Michael Atherton - pushing back against "woke" excess

The ever-sensible Michael Atherton puts one away

This post is to channel a thought from the ever sensible Michael Atherton. This is from his column in The Times, which unfortunately is behind a paywall. So here is the punchline:

"The increasing tendency for people to define themselves by identity (ethnicity, race, gender etc) was undermining empathy among Britons... the challenge is to ensure we don’t end up in a siloed world where everybody is hypersensitive about their own individual interests.

The key issue is how do we move beyond the ‘I’ to the ‘we’, how do we think of ourselves as citizens in a country or in the world .”

The context for Atherton's comment is the very English issue of social class in cricket. Cricket has long been unfairly, sometimes absurdly, portrayed as an upper-class game, which it never was. 

But at a moment when the biggest controversy in English cricket is the racism Azeem Rafiq says is endemic in Yorkshire, when the two hundred year old tradition of the Eton vs. Harrow game at Lord's has been cancelled, Michael Atherton has touched on a truth which is much bigger than cricket or even England. We become a better game/ country/ world by focusing on the humanity that unites us, rather than the many million identities that divide us.

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.

"Winning Takes Care of Everything". By Tiger Woods, Barack Obama and Bhagavan Sri Krishna

Tiger Woods on the importance of winning

How far does one go to win? 

As far as one possibly can. 

Most sportsmen would agree with Tiger Woods on that point. 

Win gracefully if that is your style. Win ugly if not. Test the edges of the rules. Win! 

This might stick in the throat of nice, well brought up, middle class boys like this blogger. But fair enough. Tiger Woods is a pro. He is playing hardball. So are his competitors. Maybe winning does take care of everything. For Tiger. 

How well does that generalize? 

Depends. 

On how well winning is defined. And on how well-defined the rules are. 

In most walks of life both winning and the rules of play are very loosely defined. 

Barack Obama with Tim Kaine
On the importance of winning

So how hard does one play? 

Public life is a sphere where hardball might be a bad idea, where the unwritten rules are more important than in sports, where winning doesn’t take care of everything. 

So, it was interesting to learn that Nobel Peace prize laurate ex-President Barack Obama endorses hardball. 

Apparently he told Tim Kaine, then candidate Hillary Clinton’s VP nominee “Tim, remember, this is no time to be a purist. You've got to keep a fascist out of the White House". 

Barack thinks that when the stakes are high, purity is less important than winning. 

This is not a recent question. 

Bhagavan Sri Krishna played hardball. 

Arjuna asked Bhagavan Sri Krishna about dharma at Kurukshetra. Bhagavan Sri Krishna replied with his actions. Whether it was forcing Karna to waste Indra’s Shakthi on Ghatothkacha, obscuring the sun with his Sudarshana-chakra so Arjuna could avenge Abhimanyu’s death, or orchestrating Yudhishthira’s only lie so Dhrishtadhyumna could kill Guru Dronacharya, Bhagavan Sri Krishna was willing to play hardball. The stakes were high enough to justify this. Winning mattered more than purity.

In contexts that are more important than sports, maybe winning doesn’t take care of everything. 

But winning does take care of a lot of things.

Bhagawan Sri Krishna with Arjuna
On the importance of winning

Did Don McLean anticipate the 2020 Biden-Trump election?

I was reflecting on the weirdness of Donald Trump refusing to concede to Joe Biden and the words that came to mind, unbidden, were:

“The players tried to take the field 

the marching band refused to yield…”

From Don McLean’s American Pie.

Could Don McLean have foreseen this moment fifty years ago? 

Sort of like Nostradamus foresaw moments in the future? I’m only half kidding. 

American Pie is so different from, and so much better than, the rest of Don McLean’s work that it is easy to imagine that the song was written by a higher force that just expressed itself through Don McLean when he was in an altered mind-state, sort of like the state Samuel Taylor Coleridge was in when he wrote Kubla Khan.

Victory to Kamala Harris! Or...Jaye Jaye He Mahishasura Mardhini Ramyaka Pardhini Shailasute!

 

See the picture above? 

Meena Harris (Kamala Harris’ sister Maya’s daughter) tweeted it a few weeks ago. 

