Sachin Tendulkar on Dvaita and Advaita

Sachin Tendulkar and Cheteshwar Pujara

Cheteshwar Pujara, looking back on his test debut, remembers that “ he (Sachin) told me that God has given you this chance to play; he will help you score runs, don’t worry.” 

Pujara’s words give devout Sachinists a rare insight into Sachin's religious thought. To Sachin, it is clearly self-evident that God exists, and that God is merciful and kind. Sachin also seems to be describing a God who is out-there rather than in-here, the Dvaita God rather than the Advaita God. He is not asking Pujara to search for the spark of the divine that dwells within, he is asking Pujara to trust in the Almighty, a power distinct and different from Pujara. 

Sachin’s advice worked. Pujara kept his cool and made a fourth inning 72 to steer India to a memorable series win against Australia. That is good evidence in support of Sachin’s theology. 

Spiritual faith can’t be evaluated for truth, because its truth or falsehood can never be empirically tested. Spiritual faith can only be judged, if it can be judged at all, by the yardstick of usefulness: does this faith result in better human behaviour or performance? Pujara’s experience suggests that trusting God, and therefore freeing up the mind and spirit to be present in the moment, does improve performance. 

Sachin believing instinctively in a God-out-there, in a higher power than man, feels natural. He is so gifted he could make an atheist believe in God. 

Radheya and his Guru Parashurama

Yet the Gods are capricious. They can be cruel even to the devout, even to their most favoured sons. The gifts the Gods give so liberally they can take away, especially when they are most needed.

This happened to Sachin at a pivot point in history. After he was player of the tournament in the 2003 World Cup, he was touring Australia with Saurav Ganguly’s team in 2004. India were going toe to toe, eyeball to eyeball, with Steve Waugh’s team, the greatest cricket team since Clive Lloyd’s Windies. India were playing with courage, conviction and skill, matching the Aussies’ every move. Dada, Rahul, Laxman and Viru had all scored career defining centuries. 

But where was our best player? Sachin was missing. 

It was as if Sachin was Radheya in the Mahabharata, the greatest archer in the great war at Kurukshetra, who lost his skills at the war’s most crucial moment. In the first three tests, Sachin had managed scores of 0, 0, 44, 1 and 37. Worse than the scores themselves was the way he was batting: scratching around, groping for the ball, hanging his bat out to dry. 

Now, even Sachin was a mere mortal. 

As the series reached its climax, Sachin responded to his mortality by reaching within, by discovering that he was man enough to make his own destiny.

For the final and decisive test match in Sydney, Steve Waugh’s last match, Sachin turned his game upside down. He did not put his trust in God. He did not trust his God-given instincts. He did not play at anything outside the off stump, an area which had been so productive for him over the years. He did not drive at half volleys secure in the knowledge that the Gods would guide the ball to the cover boundary instead of into second slip’s hands. 

Sachin playing the shot
he denied himself in Sydney

He completely cut out his favourite offside shots. He didn't score a single boundary between point and long-off. He made the Aussies bowl on to his pads, batted all day with VVS Laxman, remained unbeaten on 241, and took India to a position from where Australia could not win.

This was unquestionably Sachin’s greatest innings, and it was completely unlike anything Sachin had ever played before. It wasn’t about incandescent, outrageous talent blowing away the opposition. It was about character and craftsmanship, grit and determination, the gifts of the God-found-within as much as the God-above. 

Sachin did not turn his back on the Gods. He was not bitter that the Gods had abandoned him. He accepted God's  wrath as graciously as he accepted His munificence. But Sachin was no longer solely dependent on God's munificence; he was now twice-born, having given expression to the God-within as well as the God-above. 

On his test debut, Pujara discovered that the Gods can be kind, the Gods had given him a chance to play for India. He found out that the Gods can be cruel, like with the grubber from Mitchell Johnson that got him LBW in his first test innings. He discovered that faith in God can be useful, like the faith that kept him calm during his match-winning second innings. But the longer he plays, the more he will discover that he needs to find the God-within to join the ranks of India’s great players, like Saurav Ganguly, Zaheer Khan, Anil Kumble, Sunil Gavaskar, or that ultimate fighter, Mohinder Amarnath. Or like Sachin Himself.

Avatar: The Worship of Vishnu

Watch Avatar. It’s a great film. If you have watched Avatar as entertainment, I urge you to watch it again, now with a piety in your heart, in the spirit of bhakti, for this is no ordinary Hollywood blockbuster, it is the tale of a blue-skinned hero, animated by a celestial spirit, who was born to save god’s righteous people, and leads them to glorious victory over evil.

Our blue-skinned hero’s people are noble and devout. Yet, our hero arrives among them in troubled times. Many doubt him. Unfazed by the doubters, our glorious hero slays demons, charms the tribal elders, frolics in a scented grove with a beauteous maiden, does battle to save his father’s soul, and rides the skies on a sacred eagle. He is accepted as one of the chosen people, is appointed commander-in-chief, and leads his tribe into an apocalyptic battle that pits right against wrong, good against evil. He leads with courage and cunning in this battle, wins a decisive victory, and restores the natural order of the universe.

