Indian Clubs Go Tumbling in Champions League

The Delhi Daredevils alone will carry the flag of the Indian Premier League in the playoff stages of the Champions League.

Delhi made it to the final four of the global championship for Twenty20 clubs after a rainout Tuesday against the Titans, a South African team. They will meet another South African team, the Highveld Lions, on Thursday, while the Titans meet the Sydney Sixers in the other semifinal on Friday. The winners will meet in the final on Sunday in Johannesburg.

The other three Indian teams from the most lucrative league in cricket - Kolkata Knight Riders, Mumbai Indians and Chennai Super Kings - are on their way home after they were eliminated.

Their failure is surprising in a tournament designed to favor the Indian teams. Four qualify from the nine-team I.P.L., compared to two each from South Africa and Australia. Teams from other countries - Sri Lanka, Pakistan, West Indies, New Zealand and England - have to play in a qualifying tournament, with six clubs vying for two places this year.

Why the imbalance? Because the tournament originated as a joint enterprise of the Indian, Australian and South African cricket authorities.

“India is the biggest shareholder,” said Jeremy Faul, acting chief executive of Cricket South Africa. “The commercial success of the tournament relies on the Indian interest, so it makes sense to have a lot of Indian teams in there.”

The Indian teams are also likely to prevail when there is a conflict over players who have performed for more than one of the teams in the tournament.

The Australian fast bowler Brett Lee comes from Sydney and plays for the Sydney Sixers in the Big Bash, Australia's Twenty20 championship. But in the Champions League, he played for his I.P.L. team, the Knight Riders.

Lee, though, will be a spectator this week, while his compatriots from Sydney remain active participants. Sydney won every match in the pool stage, while the Indian teams were a combined 5-7.

Mumbai did not win a match, and Kolkata's only victory was in a dead-rubber game after it had already been eliminated; while Chennai broke even over all, it was effectively eliminated once it lost its first two matches.

“It is very disappointing not to qualify for the semifinals, but this is not the end of the world,” said Kolkata's captain, Gautam Gambhir, who promised that his team “will definitely come back stronger in the next edition of the Indian Premier League.”

“We should put it down to the fact that we have not played good cricket and that other teams have batted better than us,” said Mumbai's Dinesh Karthik, who refused to make excuses about his team's play. “The pitches are a little different to those in India, but we even played practice games. They have been good wickets and good teams could play well on them.”

Kolkata's South African all-rounder, Jacques Kallis, strained credulity when he complained that a rain-out against Perth had cost his team a chance to qualify: It came after Kolkata had already lost two matches.

He may, though, have hit on a possible reason why the Indian clubs did not perform so well when he said, “The guys now go away to different parts of the globe and will play for different teams.”

The Indian teams are made up of international all-stars attracted by the huge salaries of the I.P.L. They are created by rotisserie-style auctions, and every three years there are wholesale roster changes, wrecking any sense of continuity.

That makes them very different from the outstanding teams in the pool stages. The Sydney Sixers are based on the New South Wales cricket team in Australia, while the Highveld Lions is based on the Gauteng team in South Africa.

This helps create the team spirit particularly evident in the Lions, who have seen journeymen players produce outstanding performances. “We always knew we could be in a position like this,” said Lions captain Alviro Petersen, who credited “calm and focused performances” in victories over Chennai and Mumbai.

Gulam Bodi played two vital attacking innings for the Lions. (Bodi previously was famous as the player whose selection for a contract by KwaZulu-Natal prompted the South African Kevin Pietersen to invoke his English descent and change countries.) Aaron Phangiso, a 28-year-old spin bowler for the Lions, has been the meanest bowler in the competition, wholly unfazed by the big names in the I.P.L. teams.

“Honestly speaking, I don't look at names,” Phangiso said. “I just work on my game and try and execute what I do best.”

Chemistry, it seems, can outweigh big payrolls, in cricket as well as in baseball.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 25, 2012, in The International Herald Tribune.

Messenger and Message Under One Cap

NEW DELHI - Some might assume that he had lost a bet and as a consequence has to walk around in a white cap that has “I am the common man” written on it. But Arvind Kejriwal is a very serious man not given to mirth, and the cap he has been wearing is intended to be a brooding message to India's politicians that the average citizen will not tolerate the corrupt rulers for much longer.

