MCC Issues a Coin

After its stamp and seal it was only a matter of time before we would see a coin.

The front is silver the back is bronze.

Shahjahanabad

Shahjahanabad

The Sovereign City in Mughal India 1639-1739

By Stephen P. Blake

After reading Shahjahanabad one starts to understand some of the military, economic, and governance problems that contributed to the decline of the Mughal Empire. Take the military for instance. While the individual soldiers practised their skills regularly and were skillful there was almost no concept of a thought out military exercise to the extent that Aurangzeb complained that he had not been taught how to lay a siege. Perhaps this character has been somewhat retained in even the current culture. Individual brilliance in team sports while exhibiting little team cohesion has been the hallmark of quite a few Subcontinental teams.

It is a small book (about 200 pages) that covers a lot of ground with a lot of references. Sometimes one feels that the references could have been discussed more but the purpose of the book is academic in that it is to provide the references while giving an overview and it does it well. There are some small errors that need to be corrected.

The only gripe I have against the author is in calling Bahadurshah Zafar an uninspired poet. The man himself may have been uninspired perhaps but his poetry certainly was not.

There were about a hundred men (The emperor, the great princes and the great amirs) who controlled the power, military and economic, at the center. This pyramid structure is even now true to a large extent. Even in very large countries and even now these powers are shared by a few hundred men.

The Short Sighted Led the Blind Nowhere

All countries have the right to refuse entry to anyone, as things currently stand. It is rather sad that having such a small planet to begin with man has found ways to restrict himself and his brethren to still smaller parts of it. We are not going to solve that one anytime soon so to begin again ...

All countries have the right to refuse entry to anyone. However, when they start to do so for sporting bodies the sports fraternity as a whole must object. Tennis did so against UAE. It threatened to remove Dubai from the calendar for removing Peer. England's recent record is something that should be of concern. It got Zimbabwe to remove itself from a world cup and now it has refused entry to a world cup winning team. In the first case there was no international sporting sanction and in the second only the border agents seem to have eyes that will see something. When things get to such a stage it must seriously be considered whether such xenophobia should lead to being excluded from hosting international events.

There is something troubling about pre-judging and doing it brazenly. This pre-emption bit is getting tiresome. It is almost as bad as some of the aircrew's fondness for their newly acquired powers in putting down anyone who doesn't show abject subjugation. Nor is it true that the British government's hands are tied by the recommendations of the border cops. When they wish a certain outcome all governments have plenty of tricks in the bag to achieve it ... or not.

But let us leave the governments and their workings aside for the moment. This was an issue where the self-appointed moral guardians of cricket, the MCC, could have taken a strong public stance in backing the blind cricketers for the name of the game is still cricket. This would have gone much further in making amends for its past rather than that trip to Afghanistan which was a rather shameful attempt to hog the limelight after the Afghan's success. Of course the fact that their players had benefited from playing in Pakistan's domestics and before embarking on their conquest a series of matches had been arranged by PCB for them got little coverage to begin with and almost none afterwards. Before that there were coaches and training that were provided by different figures in Pakistani cricket.

Also remiss were ICC, as the international cricket body, and ECB, as England's domestic body, in not raising their voices effectively for their brothers in the sport of cricket.

Now to return to the border cops. They do not seem to have a problem with a lot of politicians showing up in England when there is little doubt that many have come to stay for extremely long periods if not forever. Not only that they have a very hard time extraditing any of them. But then may be they have no say there against their government's wishes. Kick a few innocent students out but let's keep all the corrupt politicians collected from all over. The thing is that it is likely that it is the British government pulling the strings for other political reasons and the border guards are not as independent as claimed.

Also disturbing were the extent of guarantees asked of the cricketers. The cricketers may have been blind but it was the border guards who were short sighted.

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.sport.cricket/browse_frm/thread/5ef98e7a012e76a1/004ad36427f326a8?hl=en#004ad36427f326a8