"Hindostan is an Italy of Asiatic dimensions", Karl Marx, 1853

Karl Marx didn't have a whole lot to say about India, but this thought - likening India to an Asian Italy - is still fascinating. 

I know it from researching a debate way back when I was in college. It came back to mind this morning, reading Frank Bruni's oped piece in the New York times titled "Italy Breaks Your Heart". Bruni piece describes a country - ancient grandeur and contemporary political dysfunction, a "terrific" high-speed rail line and uncleared garbage on the streets of the capital city - that could be India, almost word for word.

My glass half full interpretation of that parallel: despite everything, Italy's per capita GDP at PPP is above $30,000. India is at about $3,900. Despite everything, things in India can still get a whole lot better.  

Hindostan, Asia's Italy

Italy, Europe's India

BTW...Karl Marx's article on India, in the New York Herald Tribune, is available here. Worth a read. Wish I'd had Google while researching debates back in college.

Roger Federer's Next Career: Doubles #1

Federer and Wawrinka. Olympic Gold medalists in 2008

Earlier this week, Roger Federer lost to Gael Monfils in the third round of the Shanghai Open, setting off a flurry of twittering among the Roger-ists. Many think their hero is better off retiring now, still close to the top, rather than fading away slowly and inelegantly.

On the flip side of the argument, Roger clearly still wants to show up and play, despite the indignities of his declining win:loss ratio. As a fan, surely this is something to be happy about. Surely Roger gives more to the world with a racquet in his hand than as another talking head on TV (like Boris Becker), or as an underwear manufacturing entrepreneur (like Bjorn Borg).   

Leander Paes, Grand Slam champion at 40

In that context, Moonballs from Planet Earth would like to propose a path that allows Roger, and fans like us, have it both ways: quit singles, focus on doubles.

Roger, 32, can realistically expect to play another decade of top flight doubles. Roger's classical style lends itself well to doubles. Leander Paes just demonstrated the longevity of doubles players by winning the US Open at 40.

Roger’s presence also gives a much needed injection of glamour to the doubles game. Doubles is the mainstay of amateur tennis. It is every bit as watchable as singles (refer Davis Cup), but still gets so little media coverage because it lacks narratives, lacks personalities. A bit of Federer stardust will help set that right. 

Moonwalking with Einstein. On why I blog, and take pictures

Just finished this excellent book called Moonwalking with Einstein, by Joshua Foer. Among its many pleasures was this passage, which feels close to the heart of what keeps me blogging, or taking photographs, for that matter:

Until relatively recently…people had only a few books – the Bible, an almanac, a devotional work or two – and they read them over and over again, usually aloud and in groups, so that a narrow range of traditional literature became deeply impressed on their consciousness.

But after the printing press appeared around 1440, things began gradually to change. In the first century after Gutenberg, it because possible for the first time, for people without great wealth to have a small library in their own homes...

Today, we read books “extensively”, without much in the way of sustained focus, and with rare exceptions, we read each book only once. We value quantity over quality of reading. We have no choice, if we want to keep up with the broader culture. Few of us make any serious effort to remember what we read…

We read and read and read, and forget and forget and forget. So why do we bother? Michael de Montaigne expressed the dilemma of extensive reading in the sixteenth century: “I leaf through books, I do not study them”, he wrote. “What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else’s. It is only the material from which my judgment has profited, and the thoughts and ideas with which it has become imbued; the author, the place, the words, and other circumstances, I immediately forget.”

He goes on to explain how “to compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory”, he adopted the habit of writing in the back of every book a short critical judgment, so as to have at least some general idea of that the tome was about and what he thought of it.

I know that works for me too. Synthesizing a thought on what a book, or movie, or trip was about, and writing it down, makes the experience itself richer, more memorable.

Joshua Foer

Gumption, not grit, is the key to success

This popular TED talk by ex-management-consultant Angela Lee Duckworth reports that the key to success, in academics and in life, is...ta dah...grit. Not talent, but fighting spirit and the resilience to battle on despite setbacks. This feels like a limp conclusion, because Ms Duckworth doesn't know where grit comes from.

Gumption might be a more useful word that grit in this context. It includes grit, and it also captures a little bit of where the grit comes from. Gumption includes enthusiasm, an amateur's passion, that fuels grit and therefore resilience. And gumption can be made.

