Welcome to the other side of the looking glass.

The story began with Jagdish Sharma, a State Bank of India employee, announcing his plan to launch a cricket club exclusively for left-handers. The club, to be named Southpaw, will field a side in one of the Mumbai Cricket Association (MCA) tournaments. The club will host a four-team tournament for the Ajit Wadekar Trophy, if the former chairman of selection blesses the concept. The teams will be named after left-handed cricketers who have served Mumbai Eknath Solkar, Karsan Ghavri, Naresh Churi and Sanjay Patil. Sharma has already approached the MCA forpermission. And he has religiously drawn up a list of 36 lefties -- including Vinod Kambli, Jatin Paranjpe, Rohan Gavaskar, Sairaj Bahutale -- whom he will invite to play in the tournament. Asked why this curious project appealed to him, Sharma launches into rhetoric. ``Left-handers need their own place in the world. They are often made to feel they are not right. For instance, at temples, my son puts out his left hand for prasad, and he is rebuked.''Sharma, who ``hopes to raise social awareness to the southpaw cause in a fun way'', was inspired by an advertisement he saw in a British newspaper in August. His non-profit trust takes schoolboys on an annual cricket tour to Bristol in that season. The advertisement, in The Evening Post, was issued by The Lefthanders Club, London. To commemorate International Left-handers Day on August 13, the club had organised a day-long programme of cricket.Sharma wrote back, and the club duly send him brochures of their activities. Among them was a store -- AnythingLefthanded Ltd -- that peddled ware for southpaws. Sharma was encouraged to look them up on the Internet.

A visit there gives an entirely new spin to marginalisation. The Yahoo! Search engine lists 13 sites for left-handers under Culture and Groups. The most prominent among them is www.thelefthand.com, that peddles products --ranging from computer keyboards to scissors designed for left-handers. The site www.cs.ruu.nl answers 45 frequently asked questions about left-handers, including why they deserve their own coffee mugs (see box).

Lorin's left-handed site at http:/duke/usask.ca/ elias/left, the most comprehensive of them all, contains findings of research on left-handers. For instance, alcoholics, architects, blue-eyed people, blondes, criminals, Eskimos, homosexuals, musicians, smoking mothers, pro tennis players and vegetarians are listed as groups with an elevated prevalence of left-handers.Dr MK Holder's page at www.indiana.edu/`primate/left.html names some famous left-handers. Whilewww.southpaw.com lists shops in three continents catering solely to left-handers. The US alone has 26. One in Delaware, called What's Left, sells ``left-handed cards for right-minded people.'' Another in Massachussetts has a clever name Left-handed Complements.

A third in Connecticut, White Sinistral, is self-righteous. It is ``open to lef-handed people whose IQs are the top 2 per cent of the population and who are eligible to be members of MENSA.''

In fact, all the 13 sites make much ado about the disadvantages of being a left-hander. One says, ``This group has had to spend its life conforming to a world that was not designed for its benefit. In addition, this group has had to put up with insults and derogatory comments aimed in its direction. This site is meant as a consciousness raising tool for left-handedness.''

The importance of being a Southpaw