The Cerne Giant drinks beer! Ganpati drinks milk!

The Cerne Giant on his Dorset hillside

The Cerne Giant (pictured above) is one of England’s most cherished icons. He is a chalk figure etched into the lush Dorset countryside, just above the village of Cerne Abbas.

The Cerne Giant stands tall. At one hundred and eighty feet, he is about as tall as a twenty-story apartment block. His erect penis also stands tall; at twenty-six feet it is a big as the Giant’s head. He wields a big knobbly club with which he could clearly do some damage.

While the Giant’s origins are not well known, (this New Yorker article is the source of my fundas about Cerne Abbas and is guaranteed to improve your weekend) what is abundantly clear is that the Giant is relevant today.

Volunteers maintaining the Giant's chalk markings

The villagers of Cerne Abbas take take care of their Giant. He is in such good shape because hundreds of local volunteers, fortified by tea and cakes, turn out every year to keep the Giant’s chalk outline clear of weeds. The Giant reciprocates with good karma. Cerne Abbas was recently voted “Britain’s Most Desirable Village.”

Cerne Abbas has a local brewery, as a desirable village should. When the Cerne Abbas Brewery develops a new beer, the owner Vic Irvine, and his business partner Jodie Moore, climb the hill at night – often with friends – and hop the fence surrounding the Giant. Then they pour some of the beer into the Giant’s mouth “as a libation”.

Jonathan Still, the vicar of St. Mary’s Church, Cerne Abbas, also serves as the Spiritual Director of the Cerne Abbas brewery. He joined the brewers on one night-time climb to the hilltop. Irvine and Moore had brought plastic jugs filled with their latest brews—an offering for the giant. “It was a clear night, about half past twelve, and we could see the whole valley in the blue moonlight,” Still recalled. “It was freezing cold, with the smoke curling up from the chimneys below. We sat up around the giant’s head—which is totally illegal—and we tasted this one, and that one, and we poured some into the giant’s mouth.” After about an hour of sitting and drinking, Still said, an extraordinary thing happened: “We poured this beer into the giant’s mouth, and we saw his Adam’s apple go up and down as he swallowed it.”

I’ve heard this story before. 

I remember hearing it on 21 September 1995, when India came to a standstill to observe "Ganpati drinking milk”.

Neivedhyam in front of Lord Ganesha

Actually, I’ve heard it hundreds of times before. It’s the same thought as neivaidhyam, of pausing before a meal or celebration to offer one’s food to the Gods in thanksgiving.

Actually, it’s the same thought as leaving carrots and cookies out for Rudolph and Santa on Christmas night. The carrots and cookies we left out for Rudolph and Santa always got consumed. That proved that Rudolph and Santa actually, really brought our presents home.

I hope Santa takes some cookies for the Cerne Giant this Christmas. Or some crackers. To bring out the flavour of the new Cerne Abbas brews. The Giant behind Britain’s Most Desirable Village surely deserves some Christmas cheer. 

And I hope the vicar of St. Mary's Church leaves some carrots and cookies out for Rudolph and Santa on the hillside on Christmas night, for when they bring presents for the Cerne Giant.

Cerne Abbas Brew
As Preferred by the Giant

Can writers actually write together? Evidence from Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and the Aussies called Alice.

Can writers actually write together? Can writers jam together the way members of a rock or jazz band might, to create something better than any of them could have produced working alone? 

One very good writer, Anthony Lane of the New Yorker magazine, doesn't think so. I discovered this while flipping through a back issue of the New Yorker where I found his review of The President is Missing, a thriller co-authored by Bill Clinton and James Patterson. In his assessment:

“Writing, like dying, is one of those things that should be done alone or not at all. In each case, loved ones may hover around and tender their support, but, in the end, it’s up to you.”

Anthony Lane’s snarky and thoroughly enjoyable review (available here outside the paywall) has no doubt that the mediocrity of The President is Missing is further evidence that writing is, ultimately, an intensely personal and private craft. All this stuff about "creative collaboration" is nothing more than marketing fluff.

Yet further on into the same New Yorker issue I encountered Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama’s speechwriter. Rhodes' story offers a counterpoint, an example of one man elegantly and effectively channeling another’s thoughts:

“The journalistic cliché of a “mind meld” doesn’t capture the totality of Rhodes’s identification with the President.”

And how was this mind meld achieved?

"(Rhodes) came to Obama with an M.F.A. in fiction writing from New York University and a few years on the staff of a Washington think-tank…

he joined the campaign as a foreign-policy speechwriter in mid-2007, when he was twenty-nine…

he was sixteen years younger and six inches shorter than Obama…

he became so adept at anticipating Obama’s thoughts and finding Obamaesque words for them that the President made him a top foreign-policy adviser, with a say on every major issue…

he rose to become a deputy national-security adviser; accompanied Obama on every trip overseas but one; stayed to the last day of the Presidency; and even joined the Obamas on the flight to their first post-Presidential vacation, in Palm Springs, wanting to ease the loneliness of their sudden return to private life….”

