IPL is back !!!!!

The excitement and expectations from the IPL increase as the second edition approaches. The auction for the foreign players begins on the sixth of February. This year’s edition will see England being represented by Kevin Pietersen & Co for the first time, whereas Shoaib Akthar’s aeroplane celebration wil be missed due to the ban on Pakistani players. Nevertheless here is a look at some of the special moments that clearly made IPL 2008 cricket’s new avtaar.

Behind the action

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Pietersen, Clarke have costliest base price at IPL auction
England’s dethroned captain Kevin Pietersen and Australian vice captain Michael Clarke are to command the top two reserve prices of 1.35 and one million USD, respectively, during the second Indian Premier League players’ auction to be held in Goa on February 6.

England’s charismatic all rounder Andrew Flintoff’s base price has been pegged at USD 950,000 in the auction for which a final list of 43 players nominated by the eight franchisees to go under the auctioner’s hammer was announced by the IPL today.

As per the guidelines set by the Governing Council for the DLF IPL 2009, each franchisee will have a maximum purse of USD 2 million, less any amount spent on signing temporary replacements from last year to select the cricketers best suited for their team’s strategies.

A total of 15 Australians, four Bangladeshis, seven Englishmen, three New Zealanders, five South Africans, four Sri Lankans and five West Indians would go under the hammer, the IPL said.

The first IPL auction last year saw current Indian captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni being bought by Chennai Super Kings for a whopping USD 1.5 million, setting the benchmark for a tumultuous day of auctioning of top players from around the world.

The second-best signing was of controversial Australian all rounder Andrew Symonds who was bought by Deccan Chargers for USD 1.35 million.

These two players were the only millionaire signings last year in the inaugural edition of the Twenty20 League.

The second edition is set to kick off on April 10.

Final list of players nominated and their base prices in USD:
Australia: Aaron Bird 45,000, Brett Geeves 45,000, Bryce McGain 50,000, Daniel Harris 50,000, Dominic Thornley 50,000, George Bailey 50,000, Jonathan Moss 50,000, Michael Clarke 1,000,000, Michael Dighton 85,000, Michael Hill 50,000, Phil Jacques 100,000, Shane Harwood 75,000, Shaun Tait 250,000, Steven Smith 75,000 and Stuart Clark 250,000.

Bangladesh: Mashrafe Bin Mortaza 50,000, Mohammed Ashraful 75,000, Shakib Al Hasan 75,000 and Tamim Iqbal 50,000.

England: Andrew Flintoff 950,000, Kevin Pietersen 1,35,000, Luke Wright 150,000, Owais Shah 150,000, Paul Collingwood 250,000, Ravi Bopara 150,000 and Samit Patel 100,000.

New Zealand: James Franklin 50,000, Jesse Ryder 100,000 and Kyle Mills 150,000.

South Africa: Gulam Bodi 100,000, J P Duminy 300,000, Morne Van Wyk 100,000, Tyron Henderson 100,000 and Yusuf Abdullah 25,000.

Sri Lanka: Chamara Kapugedara 150,000, Kaushalya Weereratne 50,000, Nuwan Kulasekera 100,000 and Thilan Tushara 100,000.

West Indies: Dwayne Smith (To be confirmed), Fidel Edwards 150,000, Jerome Taylor (TBC), Kemar Roach 50,000 and Kieron Pollard 60,000.

India's first moon mission is world's 68th

Chandrayaan-1, that lifted off Wednesday morning from Sriharikota, is India's first and the world's 68th mission to the moon, the earth's closest celestial body which has fascinated children, scientists and poets alike.

"Through the ages, the moon, our closest celestial body, has aroused curiosity in our mind, far more than any other objects in the sky," says the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on its maiden moon mission.

The world's first moon mission was by the then Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) on Jan 2, 1959, followed two months later by the US on March 3.

Between them, the two countries have sent 62 missions to probe the moon with the US stealing a march over the then cold war rival USSR by landing a man on the moon on July 20, 1969.

Japan broke the monopoly of the two superpowers on Jan 24, 1990 by sending its spacecraft Hiten to orbit the moon. The European Space Agency launched its probe in September 2003. China sent its spacecraft Chang-e last year.

