The Lions of Lanka

Swiss Nuggets: Observations about Switzerland following a long-weekend visit

The most visible minority in Switzerland are Sri Lankan Tamil refugees.

They include Giritharan Thiagarajan, the head chef at Vatter, an excellent vegetarian restaurant in Bern, who was delighted to meet fellow Tamils visiting his restaurant.

Wikipedia thinks 40,000 Tamils live in Switzerland. Giritharan thinks the number is 80,000…and he might be right. To put that in perspective, the sovereign nation of Liechtenstein, Switzerland’s eastern neighbour, is home to about 34,000 souls.

The Lions of Lucerne

Swiss Nuggets: Observations about Switzerland following a long-weekend visit

The cuckoo clock piece is untrue, so is the myth of brotherly love.

If anything, the Swiss myth of nationhood is martial: Switzerland is the only country in Western Europe that still has universal conscription. Hence the reputation for being excellent mercenaries, hence the Swiss Guards around the Pope resplendent in Michelangelo’s glorious metrosexual colours, hence the Swiss Army knives.

Hence the magnificient Lion of Lucerne, to remember the 700 Swiss Guards who fought to the last man against a bloodthirsty mob at Tuileries in 1792 while Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette escaped from the palace.




My wife and I were travelling with our six and three year old daughters. We chose not to inflict this story of futile heroism and cynical royalty on the kids, and decided the visit the Verkehrshaus, the Swiss transportation museum, instead.

Cuckoo

Swiss Nuggets: Observations about Switzerland following a long-weekend visit

In Italy under the Borgias they had warfare, terror and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.

Since I had a great time in Switzerland, I must come to my gracious host's defence. The famous words quoted above are not true. The cuckoo clock was invented in Bavaria, in southern Germany.

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.

The Many Meanings of Moonballs

The word moonball has taken on an important new meaning: a type of squash serve.

This serve is played from the right-hander's forehand court, high and quite softly against the front wall (1). The balls descends steeply into the deep backhand corner (2), too high to comfortably play a backhand volley. It hits the back wall (3) and dies too quickly for a backhand drive (4). It's very effective, especially against average players like this blogger.

Click here for a demo of this serve on youtube, where it is unimaginatively described as a "lob serve".

Seeing the ball like a football

Cricket fans know that a batsman who has spent a lot of time at the crease is hard to dismiss, because he is “seeing the ball like a football”. A batsman who is new to the crease is always easier to dismiss. He struggles to sight the ball.

This is true regardless of the quality of the light. A batsman who is in can bat on comfortably through the gathering caliginosity, while a new man at the crease struggles to sight the ball even in glorious sunshine. This has always been true, something cricketers accept as natural.

The mechanism that makes this natural just became apparent me, from this article by Atul Gawande.

Gawande’s piece is about an emerging scientific understanding about the nature of perception. The new realization: perception is mostly memory. The inputs coming in from the senses are thin/ low fidelity/ low resolution/ highly pixellated compared to the richness with which the brain experiences the sensory input. The mind fills in the blanks.

Our centuries long assumption has been that the sensory data we receive from our eyes, ears, nose, fingers and so on contain all the information we need for perception…Yet, as scientists set about analyzing the sensory signals, they found them to be radically impoverished…The mind fills in most of the picture...Richard Gregory, a British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety percent memory and less than ten percent sensory nerve signals…

Gawande’s article talks a lot about phantom limbs, and intense itches felt on injured tissues which have no nerve endings. These extreme examples are useful because they make a powerful argument; perception of a phantom limb can’t be determined by objective sensory experience, because there is no sensory experience. But to me, this theory is more interesting because of the light it sheds on everyday experiences.

A batsman who is in is literally seeing the ball better than a batsman who has just come to the wicket. His memory has more readily accessible images of the moving ball. He is therefore better able to make meaning of the sketchy data that his eyes pick up.

This is the reason it is hard to listen to an unfamiliar genre of music. The mind simply doesn’t have enough stuff in memory to fill in the blanks and enrich the music.

This is the reason it is hard to drive on unfamiliar roads. The driver literally sees less of the road. The eyes pick up the same volume of information as on a familiar road. But the mind doesn’t have a stock of memories with which to enrich the image.

This is the reason I enjoy watching cricket on TV more than I enjoy watching football. My mind has a bigger bank of cricket memories to draw on, simply because I have watched more cricket over the years.