It has to be my favourite image from the just concluded US presidential election. It’s a crazy, whacky, light-hearted juxtaposition of the Mahishasura Mardini Stottram with the rough and tumble of electoral politics, just what the doctor ordered to lighten the mood at a time when both religion and politics feel awfully serious. 

Unfortunately, Meena Harris had to take this off Twitter because it "offended Hindus”. 

I find that odd. I am a Hindu and I see nothing offensive in the image. So, I’m recirculating the image now with a little explanation on how this image can be an access-point to deeper Hindu ideas like advaita, karma yoga and bhakti. 

Consider advaita, the idea that divinity is latent within each of us, that the purpose of life is to give expression to the divine within. In this context, Kamala Harris could be seen as giving expression to the power of Maa-Durga, the divinity who lives within her. 

Or consider karma yoga, the idea that spiritual attainment is not the exclusive privilege of world-renouncing monks, that the divine can be fully realised by engaging wholeheartedly in worldly work. In this context, Kamala Harris could be seen fighting the good fight on the electoral battlefield, therefore getting ever closer to the divine by treading her chosen path as a karma yogi. 

Or consider bhakti, the mystic experience of oneness with the divine, unfettered by intellectualism or duty. To me personally, that is the association the image brings to mind most readily. The Mahisura Mardhini Stottram, which this image is riffing on, is one of my favourite prayers. I was brought up listening to it as a part of life’s ambient soundtrack. This stottram is typically set to a rhythmic, hypnotic beat (click here to listen) that lends itself to the immersive rapture of bhakti. 

The point (hopefully the now obvious point) is that there is nothing anti-Hindu about the picture above. It's not even anti-Trump. Caricature has always been (and should be) a part of politics.

So, let’s keep alive our sense of humour and sense of perspective and enjoy the jokey juxtaposition of the Mahishasura mardhini stottram with American politics. Let’s enjoy the fact that Kamala Harris will be the first person of Indian descent to ascend to the White House. And let’s trust that the Devi will manifest herself in Kamala, Maya, Meena, and in strong women everywhere, as the cycle of time turns and good times return.

Why is the IPL so popular? Because it shows us the India we want to be.

IPL XIII Captains

I’m watching the IPL. Everybody is watching the IPL. I’m watching the IPL partly because everybody is watching the IPL. 

The IPL has gone from sport to entertainment to a shared Indian experience because it shows us the India we want to be. 

In the IPL world identity doesn’t matter. Delhi-boy Virat Kohli lives in Mumbai and captains Bangalore. MS Dhoni, a Hindi-speaker from Ranchi, is now Chennai’s favourite son. Shreyas Iyer, a Tamil from Mumbai, captains the Delhi Capitals. Nobody cares. In the IPL world India is not fractured by caste, language, religion or ethnicity. In the IPL world India is one nation, Indians are one people.

In the IPL world India is the land of opportunity. T Natarajan from Chinnappampatti, TN, whose father worked as a daily wage coolie at a railway station, can win a multi-crore contract to bowl yorkers for Hyderabad. Yashasvi Jaiswal from Badhoi, UP, who once worked in a pani puri stall on Azad Maidan during the Ram Leela celebrations, can win a multi-crore contract to open the batting for Rajasthan. Rahul Tewatia can bounce back from his humiliations in the Ricky Ponting regime to become a swashbuckling match winner. Rookie mystery-spinner Varun Chakravarthy can demolish King MSD’s castle with a fizzing flipper, and can be rewarded for this insubordination with an India cap. In the IPL world dreams do come true.

Dwayne Bravo Chennai-style

In the IPL world, India is the world’s pre-eminent nation. When David Warner makes videos of his family wearing Indian clothes and dancing to Telugu songs, when Dwayne Bravo dresses in a veshti and calls Chennai his second home, when Sam Curran learns Tamil words to fit into the CSK gang, when Jonty Rhodes names his daughter India, they’re not mocking us. They’re telling us that they want to belong. 

In a way, celebrating the IPL is like celebrating Dussera. 