I first met the word gumption during my first term in college, when I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance several times over (when I really should have been studying calculus). One of Pirsig's examples has stayed with me since: making your own motorcycle parts builds gumption. 

I'm still constantly on the lookout for that sort of gumption, for a quiet heartfelt enthusiasm that runs deeper than the "look at me, I've worked so hard, I'm so cool, I really deserve a raise/bonus/ promotion" rhythm that is so pervasive today. I like TED talks, but TED talks are actually a part of this "I'm so cool" culture.

BTW, I also found this picture of Pirsig and his son Chris on their legendary road trip across America...thanks guys.

Pirsig and his son Chris, motorbiking across America

The McKinsey Man plays tennis

Novak Djokovic in action

The New Yorker about Novak Djokovic:

"He was a McKinsey man, hitting his percentages. His approach was scientific. He brought to mind a diagram on the side of a workout machine, isolating the necessary muscles required for each stroke, and no more..."

So McKinsey Man is now a part of the English language. It means someone who puts in the precise amount of effort required to perform a specific task, and nothing more. Interesting. That is not quite how they describe it in books like The McKinsey Mind, though.

Should Mother Cricket have punished Michael Clarke for gallant/ stupid declaration?

Clarke and his team. Crushed? Or enough spirit left to learn?

I was in two minds yesterday, following the thrilling/ farcical denouement to the home Ashes. 

One part of me wanted to gods to reward Clarke for his gallant declaration. His spirit, his courage, his sense of adventure, kept the game alive right until the last ball. Most captains, at any level, would have settled for a draw. Surely that spirit deserves to be applauded, nurtured.

My less romantic side couldn't help thinking that Clarke's declaration wasn't gallant at all, it was merely stupid. Siddle, Harris, Faulkner and Lyon were never going to roll England over in one session of play. Even McGrath, Gillespie, Lee and Warne were highly unlikely to win this game. Clarke misjudged the situation. He was wildly over optimistic, and deserved to lose for his stupidity.

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that my unromantic side is right. 

Clarke grew up in an invincible Aussie team. Somewhere deep inside he still thinks the Aussies are invincible. In reality, they're just an average team, with a losing habit. Clarke needs to teach his team to be hard to beat, before he can teach them to win. He has to do for Australia what Nasser Hussain once did for England. Until he realizes that that is his job, he is the wrong man to captain Australia. 

Clarke and umpire Dharmasena

As it turned out, Mother Cricket is more of a romantic than I am. She let Clarke off lightly with just a scare, with a bunch of boos rather than a crushing defeat. Looks like Mother Cricket wants to give Clarke a little more rope, to give him a chance to learn the art of Winning Ugly.

Pierre: the secret behind Novak Djokovic's mental toughness

Superstar Pierre Djokovic with his people

Novak Djokovic reveals the secret behind his mental toughness:

"When I lost to Nadal in that marathon match in Paris, I was feeling down, very, very disappointed in that moment. But when I came back to the house where we were staying, Pierre greeted me by jumping up at me, so pleased to see me. He put a smile back on my face."

...While playing at Wimbledon, Djokovic will steal precious moments walking with his girlfriend and Pierre in the park. ‘People stop to look at Pierre first,’ says Djokovic. ‘Then they see a beautiful woman with him and finally they see this guy who usually has a tennis racket in his hand. Pierre is the superstar here!’

Understanding Yudhishtira through his Shadow

Mahabharata: the game of dice

How could Yudhishtira have done what he did? How could noble King Dharmaputra have gambled away his kingdom, his brothers, his wife? Was it really Yudhishtira playing that fateful game of dice? Or, was it Yudhishtira’s Shadow?

The Shadow is a Jungian archetype. Having a Shadow is the inevitable consequence of having a Self. When the Self stands up in the light it naturally and inevitably casts a shadow, a distorted image of itself, that contains the less acknowledged, less developed, more vulnerable aspects of the personality.

I like to think Yudhishtira’s Shadow had taken over, uninvited, when the dice didn’t roll for him during that game. Yudhishtira still was a very young man then. He hadn’t yet found or tamed his Shadow. Yudhishtira finally harnessed his Shadow when he went into exile and became Kanka, teaching King Virata to play dice, thus finding the equilibrium needed to be a great king.

Shadow-puppet of King Yudhishtira

How did Rama, the other great king of Indian mythology, find and harness his Shadow? Did he find and harness his Shadow?

