Million Dollar Arm and Other Feats

Spoiler Alert!! If you haven't seen the movie "Million Dollar Arm" yet, and don't want the end spoiled for you, skip down to the next headline.

The film is about an American Baseball Agent who is declining badly as his clients are leaving him to sign with the competition. So one night while flipping channels on his TV at home, he views a cricket match and has a brilliant idea. "I wonder how fast a cricket pitcher throws the ball?" he wonders. One thing leads to another and he realizes that since India probably has the most young cricket players in the World, he comes up with a brilliant idea. He will create a nationwide competition throughout India to see if he could find, develop, and train a couple of baseball pitchers to bring to America and hopefully have them sign up with a professional baseball team. He gets a sponsor who funds the entire operation including a top prize of one Million Dollars.

The contest goes viral in India and the country's young men go wild showing up to try to throw a baseball at least the qualifying 80 miles per hour. He eventually gets his two winners and brings them back to America to try out for a group of scouts working for the American teams.

Eventually the two young men actually learn how to not only pitch the ball fast and in the strike zone, but pick-up the complexities of the game. A remarkable feat to be able to play at the highest level after less than one year, especially starting from scratch, learning the game.

The two young men signed a contract with the Pittsburgh Pirates and are major league players. The scout has fallen in love with India and he moved there to open baseball teaching schools in many Indian cities. His original idea of the million dollar arm competition is now an annual event and American baseball has many new loyal Indian fans.

India Elects Narenda Modi Prime Minister

After an election period that lasted 5 weeks, India, the Worlds largest Democracy elected Narenda Modi (63) of the B.J.P. party as it's next Prime Minister. Modi swept the national election in a landslide not seen since the 1980's.

The pro business leader faces huge challenges including needing to accomplish large job creation, that up to now has not been keeping up with the massive population growth. Most of the World is unaware that since there are so many parties in India this new Prime Minister won the election with only approximately 31% of the total vote. It has been guesstimated by knowledgeable sources that 830 million people voted.

Prime Minister Modi has promised to achieve exceptional growth and change for India. He wants to increase the infrastructure by; building at least 100 new Indian cities, creating a massive high speed rail network, and the gigantic task of cleaning up the pollution in the Ganges River. He claims to be inspired and energized by China's incredible growth and development, but I believe China has had it easier to achieve their goals and here's why. China is a top-down style of government, and India is the world largest Democracy with many voices and many diffuse parties. Modi's Nationalist Bhafatiya Janata Party which won 282 of the 543 parliamentary seats will not face impossible political obstructionism, but expectations are very high for his success and it may set the stage for ever increasing disappointment if things don't happen quickly enough to satisfy his distractors.

The World Took A Peek At India's Election Process

If anybody took a look at the ongoing conflict between the two major political parties in the United States, especially by viewing cable news, you would wonder how anything ever gets done. You would be mostly right. They used to get along , now they are so unable and unwilling to cooperate, that many important problems never not only don't get resolved, but often never even get discussed. The U.S. Congress has an approval rate under 9%.

One of America most popular Comedy Cable Networks (Comedy Central), sent one of their correspondents named Jason Jones to India for a week to view your election process. Here are a few of the things Jason reported back to America in a humorous way.

The polls in India are usually incorrect.

You can bribe some news people to write a story that is totally fiction. Jason gives $2500. to a reporter from the Millennium Post to publish a totally made-up story about Jones as a 6 time Mr. Canada and some other ridiculousness. She admitted it cheerfully when interviewed by him on camera and said it's commonplace.

Paid for "News" has become relatively routine among the 93,000 registered publications in India
The confusing, ever moving graphics, during the election period coverage was practically impossible to view.

The editor-in-chief of CNN-IBN of India, Rajdeep Sardesai said "Indian people like noise" in their news. It was very funny and confusing watching a split screen during a debate where almost everybody (nine people) were talking at the same time. Debates were filled with shouting matches and Jones called it the Foxification of Indian News.

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