Is The Umbrella Academy a remake of The Sound of Music?

The Umbrella Academy - Now on Netflix

The Sound of Music - circa 1965

Spoiler Alert

Season 1 of The Umbrella Academy is great. It features seven gifted children growing up in an exquisitely beautiful house. The children don’t have a mother. They’re being raised by an emotionally distant tyrant of a father who addresses them by serial number rather than by name.

The father is obsessed with the coming apocalypse. He has foreseen this terrible event by virtue of his unique insight. His only agenda is to forge his children into instruments of war who can prevent this apocalypse.

Through many adventures the children discover themselves, each other, and even learn to understand their father. They realise that their destiny is to prevent the apocalypse.

At the end of Season 1, they don’t quite succeed. They can’t stop the apocalypse. But they do escape from it. They live to fight another apocalypse on another day. Which, doubtless, will be the story of Season 2.

I was haunted by a sense of déjà vu through Season 1. I’d seen this story before. Until finally the penny popped – The Umbrella Academy is The Sound of Music, with the children rather than Maria as the central characters.

- Seven gifted children, check.

- Super-wealthy background, check.
- Distant tyrannical father, check.

- Looming apocalypse (the rise of Nazi Germany), check.
- Betrayal from within (Rolf the Nazi Postman), check
- Narrow but defiant escape from the apocalypse (Climb every mountain…), check.

The parallel is not perfect. By its logic, Maria would be a programmable robot, which is a bit harsh.

But the parallel also throws in relief what The Sound of Music didn’t show. Were the children really supposed to be pretty props singing along with Maria? What was it like to be Louisa? Or Brigitta? Did Friedrich ever hate his emotionally absent father? There is room for some creative reinterpretation...

The Von Trapp Family Singers

The Hargreeves Family Crimefighters

Finding Malgudi in the Mediterranean, with Victoria Hislop

Since I can’t physically holiday on the Mediterranean this summer, I’m doing the next best thing and reading about Mediterranean holiday locations.

I reread The Last Dance, by Victoria Hislop, a collection of short stories I’d picked up while travelling in Greece many years ago. I’m loving it. Because these vignettes of Greek village life could so easily have been set in RK Narayan’s Malgudi.

These are stories of a simple, happy people, living among friends and family members they have known for generations. They sometimes get into fracas with each other, but these frictions are quickly and happily resolved.

There is a story of the Malkis brothers who fight over an inherited street café, split it down the middle, but then make up and reunite. There is the story of Claire from Yorkshire, who is engaged to Andreas the Cypriot, who learns about her fiancé’s family and to feel at home in this place where it is really hot even at Christmas. The title story is about Theodoris, who shares a dance with his one true love on the night they both are getting married to others. Fortunately, this collection doesn’t feature any deeper tragedy or pathos.

Sometimes reality does intrude on this idyllic world. The anti-Euro Athens riots make an appearance in one story, sort of like the Indian independence movement makes an appearance in Swami and Friends. But for most part, this collection evokes a simple world that carries on despite these intrusions, like Tolkien’s Shire, or Asterix the Gaul’s indomitable village, or RK Narayan’s Malgudi.

“I am often asked, ‘Where is Malgudi?’” wrote RK Narayan in his introduction to Malgudi Days. “All I can say is it is imaginary and not to be found on any map…”. So, Malgudi can’t be found on a map of the Aegean. But it does have kindred spirits on those rocky islands.

From Malgudi Days

RK Narayan with his wife Rajam

Victoria Hislop with her husband Ian

A Death in the Ganj. The Death of the Dream that was The Ganj.

A Manifesto for McCluskiegunge

A Death in the Ganj, Konkana Sen Sharma’s debut as a director, is on Amazon Prime. It’s worth watching.

Featuring Mukul Sharma's iconic
blue Ambassador

It’s worth the time purely as a 70s nostalgia trip. 

The film is based on a short story by Konkana’s father Mukul Sharma - the the MS behind the Mind Sport column that used to appear in the Illustrated Weekly of India. 

It is about the Anglo-Indian community, like 36 Chowringhee Lane, Konkana’s mother Aparna Sen’s debut as a director (which remains the best movie ever made about Anglo-Indians). 

It prominently features a blue Ambassador, which is based on a blue Ambassador that Mukul Sharma owned during Konkana’s childhood. 

It involves an endless vacation where there is absolutely nothing to do except spend time with family members, and unspecified people who are sort of like family members, whether you want their company or not. Twenty first century vacations somehow don’t have those vast vacant spaces. 

But to me the most interesting thing about the movie is the setting – McCluskieganj – the settlement on the Chota Nagpur plateau which was meant to be a homeland for Anglo-Indians. The narrative arc of Death in the Ganj parallels the death of McCluskieganj itself.

The Anglo-Indians are (roughly) the children of British colonial officers who served in India and their Indian women. They were proud of their British roots, their (relatively) fair skin, and generally adopted their father’s names, religion and language.

