Why EPL needs India to improve in football rankings

EPL is arguably one of the best football leagues in the world currently. Founded in 1992 after the split of the football clubs in the First division, it almost has a combined club revenue of around £2 billion. The main attribute of Premier league is the way they have marketed it in Americas and Asia in the past decade.
One can find many supporters of clubs like Arsenal, United and Liverpool from India. On my recent visit to Bangalore, it was great to find a Manchester United Pub opposite to Forum.

But as per my understanding this is just the start. There are very few Indians who watch football. Mainly they are from North Eastern states, Bangalore, Mumbai, Goa and Kerala. There is a huge untapped market still to be conquered by the Premier league clubs.
The best way to do it is by having some Indian to play for these clubs. Unfortunately due to India's low FIFA ranking they cannot gain a UK work permit. That makes it more difficult to reach the grassroots of football in a huge country like India.
Hence this presents a great opportunity for PL clubs like Manchester United, Chelsea, Manchester City, Liverpool and the remaining to setup academies in India which would help to train world class players and also have a marketing strategy to tap the market.
Imagine a market of around 500 million young Indians and selling the merchandise to such a huge market. I cannot imagine it to be nothing but simply mouth-watering.
This would also provide support for Indian clubs to have affiliations with top class clubs which will also improve the I-League standard in Asia.

There are a couple of clubs setting up academies in India and it does look promising.
Like Cricket which was followed in India, but the 1983 world cup win was a major catalyst in transforming Cricket in India, football needs something of that sort to reinvigorate the lost passion among many young Indians.

India centric IT

After the economical and financial meltdown, most of the IT companies in India are now focussing on diversifying their market so that they do not have to completely rely on US and UK customers.
It is a great sea change when we have always been following US for most of the IT exports in the past 20 years. Dependability on US has been so huge that the ripples of Financial meltdown were felt in the Indian IT industry, but they just whitered it in a very good manner.
Is it not the right time for IT companies in India to also look at the local market? Each of the communities and states in US and UK have their own IT budget. There has been a huge investment by the Governments all around the world to move from conventional form of governance to more IT and Technologically enabled governance.

If each of the states and inturn districts in India start investing some part of their budget on IT then it would create more opportunities for Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities and also have a more domestic driven economy.

One of the most urgent problems to be resolved is of the so many killings RTI activists in India. If we enable to process of acquiring Information through a case management methodology then, we may resolve this issue permanently and the identity of the activist cannot be used to such unhumane activities.

There are a lot of opportunities in India where enabling IT would resolve a lot of social issues and also create lot of jobs for the rural India.

Hope we can soon find the Indian Governament implementing significant IT projects, not only to become more technologically competant but also to enable fair and free regulations during governance.

EPL Rules!

Hello guys
Had been away for a while, been busy with many things, but that is not a good excuse to not update the blog.
Well am back to Oslo, and had a good summer. The temparature reached 31 degrees a day, so felt almost like India :)
I have been watching a lot of football, mainly EPL and it has kept me wanting for more. The teams in EPL are really of the highest standards. It is an amazing league with great football. It has a big fan base and many all around the world follow EPL. I was watching the 2010 World cup qualifiers and was hoping for some exciting football, but I was very disappointed with the games. There was not much fascinating and exciting football played. I believe the International teams lack some sort of bonding which is so much evident in the Club teams.
I am glad that EPL is back this Saturday with some great fixtures including Liverpool vs Sunderland.

Hope to have a great weekend :)

Norway in Nutshell continues!!!!

As I sit here in front of my system trying to work hard, it seems to be more harder to work. So to make things easy I stopped working for today!!! Hope my manager doesnt read this one!!

Ok finally me and my roomie decided to explore Norway and its beautiful fjords. I had researched a lot on what to see in Norway and there were so many places I wanted to visit. We booked the tickets for the famous "Norway in Nutshell" tour. This would take us from Oslo-Myrdal-Flam-Gudvangen-Stalheim-Voss-Bergen-Oslo.
As we started the journey from the Oslo Terminal, it was really exciting and cold. The train from Oslo-Bergen was voted the best among the top 20 railway lines during 1999.The morning shivers and the excitement made it more interesting. I had my camera all ready for any nice capture from the train. :)
The train passed over a few places on the outskirts of Oslo and after a while I could see snow for the first time in my life. It felt so fresh and bright!!! Although i captured a few snaps of the snow, the best moment was when we reached Finse which has a station 1222 meters above sea level. Everything except the tracks were covered in snow. There was a heavy breeze blowing and everyone in the train was excited by the beautiful sight. We got a couple of minutes to get down of the train and have the touch of snow!!!

