Amazing happenings in Britain

By M J Akbar

London/Dubin : Something amazing has happened in Britain. A political party has just lost the general election. And its leader has accepted his moral responsibility for the defeat by sending in his resignation. No one has said that civilisation as we know it will end if the resignations accepted. No one has called an extended emergency meeting of the All-Britain Working Committee of the Conservative Party in which to reassert total, undiluted, unquestioned, uninhibited, unnatural loyalty to the Leader and declared that the Leader shall be Leader for ever and evermore. There have been no bands of ''supporters'' carrying large banners, bursting firecrackers, beating drums, rolling their eyes and threatening anyone who dares to challenge the complete supremacy of the Leader in all matters, including the continued right to nominate every municipal chairman in every borough of the land. What kind of democracy do they have in Britain?

Even more amazing: a number of senior leaders of the defeated political party have declared that they are in the contest for the succession. No one has suggested that such ''indiscipline'' will destroy the unity and very fabric of the party and that the matter should be left to a consensus organised by all members of the All-Britain Working Committee of the Conservative Party who are above 80. Instead, the leaders are offering differing route who are above 80. Instead, the leaders are offering differing route maps for the reconstruction and revitalisation of their party. Michael Portillo believes that he is the perfect candidate to keep the Tories on the right side of Margaret Thatcher, the last Tory to lead her party (John Major was Prime Minister but not quite a leader). Ken Clarke has offered the radical but perfectly acceptable thought that he is ready to take over but only if the Tories permit him to campaign alongside Tony Blair, the man who has sent the Tories into inferno, for the euro as the national currency instead of the pound. Michael Ancram has suggested that he is the best man for the job because he represents the middle ground. And so on and so forth.

Any hope of the Indian National Congress functioning in such a manner? In fact, the problem is not that of the Congress alone. Most political parties are the personal property of some Individual Jayalalitha and Karunanidhi are agreed on his much and no more. Whether it is Mulayam Singh Yadav or Laloo Prasad Yadav in the north, their parties are extensions of their individual interest. Three national parties were meant to function as institutions: the Congress the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Bharatiya Janata Party. I suppose we should be grateful that two out of three is better that one out of three.

The British are, however, good at obituaries. Ever since William Hague got smashed out of shape in the elections he has been receiving nothing but praise, particularly from an ever-smiling Tony Blair. The few quips that Hague managed to put through in Parliament while answering the Queen's Speech were widely hailed as the embodiment of wit. The Tories cheered and Labour applauded while both of them waited for William Hague to get out of the way so that serious politics could restart.

Thursday was the summer solstice, or the longest day in the year's calendar. The morning's television news reports led with shots of sunrays glowing through the strange pillars of Stonehenge where ancient Britons offered sun worship and where modern Britons will in all likelihood open a McDonald's very soon. If the summer solstice had come a week earlier no one would have noticed for how do you know the diffrence between night and day if day is only night grown old, with a touch of grey flecked across the forehead? Till last Sunday Britain was bathed in familiar, grim rain. But the sun has burst through now, creating a P.G. Wodehouse mood that concern trates the mind wonderfully on really serious matters like cricket. I write on the morning of the last Australia-England one-dayer in the triangular that includes a robust Pakistan. It is a meaningless match since the finalists are already known; the British papers, however, insist that England will be playing for their pride. This seems to me to be a dubious proposition. How can you play for something that you do not possess? The performance of the English side against both Pakistan and Australia, where they have surrendered in every single match, suggests that their Test victories over the last year might have been flukes. I know that you cannot really fluke through Pakistan in Pakistan and Sri Lanka in Sri Lanka, but there is something seriously incomprehensible about England. Look at the Australians and they look like potential winners even when they have been defeated. There is a hard, gemlike, professional brilliance about Steve Warne's eleven that invokes superlatives. England look like flat pudding. One problem could be the absence of Nasser Hussein; Alec Stewart, who has the captaincy now looks what he is, finished. The English Establishment has permitted him to get away in the betting scam. Sir Paul Condon, who has travelled the world in search of corruption in cricket, and has hinted darkly of billions being involved, cannot get time from Alec Stewart. widely known to live down the road. Apparently, if the mysterious M K Gupta does not give evidence, there will no case against captains like Stewart and Brian Lara. Gupta will not talk. Rest in peace, Stewart, but do get out of the team so that England can play again.

Did Nasser Hussein know something we did not when, on the even of this England-Pakistan series , he appealed to Pakistan-English fans to support the team of their new horne rather than their old one? The story of the season has been the pitch, thrown firecrackers onto the ground and converted the gentleman's game into football. They even managed to overshadow Waqar Younis' stunning bowling. This was a story waiting to happen. There is a new confidence, that translates easily into belligerence, in the Asian communities as the refugee generation makes way for its children, those born on British soil, confident of their capabilities and unwilling to accept real or imagined prejudice in any form. The most aggressive of the Asian communities is actually the Bangladeshi, which is ready to give as hard as it gets. Any provocation from the louts of the National Front is answered by rocks and fire. The sports field is a mirrow of the streets of Bradford. It is a story for the front of the newspaper, not the back.