Dussera is based on the belief that good triumphs over evil. We know that that isn’t strictly, literally true. But we want it to be true. So we open our hearts, take part, believe, and therefore make the ideal of Dussera more true. 

In much the same way, we know the IPL world isn’t strictly, literally true. But we want it to be true. And by believing in the IPL world, by believing in an India that is united, an India that makes dreams come true, an India that is a big and much-loved presence on the world stage, we make that ideal of India more true.

So when Saurav Ganguly, now President of the BCCI, basking in the warm glow of TV viewership ratings that have climbed 30% off a high base, describes the IPL as "the best tournament in the world” nobody disagrees. All power to him. Let’s enjoy the final couple of weeks of IPL XIII (without sulking about the fact that CSK have already been knocked out). 

Dussera - celebrating the triumph of good over evil

"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

The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Starring Johar Tsarnaev

Johar Tsarnaev on the Rolling Stone cover

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Johar (red tie) before his high school prom

Riz Ahmed as Changez Khan

Aamir Khan as the Ice Candy Man

Nazi officers at Auschwitz

Nazi officers at Auschwitz

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

Bomb at the Boston Marathon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God's dice

A simple solution to America's fiscal cliff problem

Allow congressmen to vote in private.

This isn’t my idea. I’m channelling the noted political philosopher, Sir Humphrey Appleby. Sir Humpy explains to Jim Hacker in the very first episode of Yes Minister that Jim’s election winning slogan, “Open Government”, is in fact an oxymoron. You can be open, or you can have government, you can’t have both. I’m also channelling Fareed Zakaria’s excellent (and serious) book, The Future of Freedom.

Zakaria’s argument is that most American politicians are not stupid. Most of them don’t want to drive off the fiscal cliff. Most of them would happily cut a deal to avoid disaster, if they could. They can’t. Because they lack the privacy needed to cut deals.

For most of America’s history, Congress could do its work in private. Politicians could imply one thing while talking to constituents, go to Washington, exercise their better judgment on what is best for the country, and go back to their constituents with a shrug and an I-tried-my-best story. For most of America’s history, that worked well enough.

At some time in the 1960s some well-intentioned people thought pols should not be allowed to tell lies to the public, and decided to make their deliberations and voting records public. As a result, politicians live in a fish bowl, utterly at the mercy of special interest groups. They can’t exercise mature judgment, and therefore can’t fulfil the design of representative democracy.

This shouldn’t be hard to explain. Perfect transparency is unhelpful in most everyday contexts: in family life, in sports teams, with friends or at work. But, unfortunately, even my ardent inner optimist doesn't think politicians are going to be allowed to escape their fish bowl world any time soon.

Wish you were here, Sir Humpy. We miss you.

Sir Humphrey Appleby

The difference between the United States of America and the States of a United Europe, explained on a taxi ride

NYC taxi

I was flying from New York to Frankfurt. I got a taxi in New York. My cabbie was a brown skinned guy with an accent.

"Where are you from?", I asked him.

"I'm from Queens" he replied.

"Really? From the Queens?"

"Yeah, man. I live in Queens." He didn't sound like a Queens native.

"How long have you lived there?" 

"Six months. But I'm from the Queens. I live in the Queens" he insisted. 

"And before the Queens?"

"Gautemala" he replied. "But all that was a long time ago, man. Now I'm from Queens."

I reached Frankfurt and got a taxi. Again, my cabbie was a brown skinned guy with an accent.

Frankfurt skyline

"Where are you from?", I asked him.

"I'm from Turkey", he replied.

"How long have you lived in Frankfurt", I asked.

"My grandfather came here in 1952. But I am from Turkey."

I heard this story years ago, at a business conference in Budapest, as an explanation for why the states of a united Europe will never morph into the United States of Europe. This was back in 2005, when the European project felt secure and looked like a stunning success.

It comes back to mind frequently because the future of Europe is so much in the news. For instance, the latest Economist has this story about Jose Manuel Barosso, the president of the European Commission, speaking of a the EU becoming a "federation of nation-states". I guess he didn't vet the idea with his cabbie.