Arvind Kejriwal, left, during a protest in New Delhi last week.

Since April last year, when he was at the forefront of a citizens' uprising against politicians, and particularly in the last few weeks after he reiterated that he soon would establish a political party made up of honest people, of whom one-third would be honest women, Mr. Kejriwal has shaken the political class with his confident allegations of corruption against some of the nation's most powerful figures, often holding apparent documentary evidence in both hands.

Mr. Kejriwal, by general opinion, is a new kind of Indian politician. But in fact he is operating in the realm of journalism.

Journalism is the art not merely of telling a story, but also of finding permissible vehicles for telling that story. By holding Mr. Kejriwal up as a revolutionary public figure, Indian journalism has devised such a vehicle. The stories that journalists cannot tell - or cannot tell the way they wish out of fear of libel suits or their promoters' fear of politicians - are now told through coverage of Mr. Kejriwal's accusations, which may have some holes in them but retain enough substance to set off a brisk news cycle. Also, political corruption is not big news anymore in India. Rather, it is how the news is broken that is. To that end, Mr. Kejriwal, who is both messenger and message, has become a one-man news agency to whom the entire Indian media have seemingly subscribed.

Politicians are alarmed, as they would be, naturally, at the birth of any news organization that appears to have no stake in its own survival and is therefore unafraid of defamation suits.

This month, Mr. Kejriwal asserted that Robert Vadra, the son-in-law of Sonia Gandhi, president of the Indian National Congress party, had received interest-free loans and bargains on property deals from the real estate developer D.L.F. in exchange for using his political clout to advance the company's interests. Mr. Kejriwal's statement was a more emphatic version of a story reported with great caution last year by The Economic Times, a newspaper. Both D.L.F. and Mr. Vadra have dismissed his allegations.

Days later, Mr. Kejriwal accused Nitin Gadkari, president of the Congress party's archrival, the Bharatiya Janata Party, of using his position to enrich his business. Mr. Gadkari has denied any wrongdoing. Then, Mr. Kejriwal said that the chief minister of Delhi, Sheila Dixit, was a “broker” who favored electrical power distribution companies. Ms. Dixit has sent him a legal notice accusing him of defamation and threatening to drag him to court if he does not apologize. Mr. Kejriwal told journalists that he was, of course, defaming her but then corrected himself to say that she was “defaming herself” through her actions.

Last year, when the social reformer Anna Hazare declared war against Indian politicians, chiefly through staging fasts, Mr. Kejriwal assumed the role of one of those classic Indian deputies who are always around public figures, tip-toeing reverentially to their bosses and whispering things into their ears, and in the process extracting a bit of notability for themselves. Mr. Kejriwal became a key player in Mr. Hazare's inner circle, known as Team Anna, though the two men have since parted ways.

Mr. Kejriwal is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, the most revered educational institution in the country. Its graduates become newsworthy if they take a low-paying job; usually they leave India in search of an affluent life. Mr. Kejriwal decided to stay in India and joined the government as a revenue officer, a job he quit about six years ago.

The last time graduates from the institute tried to enter Indian politics to clean it from within, it was a disaster. In 2006, some of them formed a political party in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. Their Web site, which tried to introduce their ideology, said in what appeared to be English: “Reality is a continuum. Knowledge system, in shortest, is fragmentation imposed upon the continuum of reality.” Not surprisingly, they received very few votes when they ran for election.

But Mr. Kejriwal is different. He knows how to influence a vast body of people and how to provoke seasoned politicians into making fools of themselves. The law minister, Salman Kurshid, even threatened him with physical harm, which gave Mr. Kejriwal the opportunity to refer to himself in the third person - as is the habit among Indian film stars, politicians, martyrs and social reformers - “If one Arvind is killed, there will be another 100 Arvinds.”

In the past, angry social reformers like Mr. Kejriwal were often the key figures behind what appeared to be investigative stories and media exposés. They did most of the research and collected the evidence, which they turned over to journalists, who then usually credited them as “sources.” But now, as sometimes happens in journalism, the source has become the story.

Manu Joseph is editor of the Indian newsweekly Open and author of the novel “The Illicit Happiness of Other People.”

A version of this article appeared in print on October 25, 2012, in The International Herald Tribune.

Ai Weiwei Covers \'Gangnam Style\' Video

Ai Weiwei, via Instagram An image circulated on Twitter by Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist and dissident, shows him performing in a cover version of the “Gangnam Style” music video.

