The Clintons, the Obamas and Mr Liz Hurley

The Clintons' marriage is famously “complicated”. The Obamas seem a stable and happy couple. This blog believes that Liz Hurley’s marriage to her unlikely Indian beau Arun Nayar is more likely to go the Obama way than the Clinton way; the Hurley-Nayar yin and yang are in balance, as are the Obamas’, while the Clintons’ is not.

Earlier, I had floated a general theory: the psyche seeks a balance of yin and yang in every couple. Happy couples have this balance. The Clintons don’t. Both Bill and Hillary are tough, smart, super-ambitious scrappers. All yang. Where there are differences in style, Bill the charming compromiser seems more in touch with yin energy than Hillary, the doctrinaire disciplinarian. They could easily be best friends; they seem to understand each other perfectly and enjoy each other’s company. But they are too alike to be a couple, their marriage needs more yin.

Michelle Obama, unlike Hillary Clinton, seems very happy being a wife and mom. She is not using her first ladyship as a platform from which to influence policy. She could if she wanted to. She is smart enough and has the necessary training. The Economist ran a thoughtful and sympathetic column a year ago, lamenting the “momification of Michelle”:

...during the campaign she raised a lot of thought-provoking questions—about “the flimsy difference between success and failure” in America, about the removal of rungs from the ladder of opportunity, and about the plight of families at the bottom of the heap. It would be good to hear a bit more about what Mrs Obama thinks and a lot less about what she wears.

The Economist is missing the bigger picture: the Obamas have an endless supply of smart, articulate, well-trained, motivated people capable of raising thought-provoking questions about the flimsy difference between success and failure. They don’t have anybody else who can be Mommy. In choosing to be Mommy, Michelle is doing what she alone can do, and letting others do what they can do as well as she can. David Ricardo would have congratulated her for focusing on her comparative advantage. CJ Jung would have congratulated her for bringing more yin energy to her marriage when it was needed; now that Barack is the most powerful man in the world, he inevitably gathers more yang around him than he ever did before.

When the Obamas first got together, their balance of yin and yang probably was different. Michelle was Barack’s senior at Harvard Law School and his mentor at the law firm in Chicago when they got to know each other. The change in the way their marriage works is a nice example of how plastic identity can be, and how much that identity is shaped by context.

Readers shocked by this apparent endorsement of a woman’s traditional role... hang in there. Another marriage which seems about right in terms of yin and yang balance, but with a woman being the tougher partner, is that of Liz Hurley and Arun Nayar.

I was a bit preplexed when I first heard about this match. It was reported in the British press as Liz Hurley marrying an Indian textile tycoon. Sure, this was good publicity for India, and a glamourous A list celebrity like Liz Hurley would make a fantastic trophy wife for an Indian tycoon. But who exactly was this Indian textile tycoon? I am pretty close to business circles in India, and nobody I know had ever heard of Arun Nayar, or of his family’s “import export” business. And if Mr Nayar is not exactly an A lister back home in India, why does Liz want him?

Last week’s Sunday Times resolved at least a part of this puzzle. Liz Hurley never was destined to be a trophy for some Indian textile tycoon. She is one tough honey: determined, hard-working, ambitious, rich, successful and totally in charge. She was getting herself a well-built husband who would look appropriate (and not say anything inappropriate) at public events, and would be happy to help mind the animals at the farm back in Gloucestershire. Some extracts:

- Liz says "Chasing goals has less to do with earning more money – although I’m not against it – and more to do with being challenged and trying to win”

- Arun Nayar, her husband [is her] most devoted member of staff. Only the other week, she announces proudly, Arun came home from manning the farm’s stall at Cirencester boasting how many of wifey’s snack bars he’d hawked. “He sold 50!” she beams

- Does she worry that Arun might suffer from a touch of the beta males, given she’s such a big personality and it’s her name on the family business? “Arun is astonishingly good-natured and would be the last man on earth to feel overshadowed by me,” she says, unruffled. “He’s thoroughly comfortable in his own skin and I don’t think he’d swap places with anyone.”

