Category Archives: General

The Beautiful Game

Published June 13, 2014 / by Jehangir

Picture yourself lying sprawled on the ground with your chest heaving, heart thumping, lungs screaming for air and your muscles afire. The only emotion you can feel is pure unadulterated bliss.

That sweet mix of pain and joy can only mean one thing – you have just scored a goal !!!!

It is the second greatest feeling in the world and now you are hopelessly addicted to the Beautiful Game.

Football or Soccer in its purest form is simplicity itself. There is a ball at your feet and your natural instinct is to kick it. Like this:

The Best Goal ever:

And its carbon copy:

The Best Header ever:

The Best Free Kick ever:

Almost as good:

The Best Save ever:

The Most Amazing Play ever:

The Most Ridiculous Play ever:

The Best Team Goal ever:

The Best Team ever:

Update:

The Best Penalty ever:

The Worst Penalty ever:

Bonus:

The Best Goal Celebrations ever:

P.S

Just for the record:

Maradona > Pele
Messi is the best footballer ever.

And finally, a timeless quote from Bill Shankly.

Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude.
I can assure you it is much, much more important than that'.

Bonus 2:
The great fallacy is that the game is first and last about winning. It is nothing of the kind. The game is about glory, it is about doing things in style and with a flourish, about going out and beating the lot, not waiting for them to die of boredom.
~ Danny Blanchflower

Saving Water (and Ourselves)

Published May 17, 2014 / by Jehangir

In 1995, World Bank Vice President Ismail Serageldin said that the wars of the next century will be fought over water.

Here are some eye-openers:

– Only less than 1 percent of all water on Earth is suitable for use by humanity. The rest is either salt water or permanently frozen.

– 11% of the global population, or 783 million people, are still without access to improved sources of drinking water.

– Singapore recycles water from toilets and drains to meet its water demand.

The situation with bottled water is simply ridiculous.

– 3 liters of water is used to package 1 liter of bottled water!

– The bottles used to package water take over 1,000 years to bio-degrade and if incinerated, they produce toxic fumes.

In the USA, Sustainability Engineer Pablo Päster of triplepundit.com controversially calculated the environmental cost of a single bottle of Fiji Water thus:

'the manufacture and transport of that one kilogram bottle of Fiji water consumed 26.88 kilograms of water (7.1 gallons) .849 Kilograms of fossil fuel (one litre or .26 gal) and emitted 562 grams of Greenhouse Gases (1.2 pounds)'

While clean and safe drinking water is scarce in most of the developing world, Kashmir is blessed with generous water resources.

Fortunate as we are, we still waste too much of this precious resource. It is our responsibility as concerned individuals to reduce the wastage of water.

Rainwater harvesting is a simple method that can have a huge impact by reducing the demand on water for outdoor activities.

As per experts, 1 mm of rain on 1 square metre of roof area provides 1 litre of water.

As per NOAA data, Srinagar receives around 28 inches of rainfall per year.

Since I am metrically handicapped, this would mean that, if my calculations are correct;

1 inch of rain on 1 square foot of roof will provide 2.36 litres of water.

The potential to harvest rainwater for my house which has a roof area of approx 2500 sq.ft can be calculated using this Rainfall Calculator.

28 inches X 2500 sq. ft = 165182 litres per year

How awesome is that? One hundred and sixty-five thousand litres a year or approximately 450 litres of pure rainwater every day absolutely free.

While I was designing my home, I took care to construct the roof in a manner that would make it easy to collect and store rainwater.

Instead of an overdesigned roof, I have four simple valleys that act as virtual quarter funnels channeling rainwater to four collection spots where I can easily store or divert rainwater.

This 1000 litre tank waters my garden.

This 1000 litre tank maintains my lily pond.

The two other downspouts recharge my tubewell and will also be used to water my vegetable garden and to wash my car once I have the filter system in place.

Since most houses in Kashmir have a 'parnala' or rainwater gutter system, all we have to do is to divert the downspout into a storage tank and we can enjoy an abundant supply of fresh water for sustainable gardening plus the warm fuzzy feeling of being a concerned socially responsible citizen.

The responsibility of saving the world should not be limited to beauty pageant contestants only 🙂

The Trout Angle

Published March 17, 2014 / by Jehangir

Kashmir has earned a well-deserved reputation as an angler's paradise. With the demise of the great Mahseer, the Trout is the undisputed numero uno game fish of Kashmir.

In 1899 Frank Mitchell, Colonel's Ward and Unwin, and Captain Allan contributed the sum of 50 pounds each to import trout from Scotland to Kashmir. The Duke of Bedford provided a consignment of 10,000 trout ova, but the first batch perished at sea. The second batch of eyed-ova travelled by steamer to Bombay, then by rail upto Rawalpindi – and survived an ardous bus journey to reach Srinagar in December 1900. The hatchlings were reared in a pond in Frank Mitchell’s carpet factory at Bagh-i-Dilawar Khan before being transferred to a hatchery established under his supervision at Harwan at the outlet of the Dagwan stream from Dachigam.

Trout thrive in rushing cold streams and the Dagwan running through the Maharaja's shooting preserve proved to be the perfect trout stream. Later aged ova and yearling trout were introduced in other streams in Kashmir like Achabal, Wangat, Veshav, Kishenganga, Liddar, Marwar and Erin among others. Yearlings were also released in the Burzil and Gurez streams, the Gangarbal Lake, and in the Poonch River. In the 1950's, rainbow trout from Denmark were introduced in Kashmir.

The brown (Salmo trutta) and rainbow (Oncorhynchus mykiss) varieties adapted to Kashmir's rivers and thrived to the extent that they were later introduced in other states like Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim and Bhutan.

Anyway, Hermes and not Mammon is my muse when I avow that the sport of trout fishing is addictive to the point of becoming an obsession. There can be no better introduction to the thrill of angling for trout in Kashmir than the first few paragraphs of this article from the New York Times circa 1983. Compare it to the reprint of A Day on a Kashmir Trout Stream from a century earlier.

The Masjid and Yennar beats on the Lidder in Pahalgam remain my favourite beats as I have rarely angled any other stream except for a few unsuccessful casts in the Ferozepur Nallah. A whole day on Tilwan Kol, the little creek that runs through the exquisite untamed Bangus valley proved entirely fruitless while the plop-and-land excess of the Gangabal Lake provided a full bag but little sport. In my experience the trout from high-altitude lakes like Gangabal have bigger heads but smaller bodies, while the farm-reared variety are spongier than the fish caught in streams.

Trout from Kashmir's glacial streams, though smaller than elsewhere, are considered to be among the most delicious in the world. The State Department of Fisheries have a highly-popular sale for farmed trout on Saturdays, but we rarely avail the opportunity. The tastiest trout is the one that satisfies the appetite triggered by the thrill of having landed it with my own Shakespeare. One of the most memorable meals one can have in Kashmir is a trout hooked, gutted and cooked on-the-go. This page has a trout recipe fit for a king (quite literally, since the author is the present Maharaja of of Indore)

Nothing finer, anywhere, indeed.

Update: (2019) After 120 years, 2.25 lakh eyed ova have been imported from Denmark to the hatchery set up for the rearing of genetically improved Rainbow Trout at Beerwah Budgam.

Note: The official record holder for Kashmir is a 17+ pounder caught in the Verinag stream.