Life as I find it

Lots beyond cricket seems to be happening on the cricket scenario. Really, cricket has become so much more than a game, that people need to take a good hard look at what they perceive it to be.

Pakistan is out of the game. This is of course awful news for a nation charged on cricket like India, which might be on a similar path, if they don’t watch out. But that’s just the game. Angry mobs in India as well as Pakistan have spared no hard words in expressing themselves, burning effigies and generally expressing their contempt. I can understand the anger. We all have a lot of expectations from our national teams.

The sad news is that Bob Woolmer died. Probably stress - they say, but nothing concrete is out yet. Inzamam has retired from ODIs (many say that was overdue).

Not much better happening on the Indian front. Angry fans are burning effigies, and a mob actually vandalized Dhoni’s home in Ranchi. This is really terrible. Strange how people forget the performances these guys have made in the name of the country, and attack homes like this. Why would a player want to live up to their ambitions? Which of those fans thinks that this kind of behaviour will let him go out on the pitch and blaze away to glory without worrying about what’s happening back home?

If in the rare scenario that Dhoni plays outstandingly today and continues to do so, will those fans come back and help reconstruct his home and pay for damages? What if India wins the cup because of him? Will they then come up and say they were sorry and repair damages?

We Indians really need to take a good hard look at how we treat our heroes. We put them on pedestals, we bring them down, we rip them to bits when they fail to live up to our expectations…… but do we really see them as humans and capable of having the occasional bad day?

Please guys, let’s remember that its team India. They are out there, trying to make our dreams come true. Let us not sabotage their efforts like that, by adding to the worries that will distract them from their game.

This is something I’d really want to go and see for myself:

LONDON (AFP) - Potholers have discovered the country’s deepest cave beneath a hillside in central England, using an account by an 18th-century underground explorer, which only recently resurfaced.

“It’s like the inside of a cathedral — just magnificently beautiful,” said Morland Sanders, who was the first non-potholer to abseil down the shaft.

“It’s an incredible place, awesome,” he told The Guardian newspaper Tuesday.

Local potholer Dave Nixon found an underground entrance into the cavern, in the Peak District in Derbyshire, after discovering an account by an obscure 18th-century academic in the University of Cambridge library.

In a paper written in 1793, James Plumtree described a network of caves found after descending into a lead mine near a local fissure known for centuries as the Devil’s Arsehole.

But a rockfall had apparently blocked access to the caverns, and it took potholers three years to hack their way through.

“It wasn’t a matter of stumbling, it was a lot of research and a lot of hard work,” Nixon told the BBC, which has made a television documentary about the discovery.

After having broken through underground it became obvious that the cavern stetched upwards to near the surface, and a man-made shaft was dug from the hillside into the gaping hole.

The new entrance from ground level can be used by abseilers to reach the bottom of the cave, saving a five-hour underground journey.

Titan is nearly 60 metres (200 feet) deeper than the previous record holder, Gaping Gyhll in the Yorkshire Dales in northern England.