The Times journalist isn’t trying to portray either Liz Hurley or Arun Nayar in flattering light here. But it isn’t hard to imagine that it is easier for the driven Ms Hurley to live with the amiable anonymity of Mr Nayar, than with a man who is as driven as she is. She needs someone to bring some yin to her yang.

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.

Wicked

"That's wicked! Really wicked! Thank you man. Thank you. Wicked!"

Thus spake a man-on-the-street. He wore workman's overalls. He spoke into his cell phone, excitedly, animatedly. I overheard him as I walked to Pret to pick up lunch, and thought it odd that a word that once meant bad has come to mean good. Ours is a topsy-turvy world, a world without roots or moral anchors. A sign, perhaps, that the common people can no longer tell good from bad? A sign, perhaps, of civilizational decline?

It turns out that the word wicked is derived from wicca, or witchcraft. Wicked came to mean evil in a specific medieval context, when witches were burnt at the stake for pagan or occult spiritual practices, even in supposedly secular America, which must count as one of the most horrifying traditions of religious persecution in history.

My Enid Blyton reading daughter instinctively knew this etymology. When I asked her what exactly wicked meant, the first word she associated with it was wizard. Wicked, wizard and smashing can be used interchangably to describe The Famous Five's sumptuous teas.

Wicked's reinstatement into modern English as a stylish, ironic synonym for very good has impeccable antecedents. F Scott Fitzgerald was the first modern writer to use the word in this context. This has since become common usage in both New England and Old England. Though if the global appeal of the Twilight movies, Harry Potter and even classic pop hits like "You can do magic" are anything to go by, understanding the roots of wicked will actually give the word more currency. Go wicked.

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.

The Universal Soldier. In Afghanistan

The war in Afghanistan is not going that well. It is not clear what exactly the fighting is for. Young soldiers are getting killed. There is no end in sight.

Yet, Sam Kiley, a British journalist who just brought out this book on touring with the paratroopers of the 16 Air Assault Brigade in Helmand province, reports that the troops are committed and motivated.

Why? In part, says Mr Kiley, it comes from “a basic male instinct” to prove yourself. In part it is about fighting for your friends and, when they are killed, about avenging them. Above all, it is about sheer thrill. As one Para quoted by Mr Kiley says during a battle: “Living the fucking dream mate.”

Without having read the book, my instinct is that Mr Kiley is telling it like it is, no spin. The Para living the dream is a Universal Soldier.

He's five foot two, he's six feet four
He fights with missiles and with spears,
He's all of thirty one, he is only seventeen,
He's been a soldier for a thousand years.

He's a Catholic, a Hindu, an atheist, a Jain
He's a Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew,
He knows he shouldn't kill and he knows he always will
Kill you for me my friend, and me for you.

He's fighting for Canada, he's fighting for France,
He's fighting for the USA
He's fighting for Russia, he's fighting for Japan...

The Universal Soldier is an archetype; vigourous, integral, eternal. He can pack more life into two days of intense experience than most mortals can in entire lifetimes (refer E. Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls).

Yet, this is almost certainly not what Donovan meant when he sang this song in the sixties. Donovan was the guy who replaced Bob Dylan in the Joan Baez sets at the Newport Folk festival, when Bobby quit being political and broke up with Joanie. Donovan had picked this piece up from a Canadian songwriter called Buffy Sainte-Marie. She was a sixties anti-war protester, a pacifist pointing an accusing finger at the Universal Soldier:

He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame,
His orders come from far away no more,
They come from here and there and you and me,
And brothers can't you see,
This is not the way we put an end to war.

Fighting a fighting archetype, huh? Who would've thought...

Re-thinking Clement Attlee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Cameron goes Dutch?

Gezellig - space and people coming together in harmony, that special spirit of cosy fellowship that animates Dutch life - would be an excellent addition to the English language and to English speaking cultures. Maybe, but maybe not in the way I initially thought. When I first wrote about Gezellig, I assumed that the word that best describes Amsterdam would naturally be liberal (as opposed to Liberal). Having thought about it longer, I’m realizing that gezellig is in fact deeply conservative.

