From Bombay to Baramulla

Here is an argument I heard a lot of six months ago, which, since 26/11, seems so facile that it has vanished from the debate. It is worth noting how dangerous this argument is right now, because this argument will find plausible new clothes and re-appear in six months, or a year, or in six years.

The argument goes roughly as follows:

Kashmir is not worth the bother. Let it go. Give it to Pakistan. Or give it independence. Once the vast resources invested in Kashmir are freed up, India can carry on realizing its manifest destiny as a great nation that all of humanity looks to for moral, spiritual, technological and economic leadership.

This argument was well expressed by Vir Sanghvi, in this piece in the Hindustan Times in Aug 2008. Vir Sanghvi is the Editorial Director of the Hindustan Times, the former editor of Sunday magazine, a fairly mainstream journalistic voice I've agreed with many times in the past.

What 26/11 made painfully obvious is the naivety of this notion: that a surgical excision of Kashmir from India would result in a quid pro quo reduction in violence on this side of the border. This notion now looks as shallow as the conceit, back in 1947, that partition would “solve” the problem of plural identities in India.

India’s federal, democratic structure is not perfect, but it is designed well enough to accommodate the many distinct identities within India. Vir Sanghvi correctly points out that secession movements inspired by language, race and religion have been successfully accommodated within India multiple times, in places like Tamil Nadu, Mizoram and Punjab.

The reason the federal, secular, democratic framework of the Indian constitution does not work for Kashmir is that a scary number of the people who claim to speak for Kashmir are not Kashmiris, and don’t especially care about the political expression of a Kashmiri identity. They are international jihadists. Palestine, Chehnya, Kashmir, Iraq, Afghanistan, American tanks on sacred Saudi soil, Western decadence, apostate regimes in the Islamic world, insults to Islam in Danish newspapers – any grievance is grist to their mill. Understanding who these jihadist terrorists are and what these terrorists are trying to achieve is essential to understanding Kashmir in context, and to getting a sense for what it might mean to surgically excise Kashmir from India.

Terrorism is not especially Islamic. The personal psycho-drama that happens within a terrorist is neither mysterious, nor Islamic, nor the by-product of failed societies. It is commonplace. David Kilcullen, a brilliant Australian anthropologist who first learnt about terror as a soldier serving in Indonesia, gets his students to watch the film Fight Club to understand a terrorist’s psychology.

In essence, contemporary jihad, like all terrorism, is a rational political strategy. It was invented as a modern political strategy in 1946, when David Ben Gurion authorized the bombing of the Hotel King David in the then British Protectorate of Palestine. The consequence of this bombing was that Clement Atlee expedited the withdrawal of British forces from Palestine, thereby establishing the sovereign state of Israel. Wikipedia maintains that a former Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, took part in celebrations to mark the 60th anniversary of this attack, organized by the Menachem Begin center. The most ruthless terrorists in the world today are probably Hindu Tamils in Sri Lanka. The consequence of their ruthlessness, especially in murdering dissenting Tamils, has been that theirs is the only audible voice that claims to speak for Lanka’s Tamil people. The PKK, led by Abdullah Ocalan, killed 40,000 innocent Turks in the name of Kurdistan, winning the sympathy of bleeding heart liberals in Western Europe as a "people without a nation". Danielle Mitterand, the French President's wife was an public supporter of Ocalan, and pleaded for clemency in sentencing when Ocalan was captured by the Turkish army. The hijack of IC 814 from Kathmandu to Kandahar in 1999 led to the release of Masood Azhar, a Jaish e Mohammad operative believed to the involved in the attacks on Mumbai. Another of the IC 814 terrorists released, Omar Sheikh, was involved in the murder of WSJ journalist Daniel Pearl.

The most successful terrorist attack of all time, purely in terms of the political pay-off, must be 911. It resulted in the Al Queda being addressed by the world’s only superpower like it was a force of equal stature. Their preferred tactic, suicide bombings to murder non-combatants, is now dignified by the term War on Terror. Before the War on Terror, the Al Queda was a toxic but small fragment left over from the Soviet war in Afghanistan, with no easily identifiable outcome it was working towards. It felt, or could have been made to feel, like an anachronism. It might have struggled to capture the imagination of young people; it might have struggled to stay alive another generation. That is no longer a problem, not for the Al Queda.

It is now crystal clear that there is no morally justified use of terror, exactly like there is no morally justified use of genocide. It is also clear that terrorism is growing alarmingly because terror works. The only way in which the world-of-order can defeat terror is to make it a strategy that does not work.

Terrorists cannot be engaged and defeated in open battle. They need to be starved. They need to be deprived of the oxygen of media exposure, of new recruits, of arms, of money. Most importantly, they need to be deprived of the sweet smell of success.

The world-of-order needs to realize that this victory will be won slowly. This victory will involve intelligence, media management, paranoia, nonchalance, ruthlessness, mercy, narcotics control, anti-money-laundering operations, inter-national co-operation...lots of stuff. There will be no spectacular television-friendly signing of treaties that constitute a “solution”.

This is the context in which the Kashmir situation must be understood. India’s political class has got this one right. Kashmir needs to stay within the Indian Union, with as humane a police/ military presence as is possible. Not because of jingoistic nationalism. But because throwing a hunk of juicy red meat to the beast of international terrorism, breathing energy and life into the beast, is the most dangerous and irresponsible thing any civilized nation could do, today, or at any time in the foreseeable future.

Dravid's slump in form

I am on vacation in India. One of my nephews and I are vegging out in front of the TV on a Monday afternoon at my in-laws place, while the rest of the family naps. We are watching India nurdle along at 2 runs per over on the fourth afternoon of the Mohali test against England.

The commentators don't have a whole lot to talk about. We are watching endless replays of Dravid's stumps being shattered by Stuart Broad. Are horrible pictures like this a sign of Rahul Dravid's decline? Or does this just happen sometimes to any batsman, however great? And what to read into his century in the first innings of the Mohali test? The commentators are blathering on and on...for long enough for my inner-analyst to want to get beyond the balther...

The commentariat all agree that Dravid is suffering a slump in form. What, unfortunately, has not been properly examined is whether Dravid has really been scoring fewer runs than before, or whether the perceived slump in form is nothing more than randomness playing out. It is entirely possible that Dravid is batting as well as he ever has, and that the dice just haven't rolled his way. The mind is very good at spotting patterns, especially when there aren't any.

