Now this is ugly

[THX_1138]

Re: Now this is ugly

Though written 4 years ago...still holds true... I don't see a single Desi player in the Aussie team...and doubt there will be one for years to come... The only team in the WC without a single desi who has played for the team in the past year...as far as I can tell...

the finest player in the women's squad is of indian origin. infact, both england and australian women's teams have players of indian origin and both are indeed fit chicks. i know a lot of convicts and from personal experience, these blokes are exceptional athletes. it is not easy to compete with these guys. think about it, there is only one player of aboriginal origin in the entire aussie circuit. people of chinese origin constitute upto 2% of the aussie population yet there is not a single aussie athlete of chinese decent.

[Cricketics]

Re: Now this is ugly Andrew Symonds (born 9 June 1975, Birmingham, England) is an Australian cricketer of West Indian heritage.... just to add some masala...

[kumble_rocks]

Re: Now this is ugly

I don't see a single Desi player in the Aussie team...and doubt there will be one for years to come...

While I agree aussie is a racist culture , it works both ways mate. let me play devil's advocate here. I don't see a single dalit in the indian cricket team among Hindus. Do you ? What coud be the reason ? :huh: likely playing 11 1. Virender Sehwag (Rajput) 2. Sourav Ganguly(Brahmin) 3. Rahul Dravid*(Brahmin) 4. Sachin Tendulkar(Brahmin) 5. Yuvraj Singh(half Rajput) 6. Mahendra Dhoni(Rajput) 7. Irfan Pathan 8. Ajit Agarkar(Brahmin) 9. Zaheer Khan 10. Kumble(Brahmin) or harbhy 11. Munaf Patel

my sympathies with the dalits for they have indeed been handed the short end of the stick for over half a millennium, but your logic is pointing towards some sort of affirmative action in sports which can only spell disaster. we are a country of one billion and dalits make up a small number of that majority, maybe you ought to consider the possibility that the best 11 or 16 players amongst these one billion come from the overwhelming majority?

Brahmins and Kshatriyas are hardly a majority . In fact they are a minority in terms of population(hardly 20%) and yet they have always been the majority in the Indian cricket team. This trend has been going on for decades now. I am not supporting affirmative action. I am just stating that People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. We blame Australia for discrimination based on race , whereas it could be very well true that we can also be blamed for discrimination based on caste basis when it comes to cricket.

[Birbal3]

Re: Now this is ugly Once again I pointed out to you... the INCONSISTENCY of your position... Dalits in India are economically WAAAY BEHIND... yet Indians in Aus are not... Cricket is a relatively speaking a "Rich mans game"... compared to football, running, etc... I am sure there are Dalits in Football, Hockey, Athletics, etc... in India... Why are they not any Indian or other minority origin players in Aussie cricket...when they are found in almost every other team in the world... Gillespie is claimed to be 1/16 abroginie.. and Symonds partially West Indian... but even they are the exceptions... England had Ranji as long ago as 1896...West Indies had Ramadhin in the 50s where is the Aussie Ranji and Ramadhin?

[Birbal3]

Re: Now this is ugly And KR did you take up the cudgels and say Darren Lehmann...of the famous "Black C.U.N.T" incident should not be saying anything about Sunny... as people who live in glass houses....blah...blah...blah... Of course not... you restrict your SERMONIZING only to fellow Indians...