Through the Raj, the Anglo-Indians remained a privileged class in Indian society. For example, an Anglo-Indian in the Indian Railways was paid more than a native officer of the same rank, but less than a white Britisher. They remained faithful to the Crown through the tumult of India’s freedom struggle. In their own eyes, they were “domiciled Europeans and 100% British”.

However, as the prospect of Indian independence became ever more plausible, and as the prospect of lakhs of Anglo-Indians being warmly welcomed “home” to England became ever less plausible, some amount of soul searching was perhaps inevitable.

Mr Ernest Timothy McCluskie of Park Street, Calcutta, a successful property broker and a member of the Bengal Legislative Council, responded to this historical moment by dreaming up McCluskiegunge. He found a land parcel of 10,000 acres that was watered by the Damodar and Jagriti Rivers and was connected by train to Calcutta. He leased this land in perpetuity from the Raja of Ratu, named this development after himself, and invited Anglo-Indians from across India to buy property here.

Mr McCluskie’s vision was much bigger than just a property deal.

McCluskiegunge was packaged as a clarion call to heroic adventure (see advert/ manifesto above), an exhortation to vigorous Anglo-Indian youth to shed their lethargy and bring civilization to the virgin forests of Chota Nagpur, sort of like American pioneers or Zionist kibbutzim. This could be read as a sacred duty, as McCluskiegunge was a “mulk” for Anglo-Indians, a promised land of their own.

If “mulk” is a self-consciously Urdu word (Hyderabad was ruled by the Nizam ul Mulk), the McCluskiegunge advert/ manifesto even more explicitly references Pakistan, “We see in McCluskiegunge the beginnings of what the Moslems call Pakistan but we call Anglo-India. A place in India where we can foregather and mix freely.”

And for a while, this dream worked. For a while, the forests of Chota Nagpur became Chota England. Spacious bungalows, tiger hunting, afternoon tea parties, ballroom dancing, piano music – McCluskiegunge had it all, everything the Anglo-Indians wanted, everything except jobs. There never was a reason why the kind of jobs vigorous young Anglo-Indians might want to do would migrate to The Ganj, and in the absence of those vital jobs, the Ganj went into a spiral of decline. Like Salman Rushdie’s Peccavistan, McCluskiegunge was incompletely imagined.

By the 70s it already was a quixotic museum piece, a parable about the dangers of putting ethnic purity above just-rub-along pragmatism. Today, with only twenty odd Anglo-Indian families left in The Ganj, it’s not clear if its unique Anglo-Indian flavour will even live on.

There is something distinctly illiberal about the idea of a “mulk” for Anglo-Indians, a pure ethnically clean homeland for a chosen people, far away from the cheek-by-jowl diversity and chaos of India’s great cities. So why does Konkana Sen Sharma, a strident liberal, show The Ganj in sympathetic light?

It feels a bit like Joan Baez singing “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”.

Once an idea is completely defeated, the idea and its champions acquire a sepia-toned sweetness. Liberals respond to the underdog, or the tragic-loser status that the defeated now have, rather than the ideas the underdogs once championed.

This is a dangerous and slippery slope. Ideas have a life of their own. I’m sure Joan Baez never imagined that white supremacists waving the Confederate flag would storm the US Capitol in the twenty first century.

So, is that likely to happen in India? Are the contemporary avatars of Mr Ernest Timothy McCluskie going to rise up and demand the creation/ restoration of their “mulk”?

Probably not. Because so many of them have emigrated.

Frank Anthony (who shares a name with India’s most celebrated Anglo-Indian parliamentarian) estimates that about 50% of the Anglo-Indian population have emigrated to Canada, Australia or England. Compare that to the ~15% emigration rates from Goa and the ~100% emigration rates of the Keralite Jews.

The remaining 50% are still very much here, embedded in every major Indian city, contributing to the tapestry of Indian life, but very far away from The Ganj that hasn’t quite died yet but is clearly fading away.

WandaVision: Another Retelling of Savitri-Satyavan

My family I are hooked on a TV miniseries called WandaVision. 

WandaVision is a part of the Marvel-verse - an alternative reality with many heroes and heroines who have amazing superpowers, whose narratives are all tangled together and sometimes inconsistent, where time and causality are fluid, where good characters sometimes discover the dark side within, but where the dividing line between good and evil is always discernible. 

Here is what I see going on in WandaVision. 

Wanda and Vision are a loving wife and husband. They live an idyllic suburban life in 1950s America, with a Chevrolet, a Frigidaire, chicken dinners and nosy neighbours. 

But that charming reality is not as it seems. 

In another greater reality, Wanda and Vision were Avengers! They were warriors for good fighting against evil. In this Avengers reality, Vision was killed on the battlefield. 

Wanda refused to give up on her fallen partner. 

Wanda used her superpowers to bring Vision back from the dead. 