Gezellig cosiness implies a comfort with the status quo, the fellowship a comfort with people like us. A gezellig culture could easily be the culture of a smug, closed-minded, back-slapping clique. The liberal experience is necessarily edgy. It means making peace with the creative destruction wrought by liberal economic ideas, and connecting with the strange people and their unfamiliar customs that liberal social ideas inevitably bring into the mainstream.

About a year ago, until the world was hit by a recession, David Cameron’s Tories were making a strong and very articulate pitch for gezellig in British life. David Brooks, once protégé of William Buckley, wrote about this pitch in his New York Times column:

The central political debate of the 20th century was over the role of government. The right stood for individual freedom while the left stood for extending the role of the state. But the central debate of the 21st century is over quality of life. In this new debate, it is necessary for political leaders to talk about “the whole way we live our lives.”

The David Brooks column pointed me to this paper called On Fraternity, by Danny Kruger, a special advisor to David Cameron.

The title is well chosen. Take the French Revolution’s trinity of liberty, equality and fraternity. Liberty belongs to the right, equality to the left. This paper is a call to make fraternity Tory territory. And Kruger’s diagnosis of what ails Britain?

...Britain is suffering ‘social desertification’... a process that began in the 1980s as hundreds of local institutions... were swept away... small high-street grocers and bakers disappeared. Family-run pubs were subsumed into giant chains... this trend is apparent in the rates of family breakdown and the prevalence of drug addiction and violent, alcohol-fuelled crime; in the neglect of the old and the precocious sexuality of children; in the cult of vicarious narcissism which is ‘reality TV’; in the popular addiction to shopping as a means of self-definition, and in the astronomical scale of private debt which is necessary to maintain the shopping habit...

Everything Kruger doesn’t like is ongezellig, the opposite of gezellig. It’s all so unlike the halcyon past. Terrible isn’t it, old chap?

This blog isn’t about ask if the Thatcher-Blair decades saw the re-birth of British vitality, or guess the correct level of social cohesion needed for liberal institutions to take root. But hopefully, the conservative possibilities of gezellig are apparent.

By the way, lamenting the absence of gezellig is not the same thing as experiencing gezellig. Is it ongezellig to moan about the absence of gezellig?

There but for the grace of you go I

Came across this story in the New Yorker, a profile of a liberal Iranian economist called Mohammed Tabibian. Has stayed in memory because Iran, seen through Tabibian's eyes, reminds me so much of India.

Here are some nuggets that I really liked:

- Tabibian speaks with a lucidity and directness that is startling in a culture marked by allusiveness and elaborate courtesy

- In Iran the spectrum of economic thought, Tabibian joked, "runs from left to left". The so-called convervatives... talk of redistributing Iran's wealth, not of re-structuring its economy

- "The common morality was that if the rich give a part of their wealth to the poor, then the poor will be helped out. Many days and nights, in my imagination and daydreaming, I distributed the wealth of my family to the poor in my neighbourhood. Always my calculation came to the same conculsion: that such an imaginary scheme, even if it happens, makes us poor and the neighbourhood not much better off"

- Tabibian is not bothered by the negative example (of free markets run amok) unfolding in the West. "We are on two different sides of the spectrum. You need more regulation. We need less regulation and government intervention"

- The senior Iranian clergy at Qom "were nice people, gentle people, very concerned about morality and things to come from the other life". Their economic presriptions, however, were vanishingly vague: society should be prosperous, people should not be greedy

- After the Revolution, the Central Bank had only one clear priority, to abolish the interest rate which was deemed un-Islamic. And yet, no matter which policy the Central Bank pursued, interest quickly reappeared. A bank branch in Tehran would place a red car on its roof and announce that all depositers would be entered into a lottery for that car - a strategy that allowed the bank to pay a variable rate of return on its deposits. Bankers even found ayatollahs who would issue fatwas in support of their schemes

- The revolution had made education available to more Iranians. But there was no role for these people in an economy that depended not on productive industries but on the dispensation of oil-rents

All the Shah’s Men?

Was Barack Obama’s tough talk on Iran the kiss of death for the recent protests?