[zubinpepsi]

Re: Now this is ugly guys the discussion is going away from the topic of this thread... check this out.. http://observer.guardian.co.uk/osm/story/0,,1931021,00.html#article_continue an article abt this basta@rd ricky ponting... written by the same author tht Birbal was referring to before.. He rips ricky ponting in and out.. what a cheap silly filthy MF and SOB he is.. Malcolm Knox Sunday October 29, 2006 Observer Sport Monthly The Bourbon & Beefsteak Bar, in Sydney's red light district, never closed. For a start, it had no doors. Opened in 1968 to attract American GIs on leave from Vietnam, it was the city's nocturnal destination of last resort, as popular with pimps and crooks as with tourists and office workers out on the town. One Sunday night in January 1999, Ricky Ponting dropped in at the Bourbon after another poor performance against England in a one-day international. He was 24 and in his third year in - and often out - of the Australia team (he had been dropped and reinstated four times). His confidence was fragile after a wretched season. He was gambling more than he should and drinking too much. There was a feeling that he had risen too fast and that the team management could not keep protecting him from his worst excesses. That Sunday night Ponting had been drinking with team-mates when he met a young, dark-haired woman. She was not Kellie Sainty, his long-term girlfriend from Tasmania. Together they went to the Bourbon where, later, Ponting tried to hit the dance floor with Carlotta, a famous drag queen. The details of what happened next may have remained hazy were it not for the presence of an off-duty photographer from Sydney's Sun-Herald newspaper, Julian Andrews, whose photographs of Ponting stumbling out of the Bourbon with one-and-a-half black eyes were published later that week. It emerged that Ponting had been punched by a bouncer following an altercation. Carlotta said the cricketer had taken exception to a barman refusing him a drink. As he left the bar, supported by his 'mystery date', Ponting looked every bit our Tasmanian George Best. The most talented young batsman in Australia seemed set on self-destruction. With the efficiency of a bank securing its investment, the Australian Cricket Board hauled Ponting in, showered him down and paraded him as a repentant AA convert. At a press conference in the Grand Chancellor Hotel in Hobart four days later, Ponting, his eyes still bruised, conceded that he had an alcohol problem and would seek counselling. He uttered all the required bromides, apologised to his state and country, and then went to cricket practice. It was a sad and unconvincing performance from a troubled young man. We had seen this kind of flawed character before, it was said. Nothing could save him. You could take the boy out of working-class, asbestos-clad Tassie, but you couldn't take Tassie out of the boy. I met Ricky Ponting in 1996 when I became cricket correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald. Our relationship, at best, can be termed 'professional'. I didn't like Ponting and he didn't like journalists. During the next three years, I can't recall exchanging a single word with him outside formal interviews and press conferences. My first impression of him was a reminder that many great batsmen, from Bradman to Lara, are small men. Ponting seemed shorter than the 5ft 10in the stat sheets gave him and he couldn't have weighed more than 11 stone. He was still a boy. Every team has its careerists and its wild boys, and Ponting, whose love of the racetrack and greyhounds earned him his nickname 'Punter', gravitated to the latter. He was soon a member of the Australia team's 'in' group. Led by Shane Warne and Mark Waugh, this clique shared a set of attributes - risk-taking, flamboyance, cockiness that verged on arrogance - that was buoyed up by their remarkable sporting talent. Talent was their insurance against the consequences of misbehaviour. As Warne has shown repeatedly, self-belief on the field can blur into a kind of sociopathy off it. When I met Ponting, he was still a fresh arrival in the team. A teenage prodigy from Tasmania, he had scored 96 on his Test debut against Sri Lanka in 1995 before being given out leg before by the Pakistani umpire Khizar Hayat, who had his own colourful history (he had been the second umpire, with Shakoor Rana, in Mike Gatting's notorious Faisalabad flare-up in 1987). In his second summer, the boy was given a man's job: the number-three position vacated by the retiring David Boon, the pioneer Tasmanian player and Ponting's spiritual guide. It was a sign of respect for his talent that he should be expected to fill such an important position against West Indies' ageing but still potent Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh. He failed. Within two Tests he was dropped, the wonder boy sent back to finishing school. It was the first real setback Ponting had experienced. As an 11-year-old he had scored centuries against men at the Mowbray club in Launceston, a town in northern Tasmania. A working-class suburb of mainly public housing, Mowbray was rough-edged even by Tasmanian standards and had the archetypal blue-collar cricket club. Mark Ray was an imported first-class player from Sydney in the 1980s who represented the Riverside club, in Hobart. He describes himself as 'the perfect target for Mowbray to hate and destroy', and the rivalry within Tasmania, particularly Launceston, was as fierce as any he experienced during a decade of top-level cricket. 