Is it principled to be principled?

"Nobody ever did anything very foolish except from some strong principle". I chanced upon this quote a couple of months ago, and it has stayed in my mind ever since. It is an old quote, by the 2nd Viscount Melbourne, the young Queen Victoria's political mentor, but it has stayed in mind because it feels contemporary, and is less cynical than it sounds.

Good principles - like, for instance, that all human beings are created equal - tend to be very abstract. It is never obvious how these abstract principles translate into programs of specific action, into doing. However, it is always tempting to invoke these principles to build support for a program of action.

The problem with linking an action plan closely with its animating principle is that it makes it harder to abandon the action plan, which is a pity, because only certainty with any action plan is that it will be made to look silly by "black swans", by real-world conditions that the plan did not, and could not have, known about. The bigger the agenda, the more quickly the black swans will strike.

A program of action which is tightly linked to a cherished principle usually means a program of action that isn't adaptive enough. von Moltke the elder was pointing in the same direction when he said "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy" 

"Let us take what the terrain gives"

"Follow your dream" is advice I have frequently received. This is also advice I have given multiple times. However, in most circumstances, this advice is worse than useless. I need to make choices about my career as a business executive in the here and now. Reminding myself of my childhood dream, to open the batting for the Indian cricket team, doesn't in any way help me make better life choices.

I discussed this in an earlier blog post, titled "Follow your dream, not". More recently, I came across the words "let us take what the terrain gives", which make the same point more elegantly, more positively.

These words were spoken by Daniel Kahneman back in 1996, at a graveside eulogy for his lifelong research partner Amos Tversky. Apparently, "let us take what the terrain gives" was the maxim Amos Tversky lived by. Kahneman went on to win the Nobel prize in 2002, his partner Tversky tragically missed out because he died so young. "Let us take what the terrain gives" is clearly not a case for embracing mediocrity, but it does recognize that "the other side of freedom is the ability to find joy in what one does".

BTW...I loved these pictures of Tversky on holiday in Switzerland in 1972...

Socrates. On beauty and victory

“Beauty comes first. Victory is secondary. What matters is joy.”

 These are the last words in Football Philosophy, a book by the Brazilian legend Socrates. I was doubly bereft as I read these words. First, because I read them in this obituary for Socrates, who died prematurely aged just 57. Second, because the great Brazilian disagrees with me.

Socrates seems to be saying that to abandon beauty for the sake of mere victory would be sacrilege. Yet, I posted earlier this year about the joy of "winning ugly". Where did I go wrong? At the time, I was writing about India winning at cricket during the World Cup. Was I sliding ingloriously into patriotism, that last refuge of scoundrels?

I could try to rebut the argument. I could wade into how players are characters in a larger drama, whose role is to do what it takes to win, not to step out of character seeking elusive beauty. But it somehow feels wrong, un-beautiful, to debate with someone who scored a goal like this in a World Cup:

 

 Adieu Socrates. Long may your tribe of thoughtful sportsmen thrive.

Kolaveri Di and the Eurovision Song Contest

Kolaveri Di has lived out fourteen out of its fifteen minutes of fame. So, one final thought to occupy that last minute: Kolaveri Di has what it takes to win the Eurovision song contest.

This thought comes straight from Only Mr. God Knows Why, an article by Anthony Lane (which, refreshingly, is still visible to the public on the New Yorker website). Anthony Lane's thesis is that a Eurovision contestant's main problem is reach out across a continent which doesn't know your language or culture. Consider these extracts:

“Europe has a problem...if you don’t speak English, you’re immediately at a disadvantage. The Greek guys? Good song, but it’s in Greek. Will they play that on the radio in France?"

...of the songs that have reached the finals over the years, two hundred and sixty-three have been in English, the lingua franca of pop. French, with a hundred and fifty, is the only other language in triple figures; the rest lag far behind...

On the one hand, the contest is an obvious chance for European nations, especially the less prominent ones, to flaunt their wares by singing in their native tongue. On the other hand, when you sing in English, you may be blasting through the language barrier to reach a wider audience, but are you not abasing yourself before the Anglo-American cultural hegemony...

 ...there are three well-established methods for avoiding it.

One is to be France, whose performers, as you would hope, grind away in French, year after year, repelling all intruders, giving only the barest hint that other languages, let alone other civilizations, even exist...

The second method is to be Ireland, the nation that has won the contest more often than any other. Seven times it has struck gold, and no wonder; if you can sing in English without actually being English—all the technical advantages without the shameful imperialist baggage—you’re halfway to the podium already.

