Youngistan !!

I just came across Pepsi's new tag line 'Youngistan'. One of the add features Ranbir Kapoor and Deepika Padukone outwitting 'Badshah' Khan. The other one features young faces of Indian cricket team. To me this tag line emphasizes on the role of youth in India. The challenges from the young blood to the aged expertize of the old India, a country emerging out of the shackles of tradition and customs to the superpower of the new millennium. For now, lets look at new development in cricket.

The role of the youth in the recent victory of our cricket team against numer-uno team Australia showed the effects. The strategies that were chalked out where never too predictable; Dhoni leading from the front took some interesting decisions of dropping Sehwag and replacing an opening bat with an extra simmer. All our experts in cricket went on saying that was a mistake and some even commented that this may be Dhoni's tactics to keep Viru hungry for runs, whenever he is included in paying eleven. As we all saw, he never made it. Was it right or wrong in cricketing sense, I dont know. But the bottom-line is that it worked. Dhoni's decision to keep out the expertize of Ganguly and Dravid was also a shock to many of us, especially since the tour was overseas. If we keep in mind that neither Ganguly, Dravid or Tendulkar will make it to the World Cup 2011 and consider that to be the ultimate reward of playing one-dayers then it was a reasonable decision. But there was also risk of loosing the tournament. So under all these circumstances I would say Dhoni did a good job. He has his own vision and is ready to stand by it, very similar to what Ganguly did a couple of years back to revive the Indian team and giving a new title of 'Team India'. Ganguly's policy was to include new faces but also give the seniors enough chances they deserve. This might go back in keeping Dravid in the one-day team under immnese contradiction from the selectors. In fact, Ganguly went to the extent of using Dravid's wicket keeping abilities to retain him in World Cup 2003 team as a wicket-keeper batsman.
But after all these revolutionary changes Ganguly brought to Indian Team, they were still shy of the championship titles. In fact, under Ganguly Indian Team lost record number of championship finales, including the WC 2003. Its too early to comment on Dhoni's policies as a skipper, but from what we have seen so far we can say that he wants young guns in the team and is not shy of criticizing even legendary Sachin on his failure on the top order. The inclusion of new faces and giving them chances on a rotation basis might prove to be the best for the rise of Indian team and actually winning more championships. They even did that, they won T20 and now the last ever CB series in Australia. This was the last of these triangular nation tournament in Australia and Aussies are shocked to lose it to India. India proved they are the second best team in the world in Test cricket and a lot of potency to be the World No. 1 in one-dayers. Kudos to Dhoni and his men.

This is really a 'Youngistan' !!