ready.

Simple solution to a common problem that I often face.