This question is inspired by Moneyball (recommended reading for any cricket fan). Moneyball is about how statistical analysis forms the foundation of a winning baseball team, the Oakland Athletics. It reports on persistent sporting myths that statistics busts. For instance, there is no such thing as a clutch hitter, a batter who does especially well in vital situations. Or that there is no such thing as a hot hand, a streak in basketball when a NBA player is "in-the-groove" and landing every shot in the basket.

Baseball is now enriched by a Society for American Baseball Research. The American Statistical Association now has a section dedicated to sports statistics. It is a pity that this quality of statistical analysis has not been applied to cricket, despite the richness of the data available. It is also an opportunity for a smart young cricket-loving statisticians. Calling S. Rajesh of Cricinfo?

To give the interested (geeky) reader a flavour of what is possible, here is the outline of a statistical analysis that would shed more light on Dravid's form than anything that has appeared in the media so far. None of the technique described below is very complicated, or goes beyond material taught routinely at the undergraduate level. I would be delighted to see this analysis available in the public domain along with a well documented methodology and explanations, and expect no credit or authorship rights. Also, a disclaimer. I am not a professional statistician; my knowledge of statistics is mainly as a customer to statisticians. Any feedback from readers with more statistical knowledge, especially around time-series analytic techniques could improve this analysis, is appreciated.

Outline of desired analysis
Step 1: compile the dataset
Each record in the dataset is one of the ~25000 balls Rahul Dravid has faced in test cricket. Each record in the dataset has the following fields: outcome (which takes the values 0-6 and W, all represented as class variables), opponent (Australia, England etc.), bowler, bowler type (pace, military medium, leg spin etc.), location, home away flag (derived from location), innings (which-ith innings of a test match), position played in the batting order (mostly #3), number of balls already faced in the innings, date innings started, a random number (for validation in step 5).

I don't think any of this data is hard to obtain. It is reported in the ball by ball commentary on Cricinfo, which I'm assuming is professionally archived. This list is not meant to be exhaustive, most datasets come with a few plausible covariates that can be thrown in and played with.

A couple of fields I would love to add, which may be harder to obtain, are length (full, length, back-of, short) and line (outside off, off, middle and leg, outside leg). I believe this is the data the team statisticians sitting in the dressing room code in their laptops.

Examine the dataset to get familiar with patterns, especially with potentially tricky variables like bowler or location. For instance, a bowler Dravid has faced for 12 balls may have dismissed Dravid twice. Worth being aware of weird things in the data before running any regressions.

Step 2: run the regression model
Model the outcome, number of runs scored, wicket or dot-ball as a multinomial logistic outcome. This class of models are used in transportation analysis - every commuter has the choice of multiple models of transportation - or in brand analysis - every consumer has the choice of multiple brands of breakfast cereal. Similarly, every ball has the choice of different outcomes - from sixer through dot-ball to wicket.

Allow the model to see all the fields listed above. Do not constrain the model. All two-term interactions. Just maximize the fit. Essentially, the computer is finding the configuration of explanatory variables with maximizes the likelihood of the observing the outcomes in the dataset.

Most modern statistical packages will apply simple transforms to covariates to improve fit, like for instance taking log(number of balls already faced), a transform which makes intuitive sense anyway.

Step 3: read the results
First pass, one is expecting to see date of innings being a statistically significant. If it is clearly significant, and the coefficient has the right sign (a decline in form), that probably means the effect is real. A completely unconstrained model might spit out some funky functional forms, with performance being a parabolic function of time...improving initially and then declining.

A bunch of other interesting effects will be visible at this stage, and are fun to look for. For instance, does Dravid have a nemesis bowler? Is Dravid genuinely as good abroad as he is at home? Has he done any worse as an opener than at #3? Is Dravid more vulnerable to full length deliveries on the slow pitches at home than abroad (does the interaction term between home away flag and length have a non-zero coefficient)?

Step 4: tweak the model
Refinements to the model are usually needed at this stage.

For instance, if no effect is observed overall, it might be because a real effect over the last six months may be hidden by the length of the continuous dataset in use. Converting time into six monthly blocks may be useful.

Also, a time effect might be masked because it is correlated with the opposition. It might look like Dravid just happens to be weaker against Sri Lanka and Australia, India's most recent opponents. In this case, one might want to force the model to accept time blocks before it admits opposition.

Bowlers with thin data might show up having implausibly strong effects. One might want to modify the data to slot all bowlers who have bowled less than 250 balls at Dravid into a pie-chuckers categorical variable.

Step 5: validate the model

Keep a random subset of ~5000 balls outside the analysis described so far. Repeat the analysis on this holdout to make sure the results observed are similar. Validating on an additional time period is probably nonsense in this context, since time is a variable of interest.

A more interesting approaches to validation is to validate on non-test match data. If Dravid is in decline, we would expect to see that in all forms of cricket.

Step 6: Document the results and limitations
Gaps in data and any subjective interpretations or analytic choices missing values/ definition of class variable etc. would be logged here.

Some limitations are systematic. This dataset is limited to Dravid's performance only. So a generalized improvement in the performance of all test batsmen of the same time period would not be picked up by the model. It is possible that Dravid is playing as well as ever, and that the world has moved forward faster than Dravid. A more ambitious analysis spanning a broader base of test batsmen is needed to shed more light on this.

Also highlight opportunities to improve on the analysis. For instance, it would be interesting to compare Dravid's decline with that of other top players. Assuming there is a decline, is it worse than what Gavaskar or Border suffered? Data may be thinner in the pre-internet era...but maybe it is out there in official score sheets.

Most critically, this analysis does not tell the captain whether or not Dravid should be replaced with a younger batsman. That remains a judgment call, based largely on how he wants to build his team. What it may tell the captain is that Dravid's run of poor scores is explained by randomness and is likely to end soon. So we avoid the injustice of a great player being judged on poorly constructed evidence.

What is right about Indian education?

My friends and family in India are in a state of perpetual despair about our education system. The system does not even attempt to develop creativity, or critical reasoning, or the love of learning, or emotional intelligence. These are things we all want. Some good friends of mine are doing superb work to try and invigourate the system. But the fact remains that the system teaches students to learn by rote, to "crack" exams.

Yet, despite this depressing unidimensional approach, one can't help but notice that the products of this flawed system generally do OK. Certainly, compared the products of other national systems, and better than the prevailing despair might suggest. Why?