Wanda created an alternative reality in which she and Vision could be united once more. 

So, WandaVision is about a strong virtuous woman with superpowers who brings her husband back from the dead. Where have I heard that before? 

In another magical alternative universe. In the alternative reality of Indian mythology, where many heroes and heroines have amazing superpowers, whose narratives are all tangled together and sometimes inconsistent, where time and causality are fluid, where good characters sometimes discover the dark side within, but where the dividing line between good and evil is always discernible.

Wanda's story is basically the Savitri-Satyavan story. 

Savitri was also a strong virtuous woman with superpowers who brought her husband Satyavan back from the dead. 

Savitri’s superpowers were her intelligence and devotion. Wanda’s superpowers include telekinesis, energy manipulation and neuroelectric interfacing. Sure, there are differences between the two characters, and the telling of the two stories. But if the two heroines were to meet, they would have plenty in common to talk about.

Savitri negotiating with Yama in
Raja Ravi Verma's Painting

"Asgard is not a place. Asgard is a people."

Surtur straddles the ruins of Asgard
as Thor and Hela face off

"Asgard is not a place. Asgard is a people."

But is it? 

Would Israel still be Israel if it were not in the holy land?

Would Hogwarts still be Hogwarts if it were rehoused in a steel and glass structure in London?

For context “Asgard is not a place. It’s a people” is from the Marvel movie Thor: Ragnarok! 

Thor (the most powerful hero in the universe) has used the demon Surtur to destroy his hometown Asgard. This will also destroy Hela (Thor’s evil sister) who derives her power from Asgard. 

Thor and his superhero friends rescue the people of Asgard from the collapsing city. They load them up into a spacecraft and ferry them off to a new life on a new planet. 

This collateral damage is worth it because as the all-father Odin explains to Thor “Asgard is not a place. It’s a people.” 

The all-father presents his argument as if it is obvious, as if it is self-evident that Asgard is its people. Hollywood clearly assumes that the trade-off is obvious, and Hollywood’s assumptions are a pretty good barometer of the zeitgeist. 

But stepping outside the Marvel-verse, is it really that obvious? Is it even sort of true at all?

There are plenty of real-life situations that parallel that of Asgard.

Consider the Maldives. The entire country is just about one meter above sea level. Most estimates are that the islands will be submerged by 2100. The people (about 500,000 people) could be relocated. But is it obvious to those people that the Maldives are not a place, but a people? 

Or Tehri - the ancient town on the banks of the sacred Baghirathi river - which was submerged under the Tehri dam? People were relocated. They lived. Were they OK?

Or Chernobyl. Its evacuee population was relocated to the purpose-built Soviet city of Slavutych (now in the Ukraine). Maybe these people were OK. Maybe Chernobyl was sort of soulless anyway.

Professor Stephen Landsberg, the Armchair Economist, asked this question sharply and provocatively after hurricane Katrina. Back in 2005 the American government was planning to spend over $200 billion on New Orleans. The pre-Katrina population of the New Orleans metro region was, say, 1 million. That is $200,000 per individual, $800,000 for a family of four. Would people rather take the lump sum of  $800,000 and relocate to an American city of their choice? Or have the government spend $200 billion on their behalf rebuilding New Orleans? 

Landsberg’s point was the most people would rather take the $800,000 and move. It’s a good point, as long as the thing being destroyed is not sacred, as long as “Asgard is not a place. It’s a people.”

I guess it hinges on whether the place in question is sacred. 

I guess mighty Odin the all-father is well qualified to take that decision.

Ari Ben Cannan in The Promised Land of Israel 
From the movie Exodus
Starring Paul Newman

Freddy Mercury. A Paki? Or a Zanzibari?

Bohemian Rhapsody - the superb Freddy Mercury biopic which triggered this post

[Scene: Heathrow airport, 1970]

Baggage handlers are on the tarmac unloading suitcases from a plane.

A longhaired, buck toothed, leather jacketed handler pauses. He was distracted by an eye-catching striped bag covered with stickers that hinted at its travels around the world.

Handler 1: “Oi, you missed one, you Paki.”

Handler 2 (Farrokh Bulsara): “I’m not from Pakistan!”

These are his first words. Farrokh Bulsara, soon to become Freddy Mercury, announces himself in his (excellent) biopic Bohemian Rhapsody with “I’m not from Pakistan”.

So, where is he from? 

From Zanzibar. 

Except that that doesn’t actually answer any questions. Why was a middle class Parsi family in Zanzibar? What was Freddy Mercury's back-story?

It turns out that the Bulsara family's back-story parallels that of the Gujaratis who were expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin. 

