DHONI’S FUTURE
   Date :23-Jul-2019

 
BY NAMING Rishabh Pant to play all the three formats as specialist wicketkeeper on the forthcoming tour to the West Indies, the Indian selectors have laid out a clear roadmap which seeks to blood youngsters instead of depending on old warhorse Mahendra Singh Dhoni. The selection, however, raises the most-asked question, have we already seen the end of Dhoni? The wicketkeeper-batsman has not made himself available for the West Indies tour and opted to serve his regiment in the territorial army. He has not announced retirement and instead put the ball in the selectors’ court. It is an interesting move since the present selectors will hardly take a call without the team management’s approval, something that chief selector MSK Prasad had already conceded during World Cup replacements. Dhoni’s influence on the current team is immense. The backing he has from captain Virat Kohli makes it tough for the selectors to call the elephant in the room. While there are differing voices over Dhoni’s international future how those translate into a firm verdict needs to be seen after two months.
 
WILD PROBLEM
 
EVEN as 13,00 firefighters currently battle to put out wildfires in Portugal, the people around the world realise how helpless they are against the calamity that is striking at this or that spot around the world almost throughout the year, sparing no country, sparing no geographic segment, sparing no land of natural forest ecosystem. That global warming is a major cause of such outbreaks of wildfires, may be one reality. But investigators have identified several other causes as well for wildfires, such as inept forest management. No matter all that, the ugly phenomenon of wildfires has continued to dog the humanity more pronouncedly in recent decades, destroying in the process wonderful forests spread over countless thousands of hectares of land across the world. So serious has the problem become that time has come for a concerted global response to the challenge that threatens to hit any country any time. As the world braces up to face climate change, this one dimension, needs to be tackled collectively by governments.