 "Weekend Bites: Skill, chance, and how Tom Cruise transcends both")
On June 6, 1994, Brian Lara was batting for the English county Warwickshire against Durham. When he had scored 12, Lara was bowled, but it was off a no ball. On 18, he nicked a delivery, but the wicketkeeper, Chris Scott, dropped the catch.
Scott, according to county cricket folklore, said: “Oh dear, he'll probably go on and get a hundred.” Lara went on to score 501 not out, the highest score in all first-class cricket, which includes Test matches.
Lara got two chances that day. He had the skills to make the most of both. Cricket is full of such stories — stories where a stroke of luck turned not only the course of the match but, in certain cases, a player’s entire career.
On March 27, 1994, News Zealand batted first against India at Auckland and scored 142. That morning, India’s regular opener, Navjot Sidhu, had pulled out of the match with a neck pain. When India batted, Sachin Tendulkar walked out to open the innings for the first time in a one-day international (ODI). A lot of good people believe that changed not only the course of Sachin’s ODI career but also rewrote the future of ODI cricket. Such was Sachin’s skill, which he got to display.
We bring up cricket here for easy familiarity. Otherwise, the world of sports is filled with instances where chance has played a critical role, and certain players have had the skill to make the most of them. No wonder, sports people, however skilled, are known to be a superstitious folk.
Story of the week
On Tuesday, the Goods and Services Tax Council approved a uniform 28 per cent tax on the full “face value” of bets involving online gaming, casinos, and horse racing, bringing them on a par with betting and gambling. Industry stakeholders had been arguing that games of skill be taxed differently from games of chance.
Currently, most online gaming platforms pay 18 per cent tax on the commission collected for each game. Betting and gambling attract 28 per cent GST. For horse racing, the GST is 28 per cent on the bet value.
A Group of Ministers (GoM) headed by Conrad Sangma, the chief minister of Meghalaya, was tasked with examining the taxation of fantasy sports and casinos. In June 2022, the GoM suggested no distinction between fantasy sports and casinos “merely on the ground that an activity is a game of skill or chance or both”, and said tax should be levied on the “full value”, including the contest entry fee paid by the player.
The GoM was asked to relook into its suggestions. The panel could not arrive at a consensus in its second report, citing divergent views of certain states. IAMAI, which represents online gaming companies, said the GST Council's decision was a blow to India's goal of becoming $1 trillion digital economy by 2025.
In Wednesday’s intraday trade, the shares of Delta Corp and Nazara Technologies tumbled 28 per cent on the BSE.
Sanjay Malhotra, the Revenue Secretary, said in an interview with Shrimi Choudhary the 28 per cent decision was “unanimous” and did not need a review.
In other news…
The Indian Space Research Organisation launched its third lunar mission on Friday. Prime Minister Narendra Modi hailed the launch as a "new chapter" in India's space odyssey and said it had elevated the dreams and ambitions of every Indian.
Taiwanese Foxconn walked out of its joint venture with Anil Agarwal-led Vedanta group almost a year after signing a pact to set up a Rs 1.54 trillion facility in Gujarat. This would have been India’s first semiconductor plant.
This was a huge disappointment. Getting some semiconductor fabrication to happen onshore was a crucial part of India’s plans to create a homegrown, end-to-end electronics manufacturing supply chain.
Foxconn is learnt to be looking at plans to apply to the government to set up two fab plants on its own. Undaunted, Vedanta says it will enter the market for manufacturing of chips and displays this year.
The Tata group is close to signing an agreement to acquire Apple supplier Wistron's factory as soon as August, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. This would make India's largest conglomerate the first local company to move into the assembly of iPhones.
Amid the ongoing investigation against 17 electric two-wheeler makers, Kamran Rizvi, secretary to the Ministry of Heavy Industries, warned the companies of legal action — ranging from civil to criminal liability — if they refused to return the wrongfully claimed subsidy.
“We can live without the FAME regime,” Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal told us in an interview. Asked if he was ready for a no-subsidy regime, Aggarwal said: “We are working towards it... If the subsidy is extended, good — if not, the industry has to step up. We can live without FAME.”