You’ve heard this story before, you will hear this story again. In James Cameron's telling of this story, the blue-skinned avatar is called jakesully, the animating spirit is Jake Sully, the righteous tribe are the Na'vi of Pandora, the slain demon is a Thantor, the beauteous maiden is Neytiri, the father figure is Dr Grace Augustine, the sacred eagle is a Toruk, and the evil forces defeated in the apocalyptic battle are the US Marines. In previous tellings of this story, the blue-skinned avatar is called Rama, the animating spirit is Vishnu, the righteous tribe are the Raghuvanshi of Aryavrata, the slain demon is Taataka, the beauteous maiden is Sita (or perhaps Radha is better cast?), the father figure is Dasharatha, the sacred eagle is Garuda, and the evil forces defeated in battle are Ravana's rakshasas.

Other Vaishnavite inspirations are less obvious. Are the floating mountains which protect Pandora's sacred forests inspired by Govardhan? Is the carriage of the Na'vi people, who walk tall and lithe, and swish their tails with pride, inspired by the vanaras of Kishkinda?

Google tells me that these parallels haven't gone unnoticed. Some cranks were offended. Many Hindus, including me, enjoy these resonances. A film maker called Sudipto Chattopadhyay likened Jake Sully to Kalki, the long awaited tenth avatar of Vishnu. One of the beautiful things about Kalki is that every tribe, every culture can locate their own messiah in that placeholder.

The story that you have heard before, that you will hear again, is what Joseph Campbell called the monomyth, the single narrative that underlies all the great stories ever told, the Odyssey, the Norse myths, the stories of Rama, and Gautam Buddha and Jesus. Contemporary mythology - Lord of the Rings, Narnia, Star Wars and now Avatar - follows the same narrative structure, sometimes instinctively, sometimes intentionally.

Re-telling the monomyth becomes interesting because of rich detail which Avatar has in plenty, like, the complete Maori-based Na'vi language invented for the film, or the coral reef inspired jungle-scapes of Pandora. These stories aren’t about surprise endings. They gain meaning, resonance and emotional heft with repetition. The story of Rama is retold every Dussera. The story of Krishna is retold every Janmashtami. Perhaps the story of Jake Sully will be retold every April 22, on Earth Day, to honour the Na'vi's Gaian ethos? Perhaps we will be blessed with an Oscar winning sequel?

Kannadasan and Krishna Consciousness in the Peak District

காட்டுக்கேது தோட்டக்காரன் இதுதான் என் கட்சி

kattukkethu thottakaran, ithuthan en katchi

These words are from a favourite old song by Kannadasan, one of Tamil cinema’s greatest and most celebrated poets. This translates roughly to: does the forest have a gardener? His side is the side I’m on.

As it turns out, the forest does have a gardener. His name is Les Morson. His side is the Hartington Sports Committee. My family and I discovered him, and the woods named in his honour, on a recent walk through the Peak District National Park.





Kannadasan’s lyrics were written for a character disowned by his family, trying to assert that he still is one of God’s people. In that context, the kattukku thottakaran, the forest gardener, probably refers to God. Krishna is vanmaali, literally forest gardener, in many Indian traditions.

It seems perfectly reasonable to assume that when Mr Les Morson starting planting trees to make a forest, he did not intend to discover his inner Krishna-avatar, even if that is in fact what he did. The Lord manifests himself in mysterious ways.

Etah, ASBOs and Skybet

"I started my management career in a backward village in Etah, Uttar Pradesh. I lived in the village, as one of the local people, trying to improve their lives.

Women in my village walked five miles each way, every day, to get water for their families. This was obviously a big effort; it left them physically drained. Couldn’t we improve these women’s lives by putting in a water pump, right here, in our village? Of course, easily done. My company bought and installed a new water pump in the village. But that didn’t work out. The women still had to do their daily hike for water because the water pump never worked. It got vandalized at night, either for components or by local boys with nothing better to do. My company repaired the pump, again and again. But it never worked.

The breakthrough came when the company stopped buying the pump, and said the villagers would have to buy a new pump themselves. Sure the company could top the pot up with cash if needed, but each family in the village would have to contribute towards buying the pump. There were no exemptions for poor families. The could make really small contributions of one or two rupees. But everyone had to contribute. It took months of conversation, cajoling and threats of being socially ostracized to get every family to contribute. But once they got there, once the villagers had their pump with their own hard earned money, the pump stayed in repair. People would protect their pump from thieves, vandals knew they would be ostracized. Nobody cares about a company’s pump."

This is not a parable. I heard this story as a historical account, from a friend who now teaches at Stanford. He started his career with Unilever India as a management trainee. This prestigious Unilever program places trainees in villages in Etah, a backward part of Uttar Pradesh, for six weeks.