Great question, because it opens up a pivotal passage in history that needs to be resolved before sanity returns to the Middle East. I didn’t know about this until I read All the Shah’s Men. This book, a breeze at 230 pages of comfortably large fonts, is a must read for anyone who has been following the news coming out of Iran over the last few weeks.

The key to understanding Iran, and why any association with America and/or Britain is so toxic in Iranian politics, goes back to 1953.



This was when the CIA sponsored a coup to unseat the secular, liberal, democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, and install Shah Reza Pahlavi in his place. The point of the coup was to retain western control of the oil fields and refineries at Abadan. Mohammed Mossadegh planned to nationalize these oil fields, which were owned and operated by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now known as British Petroleum).

The coup worked for a quarter century, until the Shah was overthrown in 1979 by a people’s revolution that morphed into the Islamic Republic. These events, not much talked about in today's western media, are vividly remembered in the Middle East.

Interestingly, America’s Democrat leaders are well aware of this history:

- Barack Obama referred to the 1953 coup during his historic speech at Cairo University, “For many years, Iran has defined itself in part by its opposition to my country, and there is in fact a tumultuous history between us. In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government”.

- John Kerry wrote this op-ed piece in the New York Times, “The last thing we should do is give Mr. Ahmadinejad an opportunity to evoke the 1953 American-sponsored coup, which ousted Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and returned Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to power. Doing so would only allow him to cast himself as a modern-day Mossadegh, standing up for principle against a Western puppet”.

Some other interesting nuggets from All the Shah's Men:

- Kermit Roosevelt Jr., Teddy Roosevelt's grandson, was the CIA agent who engineered the 1953 coup

- Norman Schwarzkopf Sr. spoke to the exiled Shah to convince him to return to Iran and take power. His son was the Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. who commanded American forces in Operation Desert Storm in 1991

- Winston Churchill was the British Prime Minister when Mossadegh started moves to nationalize Anglo-Iranian. This felt personal to Churchill, the Admiralty man. Abadan had fueled the Royal Navy through two world wars. Churchill immediately reached out to America for help, and got nowhere with President Harry Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson. The plot to oust Mossadegh really started getting traction when the Eisenhower administration brought the Dulles brothers to the center of power.

Flying through Dulles airport in Washington DC reminds me of the story of Mohammed Mossadegh.

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.

Slumdog Smarts

Slumdog Millionaire makes a good point about intelligence: the chaiwallah knows a lot of answers, if the questions relate to his life experiences.

This thought sits on a serious problem with IQ testing, or with most standardized tests like the SAT, GRE or CAT. They don't test native intelligence. They test familiarity with a specific way of thinking, which is embedded in culture.

This is the reason why cultural minorities tend to do poorly on standardized tests. A favourite example from this piece by Malcolm Gladwell illustrates this point: Kpelle tribals from Liberia naturally group knives with potatoes, because knives are used to cut potatoes. While this is quite logical, standardized tests generally expect knives to be grouped with other tools, and potates with other root vegetables.

Unfortunately, this unsurprising and well understood limitation of standardized testing has led to horribly complicated racial profiling for university admissions in the USA, and in explicit, even more divisive, quotas in India.

Surely the more creative route is in designing culture-neutral tests? And in validating these instruments sufficiently to bring them into mainstream use?

This blog is idealistic enough to believe that better technology can at least alleviate really knotty political problems.

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.

Pyaasa

Since 26/11, it hasn’t felt appropriate to change the topic to something other than the Mumbai attacks. Sachin’s century at Chepauk has given me permission to do just that.

This test match was always about more the cricket. For England to have shown the gumption to come out and play, for Strauss and Collingwood to play gritty career defining knocks, for Sachin Tendulkar to lead India on a record breaking run-chase, bringing up his century and the winning runs with the same shot, and for Sachin to have the grace and presence of mind to dedicate his century to the victims of the Mumbai attacks...

I'm just grateful that my favourite game can produce such a moment. The best piece I came across on this test match being about more than cricket was by Peter Roebuck in Cricinfo.