Billionaire Gautam Adani's flagship firm has raised Rs 1,250 crore through a local-currency bond sale, the first since a US short-seller's scathing report sparked a rout in the group's securities.
Tech that: Word from the world of technology and start-ups
K Krithivasan, the chief executive of Tata Consultancy Services, who calls himself an optimist, is confident that demand for tech services is on track in the long term. Some new tech, such as generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI), will be business-driven, and not IT-driven, he told us in an interview.
Watch it: From The Morning Show
Rivers in North India are flowing close to or above the danger mark and inundating low-lying areas, leaving thousands homeless. Parts of Delhi-NCR are submerged. Why is India failing to manage its river systems?
What is Suveen obsessing over?
When the first Mission: Impossible movie came out on May 22, 1996, the Santro, Wagon R, and Alto had not yet descended on India’s roads. The longevity of the series – the seventh movie in the franchise released this week – is a testament to the endless box-office appeal of its lead actor, Tom Cruise, who, at 61, shows no sign of slowing down. On the contrary, he said he would like to be doing Mission: Impossible movies into his eighties, akin to what Harrison Ford is doing with the Indiana Jones movies.
By consensus, Mission: Impossible is the most successful movie franchise of all time, not just in box-office collections but also in the manner in which it redefined the spy genre. With a little help from Jason Bourne, MI’s Ethan Hunt forced the James Bond franchise, much older, to reinvent itself.
Whereas once the MI movies would have been set aside as too popular for refined drawing-room conversations, they are all the rage now even among the grisly movie critics of uppity newspapers in England. In fact, Tom Cruise these days is spoken of in hushed tones as the Saviour who pulled Hollywood out of its pandemic slump, starting with Top Gun: Maverick, which brough audiences back to theatres.
Since Indian filmmakers have always been susceptible to ‘inspiration’ from Hollywood, one hopes they do not think it is a simple matter of putting colons (:) in movies’ names. It might need a little more skill, and perhaps a bit of chance as well.
This is Suveen signing off. Please send tips, comments, news, or views about skills, chances, or random punctuation marks to suveen.sinha@bsmail.in.
(Suveen Sinha is Chief Content Editor at Business Standard)
Scott, according to county cricket folklore, said: “Oh dear, he'll probably go on and get a hundred.” Lara went on to score 501 not out, the highest score in all first-class cricket, which includes Test matches.
Lara got two chances that day. He had the skills to make the most of both. Cricket is full of such stories — stories where a stroke of luck turned not only the course of the match but, in certain cases, a player’s entire career.
On March 27, 1994, News Zealand batted first against India at Auckland and scored 142. That morning, India’s regular opener, Navjot Sidhu, had pulled out of the match with a neck pain. When India batted, Sachin Tendulkar walked out to open the innings for the first time in a one-day international (ODI). A lot of good people believe that changed not only the course of Sachin’s ODI career but also rewrote the future of ODI cricket. Such was Sachin’s skill, which he got to display.
We bring up cricket here for easy familiarity. Otherwise, the world of sports is filled with instances where chance has played a critical role, and certain players have had the skill to make the most of them. No wonder, sports people, however skilled, are known to be a superstitious folk.
Story of the week
On Tuesday, the Goods and Services Tax Council approved a uniform 28 per cent tax on the full “face value” of bets involving online gaming, casinos, and horse racing, bringing them on a par with betting and gambling. Industry stakeholders had been arguing that games of skill be taxed differently from games of chance.
Currently, most online gaming platforms pay 18 per cent tax on the commission collected for each game. Betting and gambling attract 28 per cent GST. For horse racing, the GST is 28 per cent on the bet value.
A Group of Ministers (GoM) headed by Conrad Sangma, the chief minister of Meghalaya, was tasked with examining the taxation of fantasy sports and casinos. In June 2022, the GoM suggested no distinction between fantasy sports and casinos “merely on the ground that an activity is a game of skill or chance or both”, and said tax should be levied on the “full value”, including the contest entry fee paid by the player.