Lord William Henry Beveridge, born in Rangpur, Bengal, to an ICS officer in 1879, quoted here here in the Times, may have a clue. In his report on Social Insurance and Allied Services, submitted to the Government of Winston Churchill in 1942, he notes that:

“Most men who have once gained the habit of work would rather work... than be idle... "

Extrapolating a bit, teenagers who have worked their tails off to get 97% in their board exams have surely gained the habit of hard work. Ditto for the brutally competitive entrance exams which serve as gatekeepers to most walks of Indian life. The same habit of hard work has been installed in ten times that number who slaved away for assorted entrance exams and didn't get accepted. They Indian educational system may be very good at giving kids a tough work ethic.

This may also provide a clue to another puzzle. Why do jocks, serious sportsmen, do much better than their CGPAs suggest? Maybe because they have developed a tough work ethic?

Pyaasa

Since 26/11, it hasn’t felt appropriate to change the topic to something other than the Mumbai attacks. Sachin’s century at Chepauk has given me permission to do just that.

This test match was always about more the cricket. For England to have shown the gumption to come out and play, for Strauss and Collingwood to play gritty career defining knocks, for Sachin Tendulkar to lead India on a record breaking run-chase, bringing up his century and the winning runs with the same shot, and for Sachin to have the grace and presence of mind to dedicate his century to the victims of the Mumbai attacks...

I'm just grateful that my favourite game can produce such a moment. The best piece I came across on this test match being about more than cricket was by Peter Roebuck in Cricinfo.

Yet, as a long-suffering India cricket fan, this win is special to me in just simple cricketing terms. This tickles the same spot as watching Ishant Sharma dominate Ricky Ponting at the WACA; it slakes a thirst that has been building up for decades.

Great teams chase down big targets. Bradman’s Invincibles chased down 403 at Headingley in 1948, to secure the Ashes and their status as the Invincibles. Steve Waugh’s Aussies chased down 369 in Sydney, 1999, after being 5 for 126, against a Pakistan attack that included Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis, Shoaib Akthar and Saqlain Mushtaq. Clive Lloyd’s Windies had their own great chase when Gordon Greenidge made mockery of David Gower’s declaration at Lord's in 1984 by chasing down 342 at a rate of over 5 an over while losing just one wicket. These wins matter more than others; they take on a talismanic quality, keeping the possibility of victory alive in a team’s imagination even in the worst situation.

India, Saurav’s India, had a talismanic win in Kolkata, 2001. But this win felt different from a triumphal march through a fourth innings chase. It was built around Rahul and VVS gritting out for survival in the third innings, with Harbhajan coming in to deliver the kill. Strangely, despite being a team built around a wealth of batting talent, India’s fourth innings performances have been appalling.

Think back to the inexplicable collapse to Shahid Afridi in Bangalore, 2005, needing to bat out a day to win the series. All out for 100 to the mesmerizing spin of Shaun Udal in Mumbai, 2006, again needing to bat out a day to win the series. Or losing three wickets in five balls to Michael Clarke in Sydney, 2008.

Going back a bit, remember the collapse in Barbados, 1997, when faced with the opportunity to be the first team in two generations to dethrone the Windies at home? Or falling achingly short of the mark against Akram’s Pakis in Chennai, 1999, in an ill-tempered and tightly fought series. Even the famous tied test against the Aussies in Chennai, 1987, was a game India should have won in a canter.

India have also generally made heavy weather of small fourth innings targets, even if we did go on to win. It came down to Sameer Dighe and Harbhajan Singh to hold their nerve and chase down 155 in Chennai, 2001. Chasing 233 to win in Adelaide, 2004, was a nervy affair that could have gone either way.

Those ghosts have now been exorcised.

What else would I have wished for in this game? For Rohit Sharma, S Badrinath, Virat Kohli, Robin Uthappa, Suresh Raina, M Vijay and Shikar Dhawan to have been sitting in the dressing room, absorbing the atmosphere, drinking in the subliminal belief that this is how India bats when it really counts.

Memories of the Taj Mahal, Mumbai

Some personal memories of the Taj:

- My first day at work, ever. I'd joined Procter and Gamble India as an Assistant Brand Manager and was attending a Hoopla, an annual jamboree at the Taj attended by employees from all over India

- My first job offer, ever. This was from the Indian Hotels Company, the company that owns the Taj. I heard the story about "Dogs and Indian not allowed" at their recruitment event

- I met my now parents-in-law at the Taj. Dinner at the Golden Dragon is an excellent way of reassuring the girl's parents that their daughter's boyfriend is appropriate. That tactic worked partly because my father-in-law had a long and fulfilling career with the Tata's. As did my grandfather

- I've had many All Day Breakfasts at the Sea Lounge, overlooking the Gateway of India. My wife and I'd meet there after work to fortify ourselves for the drive back to the suburbs. Once, while I was working through a three egg omelette, a member of the staff walked up to me with a shoe polish kit and offered to smarten me up. Were my shoes inappropriately scuffy? No. A waiter had spilt milk on my shoe and was keen to make amends

- The shoes had also been bought at the Taj. The shoes were a gift from my father, a pair of black brogues from the excellent Joy Shoes which he'd picked up on a business trip to Bombay

- I splurged Rs. 200 on a funky hand drawn map of Bombay at the Nalanda book shop. Not to scale, with handwritten labels, and with cool touristy joints like Cafe Mondegar and Prithvi Theatre marked out with little sketches. Back in the 90s, Rs. 200 was quite a lot of money for something I didn't need. And funky maps weren't all that common

- I've attended a college reunion at the Taj Ball Room, organized by the Western India Stephanians Association. I went in with rock bottom expectations, muttering something to myself about "old fuddy duddies", and wound up having a rollicking good time.

- I've sung Mohammad Rafi's "yeh hai Bombay meri jaan" with gusto if not talent, sitting on a bench outside the Taj. I'm sure I was accompanied by some equally unmusical Stephanian friends. Not totally sure if it was the same evening...

- The Brand Equity Quiz regional finals were at the Taj. I was proudly representing my company after competitive internal trials, and our team was leading the Western India finals with just 3 rounds to go. Then Derek O'Brien snuck in a scrambled word puzzle that has nothing to do with quizzing. I guess the national finals were not meant to be :(

You get the drift.

The Taj is not just some aseptic and characterless dormitory near an airport. It's a living part of a great city. I am not a Bombay-ite. I just happened to live in Bombay for a few years. Yet, the Taj is tightly woven into the fabric of my life, my memories.