Ah.. here you go with a nice picture of Finse station.
This was one of the best travel experiences for me. After a few minutes, the train driver announced that there is a glacier on our right side and boy was it not beautiful. You should see it for yourself below!



Isnt it beautiful? And dont fail to see those small houses at the bottom of that picture. How I wish to stay there for a week drinking beer along with coffee. Travelling around to see the beautiful snow capped mountains.
As we were approaching the Myrdal station we had a glimpse of a beautiful snow capped mountain. It seemed as though that mountain is a part of heaven. A place where there is nothing regarding your daily jobs, no news of killings, no news of political instability!



Finally we reached Myrdal where we had to change the train to travel to one of the most exciting train journeys in the world and the most beautiful one! Since the train from Bergen got delayed by 1 hour, we had some time to explore the beautiful sights surrouning Myrdal.
Myrdal seemed to be inbetween mountains and we were left alone in between from the outside world. It seemed that we were in a valley of several mountains around us.




There are so many pictures which I can show you all, but probably you have to visit my photo album.
But i cannot resist myself from including one more picture for this post as it would seem injustice to one of the best trains' Flambana. This train starts from 800 mts above sea level and reached 2 meters above sea level in 20 kms. It takes around 1 hour to reach Flam from Myrdal.

This train is a cable pulled train and is the first of its kind in the world. The train stops at the best locations so that people can enjoy the beautiful mountains and waterfalls. One of them is the Kjosfossen waterfall.

We finally reached Flam from where we had to board a ferry. Reaching Flam seemed like reaching a new world alltogether, it was in the center of many mountains and so peaceful and beautiful. See for yourself the beauty of Flam and my photography. :)))



From Flam through the Fjords... will continue!!!
Happy Reading!

Norway in Nutshell

I have been planning from a long time to write about my first trip out of India. My very good friend Susheel has been trying get my thoughts about the trip to Oslo. As usual due to my habit of procrastination it has taken me more than 3 months to finally get started. Anyways I am happy that it is better late than never.

Date: 9th October, 2007
Place: Bangalore
Do I need to tell about this place? I do not feel like, but just to let you know that the IT city of India has one of the most unorganized airports. I still cannot understand what made the government take so long to get an International Airport in Bangalore( lets hope the BIAL airport kicks off on time ).

After wishing my family and friends good bye, I was sitting in the waiting area for my flight. Finally after 2 long hours of wait I got my first chance to travel in an International flight destination Paris. I was overwhelmed by the word Paris. I always wanted to travel to Europe and Paris was my stop over to Oslo. The flight journey was really tiring, but I was more excited about reaching Norway and hence did not feel the journey tiring. After around 9 hours of flight journey I reached Paris and I felt great to see the CDG. It is an awesome and wonderfully managed Airport. I reached the Terminal 2D. From this terminal I had to travel to the terminal 2E for my next flight to Oslo. And to my excitement I had to travel by a train to terminal 2E.
The CDG airport was in itself a small town and everything was perfectly organized.

My next flight to Oslo was about in 2 hours. So in the mean time I was trying out if I could access some internet on my laptop. I was really disappointed that at CDG there was no facility to surf the internet free of cost. There were a few networks available but none was free. I believe CDG should have had at least one network setup where people could surf the net for free as it made no sense in buying a 24 hour internet connection from the networks at the airport when you are there for not more than a couple of hours.

After a wait which seemed to be a bit long I was finally in the KLM flight to Oslo. The journey to Oslo was tiring. I was trying to keep myself awake so that I can get the feel of the journey, but could not help closing my eyes for a few times. Finally when I could hear the captain saying that the plane will be landing in 20 minutes at the Oslo Airport, Gardermoen I was thrilled. I was finally going to land in Oslo after a long journey of 15 hours.
Well when I landed at the Oslo Airport, I was surprised by the size of the Airport. I was expecting it to be a very big one, but felt that I was landing on a airport similar to the one in Bangalore. Similarity ends here as the airport is very well maintained. One cannot forget that Norway lists in the top 3 cleanest countries in the world.