This mind meld doesn’t seem like a creative collaboration, which suggests some sort of parity between the collaborators. Ben Rhodes has intentionally muted his own voice to amplify that of his master. This can’t have been entirely easy for a smart and ambitious young man like Ben Rhodes, however much he admired President Obama.

“(Rhodes’) decade with Obama blurred his own identity to the vanishing point, and he was sensitive enough—unusually so for a political operative—to fear losing himself entirely in the larger story. Meeting Obama was a fantastic career opportunity and an existential threat.”

Tversky and Kahneman in the 70s

A more successful model for a creative partnership between equals may be Dan Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the founders of Behavioural Economics.

They were close friends. They had sharply contrasting attitudes and styles, there was never any question of a mind meld. Tversky was extroverted, optimistic, hyper-organized, a wise-cracking military hero before becoming an academic. Kahneman was a worrying, bespectacled, introverted pessimist who couldn’t find his way around his own office. But their differences made their work better. Tversky’s optimism gave them resilience and Kahneman’s worrying gave them rigour.

Their partnership worked, but at a cost. Here is what Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein had to say:

“The low rate of output was one of their strengths, and is a direct result of their joint personality traits. Kahneman’s constant worry about how they might be wrong combined perfectly with Tversky’s mantra: “Let’s get it right.” And it takes a long time to write a paper when both authors have to agree on every word, one by one.”

But the eight papers they published between 1971 and 1979, working in harness in a period of extraordinary creativity, won Kahneman the Nobel Prize, and would change their field, and perhaps the world, forever. (Amos Tversky tragically died of cancer at the age of fifty-nine before he could share the Nobel).

BTW…I’m reading The Undoing Project, Micheal Lewis’ book on Kahneman and Tversky. It’s going well. Right up there along with Money Ball, Liar’s Poker, Boomerang or The Big Short.

The most successful creative collaboration I came across while Google-researching this post is someone I’m much less likely to have read than Micheal Lewis, Dan Kahneman, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. This is Alice Campion. Her widely acclaimed bestseller is called The Painted Sky.

Alice Campion is actually a group of Sydney housewives called Jenny Crocker, Madeline Oliver, Jane Richards, Jane St Vincent Welch and Denise Tart. 

Their writing adventure started when their book club (Booksluts: We’ll Read Anything) went on a weekend away. After much vodka had been consumed, they made a pact to fund the Booksluts' tenth anniversary celebrations by writing a novel about a city girl who inherits her father’s farm in the outback, meets her rugged, handsome cattle-farmer neighbour, and sparks fly! 

To their own surprise, the Booksluts did come home to Sydney, wrote their novel, sent it to a publisher, got it published and watched it climb to the top of the bestseller charts.

They describe their creative process as a genuine collaboration, without any one Bookslut doing the heavy lifting. They actually experienced mind meld. 

The Booksluts behind Alice Campion

This mind meld happened partly because of how well the knew each other; e.g. their initial plan to write the sex scenes individually and mail them into the group anonymously didn’t work because everyone instantly knew who had written each passage. They knew each other too well for anonymity. 

And in the process they seem to have a had more fun collaborating than the Clinton-Patterson, Obama-Rhodes or even the Kahneman-Tversky duos. Cheers to the Booksluts!

I might just get out of my comfort zone and pay Rs 1,967.69 to download The Painted Sky onto my Kindle.

Dear Marie Kondo, Please come to India and play Holi...

Marie Kondo, the Japanese decluttering guru, wearing a signature white dress

Dear Marie,

I love KonMari. Your world famous decluttering method has cleansed my life of meaningless tat. You have filled my life with thoughts and memories that Spark Joy. You have refreshed my senses and renewed my life-spirit, my chi. Thank you.

Marie Kondo meditating
wearing a signature white dress

I love that you always wear white.

Your New York Magazine profile reveals that “Marie Kondo has more in common with a snowflake than with the flesh-and-blood humans around her.” If you are manifesting the energy of a beautiful and unique snowflake, it is natural that your spirit finds expression in pristine white.

I love that you understand strategic marketing. As you explained while shopping at Anthropologie, New York, you always wear white because “It is a part of my brand…my image colour. It is easy to recognize me.”

I come from India. Like you, we Indians understand that objects are animated by spirits. We know that our own spirits are enhanced by honouring and celebrating the spirits that live within things. We understand that less is more. I’m sure KonMari will be a hit in India.

I would therefore like to invite you to India, to grace our shores with your presence and your business.

Please time your visit so you’re here in the spring. When you're here we must celebrate Holi together. You will find thoughts in Holi that both resonate with and build on KonMari.

Indian Actress Alia Bhatt
Started the day in spotless whites
Had fun playing Holi 

The night before Holi, we Indians collect the clutter that has built up in our homes, the objects that no longer Spark Joy. We burn these objects in a bonfire. The negative energies that were trapped in these joyless objects are released, cleansed by the Fire God Agni in the Holika Dahan. I’m sure you will enjoy this decluttering, this Indian oshoji.