The sun is a more reluctant visitor to Ireland, but it has more to light up here when it does arrive. As the familiar line goes, Irish eyes are always smiling. This is a bit of an understatement. The Irish smile from the toes up. The Irish smile because they want to. The British smile when they have to Aristocracy may have something to do with it. The upper classes consider it very declasse to show any emotions whatsoever. This could be because they have no emotions whatsoever, but I cannot be certain about that. Certainly the Queen of England never changed her glum visage throughout the time she read out the long speech outlining ''My government's policies'' during the opening of Parliament; it would probably have been considered im polite to smile. On the other hand, the lady has plenty to be glum about having married someone whose rocker is a few degrees south of common sense and whose children have divorced more often than they have married. (It isn't adultery that gets the royals; it is the fact that the heirs can't keep their mouths shut about it.)

The Irish may have less money than their cousins, but they make it go a longer way on the fun-road. The Dubin City Centre is a mass of wine, flirtation and song long into the tourists alone who are spending this money. I am sure no one had told the Irish Tourist Board that a few people with their original loyalty to Calcutta were headed in their direction but the only permissible form of transport on the protected paths of the city centre were rickshaws. Not of the mechanical variety, but of the Calcutta hand-held variety. Someone with a knowledge of mechanics had widened the rectangle within which the rickshawwallah pulled his machine, and made it of aluminium instead of wod, but otherwise this was Calcutta in Dublin. Muscular young men stood beside their contraptions waiting for tourists to enjoy the pleasure of a ride, and one could visualise more than one American tourist taking the rickshaw home and leaving it outside while the rickshawpuller went in for a nightcap.

There is a famous cover of Dubliners that shows James Joyce, or a suspiciously good lookalike, striding across the canal that is one of the perimeters of Ireland's capital. That is a lasting image in the memory of an Eng. Lit. student, James Joyce, Ulysses. Epic imagination and language the breaks and remakes consciousness. We admired Joyce even when we did not understand him. Maybe because we did not understand him. (There is some evidence that Joyce did n ot always understand himself either, but who cares?) What emerged from his pen was magic. I associated Joyce with a vast canvas; he should have been striding across the Brahmaputra in flood. The real canal is a straggle of water that cannot decide if it is going anywhere. The river across the city is hardly more dramatic. The miniature scale of Europe's wonders never ceases to amaze a visiting Indian. Anyone familiar with Ireland's literary genius knows how it dominated the English language in the last century. Indian writers are going to be the Irish element in English in this century.

Melancholy thought; India could have got home rule from the British at the same time as Ireland did, in 1921, when the British Empire had weakend from loss of blood in the First World War. But de Valera settled for a compromise and Gandhi did not. Gandhi, in fact, settled for defeat and withdrew the non-cooperation movement that had unhinged the British by 1921, leaving his followers as bewildered as his opponents. That is a much longer story. But it is worth recording that terminology from Ireland formed a substantive part of the discourse of the Indian national movement. India and Ireland were the first nations to rise against British rule. Repeatedly, and till Gandhii accepted Partitition, the Mahatma would insist that he would not allow any Ulster in India (Ulster is that part of Northern Ireland that was partitioned and kept for Protestants when the British gave Catholic Ireland home rule). One can imagine khadi-clad nationalists in Arrah and Azamgarh chanting ''Hindustan mein Ulster nahin banega, nahin banega!'' But what if Gandhi had accepted home rule and a form of swaraj rather than insisting on purna swaraj? Swaraj too would have led us to full independence and a republic after the Second World War'' (Ire and became a republic in 1948). But the journey would have been under the charge of Indians rather than the British alone. With consequences better than 1947, or not? At least it is a good question.

There was fire on the front pages of the newspapers when we landed in Dublin. An orange glow had lit up Belfast in Northern Ireland yet again as petrol bombs were hurled by Protestants and Catholics across the barriers of mind and heart, the police an ineffectual wall silhouetted against fire.

But at least they were petrol bombs, not nuclear bombs.

Sports umpiring goes Hi-tech

By G V Joshi

The day when computers supported by electronic aids will make every decision in sports like cricket and soccer is not far away. Many test umpires in international cricket could be out of job by the beginning of 2002.

Developments in computer programming have reached a stage when all key decisions that were once the privilege of field umpires would be resolved by television replay and computer.

