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So here I am with my second post. Being a cricket fanatic in a country where cricket is not a game but a religion is quite obvious. Had wanting to write about cricket for some time now, just couldn’t get it done till now. So yeah I’ll be discussing the 2nd semifinal of the Champions Trophy 2017 which saw the head to head contest between two Asian nations India and Bangladesh. Having earned their way into the semis both the teams looked to keep their winning momentum alive to earn a spot in the finals against Pakistan on Sunday. Talking about the conditions, it was a bit overcast with some chances of rain. Owing to the overcast conditions the toss was quite crucial, which was later won by India and they decided to bowl first probably due to the overcast conditions and the chasing trend that had been going on in this tournament. India had a really good start with the ball as they picked up two quick wickets reducing Bangladesh to 30 odd for 2 in 7 odd overs. Bangladesh looked to build their innings slowly and also thanks to some undisciplined bowling from India the Tigers built a good partnership with Tamim Iqbal and Mushfiqur Rahim at the crease. This partnership looked to take the game away from India as Bangladesh were cruising at 151/2 in 27 overs. The run rate was pretty good and the projected score seemed a bit of concern for Kohli and company. The partnership was finally broken by the part-timer Jadhav who cleaned up Tamim with a short flighted delivery. The next batsmen in Shakib could manage to score only 15 runs before falling to Jadeja by a brilliant catch from MS Dhoni behind the stumps. Just after Shakib’s departure Mushfiqur Rahim also got out after scoring a well played 61 and the score was now reduced to 179/5. This was the chance for India to pull things back and they quite grabbed it with both hands reducing Bangladesh to 229/7 at the end of 45 overs. Bangladesh didn’t lose another wicket after that and went on to score 264 in their allotted 50 overs. The target wasn’t a terrifying one but at least the opposition had something to bowl at and who knew might have proven to be a big total in a crunch, high-pressure game like this semifinal. India got off to a flier where Dhawan and Rohit both looked in solid touch. They added 87 in just 14.4 overs before Dhawan falling to opposition captain Mortaza at a well made 46. Next came in Kohli who looked to be in sweet touch right from ball one. By this time bright sunshine had covered the ground and the pitch behaved like a flat deck with absolutely nothing for the bowlers. The Bangladeshi bowlers struggled due to their lack of discipline and the flat nature of this pitch. Runs came thick and fast as both the batsmen dominated the bowlers adding a matchwinning unbeaten partnership of 178 runs which took India across the finish line with 9 wickets intact. This game proved out to be a yet another single sided contest. Great character shown by the men in blue to book their place in the final against Pakistan. So India will be taking on the arch-rivals Pakistan in the final of 2017 Champions Trophy.

So here I am with my first blog post officially(have quite a few incomplete ones in the drafts though😂). So yeah achieving something, especially achieving something which you dreamt of, achieving something which has been your goal from the beginning, in other words being successful and satisfied in life takes a lot of hard work, effort, sacrifice, and courage. Not many people have it in them what it takes, but those do they are the one’s worth appraisal and ones looked forward to for inspiration. Everybody has some dreams in life which they aim to achieve whatever it takes, but not everybody has that “whatever it takes” and many people give up in the midway. Let me tell you each and every one of us has the power to dream big and have the courage, determination, the hunger to achieve those dreams, all one need is to never give up. Draw an inspiration, if not from others draw it from yourself and think of the times when the conditions were not favourable for you, where you yourself had almost given up but something in you still wanted to go on, somewhere in a little corner deep inside your heart you had the courage to achieve, you had the “thing” to go on. Life is full of hardships, there will be times when life throws you down when you least expect it but don’t give up take it as an opportunity to emerge out more stronger than you used to be. Don’t let the failures define you, wear your failures as a badge of honor and continue on the same path with utmost determination and the anger to have it done. You might deviate from the path sometimes, but don’t let those deviations be permanent, and yes don’t be stuck in your past failures, get over them continue to work hard, just put the effort even if you don’t feel like doing it anymore, just hang on there and eventually you’ll make way for yourself.

Networking is a really important part of building dynamic applications. When it ccomes to loading data from the internet and displaying in the app, we can do it with three most probable methods. One can be loading data directly on the UI thread(this is a quite bad practice to load data on the app and I guess we have all moved beyond loading data on the UI thread), one can be using Async Loader class which does the networking part on a different background thread. So this method of using the Async Task class comes in quite handy for our cause since it performs the action of loading data from the internet by creating a new background thread and doesn’t quite alter the working of the main UI thread, but this method also has some drawbacks which might alter the working of the application and causing it to crash. By default the device configuration changes such as rotating your whole activity(one of the main reasons it is quite critical not to keep a reference to your activity or any views). So here the Loaders comes to the rescue. The best part about Loaders is that it survives configuration changes i.e. the similar data is not loaded again and again on the change of configuration. The once loaded data is still there when the activity comes back up. Data is queued up for deliivery so you aren’t going to lose data during device configurtion changes. One more advantage of using a Loader is that it does not stays around forever. It gets automatically cleaned up when the requesting activity or the fragment is permanently destroyed. That means no lingering, unneccessary loads which is not the case of using AsynTask class.