The first hard landing on the moon was on Sep 12, 1959 by Soviet Union's Luna 2.

The first photos from the moon were taken by Oct 4, 1959 from the Soviet spacecraft Luna 3.

On Jan 26, 1962, the US Ranger 3 missed the Moon by 36,793 km.

The Soviet Union's Luna 6 did worse on June 8, 1965 missing the moon by 160,000 km.

Luna 9 made up for it on Jan 31, 1966 by becoming the first spacecraft to soft land on the moon.

The Indian mission to the moon was proposed at a meeting of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 1999.

Then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee announced the project was on course in his Independence Day speech on Aug 15, 2003.

The Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft is cuboid in shape, weighs 1,304 kg at launch and 590 kg at lunar orbit. It will carry 11 payloads, including six from abroad.


A canted single-sided solar array will generate required power for the spacecraft during its two-year mission. The solar array generates 700 watts of peak power. During eclipse the spacecraft will be powered by Lithium ion (Li-Ion) batteries.

The spacecraft employs an X-band, 0.7-metre diameter parabolic antenna for payload data transmission.

The Telemetry, Tracking & Command (TTC) communication is in S-band frequency and scientific payload data transmission in X-band frequency.

The spacecraft has three Solid State Recorders (SSRs) to record data from various payloads.

SSR-1 will store science payload data and has capability of storing 32 GB data.


The 8 GB SSR-2 will store science payload data along with spacecraft attitude information, satellite house keeping and other auxiliary data.

The third SSR with 10 GB SSR is for storing M3 (Moon Mineralogy Mapper) payload data.

On the ground, Chandrayaan-1 will be tracked by the Deep Space Station (DSN), Spacecraft Control Centre (SCC) and Indian Space Science Data Centre (ISSDC).

The spacecraft will blast off on an upgraded version of the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, built first in the early 1990s by ISRO.

PSLV is ISRO's workhorse launch vehicle. The upgraded version, PSLV-C11, has a liftoff weight of 316 tonnes.

Chandrayaan-1 costs Rs.3.86 billion (about $76 million): Rs.530 million (about $11 million) for Payload development, Rs.830 million (about $17 million) for Spacecraft Bus, Rs.1 billion ($20 million) for Deep Space Network, Rs.1 billion ($20 million) for PSLV launch vehicle, and Rs.500 million ($10 million) for scientific data centre, external network support and programme management expenses.

India reached Moon

India's maiden moon probe crashed on to the lunar surface at 8.31 p.m. Friday, sending a wealth of data to its mother spacecraft Chandrayaan-1 during the 25 minutes of its useful life. India became the fourth country to send a probe to the moon.

The moon impact probe (MIP), which has the Indian tricolour painted on its four sides, will remain for all time to come on the Shackleton Crater region of the lunar south pole. It will never corrode due to the lack of atmosphere on the moon.

"We have given the moon to India," a beaming and excited chief of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) G. Madhavan Nair said minutes after the MIP landed. "The moon has been very favourable to us all through. We have travelled all the way to the moon," Nair told a crowded press conference at an ISRO base here as his fellow space scientists applauded.

The MIP has already sent "beautiful images with high resolution of the moon and their analysis will now begin", Nair said.

The around 35-kg MIP with three instruments took the images as it drifted towards the lunar surface detaching from India's first unmanned lunar spacecraft Chandrayaan-1 at 8.06 p.m.

The crash landing of the 375 mm x 375 mm x 470 mm MIP, a honeycomb structure carrying a radar altimeter, a video imaging system and a mass spectrometer, raised a cloud of dust that will be analysed by the scientists, yielding a host of data about the composition of the moon.

But well before that, the video imaging system and the mass spectrometer had obtained data that will enable the scientists to analyse if the moon has water, if it has anything that can be used as fuel for nuclear fusion, hopefully even the age of the moon.

Scientists at ISRO waited impatiently for the first batch of data sent by the MIP to Chandrayaan-1, as the spacecraft went behind the moon for an hour after the landing, while orbiting the Earth's natural satellite from 100 km above.

The landing of the MIP comes 50 years after the first man-made object landed on the lunar surface. The other countries that landed probes on the moon are the former USSR, the US and China.