Every Self has a Shadow. But Rama’s Shadow is invisible, we don't know anything about it. Rama is flawless. He was born the perfect man, the maryada purushottam. He didn’t have to struggle to grow into the role, which, paradoxically, makes me less comfortable with Rama; like there is a Shadow out there that might emerge at a crucial moment and do something spectacularly daft.

Shadow wars, or the tragedy of Monty vs Monty

Monty Panesar celebrates with his England team mates

Whatever happened to Monty?

For years he was international cricket’s quietest, sweetest, most diffident player. He has lived through highs and lows: bowling England to glorious victories, being dropped by his county. The fans loved him, and mocked him. Through all those years, he had nothing but polite, respectful words for everybody, including the opposition. He responded to everything life threw his way with hard work, piety, discipline and “putting the ball in the right areas”.

And now? He is getting thrown out of nightclubs for misbehaving, and getting arrested for pissing on bouncers. Where did this other Monty come from?

My take is that the other Monty was always there, the other Monty is Monty's Shadow. 

The Shadow is a Jungian archetype. Having a Shadow is the inevitable consequence of having a Self. When the Self stands up in the light it naturally and inevitably casts a shadow, a distorted image of itself, that contains the less acknowledged, less developed, more vulnerable aspects of the personality.

Everybody has a Shadow. The real question is not whether Monty had a Shadow, but what Monty did with his Shadow. Like a lot of people-like-us, Monty suppressed his Shadow. He hid it away. He let his Shadow eat his disappointment, his shame, his humiliation, his anger, and came out to play with his game face on, radiating earnestness, belief, team-ship and optimism.

It worked, up to a point. Monty did play test cricket for England. But he remained a curiously mechanical, one-dimensional player. As Shane Warne acutely observed, “Monty hasn’t played thirty-three tests, he has played one test thirty-three times”. Monty was never creative. He was too distant from his Shadow.

Psychologists Barry Michels and Phil Stutz run a cult-practice in Hollywood, helping directors, screen-writers, agents and actors harness their Shadows. They see the Shadow as the key to creativity, in art, and in everything else. I heard about them from this New Yorker article:

As the liaison to the unconscious, Michels says, the Shadow is the source of all creativity and agility in life, business, and art, which he calls “flow.”

Barry Michels' Shadow

...Michels asks his patients to relate to the Shadow as something real, which can be coaxed from the cobwebbed lair of the unconscious into the physical world. The process, as he describes it, is spooky, a kind of daylight séance in which he plays the role of guide. 

In “The Tools,” Michels tells the story of “Jennifer,” a model who lobbies to get her child into a fifteen-thousand-dollar-a-year kindergarten but is too ashamed of her self-described “trailer trash” origins to talk to the other mothers, whom she views as “a superior race of Range-Rover-driving goddesses.” The secret to her crippling sense of inferiority lies with her Shadow, which she must accept and integrate into her public self. “I asked her to close her eyes,” Michels writes. He goes on:

“Go back to the parents’ meeting where you froze up; re-create all those shaky feelings you had.” She nodded. “Now, push the feelings out in front of you and give them a face and body. This figure is the embodiment of everything you feel insecure about.” I paused. “When you’re ready, tell me what you see.”

There was a long silence. Jennifer flinched suddenly, then blinked her eyes open. “Ugh,” she said grimacing. “I saw this 13 or 14 years old girl, overweight, unwashed. Her face was pasty and covered with zits . . . a complete loser.”

Jennifer had just seen her shadow.

In a similar sort of way, I think we’ve just seen Monty’s Shadow. Monty’s Shadow wants to make it with chicks at the nightclub. The Shadow wants to give it back to bullying bouncers. Monty doesn’t know how to, but his Shadow really wants to.

Stutz and Michels’ therapy is about discovering the Shadow, acknowledging it, giving it the respect you long for, and integrating the Shadow with the Self. From that viewpoint, it may not have been a bad thing for Monty’s Shadow to start finding expression. It might have helped him find his mojo, find creativity, re-kindle his career. After all, Monty isn’t much older now than Greame Swann was when he made his test debut (also a second coming).

Tragically, Monty’s Shadow seems to have taken control uninvited, at a moment when Monty’s Self was vulnerable, after having been dropped for the fourth test of the Ashes.