The GoM was asked to relook into its suggestions. The panel could not arrive at a consensus in its second report, citing divergent views of certain states. IAMAI, which represents online gaming companies, said the GST Council's decision was a blow to India's goal of becoming $1 trillion digital economy by 2025.
In Wednesday’s intraday trade, the shares of Delta Corp and Nazara Technologies tumbled 28 per cent on the BSE.
Sanjay Malhotra, the Revenue Secretary, said in an interview with Shrimi Choudhary the 28 per cent decision was “unanimous” and did not need a review.
In other news…
The Indian Space Research Organisation launched its third lunar mission on Friday. Prime Minister Narendra Modi hailed the launch as a "new chapter" in India's space odyssey and said it had elevated the dreams and ambitions of every Indian.
Taiwanese Foxconn walked out of its joint venture with Anil Agarwal-led Vedanta group almost a year after signing a pact to set up a Rs 1.54 trillion facility in Gujarat. This would have been India’s first semiconductor plant.
This was a huge disappointment. Getting some semiconductor fabrication to happen onshore was a crucial part of India’s plans to create a homegrown, end-to-end electronics manufacturing supply chain.
Foxconn is learnt to be looking at plans to apply to the government to set up two fab plants on its own. Undaunted, Vedanta says it will enter the market for manufacturing of chips and displays this year.
The Tata group is close to signing an agreement to acquire Apple supplier Wistron's factory as soon as August, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. This would make India's largest conglomerate the first local company to move into the assembly of iPhones.
Amid the ongoing investigation against 17 electric two-wheeler makers, Kamran Rizvi, secretary to the Ministry of Heavy Industries, warned the companies of legal action — ranging from civil to criminal liability — if they refused to return the wrongfully claimed subsidy.
“We can live without the FAME regime,” Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal told us in an interview. Asked if he was ready for a no-subsidy regime, Aggarwal said: “We are working towards it... If the subsidy is extended, good — if not, the industry has to step up. We can live without FAME.”
Billionaire Gautam Adani's flagship firm has raised Rs 1,250 crore through a local-currency bond sale, the first since a US short-seller's scathing report sparked a rout in the group's securities.
Tech that: Word from the world of technology and start-ups
K Krithivasan, the chief executive of Tata Consultancy Services, who calls himself an optimist, is confident that demand for tech services is on track in the long term. Some new tech, such as generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI), will be business-driven, and not IT-driven, he told us in an interview.
Watch it: From The Morning Show
Rivers in North India are flowing close to or above the danger mark and inundating low-lying areas, leaving thousands homeless. Parts of Delhi-NCR are submerged. Why is India failing to manage its river systems?
What is Suveen obsessing over?
When the first Mission: Impossible movie came out on May 22, 1996, the Santro, Wagon R, and Alto had not yet descended on India’s roads. The longevity of the series – the seventh movie in the franchise released this week – is a testament to the endless box-office appeal of its lead actor, Tom Cruise, who, at 61, shows no sign of slowing down. On the contrary, he said he would like to be doing Mission: Impossible movies into his eighties, akin to what Harrison Ford is doing with the Indiana Jones movies.
By consensus, Mission: Impossible is the most successful movie franchise of all time, not just in box-office collections but also in the manner in which it redefined the spy genre. With a little help from Jason Bourne, MI’s Ethan Hunt forced the James Bond franchise, much older, to reinvent itself.
Whereas once the MI movies would have been set aside as too popular for refined drawing-room conversations, they are all the rage now even among the grisly movie critics of uppity newspapers in England. In fact, Tom Cruise these days is spoken of in hushed tones as the Saviour who pulled Hollywood out of its pandemic slump, starting with Top Gun: Maverick, which brough audiences back to theatres.
Since Indian filmmakers have always been susceptible to ‘inspiration’ from Hollywood, one hopes they do not think it is a simple matter of putting colons (:) in movies’ names. It might need a little more skill, and perhaps a bit of chance as well.
This is Suveen signing off. Please send tips, comments, news, or views about skills, chances, or random punctuation marks to suveen.sinha@bsmail.in.
(Suveen Sinha is Chief Content Editor at Business Standard)