Zanzibar was a British protectorate in the mid twentieth century. Bomi Bulsara, Farrokh’s dad, worked for the colonial government as an officer in the Zanzibar High Court. Farrokh was born in Stone Town, Zanzibar. The family were comfortably off. They lived in a spacious apartment (now a Freddy Mercury museum) and employed a live-in nanny. They sent their son to boarding school in India, to St. Peter's in Panchgani. This wasn’t unusual. Indian boarding schools were designed for the children of colonial officers stationed in far-flung outposts of the Empire.

The Bulsara family’s comfortable Zanzibari base dissolved along with the Empire. 

In 1963, the British Empire transferred power to the Sultan of Zanzibar, Jamshid bin Abdullah, who was to rule as a constitutional monarch. The Arab Sultan held power for less than a month. He was overthrown in the Zanzibar Revolution, led by a charismatic former brick-layer called John Okkelo. The Socialist Republic of Zanzibar and Pemba was declared.

An orgy of violence was unleashed. Arab and Indian minorities were targeted. A BBC story says 17,000 people (out of a population of about 250,000) were slaughtered on the streets. Genocide claims are still being debated. Those who could fled. 

Six months later, the Socialist Republic of Zanzibar and Pemba ceased to exist. It was merged with Tanganiyka to create Tanzania (a synthetic coined name). This was eight years before Idi Amin expelled Asians from Uganda.

The Bulsara family arrived in the UK in 1964 as refugees from this chaos. Freddy was 17 then.  

How did that tumultuous backdrop shape Freddy Mercury? 

Freddy didn’t talk much about politics or about his family’s heritage. We can only conjecture. My conjecture is that that Zanzibar taught him the truth of Jim Morrison’s immortal words at the end of Roadhouse Blues:

“..Alright! Alright! Alright!

Jim Morrison. Freddy's philosopher?

Hey, listen! Listen! 

Listen, man! listen, man!

I don't know how many you people believe in astrology...

Yeah, that's right...that's right, baby, I...I am a Sagittarius

The most philosophical of all the signs

But anyway, I don't believe in it

I think it's a bunch of bullshit, myself

But I tell you this, man, 

I tell you this,

I don't know what's gonna happen, man, 

But I wanna have my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames.

Alright!”

Farrokh Bulsara was a Virgo, not a Sagittarius. But it seems he came to the same philosophical conclusion as Jim Morrison: that it isn’t all about how long you live, that it is about how much life you live while you’re still alive. 

Thanks Farrokh/ Freddy. For being a Paki, a Zanzibari, a Parsi, a Brit, a hero.

Farrokh Bulsara in Panchgani

Wikileaks reveals…the importance of table manners

Julian Assange, photographed outside Ellingham Hall

Wikileaks has radically changed the way I see our world. Not the way I see war, liberty or the role of the state – a lot of the material Wikileaks leaked, was, frankly, unsurprising – but the way I see table manners. Wikileaks' leadership team retained what sanity they had, thanks to a regimen of strict table manners.

This thought comes from the excellent documentary We Steal Secrets: the Story of Wikileaks. In it, there is a period when the Wikileaks inner circle of about fifteen people are stuck in Ellingham Hall, Norfolk, on journalist Vaughn Smith’s country estate. They can’t leave Ellingham Hall; the MI6, CIA etc. are out to get them. So they’re stuck in the middle of nowhere, with just each other for company, united only by their distrust of the outside world, each day melting into the next, as weeks run into months which run into years.

How did they manage to keep things civilized? By enforcing very strict rules on table manners. Vaughn Smith and his housekeeper enforced strict table etiquette, three meals a day, for over five hundred days of maddening claustrophobia.

Must have been the same dynamic in colonial officer’s messes, and up in the tea plantations.

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.

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

James Bond style woozling

Sitting around staring at brick walls is called "woozling" in my family. I just discovered that James Bond woozles too. From this interview with Daniel Craig:

"I keep an energy level up through filming and then as soon as it finishes I just relax and drop. We all do. You’ll find most of the crew kind of sitting around staring at brick walls because it’s been full on, all day, every day. "

Re-imagining Snow White

Snow White and the Huntsman

Just watched Snow White and the Huntsman. Enjoyed the movie, in much the same way that I enjoy watching Brendan Nash bat. 

Brendan Nash in action

Nash doesn’t strike the ball especially sweetly. However, as a white guy playing for the West Indies, he asks some interesting questions of unspoken assumptions, and for that reason is one of my favourite contemporary cricketers.

Similarly, Snow White and the Huntsman suffers from wooden acting, and a plot line that occasionally stalls. However, it does challenge the assumption that fairy tales are meant for children, and therefore need to be told in a brightly-lit Disney-esque style. This telling is dark. The palette is wintry: all greys, blacks, browns and whites, broken only by the occasional splash of blood red. This menacing mood works. It feels more true to the dark heart of the Grimm Brothers’ story than Disney’s incongruously cheery style.

I would love to see an even more radical reinvention of Snow White. Say, one in which Snow White is offered the throne, and refuses, because she prefers to live in the woods with her beloved dwarves. Unfortunately, this telling isn’t that adventurous or brave. It’s about style, not revolution. But its still worth the watch just for its style.