A night out with the lads would have been unremarkable for Swanny, Bressy, Broady or KP. It probably means the end of the road for Monty. I don’t think the cricket media have grasped this thought yet, they’re still taking the piss. But I’m finding it hard to imagine the England establishment forgiving Monty his trespasses. I wish he had had a more dignified farewell. I don’t think he will play another international.

But before Monty goes away, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on Monty’s golden moments: his first test wicket, Sachin Tendulkar in Nagpur 2005, the beauty he bowled Younis Khan with at Old Trafford in 2009, his match winning performance in Bombay in 2012. And this amazing one-handed diving catch, which I haven’t seen before, which is the most watched You tube video featuring Monty.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Starring Johar Tsarnaev

Johar Tsarnaev on the Rolling Stone cover

I spent last weekend wallowing in this Rolling Stone cover story about Johar Tsarnaev, about what a kind, charming, thoughtful, smart, sensitive, popular, wholesome kid Johar was, about how the creeping shadows of political and familial dysfunction haunt his tender mind, and turn him into an Islamist murderer. It’s a great story. It should be made into a movie.

Actually, big part of Johar’s story has already been made into a movie: The Reluctant Fundamentalist, directed by Mira Nair, based on the book by Mohsin Hamid. Reading Johar’s story helped me realise why I disliked The Reluctant Fundamentalist so much.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s protagonist, Changez Khan, is a lot like Johar. Changez too is a kind, charming, thoughtful, smart, sensitive, popular and wholesome kid. Like Johar, Changez arrives in America, assimilates successfully, falls out of love with post 9/11 America, and drifts towards terrorism. The story is well told, that drift towards terrorism feels natural, inevitable, the consequence of integrity.

However, that is where it stops. Changez’s story stops tantalisingly short of where the radicalised Islamist man-child commits murder in the name of God. Mohsin Hamid invites us to sympathise with Changez’s drift towards fundamentalism, he doesn’t show us the consequences of that drift.

Rolling Stone invites us to sympathise with Johar’s drift towards fundamentalism, to understand how his sensitivity and intelligence contributed to his alienation. But in Johar’s case, we already know the consequences. Before reading about Johar, we already know what he did for the sake of his half-baked political ideas. We know Johar murdered eight year old Martin Richards, who was cheering finishers at the Boston Marathon.

The mainstream media, the popular imagination, finds it hard to deal with the fact that a sweet kid can do evil, and therefore be evil. Evil-doers are objectified: we don’t do evil, they do. The narrative is about how a nice kid who was one of us inexplicably transformed into one of them, a monster. A lot of America interpreted the Rolling Stone cover as glamourising a monster, making a rock star of a terrorist, making evil cool. That isn’t how I read it.

To me, the Rolling Stone cover story makes obvious that evil-doers are not monsters, they’re perfectly ordinary people. Often, they're very nice people. They look like Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man, or these happy laughing Nazi officers playing with an accordion at Auschwitz, or like Johar Tsarnaev, hamming it up with his buddies before his high school prom. This doesn’t make them any less evil. But it does make them a lot more scary.

Johar (red tie) before his high school prom

Riz Ahmed as Changez Khan

Aamir Khan as the Ice Candy Man

Nazi officers at Auschwitz

Nazi officers at Auschwitz

Jack Reacher, the twenty first century cowboy

Jack Reacher, the movie, starts with a gripping premise:

Normal people are living their everyday lives on a crisp sunny morning in an American city, when a shot rings out. A nicely dressed lady crumples to the ground, dead. Another shot rings out, another random person is dead. People start running in all directions, trying to escape from the shooter they can't see. The firing continues. Three more shots ring out. Three more people die.

The city is shocked. The authorities must solve this case, do something, show that they are in charge. The police try. But the ordinary police are clearly not up the the task. This special case requires a special kind of policeman...enter Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher...ta tan ta taaan.

Ultimately Jack Reacher does solve the case. On the way he saves damsels in distress, bashes up baddies, nails cruel Russian gangsters, and exposes corruption in high places. It's good in-flight entertainment, though I won't remember it a year from now.

What I found interesting though, was how despite the cheesy plot and predictable characters, Jack Reacher was so unlike a Bollywood movie. A Bollywood hero will typically step into the story, bash up a couple of baddies, and quickly tell the audience his back story: all about his kith and kin, about his struggles in his younger days, about how he became who is his.