The next morning, be sure to dress in your signature whites. Most of India will be wearing whites too. Those whites will remain pristine until we start to play Holi.

When the play starts you’ll be swirled away in a riot of colour, music, drink, food, heat and holy craziness, that replace the tired joyless spirits that were swept away the previous night with energetic, young, joyful spirits. These Holi spirits have a zest for life that won’t stop at a spark of joy, they will light up entire bonfires of joy.

Your whites will not, should not, be pristine by the end of the day. That is the point. To us, this balance between the night before and the morning after, between emptying out and filling up, is as natural as breathing out and then breathing in. It’s a part of the cycle of life.

Do bring your family along when you visit India. Your husband and daughters will love Holi.  

We look forward to seeing you in India soon. And to doing (big) business together,

Cheers,

Moonballs from Planet Earth

Aam Janata playing Holi

Veeru and Basanti at Holi in Sholay

Marie Kondo says "Namaste"
Hope to see you in India soon :)

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.

Peri Lyons' Psychic Technique: Radical Empathy

I hate fortune tellers. This feeling isn't mild, amused scepticism, but fierce antipathy, and comes from Indian upbringing. Back in India, fortune-tellers are not innocent fair-ground amusements. They are serious and powerful people, jyotishtis, seers who can divine the fates on account of their spiritual attainment. Conveniently, these seers can also intervene with the fates on a client's behalf, to prevent dark and dire events that have been foretold from coming to pass.

The conversation between the seer and the client develops along the lines "I see the possibility of a glorious future...but...I also see terrible dangers...the divinity x needs to be appeased with sop y ...to protect your loved ones from these dangers...". Sop y generally contributes to the jyotishti's well-being. The client gradually learns to be dependent on the seer and loses autonomy, as he wins her over with honest trifles and betrays her in matters of the deepest consequence. Divination becomes an extortion racket, reinforced by the Stockholm syndrome.

I find the extortion practiced by jyotishtis more distressing than the simple violent extortion practiced by gangland bosses or cops on the beat. These "god men" are preying on the sacred, on faith, on hope - on human faculties that could be so life-enhancing if they were not abused. So, in my moral hierarchy, fortune-tellers, psychics, seers, astrologers, soothsayers and their ilk fall below common or garden charlatans like Bernie Madoff or Adam Stanford. They sit closer to JRR Tolkien's Grima Wormtongue, whose murmurs and whispers rob Lord Theoden of Rohan of his vitality, or JK Rowling's dementors, killers who do their business not through violence but by robbing their victims of the will to live.  

This attitude is why I was surprised to find myself warming to a psychic I came across while flipping through a back issue of the New Yorker.

Peri Lyons

This is Peri Lyons, "the most expensive psychic in New York". She plays by certain rules. Rule #1 is "readings by Peri Lyons are for entertainment purposes only". Also, she only does "good stuff... I very rarely get "bad" stuff. Either I'm way too positive for that, or my spirit guides are really chicken." Those rules take the whole extortion racket out of the equation, thank God. But what I liked, rather than just didn't hate, was her psychic method.

Peri Lyons does not read the stars, or the entrails of animals, or ancient palm leaves or any such thing. She practices "radical empathy". If I've understood what that means, she does with her clients what a method actor does with a character. She gets into the skin of her subject, experiences what they experience, uses that insight to tell her subjects about themselves, and about any self-fulfilling beliefs that she senses. This is not in any way a mysterious or other-worldly faculty. I routinely do this as a sports fan, tuning into the players' psyche, trying to sense their commitment, intensity and confidence. A good psychic just does this tuning-in very well.

Courtney Love

One of Peri Lyons' good friends and client is Courtney Love, who, apparently, "doesn't do soothsayers". I have a hunch that for Courtney Love, the psychic service that matters is just plain empathy, rather than any sort of forecasting.

Peri Lyons also runs a popular class called "How To Be a Psychic Without Even Trying". Maybe Paul the Octopus was one of her graduates.   

Paul, the psychic octopus 

JRR Tolkien, the lousy teacher

"At Oxford in the nineteen-forties, Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was generally considered the most boring lecturer around, teaching the most boring subject known to man, Anglo-Saxon philology and literature, in the most boring way imaginable. “Incoherent and often inaudible” was Kingsley Amis’s verdict on his teacher. Tolkien, he reported, would write long lists of words on the blackboard, obscuring them with his body as he droned on, then would absent-mindedly erase them without turning around. “I can just about stand learning the filthy lingo it’s written in,” Philip Larkin, another Tolkien student, complained about the old man’s lectures on “Beowulf.” “What gets me down is being expected to admire the bloody stuff.”

It is still one of the finest jests of the modern muses that this fogged-in English don was going home nights to work on perhaps the most popular adventure story ever written..."