'Mowbray were rough and tough, aggressive, and liked a scrap,' he says. 'But there was a substance behind it. They played good cricket and I liked to have a beer with them after the game. Once I suggested going into the Mowbray dressing room and the Riverside boys said, "You've got to be kidding!" So I went on my own. By the time I left Tasmania, we had a booze-up and I think 10 Mowbray blokes turned up and only one or two from my own club.' Ponting's parents - Graeme, an outstanding golfer, and Lorraine - enjoyed the club atmosphere of sport, a drink at the end of the day and a touch of class warfare. The cricket was tough. Troy Cooley, a Mowbray player and England's bowling coach from 2003 until his return to Australia this year, remembers Ponting 'hanging around outside the changing rooms' as a young teenager. 'We were the working-class club and Launceston was the private-school club,' he says. 'The rivalry was pretty hard.' Nine years older than Ponting, 6ft 3in and then one of the fastest bowlers in Australia, Cooley says he can't remember the kid ever backing away from him in the nets. 'He was scared of nothing. He came to the club as a dasher, a risk-taker, and the batsman you see now was the batsman he was then. He was fearless, never scared to play his shots, never took a backward step. And he was extremely ambitious. He was one of those kids who lived for sport and was good at anything he tried: football, golf. We're lucky he chose cricket because he would have succeeded to the same level in anything else.' As a stylist, Ponting is an aggressor who loves to confront bowlers; superbly balanced, he has a strong array of shots to every part of the ground. His greatest strength is also his only weakness: he can be too aggressive. Graeme and Lorraine Ponting gave Ricky nothing but encouragement. Graeme has told the story of how he promised Ricky a new bat if he scored 20 runs in a game as a tiny boy against older players. 'He was only little and couldn't hit the ball very far but he kept playing these straight drives and good proper shots that got him to 20. So I had to go out and buy him a new bat.' As a student at Brooks Senior High School, Ponting was, like most sportsmen, in no way academic. The usual career path was from school to the dole queue. The fast track out of Mowbray was sport. Brooks Senior High fed the local cricket and Australian rules football clubs, and in the Ponting home sport gave Ricky a sense of purpose and structure. His talent was noted early. Tasmanian cricket commentator Neville Oliver told a reporter from Hobart's Examiner newspaper: 'We've got a 14-year-old who's better than Boon - but don't write anything about him yet, it's too much pressure.' At 16, Ponting was plucked out of Mowbray and taken to Adelaide to be nurtured by Rod Marsh at the Australian Cricket Academy. By the age of 17, he was representing Tasmania in the Sheffield Shield. It was 1992. Full professionalism was new in Australia. Ponting was among the first crop of teenagers who could aim at doing little else in life but play cricket. The gilt of prodigy shone from Ponting, but the shadow of Mowbray followed him. After being dropped in his second year of Test cricket, Ponting returned with a triumphant century at Headingley in 1997. But he faltered again in Australia the next summer. His father was causing embarrassment, too. The then chairman of the Australian Cricket Board, the late Denis Rogers, was concerned about the number of times Graeme Ponting would get merry at cricket functions and rave noisily about how great Ricky was. Then, touring India in early 1998, Mark Taylor's team lost their first series since 1994. For the clique to which Ponting belonged, the subcontinent was an unhappy place to tour. As one Australia player complained: 'There are no TABs [Australia's betting agency for horse racing] in the whole country.' Nor were there the other standard perks of the job: eager groupies, in-house adult movies, good golf courses. The players were suffering acutely from what journalist Mike Coward called 'the curse of insidious and self-defeating Indophobia'. Australia lost the first Test in Chennai and then, in the second, in Calcutta, suffered their biggest defeat since 1938. Ponting struggled in both Tests, scoring a total of 89 runs in four innings. He liked the game to be played at pace, and India required patience. Frustrations piled up. The night the Calcutta Test finished, some of the players gathered in the bar of the Taj Bengal hotel and watched satellite coverage of the final of a pre-season Aussie rules competition, between St Kilda Saints, for whom Warne had played as a junior, and the North Melbourne Kangaroos, who were Ponting's passion. Warne and Ponting both once had dreams of playing Aussie Rules, and, in some ways, each has brought the physicality of that contact sport to cricket. The bar - and particularly the two players - grew noisy as the game progressed. Ponting's team won. Most of the team went to bed. Amid a dismal tour, Ponting decided to let off some steam and went to a local nightclub, the Equinox. En route to Bangalore for the third Test, we heard that an Indian newspaper was carrying stories about Ponting's bad behaviour in the nightclub. The team management met Ponting that same morning. The manager, Steve Bernard, told journalists that Ricky couldn't remember doing anything wrong, but they fined him all the same. Sohini Sarkar, a woman who had been at the Equinox, spoke to me about how Ponting had been behaving in the bar. 