the brook

The gentleman’s game just turned ugly. It has been confirmed that Bob Woolmer, the Pakistan coach was murdered, strangled to death in his hotel room after Pakistan were knocked out of the world cup.

Sport almost by definition is competition sans malice, rivalry sans warfare. We play, watch and love sport because it’s essentially a friendly activity but with intense competition. Our hearts and souls soar and sink with our team’s performance, but either way the highs and lows fade because at the end of the day, we understand that it’s just a game. Unfortunately, that’s no longer true.

The timing and manner of Bob Woolmer’s death almost certainly indicates that it had something to do with Pakistan’s terrible performance at the world cup. Before the murder was confirmed, Sambit Bal wrote an excellent article explaining why the sport of cricket was already in danger of being hyped to the point of fanaticism. With this incident, a very stark line has been crossed. If a sport as a collective (players, sponsors, fans) cannot handle being a sport, does it deserve so high a pedastal? Is the cricket world cup worth more than a human life?

India has a must-win match this evening against Sri Lanka if it must go into the next stage. Normally, there would be nothing else on my mind. Yet right now, I cannot tell if I’ll be able to bear watching the match.

It’s hard to watch a sport when the result may be a matter of life or death. I can only wonder how hard it must be to play it with that at the back of your mind.

As you perhaps can tell, I’ve come to appreciate Gemmell a lot. I find his style of fantasy writing refreshing; in a world where almost all fantasy writing is all about good battling evil, his writings blur the distinction between the two and set the reader into new directions of thinking about them.

This novel is based in a world where a select few members of an elite race rule over the rest of the world. The trouble, however is that the members of the elite race are dying out. Their existence is threatened by the possibility of revolt from their inferior subjects, but also by the arrival of another elite race from another dimension. Though reluctant, rulers and subjects must unite to face the imminent threat. Quite a lot of magic in this one, as well as sea and land strategic battles, politics, and as usual a few interesting philosophical angles.

A great strength of Gemmell evident in this book is the wonderful characters he builds. There is of course the noble hero who, although very well built up, is not the most interesting. A hallmark of Gemmell I’ve seen is a character whom at first instinct one would describe as evil – except that by the end of the book, you no longer think of him that way, and find that the character actually has some charm. All the three books I’ve read have had a character like this – Viruk in this book, Decado in The Swords of Night and Day, and Dace in Dark Moon.

Overall a great read.

Rating: 4/5

Although this is the last book of the Drenai series (none of which I’ve read) – it’s a perfectly fine read on its own. One really has to thank David Gemmell for keeping his series books more or less independent.

This fantasy tale revolves around the resurrection of two legendary millennia-old heroes to fight the evils of the day. A very nicely woven plot with political intricacy, very little magic (which I like) and amazing duel and war descriptions. Even though he writes a full story in an individual book, Gemmell always makes his stories seem reasonably significant and impactful.

Because this story is told partly from the point of view of a thousand year old hero, the book manages to create a relatively new perspective on the whole business of what good and evil mean, and what it really means to “destroy” evil. If I go on, I’ll be revealing the plot, so let me stop here.

Safe enough to say that he’s definitely a fantasy writer with a difference, and you’ll really enjoy the book if you like reading fantasy.

Rating: 4/5

1. You can never get anything right the first time.
2. Every next try is the first time you’re trying to get the previous attempt right.

By induction, no matter what you try to do, you’re doomed to failure :)

…according to the BBC.

“If you sell me off I shall become more expensive than you can possibly imagine.”

There are just two kinds of languages: the ones everybody complains about and the ones nobody uses.

– Bjarne Stroustrup, designer and creator of C++, in an interview to Technology Review.