Ithaka is to some what Tatooine is to others

Luke Skywalker strides towards the twin sunset on Tatooine

I'd posted yesterday about the poem "Keep Ithaka always in the mind", in which Ithaka is a metaphor for home, for integrity. Other classical traditions have their own Ithakas, their own sacred places that stand for integrity. For instance, Star Wars fans might think of Tatooine - the desert planet in a galaxy far, far away where Luke Skywalker was raised - as their Ithaka.

The mythic, metaphorical Ithaka has a physical analogue: the island of Ithaki in western Greece. It turns out that Tatooine also has a physical analogue: Tataouine, in southern Tunisia.

George Lucas filmed the desert landscapes of Tatooine on location in Tunisia, the Breber architecture in Tataouine is recognizably the inspiration behind Luke Skywalker's childhood home. Apparently, he borrowed the name of a local town as well. Adherents of the Jedi faith are now making pilgrimages to Tataouine. The World's latest Technology podcast has a story about a Jedi knight, Mark from Norwich, who got married at Tataouine.

If only the people in power would uphold Britain's traditions of tolerance and include the Jedi religion on the census questionnaire, conversion to the Jedi faith would hit a tipping point...pilgrim traffic to the Tunisian Sahara would take off...the Tunisian economy would improve...the Arab Spring would be reinforced...inexpensive and effective nation-building in the Arab world!

Berber granaries in Tataouine, Tunisia

Is Mark Zuckerberg richer than Mr Darcy?

This picture of Mark Zuckerberg’s wedding with Priscilla Chan was one of the few truly heart warming images from the last few weeks. This picture was so heart-warming because I learnt something new: I didn’t know Zuckerberg’s girlfriend was Asian. This knowledge re-framed the Zuckerberg wedding for me, as a fellow Asian. This isn’t just another wedding photo any more. It is now the picture of every Tiger Mom’s most fervent dream coming true. Dennis and Yvonne Chan, ex-refugee immigrants who ran a Chinese takeaway in Boston, must be so happy with their multi-billionaire son-in-law. How nice for them!

As my heart warmed to the Chan family’s good fortune, I started slipping into an authentic Tiger Mom mindset, and some more tough-minded thoughts took shape. A good Tiger Mom would do some rigorous competitive benchmarking. She would ask herself, “Mark Zuckerberg is a nice boy, but is he really rich enough for Priscilla? Is he as rich as Mrs. Bennet's son-in-law, Mr. Darcy? You know, the one they want to marry Elizabeth off to?”

It turns out Mrs Chan need not have worried, her son-in-law compares very well with Mrs Bennet’s son-in-law. Jane Austen tells us that Mr Darcy had an income of ten thousand pounds per year, in 1810, in England. Converted into today’s money, that is about $600,000 per year. That is a tidy income, but feels distinctly imaginable, more affluent-professional than masters-of-the-universe, certainly not the kind of money that animates the Occupy Wall Street movement. A self respecting Tiger Mom would wish more for her children.

So, is that game, set and match to Mrs Chan? Was Mr Darcy really no better off than assorted corporate vice presidents? Mr Darcy owned half of Derbyshire and employed a vast domestic staff, but he couldn’t buy an asprin, or watch the World Cup finals on HDTV. Can one really compare his situation to ours? To whatever extent comparisons are possible, it seems like our living standards have improved so much that millions of upper middle class professionals enjoy a quality of life that is equivalent to that of the most privileged landed aristocrats just two hundred years ago, which is a comforting thought in these troubled times.

Mrs. Bennet’s partisans might argue that relative income matters more than absolute income. This is reasonable. Behavioural economics and evolutionary biology suggest that people care more about status than about absolute living standards. Mr Darcy was high status, certainly higher status than the armies of contemporary upper middle class professionals who share his living standards. But how does his relative income or status compare with Mark Zuckerberg?

The American academic James Heldman tells us that Mr Darcy’s income of 10,000 pounds per year was 300 times the per capita income in his day. The per capita income in today’s America is $48,000, so a contemporary Mr Darcy would make approximately $15 million per annum, which is starting to feel appropriately rarified. Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune is at least $10 billion. If that earns risk free returns of 2% p.a., that is an income of $200 million, which is an order of magnitude more than what our contemporary Mr Darcy makes.

James Heldman also refers to the economic historian G.E. Mingay, who estimates that there were only 400 families among the landed gentry of England with an income in the range of 5,000 to 50,000 pounds per annum, with the average being about 10,000. To keep things simple, lets say that puts Mr Darcy in at about the 200th richest man in his England. Mark Zuckerberg is the 14th richest person in his America, trumping Mr Darcy once again, without any fiddly adjustments for the larger population in today’s America. However one looks at the numbers, our contemporary Tiger Mom Mrs. Chan has outperformed the proto-Tiger Mom Mrs. Bennet.