'With one woman,' she said, 'he rubbed himself against her. With another, he was pulling his zipper up and down, drawing attention to his zipper. One of the management asked him to leave and Ponting assaulted him.' such a cheap SOB I wrote the story for the Sydney Morning Herald. As former Australia wicketkeeper Ian Healy once said, journalists were expected to be 'part of the effort'. If you weren't with 'the boys', you were against them. In giving the victim of Ponting's behaviour a voice in the Australian media, my transgression was a major one. I was ostracised by the entire squad. But then an interesting thing happened. Two weeks later, after top-scoring in a one-day game against Zimbabwe, Ponting gave a press conference. It was the first time I'd been anywhere near him since becoming his tour-wrecker. We began tensely. If this was Mark Waugh, he would have refused to answer my questions. Shane Warne would have blathered emptily, without seeking to hide his contempt. Steve Waugh would have snapped sarcastic monosyllables. But Ricky Ponting, who was 23 years old and had just been embarrassed in the papers, looked me in the eye and answered each question expansively. He shook my hand and showed no sign of malice. It was, in that context, a more impressive performance than the century he had scored. It was at that point that I saw why people considered him a future captain. His turmoil wasn't over: the Bourbon & Beefsteak Bar, gambling problems and more form slumps lay ahead. Even today, the old Ponting isn't completely dead. He rose during the 2005 Ashes with his on-field outburst at coach Duncan Fletcher, during the fourth Test at Trent Bridge, over England's use of substitute fielders. He rose again in the first games of the 2006 season, in Malaysia, which everyone treated as meaningless one-day jamborees - everyone except Ponting, that is, who was twice in trouble for questioning umpires' decisions. Ponting is under constant pressure approaching a season in which Australia will strive to regain the Ashes that his own team lost. Former Test batsman Greg Ritchie recently said Australia couldn't win the Ashes under Ponting, because his captaincy had been so poor 'you wouldn't expect it from ... [an] under-14'. Ian Chappell, the 1970s captain who never lost a series, would rather that Shane Warne had the job. Chappell has said that while, in 2005, Michael Vaughan made 'his players believe it was all under control ... with Ricky you'd see a meeting of three or four guys and it would go on for three or four minutes. I don't think he's an indecisive person, but with guys like Warne, [Adam] Gilchrist and [Glenn] McGrath around him, great players, he didn't feel comfortable telling them, "Piss off, I'm running this show".' Mowbray is not another country for Ponting; it is not even the past. He will never bury or escape the memory of the toughness of those early years and probably, like Allan Border, will get crankier with each new grey hair. Yet something did change in Ponting after the nightclub affrays. Perhaps he finally realised that he had too much to lose, too much talent to waste. 'He was just growing up,' Troy Cooley says now. 'You knew he was going to fulfil his talent as long as the wheels didn't fall off, and he just did a few things that would be typical of any young guy in his situation.' Perhaps it was as simple as romance. Ponting used to be teased that his old Tasmanian girlfriend still clung to him even when he was an international star; but instead of following Warne down the path of excess, he found Rianna Cantor, a woman he adores. He extols his 'beautiful wife' and blows kisses from the field to her, rather than to the dressing room. When she met Ponting, in 2001, Cantor had no idea who he was - which, he has said, was the best thing for him. She was a law student at the University of Wollongong, graduating after they married in 2002. In his book Ashes Diary 2005, he wrote of her: 'You are my inspiration, my love, and I am so proud to have you in my life. No matter what happens on the field, as long as I have you beside me then I know everything in the world is right.' In his books, he thanks her family, middle-class and aspirational, rather than his own back in Tasmania. There is a sense, here, of a man who prefers where he is now to where he came from. Rather than fulfil the template of uneducated working-class youth rising too fast and being destroyed by fame, he has more than fulfilled his promise and is acclaimed by many as the world's best batsman - he averages 58 in 105 Tests, a record that places him in the all-time elite. Since losing to England last summer, Australia have played 12 Tests, winning 11 and drawing one. In spite of the grumbling of Ian Chappell and others, Ponting has become an increasingly poised and respected leader, 'a solid citizen' as Cooley calls him. Ricky and Rianna have bought a big house on the southern Sydney waterfront, where their neighbours include the Waugh brothers and swimmer Ian Thorpe. They are settled and happy. In public, Ponting seems more at ease and serene than he has for many years, even if, on the field, the old rough edges are sometimes still exposed, which is as it should be for an Australia cricket captain. No one would like to think that he has gone soft. His mission now could not be clearer: to lead his hugely motivated team to victory over England and thus reclaim the Ashes. ? Malcolm Knox is a former cricket correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald. His most recent novel is Adult Book (Bloomsbury)

