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.

Would Captain Haddock have had a Scottish accent?

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

Pithecanthropus! Lily livered landlubbers! Troglodytes!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Raj Rajaratnam: Nayagan?

தென் பாண்டி சீமையிலே
தேரோடும் வீதியிலே
மான் போல வந்தவனே
யார்  அடித்தாரோ
யார்  அடித்தாரோ


These lyrics are from the theme song of the Tamil film Nayagan. The refrain, "yaar aditharo?" translates to "who hit you?", which is a pretty accurate description of what this Mani Ratnam film is about.

Nayagan is an exploration of what hit a young Tamil boy called Shakti Velu, and turned him into Velu Nayagan, one of Bombay's most feared crime bosses. It tells the story a frightened boy who runs away from a crumbling home, arrives in distant, alien Bombay, gets caught up by chance with the criminal underworld, rises through the crime ranks with his smarts, and when needed, his decisive brutality, yet retains his innate integrity, his decency, his faith, a capacity for empathy. It is based loosely on the life of the real-life Bombay crime boss Varadarajan Mudaliar, and for my money, is one of the best films ever made.

This film came back to mind because I was reading about, and reflecting on, a similar contemporary story.

In this contemporary telling, the distant alien city the young Tamil boy finds himself in is not Bombay, but New York, the criminal underworld is Wall Street. The crime boss in question - the Nayagan - is Raj Rajarathnam. The story teller is journalist Suketu Mehta, who did several hours of interviews with Raj Rajarathnam shortly after his eleven year prison sentence was announced. These interviews contain a fair bit of new information. Rajaratnam was a very private man in his glory days, and these are the first interviews he has given since being charged.

Suketu Mehta's portrayal of Rajaratnam is generally sympathetic. Rajaratnam is portrayed as The Outsider, doing what he had to, to win at a game where the deck was stacked against him.

"He had grown up, as he tells it, in fear: of the Sinhalese majority in his homeland; of the skinheads in Britain where he’d studied; and of the established elites of Wall Street where he did business. At just about every stage of his life, there were people out to get him."

Mehta emphasizes Rajaratnam's community spirit and generosity:

"In New York’s South Asian community there are many stories of Rajaratnam’s generosity. He has given financial support to the Harlem Children’s Zone; the education reformer Geoffrey Canada testified in his support during the trial. He’s also given $250,000 a year for three years to South Asian Youth Action, a Queens-based NGO; his wife, Asha, is on the board..."

He emphasizes Rajaratnam's dignity in adversity: Raj refuses to wear a wire-tap, and refuses to be drawn into any immigrants vs. insiders conspiracy theory.

"Rajaratnam was...being asked by the government to turn on (Rajat) Gupta. But he wouldn’t wear a wire, he says, so he could sleep at night."

"Why so many Indian names in the indictments, I ask. “Because Roomy Khan’s network was Indian,” he explains simply. “They’re not being unfairly targeted. I don’t believe in conspiracy theories. ” His brother Rengan sees it differently. “For years these guys were sitting around in sports clubs and exchanging information. That wasn’t a crime. And now we immigrants do the same thing and it is?”

Mehta emphasizes the contrast between the moral codes and norms of America, and what Rajaratnam grew up with in Sri Lanka.

"The whole story speaks to the South Asian–American community: its pursuit of success and money at any cost; the differences between immigrants and the first generation; and the immigrants’ incomplete understanding of the rigor of the law in the U.S."

The picture that develops through Suketu Mehta's story is of a proud, big-hearted, dignified man, a spirited underdog, more a victim than a villain, who is facing an unprecedented jail term for doing things that he did not see as a serious crime, because so many others around him were doing the same.

The picture that also emerges if that of someone who comes from a familiar milieu, a milieu that I, and I guess most readers of this blog, would find easy to relate to. Rajaratnam is a Tamil, like me. His father was an upright executive, head of the Singer Sewing Machine Company in South Asia. My father was also an upright executive, he worked for Unilever and Ogilvy & Mather advertising in India. Rajaratnam studied business at Wharton, I studied at the University of Chicago. Rajaratnam's face lights up when talking about PG Wodehouse. Mine would too, I come from a devoutly Wodehousian clan.

However, unlike Rajaratnam, I did not attend Dulwich College, the south London public school that Wodehouse himself attended. Rajaratnam spent three years of his life in what once was Wodehouse's room. This is the point at which the similarity in our backgrounds starts to break down; I know several South Asian professionals, I don't know any who sent their children to public school in England. My parents were very well off by the standards of their time, but I don't think they could have dreamt of sending me to public school in England. If anything Rajaratnam seems to come from a background which is similar to mine, but even more privileged.