Jack Reacher, however, has no back story. He walks into the movie, does his thing, and rides away into the sunset. We know nothing about his loving mother, his noble father, or the evil uncle who stole his khandaani haveli (family property). We don't see him bullied in high-school or picked on by a sadistic teacher, being rejected by his childhood sweetheart, or losing his best buddy in battle. We don't know what shaped him. He doesn't have a context, his people. He stands alone.

Does that make Jack Reacher quintessentially American? Tempting thought, but I don't think so. Superman and Batman are classical Bollywood characters, with their rich back stories about planet Krypton, and the misfortunes of the Wayne dynasty.

Maybe Jack Reacher is what the Western has become. The city is now the wild west, and clean-cut Tom Cruise is the new-look cowboy.

We drive on the left, so why do we walk on the right?

In England, we drive on the left. So it would be natural to walk on the left, right? Wrong! 

This sign, instructing pedestrians to walk on the right, was photographed in the Green Park tube station, in Central London.

In the Green Park tube station

Why? Because of the high concentration of American tourists in Central London? Maybe...but it might just be random. 

I'm conditioned to think that things are the way they are for a reason. It is much harder to accept that most things are the way they are for no especially good reason. It just is what it is. Get with the programme, baby, go with the flow.

Pedestrian tunnel, Green Park tube station

The Boston Marathon bombings - terrorism, Islamophobia, or something even scarier?

Bomb at the Boston Marathon

A couple of twisted young men kill innocent people at the Boston marathon, and it’s called terrorism. Other twisted young men kill innocent people - at a Batman movie premier in Aurora, Colorado, or at a political rally in Tuscon, Arizona, or at a primary school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut - and there is no mention of terrorism.

What’s the difference? The Boston murderers were Muslims of Chechen origin, the other murderers were “regular” Americans. It’s easy to believe the different coverage is down to xenophobia or Islamo-phobia, and I don’t doubt there is plenty of that going on.

But there may be something deeper going on as well, which is about the way the brain processes information, something that is much harder to correct than xenophobia.

Apparently, new information coming to the brain is not absorbed directly. The brain makes sense of new information by referencing it to old or familiar information. Familiar information becomes a benchmark or a norm. New information is compared and contrasted to this familiar norm. Distinctive features of the new information are made sense of, are explained, by the attributes in which they most obviously differ from the norm. 

For instance, in the corporate world I inhabit, the "norm" is that powerful people are white men. So when a woman exhibits a particular behaviour, say domineering or bullying behaviour, the mind finds an explanation for that behaviour, in her gender. The mind thinks "She's being domineering because she is a woman. Maybe she is over-compensating, trying to get ahead in a man's world." Equally, when a woman is self effacing, the mind thinks "She's being self-effacing because she is a woman, she is the product of generations of gender stereo-typing." The same behaviour observed in a white male might be explained by his biography or personality, but not by his gender.

Critically, this habit of the mind is involuntary. Research shows that it affects passionate liberals as much as bigots, even when the passionate liberals are fully aware of this unreasonable pattern of thought. 

The same mental mechanism looks for an explanation for what happened, a cause, in the bombers' Chechen background - "they did what they did because of what happened in Chechnya". That is less stupid than jumping to the conclusion that the bombings were a part of an Islamist terrorist plot. That doesn't make it true. 

The reality is that it is almost impossible to know why what happened happened.  The mind doesn't accept this vacuum, it fills it up with a plausible story. "Islamist plot", "right wing bigotry", "misunderstood immigrants", whatever - any story will do. The stories don't have to be true. They just need to protect us from accepting that God plays dice with the universe.

God's dice

Why Bollywood does beautiful forevers

Bollywood India

For the same reason that Sweden does crime fiction.

Camilla Lackberg

Sweden's best selling crime writer, Camilla Lackberg, explained to The Independent why a country as sedate as Sweden has spawned such a crop of world-beating crime writers. Her thesis is it's because Sweden is so safe. "Crime stories are our version of sitting round a camp fire and telling tales. We enjoy being scared under safe circumstances. That's why there's no tradition of crime writing in countries that have wars."

Basically, fiction provides the ingredient missing in real life.

Which is precisely why Bollywood is syrupy sweet. India still is poor. Life in India still is tough. Fiction needs to provide the sweetness that is so elusive in real life.

Another India

Learning monetary policy from Monopoly

Ben Bernanke, Mervyn King and D Subbarao ought to play more Monopoly. That would teach them a thing or two about the perils of an expansionary monetary policy.