More evidence that genius in one aspect of life, even in one aspect of communication, can go hand in hand with mediocrity in other related aspects of life, or communication.

Extracted from this (very nice) story in the New Yorker, which is still visible online...

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.

Haimish, Gezellig and the Great Pumpkin

English is the world's most successful language because it is so rich, it has many more words than any comparable language. Yet, frustratingly, English still doesn't have words for so many useful, everyday concepts. Consider, for instance, haimish: a Yiddish word that suggests warmth, domesticity and unpretentious conviviality.

I was looking up the meaning because it is in this (excellent) New Yorker article about IKEA: "IKEA believes that it can make your sleep better and enhance your family life...IKEA's vision of life in its environs is a safe and haimish one. In its rooms, people don't run late, the don't bicker; the have children, but they don't have sex."

The most interesting definition of haimish I found was by David Brooks, the NY Times conservative columnist, talking about why simple, wholesome, communal safari camps are more rewarding than elegant, luxurious camps that lack the haimish spirit. Understood this way, haimish feels a lot like another word I've blogged about before: gezellig, space and people coming together in harmony, that special spirit of cosy fellowship that animates Dutch life.

This sentiment is not unfamiliar to Anglophone cultures. For instance, I've long loved Charles Schulz's Peanuts comics for their haimish or gezellig character. Linus van Pelt lives in the hope that the Great Pumpkin will grace his pumpkin patch on Halloween night for being the most "sincere". I suspect the notion Linus and the Great Pumpkin are searching for is closer to haimish or gezellig than just sincere. Haimish and gezellig include sincere, and a whole lot else besides, except that it would be so ongezellig to use a foreign word like gezellig in Linus' pumpkin patch.

Is it just a matter of time before English co-opts haimish? The casual way in which the New Yorker used the word suggests that that is already happening. My wife and I couldn't find plausible Hindi or Tamil equivalents for haimish or gezellig either. Any suggestions?

On Being a Grown Up

"Life gradually became less a search for meaning than a process of optimization: how to put this sentence the best way in the fewest words, how to choose the right things to buy at the supermarket and pay for them in the fastest-moving line, what to do and ingest in order to keep from getting sick or depressed..."

The essential difference between brahmacharya and grihastashram. Taken, a little out of context and beyond all consequences, from In The World, by Elif Batuman, in a recent New Yorker.

Roger Federer: The Middle Class Champion

The dust has now settled on Wimbledon 2011. We have two exciting young champions to celebrate in Petra Kvitova and Novak Djokovic. Rafael Nadal is taking time off to let his fractured foot heal. Maggie May, Andy Murray's dog, is also recovering, from all the stress and media scrutiny that comes with being a celebrity. Yet, after the fun and the excitement have died down, after the Pimm's No. 1 and the strawberries and cream have been put away, the taste that lingers on from Wimbledon 2011 is the taste of a golden age coming to an end: the Age of Roger Federer.

Just how golden the Age of Roger Federer has been became clear to me, thanks, unexpectedly, to the British press.

As is traditional during the Wimbledon fortnight, the British moaned on about the absence of a British champion. The explanation they most commonly trotted out is that British tennis is a middle class game. For instance, here is Peter Preston, the former editor of the Guardian, writing about the Middle Class Malaise: "Why don't the British win Wimbledon anymore? Because we aren't hungry for success".

The term "middle class" merits some translation. In Britain, it does not describe people in the middle of the income distribution, a class now described as the "squeezed middle". It includes, and usually describes, affluent, well-educated, well-connected professionals: corporate executives, civil servants, lawyers, doctors, university professors. This haute bourgeois constitutes a middle class, rather than a privileged elite, because its members are notionally of lower rank than the hereditary landed aristocracy. These are the comfortably-off families who generally play and watch tennis for fun, and who generally fail to turn their children into Wimbledon champions. The claim that this class does not produce champions feels close to the bone, because this is the class I come from, and happily live within.

Prima facie, this reasoning looks like pure rubbish, nothing more than typical Pommy whingeing. But looking around at tennis, maybe the whingers have a point.

Consider, for instance, the Williams sisters' story. Their father, Richard Williams, son of a single mom from Shreveport, Louisiana, who now lives in the inner-city war zone of South Central Los Angeles, was idly watching tennis on TV when he was powerfully impressed by the prize money tennis players won. So he coaxed and cajoled his wife into having two more children, children #4 and #5, who would be raised from birth to play tennis and win that sweet prize money. Miraculously, this scheme worked, but it would never have occurred to even the most pushy tennis club members from suburban Long Island or Surrey.

Novak Djokovic, whose parents run a pizza restaurant in Belgrade, talks about growing up in a different kind of war-zone:

Djokovic reflected on how he had to negotiate some serious “ups and downs in life to become a champion”. The downs included a spell in spring 1999 when Djokovic, his parents and two brothers, Marko and Djordje, were living in a small apartment in Belgrade as Nato jets were targeting the Serbian capital.