The Taj will be throb with life again. Bombay will be herself again. This nightmare will pass.

The Taj

Jamsetji Nasserwanji Tata had visitors from out of town. A proud citizen of Bombay, he wanted to show his city off to his guests. He took them out to Bombay's finest hotel, where he encountered a sign: "Dogs and Indians not allowed".

Angry but determined, he swore he would build a even greater hotel in Bombay. A hotel that would be counted among the finest in the world. A hotel where Indians and whites, blacks and yellows, Hindus and Muslims, Christians and Jews, Sikhs, Parsees, Buddhists, Jains and Atheists were all welcome.

Mr. Tata kept his promise. Thus was born the Taj Mahal Hotel on Apollo Bunder. The Taj is not just any luxury hotel. It is a special place, resonant with meaning. It is every bit as iconic as the twin towers that were attacked in New York on 9/11.

This is the place that the dirty little insects who crawled ashore on the Sassoon Docks have chosen to attack, the place where they shot dead women and children in the middle of the night.



This hurts more than railway lines that get blown up in the hinterland. This is an attack on an idea of India: an India which is warm-hearted, open-minded and walks the world with its head held high.

This feels like a watershed, a turning point. Where do we turn to? We could do worse than look to the character of Jamsetji Tata himself.

Let the Taj be refurbished. Let it be an even greater, even more vibrant, even more humane place than it's been for a hundred years. May the spirit behind the Taj live on forever. Jai Hind.

The Master of Disguise

This blog has a personality. It is a Doer. This blog is like a cool chick wearing shorts and two pony-tails, bouncing a ball. Doers are:

"The active and playful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.

The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time. "

This verdict was delivered by a web site which analyzes blogs and maps them to a psychological (MBTI) profile. Moonballs from Planet Earth is an ESTP blog: Extraverted Sensing Thinking Perceptive.

This is not what I am like in real life. My preferred operating mode, as measured on most MBTI instruments, is INTJ: Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Judgmental. INTJs are like the geeky guys who wear glasses and struggle to get dates:

"The long-range thinking and individualistic type. They are especially good at looking at almost anything and figuring out a way of improving it - often with a highly creative and imaginative touch. They are intellectually curious and daring, but might be physically hesitant to try new things.

They enjoy theoretical work that allows them to use their strong minds and bold creativity. Since they tend to be so abstract and theoretical in their communication they often have a problem communicating their visions to other people and need to learn patience and use concrete examples. Since they are extremely good at concentrating they often have no trouble working alone. "

What's going on here?

One possibility is that the blog analysis tool is pure bunkum; a very real possibility.

Another interesting but speculative possibility is that this reflects the fact that I'm an amateur blogger.

I picked up the blog analysis tool from Greg Mankiw's blog. Mankiw is a professional economist. He is also an INTJ, an unsurprising personality type for a professional economist. His blog is linked to his work as an economist; it started as a teaching aid for his introductory economics class at Harvard. It's not surprising that his professional persona is reflected in his blog.

I am a professional analyst, a credit policy wonk. My time at work is spent wrestling with financial data, regression models and dodgy forecasts. I am blessed: I quite enjoy my job, it fits my INTJ preferences. The company I work for is dominated by NT personalities. But...the point of my blog is to get at stuff my mind wants to play with, but is not related to my work.

Maybe it's natural for extra-curricular activities to be coloured by people's shadow personality.

The Tourons of Planet Bollywood

Swiss Nuggets: Observations on Switzerland following a long-weekend visit

Touron is a great new word, created by smooshing together tourist and moron. It is often used to describe lads consuming lager and chicken-tikka pizza on the Costa del Sol. This word may have found a wonderful growth market in describing Indian tourists in Switzerland.

India is now one of Switzerland’s fastest growing tourist markets, thanks to Dilwale Dulhania le Jayenge. And Indians are now visible everywhere.

In terms of numbers, about 250,000 Indian tourists visit Switzerland every year. That is still only about 1.5% of the market, maybe 5% once business travellers and sports-tourists are taken out of the denominator. But Indians are more conspicuous than the numbers suggest. Maybe it’s the brides on group honeymoons, still wearing their mehendi and wedding jewellery. Maybe it’s the garment exporter, travelling with his extended family, raising his voice on a business call to compensate for weak cell phone reception in the Alps. Maybe its because I’m Indian and I tend to observe people and behaviours I’m already familiar with.

Whichever way, the Swiss tourist industry is warmly embracing this growth market. The Swiss are now promoting Bollywood movies that are set in Switzerland, where not just the dream song-and-dance sequence is shot in Switzerland. And Jungfraujoch, the train station at the top of Europe, the climax of a trip into the Alps, now features a Restaurant Bollywood.

Medieval Living?

Swiss Nuggets: Observations on Switzerland following a long-weekend visit



Bern’s town center, the street plan and the architecture, have been unchanged for five hundred years. It is a UNESCO world heritage site. I was half expecting a twee little museum piece; a backdrop for touristy snapshots, that has been all but abandoned by the locals.

I was surprised and delighted to find a city center throbbing with local life, with grocers, designer boutiques, discount shoe stores and newsagents all spilling out from a very well maintained fifteenth century layout, a bit like a first-world version of Chandni Chowk in Delhi or Crawford Market in Bombay.

City scapes

My strongest childhood stereotype of Switerland is from Asterix, where the Swiss diligently clean up behind the Roman orgies, where they decide to carry Obelix home after he drinks too much and passes out in the snow because he looks "messy" just lying there.




Going off stereotype, I was expecting Swiss city-scapes to be as pristine and pretty as the pictures on chocolate boxes. While some pristine and pretty cityscapes do exist, like the tourist friendly city center in Lucerne, there is also plenty of urban grit.

The graffiti along the train lines in Geneva and the tram lines in Bern can compete with London, Chicago or Bombay. There are practical but uninspired suburbs ringing the beautifully preserved city centres. There are also ugly American style strip malls sprouting neon advertising signs are being planted in chocolate box country side, despite some architects protesting.

Reality bites..even in Switzerland.

The Lions of Lanka

Swiss Nuggets: Observations about Switzerland following a long-weekend visit

The most visible minority in Switzerland are Sri Lankan Tamil refugees.

They include Giritharan Thiagarajan, the head chef at Vatter, an excellent vegetarian restaurant in Bern, who was delighted to meet fellow Tamils visiting his restaurant.