Why Andrew Strauss shows MS Dhoni's captaincy in such good light

Andrew Strauss

Andrew Strauss retired yesterday. Strauss is a good egg, a decent chap. He has been a fine player and captain, has served cricket well. It is sad that he is retiring.

What made Strauss' retirement even sadder was the timing of his announcement. It came a day after England were crushed by South Africa, with the batting crumbling yet again. Kevin Pietersen hammered a century for Surrey that day, to highlight what might have been but for the rift between the English captain and his best player. Strauss and the England management didn't want to talk about KP. The media clearly did, understandably so, because the KP melodrama highlights both the best and worst thing about Strauss' captaincy.

Strauss' greatest achievement, and his greatest weakness, is that he built a team in his own image. Strauss is a diligent, hard-working, respectful, determined, virtuous, fair-minded guy who puts the team's interests above his own. Andy Flower shares his personality. Strauss and Flower have built a team that values and develops players with Strauss' temperament - like Cook, Trott, Prior and Bresnan - whose game is built around discipline and professionalism. I'm naturally sympathetic to this approach. It feels proper and just that the Protestant (or Tam Bram) ethic should pay off, will pay off.

Unfortunately, this is simply not true. All international cricket is now very professional. Paradoxically, that means discipline and professionalism are no longer differentiators. The difference between competent teams and great teams comes down to a handful of geniuses with outrageous god-given gifts. Some of these favourites of the gods - like Muralitharan and Tendulkar - are nice guys who generally share Strauss' ethos. But the gods are capricious. A disproportionate number of the players the gods have bestowed the greatest gifts on - Shane Warne, Chris Gayle, Shoaib Akthar, Yuvraj Singh, Freddy Flintoff, Kevin Pietersen - are egoistic prima donnas.

I can imagine that it is really hard to be on the same team as arrogant superstars: travelling together, sharing a dressing room, sharing meals, year after year. However, a team needs great players more than it needs unity. Bob Woolmer's first action when he became Pakistan's coach was to bring back Shahid Afridi and Shoaib Akthar, which surely wasn't easy for captain Inzamam-ul-Haq, but it was the right thing to do. Leading a cricket team (at any level, actually) is about holding together a naturally fractious coalition. I'm sure Strauss knows this intellectually, but unfortunately for him, that part of the job didn't quite work out.

By contrast, the captain who has done brilliantly at this aspect of captaincy is MS Dhoni.

MS Dhoni with former captain Saurav Ganguly

In a way, Dhoni was dealt a much tougher hand than Strauss. Every team he has led has been chock a block with galacticos. He became captain unexpectedly, when Rahul Dravid resigned after winning a test series in England. In his first test match as captain he was leading Tendulkar, Ganguly, Dravid, Laxman, Kumble, Harbhajan and Zaheer (I don't remember why Sehwag wasn't playing). Each of these players was already a legend in his own right, Dhoni's natural seniors in life and in cricket. Dhoni didn't try to impose his style or method on them. He accepted them as they were - from Dravid's gentlemanliness to Harbhajan's in-your-face aggro - and the grace and charm with which he did that somehow enhanced his authority.

Over time, his task didn't get easier. He has had to manage Yuvraj, Sreesanth, Munaf, Kohli - difficult characters all. He has had to deal with the selectors, the sponsors, the media. MSD has been up to the task every time. I wish I knew how he does it. Regardless, in the frenetic world of Indian cricket, brimming over with outsize egos and chips-on-shoulders, Dhoni's contribution as captain cool has been huge, dwarfing his substantial contribution as a keeper, batsman and tactician.   

Gilcrist caught Strauss bowled Flintoff circa 2005

Looking back on Strauss' career, the English media are going on about his back-to-back Ashes triumphs as a captain. My favourite Strauss moments actually feature him as a player: his catch at Trent Bridge to dismiss Adam Gilchrist in the 2005 Ashes, his century at Wankhede in 2006 to set up England's first test match win in India in twenty years, and his back to back centuries at Chepauk in 2008 (under KP's captaincy) in what turned out to be a losing cause. I'd be very happy to buy Straussy a whiskey-sour at the bar, or a Jagermeister if he so prefers, to raise a toast to those moments.