He and Ana Ivanovic...along with Jelena Jankovic...would sometimes have to disappear into a bomb shelter when their practice in an empty swimming pool, which had been turned into a makeshift tennis court, was alarmingly interrupted.

Djokovic can remember the menacing drone of the low-flying bombers drowning out the renditions of “Happy Birthday to You” when he turned 12. Episodes like that build character. “All of us who went through that came out with their spirit stronger,” he once said. “Now we appreciate the value of life. We know how it feels to be living in 60 square metres being bombed.”

Andy Murray, the great British hope, comes from Dunblane, Scotland. Dunblane is about as far away from the manicured courts of SW19 as South Central LA is from the courts of the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, New York, or Bhagalpur, Bihar, is from the Bombay Gymkhana. Dunblane is best remembered in Britain for a horrific massacre of schoolchildren by a crazy gunman in 1996. Andy's brother Jamie was in school when this massacre happened.

While Andy Murray does come from a tough place, he may be an even better example of another clear pattern: champions created by pushy tennis-parents. Andy's story is less about escaping Dunblane, and more about being Judy Murray's son.

Judy Murray, then Judy Erskine from Glasgow, once tried to make it as a tennis pro. She took buses to European tournaments because she couldn't afford the airfare, slept in tents, and shared cigarettes in the locker room with Mariana Simonescu, then Bjorn Borg's girlfriend. Her tennis career failed. She became a secretary. She got married. Her marriage broke up, bitterly. Andy is her redemption.

Martina Hingis was brought up by an ambitious single mom who named her daughter after the great Martina Navratilova. Jelena Dokic has a famously pushy tennis-dad. The American Bryan twins' parents are tennis coaches, who made sure their boys spent every waking hour on either tennis or music. Bernard Tomic's dad used to coach Goran Ivanisevic. Andre Agassi's dad, who boxed for Iran in the Olympics, fits the pattern well enough.

This pattern isn't entirely new, but it is strengthening. Jimmy Connor's mother Gloria was a tennis teacher, who once attracted a fair bit of comment for being so present in her adult son's life. Gloria Connors was once a remarkable exception. Today she would be routine. In general, players coming through into top tier tennis either come from tough backgrounds, or have laser-focused tennis parents, or both.

An excellent book called Why England Lose looked at this pattern in football. More than 50% of the English population describe themselves as middle-class. They love football more than any other sport, and routinely send their sons to football coaching. Yet England's national team typically doesn't include a single middle-class player. The team consists entirely of men whose fathers were manual labourers, or on benefits, or former football professionals. These guys don't spend their precious teenage years swotting for math and physics A levels, or practicing classical music, or attending family reunions. They just play football. Therefore, they clock in the 10,000 hours of practice needed to be really good at something. The middle-class kids never do.

In this context, the LTA's strategy to develop British tennis is to spend surpluses from Wimbledon on courts in blighted inner-cities, and hope for a British version of Serena Williams, or Gael Monfils, to come through. Commentators talk about how Amir Khan, a boxer from Bolton with Pakistani roots, has breathed new life into British boxing. As a strategy, this makes sense. But at some deeper level, it sticks in my throat.

I'm all for social mobility. But surely, that is a serious question for schools, policing and public policy. Tennis is a game. Tennis is not meant to create pathways for social mobility, or win the Battle of Waterloo, or prove the superiority of the Aryan race, or of the Communist system, or serve any other political agenda. It shouldn't be about fulfilling a parent's frustrated dream either; that is just bad parenting. Tennis shouldn't really be about anything more than the pleasure of playing with a bat and ball.

The amateur ideal of previous generations was an attempt, however flawed, at letting the game just be a game. That ideal is now gone. As recently as the 1970s, the future of American tennis was the Stanford University tennis team. Now, kids who are serious about tennis wouldn't waste their time at Stanford University. Tennis, and sport in general, suffers from what Arnold Toynbee called a schism in the soul. The spirit in which amateurs play tennis is now completely disconnected from the spirit in which top professionals play.

Until Roger Federer.

Federer's greatness isn't fully captured by his sixteen grand slam titles. His reign is a golden age because of the spirit with which he played to win those sixteen titles, a spirit which is primarily about his love for playing the game. Here is a an extract from a story about Federer in the New Yorker:

... beneath that unflappable exterior I could sense that he was enjoying himself enormously—a deep, visceral joy that vibrated like an electric current in certain shots. Some of the top tennis players have given the opposite impression: Pete Sampras’s hangdog look on the court always made you want to cheer him up, and Andre Agassi, in his 2009 memoir, tells us again and again how he secretly hated the game. Federer clearly loves to play, and this is no small part of the pleasure in watching him.

Roger Federer didn't need to escape from a ghetto or a war zone. Federer's parents both work for Ciba-Geigy, the pharmaceuticals company, near Basel, Switzerland. This is the sort of upbringing I, and most readers of this blog, can totally relate to. My father was a tennis-playing executive at a multinational corporation. So am I.