Wikipedia thinks 40,000 Tamils live in Switzerland. Giritharan thinks the number is 80,000…and he might be right. To put that in perspective, the sovereign nation of Liechtenstein, Switzerland’s eastern neighbour, is home to about 34,000 souls.

The Lions of Lucerne

Swiss Nuggets: Observations about Switzerland following a long-weekend visit

The cuckoo clock piece is untrue, so is the myth of brotherly love.

If anything, the Swiss myth of nationhood is martial: Switzerland is the only country in Western Europe that still has universal conscription. Hence the reputation for being excellent mercenaries, hence the Swiss Guards around the Pope resplendent in Michelangelo’s glorious metrosexual colours, hence the Swiss Army knives.

Hence the magnificient Lion of Lucerne, to remember the 700 Swiss Guards who fought to the last man against a bloodthirsty mob at Tuileries in 1792 while Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette escaped from the palace.




My wife and I were travelling with our six and three year old daughters. We chose not to inflict this story of futile heroism and cynical royalty on the kids, and decided the visit the Verkehrshaus, the Swiss transportation museum, instead.

Cuckoo

Swiss Nuggets: Observations about Switzerland following a long-weekend visit

In Italy under the Borgias they had warfare, terror and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.

Since I had a great time in Switzerland, I must come to my gracious host's defence. The famous words quoted above are not true. The cuckoo clock was invented in Bavaria, in southern Germany.

Amateurs talk strategy. Real generals talk logistics

Here's the Economist on the last lap of the Obama-McCain campaign in Pennsylvania, a vital swing state.

...Obama has 81 field offices across the state, many in places where Democrats have never competed before, compared with Mr McCain’s three dozen...

...The McCain office only had a couple of people working the phones when The Economist visited. The young man who was in charge had no idea that Mr McCain was in the state that day. The Obama office, by contrast, was crammed to the brim and hyper-organised. There were plenty of older people sporting “Hillary sent me” badges as well as younger Obamaphiles. The walls were covered with charts telling people where they had to be and when. After dark, it was still buzzing with volunteers. The McCain office was closed...

There's the glimmer of an interesting theory here: winning elections is not about policy, performances, or even mud-slinging. All that is just noise that keeps the commentariat busy. The real business of winning elections is about logistics, keeping the show rolling on the ground. Politics is about Sales, not Marketing.

This may also be the real reason why the Congress, India's Grand Old Party, is now a shambles. It's not the failure of Nehruvian socialism or any such grand theory. It's probably about the about the slow tactical melting away of the grass-roots organization, of the Congressman in each village, of the great sales organization that was built up during the freedom struggle.

The Many Meanings of Moonballs

The word moonball has taken on an important new meaning: a type of squash serve.

This serve is played from the right-hander's forehand court, high and quite softly against the front wall (1). The balls descends steeply into the deep backhand corner (2), too high to comfortably play a backhand volley. It hits the back wall (3) and dies too quickly for a backhand drive (4). It's very effective, especially against average players like this blogger.

Click here for a demo of this serve on youtube, where it is unimaginatively described as a "lob serve".

Seeing the ball like a football

Cricket fans know that a batsman who has spent a lot of time at the crease is hard to dismiss, because he is “seeing the ball like a football”. A batsman who is new to the crease is always easier to dismiss. He struggles to sight the ball.

This is true regardless of the quality of the light. A batsman who is in can bat on comfortably through the gathering caliginosity, while a new man at the crease struggles to sight the ball even in glorious sunshine. This has always been true, something cricketers accept as natural.

The mechanism that makes this natural just became apparent me, from this article by Atul Gawande.

Gawande’s piece is about an emerging scientific understanding about the nature of perception. The new realization: perception is mostly memory. The inputs coming in from the senses are thin/ low fidelity/ low resolution/ highly pixellated compared to the richness with which the brain experiences the sensory input. The mind fills in the blanks.

Our centuries long assumption has been that the sensory data we receive from our eyes, ears, nose, fingers and so on contain all the information we need for perception…Yet, as scientists set about analyzing the sensory signals, they found them to be radically impoverished…The mind fills in most of the picture...Richard Gregory, a British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety percent memory and less than ten percent sensory nerve signals…

Gawande’s article talks a lot about phantom limbs, and intense itches felt on injured tissues which have no nerve endings. These extreme examples are useful because they make a powerful argument; perception of a phantom limb can’t be determined by objective sensory experience, because there is no sensory experience. But to me, this theory is more interesting because of the light it sheds on everyday experiences.

A batsman who is in is literally seeing the ball better than a batsman who has just come to the wicket. His memory has more readily accessible images of the moving ball. He is therefore better able to make meaning of the sketchy data that his eyes pick up.

This is the reason it is hard to listen to an unfamiliar genre of music. The mind simply doesn’t have enough stuff in memory to fill in the blanks and enrich the music.

This is the reason it is hard to drive on unfamiliar roads. The driver literally sees less of the road. The eyes pick up the same volume of information as on a familiar road. But the mind doesn’t have a stock of memories with which to enrich the image.

This is the reason I enjoy watching cricket on TV more than I enjoy watching football. My mind has a bigger bank of cricket memories to draw on, simply because I have watched more cricket over the years.

There is an elaborate academic literature on how Caucasian-Americans are not very good at recognizing Blacks, and to a slightly lesser extent, how Blacks are not very good at recognizing whites. This has sometimes been interpreted as racism, but sheer lack of familiarity seems a simpler and less incendiary explanation. Interestingly, the effects are smaller in racially integrated schools and among children who live in integrated neighbourhoods.

This might also be the reason for the cognitive biases that Greg Pye's blog (and Kahneman and Taversky), keep talking about. The confirmatory bias happens because people, literally, don’t see evidence which goes against their prior beliefs without making a pretty substantial effort.

Gunther, Mother Cricket and Ice Bath Buddies

It's quite rare for a cricket fan like me, who has been following the game avidly since childhood with an avidity a clinical psychotherapist might worry about, to come across interestingly unfamiliar cricketing words or concepts. This English summer I encountered three. Let's celebrate these three concepts before the hopefully-not-too-emotionally-wrenching India-Australia test series gets underway.

Gunther: "Gunther is a guy who lives in the mountains and doesn't get enough oxygen to the brain and that makes him crazy. As soon as I get thrown the ball, its like a little switch goes in my head. Gunther takes over."