I learnt about the dangers of monetary expansion last weekend, when my daughter challenged me to a game. I nearly lost inside half an hour. I landed on three houses at Oxford Street and had to mortgage King’s Cross and Liverpool station to survive; the end seemed nigh. But then I picked up £200 as I passed Go, then another £150 from Community Chest, and an hour later both my daughter and I were in rude financial health.

In effect, I’d been bailed out by an expansionary monetary policy.

Monopoly has fixed nominal prices (i.e. a hotel room on Pall Mall always costs £625). However the real price of that hotel room is constantly declining. The Bank pumps £200 per player into the economy every round, so money supply is constantly increasing, so “sticky” prices keep getting smaller compared to the money in the game, so, on average, everybody feels richer.

Hotels on Pall Mall and Vine Street are life-threatening early on. As the game develops, the board fills up with houses and hotels, and landing at a hotel on Pall Mall is a mere flea-bite. By now the action has shifted to Mayfair and Park Lane. If the dice roll such that all players survive long enough, even a hotel on Mayfair stops being life-threatening.

From that point on, the players are no longer playing Monopoly, they are playing Comfortable Oligopoly. In this game, the veneer of competition is maintained, but the Bank ensures that nobody actually goes bust, despite the fact that nobody is taking any real risks or making valuable things. There is no natural way of ending this meaningless game. My daughter and I stopped our game only when higher authorities stepped in and decreed that it was lunchtime.

So, policy makers, play a few endless games of Monopoly. Learn that in the short term, monetary expansion can save a few dads from going bust. Learn also that monetary expansion that goes on and on and on robs the world of meaning, until the real economy finally breaks through and produces lunch.

PS: I wonder if the great monetarists Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas suffered through a few endless games of Monopoly?

Umwelt

Umwelt: this word deserves to be in more common use. It means "the world as it is experienced by a particular organism".

It comes from zoology, specifically ethology, I found it in this book on dog behaviour. Umwelt has the sense that a dog's, or any organism's, experience of the world is bounded by its range of perception. This range of perception forms a bubble the animal lives within. This perceptual bubble in turn limits (and distorts) the range of emotion and action the organism is capable of.

Human experience is equally circumscribed by perceptual bubbles (except that the more interesting perceptual bubbles are cognitive, or maybe maybe linguistic, rather than sensory). We need a word for those bubbles. Let umwelt be that word.

Let umwelt takes its rightful place in the English lexicon, alongside gestalt, zeitgeist, schadenfreude and cousin weltanschauung.

The wind beneath my wings does NOT make me fly high

Bette Midler singing "Wind beneath my wings"

Actually, it's the wind above my wings that makes me fly.

Air flows faster over the upper surface of the wing, which lowers pressure, and therefore provides lift and enables flight. The mechanics are the same for a airplane wing, a frisbee, a sail, a swinging cricket ball or an eagle's wing. Similarly, the spoiler blades at the back of F1 racing cars are designed so the wind passes beneath the wings. This pulls the car down towards the tarmac, and provides stability.

This science is complex enough to provide many engineers with a lifetime of work, but is neither new nor controversial. It follows from Bernoulli's principle, which I was taught in 8th class by Kanaka Eshwaran-Miss (aka Kinetic Energy-miss).

So why does Bette Midler keep showing up on Muzak tracks around the world singing:

"I can fly higher than an eagle,
'cause you are the wind beneath my wings"?

Wrong! The wind above her wings makes her fly high. The wind beneath her wings brings her down to earth. Ignoramus. Fancy dress Fatima! Bougainvillea! Pithecanthropus! Odd-toed ungulate!! Nit-witted ninepin! Squawking popinjay!

F1 car, that uses wind beneath the wings to stay low

Airplane, that uses wind above the wings to fly high

PS: I'm kidding. It's fun to win an argument conclusively in an age of "it depends".

My beloved homeland: the 1990s

I’m homesick.
I want to go home,
to a place where I feel safe,
to a place where I know stuff,
like I know that democracy is good,
that capitalism will save us from poverty,
that the Rio summit will save the planet,
and that Sanjay Manjrekar’s immaculate technique will elevate him to Gavaskar-esque greatness.

I want to know that MTV VJ Sophiya Haque is cool, achingly so,
and that institutions reinvent themselves,
sort of, like, Tony Blair reinvented the Labour Party.