Yet, as a long-suffering India cricket fan, this win is special to me in just simple cricketing terms. This tickles the same spot as watching Ishant Sharma dominate Ricky Ponting at the WACA; it slakes a thirst that has been building up for decades.

Great teams chase down big targets. Bradman’s Invincibles chased down 403 at Headingley in 1948, to secure the Ashes and their status as the Invincibles. Steve Waugh’s Aussies chased down 369 in Sydney, 1999, after being 5 for 126, against a Pakistan attack that included Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis, Shoaib Akthar and Saqlain Mushtaq. Clive Lloyd’s Windies had their own great chase when Gordon Greenidge made mockery of David Gower’s declaration at Lord's in 1984 by chasing down 342 at a rate of over 5 an over while losing just one wicket. These wins matter more than others; they take on a talismanic quality, keeping the possibility of victory alive in a team’s imagination even in the worst situation.

India, Saurav’s India, had a talismanic win in Kolkata, 2001. But this win felt different from a triumphal march through a fourth innings chase. It was built around Rahul and VVS gritting out for survival in the third innings, with Harbhajan coming in to deliver the kill. Strangely, despite being a team built around a wealth of batting talent, India’s fourth innings performances have been appalling.

Think back to the inexplicable collapse to Shahid Afridi in Bangalore, 2005, needing to bat out a day to win the series. All out for 100 to the mesmerizing spin of Shaun Udal in Mumbai, 2006, again needing to bat out a day to win the series. Or losing three wickets in five balls to Michael Clarke in Sydney, 2008.

Going back a bit, remember the collapse in Barbados, 1997, when faced with the opportunity to be the first team in two generations to dethrone the Windies at home? Or falling achingly short of the mark against Akram’s Pakis in Chennai, 1999, in an ill-tempered and tightly fought series. Even the famous tied test against the Aussies in Chennai, 1987, was a game India should have won in a canter.

India have also generally made heavy weather of small fourth innings targets, even if we did go on to win. It came down to Sameer Dighe and Harbhajan Singh to hold their nerve and chase down 155 in Chennai, 2001. Chasing 233 to win in Adelaide, 2004, was a nervy affair that could have gone either way.

Those ghosts have now been exorcised.

What else would I have wished for in this game? For Rohit Sharma, S Badrinath, Virat Kohli, Robin Uthappa, Suresh Raina, M Vijay and Shikar Dhawan to have been sitting in the dressing room, absorbing the atmosphere, drinking in the subliminal belief that this is how India bats when it really counts.

The Taj

Jamsetji Nasserwanji Tata had visitors from out of town. A proud citizen of Bombay, he wanted to show his city off to his guests. He took them out to Bombay's finest hotel, where he encountered a sign: "Dogs and Indians not allowed".

Angry but determined, he swore he would build a even greater hotel in Bombay. A hotel that would be counted among the finest in the world. A hotel where Indians and whites, blacks and yellows, Hindus and Muslims, Christians and Jews, Sikhs, Parsees, Buddhists, Jains and Atheists were all welcome.

Mr. Tata kept his promise. Thus was born the Taj Mahal Hotel on Apollo Bunder. The Taj is not just any luxury hotel. It is a special place, resonant with meaning. It is every bit as iconic as the twin towers that were attacked in New York on 9/11.

This is the place that the dirty little insects who crawled ashore on the Sassoon Docks have chosen to attack, the place where they shot dead women and children in the middle of the night.



This hurts more than railway lines that get blown up in the hinterland. This is an attack on an idea of India: an India which is warm-hearted, open-minded and walks the world with its head held high.

This feels like a watershed, a turning point. Where do we turn to? We could do worse than look to the character of Jamsetji Tata himself.

Let the Taj be refurbished. Let it be an even greater, even more vibrant, even more humane place than it's been for a hundred years. May the spirit behind the Taj live on forever. Jai Hind.

Amateurs talk strategy. Real generals talk logistics

Here's the Economist on the last lap of the Obama-McCain campaign in Pennsylvania, a vital swing state.

...Obama has 81 field offices across the state, many in places where Democrats have never competed before, compared with Mr McCain’s three dozen...