This placement provides Unilever trainees - who mostly are privileged, ambitious, well-educated, upper-middle-class youngsters from India’s metros - with a lifetime supply of interesting stories. There have been insinuations that the sole purpose of the Etah placement is to equip management trainees with good stories. These insinuations are not true. Unilever has a dairy factory in Etah. The company is engaged in an Integrated Rural Development Program (IRDP) in the surrounding villages to improve the supply of milk to its factory. Management trainee placement in Etah is a part of this larger serious-minded program.

This story keeps coming back to my mind because its insight, call it the Etah Insight - that public enterprises work only if the populace are emotionally invested in the enterprise - feels bleeding obvious, but is so often ignored.

For instance, just last month, the Con - Lib government in the UK announced an emergency budget. They are raising the personal allowance by $1000; so 880,000 families will be taken out of the income tax net. This sounds both pro-poor and fiscally responsible, and has attracted almost no comment from the mainstream media. However, looked at through the lens of the Etah Insight, it could actually mean 880,000 more families have less of an emotional stake in their society’s success.

Taxes need not be about revenues. They could have a role to play even in households who receive more in benefits than they would ever pay in taxes. People who realize that benefits and government services are not free are more likely to use these services responsibly and respect the society which provides these benefits.

Taxes could be re-framed, like voting, as a part of a broader social contract. Benefits become a part of a contract rather than a pure entitlement. Taxes, despite being involuntary, could help foster a sense of ownership in the “broken society” that David Cameron’s Conservatives once cared so much about.

Stimulus spending, which is a bit like buying water pumps for villages, is in the news across the pond. The commentary is predictably sterile and partisan, with the left talking up spending and the right claiming that the $787 billion stimulus did not work. The Etah Insight suggests that the more creative conversation is in the middle and a few levels deeper; about precisely where stimulus spending would work, which depends mostly on whether the social norms to make stimulus work are in place. Will the stimulus pumps remain intact, or will they just get vandalized by the local yobs?

The Etah Insight also suggests that the pain of paying taxes matters. It is clearly easier to collect taxes like VAT and TDS, which are perceived as higher prices or lower incomes rather than as a price paid for governance. However, making it necessary to pay hard cash for government services could produce a more engaged, and ultimately more successful, citizenry.

The Etah insight is not on the public agenda, but the bookies are one constituency who seem to get the idea. Betting remained robustly recession proof through this World Cup. Why? Skybet’s advertising slogan hit the bunny on the nose: it matters more if there’s money on it.

Vishwaroopam and Florida

We’ve found the culprits. We know who dun it. It’s them Adam and Eve, residents of Eden Gardens, Paradise, PL24 2SG. They inspired the Cruella de Vils slaughtering innocent baby pythons in Florida.

There are serious arguments being made for the extermination of the Florida python. Learned Associate Professors believe that the python is a threat to delicately balanced ecosystems. Yet, I can’t help noticing that other non-native species that are spreading through the American south, like, for instance, wild hogs, are treated differently. Hogs are also large, potentially violent, omnivorous, fast breeding, adaptive, mobile, elusive, and are potentially upsetting the balance of many delicate American ecosystems. But unlike pythons, nobody is trying to wipe them out. Why?

My hunch is that this is simply because pythons are snakes. Snakes have had bad rap, negative symbolic associations, ever since they were cast, through no fault of their own, in the villain’s role in the legend of Adam and Eve. Imagine how easily a magpie, symbolizing excessive attraction to superficial beauty, could have prompted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. But mythology can't easily be undone, and this slander of serpents has played through to modern pop-myths. Like, in Harry Potter, Gryffindor's emblem is a lion, but Slytherin's is a serpent?

I find this uniformly negative portrayal of snakes hard to relate to, probably because snakes are often portrayed in positive light in Indian iconography. Shiva has a garland of cobras coiled around his neck. The traditional depiction of Maha Vishnu, Vishwaroopam, shows him reclining on his friend and protector Adisesha, the sire of the serpents. In some traditions, Adisesha accompanies Maha Vishnu to earth to be his best friend during his avatars, like Krishna and Balarama or Rama and Lakshmana. Vasuki, the king of the serpents, churns the ocean of milk to find Amrit, the nectar of immortality, which the beautiful Mohini delivers to the good Devas rather than the evil Asuras.

Not all Indian snakes are good; Krishna tames the evil ten-headed Kaaliya by dancing on his heads. But, Indian snakes are more good than bad, and in that context, it feels natural to revere real snakes that live near people. It feels natural for Wildlife SOS, a charity I support, to send me email about how they’ve rescued lost or injured pythons. Or for the Chinese zodiac to associate the snake with wisdom, intelligence and grace.

Once, western cultures also depicted snakes in positive light. The snakes coiled around medicine’s Hippocratic staff represent life itself. The Mediterranean Tree of Life once showed a serpent twined around the trunk of a flowering tree, the fertile and the virile, yin and yang. Much that was beautiful was lost in Adam and Eve’s deadly smear campaign.