Federer didn't need to fulfil the ambitions of a tennis-parent. His parents played recreational tennis at the firm's club. "We’d spend weekends on the tennis court," Lynette (his mother) recalled, "and the kids"—Roger and his sister, Diana, who was two years older—"would join us... It was Roger’s decision, at twelve, to quit playing soccer and to enter the program at the Swiss National Tennis Center, in Ecublens, two and a half hours by train from home.

Roger Federer's balanced perspective, his view of tennis as just a part of life, is why it now feels like a golden age is ending. Novak Djokovic has taken tennis to an entirely new level. Andy Murray has sworn to catch up by "working two per cent three per cent harder". These guys already work very hard. The marginal cost of that extra "two per cent three per cent" is high.

With his sixteen titles already in the bag, with his two young daughters at home, I doubt that Federer will put in that extra two per cent three per cent. He could spend that time at home, attending, say, a teddy bear's tea party. I know I would. Despite that, I think Roger Federer will will himself on to one more grand slam title before he rides off into the sunset. His best chance is at Wimbledon next year. One final chance then for Wimbledon, and the tennis world, to enjoy its great middle-class champion.

Big-point players in tennis: NOT a myth

There really are big-point players in tennis. Just found a couple of statistical references to support this claim.

Watching this year’s Wimbledon, Rafael Nadal always looked in charge of his semi final against Andy Murray. Yet, there was a time late in the third set, with Murray down 0-2 on his way to a 0-3 whipping, when Murray had actually won more points than Nadal. Rafa was winning the points that mattered.

Similar claims in other sports have turned out to be false. For instance, baseball long believed in “clutch hitters”, batters who perform especially well in important situations. However, Bill James, the spiritual father of sports statistics, showed that this was simply not supported by the data. Similarly, fans long believed that basketball players have “hot hands”, when they are “in the zone” and sink every attempt. Statistical analysis showed that “hot hands” were fully explained by chance. Is tennis really different?

One reason for believeing tennis is different is comes from this (superb) New Yorker article on the state of the doubles game. The relevant sections say:

The doubles tour might no longer exist, if not for Etienne de Villiers, the chairman of the men’s tour at the time. De Villiers had previously worked at Walt Disney International, so he understood the need for better marketing. The doubles tour could survive, he said, but only if the players agreed to some compromises. The game would be streamlined. Most matches would be kept to two sets, with a “match tie break” in place of the third set. If a game went to 40-40 the next point would decide it, there would be no more endless ads and dueces. (Grand slams would stick with the traditional scoring).

The new format has few fans among the players. Martina Navratilova says it is a “bullshit excuse”. Leander Paes calls it as “Russian roulette”, and Luke Jensen dismisses it as “tennis in a microwave”. Jensen believes that the shorter format favours weaker teams, “Anyone can win one set”.

Oddly enough, though, the statistics don’t bear this out. Not long after the changes were made, Wayne asked Carl Morris, a mathematician at Harvard, to calculate their effect on a team’s chances. In shorter matches, Morris concluded, the likelihood of an upset could increase by as much as five percentage points. And yet, when the ATP later reviewed the tour’s statistics, it found that the best players had improved their records. The new format offered “no second chances”, as Bob Bryan put it, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. “The one thing we didn’t figure in is that the better teams are clutch” Wayne says. “On those big points, they come through”.

That said, this is a roundabout way of making a simple point. My friend Sriram Subramaniam suggested a comparison of % break points won with % other points won. One would expect Rafa to win more break points than Murray. Unfortunately, Google didn’t turn up this specific analysis. The closest thing to this analysis that a few mintues of Googling turned up is this paper by a Franc Klaassen of the University of Amsterdam.

He shows that there really are big points, and that seeded players play better on big points than unseeded players. He observes that seeded players facing a break point on their serve have the same win % as on other points, and that unseeded players have a lower win %, suggesting that it is more about weaker players choking than better players raising their game. He also shows that serving first in a set, or serving with new balls, has no impact. He doesn’t make any conclusions about champions like Rafa or Federer as opposed to the general pool of seeded players; his dataset is small, coming only from Wimbledon 92-95.

Calling for tennis’ Bill James to mine the vast amount of data generated by the ATP tour...

Great Snakes!

The United States is being invaded!! Hundreds of thousands of slimy aliens are slithering around the sacred homeland.

And so, the United States is defending itself. War has been declared on these intruders. Patrols are being mustered to track down these sneaky, elusive aliens. Beagles are being trained to sniff them out. Scientists are working on miniature airborne drones, like the ones used by the armed forces in Afghanistan, that can detect the heat given off by these aliens from the air. Open season has been declared, and from March 8 hunters can buy the right to shoot these aliens for a $29 fee. Officials are even training hunters on how to identify, stalk, capture and remove these aliens.

What crime have these aliens committed? Nothing more than trying to stay alive. They haven't even attempted to cross an international border illegally. Why so much fear and hatred?

