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It came tantalizingly close to being a miracle but in the end, Team USA came up, in the heartbreaking words of MVP goaltender Ryan Miller, "just one shot short" in men's hockey final in the Vancouver Winter Olympics.

Ryan kept the Americans in contention throughout the game with his unbelievable saves. When America equalized 2-2 with only 24.4 seconds remaining in regulation time, a miracle beckoned. But it was not to be. Sidney Crosby found a way to beat Miller in sudden-death overtime, redeeming himself and an entire nation that lives and dies by hockey.

Perhaps it was fitting that the game should end this way but what Team USA accomplished is nothing short of miraculous. From now onwards, USA will be considered a legitimate contender for the gold. Ryan Miller, Patrick Kane and others have shown the way and there is no stopping the American momentum. There maybe setbacks on the way to the summit (just ask Canada) but eventually America will get there and remain there before another upstart nation climbs its way to the top.

The curtain comes down on the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics tonight. For Canada with the largest haul of gold medals (14), it was a spectacular success. The USA won the most medals ever in any Winter Games (37). It began in tragedy but the euphoria of Olympics soon took over. We saw grace and unfortunately, lack of it as well. The artistry, the persistence, the redemption, the inexplicable blunders and the unexpected victories, the relentless drive, the shattered records and the humble heroes (there were a few) - this is what Olympics is about and we got more than what we had any right to expect.

But I am glad the Winter Olympics is over. For 16 days I absorbed more TV than I did in the the last 16 months. The tube will be silent until July when the World Cup Soccer begins in South Africa. But that requires another mindset, another set of loyalties. Go Brazil!

Another Miracle on Ice?

So it has come down to USA and Canada in the hockey final in the Vancouver Winter Olympics! This is the dream match everyone (in North America at least) was hoping for. That the young Team USA beat Canada 5-3 in their pool match last Sunday is a distant memory. That loss actually gives Team Canada the advantage because the players are motivated to avenge their earlier defeat in front of a delirious home crowd. They have, well, a score to settle.

Certainly in the individual talent department, the Canadians leave their US counterparts in the dust. But one of the major lessons in team sports is that a less-talented team with more cohesion often beats the team with superior talent but less cohesion.

Canada has probably overcome the lack of cohesion by thrashing the mighty Russians and beating Slovakia, although their superstar Sidney Crosby is yet to show his magic. The question is: Can Team USA pull it off again? Because if they do, it will be another Miracle On Ice. It may not have the fire of the 1980 Lake Placid Miracle against the Red Machine in the subtext of the Cold War. Still, it will be big.

The two teams will undoubtedly play their hearts out and fans will talk about it for years to come. My head says Canada will win but my heart is with Team USA. That I am an American has nothing to do with it. It's just that I have a weakness for miracles. And lately there have been far too few miracles to grace our lives. Go USA!

Gold Goes to the Best Figure Skater

Even before he stepped onto the ice, Russia's defending Olympic champion let it be known through his swagger that the gold was his. The rest of the world could compete for the silver. Evgeni Plushenko was that confident.

At least one skater didn't think so. America's Evan Lysacek was confident of his artistry and athletic excellence as well and decided that, instead of verbal jousting with Evgeni, he will let his skates do the talking. And did they ever!

In the short program, Lysacek fell behind Plushenko by a huge margin. Just kidding. It was by a mere 0.55 points, the perfect place for Lysacek to be, since the pressure intensified on Plushenko to deliver.

Then came the long program two nights later. All year long, Plushenko had been chattering about how his quadruple jump would separate him from the boys. The quad would dazzle the judges and beget him the gold for sure.

Lysacek refused Plushenko's bait. There was enough fire and ice in his routine to render the quad irrelevant. He chose not to play by Plushenko's rule. And, as Robert Frost would say, that made all the difference.

Lysacek was flawless in execution. He was imaginative and daring. The poetry just flowed from him and viewers knew they were watching someone special. Plushenko was not as smooth. At times he even seemed to be going through the motions. His did score more with his quad toe loop–triple toe loop combination but all three of Lysacek's spin sequences were rated level 4 - the highest level of difficulty. Only two of Plushenko’s were level 4. Over all three spins, Lysacek outscored Plushenko by 1.26 points. When Plushenko fell 0.9 points farther behind in his step sequences, Lysacek’s overall margin of victory increased to a whopping (relatively speaking) 1.31.

The audience in the Pacific Coliseum agreed with the judges and roared their approval. Not so the prima donna Plushenko. At the award ceremony he was boorish. Clearly he felt that the judges were not perceptive or wise or smart enough to crown him the king.

"I was positive that I won," he said at the post-event press conference. He continued: "But I suppose Evan needs the medal more than I do. Maybe it's because I already have one. I have to share with you -- two silver and one Olympic gold -- that's not too bad."