[kumble_rocks]

Re: Now this is ugly

And KR did you take up the cudgels and say Darren Lehmann...of the famous "Black C.U.N.T" incident should not be saying anything about Sunny... as people who live in glass houses....blah...blah...blah... Of course not... you restrict your SERMONIZING only to fellow Indians...

What do you mean by that ? :shrug: Both Lehmann and Punter are crass ,racist, uneducated, uncouth vilage idiots.Also, I don't see you pick up the cudgel and say Gavasker crossed the line by trampling on the grave of a dead man (David Hookes and the bar incident). Why ? :shrug:

[kumble_rocks]

Re: Now this is ugly

Once again I pointed out to you... the INCONSISTENCY of your position... Dalits in India are economically WAAAY BEHIND... yet Indians in Aus are not... Cricket is a relatively speaking a "Rich mans game"... compared to football, running, etc... I am sure there are Dalits in Football, Hockey, Athletics, etc... in India... Why are they not any Indian or other minority origin players in Aussie cricket...when they are found in almost every other team in the world... Gillespie is claimed to be 1/16 abroginie.. and Symonds partially West Indian... but even they are the exceptions... England had Ranji as long ago as 1896...West Indies had Ramadhin in the 50s where is the Aussie Ranji and Ramadhin?

When did you pointed out the first time around. Did I miss something ? Also, economic condition of Dalits does excuse the fact that only upper caste folks dominate Indian cricket. Has it occured to you that they may have been discriminated against at entry level itself.I cannot bring myself to believe that 160 million Dalits do not have a single player wearing the blue cap. All I am just saying is that we need to clean up our house first before passing judgements on others . This is in regards to your statement that no desi played for Australian team or will play in forceable future.