England's next test match series is in India. As a partisan India supporter, I am not unhappy that Strauss the batsman will not be in the squad. And I'd be delighted if the England management take a "principled" stance and decide to tour India without Pietersen. I'm sure our team would rather be bowling at James Taylor and Johnny Bairstow.

The Palio di Siena: an alternative to Olympic nationalism

Palio di Siena at the Piazza di Campo

There is a general perception that a great sporting event that harks back to antiquity and delivers a profound political message has just concluded. This perception is understandable. I thoroughly enjoyed the London Olympics, which ended last Sunday.

However, arguably, an even greater sporting event that harks back to antiquity and delivers a more profound political message has not yet kicked off. It happens tomorrow, on August 16. It won't take two weeks, it lasts for less than three minutes. I'm speaking of the Palio di Siena, the bareback horse-race between rival contrade, administrative divisions of Siena, that has been run around the Piazza di Campo, the central town square, since 1581.

The Palio is preceded by a magnificent pageant in which the rival contrade present their standards to a cheering populace. The honour of leading this pageant is given not to one of the contrade, or to Siena itself, but to Montalcino, a hill town about twenty five miles south of Siena, to honour the heroism of the Republic of Siena at Montalcino.

The standard of Montalcino

The story is that the Republic of Siena, which had existed since the eleventh century, was defeated and occupied by Florence in 1555. However, a hardy group of seven hundred Sienese families retreated to the hilltop fortress of Montalcino. They established the Republic of Siena in Montalcino, and continued to resist the might of the Medicis for four years, finally surrendering in 1559. All of Siena, including Montalcino, was now absorbed into the Duchy of Florence, but the Sienese people were allowed to keep their customs and identity. A generation later, the Sienese people chose to remember the Republic of Siena at Montalcino, and gave Montalcino pride of place in their Palio. Hundreds of years later, the conquering Grand Duchy of Florence has also ceased to exist, but the grit and the guts shown by the Sienese at Montalcino will be honoured again tomorrow.

What I love about this story is that it emphasizes that nations are mortal. Sovereign entities - kingdoms, duchies, empires, republics, whatever - die as inevitably as you and me. There is no shame in death, per se. The Republic of Siena at Montalcino seems to have died honourably and continues to be revered, unlike, say, the Soviet Union. This simple fact, that no sovereign nation will live forever, is surprisingly hard to perceive, partly because nation states are generally longer lived than human beings, partly because of the layers of sanctification wrapped around nation states.

The Olympics contribute to this sanctification of nations. In our times, when identities and institutions are increasingly constructed across global, national and local layers, there was something strangely anachronistic about watching national flags being raised and anthems being sung at medal ceremonies through the games. So I'm looking forward to tomorrow's global webcast of this ancient and intensely local rivalry (on Siena TV, there are also excellent clips on You Tube). A glass of Montalcino's legendary Brunello wine might add to the excitement.

Contrade flags at the Palio

Much Ado About Nothing, set in contemporary Delhi, playing at the RSC in Stratford-upon-Avon

Watched the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Much Ado About Nothing last weekend, and loved it. The magic ingredient? It's set in contemporary Delhi.

This production isn't really about finding new psychological depth in Shakespeare. It is about relocating Shakespeare to India, and enjoying the play of images, sounds and textures that that creates, and it does this beautifully.

At times, the decision to set Much Ado About Nothing in India feels obvious rather than inspired. Shakespeare's story-line is exactly the same as hundreds of Bollywood potboilers. It features two couples, one soppily besotted, the other constantly duelling, daggers drawn. It features elaborately staged situations and misunderstandings that shift these couples in and out of love. It is excessively interested in a woman's maidenly honour. It features loyal servants, a buffoon of a policeman, a wise priest...it is as desi as butter chicken and scotch whiskey.

Beatrice and Benedick
On a jhula

What made the show for me was not the Indian setting per se, but the rich detail in which this was recreated. The ambient sound in the foyer, before the show, was the soundscape of an Indian street: an autorickshaw's tuk-tuk, dogs barking, a street vendor's call, snatches of music. The ropes defining the line to the box office were marigold garlands. Beatrice and Benedick discover their love for each other when seated together on a swing, a jhula. The guards of the Prince's Watch are armed with hurricane lanterns and lathis. The detailing is spot-on, not just authentic but exuberantly so.