Understanding this background makes me see Rajaratnam in different light, makes it harder for me to see him as a victim. Yes, there are immigrants to the USA, say Mexican fruit-pickers, who have the "immigrants’ incomplete understanding of the rigor of the law in the U.S", and may consequently break the law. Yes, there have been Sicilian immigrants who stepped on to American soil staring at a stark choice between joining the mafia and being killed by the mafia. A Columbian cocaine mule escaping from a drug cartel, like in the movie Maria Full of Grace, necessarily faces some very hard life choices, like Shakti Velu did when he found himself in Bombay. The choices Rajaratnam faced are just not comparable to the choices faced by these stereotypical, less fortunate immigrants, immigrants whose lives were hit by fate.

Rajaratnam, and his crooked henchmen from McKinsey and Company like Anil Kumar and (presumably) Rajat Gupta, were brought up to be a part of an elite. These guys had real choices. They were fully equipped - by their native intelligence, their privileged upbringing, and by their first rate education - to very quickly understand the "rigour of the law in the U.S.", with all its nuances of meaning. They were equipped to grasp just how sick and cynical Wall Street was. They had the option of trying to be a force for the good. At a minimum, they had the option of not playing and stepping away if the game got too ugly, and going on to live still very comfortable lives. Instead, despite all the privileges that they had been given, they chose to actively embrace the ugliest and most cynical aspects of life on Wall Street.

At the denouement of the movie Nayagan, Velu Nayagan's grandson asks him "Are you a good man or a bad man?". Choked up, Velu Nayagan replies "I don't know".

Velu Nayagan was a murderous mafia don. Yet, when one makes the effort to get into his skin, understand his back-story, and sees where he is coming from, it is hard not to be sympathetic. It is hard to be judgemental. His own moral ambiguity feels appropriate. With Raj Rajratnam, when one makes the effort to get into his skin, understand his back-story, when one sees all the privileges and choices he had, and the cynicism with which he chose to be a crook, it is hard to be sympathetic. Moral ambiguity doesn't feel nearly as appropriate as it did with Velu Nayagan.

Roger Federer: The Middle Class Champion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until Roger Federer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The English: friendly or distant?

My daughters learn ballet. I take them to ballet class most Saturday mornings. While I’m waiting for class to finish, I sit around in a large hall drinking Nescafe along with dozens of other parents.

I see the same set of parents at ballet class every week. I obviously have something in common with the other parents, we live in the same neighbourhood and have children the same age. Yet, none of the English parents ever acknowledge me with a head nod or a smile. The people who do acknowlege and greet me are the other expats - American, French, Iraqi, Chinese, and of course other Indians.

Yet, the same English can also be very warm and connected.

For instance, yesterday my family went on a day hike in the Peak District. We had a wonderful time, walking through densely wooded dales and over grassy hills, spotting farm animals in the pastures and fossils in the limestone rockfaces. We passed many other groups of hikers through the day – other families, groups of middle-aged ladies, people walking dogs, courting couples, white-bearded gentlemen walking solo – they made our day even better by pausing to acknowledge us, and smile and greet us. They were all English.

So, are the English aloof and stand-offish, or are they warm and friendly?

I posed this question to an English friend of mine, a career politician married to a French-Canadian. His take was that context makes all the difference.

Ballet class in an affluent suburb is actually an anxious, competitive context. Subliminally or otherwise, parents are worrying about how well they are providing for their children, relatively speaking. They are sniffing out the other parents for minute differences in wealth, status and social class. Expats frustrate this process because foreigners are especially hard to sniff out and place on a social map. The fine radar which works so well among the English doesn’t work with foreigners; so foreigners remain distant and ambiguous. Status anxiety and ambiguity don’t make people feel friendly or inclusive.

By contrast, hiking is not competitive. Hiking the Peak District is no great physical achievement. Hikers check their status anxieties in at the gate as they enter a national park, and walk to celebrate the fabulous landscape. In a way, hikers share a secular religion: we have come together to worship glorious nature, a god far greater than any of us. The sense of believing in the same god, and of our personal insignificance before the greatness of that god... yes, that could make people feel warm and inclusive.

Makes sense. Plus, something a game theorist might call the risk of repeated interactions. A hiker greeting me in the peaks is fairly sure we are never going to see each other again. A parent who engages me in small talk at ballet might wind up having to chit chat with me every weekend, which would be terrible punishment for having committed a random act of kindness.