But maybe, just maybe, the end is in sight. Maybe the magic of Disney can undo two millennia of defamation and injustice. I watched The Princess and the Frog recently. It features Disney’s first black heroine, Tiana, who is not a princess born into riches but an entrepreneur who shapes her own destiny. The fairy godmother who helps Tiana triumph over evil is not some flitty, flighty pretty little thing. She is a tough old lady who knows a thing or two about using Tabasco sauce, who lives out in the bayou. Her name is Mama Odie, and her constant companion is, yes!, a python. At home and happy in Louisiana. Walt Disney Studios may have intuitively understood and accepted America’s serpentine future in a way that the learned Associate Professors have not.

Crocodile Safari

Had stopped by at the Madras Crocodile Bank recently. The overwhelming impression I came away with was one of plenty. Plenty of crocs, piled up on top of each other. Well fed, too. Tourists can pay Rs. 60 for the privilege of watching the crocs eat dead rats which are tossed into the croc enclosures. Sometimes the crocs don't bother moving and simply ignore the rats; they're too full.

The crocs which are most obviously thriving at the Croc Bank are Mugger or Marsh Crocodiles. Other species are hard to spot in their enclosures; the Muggers are the ones piled up on top of each other. Muggers at the Croc Bank have taken to double clutching, one female laying two clutches of eggs in a season, a phenomenon that has not been observed in the wild. This astounding fertility has led to a Mugger-boom and allowed the Croc Bank to supply Muggers to zoos and wilderness restocking programs around the world - Bangladesh was down to a single crocodile in a tank at a shrine before the Croc Bank shipped some across the border. It has also led to a surplus stock at the Croc Bank of 1000 Muggers. My inner economist can't help asking the question - should these animals be harvested?

The stock answer is NO! A legal trade in wildlife products generally makes poaching more lucrative. If the Croc Bank sells Mugger hides to licensed dealers, it becomes harder to protect more vulnerable sub-species like the Philippine Crocodile from poachers. This is why, say, ivory from elephant culls is not sold.

However, it turns out that trade in crocodilian skin is entirely legal, and that this seems to be helping conservation. There are now commerical crocodile (or alligator) farms in Australia, Africa and the USA. And commerical farming seems to be working. Here's a quote from an American alligator farm web site:

In the 60's, the American alligator had almost become extinct and was placed on the endangered species list by the Federal Government. Commercial farming was correctly seen as a way to ensure the preservation of this reptile.

Why is this working? There is a nice little Powerpoint presentation on the CITES website which provides a clue. Back in the early 80s, the international trade in croc skins was over a million skins a year. Almost all these skins came from the wild. Today, the volume of trade is about the same. But 80% of this trade is in skins from ranches or captive breeding facilities. This is relatively easy to regulate because there are only five tanneries in the world which process croc skins. Skins which don't get processed at these tanneries are basically worthless, and so are unattractive to poachers. So croc conservation becomes this self supporting little econo-system, saving the crocs from extinction without competing for tax revenues or charity.

This conservation success story also has a cultural benefit in the American south. Alligator meat is a part of traditional Cajun cuisine, and thanks to the alligator's remarkable comeback, its meat is back on the dinner table.

The only little grouse I have with this story is that the majesty of a wild animal in its natural setting is somehow lost in this business of commercial farming and theme parks. But even here there may be a marketing opportunity. Maybe red blooded men could go adventuring into the swampy jungles of Queensland on a crocodile safari, hunt down their reptilian prey, cook it Cajun style over a campfire, and capture their experience in free verse. A new-age male-bonding rite-of-passage. It wouldn't sell in Bangalore or Chennai. But in Queensland? Would Queenslanders like Matthew Hayden or Andrew Symonds buy an all expenses covered wilderness experience like that? They just might...

Galli Galli Sim Sim

An auspicious post to wish all readers a happy new year...

Just discovered a piece of children's entertainment which is not just mostly harmless, but positively good. It is teaching my children that the differences between cultures around the world are there to be enjoyed, but that underneath these differences human beings are essentially the same, that we are The Family of Man (I think). This is a collection of video and music clips from Sesame Street around the world, published by Putumayo, a favourite music label.

My family is now singing along with Elmo, Big Bird and Sesame Street stars from India, Israel, Mexico, Russia and South Africa. The look and sound of each of these video clips are distinctive and local. Yet, the same spirit and mood clearly animates each of these local executions. Unity in diversity, that old mantra of Indira Gandhi-esque national integration, applies not just to India but to all of humanity.

More generally, I also think this is a fair representation of how globalisation impacts local cultures and identity. At one time, even serious and well-intentioned people in India would have had doubts about whether letting Coca Cola and their ilk operate in the country would somehow dilute India's Indianness. The first debate I ever won, back in high school in the mid 80s, was about "Have we sold our culture for a pair of jeans?". I opposed the motion back then.

Now, two decades after liberalization started, that argument feels settled. Coca Cola and Sesame Street are very much a part of the Indian landscape, and have figured out that it makes a ton of commercial sense to adopt an Indian idiom. India is changing rapidly, India is becoming ever more closely connected to the rest of humanity, and yet India remains as distinctively Indian as it ever was.