The aliens I am sticking up for here are snakes, specifically pythons. Thousands of pythons have been imported into America as pets. Some were released by owners who bought cute little things a few inches long, and found they had more snake than they could handle when their tiddlers grew into 15 foot long giants. Some escaped when Hurricane Andrew ripped through Florida, destroyed a pet store's warehouse, and air lifted python hatchlings in their frizbee-like flat-pack plastic containers out into the Everglades. Most of the ex-pet snakes died. But enough survived in the warm, humid swamps of the Everglades, a climate which may not be all that different from the Asia they came from, to establish a breeding population. There are now an estimated 150,000 pythons in the Florida wilderness.

The campaign against pythons claims that they are dangerous. They are dangerous. A two year old sleeping in her crib was tragically killed by a python, which belonged to her mother's boyfriend. This incident has little bearing on the rights and wrongs of pythons in the wild, but it clearly is bad PR for pythons.

Some ecologists worry that pythons prey on endangered native species, like the Key Largo Woodrat. These same ecologists are also clearly aware of the media potential of a "foreign invader drives local species to extinction" storyline. Consider this New Yorker article, easily the most thoughtful piece I've read on this topic. It carefully refers to the python as the Burmese python at every instance, to emphasize its foreignness, even though the python's range extends from the Himalayas through Indonesia. I was appalled at the cynicism of this extract:

Skip Snow, a wildlife biologist at the Everglades national park, was dissecting a python that had been caught in Summerland Key, one of the southernmost of the Florida Keys. He unspooled the snake...lifted it on to the counter, stuck a scalpel in it, and unzipped it like a ski bag, and examined its guts....Snow's purpose, in this case, was mostly political. If he could prove that the pythons were eating endangered (native) species, it would be much easier to lobby for funds.

The question that is not addressed is why exactly the Key Largo Woodrat is more valuable than the python. And who is to say that the Key Largo Woodrat would not have died out anyway?

Yes, invasive species can destroy ecosystems. I had blogged earlier about a tiny aphid called the Woolly Adelgid destroying Eastern Hemlock stands in the Appalachians. The Red Lionfish, a native of the Pacific, has emerged as a super-predator in the Caribbean coral reefs, and is now threatening these (valuable) ecosystems.

There may well be a case for acknowledging the law of intended consequences, and drastically cutting down on the international trade in exotic species. Who anticipated that importing decorative water hyacinth from South America would choke the life out of South Indian waterways? But slaughtering hundreds of thousands of pythons is not going to stop that on-going global species trade.

In all likelihood, this war on the python will fail despite the beagles, the drones, the "open-season" hunters, and all the attendent cruelty. A case of shutting the stable door after the snake has bolted. Many of the scientists involved in python war acknowledge that "In one week we went from 'No problem at all' to 'You might as well give up'". Pythons are omnicarnivorous, they eat almost anything that moves. They breed fast, a single female python can lay up to a hundred eggs in a single clutch. They are already extending their range north, beyond the Florida peninsula. They could find climatic conditions that match their Asiatic range across all the Southern states, and portions of Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona and California (map below). Why not just accept the inevitable and embrace a new vision of an American future, one in which the python is as much a part of the American south as the alligator?

Its not what you drink, its how you drink

When is drinking good clean fun, and when is it dangerous and destructive? The dividing line is mostly about how you drink rather than how much you drink, according to this recent Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker.

For instance, recent Italian-American immigrants drink a lot. They drink with every meal, they drink with their families, they drink when friends come over, they drink while watching television. Italian-Americans think about drink as if it were food. Alcohol consumption follows the same quotidian rhythms as the consumption of pasta and cheese. So, alcohol-fuelled loutishness or alcoholism are almost unknown, despite the vast amount consumed. Similarly, the Camba of Bolivia drink a lot, within a well-defined social ritual, with no ill-effects.

Contemporary problems with alcohol are more cultural, related to the meaning associated with alcohol, than physiological. Good point.

Unfortunately, Gladwell concedes another myth which goes against the grain of his argument: the belief that alcoholism is genetic. Consider some of his phrases:

- Around the middle of the last century, alcoholism began to be widely considered a disease: it was recognized that some proportion of the population was genetically susceptible to the effects of drinking

- Philomena Sappio (an Italian-American whose alcohol consumption was studied) could have had within her genome a grave susceptibility to alcohol. Because she lived in the protective world of New Haven's Italian community, it would never have become a problem

This excellent paper Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth College tries to seperate the impact of nature and nurture on a number of life-outcomes by studying adpoted children. It compares Korean children adopted by American families with their non-adopted siblings. I like this paper because the data is so clean, certainly compared to most natural experiments in the social sciences. These adoptive parents can't choose the children they want. They meet their child for the first time at an airport, unlike, say, in India, where it is not uncommon to adopt from within the clan.

The paper's main finding about drinking is that adopted children behave no differently from biological children. This would not be the case if alcoholism were genetic. Alcoholism does run in families, but this probably has more to do with upbringing than the genome.