Here is how Kate Fox, an English anthropologist who wrote a very useful book called Watching the English, describes this risk:

It is common, and considered entirely normal, for English commuters to make their morning and evening train journeys with the same group of people for many years without ever exchanging a word.

A young woman, who I would describe as lively and gregarious, explained, “once you start greeting people like that – nodding, I mean – unless you’re very careful you might end up starting to say ‘good morning’ or something, and then you could end up actually having to talk to them.” The problem with speaking with another commuter was that if you did it once, you might be expected to do it again - and again, and again: having acknowledged the person’s existence, you could not go back to pretending that they did not exist, and you could end up having to exchange polite words with them every day. That’s right. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

Hutton, the toff?

CMJ’s son Robin retired from first class cricket a couple of weeks ago. I looked looked him up on Cricinfo, and came across a delicious little nugget: Robin Martin Jenkins played in the same Radley College XI as Andrew Strauss and Ben Hutton.

The reigning England captain, a county all rounder who was once considered England material, and the captain of the county that calls Lord’s home – these guys all played together in a school team. Wow! What sort of school boasts such a fine cricketing tradition?



A very posh school, it turns out. Radley College is one of three remaining all-boys all-boarding public schools in England, along with Eton and Harrow. Its campus is five miles south of Oxford, sprawls across eight hundred acres, includes a cricket pavilion, a golf course and, since 2008, a real tennis court. It is only about 150 years old - Eton and Harrow are both more than 400 years old - but, regardless, an interactive web-tour of the Radley College campus confirms that it is as comfortably upper class as PG Wodehouse’s Wrykyn ever was.

Christopher Martin-Jenkins, the sonorous voice of the MCC establishment, sent his son to Radley College. That fits. Andrew Strauss’ nickname in the England dressing room is Lord Brock, after an old Etonian TV presenter famous for living the high life. That fits. But Ben Hutton? Does he fit?

The name Hutton is sacred in cricketing lore because of Ben’s grandfather Len Hutton, who, as recently as 1951, became the first professional to captain England. He was the son of a builder from a Yorkshire village called Pudsey. He went to a local council school, trained as a carpenter (perhaps, coincidentally, like Jesus Christ), set the world record for the highest test match score with 364 against Australia, and he captained England to successive Ashes victories.

Len Hutton was more than just a great player. Like Frank Worrell, the West Indies’ first black captain, Hutton’s achievements are drenched in special meaning because of who he is. Yet, this working class hero’s grandson went to one of England’s most exclusive public schools. Interesting.

Arnold Toynbee has a theory on why this is not just OK, but is profoundly good. Toynbee takes it as a given that every civilization is shaped by a ruling elite. This has been empirically true through history, including in supposedly communist or socialist societies. The vast majority in every civilization, the “internal proletariat” in Toynbee-speak, are outside the ruling elite. Toynbee believes that the relationship between this ruling elite and the internal proletariat is the most critical difference between a vital civilization and one that is breaking down.

In a vital civilization, the ruling elite have a natural legitimacy. The elite have a hold on the imagination and aspirations of the internal proletariat, who voluntarily seek to become more like the the ruling elite, a process Toynbee calls mimesis. Conversely, in a civilization which is breaking down “the internal proletariat, that majority in society which had formerly given its voluntary allegiance to a creative leadership, but which is now increasingly alienated from its own society by the coercive despotism of its corrupted masters... registers its secession from society by adopting a spiritual ethos which is alien in inspiration”. In this calculus, the Huttons are a part of a healthy civilization, one in which the best of the working class seek to become like the ruling elite.

Ben Hutton is not the first public-school-man in his family. His father Richard attended Repton, a school as exclusive as Radley College. Richard Hutton would have been eligible to enroll at Repton in 1955, when Len was the reigning England captain. It seems like Len, at the pinnacle of his career, respected the prevailing power structure even though he was not born into it, and chose to give his son a more privileged upbringing than he himself enjoyed.

England’s cricket captain sent his son to the best school that he possibly could. That fits well enough, regardless of whether the captain was a gentleman or a professional.

Cultural learnings of Eng-a-land for make benefit glorious nation of Hindustan

Kevin, our electrician/ plumber/ handyman came in over the weekend to help assemble the kid's bunk bed. He's a genial, happy and very helpful guy we've worked with a lot. We offered him tea or coffee. He turned us down...because he drinks only freshly ground coffee. How posh is that!