I want to know that if I follow my passion,
try really really hard,
give all I’ve got to give,
give with my body, mind and soul,
that I will find not just success, but fulfilment.

Papa I want to go,
Mama I want to go,
Show me the way to go home.

How do you solve a problem like Maria Sharapova?

Maria Sharapova and Grigor Dimitrov, in Milan

News from the Aussie Open is that Maria Sharapova has a new boyfriend, fellow tennis pro Gregor Dimitrov. Is this guy Maria's Mr Right?

The great Tamil lyricist Kannadasan might be on the pro-Dimitrov side of the argument. One of the greatest love songs he ever wrote, naan pesa nenaipadellam nee pesa vendum, goes: "naan kaanum ulagangal nee kaana vendum", meaning, "you should see the world's I see". This is a deep insight. Understanding each other's worlds is a critical (and under-celebrated) aspect of love. As an East European tennis pro, Grigor Dimitrov has a better chance of really getting Maria's world, than, say, a Tam Bram management consultant.

On the con side of the argument is yin-yang balance, a theme I've riffed on before. Maria is one tough cookie, she has plenty of yang in her soul. She needs a guy with dollops of yin-energy for them to be in harmony. Ex-boyfriend Andy Roddick clearly didn't fit the bill. Apparently, ex-fiancee Sasha Vujacic did't either.

Maria Sharapova and Roger Federer, in Sao Paulo

The problem is, professional sportsmen with yin-energy are rare. But they do exist. Roger Federer is a great example.

So will Grigor Dimitrov be Maria's Mr. Right? It depends, on whether Grigor can be more like Roger Federer than like Andy Roddick, and I'm not talking about winning grand slam titles.

Samudra Manthan: a stitch-up or a path to salvation?

Samudra Manthan

My children were listening to a story. I was sitting with them, squirming with discomfort.

The story was Samudra Manthan: about the churning of the ocean by the devas and asuras that produced Halahala, the terrible poison, and Amrita, the nectar of immortality. We’d chosen this story because it is one of the nicer, less gory Indian puranas, but I still was uncomfortable, because it story reads like a divine con-job.

The devas invite the asuras to work with them to churn the ocean, implying that they would share the Amrita. Yet, when the Amrita does emerge, Lord Narayana shows up disguised as the beautiful Mohini, gives all the Amrit to the devas and none to the asuras. This was justified because the devas were devotees of Lord Narayana, while the asuras were not. Bascially, its okay because “they” are not God’s people.

To my ears, this moral logic sounded a bit like the logic that European colonials used to justify the genocide of Native Americans, or that Nazis used used against the Jews. I needed to step in and re-frame this story. I needed to find a reasonable interpretation.

It turns out that my grandmother, Kamala Subramaniam, had been similarly troubled by the Samudra  Manthan story, and had thought through its implications. I found a considered, and positive, interpretation in her translation of the Srimad Bhagavatam. Here’s her take:

"The incident of the churning of the ocean must be pondered over. The devas and asuras were both working towards the same end: finding of Amrita. Both worked strenuously and equally sincerely towards this end. They both pulled the mountain Mandara with the snake Vasuki as the rope, and both efforts were equal: as a matter of fact, the asuras put in more work since they had more powerful arms.

As a result, however, the devas enjoyed the benefit while the efforts of the asuras were all wasted. This was because the devas had surrendered themselves to the Lord. They had taken the dust off the feet of the Lord, and their labour were duly rewarded.

Men of the world, when they strain their minds, their riches, their actions and other similar things towards benefiting themselves, their children, their homes and their personal happiness, their actions become all futile. If however, man does the same things dedicating the actions to the Lord, man’s actions will never be fruitless."

I like the Samudra Manthan story partly because churning the ocean is such an easy metaphor for the life-work of a karma yogi, of people like you and me who work to earn a living and raise a family. The point of this metaphor is not that God will appear at the denouement, and distribute goodies to “us” but not to “them”. It is that dedicating one's life-work to the Lord, whatever you conceive Her to be, is its own reward.

Looked at this way, the difference between the devas and asuras is not intrinsic or inborn. The difference arises from the way they frame their lives, the lens through which they choose to see their work. The devas dedicate their work to the Lord, they experience bhakti, and bhakti is the difference between the Amrita the devas experienced, and the bitterness and cynicism the asuras must have experienced.

ॐ  नमो  भगवते  वासुदेवाय.