This touched a set of feel-good buttons for me, and I'd assume for a lot of my friends and family, because it mirrors how we think and feel about India. Sure, India has problems. Serious problems. But we are not defined by our problems. We are defined by our zest for life, which shows up in our culture - in colour, in music, in flavours, in texture - and it's that zest for life that was showcased at the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford upon Avon. Thank you RSC. And in case I don't get around to posting again tomorrow - Happy Independence Day. Jai Hind!

Is Maria Sharapova Russian or American?

Maria Sharapova carries the Russian flag at the Olympics

Is Maria Sharapova American, because she lives in Florida, having learnt tennis at Nick Bolletteri's academy? Or is she Russian, because she feels Russian and is proud of being Russian?

This question has generated a bit of a storm in a tea cup. Maria Sharapova had the honour of carrying the Russian flag in the Olympics, and was obviously thrilled about it. However, Tennis magazine journalist Peter Bodo was very upset about this and went on this rant:

"I get tired of hearing Sharapova, who lives in Bradenton, Fla., go on about how thrilled she is to represent her native Russia... I find Sharapova's attitude ungracious, and mind-numbingly so...

Maria seem more like a deluded character out of a Tennessee Williams play than a formidable "brand" and money-making machine. That's just plain weird; too weird to be true. I guess the money, creature comforts, and other attractions of the U.S. are more appealing than a life spent drinking in the piney mountain air of the Urals, or bobbing around in a boat in the headwaters of the mighty Don—great as it is to represent Russia in the Olympics!"

This is not just bad-spirited, it is outright stupid. It took me less than ten seconds to find out that the distance from Maria's home town, Nyagan, to the source of the River Don, in Novomoskovsk, is 1760 miles or two and a half days of driving time. Did John McEnroe, America's proudest Davis Cupper, ever go bobbing around in a boat in the headwaters of the mighty Mississippi? It is easy to dismiss Peter Bodo as a shrivelled-up, narrow-minded American git, but personally, I find his narrow-mindedness even sadder than that: Bodo himself was born in Austria and has spent pretty much his entire life reporting on a genuinely global sport.

Bodo's bile predictably generated a ton of negative reaction. Since then, Tennis magazine have tried to row back, with their more thoughtful columnist Steve Tignor writing that "I can’t begrudge her a desire to feel a link to her family and its history". But, like another American called Mitt Romney found out last week, what has been said can't be unsaid.

I myself am proud to have serially failed the Tebbit test, like every other expat I've met in Britain, and like every Englishman or Scot I've known who has lived abroad. That puts me squarely and naturally on Maria's side of this question. So I'll be hoping even more fervently than usual that Maria beats Serena Williams to win the Olympic gold for Russia. It's a long shot - the bookies at offering 4:1 on a Maria win - but she's still got a shot.

Chorus from Hellas, by Percy Bysshe Shelley, on the London Underground

Spent fifteen minutes or so staring at these words on the London Underground:

The world`s great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn:
Heaven smiles, and faith and empires gleam,
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far;
A new Peneus rolls his fountains
Against the morning star.
Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.

A loftier Argo cleaves the main,
Fraught with a later prize;
Another Orpheus sings again,
And loves, and weeps, and dies.
A new Ulysses leaves once more
Calypso for his native shore... 

This poem is Chorus from Hellas, by Percy Bysshe Shelley, an explicitly political piece. At the time it was written, Greece had been an Ottoman colony for over three hundred years, and was fighting for independence. The English romantic poets were deeply exercised by the Greek cause.

Shelley wrote these words while raising money for Greek partisans, showing a strong pan-European sensibility; it's possible to read this poem as a creation hymn for the European Union, written one hundred and thirty years before the Treaty of Rome. Unfortunately, now, "wreaks of a dissolving dream" also bring to mind the financial havoc in Greece, and the dissolving dream of Europe.   

Thank you to Transport For London for making room for Shelley on the tube. It would have been so easy to fill this space with yet another advert.