And exactly the same logic probably applies to Israel, Mexico, Russia and South Africa as well.

Test Cricket at Brabourne

It is great to see test cricket at Brabourne Stadium in Bombay. Not just because of Sehwag's 293, or India attaining the world #1 ranking, but for its political resonance.

Brabourne stadium represents a part of India's culture and cricketing heritage that deserves to be celebrated and brought back into the mainstream. It was built by the Cricket Club of India (CCI) in 1936, to be "India's Lord's". For my money, it is a more beautiful and charismatic cricket venue than Lord's.

The CCI website tells me of one of the founding myths of Brabourne. The Maharaja of Patiala, one of the great patrons of cricket in pre-independence India, went to the Gymkhana to watch a game. He was not allowed to sit with the white skinned Europeans, and was sent to the native enclosure. Hurt, and perhaps inspired by Jamshetji Tata's hotel that stands half a mile from the Bombay Gymkhana, he swore to create a great cricket club where such segregation did not exist. He went on to build the Cricket Club of India. He saw no contradiction in naming this great new stadium after Lord Brabourne, then the British governor of Bombay Presidency.

At the time, the dominant political forces in Indian cricket were the princelings of the Raj. The Maharaja of Patiala was the first President of the CCI, and sponsored the Patiala Pavilion. The Maharaja of Idar, a Rathore prince from North Gujarat whose clan married into Ranji's Jamnagar family, paid for the Governer's pavilion. One of the great banqueting halls at the CCI is the Cooch Behar Room, presumably sponsored by another cricket loving royal family. A more recent CCI president was Raj Singh, once chairman of the Indian team's selection committee, scion of the royal family of Dungarpur.

The aristocrats of the CCI long had the Bombay Cricket Association (BCA) as tenants on their premises. The culture of the BCA was closer to that of the Marathi speaking middle class families of Dadar, Matunga and Shivaji Park - the culture of Umrigar, Phadkar, Mankad, Wadekar, Gavaskar, Shivalkar, Vengsarkar and Tendulkar - rather than the culture of India's erstwhile royalty. Discomfort between these cultures is easy to imagine, but the relationship stayed on the rails through Jawaharlal Nehru's lifetime, up until the early 70s.

By this time, India itself was changing rapidly. India had defeated Pakistan in war in 1971. East Pakistan had broken away and formed the independent nation of Bangladesh. Also in 1971, the Indian cricket team had defeated England - the old colonial masters - at their own game, in their own country. This team was captained not by a princeling like the Maharajkumar of Vijaynagaram, but by a middle-class Mumbaikar called Ajit Wadekar. A hot-headed, curly-haired, twenty two year old called Sunil Manohar Gavaskar opened India's batting. A new India was taking shape. This India had no time for the niceties of older days. Not coincidentally, 1971 was the year Indira Gandhi's parliment abolished the privy purses that had been paid to the royal families of India since independence. The lineages that had built the CCI were no longer royalty in any meaningful sense.

Relations between the CCI and the BCA came to a head during the England tour of India in 1972. The CCI apparently turned down the BCA's request for more ticket allotments. The BCA under SK Wankhede decided to break away from the CCI and build their own stadium. Wankhede stadium, an unremarkable concrete behemoth that sits a couple of blocks north of Brabourne, was completed in 1975. It has since hosted most important matches in the first city of Indian cricket, while Brabourne lies idle.

The power struggle that led to Brabourne being supplanted by Wankhede is now over. The victors should be secure in their victory. Does that create room to restore Brabourne to some of its former glory as the home of Indian cricket? And hence, can contemporary India recapture some of that spacious, graceful, cosmopolitan spirit that still pervades the CCI?

The betting is that Brabourne will be forgotten and that service as usual will return once the repairs at Wankhede are completed. But, heck, crazier things have happened.

Boo Ponting and Boo Hoo Colly

When Australia won the fourth test in two and a half days, Ricky Ponting went up to the podium to receive the winning captain's magnum of champagne, and he was roundly booed by the Headingley crowd.

The was not the first time Ponting was booed this Ashes series. It started back in Cardiff. It has continued through to Headingley, despite the ECB president Giles Clarke's calls to cease and desist. The Australian captain has ignored the booing.

Nor is this the first time booing has been in the news this summer. Paul Collingwood, the then reigning England captain, spoke in a hurt, injured tone about being booed by a predominantly Indian Lord's crowd during the Twenty20 World Cup. At the subsequent India v. South Africa game at Trent Bridge, there was much sanctimonious commentary (by Jeremy Coney, I think) about how it is nicer to cheer your own team than to boo the other team. Many of my Indian friends and family cringed. Are we really the cricket world's most boorish nation?

Well, the Ashes experience suggests that English fans aren't all that different from the Indian fans. English fans will boo Australia even when England are not playing, as I discovered at the Australia v. Sri Lanka T20 game at Trent Bridge.

Expanding the frame a bit, yes it is undeniably nicer to cheer your own team than to boo the other team. But it is easy to over-steer.