This is Springbok speedster Andre Nel on what happens when he is bowling. Compare that to a typical quote from an English quickie like Ryan Sidebottom, "Hopefully, I'll get the ball in the right areas." Or Mohammad Azharuddin's immortal words, "Well, the boys played very well."

In this age of anodyne political correctness, god bless Gunther.

Mother cricket: "It's amazing. There's a lady up there called Mother Cricket, who doesn't sleep...".

This is South African coach Mickey Arthur, giving credit where it is due, when Michael Vaughan was publicly humiliated for claiming a bump-catch after being morally indignant about AB de Villiers claiming a similar catch that same morning. Was Mother Cricket also behind Jimmy Andersen getting hit on the helmet by Dale Steyn after knocking out Daniel Flynn's tooth?

Cricket does lend itself well to the notion of karma. Maybe Mother Cricket is the sociological reason why cricket is so big in the sub-continent.

Ice bath buddy: Cricket-warriors were introduced on Sky Sports with a little box of fun-facts during the English Twenty20 tournament. This is a marketing tactic I like: any sport is a lot more fun if the viewer knows the player's back-stories. Sky Sport's fun-facts included favourite TV Show (mostly Top Gear), favourite music group, and most intriguingly, ice bath buddy.

Apparently, Duncan Fletcher insisted that all England fast bowlers immerse themselves in an ice-bath straight after stumps, to prevent injury. County dressing rooms were not designed with these sophisticated medical practices in mind. So fast bowlers, like Harmy and Hoggy, had to share ice-baths. The practice has endured into Peter Moore's reign. And so "ice bath buddy" is now county circuit lingo for best friend.

Some of the old guard are mocking this trend. David Lloyd, the former England coach and now Sky Sports commentator, would rather share an ice bath with Beyonce than some "hairy bloke".

Not sure if planting the mental image Ravi Bopara and Samit Patel, or for that matter, David Lloyd and Beyonce, frolicking together in tubs full of ice makes the game more or less appealing. Time will tell.

Morning Raga

Worth the watch, mainly because the music is so much fun.

Here's how I hope this film was made:

A film maker was listening to Sudha Raghunathan singing Thaiye Yashoda. She was moved, moved to tears imagining the love of Yashoda - the foster mother who loved Krishna and Balarama as her own sons. She felt sad that Yashoda is not celebrated in popular culture. Bollywood is saturated with Nirupa Roy like mother characters, who draw on the Jungian archetype of Kunti. But where are the characters like Yashoda? Or Radha - the charioteer's wife who loved Karna as her own son?

So the filmmaker decided to set things right. Despite not having much money, she decided to make a film that showcases both the spirit of Yashoda and Sudha Raghunathan's rendition of Thaiye Yashoda, and to give both a contemporary multi-cultural flavour. And so she made Morning Raga.

If that's how the film was conceived, it worked. Because the last scene, the rock concert in a Deccan fortress with a pulsating Carnatic fusion performance of Thaiye Yashoda, it was cathartic. It washed away 90 minutes of grumbling about amphigory art-house films.

By the way, or, bye the bye, do not watch this scene for the first time on Youtube. I considered posting a link and decided against it. The sense of catharsis, and the emotional resonance of Thaiye Yashoda are greater for having sat through the whole film.

Before the grumbles, what else worked?

Location. Or was it Rajiv Menon's camera work? Almost every location was a visual treat...the traditional south Indian home, the temple, the rock fortress where the concert was held, the bridge.

More music. Pibare Ramarasam was sung beautifully by Kalyani Menon, Rajiv Menon's mother. The reflective, introspective way it was sung made more sense in the context of the movie. The beat version of Mahaganapathim was also fun.

Associations. The film brought back memories of Shankarabharanam and Shubha Mudgal's Ab ke Sawan, both favourites.

Shabana Azmi and Nasser were excellent, as usual.

And the newcomer Sanjay Swaroop was brilliant as a restaurant owner. He asks a searching and insightful question about whether Indian youngsters who want to be rockers think they white, or black? In the interests of full disclosure, I would like to declare that I am generally sympathetic to Sanjay Swaroop. His father, Lakshman Swaroop, is a dashing sportsman who played cricket and hockey for the Madras Cricket Club, and was once featured in a print advert for Enfield Bullet motorcycles.

And the grumbles?

The script and acting were cringe-worthy.

Prakash Rao played Abhinay, the central character, Krishna to Shabana Azmi's Yashoda. He reminded me of the cricketer Yuvraj Singh. The only emotion he communicated was angry, disgruntled arrogance. Though his task wasn't made any easier by the scripting, like "I don't want to write jingles for bubble gum. I want to make music that is remembered for five hundred years. Like the Charminar."

Other cringe-worthy elements included a psychedelic-shirted, wild-haired drummer called Bajali. Alias Bals. Not Balls, just Bals. A guitar player who is stares in fascination at women's bottoms and (literally) gets picked up off the street. A villager who talks to his cow, Annapurna. A south-Bombay-ish socialite who scandalizes the villager by leaning on his arm. Pleeze. A stylish script is the one thing a budget film can afford.

But don't walk out on the film even when the cringes start to hurt. Redemption is around the corner. The cringes make the cleansing release of Thaiye Yashoda that much more welcome.

The Point of County Cricket

Here is Christopher Martin-Jenkins on the eve of a gripping finale to the county cricket season:

...county cricket... fulfil its primary function, the production of a sufficient supply of tough England cricketers for the rigours of the international circuit...

What?

Surely the point of playing county cricket is to win the county championship. At least 90% of the England qualified players competing for the championship have no real chance of playing for England. If nobody cares about winning the championship, not even CMJ, its not surprising that the county scene has "greater issues".

What really got me was that this was not CMJ's main point. It was a point made in the passing. In CMJ's mind, county cricket being nothing more than a talent screening service for international cricket is an unremarkable truism.

Unfortunately, what CMJ thinks is usually a good reflection of what the ECB establishment thinks. They seem to have learnt the wrong lesson from the BCCI's success and concluded that the point of cricket is to promote national pride through international success.

The point of the English Premiership is not to produce England internationals. The point of the ATP Tour is not to produce Davis Cup heroes. The point of the IPL is not to produce Indian internationals. These contests are worthwhile as ends in themselves. Players push themselves to the limit because they care about winning. That intensity of effort, that edge, is what produces the drama which brings in the fans. National flags don't need to be flying for sport to fascinate.