What a sore and ungracious loser! Perhaps when the Vancouver Winter Olympics comes to be remembered more for Lysacek's stellar performance than any other athlete's, Plushenko will accept reality and redeem himself with some expression of humility.

America has found a winner in Lysacek on and off the ice. We can expect another gold from him in the 2014 Games in Sochi, Russia. I wonder if Plushenko will be in the audience.

Opening Ceremony of the Vancouver Winter Olympics

The opening ceremony of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics was majestic and moving. It was so because Canada chose to be herself, instead of trying to emulate or outdo other opening ceremonies, particularly Beijing’s 2008 show-of-shows.

For me, the opening ceremony evoked memories of the two years I spent in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in the early ‘70s. I had gone to Canada from the newly-independent nation of Bangladesh to study at Dalhousie University on a scholarship. Those were two of the happiest years of my life. So I was particularly thrilled when Sarah McLachlan, Halifax’s own, sang in her lovely lyrical voice words that summed up the Olympic spirit: “When you wake up everyday/Please don’t throw your dreams away.”

Donald Sutherland’s recitation of prose and poetry by Canada’s famous writers provided just the right touch to the story of that vast and varied land. On the stage, aboriginal Canadians (First Nations, Inuit and Métis) and actors enacted how the country was settled, from the Maritime Provinces all the way west to cosmopolitan Vancouver.

Delegations from 82 nations made their colorful entries into the indoor arena. The death of a Georgian luge athlete at a practice run cast a pall of gloom over the ceremony but the Olympic spirit demanded that the show go on. The Georgian delegation received a standing ovation. It was courageous and poignant at the same time.

The most touching moment came for me when eight of Canada’s legends drawn from various fields carried a huge Olympic flag. It included Sutherland, of course, but also Anne Murray. In Halifax, the first Western singer I came to admire was Nova Scotia’s Anne Murray. Her songs (Songbird, Danny’s song) were all the rage in Canada at the time and I listened to them an endless number of times. She had passed the torch to singers like Sarah McLachlan, a continuity memorably captured in the pageantry.

The most thrilling moment for me was when the camera zoomed in on the hockey legend Bobby Orr. He was the reason I became an ardent ice hockey, and Boston Bruins, fan. When I moved to Philadelphia from Halifax to pursue a doctorate degree at Temple University, Orr remained my favorite player. I was probably the only fan in Philadelphia rooting for the Bruins when the Flyers played the team in 1974 in the Stanley Cup finals. When Booby Clarke and the Flyers won the Stanley Cup, I was devastated because I knew how much Orr wanted to win.

Well, after more than three decades, here was Orr, one of the legendary eight, and suddenly I became aware of the passage of time more vividly than ever before in my life. Orr was white-haired. He had put on weight. I am sure his reflexes had slowed. What did I expect? This is what time does to each of us.

It was at this point that the Vancouver Winter Olympics became profoundly human for me. The mishap with the Olympic cauldron only made it more so. Of all the Olympic opening ceremonies – summer and winter – this was the most poignant, intimate, evocative and inspiring that I have ever seen. Thank you, O Canada, and win tons of gold!

Thoughts on Seeing "Three Monkeys"

“Play to your strength” is a golden rule to live by but difficult to embrace. There are many reasons for it. Your parents expect you to be an engineer, and even though your heart is into photography, you spend the most creative years of your life toiling away for an engineering degree. You sense that writing is your calling but everyone tells you that there’s no money there and so you grit your teeth and enroll in medical school. And, of course, how can you go wrong with computer science, the recognized gateway to wealth, and so you follow the herd, even though creating music is your passion.

Doing what others expect you to do instead of following your own heart leads to an unfulfilled life, whether or not you are making lots of money. And there are too many of us who fall into that category! It is what I think Thoreau meant when he said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

These thoughts came to me as I watched the Hindi movie “Three Idiots.” (I will use “musketeers” in place of “idiots,” because that’s what the three protagonists really are.)

Farhan, Raju and Rancho (Aamir Khan) are three engineering students at one of India’s elite engineering colleges. Rancho is a savant and a visionary.

He is appalled by the rote learning the college promotes and shocked by the autocratic and inflexible attitude of the principal. His challenging questions unsettle the teachers whose only aim is to prepare students to pass exams and land jobs with engineering firms. That they will be no more than cogs in the wheels does not concern anyone. When mediocrity works, why not maintain the status quo?

Rancho rejects this factory approach to learning. He seeks real knowledge, not pseudo-knowledge. He tells the other two musketeers not to chase success but to “make success chase you.” “Don’t beg at the feet of luck,” he admonishes them. Again and again he reminds them not to be afraid of the future. Do what interests you. That way, your job will be like play and you will be happy and professionally fulfilled.