Lion-hearted cricketer

The third Test match of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy Series between India and Australia was meandering towards a tame draw and attention was gradually shifting to the fourth and final match of the series at Nagpur starting on November 6. However, an unexpected announcement by one of cricket’s legends – Anil Kumble – changed all that in a hurry, as the former India captain shocked the cricketing fraternity by stating that he would retire at the end of the Delhi Test.

However shocking this announcement may have been, it was delivered with the same poise, elegance and class that became synonymous with Kumble through his 19-years long international career. Kumble will go down in the record books as a gentleman cricketer, which is by no means an ordinary feat in the modern era. He will also be remembered as a lion-hearted player and a star performer who never backed down from challenges or was fazed by the criticism that was directed his way.
Citing Kumble’s impressive statistics at the international level really aren’t needed to prove the value he brought to the Indian team – but for the record, ‘Jumbo’ as he is called by his teammates, took more than 1,000 international wickets in his long and distinguished career.

Kumble finished his Test career with 619 wickets in 132 matches, and in doing so became not only the first Indian bowler to take 600 Test wickets but also had the satisfaction of being the second-most capped player for his country in the longest version of the game.

These numbers are the best answer that Kumble could have given to those detractors who wrote him off throughout his career for either not being a turner of the cricket ball or the fact that he was a medium-pacer in a spinner’s garb! It is a tribute to the man’s dedication to the game and his self-confidence that he went back to the drawing board and worked on his action and deliveries until he turned himself into a silent assassin on any pitch across the world. If Sachin Tendulkar has borne the pressure of shouldering India’s batting fortunes for most of his career, Kumble was a match-winner with the ball for the country – his performances won India 43 of the 132 Test matches he featured in — as he turned his arm over and over again despite the body niggles and injuries. Who can forget the inspirational sight of Kumble bowling with a fractured jaw in the Caribbean as he tried to bowl his side to an elusive win in the West Indies and took the prized wicket of Brian Lara in the process?
Kumble was successful not only as a bowler, but was also more than a useful lower-order batsman, who didn’t really do justice to his talent with the bat. But, he did make one Test century and the delight on his face and that of his teammates when he achieved that feat will be one of the indelible memories that will be etched in my mind.

‘Jumbo’ had always harboured dreams of captaining India, and that wish came true late last year when he was appointed India’s Test skipper. If one thought Kumble was Mr Cool and carried himself with self-assurance and commanded respect from opponents and teammates alike, the grace with which he handled himself during India’s acrimonious tour of Australia earlier in the year, only reinforced that fact. He came out of the episode with renewed confidence in his abilities as a cricketer and a leader, and also with the increased respect of is teammates.

However, in recent times, Kumble was feeling the heat as his abilities to take wickets appeared to hit a brick wall. To compound matters, there were increasing calls for him to quit international cricket, and allow Mahendra Singh Dhoni to take over the reins of the Test team as well. Kumble hit back at his critics through his syndicated newspaper columns in which he said he will go on his own terms. Well, that’s exactly what he did on the afternoon of November 2, as a country of a billion people began to understand the implication of that decision.
And, to be honest, I was one of Kumble’s critics, who felt he was overstaying his welcome, not because of his age but mainly because of his loss of form with the ball. But, the sight of Kumble being carried around the Feroz Shah Kotla ground in New Delhi was a reality check in that the team would now be without a champion bowler who had shouldered the burden of carrying India’s bowling fortunes all these years. India does have replacements for Kumble in Amit Mishra and Piyush Chawla, but the duo would know they have huge shoes to fill.

Kumble leaves behind a legacy of not only being India’s most successful Test bowler, but through his stellar career he demonstrated that there is no substitute for hard work, self-confidence and determination, and more importantly that one can reach record-breaking heights without resorting to under-handed tactics on the field. As he bids adieu to the international stage and leaves a void that will be hard to fill, we have decided to make Kumble our Cricketer of the Week as a salute to the lion-hearted cricketer from Karnataka, who was respected and admired not only by his teammates and Indians around the world, but also by the global cricketing fraternity. Thank you for the memories, ‘Jumbo’!