Television companies which transmit cricket matches to the viewers are supporting computer engineers to develop software to resolve such doubtful issues as leg-before-wicket (LBW) appeals or whether the ball brushed the bat or the glove on its way to the wicketkeeper. LBW decision is the most disputed part of cricket matches.

Dr Paul Hawkins, a British computer wizard has perfected a computerised state-of-the art technology to determine without any doubt, if a batsman is leg-before-wicket (LBW) or not. It has been aptly named Hawk-Eye.

Based on the missile-tracking technology used during the Gulf war, it can decide within two seconds whether a batsman is LBW or not. Special cameras are placed all-round the ground to provide three-dimensional images of the ball during its flight from the bowler's hand to the batsman's pad.

Within a second, the Hawk-Eye calculates where the ball pitched, its sideways movement in the air and off the pitch, its veolcity and bounce. Finally, it pinpoints where exactly the ball had struck the batsman's paid. The device then works out the path the ball would have taken, if the batsman's pads had not come in its way, thus deciding if the ball would have hit the stumps or not.

The system uses six cameras mounted on stands around the ground, two behind each set of stumps, and two square-on to the stumps. The four straight cameras work out the speed of the ball, how much it swung, where it pitched and where it hit the batsman's leg. The square cameras determine how much the ball bounced.

This information is fed to a computer which works out a few facts to establish whether or not the batsman is out, (1) Did the ball pitch outside the off stumps ? (2) Did the ball pitch outside the leg stumps? (3) Did the ball pitch on the leg-stump, (4) Did the ball hit the batsman outside the line of the stumps? (5) Would the ball have gone on to hit the stumps? After considering the answers to the first four questions and if the answer to the fifth question is in the affirmative then the batsman is declared out.

This equipment is the size of a mobile phone and fits neatly into the palm.

The International Cricket Council (ICC) has requested for a demonstration at the start of the season at the Lords in London. If the computer system is found to be one hundred per cent accurate, and better than the field umpire's visual judgment, it could get an official go-ahead from the ICC, perhaps from the next year.

If this happens, cricket will be played with only the players on the ground and the only umpire for the match sitting in front of the Television and Hawk's Eye to give decisions.

As of today, television replays are commonly used by the third umpire to determine run-outs, stumping, hit wicket, low and dropped catches and boundaries as well as sixes. It has already reached a stage that the third umpire is more important than the two umpires on the field.

South African cricket authorities propose to use the 'Red Zone' and 'Flightpath' systems to help them take LBW decisions.

They also use a device named ''Snickometer'' to detect if a batsman had hit the ball, but this, like the LBW aids, is not yet available to officials. It is also being refined to establish whether wood or any other materials have generated the sound.

Soccer is not far behind. Sometime in 1999, a football club in the UK lost an important match to its arch rival when the referee and linesman turned thumbs down on a goal. News photographs, however, proved the officials wrong. That inspired a computer software company to develop a computerised system for deciding with digital precision when a goal has been scored.

Eight miniature TV cameras are mounted around the goal's mouth-two on each corner post and four across the top bar. When something enters the goal, a central computer, receives images from these cameras and determines whether a goal has been scored or not after a thorough analysis.

First, the computer looks for a soccer ball. If it finds a sphere of the proper size, it compares images from all the cameras to verify whether the ball crossed the goal line. When a goal is confirmed, the referee hears a signal in his ear through a radio receiver.

Outfitting a stadium will cost $165,000 to $ 200,000, but teams could also rent the system for a match.

The age of electronics has worked it way onto the tennis court with a device designed to take the guesswork out of line calling. The system will call a shot within one hundredth of a centimeter of where the ball lands, according to the inventor of the system.

Penn Athletic Products has manufactured a special tennis ball for use with the electronic equipment.

Electronic signals are fed through a fine mesh of metal wiere that is affixed to the court surface along the boundary lines. The only playing surface that cannot be wired is grass. In places, such as at the baseline, the mesh may extend as much as 60 cm outside the court perimeter.

The special tennis ball looks like an ordinary ball, but, inside, it is laced with metal stands. When the ball comes in contact with the mesh sensors, it creates a short-circuit. The signal is picked up by a computer, which relays a message to the umpire through earphones and a computer terminal.

The electronic call is fed to spectators through loud synthesised voice: It will say, out, ler or ''falt,'' depending on the point of play. If the ball is ''in'' the voice will direct the message to the umpire's headset, but not to the crowd.

In games where there is no official scorekeeper, the system allows players to monitor their shots through a bank of lights installed at the far ends of the court. Red flashes indicate balls that are outside the baseline or sideline, green flashes designate shots that are on or inside the line; blue and amber record in and out serves.

The United States Tennis Association (USTA) is also using the device as an aid to court officials. It would be used to train umpires as well being used, in research on court vision.

However, there will always be a need for somebody to supervise the behaviour of players on the ground.
PTI Feature