Tony Blair once famously claimed that "we're all middle class now." Is he right?

The Guardian survey below shows that the children of the old upper classes (think Bertie Wooster and colonial colonels) now describe themselves as middle class. Truck drivers and electricians want the best schools for their children and drink tall skinny lattes while referring to themselves as working class.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2195560,00.html

My take is that there is a real convergence of identities and values happening. Slowly. It's being driven by the emergent service economy. The fascinating twist is that the old notions of class are still self-defining, even while this convergence is happening.

My clearest window into English culture is Watching the English, by Kate Fox. The author is an English anthropologist, who has an insider's right to make un-PC anthropological observations that can never really be made about Amazonian tribes.

One of her central theses is that every English person comes with a built in radar that automatically switches on during social interactions to plot the other person onto a fine, richly layered social hierarchy. The English are uncomfortable with foreigners because this radar no longer works.

Will that class-radar get slowly ground to dust by the service economy? Hard to say. My money is on the service economy winning.

O Captain! My Captain!

India beat Pakistan in a World Cup bowl-out. Zimbabwe beat Australia. Bangladesh knocked the West Indies out of a World Cup. S Badrinath and Akash Chopra clocked in double hundreds against a strong South Africa A.

Kapil Dev encouraged and inspired aspiring fashion designers in Delhi...click on this link to check out Paaji having a nice evening. Yet, through all that silliness and noise and hype, the one piece of news that felt like it mattered was Rahul Dravid's resignation.

The pundits seem to think Rahul made a good choice. Rohit Brijnath and Ian Chappel both think so.

It's easy to imagine the debate inside Rahul's head. In the Blue corner, pragmatic self-preservation. In the Red corner, service to a team that really has no alternative captain. Pragmatic self-preservation won. Rahul follows in the footsteps of Sunil Gavaskar, who abandoned a promising Indian team who desperately needed him after winning the Benson and Hedges World Championship in 1985.

But I can't help feeling disappointed. Is there any point to cricket if all it's about is pragmatic self-preservation?

Zooming out a bit, is there a sub-text here about social class? Both Rahul Dravid and Gavaskar are quintessentially middle class Indians. Educated-upper-middle-class if you want to make fine distinctions, as both their families doubtless would.

This is the class which has dominated Indian cricket since independence. Other Indian captains from similar middle class worlds include Ajit Wadekar, Dilip Vengsarkar, Polly Umrigar, Vinoo Mankad, Pankaj Roy, Ravi Shastri, Krishnamachari Srikkanth, Srinivas Venkataraghavan, Gundappa Vishwanath and Sachin Tendulkar. Anil Kumble, Javagal Srinath, Venkatesh Prasad and Bhagwat Chandrasekhar are other Bangalore cricketers from this world. This is a pleasant and comfortable world, a world of tightly knit families, kind words, regular home cooked meals and music tuitions. I can write about this India with some conviction, this is my India.

My India also carries a visceral understanding that this comfortable life is not to be taken for granted. The yawning chasm and the Other India are all too visible. And so we work for our comfortable lives with an ethic that is more Protestant than that of any Protestant nation. And we create outstanding tech companies like Infosys and technically sound but risk averse batsmen like Dravid and Gavaskar.

Interestingly, no middle class Indian captain has ever really given his team pride, self-belief and conviction. Looking around for the most influential captains, my top three sub-continentals are Imran Khan, Arjuna Ranatunga and Saurav Ganguly. All three are from the elite, more privileged than middle class.

All three have more than a whiff of the amateur playing for pride, rather than the professional just getting the job done. All three have been willing to walk away from the job. All three have backed their men to the hilt. I love Ranatunga for getting in the face of the Aussies and backing Murali through the chucker controversy. I love Imran for coming out of retirement to lead Pakistan. He didn't need to, he didn't particularly want to, but he still did. I love Saurav for refusing the play when the selectors tried to foist Sharandeep Singh on him instead of Harbhajan, against Australia in 2001. All three great captains held themselves above the system. They made the system work for them.

Rahul is not hungry for power. Of course he's willing to walk away from the job, he's shown that he is. But he is not using this leverage to make a difference. He is not saying "give me Murali Kartik or I'm not playing". When Dravid's strike bowler Sreesanth shows the aggression that generations of Indians have prayed for, does Dravid back him to the hilt? No. He backs down. Rahul works within the system, as a middle class boy would. A middle class boy's first instinct is pragmatic self-preservation. No wonder he resigned.