At this point, the top performing Tiger Mom in the jungle would need to pause, offer the other Tiger Moms a cup of tea, and initiate a conversation about how money doesn’t really matter, that there are many qualitative things like character and compatiability that make a marriage successful. This blog would like to join the Tiger Moms in drinking a cup of tea. This blog would also like to wish all happiness to the newlyweds Mark and Priscilla. May they play many Limca Cuts.

What Ross, Chandler and the F.R.I.E.N.D.S really lived through, by Joshua Ferris

F.R.I.E.N.D.S was more than a successful TV serial, it was a cultural phenomenon. I think it had such a big impact, beyond what one would expect of any well-written, well performed sitcom, because it filled in a gap in popular culture. It was the first extensive exploration of a life stage that people like us now routinely live through, but which falls outside our traditional frameworks of life stages.

Ross, Chandler, Rachel, Monica, Phoebe and Joey have finished with formal education, have started careers, but haven't yet married or started families. This time in life falls somewhere between youth and adulthood, somewhere between brahmacharya and grihastashram in the Hindu tradition. This life-stage is growing: people live longer, young men no longer get drafted into armies, more women are becoming professionals, careers demand ever longer apprenticeships. This is clearly a formative stage in life, at least as formative as the university years. This is the time in life when most of my peers found their professions and life-partners, and solidified their identities. While the angst of both youth and middle age have been mined extensively in popular culture - think Rebel Without A Cause and American Beauty - the angst of this life stage remains relatively unexplored. F.R.I.E.N.D.S captured the public imagination so powerfully because it was good, but also because it was the first show to extensively explore this life-space (the closest benchmark I can think of are one-dimensional rom-coms).

However, for all that, even F.R.I.E.N.D.S didn't explore one huge aspect of this life stage: work. In my experience, this is the life stage when work consumes more psychic energy than anything else. This is the time when the soaring expectations of youth are still very much alive, when the frustrations of the real world are an everyday reality, and when the tension between those two haven't yet found a happy equilibrium.

In real life, a young scientist like Ross probably spends a vast chunk of his energy obsessing about whether his research paper will get published, about where he will get his next grant from, and about how he can get on to this high profile consortium that might lead to a couple of Nobel Prizes. He would spend most of his social time with other research scientists. They would share, and therefore amplify, each other's career anxieties, and gossip endlessly about other research scientists. A young business executive like Chandler would obsess about departmental politics, about the hopeless incompetence of his colleagues, and about whether he should go work on Wall Street and get seriously rich. A few blocks away, journalist Carrie Bradshaw might obsess about whether freelance writing about her friend's love lives will ever win her the Pulitzer Prize, and if she should become a real journalist who risks losing an eye reporting from a war-zone.

In F.R.I.E.N.D.S, work forms the backdrop to the characters' lives. In reality, work would be in the foreground. I accepted that easily, assuming that other people's work-lives are intrinsically boring. It turns out, that assumption was wrong.

I just read this outstanding book called Then We Came To The End, by Joshua Ferris, which takes the work-lives of people like us as its raw material, and turns it into a thoroughly entertaining novel. It is set in an advertising agency, in Chicago. This agency is a big little world. It includes people of all sorts - married people, blacks, people with kids, people with cancer, people who die. But "we", the collective of cool kids from whose viewpoint this story is written, the gang who are the social and spiritual core of the agency, are squarely in the F.R.I.E.N.D.S stage in life.  

A sample of one character's thoughts:

"good God, was work so meaningless? Was life so meaningless? It reminded him of when an ad got watered down by a client, and watered down, until everything interesting about the ad disappeared. Carl still had to write copy for it. The art director still had to put the drop shadow where the drop shadow belonged and the logo in its proper place. That was the process known as polishing the turd. Those two poor saps hosing down the alleyway were just doing the same thing. All over America, in fact, people were up and out of their beds today in a continuing effort to polish turds. Sure, for the sake of survival, but more immediately, for the sake of some sadistic manager or shit-brained client whose small imagination and numbingly dumb ideas were bleaching the world of all relevancy and hope..."

The novel takes a little dig at itself. There is a writer at the agency,

Joshua Ferris

"working on a failed novel. He described it as "small and angry". We all wondered who the hell would buy small and angry. We asked him what it was about. "Work," he replied. A small, angry book about work. Now there was a guaranteed best seller. There was a fun read on the beach. We suggested alternative topics on subjects that mattered to us. "But those don't interest me" he said. "The fact that we spend most of our lives at work, that interests me." Truly noble, we said to him."

That is what this book is. It is a small, angry book about us at work. It has observed us so precisely that the blurb from The Times printed on the back cover is entirely true. "Very funny, intense and exhilarating...for the first time in fiction, it has truly captured the way we work". In a way, Joshua Ferris' book completes the F.R.I.E.N.D.S life experience.