And what terrible timing to be damning the county game with faint praise.

I'm thoroughly enjoying the finale to this season's championships. Notts, the team I support, are in the race. Notts' victory march has just been checked by Imran Tahir, an exciting young leggie from Natal. I'm clicking into Cricinfo between meetings to check the latest scores on Notts v. Hampshire, Somerset v. Lancashire and Durham v Kent. Sky Sports are covering the Notts game live. Exactly what the guys responsible for marketing county cricket should have been praying for.

Anybody want to swap Mark Mascarenhas for CMJ?

Fubsies skirring into the caliginosity

Harper Collins is running a campaign to save rarely used words from oblivion. Heard about it on on Radio 4. They asking influential cultural figures - humorists, poets, bloggers :) - to use these rare words so Harper Collings have a basis for including them in the next edition of the dictionary. Some of the endangered words, and their definitions on the Merriam Webster (since Harper Collins don't have a free online edition): - skirr: to leave hastily. Webster thinks the etymology may be an alteration of scour. The Radio 4 show suggested onomatopoeia, the sound a bird makes when beating its wings in flight, which sounds more plausible - fubsy: chubby and somewhat squat. I can't believe this beauty actually fell out of usage - Caliginosity: dimness or darkness. Has already vanished from the Webster's, so the link is to the free Wikipedia style dictionary. Radio 4 thinks caliginosity deserves to die. But to me, it evokes a sense of the eerie, an image of a hooded candle flickering in the nave of an enormous cathedral casting shadows into the vast stillness, that mere darkness does not convey. Gloaming feels closer to the mark Harper Collins claim that this exercise is needed because they need to drop words from the dictionary. They need to make room for terms like equity injection and credit crunch by dropping fubsy and skirr. I smell bullshit. Surely, in today's world, the real authoritative version of any dictionary is the soft copy, which is not constrained by size. A physical print edition can be cut to any arbitrary number of words. This seems to be an effort to raise the public profile of rare words. A worthy and noble effort in any circumstances. Lets just drop the bs.

Schism in the Soul?

Many elites in the United States are disavowing what is best in our culture and imitating what is worst. Some are trying to reinvoke old norms and reverse the process, but most are succumbing to "proletarianization." This rift is similar to ones experienced historically by disintegrating civilizations.

These words were written by Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute in 2001. Charles Murray is both an arch-conservative and a genuine intellectual. Murray is invoking Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History, a chapter beautifully titled Schism in the Soul.

In a disintegrating civilization, the creative minority has degenerated into elites that are no longer confident, no longer setting the example. Among other reactions are a "lapse into truancy" (a rejection, in effect, of the obligations of citizenship) and a "surrender to a sense of promiscuity" (vulgarizations of manners, the arts, and language) that "are apt to appear first in the ranks of the proletariat and to spread from there to the ranks of the dominant minority, which usually succumbs to the sickness of 'proletarianization.'"

Murray was writing in the aftermath of the Clintonian scandals, when the meaning of "surrender to promiscuity" was obvious.

Eight years later, what does this election tell us about the spirit of America, and more generally of of Western Civilization? Is the schism in America's soul going to heal? Or widen?

In Obama and Palin, both parties have nominated candidates from outside the traditional elite, candidates from what Toynbee would have called the internal proletariat. Is the internal proletariat aspiring to be a part of what is best about America? Toynbee would consider this a sign of a healthy growing civilization.

Or is the internal proletariat rejecting the values of the American elite, invoking a mythic "archaist" indentity, and hastening the disintegration of a great civilization? Time will tell. Either way, for an observer like me, this is politics at its most compelling.

My Blueberry Nights and the Theory of Script Writing

All great stories are built around one essential element: somebody wants something really badly, and has difficulty getting it.

Frodo Baggins really wants to destroy the ring. Dorothy really wants to go home to Kansas. Jai and Veeru really want to get Gabbar Singh. Bhuvan, in Lagaan, really wants to beat the British. Hamlet really wants to avenge his father's death. Romeo really wants Juliet. There is no story if Romeo and Juliet are just sort of fond of each other. Or if the Montagues and Capulets are willing to let bygones be bygones.

My Blueberry Nights fails because it ignores this basic rule.

Its about a charming, pretty and kind girl (Norah Jones) who is abandoned by her boyfriend. She leaves her apartment keys with a hunky guy who owns a cafe (Jude Law), sets off on a journey to nowhere specific, randomly runs into interesting people on the way, and returns to New York to fall into the arms of the hunky guy who runs the cafe. At no stage is the desire powerful enough, or the obstacle to attaining that desire steep enough, for the viewer to care about what happens next.

The real tragedy is that so much good work is wasted because of this lack of purpose. There is a beautifully crafted sub-plot about an alcoholic cop. Natalie Portman is electric in a bit role as a roving gambler. The sound track is moody and hypnotic. The photography is completely stunning. Not enough; because film isn't about visual technique. It's about story-telling.

Michael Mukherjee, Ayman al Zawahiri and a liberal education

Watched and enjoyed the Mani Ratnam film Yuva recently. This got me thinking about social change, revolution, terror and education...a train of thought led to me being an even more ardent fan the American ideal of a broad, liberal university education. Like, for example, the core College curriculum at the University of Chicago, which my cousin Shakti just finished. Probably not the point Mani Ratnam wanted to make. But then, that is why minds have windmills.

Yuva features Abhishek Bachchan as Lallan Singh: a violent underworld hit-man with a thread of gold running through his heart. Lallan Singh works for powerful establishment politicians. Ajay Devgan features as Michael Mukherjee: an idealistic middle-class student of Physics at Presidency College, Calcutta. Michael has many friends and a very gorgeous girlfriend who teaches French. He turns down a scholarship offer from MIT, takes on the violence of Lallan Singh and his wicked, venal political masters, and promises to change the system by standing for election as Mr Clean. He duly wins the election. The movie ends with Michael and friends striding confidently into the Bengal assembly. The implied feel-good conclusion is that Michael's idealism will reform the system.

What started me on the train of of thought was that I found Michael Mukherjee's idealism more scary than Lallan Singh's violence. Michael was sure. He was never in doubt. He never paused to re-consider. He never changed his mind. He couldn't have. Michael's charisma stems from his conviction, in his own personal integrity and in the completeness of his ideas. And, while Ajay Devgan isn't a gifted actor, yet he played Michael perfectly, instinctively. I know real people like Michael, people who derive their sense of self from ideological conviction.