As my colleagues Jeff DelViscio and Shreeya Sinha reported last month, “Gangnam Style,” a music video by a South Korean rapper known as PSY with more than 530 million views on YouTube, has been “remixed and redone by motivated fans” around the globe. On Wednesday, Ai Weiwei, the Chinese dissident and artist, joined in, uploading his own cover version of the rap video to YouTube.

A cover version of the rap hit “Gangnam Style,” by Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist and dissident, recorded at his studio in Beijing.

The artist, who mimics the mock horse-riding dance moves of the original while wearing handcuffs in his remix, calls his version “Grass-Mud Horse Style,” a reference to a Chinese Internet meme that employs a pun on an obscene phrase to mock government censorship of the Web.

As my colleague Michael Wines wrote in a thorough explication of the meme in 2009, the grass-mud horse is “a mythical creature whose name, in Chinese, sounds very much like an especially vile obscenity.” Chinese bloggers invented the alpaca-like creature to demonstrate the absurdity of censorship by embedding foul language in an innocent-l ooking video for a children's song about its adventures. That same year, Mr. Ai took part in the anti-censorship protest by posting a self-portrait on his blog in which he was naked, with a stuffed animal described as a grass-mud horse covering his genitals.

Last week, Mr. Ai explained what he sees as the “beautiful” side of the Internet in a video interview with Evan Osnos of The New Yorker, recorded in the artist's Beijing studio on Oct. 9.

Image of the Day: Happy Dussehra!

Rajesh Kumar Singh/Associated PressThe Hindu festival of Dussehra is celebrated to mark the victory of Lord Rama over demon king Ravana. On this public holiday in India, effigies of Ravana are burnt and children and adults perform the role play, known as ramlila, that depicts Lord Rama's conquest.

Documenting India\'s Fierce Battle Against Polio

KUSHESHWAR ASTHAN PURBI, Bihar

There is a place in India where the road ends. It isn't even a proper road - the last six kilometers coming into the town are sometimes thick mud. If you are unlucky enough to have to travel here in the rainy season, you have to walk the final stretch, because a jeep will not take you.

Beyond this little town in Bihar, known as Kusheshwar Asthan Purbi, lies the flooded area of the Kosi River. The only way onward from here is by boat. Electricity does not travel this far.

This is one of the places where the World Health Organization and Unicef have opened satellite offices as part of their polio eradication campaign in India.

Without an office here, the polio vaccine would never reach more than 200 villages scattered on the flood plain of the river. Bihar is considered a high-risk state for polio outbreaks, and the hardships faced by the volunteers are readily apparent here.

I traveled to Kusheshwar Asthan Purbi in September, and spent seven days in Bihar, documenting the polio eradication program during the last immunization round. The images were commissioned by Unicef as part of its documentation of the polio program in India. They will be part of an upcoming book, “The SNID,” for Sub National Immunization Day, which is scheduled for publication in February. The book will showcase the success of the polio immunization campaign in India as an example for the other countries still struggling with the disease.

Sephi Bergerson is an Israeli-born photographer who has lived and worked in India since 2002 and photographed the country's polio eradication campaign since 2004. His first book, “Street Food of India,” won several international awards; his next, “The Great Indian Wedding,” is scheduled for publication in early 2013. More information is available on his blog, Fotowala.

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A Conversation With: Polio Expert Naveen Thacker

Courtesy of Dr. Naveen ThackerDr. Naveen Thacker, Standing Committee Member of International Pediatric Association.

India appears have succeeded in the fight against polio, with no new cases reported since January 2011. The country will be certified “polio-free” in January 2014 by the World Health Organization if no new cases are reported between now and then, and has already been removed a list of countries with “active transmission of wild poliovirus.”

The difficulty India has had controlling other infectious and insect-borne diseases, like tuberculosis and dengue, makes polio's seeming eradication here even m ore remarkable. In honor of World Polio Day, which is Wednesday, India Ink interviewed Dr. Naveen Thacker, part of the team that led India's eradication effort.

In e-mailed responses, he explained the reasons for India's success with polio and the difficulties it encountered on the way. 

Q.

What were the two or three most important things that India's policy makers did to eradicate polio in the country?

A.

Firstly and critically, there was strong leadership and political support at every level of government.