[Lurker]

Re: Now this is ugly

While I agree aussie is a racist culture , it works both ways mate. let me play devil's advocate here. I don't see a single dalit in the indian cricket team among Hindus. Do you ? What coud be the reason ? :huh: likely playing 11 1. Virender Sehwag (Rajput) 2. Sourav Ganguly(Brahmin) 3. Rahul Dravid*(Brahmin) 4. Sachin Tendulkar(Brahmin) 5. Yuvraj Singh(half Rajput) 6. Mahendra Dhoni(Rajput) 7. Irfan Pathan 8. Ajit Agarkar(Brahmin) 9. Zaheer Khan 10. Kumble(Brahmin) or harbhy 11. Munaf Patel

KR, I am not sure where do you get all such information about caste of players. I for one wouldnt know the caste of any players. However if I do play the caste card for a second I will take the example of players coming from Uttar Pradesh. More so because UP is parosi state of Bihar and I can second guess "caste" by surname. The following UP players have represented India in past few years Mohd Kaif(Muslim) Raina(Pundit) JP Yadav(Yadav). You have a "forward" Hindu, another "lower caste" Hindu and third one a Muslim. What more do you need to see there isnt a bias? That they are all crap and hence out of the team is another story. By the way if you follow Indian Hockey you would know that it is dominated by "dalits". Just check for how many Tirkeys, Ekkas etc have represented India. Sorry I do not buy this casteism in Indian cricket angle. xxxx

[kumble_rocks]

Re: Now this is ugly

While I agree aussie is a racist culture , it works both ways mate. let me play devil's advocate here. I don't see a single dalit in the indian cricket team among Hindus. Do you ? What coud be the reason ? :huh: likely playing 11 1. Virender Sehwag (Rajput) 2. Sourav Ganguly(Brahmin) 3. Rahul Dravid*(Brahmin) 4. Sachin Tendulkar(Brahmin) 5. Yuvraj Singh(half Rajput) 6. Mahendra Dhoni(Rajput) 7. Irfan Pathan 8. Ajit Agarkar(Brahmin) 9. Zaheer Khan 10. Kumble(Brahmin) or harbhy 11. Munaf Patel

KR, I am not sure where do you get all such information about caste of players. I for one wouldnt know the caste of any players. However if I do play the caste card for a second I will take the example of players coming from Uttar Pradesh. More so because UP is parosi state of Bihar and I can second guess "caste" by surname. The following UP players have represented India in past few years Mohd Kaif(Muslim) Raina(Pundit) JP Yadav(Yadav). You have a "forward" Hindu, another "lower caste" Hindu and third one a Muslim. What more do you need to see there isnt a bias? That they are all crap and hence out of the team is another story. By the way if you follow Indian Hockey you would know that it is dominated by "dalits". Just check for how many Tirkeys, Ekkas etc have represented India. Sorry I do not buy this casteism in Indian cricket angle. xxxx

In principle I would partly agree with you that it is unlikely that caste may have played a factor. I am just stating the fact to Birbal that shouldn't Australia also get the same benefit of doubt. Birbal is making statements like "No desi played for Australian team or will play in forceable future ". I am stating that no Dalit or only a Handful played for Team India. So , we need to clean our house first before commenting on Australian selection policy. Their is a definite possibilty that the Indians in Australia are just not good enuf to merit selection so far.

[gs]

Re: Now this is ugly Now McGrath joins the nautanki - self-righteous prick is trying to take the moral highground here :mad: http://www.rediff.com/wc2007/2007/mar/16glenn.htm Sunny is really getting under their skins!! :wtg:

[dial_100]

Re: Now this is ugly Good going Sunny :wtg: :wtg: :wtg: . Koi achha hi to kaam kar rahaa hai. I hate that type of behavior on the field anyway.