In the nick of time, Rancho manages to save a girl about to be married off to a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. Of course, the girl turns out to be … who else but the principal’s daughter! The typical Hindi melodrama notwithstanding, the movie does not veer away from its focus, which is to show a) how schools can become prisons and stifle the creativity of anyone who submits to rote knowledge, and b) how to break free from the walls of ignorance and appearance we build around ourselves by playing to our strength, no matter how daunting the obstacles may be.

Rancho is thrown out of classes by teachers because he is disobedient, his questions threaten the hierarchy, and his answers do not mimic the formal and dense textbooks. So he wanders to other classes to soak up whatever knowledge he can.

Watching this reminded me of something Steve Jobs, the Apple chairman and CEO, said in a commencement address he gave at Stanford in 2005. Jobs attended an expensive community college but “after six months, I couldn't see the value in it … So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting … Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating … None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.”

What Jobs is saying is that if you trust your guts, sooner or later you will find what animates you, and then you will find your life’s calling. But you have to take that risk, “trust that it would all work out OK.”

Jobs went on to say that “Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most importantly, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

I also remembered a story about the late great physicist Richard Feynman who had the following advice for a younger physicist:

“Go look at an electron microscope photograph of an atom. Don’t just glance at it. It is very important that you examine it very closely. Think about what it means.”
“Okay.”
“And then answer this question. Does it make your heart flutter?”
“Does it make my heart flutter?”
“Yes or no. It’s a yes or no question. No equations allowed.”
“All right, I’ll let you know.”
“Don’t be dense. I don’t need to know. You need to know. This exam is self-graded. And it’s not the answer that counts. It’s what you do with the information.”

This is what Rancho is saying too: Find something that makes your heart flutter and then do something about it. If you do, the sky is the limit.

“Three Idiots” transcends the inevitable song-and-dance routines of the typical Hindi movie (which it has in plenty) and teaches something powerful in an entertaining way. If you nurture the sweet dream of self-employment or if you need a nudge to do what your heart tells you to do, you may find this movie inspiring. And remember, it is never too late to do what you always wanted to do.

Tiger Woods's Unexpected Opportunity

Americans give celebrities a wide berth.

No celebrity got a wider berth in recent years than Tiger Woods. His preternatural golfing ability trumped everything: his disdain, bordering on contempt, for spectators, his lack of humility, his arrogance, his obsession with privacy.

His infidelities, and the blatant and reckless way he went about them, were his way of telling the world that he was above norms of civilized behavior. He was untouchable. We should simply exult in the fact that he deigns to share this earth with us, the unwashed masses in swooning awe every time he picks up a club. Whenever he lost, he rarely congratulated the winner, going on about how he made unexpected mistakes that cost him the game. If only he played a little better, it would have been a no-contest.

I am sure many golfers were ticked off by Tiger’s boorish behavior on and off the course but were afraid of making waves. After all, Woods was the most prized athlete in the world. Who dares to take on an icon?

One who has spoken candidly (finally!) is Tom Watson, a golf great himself. “Tiger’s actions have been bad for our game,” he said. "His golf is really secondary at this point. From his standpoint and his family's standpoint, it's something he needs to get control of ... and make some amends and show some humility to the public when he comes back."

Watson also criticized Woods’ swearing, foul language and club-throwing. “That's not part of what we want to project as far as the professional golf tour is concerned."

"I'll let the cat out of the bag," Watson continued. "Tiger has to take ownership of what he has done. He must get his personal life in order. I think that's what he's trying to do. And when he comes back, he has to show some humility to the public.

"I would come out and I would do an interview with somebody and say, 'You know what? I screwed up. And I admit it. I am going to try to change. I am trying to change. I want my wife and family back.'"

"I feel that he has not carried the same stature that other great players that have come along like Jack (Nicklaus), Arnold (Palmer), Byron Nelson, the Hogans, in the sense that there was language and club throwing on the golf course," Watson said. "You can grant that of a young person that has not been out here for a while. But I think he needs to clean up his act and show the respect for the game that other people before him have shown."

These are bracing words, words that Woods urgently needs to heed. There are reports that Woods has left the sex rehab in Mississippi and is now with his wife and two children to work on his marriage.

Here’s hoping that Woods succeeds. The golfer must recognize that fate has presented him with a monumental teachable moment. If he can redeem himself through fidelity and humility, chances are that his game will return too. A Tiger Woods who is devoted and loyal to his family, who appreciates the adulation of his fans, and who is humble and grateful for the gift he has been blessed with, can positively influence millions of impressionable minds and change the world for the better.