...The McCain office only had a couple of people working the phones when The Economist visited. The young man who was in charge had no idea that Mr McCain was in the state that day. The Obama office, by contrast, was crammed to the brim and hyper-organised. There were plenty of older people sporting “Hillary sent me” badges as well as younger Obamaphiles. The walls were covered with charts telling people where they had to be and when. After dark, it was still buzzing with volunteers. The McCain office was closed...

There's the glimmer of an interesting theory here: winning elections is not about policy, performances, or even mud-slinging. All that is just noise that keeps the commentariat busy. The real business of winning elections is about logistics, keeping the show rolling on the ground. Politics is about Sales, not Marketing.

This may also be the real reason why the Congress, India's Grand Old Party, is now a shambles. It's not the failure of Nehruvian socialism or any such grand theory. It's probably about the about the slow tactical melting away of the grass-roots organization, of the Congressman in each village, of the great sales organization that was built up during the freedom struggle.

Schism in the Soul?

Many elites in the United States are disavowing what is best in our culture and imitating what is worst. Some are trying to reinvoke old norms and reverse the process, but most are succumbing to "proletarianization." This rift is similar to ones experienced historically by disintegrating civilizations.

These words were written by Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute in 2001. Charles Murray is both an arch-conservative and a genuine intellectual. Murray is invoking Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History, a chapter beautifully titled Schism in the Soul.

In a disintegrating civilization, the creative minority has degenerated into elites that are no longer confident, no longer setting the example. Among other reactions are a "lapse into truancy" (a rejection, in effect, of the obligations of citizenship) and a "surrender to a sense of promiscuity" (vulgarizations of manners, the arts, and language) that "are apt to appear first in the ranks of the proletariat and to spread from there to the ranks of the dominant minority, which usually succumbs to the sickness of 'proletarianization.'"

Murray was writing in the aftermath of the Clintonian scandals, when the meaning of "surrender to promiscuity" was obvious.

Eight years later, what does this election tell us about the spirit of America, and more generally of of Western Civilization? Is the schism in America's soul going to heal? Or widen?

In Obama and Palin, both parties have nominated candidates from outside the traditional elite, candidates from what Toynbee would have called the internal proletariat. Is the internal proletariat aspiring to be a part of what is best about America? Toynbee would consider this a sign of a healthy growing civilization.

Or is the internal proletariat rejecting the values of the American elite, invoking a mythic "archaist" indentity, and hastening the disintegration of a great civilization? Time will tell. Either way, for an observer like me, this is politics at its most compelling.

Michael Mukherjee, Ayman al Zawahiri and a liberal education

Watched and enjoyed the Mani Ratnam film Yuva recently. This got me thinking about social change, revolution, terror and education...a train of thought led to me being an even more ardent fan the American ideal of a broad, liberal university education. Like, for example, the core College curriculum at the University of Chicago, which my cousin Shakti just finished. Probably not the point Mani Ratnam wanted to make. But then, that is why minds have windmills.

Yuva features Abhishek Bachchan as Lallan Singh: a violent underworld hit-man with a thread of gold running through his heart. Lallan Singh works for powerful establishment politicians. Ajay Devgan features as Michael Mukherjee: an idealistic middle-class student of Physics at Presidency College, Calcutta. Michael has many friends and a very gorgeous girlfriend who teaches French. He turns down a scholarship offer from MIT, takes on the violence of Lallan Singh and his wicked, venal political masters, and promises to change the system by standing for election as Mr Clean. He duly wins the election. The movie ends with Michael and friends striding confidently into the Bengal assembly. The implied feel-good conclusion is that Michael's idealism will reform the system.

What started me on the train of of thought was that I found Michael Mukherjee's idealism more scary than Lallan Singh's violence. Michael was sure. He was never in doubt. He never paused to re-consider. He never changed his mind. He couldn't have. Michael's charisma stems from his conviction, in his own personal integrity and in the completeness of his ideas. And, while Ajay Devgan isn't a gifted actor, yet he played Michael perfectly, instinctively. I know real people like Michael, people who derive their sense of self from ideological conviction.