[indiansinaus]

now this is ugly I'm an Anglo Australian and I read the vitriol here with interest. As an Aussie I am always fascinated by the difference in behaviour between Indians in Australia and in the sub-continent. I don't know about caste, but the Indians I know in Australia seems like studious, passive people interested in the same goals as other Asians i.e. getting their kids into top schools and pursuing high-paying careers. That said, the Indian population here is so minute and the culture of Indians here is economically-interested not sports-orientated, so as not to feature on the registrar of team sports. Also remember that most top cricketers in Australia go through the Australian Institute of Sport. You actually have to be selected to go to the AIS eg Ponting and the rest. If Indian parents put their kids into cricket camps and had them trained up to be noticed we may see some Indian cricketers playing for Australia. There are only 70,000 Indians in Australia in a population of 22,000000, http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/7d12b0f6763c78caca257061001cc588/af5129cb50e07099ca2570eb0082e462!OpenDocument

[King]

I'm an Anglo Australian and I read the vitriol here with interest. As an Aussie I am always fascinated by the difference in behaviour between Indians in Australia and in the sub-continent. I don't know about caste, but the Indians I know in Australia seems like studious, passive people interested in the same goals as other Asians i.e. getting their kids into top schools and pursuing high-paying careers. That said, the Indian population here is so minute and the culture of Indians here is economically-interested not sports-orientated, so as not to feature on the registrar of team sports. Also remember that most top cricketers in Australia go through the Australian Institute of Sport. You actually have to be selected to go to the AIS eg Ponting and the rest. If Indian parents put their kids into cricket camps and had them trained up to be noticed we may see some Indian cricketers playing for Australia. There are only 70,000 Indians in Australia in a population of 22,000000, http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/7d12b0f6763c78caca257061001cc588/af5129cb50e07099ca2570eb0082e462!OpenDocument

I'm surprised you say that not enough Indian kids play cricket in Australia. Sure the Indian parents like their kids to take up education seriously but that doesn't mean the Indian kids aren't enrolled in cricket teams. I haven't come across too many Indian or Sri Lankan parents in Australia that doesn't enroll thier kids to club cricket when they are young. Even in NZ every team comprises of one or two Indian kid simply because the Indian parents are quite fanatic cricket followers. BTW enrolling into cricket academies or professional cricket setup is not up to the whims and fancies of the parents. From what I know the talented kids are picked from all grades and are given a chance to go play in the academy. I would be quite interested in statistics that shows the number of kids from sub continent that play grass root cricket (in particular kids under 14). I'm more than sure there are sizable number of Indian kids that play grass root cricket in Australia as they do in NZ.

[indiansinaus]

now this is ugly Remembering that Indians only make up around 0.333% of the Australian population, that's like saying a population of 250,000 out of India's 800,000,000. You'd hardly expect such a population to make much of an impact. The NZ census (2006) lists 9% of the population as being Asian. I'm not sure if this is the UK terminology of Asian meaning from India/Pakistan or the Australian term of it meaning from China/Korea etc. Regardless, it is a much higher percentage than in Australia. I'd reckon the Indian population in NZ is higher than in Australia. There are even more Uruguayans in Australia than Indians, and I don't see Uruguayans playing cricket...

[indiansinaus]

Further to this. You are right, the AIS picks up talented athletes and gives them sponsorship. You have to put your kids on the field to get them noticed and give them coaching. Indians in Australia don't do this. I have never seen Indian kids playing sport at any of the soccer/rugby/afl/cricket etc kids athletics events I've been to.

[indiansinaus]

now this is ugly Found another stat that puts Indian population in Aus and NZ at: Australia 235,000 1.06% New Zealand 105,000 2.65% http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-resident_Indian_and_Person_of_Indian_Origin.

[indiansinaus]

A question. I don't know anything about the tribal or regional makeup of India but I occassionally see Indian women in Australia who are black- not brown or fair- but black. They are so stunning but I have never been game to go up to them and say 'excuse me, what part of India are black people like yourself from?' because that would seem confrontational and offensive. Can someone tell me, where are the blackest people in India from and what tribe/race are they. These women are tallish, slim and often have long, straight black hair.