Crucially, the government set up the India Expert Advisory Group to ensure that we could identify and address challenges quickly and effectively. For example, being able to identify high-risk children that were missed in a polio vaccination round meant health workers could go back and ensure that each and every child received their polio vaccine.

Secondly, the government of India and public-private partnerships together put in almost $1.5 billion to the polio eradication campaign. Combined with the partnership of Rotary International, the World Health Organization, Unicef, the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, India was able to deliver vaccines to those that had previously been unreached. In Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh, we made history by administering over 900 million doses of oral polio vaccine.

Linked to this, utilizing new technological innovations was crucial to India's eradication success. For example, genetic sequencing helped us quickly identify where an outbreak of the virus had originated, so that we could prevent more polio cases.  Furthermore, the new bivalent vaccine in 2008 meant children were better protected against polio and it cost less money.

Q.

What was your contribution to the overall polio eradication program in India?

A.

I got involved in polio eradication in 1994, when there was a polio outbreak in my home state of Gujarat, where I personally saw 55 cases in less than two months. Initially I was involved in creating awareness of the polio virus and wrote small booklets that I distributed to all pediatricians in India and Rotary clubs of polio-endemic countries. In total, I wrote over 8,000 postcards a year to pediatricians and Rotarians to support Pulse polio [the government vaccination program] and report cases of acute flaccid paralysis.

Stemming from this, I was invited to be a member of the India Expert Advisory Group and have served for more than a decade, contributing to the government's polio policy, with recommendations on behalf of the Indian Academy of Pediatrics. I have also published a number of papers, chapters in books, newspaper articles and delivered more than 100 guest lectures and talks on polio, including a talk at the National Instit utes of Health in 2007.

Q.

What hurdles were encountered while making people aware of the polio eradication program, especially in rural India? How were those overcome?

A.

It was difficult to convince people to take repeated polio doses and there were some pockets of resistance, particularly in western U.P., in minority communities. This resistance mainly stemmed from false rumors about the polio vaccine.

This was overcome by involving religious leaders, local medical practitioners and huge celebrities like Amitabh Bachchan, who together highlighted the necessity for polio eradication. Where the mass marketing campaign did not reach, the door-to-door campaign by 2.3 million volunteers across the country meant that we reached children in the hardest-to-reach rural communities.

Q.

Were people more receptive to the anti-polio drive in urban India?

A.

Yes, the mass-media polio campaign meant we reached the urban population with polio messages much more easily than in rural areas.  There were still challenges. For example, some middle-class communities were reluctant to take repeated doses as they felt their child was fully protected. We got past this challenge by engaging members of the Indian Academy of Pediatrics, who were able to convince parents of the need to take additional polio drops.

Q.

Can the Indian model of success be replicated in countries such as Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan that are struggling to fight the disease? Is it true that Indian expertise is being sought by some of these countries?

A.

Absolutely, many experts said that polio eradication was impossible in India. We've proven that by investing in the polio program, both politically and economically, and embracing new technological innovations that we can totally eradicate polio. If the endemic countries follow this example and develop accountability mechanisms, work around security challenges and ensure community involvement in the polio program, we can eradicate polio everywhere.

Our model is being replicated, which is why this year there are fewer cases so far than at any other time in history. With 171 cases this year so far, compared to 467 at this point last year, we're seeing a remarkable reduction in global polio cases.  India has received experts from endemic countries and shared best practice with them. Many of the surveillance medical officers from the National Polio Surveillance Project [a collaboration between the World Health Organization and the Indian government] are stationed in Nigeria helping with their program.

Q.

Some African countries-Angola, Chad and Democratic Republic of Congoâ€"which were previously declared polio-free have again reported an outbreak of polio. What should be done to ensure that India doesn't fall into that trap, too?

A.

That's a good question, and we've seen suspected cases recently in India that thankfully didn't turn out to be polio. To remain polio-free we must ensure the maintenance of our highly sensitive surveillance system, so that we can detect outbreaks early, and we must also sustain high levels of polio immunization through routine immunization.

Furthermore, like China did in 2010 when polio came into their country from polio-endemic Pakistan, we need to ensure that we can rapidly respond to any polio importation. Globally, we've made amazing progress, but 99 percent reduction in polio cases isn't good enough. We need to finish the job.

(This interview has been lightly edited.)