Happy Easter from Anthony Gonsalves

An old friend put me on the spot recently, and quizzed me on how I found the enthu to keep blogging.

I wasn't expecting the question. So, understandably, I lapsed into my native language: geek-speak. I chuntered on about "intrinsic motivation" and "the universal need for self-expression, for which there are only limited opportunities in contemporary corporate life". Instead, I really should have answered my friend musically, by serenading him with the Amitabh Bachchan - Kishore Kumar classic "My name is Anthony Gonsalves".

Anthony Gonsalves has a real insight into an amateur blogger's psyche. His phrase "you are a sophisticated rhetorician intoxicated by the exuberance of your own verbosity", is spot on. In fact, if I'm asked the same question this Easter weekend, I might enhance my answer by emerging from an egg, unless "such extenuating circumstances coerce me to preclude you from such extravagance".

Happy Easter blog readers. For further clarification, please refer roop mahal, prem galli, koli नंबर चार सौ बीस . Excuse me, please!

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...

Would Captain Haddock have had a Scottish accent?

Blistering barnacles! Thundering typhoons! Ostrogoths! Bashi bazouks! Why has Steven Spielberg given Captain Haddock a Scottish accent?

Pithecanthropus! Lily livered landlubbers! Troglodytes!

I caught the Tintin movie on a flight recently, and it was a mixed bag. I loved the look. The motion capture technique works well. It strikes a  nice balance between maintaining the texture of the original comic and creating something contemporary. But the movie takes a bunch of arbitrary, and entirely unnecessary, liberties with the story and characterization, which grates on committed, long-term Tintin fans like me.

Like, for example, Captain Haddock's Scottish accent. There is no indication in any of Herge's comics that the Captain is Scottish. One doesn't have to be a Scot to love Scotch. Sure, Captain Haddock still is endearing even with his accent, but why introduce this Scottish distraction? 

Scottish identity is especially distinctive and pungent right now, with a referendum looming on Scotland's independence. A Scottish accent also communicates class. The Scottish upper classes - the kind of people who trace their lineage to colonial naval captains, are heirs to stately homes, and are christened Archibald - typically speak with upper-class English accents. Even The Scotsman is not sure how to react to this Scottish Haddock. Embrace him, because he is cool and Scottish? Or cringe, because he reinforces the stereotype of the Scot as a drunken grouch with a heart-of-gold? I don't think Spielberg is trying to stir these ghosts, but by treading on this ground, he inevitably does so.  

Fortunately, Spielberg's Tintin hasn't been saturated with a specific identity. He remains the Tintin we grew up with - the Tintin of indeterminate age, social class, nationality, sexuality and politics - which is the genius of Tintin. His ambiguity is his strength. Tintin is neutral. So, it is easy to project any self, any identity, into Tintin. As a Tam Bram boy in Madras, I didn't have to make an effort to locate myself in Tintin's skin, and go exploring the world of the Incas, Tibet, Al Capone's Chicago, Syldavia or the moon. I would have had a harder time getting myself into a Scottish, or even an explicitly Belgian, Tintin.

Another grouse: they don't sail to the Caribbean in search of Red Rackham's Treasure. Surely, they can't edit out that sequence! Exploring the wreck of the Unicorn in Professor Calculus' anti-shark submarine would make for some wonderful cinema.

I blame Steven Spielberg for these grating deviations from Herge's script, rather than his co-producer Peter Jackson. Steven Spielberg first heard about Tintin when his Indiana Jones character was likened to Tintin. Peter Jackson grew up as a Tintin devotee. He also grew up as a Lord of the Rings devotee, and he struck that delicate balance between fidelity and re-interpretation perfectly when he made the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Peter Jackson will be directing the next Tintin film, so I'm optimistic that the next film will show a more refined instinct for what is, and is not, sacred about Tintin.

Peter Jackson could do worse than to cast himself as a Kiwi Captain Haddock. He looks the part. Check out the featurette below...

Did Jesus come before Christ? Or Christ before Jesus?

I read, and enjoyed, a book that called Christ a scoundrel. The book is by Philip Pullman, a well known atheist. Pullman isn’t being subtle about his name calling, Christ is referred to as a scoundrel in bold print, in the book’s title.

Initially, I wasn’t sure if I should be blogging about a book that calls Christ a scoundrel, I'm not here to offend people. Then, I found that the Church of England Newspaper called the book “magnificent” (while noting that five hundred years ago Philip Pullman would have been burnt at stake as a heretic). The former Bishop of Edinburgh wrote a thoughtful and positive review in The Guardian. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s review found in it “a voice of genuine spiritual authority”. My blogging about the scoundrel Christ should be okay.

Pullman’s book is a retelling of the life of Jesus, with a twist.