People who share Michael's conviction are often revolutionaries. Could be the Communist Revolution, the Islamist Revolution, the Environmental Revolution, the Freedom Movement, racist supremacists, religious evangelists of any hue…you get the picture. What Michael Mukherjee and all these people share is a world view that is complete. When this world view is adopted, the mind comes to rest. The psyche now has the basis for action. The action is usually both bloody and futile, because the real world is never that simple.

Was it just chance that Michael Mukherjee was a student of physics?

A theory I heard from Professor Ahmet Evin suggests not. Professor Evin was lamenting the (relative) failure of modern Turkey to create a vital civil society. He attributed this to the fact that the Turkish leadership, and therefore all of Turkey, prizes a technical education above a liberal one. The Engineer’s Mind tends to see society as a problem to be solved with a simple, specific and well-designed intervention. Not as an amorphous mass of humanity which needs to be inspired, jollied and cajoled towards another amorphous vision of beauty, virtue and justice (or words to that effect).

While this has to be unfair to my many well-read engineer friends, this theory really resonated with me, as an Indian. My friends from China and Mexico tell me the same narrowness of vision is true of their countries as well.

The prevalence of a technical education among the Al Queda top brass is fascinating. Osama bin Laden is a civil engineer, apparently a pretty good one. Ayman al Zawahiri is a medical doctor. His fellow Al Queda ideologue, Dr. Fadl, is also a medical doctor. Mohamed Atta is an architect who did a Masters degree in Urban Planning at Hamburg University. The pattern is clearly not perfect: Anton Balasingham, the LTTE’s ideologue, had apparently read up on the Vedanta and Buddhism. But there still seems to be a pattern here.

The problem could only be the dog that did not bark. A solid base of engineering knowledge could hardly be a bad thing, in any circumstances. The problem might be that these smart, sensitive, idealistic young people, who were going to be influential in their societies anyway, had no exposure to history, politics or law. They knew nothing of the genius of the Medici family in making the Renaissance possible in tiny, vulnerable medieval Florence. They knew nothing of C. Rajagopalachari’s dissenting views on Indian socialism, and on organizing independent India into language based states. They never wrestled with the differing world views of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, or with Friedrich Hayek's notion of The Fatal Conceit, the conceit that societies can be engineered.

Maybe, in that half light between education and ignorance, it is easy to imagine that building one mega-dam, or embracing the one true faith, or ridding the world of one hated oppressor, or anointing one master race, or detonating that one perfect suicide bomb, is the key to liberation.

In that case, the point of an education should surely be to dispel that half-light. Education, as opposed to technical training, should be about exposing plastic minds to this dazzling diversity of thought, none of which are complete or correct.

This, unfortunately, is a concept of education alien to Indian Universities. In India, understandable middle class anxiety frames education as a means to earn a decent living. I'm fairly close to my company's graduate hiring program at British Universities. I don't often run into this ideal in Britain either, where 18 year olds are encouraged to make definitive choices between chemical engineering, medicine or architecture. Though the PPE program at Oxford points in this direction. This ideal seems to be best developed in America, where a liberal university education often precedes technical specialization, therefore cultivating humanity.

Why is this post in English? Part II

My earlier post talked about English as the world's de facto lingua franca.

Is this simply because America followed Britain as the world's dominant imperial/ economic power, and by some quirk of history both happened to be English speaking? Or does this connecting power come from something intrinsic to the English language?

How to find out? Ideally, I would run a test vs. control version of history.

The test version would feature a Swahili speaking super power. The control version would feature an English speaking super power. Both super powers would rise, shine, decline and die. 250 years after the death of the empires, a statistician would measure the usage rates of both English and Swahili in the former Imperial domains/ spheres of influence and perform a test of proportions to determine if English is stickier than Swahili.

Looking around at the real world, there probably are a number of natural experiments that come interestingly close to this design.

Do Kazakhs and Estonians, once united within the mighty USSR, speak to each other in Russian or in English? And how will they speak to each other a hundred years from now? My money is on English. Or Mandarin.