Ultimately, cricket is fun because it is theatre. Banter is a part of the theatre. Like booing a villain at the pantomime is a part of the fun. There is a very fine line between banter and sledging, defined mostly by the spirit in which the words are spoken and received.

Sure, maybe the booing at Headingley and Lord's was not in the right spirit. But the English ODI captain can surely learn a thing or two about stiff upper lips from his Australian counterpart.

Spiritual Intelligence and corporate life

कर्मण्ये  वाधिकारस्ते  मा  फलेषु  कदाचन
मा  कर्मफलहेतुर  भूर  मा  ते संगोस्त्व  अकर्मणि

These words from the Bhagavad Gita were first spoken by Lord Krishna to Arjuna at Kurukshetra. They roughly translate to: you contol your actions, but not their more remote consequences. So take the remote consequences off your mind, act, and fulfill your sacred destiny.

These words were also the theme of a corporate leadership development program I was at earlier this week. A bunch of successful and well-compensated executives spoke to us developees about how leadership is about service, about having a bias for action, and not obsessing about moving up the corporate ladder. Absolutely. Following the blockbuster success of Emotional Intelligence, Amazon is now selling a book on Spiritual Intelligence.

Yeah, right…but this program was not naïve. It recognized that the developees cared about money. After all, these were people in corporate jobs. The program advised setting very specific goals on how much wealth one wanted to build.

This advice, from Jack Weber at the Darden School in Virginia, was based on an interesting longitudinal study done by Harvard Business School. The study sampled a class of HBS MBAs at graduation. It asked the graduates to rate how much they cared about money on a scale of 1-10. It also asked them how much they thought their net worth would be in 5, 10 and 15 years. The answer to the second question could also be “don’t know”. The study then went back and measured the net worth of these graduates in 5, 10 and 15 years. The finding was that the first question had no predictive power: the MBAs all cared about making money. The second question was a strong predictor of future net worth, with the people who didn’t know what they would be worth performing even worse than those who had put down modest targets. As an aside, I would love to know if the students with the highest wealth expectations also had the highest variance in wealth outcomes, because of having made lower probability bets (I couldn’t locate this study through googling).

A third perspective on careers that emerged came not from the faculty but from a fellow developee, chatting after work. Her boss had told her, “Our company is an ocean with many currents running through it. The key to success is to find a current that will become as big as the Gulf Stream, and to ride it.” This makes even more sense if company were replaced by industry or society. Some realpolitick here: how does one respond to mundane work that moves the company forward, but is unlikely to grow into a career-enhancing Gulf Stream?

Maybe staying sane is about balancing these perspectives. Or maybe it is about these elements coming together: ride the Gulf Stream to get wealthy, which enables the generosity of spirit needed to think in terms of मा कर्मफलहेतुर भूर.

Cherokee Medicine

"The Cherokee lands furnished herbs to treat every known illness – until the Europeans came". This claim is from a tourist brochure I came across in North Carolina, still home to the Cherokee Nation.

Herbs to treat every known illness? A strong claim by any standards. Yet I read that claim humbly, respectfully, sympathetically. It is an assertion of Cherokee pride, an assertion worth making after the horrors of native American history. Is there a crime even worse than genocide? The annihilation of an entire civilization?

That respectful, sympathetic moment stuck in memory when I realized that I would never extend the same courtsey to the other sort of Indians, Asian-Indians like myself. This, despite the many terrible things that have been done to us through history.

When a fellow Indian seriously claims that our ancient culture had herbs to treat every known illness (this happens astonishingly often), my irritated instinct is to refer him to Ben Goldacre's excellent book/ blog on Bad Science, and ask to see the data from randomized, double blind, placebo controlled clinical trials.

Why the difference?

I guess I just can't think about India as a Wounded Civilization any more.

Gwyneth Paltrow's Hindu Haircut

Regular readers of this blog may not have been aware: Gwyneth Paltrow has had a haircut.

Gwyneth revealed that this was part of the healing process following the death of her father. "I was very very attached to my hair," she says. "I still had hair from when my father was alive. I made it a talisman. Then one day, on a shoot with Mario Testino, I suddenly said 'I need to cut it now'. It was almost as if it was part of the grieving process. I just had to let something go."

Gwyneth may not have known this, but she is a karma yogi going through the process of samskara.

A karma yogi fulfills her destiny, or achieves personal growth, or attains moksha, by facing up to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune with integrity and dignity, in accord with her dharma. Rituals, like cutting one's hair when a father dies, are ways of ways of coping with grief and moving the soul along its natural journey.

Traditional Hindu doctrine might have preferred for the psyche to step into a new life-stage in front of the sacred fire rather than at a Mario Testino photo-shoot, but that surely is a minor detail.

Blogger or banker?

Here's the theory on people who work for a bank and blog for fun. Do they think of themselves as bankers or bloggers?