The third method, which is by far the most popular, and which has brought mirthful pleasure to millions on an annual basis, is to sing in Eurovision English: an exquisite tongue, spoken nowhere else, which raises the poetry of heartfelt but absolute nonsense to a level of which Lewis Carroll could only have dreamed. The Swedes are predictably fluent in this (“Your breasts are like swallows a-nesting,” they sang in 1973), and the Finns, too, should be hailed as early masters, with their faintly troubling back-to-back efforts from the mid-seventies, “Old Man Fiddle” and “Pump-pump,”

 ...hence such gems as Austria’s “Boom Boom Boomerang,” from 1977 (not to be confused with Denmark’s “Boom Boom,” of the following year), Portugal’s “Bem-bom,” from 1982, and Sweden’s “Diggi-loo Diggi-ley,” which won in 1984. The next year’s contenders, spurred by such bravado, responded with “Magic, Oh Magic” (Italy) and “Piano Piano” (Switzerland). Not that the host nation relinquished the crown without a fight, as anyone who watched Kikki Danielsson can attest. Her song was called “Bra Vibrationer.” It was, regrettably, in Swedish.

Kolaveri Di fits this third formula perfectly. One doesn't need to really know either Tamil or English to get into the spirit of Kolaveri Di. "Distance-u la moon-u moon-u, moon-u colour-u white-u", is right up there with anything the Swedes, Finns or Portuguese can create. Please note: it is entirely conceivable that India will participate in the Eurovision song contest one day, last year's winner was Azerbaijan.

On an aside, maybe the Punjabization of India I posted about last week is because Punjabi is the most onamatopoeic of Indian languages. I don't know Punjabi, yet, I have no problem understanding "Chak de India" or "Tootak tootak tootiyan hey jamaalon". The language used by Premchand, Tagore, Bharatiyar, or for that matter, Shakespeare, is necessarily for narrower audiences.

Kolaveri Di and the Punjabization of India

Once upon a time, grown women in Madras wore sarees. No longer. Now, the default outfit is a salwar kameez, especially among younger women. The saree is gradually becoming formal wear, for special occasions. One of my aunts thinks this is because of the coarsening of Tamil culture – the saree is too revealing for today’s nasty world, women feel safer in the more fully covered-up salwar kameez – and there surely is some truth in her viewpoint. But the more popular interpretation is that this is a part of a wider cultural phenomenon: the Punjabization of India.

Vir Sanghvi wrote this nice piece about the Punjabization process. The passage which stuck in my mind was:

I went to shoot at a small hotel in the Wayanad region of Kerala. I had been looking forward to some good Kerala food. Instead, the buffet was full of black dal, butter chicken, paneer and seekh kebabs. I remonstrated with the manager. He was helpless, he said. This was what his largely south Indian guests wanted to eat when they were on vacation.

To put this nationwide Punjabi influence into perspective, the distance between Kerala and Punjab is about 1500 miles, which is the distance between London and Moscow. Arguably, the cultural differences within that span are even greater in India than in Europe.

The Punjabi influence isn’t limited to South India. For instance, this Bengali blogger was upset at the wedding sequence in the movie Parineeta. The movie is based on a classic Bengali novel by Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay. However, in the Bollywood version, the bhadralok wedding acquires a Punjabi flavour, with garish costumes, dolaks and song and dance sequences. Parineeta’s leading man was Saif Ali Khan, a son of Bengal’s revered Tagore family, which can’t have helped ease this blogger’s angst.

However, there is a flip side to being offered butter chicken in Kerala: it is not so hard to find a good masala dosa in Chandigarh or Lucknow. Bombay-style bhel puri is consumed with gusto in Calcutta, plenty of rasagollas are enjoyed in Bombay. Indian identity is sometimes compared to a salad bowl. As the salad bowl gets shaken, cultural elements get juxtaposed in unexpected, surprising, random ways. It isn't one-way traffic. What goes around comes around.

This is precisely why "why this kolaveri di" is so refreshing. It is in Tamil, or at least, it is Tamil-flavoured. The video features a bunch of losers in lungis who can't dance. It isn't Punjabi. It doesn't sound Bollywood. Yet, Kolaveri di is going viral right across the country. India just bit into a chilled-out southie ingredient in that cultural salad bowl, and enjoyed it. So did Japan.

Kolaveri Di's refrain translates roughly to "why this murderous rage?", the tone implies that the rage is so not worth it. So the next time a fellow south Indian gets worked up about the cultural imperialism of the north Indians, I can respond in song with "Why this kolaveri kolaveri kolaveri... why this kolaveri di?"