Hoo Ha India Haaya India

It was proud to see Sehwag removing his helmet for a fifty after sixty matches of glory.(oh yeah... this was his first fifty in sixty matches) that too against a truly formidable adversary. He definitely deserves to be appreciated for managing to find the gaps especially with Leverock(my favourite bermuda player) covering the entire ground (for which he didnt have to move much).

The news item in NDTV "How much the Indian advertisers would lose if India doesn't qualify to the super 8?", left me wondering. Consider a 10 sec slot during a match. If it was India playing, the rate would be 8 to 10 lakhs as opposed to 1 or 2 lakhs for any other team. A match running for 6 hours with at least 30 slots per hour, would make 16 crores more per match if it was by India. Which gives 80 crores if India played at least 5 more matches. With promotion campaigns, cheering up, cricket based movies, albums, sms competitions, chance to have a date with cricketers, sms polls, guess games, bets the amount goes to hundreds of crores. India has THE LARGEST home audience for any product based ad to be targetted at. With Sri Lanka's determination to thwart us when we are in our "peak" and not play easy just so that we have a chance to go to the super 8, my advice to these advertisers would be "Please go and pay a part of this money to Sri Lankans or for that matter anyone playing against India in the future, asking them to...." (Well.... you get the idea).