It boils down to their Ginis. You see, some people have magic lamps inhabited by blue-suited banker Ginis, some people's magic lamps have sailor-suited Ginis... :)

Actually, a Gini coefficient is a measure of statistical dispersion, and is a standard measure of income inequality in a society. My take is that people from more unequal societies are more likely to define their identities in terms of who they are at work.

Why?

Imagine a relatively well-off person living in an obviously unequal country. He needs to make peace with the fact that he lives a comfortable life, but the people from the slum/ favela/ ghetto/ council estate/ inner city live obviously miserable, abysmal lives. The sheer presence of that abyss, the unspoken fear and guilt that that abyss evokes, pulls at the psyche of the comfortably-off like gravity. The psyche protects itself from that pull by believing that privilege and comfort are deserved, earned, by hard work, by education, by qualifications, by seriousness.

In this unequal context, it is hard to think of oneself in purely frivolous terms. It feels like being the surfer on the beach in Apocalypse Now. Its the reason why cricket in India or football in Mexico are not just silly games played for fun, they are about the redemption of national pride.

So what do I expect to observe in the data? I expect people from more unequal societies to wrap their identity ever more tightly around their professional selves.

Here are Ginis for some of the OECD-30. Their rankings are:

1. Mexico: .474
2. Turkey: .430
4. USA: .381
7. Great Britain: .335
8. New Zealand: .335
12. Canada: 0.317

The two most unequal OECD members are Mexico and Turkey. Fortunately, I have friends from Mexico and Turkey who tell me their compatriots unambiguously define who they are in terms of who they are at work.

Also, to my earlier observation, Britain's Gini is the same as New Zealand, and is a lot lower than the USA. Canada is even further away from the USA than is Britain. So if the theory holds, Canadians should be a less likely to derive their identity from work than either Americans or Britons, despite Canada's stereotypical cultural location somewhere in-between the USA and Britain.

India is not in the OECD. So I looked up the World Bank's Ginis metrics, which show that India is better (i.e. more equal) than the USA.

While that is flattering, and says something important about the world's only superpower, the World Bank might be systematically underestimating South Asian inequality. Pakistan looks really good on the same metrics, more equal than the Netherlands, Canada, France or Switzerland. That doesn't ring true. My hunch is that India really is in the mid - 40s pack, along with Mexico, China, Jamaica and Turkey.

A more classical theory, which involves no melodrama about the gravitational pull of the abyss, is the impact of marginal tax rates on labour supply. More equal societies have higher marginal tax rates. People therefore have less reason to work hard to earn money. They therefore invest more of their time, and identity, in leisure rather than labour.

I buy into the conventional theory, but it doesn't quite feel complete. Maybe that is because I remember an India with high marginal tax rates, in Indira Gandhi's time, when people still wrapped their identities around their work, even if they didn't work especially hard. The ways in which people construct their identities change more slowly than tax policy.

Setting Free the Bears

Here’s a heart-warming success story, at a time when good news is a bit thin on the ground.

I visited Wildlife SOS' Agra Bear Rescue Facility earlier this winter. This is part of a program to rescue dancing bears from captivity, and to rehabilitate both the bears and the kalandar families who once depended on dancing bears for their livelihood.

- The rescue facility is a very nice retirement home for the former dancing bears, on a reserve forest between Delhi and Agra

- The past these dancing bears have endured is terrible. Typically, young bears are captured by poachers after the parents have been murdered. They are sold to kalandars, who torture the bears their entire lives to make them perform

- The rescue program essentially buys bears back from the kalandars, and relocates them at this centre where they are well looked after by professional vets. I was especially impressed that the vets were thinking about the bear’s mental state, getting traumatized rescued bears to engage by playing with a ball or climbing a trestle

- Visitors are allowed in only by prior appointment, and are accompanied by wildlife professionals. Otherwise, visitors who have paid good money to see bears may expect to be “entertained” to get their money’s worth, which would create exactly the wrong environment for the bear’s rehabilitation

- There is no breeding program. The rescued bears are simply not in shape to sire a bloodline. The rescue facility is supported only by charity

- The main reason to believe the program will work, longer term, is that it is a buy back coupled with social services. Kalandars get a substantial lump sum, and are being supported in moving on to a new life. One family featured on the visitor centre video used this buy-back money to buy a second hand autorickshaw. Kalandar children are now sent to school, for the first time in over 500 years

- Dancing bears, and the attendant cruelty, have been around since medieval times across all of Eurasia. The Indian program is a part of a larger worldwide effort to rescue dancing bears. The last dancing bears in Europe were rescued as recently as 2007, in Bulgaria. Turkey rescued its last dancing bear in 1998

There is a tantalizing moral question hanging at the edge of this story. Why does this matter? Why is it worth ending the bears’ suffering? Is it because of the acuteness with which bears can experience suffering? I’d be less moved by the suffering of invertebrates. Is it because so little is at stake? I can see the argument for testing life saving drugs on higher mammals, but suffering for the sake of entertainment feels unambiguously wrong. Is it because the horrors we have inflicted on ourselves, from Auschwitz to Abu Ghraib, have taught us that to be human is to be humane? Or more plausibly, that to be civilized is to be humane? Does a society that experiences success in preventing suffering, of whatever sort, build momentum and commitment that serves the cause of preventing even more grievous suffering?