The Sound of the Fury

...Peter Jackson, requiring a wrathful army for Helm's Deep, bravely ventured onto a cricket pitch, during a break, and asked twenty-five thousand fans to roar in unison. They obliged.

From the New Yorker

Re-thinking Clement Attlee

Was Clement Attlee a great Prime Minister? Or was he a bungling idiot?

This feels like an interesting question right now, because the two issues that define Attlee’s legacy are very similar to the issues that President Obama is grappling with – withdrawing from occupied countries and providing health care to the less fortunate.

As an Indian, my first instinct is that Clement Attlee was a bungling idiot. He was responsible for the British withdrawal from India in 1947. However one looks at it, the way the British withdrawal from India was managed, and the consequent partition of India, was an unmitigated disaster (as was Attlee's withdrawal from the British mandate of Palestine). What kind of a fool would chose to dismantle an edifice that had been built up over more than three hundred years - Emperor Jehangir's firman to allow the East India Company to set up a factory in Surat was issued in 1615 - in nine months? The kind of fool who had never before held any substantial responsibility. His Labour party had never been in government before. His sheer ignorance would have given him courage.

However, that is not how the British see Attlee. Surveys generally show that Atlee is one of the best loved British Prime Ministers of the twentieth century. This BBC survey shows Attlee, Churchill’s “modest man with much to be modest about”, at #3 out of 19 behind Churchill and Lloyd George. A more recent Newsnight poll in 2008 ranked Attlee at #2 behind Churchill among 12 post war PMs. His most beloved achievement? The NHS.

When I first read about this, I thought there was a pattern here. The NHS, a comprehensive medical system which is totally free at the point of use, entirely funded and managed by the state, is an astonishing enterprise. It is staggeringly vast and impossibly complex. By rights, it should collapse under its own weight. But, miraculously, it works. Okay, not perfectly, but certainly adequately. Maybe it took a beginner’s mind to even imagine that something as ambitious as the NHS could be created. Lack of experience fooled Attlee and his government of beginners into thinking he could just walk away from India without all hell breaking loose. The same lack of experience told him that it was possible to create something as ambitious as the NHS. The beginner’s mind comes with both risks and possibilities.

It turns out I was being too kind to Attlee. Neither he, nor his health minister Aneurin Bevan, dreamt up the NHS with the innocence of a beginner’s mind, and then willed it into existence. Nobody did. The NHS just happened.

This outstanding article by Atul Gawande talks about how. The entire health infrastructure that existed in Britain had been bombed down to rubble through WWII. Yet millions of injured servicemen, and displaced urbanites, evacuated by the government into the countryside, needed to be looked after. There was nobody to do the looking after except the government. By the time the war ended, the only health services that existed in Britain were delivered through this vast nationalized system that nobody would have dreamt possible, or maybe even wanted, if it didn’t already exist. Attlee and Bevan “creating the NHS” was nothing more than legislating to keep the status quo.

What Attlee’s legacy in India and Palestine demonstrate is that the consequences of incompetence are as grave as the consequences of evil. Attlee meant well, and had long supported the Indian freedom struggle. He did not intend to leave millions dead in the wake of British withdrawal and partition. Nor did he want the hurried British withdrawal from Palestine to destabilize the Middle East for generations. Yet, intended or not, the consequences of his actions were as horrible as those of other politicians with more explicitly evil intent.

The verdict of history? The British public has successfully forgotten about Empire, but lives with the NHS every day. Attlee’s spot in the great Prime Ministers rankings looks secure. The take away for President Obama? America will remember his health care reforms much more vividly than any events that unfold in Iraq or Afghanistan.
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Fact check: Clement Attlee did serve as Deputy Prime Minister as a part of a coalition governing arrangement between Labour, the Liberals and the Conservatives during the war. Churchill served as PM, and chaired the War cabinet. Previously, Attlee was a Major in the British Army during WWI, and gave up a legal career to become a social worker in London before being elected to Parliment.

Dumbo, the great educator

Psychologists think the ability to delay gratification is central to academic achievement, and more generally, to emotional intelligence.

Consider this Stanford psychology study: four year old children were given the option of a treat right now, say, a marshmallow, or waiting for two marshmallows. Years later, the children who were able to wait had better academic performance (SAT scores) and life outcomes (stronger friendships, fewer behavioural problems) than their more impatient cohorts.

Given this evidence, training children to delay gratification ought to be a central goal of education. The question is how?

The answer: take them to Disneyland.

Last weekend, I witnessed hundreds of children aged between four and twelve stand in line uncomplainingly for over an hour, on a hot, sultry Paris afternoon, to ride Dumbo, The Flying Elephant. The ride itself lasts between two and three minutes. The ride is pretty cool, the rider can make Dumbo fly higher or lower by toggling a little lever. Nonetheless, this was an impressive display of delayed gratification.

If this is what today's youngsters are capable of, it bodes well for the future of civilization.