People who share Michael's conviction are often revolutionaries. Could be the Communist Revolution, the Islamist Revolution, the Environmental Revolution, the Freedom Movement, racist supremacists, religious evangelists of any hue…you get the picture. What Michael Mukherjee and all these people share is a world view that is complete. When this world view is adopted, the mind comes to rest. The psyche now has the basis for action. The action is usually both bloody and futile, because the real world is never that simple.

Was it just chance that Michael Mukherjee was a student of physics?

A theory I heard from Professor Ahmet Evin suggests not. Professor Evin was lamenting the (relative) failure of modern Turkey to create a vital civil society. He attributed this to the fact that the Turkish leadership, and therefore all of Turkey, prizes a technical education above a liberal one. The Engineer’s Mind tends to see society as a problem to be solved with a simple, specific and well-designed intervention. Not as an amorphous mass of humanity which needs to be inspired, jollied and cajoled towards another amorphous vision of beauty, virtue and justice (or words to that effect).

While this has to be unfair to my many well-read engineer friends, this theory really resonated with me, as an Indian. My friends from China and Mexico tell me the same narrowness of vision is true of their countries as well.

The prevalence of a technical education among the Al Queda top brass is fascinating. Osama bin Laden is a civil engineer, apparently a pretty good one. Ayman al Zawahiri is a medical doctor. His fellow Al Queda ideologue, Dr. Fadl, is also a medical doctor. Mohamed Atta is an architect who did a Masters degree in Urban Planning at Hamburg University. The pattern is clearly not perfect: Anton Balasingham, the LTTE’s ideologue, had apparently read up on the Vedanta and Buddhism. But there still seems to be a pattern here.

The problem could only be the dog that did not bark. A solid base of engineering knowledge could hardly be a bad thing, in any circumstances. The problem might be that these smart, sensitive, idealistic young people, who were going to be influential in their societies anyway, had no exposure to history, politics or law. They knew nothing of the genius of the Medici family in making the Renaissance possible in tiny, vulnerable medieval Florence. They knew nothing of C. Rajagopalachari’s dissenting views on Indian socialism, and on organizing independent India into language based states. They never wrestled with the differing world views of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, or with Friedrich Hayek's notion of The Fatal Conceit, the conceit that societies can be engineered.

Maybe, in that half light between education and ignorance, it is easy to imagine that building one mega-dam, or embracing the one true faith, or ridding the world of one hated oppressor, or anointing one master race, or detonating that one perfect suicide bomb, is the key to liberation.

In that case, the point of an education should surely be to dispel that half-light. Education, as opposed to technical training, should be about exposing plastic minds to this dazzling diversity of thought, none of which are complete or correct.

This, unfortunately, is a concept of education alien to Indian Universities. In India, understandable middle class anxiety frames education as a means to earn a decent living. I'm fairly close to my company's graduate hiring program at British Universities. I don't often run into this ideal in Britain either, where 18 year olds are encouraged to make definitive choices between chemical engineering, medicine or architecture. Though the PPE program at Oxford points in this direction. This ideal seems to be best developed in America, where a liberal university education often precedes technical specialization, therefore cultivating humanity.

Why is this post in English? Part II

My earlier post talked about English as the world's de facto lingua franca.

Is this simply because America followed Britain as the world's dominant imperial/ economic power, and by some quirk of history both happened to be English speaking? Or does this connecting power come from something intrinsic to the English language?

How to find out? Ideally, I would run a test vs. control version of history.

The test version would feature a Swahili speaking super power. The control version would feature an English speaking super power. Both super powers would rise, shine, decline and die. 250 years after the death of the empires, a statistician would measure the usage rates of both English and Swahili in the former Imperial domains/ spheres of influence and perform a test of proportions to determine if English is stickier than Swahili.

Looking around at the real world, there probably are a number of natural experiments that come interestingly close to this design.

Do Kazakhs and Estonians, once united within the mighty USSR, speak to each other in Russian or in English? And how will they speak to each other a hundred years from now? My money is on English. Or Mandarin.

How sticky was Spanish in the old American colonies? Pretty darn sticky. Did the newly independent Latin American nations try to embrace their native American-Indian languages? Were the native American languages sub-scale? Was there really a viable alternative to Spanish?

Did Urdu, the great language of the Mughal courts, survive the decline of the Mughals? Just about survived in Lucknow and Hyderabad. Did not thrive. I'm not sure if the Punjabi version spoken in modern Pakistan would be recognized as Urdu by the Lucknow cognoscenti.

How sticky was Turkish in the former Ottoman Empire? This empire extended from Hungary, through what is now called Iraq, to the Persian border. As far as I know (I don't know much about the Middle East) this swath speaks Arabic, the language of the Koran.

Did Latin survive the fall of the Roman Empire? Yes, thanks to the Catholic church. Will Latin survive the Second Vatican Council? Maybe, thanks to Pope Benedict XVI. Sanskrit survived long after classical Hindu India because of a similarly tenacious priesthood. Hebrew has done rather well in modern Israel. There is a pattern here.

Go back to the randomized test and check if either empire embedded language within a religion. The more sticky language was probably the one which was embedded in a religion.

Is modern English woven into a religion? Yes. Its called Hollywood. Maybe English will continue to thrive long after the USA ceases to be the world's only super power because the world continues to worship at the temple of Brad, Angelina and their spiritual heirs.

Adam Smith and the Mystery of Mushie

I finally discovered why Mushtaq Ahmed, the Pakistani leg spinner, was so much more successful bowling for Sussex than any other team. Angus Fraser writes:

"When Sussex signed him for the 2003 season not even the club expected him to have such an impact. His initial deal was on a modest basic salary with huge bonuses for taking wickets. The contract worked. Mushtaq claimed five 10-wicket hauls to become the first bowler in five years to take 100 county championship wickets in a season, and Sussex's 164-year wait for the county championship ended."

The power of incentives. Angus goes on:

"It is a mystery why such a fine bowler failed to have similar success in Test cricket."

Was the Pakistan Cricket Board enlightened enough to offer Mushtaq steeply sloped incentives linked to an objective measure of performance? No. It is stunningly unsurprising that Mushtaq bowled with more heart for Sussex than for Pakistan.

A more serious point: the incentives need to matter at a visceral level. At a cognitive level, every player always wants to win. The bones don't always agree. South Africa are playing like their bones packed up and went home home after the Edgbaston test.