I’m not trying to answer these deeper questions here. I’m just happy that Ravi the bear can gambol down a forest path, keeping pace with my sprinting five year old nephew, just because he wants to.

"So, what do you do?"

In New Zealand, when this question is asked, it means "do you sail or do you hike?". Not "are you a lawyer or a banker?". Some good Kiwi perspective for these troubled times.

Is this true? Heard it from a colleague of mine, a big outdoors enthusiast, who spent a year in Kiwi-land on a working holiday. Context matters; a management consultant who flies in from Hong Kong would have probably met more people who describe themselves as Business Systems Analysts rather than as (amateur) Yngling Class yatchsmen. But the question is still meaningful: when asked in a neutral context, which identity do people assume? I suspect, and hope, that the story I heard is still true when "So, what do you do?" is asked in a neutral context. Kiwi readers...any comments?

My own culture, the culture of urban middle-class India, mostly devout Hindus and a smattering of Sunnis and Catholics, who live by an impeccably Protestant work ethic, is very different. Back home, you are who you are at work. This is great when one is gunning for 10% GDP growth, but might make India's collective psyche a little less resilient to the business cycle.

This assumption is expressed in sometimes quaint ways: in a typical South Indian wedding invitation, the bridegroom's name is suffixed by his educational qualifications, the name of his employer and his rank/ designation. Or think back to Sen-saab, IAS, from English August; his identity cannot be decoupled from the fact that he is an Indian Administrative Service officer.

This assumption about the source of identity defines an interesting cultural axis.

My Chinese friends tell me that China is pretty close to my slice of India. My reading of Memoirs of a Geisha suggests that Japan, if anything, is further out on the same axis. The USA is, in my personal experience, only a little bit more laid back than India.

England, surprisingly, is a lot closer to New Zealand than the USA. A typical conversation after a game of squash might go:

Prithvi: "So, where do you work?"

English squash player: "About eight miles off the M1".

The same conversation in sub-text should read:

Prithvi: "How do you make a living?". Since I am well brought up and cosmopolitan I don't follow that question up with "So, what is your salary?", which would be quite acceptable at home

English squash player: "How I make a living is strictly my business, but I'm too polite to tell you to butt out, so I'll say something neutral"

I guess England is in Europe after all.

Grabbing the SKU Rationalization bull by the horns

The day after Pongal is mattu Pongal, literally cattle Pongal. The idea is to thank the cattle for their help with the harvest. The cattle are fed sugar cane, which is a nice alternative to hay. They are decorated with flowers and bells, their horns are painted, and they are proudly paraded through their home towns.

Asian Paints, India’s leading paints brand, markets small cans of paint in festive colours during the Pongal season, targeted specially at the horn-painting market. Cool. This is the work of India Inc., woven right into the fabric of Indian life.

Except... extensive googling earlier today reveals no evidence that this Pongal SKU (stock keeping unit) actually exists.

I first heard this story about twenty years ago from my father. My dad was a marketing professional; he was probably trying to impress on his teenage son that marketing is cool, and in that mission he succeeded. Is there a version of events that could make my dad’s story not only successful, but also accurate?

Perhaps 20-25 years ago paint was mixed in centralized factories, packaged in cans, and then distributed nationally. This would have meant managing a system with literally millions of colour * can size combinations. Today, pigments and a paint base are probably distributed independently, and mixed and packed at the point of sale. So the farmer painting a bull’s horns can now buy a small quantity of paint, in the colour of his choice, at a retail point in the local farmers’ market....

Or maybe painting contractors re-sell the small sample cans they get free from paint companies to wholesalers, who in turn bundle these small paint cans into special Pongal packages, which include sugar cane stalks, flowers, new clothes, luridly illustrated religious calendars, and cans of paint, to sell at local farmers’ markets.

Either way, the one thing I’m pretty sure of is that the work of India Inc. is woven right into the fabric of Indian life. Asian Paints did try to build this Pongal connection into their brand identity with this excellent TV commercial. Enjoy.

Happy Pongal from the Grateful Dead

Reach out your hand
If your cup be empty
If your cup be full
May it be again...

These words are from Ripple, a classic Grateful Dead song released in 1970. They were on my mind because it was Pongal earlier this week.

Pongal is the main harvest festival along the South East coast of India, where I'm from. Pongal is celebrated by boiling milk in every home; it is literally the moment when the steaming milk brims over, symbolizing abundance.

The Grateful Dead clearly understood the symbolism. So does the Jamaican bloke who makes cappuccinos at the tennis club down the road, there's always a nice head of foamy milk topping off the (expensive) brew.

Happy Pongal to all readers of this blog.

From Bombay to Baramulla

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

The argument goes roughly as follows:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is right about Indian education?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Memories of the Taj Mahal, Mumbai

Some personal memories of the Taj:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You get the drift.

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

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