In Pullman's telling, Jesus is born with a twin brother called Christ. Jesus is a passionate, charismatic idealist. Christ is a clever, careful pragmatist, an apparatchik. Jesus connects with real people, and moves or exhorts them to a more fulfilling life. Christ hero-worships his brother Jesus, diligently records his words, and conceives of an institution he calls “the church” to celebrate and immortalize Jesus, an idea Jesus despises.

Jesus says “if anyone hits you on the right cheek, offer him the left as well...love your enemies, and pray for them...The road that leads to life is a hard one, and it passes through a narrow gate, but the road to destruction is easy, and the gate is broad...do to others as you hope they would do to you.”

Christ says “think of the advantages if there were a body of believers, a structure, an organization already in place...I can see the whole world united in this Kingdom of the faithful...local groups under the guidance of a wise elder in the region, the regional leaders all answering to the authority of one supreme director, a kind of regent of God on earth...I can see Caesar himself having to bow down before this body, and offer obeisance to God’s own kingdom here in the world...I can see the majesty and splendour of the great temples, the courts, the palaces devoted to the glory of God, and I can see this whole wonderful creation lasting for generation after generation.”

Pullman makes no secret of his contempt for the church, his anger about “the Crusades, the witch-hunts, the heretic-burnings, the narrow fanatical zeal that comes so swiftly and naturally to some individuals in positions of power when faith gives them an excuse”. His character Christ is written to be the object of this contempt, this anger. Pullman explains: “I wanted this Christ to embody as much as possible of what the church later did to alter, edit and ignore the words of Jesus, and to benefit from his death and supposed resurrection.”

So, in Pullman's story, Christ betrays Jesus to the Romans. The church needs the crucifixion to happen, to serve as its founding myth. Pullman sees the church as the judas who betrays Jesus.

Yet, paradoxically, by writing Jesus and Christ as distinct characters, and by juxtaposing them, Pullman liberates the good man Jesus from the scoundrel Christ. Jesus' greatness is so much more apparent when the evil that has been done in his name can be decanted into another character.

Even his portrayal of the scoundrel Christ is kinder than it might have been. Pullman explains, “Christ developed in a way I hadn’t expected, and found himself with a human conscience, tempted and torn and compromised”. The modern church has good reason to be so relaxed about Pullman’s heresy.

I find I can relate to this tension - between an ideal and an institution that claims to stand for that ideal - more directly, more emotionally, by porting it into an Indian context. These lines from Tagore’s Gitanjali are often cited as the animating spirit behind India’s freedom:

"Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason
has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action---
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake."

Unsurprisingly, the Republic of India doesn’t always live up to Tagore’s ideal. That isn’t a reason to lose faith in either Tagore’s ideal or in the Indian republic.

Perhaps the only certainty with any institution is that the institution seeks to enhance its own power. This is true for nation states, churches, business corporations, NGOs, universities, armies...the whole shooting match...they’re all out to turn themselves into something majestic, splendid and glorious, lasting generation after generation. In the process, they can do terrible things. Limiting their power, so terrible things happen less often, is good. Yoking that power to a higher ideal, doesn’t always work, but is not bad.

So, just how much of a scoundrel is Pullman's Christ, thought of both as a character in this story, as well as a metaphor for the church as an institution?

Pullman's narrative starts at Jesus' conception. The story continues along Jesus' noble path - rejecting Satan's temptations, the sermon on the mount, the cleansing of the temple - until it descends to the squalor of Christ taking money from Caiaphas to betray Jesus. That narrative arc feels like the fall of man. it shows Christ as a scoundrel.

However, Jesus is not Adam. His story didn't begin at his conception. Jesus was born into a context, a context which is apparent even in Pullman's tight narrative. Jesus was born into a world of brutal Roman oppressors, of the rigid and corrupt Jewish establishment, and of any number of transient spiritual cults. These cults, however transient, gave people something they valued - a sense of purpose and belonging. In that context, creating an durable institution that would provide people with some of this value feels like the right thing to do.

Was it worth betraying Jesus to create such an institution? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe Pullman's Christ is like one of John Le Carre's spies, Smiley's people, doing shady deals that may or may not work, for a cause that may or may not turn out to be just, like Kim Philby, the upper-class Englishman who betrayed his people to spy for the soviets because he sincerely believed in the communist ideal. Maybe Christ's dilemma was like Brutus': Brutus loved Caesar, but loved Rome more. History judged Brutus kindly. Either way, Christ seen in context is an ambiguous character, not obviously a scoundrel.

Or maybe (I don't like this thought, but it is too strong to resist) it comes down to youth. Jesus had the charisma, idealism and moral clarity of youth. Like John Kennedy, Jim Morrison and James Dean, like Gautam Buddha, Adi Shankara and Swami Vivekananda, Jesus died young, and remained pure. Christ lived on, to be tarnished by an imperfect world, to be called a scoundrel for his troubles. Looked at this way, the benediction that follows most naturally from the life of Jesus and Christ are the words of another man who was once called Judas: "may you stay, forever young".