How sticky was Spanish in the old American colonies? Pretty darn sticky. Did the newly independent Latin American nations try to embrace their native American-Indian languages? Were the native American languages sub-scale? Was there really a viable alternative to Spanish?

Did Urdu, the great language of the Mughal courts, survive the decline of the Mughals? Just about survived in Lucknow and Hyderabad. Did not thrive. I'm not sure if the Punjabi version spoken in modern Pakistan would be recognized as Urdu by the Lucknow cognoscenti.

How sticky was Turkish in the former Ottoman Empire? This empire extended from Hungary, through what is now called Iraq, to the Persian border. As far as I know (I don't know much about the Middle East) this swath speaks Arabic, the language of the Koran.

Did Latin survive the fall of the Roman Empire? Yes, thanks to the Catholic church. Will Latin survive the Second Vatican Council? Maybe, thanks to Pope Benedict XVI. Sanskrit survived long after classical Hindu India because of a similarly tenacious priesthood. Hebrew has done rather well in modern Israel. There is a pattern here.

Go back to the randomized test and check if either empire embedded language within a religion. The more sticky language was probably the one which was embedded in a religion.

Is modern English woven into a religion? Yes. Its called Hollywood. Maybe English will continue to thrive long after the USA ceases to be the world's only super power because the world continues to worship at the temple of Brad, Angelina and their spiritual heirs.

Why is this post in English?

An American friend observed at dinner last week that it is common for non-native English speakers, like maybe me and my wife, to speak with each other in English. Why does that happen?

The trivial argument is that my wife and I are native English speakers, as Indian-Indians. We've been educated in English in India since the age of three, like tens of millions of proud and privileged Indians. There is a case for India appropriating English and making it another Indian language, much like India has appropriated cricket and made it a very Indian game. But there is something more interesting happening here than identity politics.

English is famously weak among non-native speakers as being a poor medium for expressing emotion. But, despite that, English may lend itself to expressing precise, complex or subtle thoughts more readily than any other language.

That is an unprovable and potentially incendiary claim...but it still is worth holding that thought for a moment to see where it goes.

The strength of English is most obvious in the size of its vocabulary. English has about twice as many words as Spanish, the #2 language on the wordlists. This happens mainly because English is the default language of business, science and technology. Things that enrich people's lives, new experiences people want to talk about, happen because of business or technology and are therefore conceived in English. Translating gear, amplifier, covariance, browser or credit card out of English rarely feels natural. Hence, when Brazilians and Japanese want to talk, they talk in English. Hence Hinglish, Spanglish and Franglais.

Also, English is wonderfully assimilative. There is no language police to prevent beautiful words like gestalt, schadenfreude or zeitgeist from being imported into English words. Yin, yang, chi, karma, avatar and kismet are, or are well on their way to being, mainstream English words.

So, technically educated polyglots whose first language is Tamil, Arabic or Malay may well drift into English as they start expressing more complex ideas.

It looks like when history and custom provide a simple but robust (grammatical) framework, when nationalistic pride and the language police are kept away, when business and technology are allowed to just get on with it and do their thing, what develops is something amazingly powerful that connects a big slice of humanity. Is there is political philosophy lurking somewhere in here? Or is it just the Linux business model?

Time for thought

A private conversation between Barack Obama and David Cameron picked up by accident on an ABC microphone:

Cameron: Do you have a break at all?

Obama: Actually, the most important thing you need to do is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you're doing is thinking...The biggest mistake a lot of folks make is just feeling as if you have to be...

Cameron: These guys just chalk up your diary

Obama: Right. In 15 minute increments...

Cameron: We call it the dentist's waiting room. You have to scrap that...you've got to have time

Obama: And...well you start making mistake, or you lose the big picture, or you lose a sense of, I think you lose a feel...

Cameron: Your feeling. And this is exactly what politics is all about. The judgment you bring to making decisions.

It is not universal. I find it hard to imagine Hillary Clinton living by this ethic of reflective thought rather than just working harder. Maybe Hillary would have been better off with a less packed schedule and more time for thought.

For my money, this might be the best management advice I've ever had.