After collecting my baggage, I had to travel to the Oslo City. I was told that we have airport trains which run every 20 minutes from the Airport to Oslo S. Everything seemed so easy, right from collecting the train tickets to carrying your baggage till the train. The train is just at the basement of the Airport which makes it much more comfortable. Looking at the train I felt that it was nothing less than an airplane on tracks. The train was to travel till Skoyen from Oslo Airport. From the airport till the Oslo S there was one stop at Lillestrom. Sitting in the train I was watching the beautiful country side of Norway. It was a pleasant time of the day with mild sunshine. I was very impressed by the travel time of just 19 minutes from the Airport to the center of the city. This was a fast train traveling at around 80 - 100 kms per hour.
Finally after getting out of the train and walking for some 100 meters I could find the taxi stand and was very excited to travel in a Mercedes.

In all it was a exciting journey to reach Oslo with some hiccups in the middle to reach my place in Oslo City mainly again due to some disorganized things which I cannot mention here.
For the next edition of Norway in Nutshell keep visiting this blog.
Till then
Takk!

gyrela = "ornament"

I hope you are at least slightly motivated by my previous post.... :-)

The other day I spent a lot of time with one of my friends'. We were discussing various topics from A - Z. There came a topic called G. G! Wondering what is this G?
Girls!!!
"Come on you are too much!", heard this anywhere? Talk to a gal and believe me you will be amazed by the count of "too much"'s in their sentence.

This topic is completely based on views of how a boy sees a girl, I mean not literally though ;-). In aspects on the way a guy understands a girl. So I hope any girl reading this article will not be offended by any of the assumptions or conclusions reached.
God has made girls to be different.
I believe, girls are really difficult to be understood. When I was discussing with my friend about girls, I told him about the different instances on how girls behave to the same situation.

A gal always has a complaint on a guy's behaviour whoever it may be( a boyfriend, a friend, brother etc. ). Most of the gals assume that boys will never understand a girl's emotions and feelings. Sometimes I wonder why girls do not make the boys understand exactly what they feel. I feel there is no need to make an assumption, instead I think it is better they make us guys understand her problem.
Finally they conclude with a statement about guys - "Guys are guys... they wont change!!!!" Right girls?

One fine morning you call your friend who is a girl, she may just be not speaking to you. You will be surprised by her reaction. Such a reaction means that she is not in good mood. She wont tell you that she is not in good mood, but we need to understand.... Too much right? And if at you come to understand that she is not in good mood, she then wont tell you the reason. We need to ask her!!!! :-)
Next morning you call her, then she will be laughing, singing and what not!!! You can never find such mood fluctuations any other species( sorry to use this word... tried to find a substitute but ran out of time ).

They want to be in good terms with everyone. I really do not understand on how can one be in good terms with everyone. In achieving this they end up managing everyone and the most one suffering will be her boy friend. Poor guy!!!

They will suggest you not to keep expectations in any aspect, but they are the ones who expect a lot from everyone( at least friends ).

But girls are the best people to tell anything and everything. They listen so carefully that you feel comfortable sharing anything with them.
Barring all the above mentioned peculiarities about girls, guys are still inclined towards the fairer-sex. May be God has made guys that way :)

Ask any guy, he will be so interested in talking about girls and will fall for girls.
May be that is the reason "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus"!

DIP

Motivation..........

Few days back I was reading the book by Arindham Chaudhari - "Count Your Chickens Before They Hatch".
I was wondering the importance of the title. The author has in a subtle way tried to explain so many things in a single beautiful title.

Count Your Chickens - Do we really need to count the chickens? Yes - we do need to. We need to dream big! We need to believe that we can achieve what we have dreamt. Without a proper understanding on what we are aiming at, we can never start. Hence we need to count the chickens before they hatch.

Count Your Chickens - We need to define the Goal. Goal - Yes the number of chickens. Sounds interesting right? Define the number and you will work towards achieving the same. Count Your Chickens before they hatch.

Its all about counting... or may be thinking that we can!

So how do we know what we need to achieve? Sounds a very difficult statement/question to crack?

Nothing but we need to understand a simple word in English - "MOTIVATION".

Seems to be simple, but difficult to implement and much more difficult to sustain it for the entire life.
And why do we need motivation, is it a formula - not a formula though but a magic word which will revive your thinking! Only thinking does not make you successful - you need to be motivated to implement. Implementation does not mean you are successful in attaining the GOAL, yes you also need to be motivated to improve on what you have implemented. So in all we need MOTIVATION.
As human beings, our minds are fickle. Hence to stay focused we need motivation.

Now I think you people have realised what motivation is? Just not the meaning in Oxford, but the understanding about the word "Motivation".

Thus being motivated in life makes you capable of thinking BIG, making things POSSIBLE and is the road towards being successful.

GO! BE MOTIVATED!

All the best!