There is an elaborate academic literature on how Caucasian-Americans are not very good at recognizing Blacks, and to a slightly lesser extent, how Blacks are not very good at recognizing whites. This has sometimes been interpreted as racism, but sheer lack of familiarity seems a simpler and less incendiary explanation. Interestingly, the effects are smaller in racially integrated schools and among children who live in integrated neighbourhoods.

This might also be the reason for the cognitive biases that Greg Pye's blog (and Kahneman and Taversky), keep talking about. The confirmatory bias happens because people, literally, don’t see evidence which goes against their prior beliefs without making a pretty substantial effort.

Gunther, Mother Cricket and Ice Bath Buddies

It's quite rare for a cricket fan like me, who has been following the game avidly since childhood with an avidity a clinical psychotherapist might worry about, to come across interestingly unfamiliar cricketing words or concepts. This English summer I encountered three. Let's celebrate these three concepts before the hopefully-not-too-emotionally-wrenching India-Australia test series gets underway.

Gunther: "Gunther is a guy who lives in the mountains and doesn't get enough oxygen to the brain and that makes him crazy. As soon as I get thrown the ball, its like a little switch goes in my head. Gunther takes over."

This is Springbok speedster Andre Nel on what happens when he is bowling. Compare that to a typical quote from an English quickie like Ryan Sidebottom, "Hopefully, I'll get the ball in the right areas." Or Mohammad Azharuddin's immortal words, "Well, the boys played very well."

In this age of anodyne political correctness, god bless Gunther.

Mother cricket: "It's amazing. There's a lady up there called Mother Cricket, who doesn't sleep...".

This is South African coach Mickey Arthur, giving credit where it is due, when Michael Vaughan was publicly humiliated for claiming a bump-catch after being morally indignant about AB de Villiers claiming a similar catch that same morning. Was Mother Cricket also behind Jimmy Andersen getting hit on the helmet by Dale Steyn after knocking out Daniel Flynn's tooth?

Cricket does lend itself well to the notion of karma. Maybe Mother Cricket is the sociological reason why cricket is so big in the sub-continent.

Ice bath buddy: Cricket-warriors were introduced on Sky Sports with a little box of fun-facts during the English Twenty20 tournament. This is a marketing tactic I like: any sport is a lot more fun if the viewer knows the player's back-stories. Sky Sport's fun-facts included favourite TV Show (mostly Top Gear), favourite music group, and most intriguingly, ice bath buddy.

Apparently, Duncan Fletcher insisted that all England fast bowlers immerse themselves in an ice-bath straight after stumps, to prevent injury. County dressing rooms were not designed with these sophisticated medical practices in mind. So fast bowlers, like Harmy and Hoggy, had to share ice-baths. The practice has endured into Peter Moore's reign. And so "ice bath buddy" is now county circuit lingo for best friend.

Some of the old guard are mocking this trend. David Lloyd, the former England coach and now Sky Sports commentator, would rather share an ice bath with Beyonce than some "hairy bloke".

Not sure if planting the mental image Ravi Bopara and Samit Patel, or for that matter, David Lloyd and Beyonce, frolicking together in tubs full of ice makes the game more or less appealing. Time will tell.

Morning Raga

Worth the watch, mainly because the music is so much fun.

Here's how I hope this film was made:

A film maker was listening to Sudha Raghunathan singing Thaiye Yashoda. She was moved, moved to tears imagining the love of Yashoda - the foster mother who loved Krishna and Balarama as her own sons. She felt sad that Yashoda is not celebrated in popular culture. Bollywood is saturated with Nirupa Roy like mother characters, who draw on the Jungian archetype of Kunti. But where are the characters like Yashoda? Or Radha - the charioteer's wife who loved Karna as her own son?

So the filmmaker decided to set things right. Despite not having much money, she decided to make a film that showcases both the spirit of Yashoda and Sudha Raghunathan's rendition of Thaiye Yashoda, and to give both a contemporary multi-cultural flavour. And so she made Morning Raga.

If that's how the film was conceived, it worked. Because the last scene, the rock concert in a Deccan fortress with a pulsating Carnatic fusion performance of Thaiye Yashoda, it was cathartic. It washed away 90 minutes of grumbling about amphigory art-house films.

By the way, or, bye the bye, do not watch this scene for the first time on Youtube. I considered posting a link and decided against it. The sense of catharsis, and the emotional resonance of Thaiye Yashoda are greater for having sat through the whole film.

Before the grumbles, what else worked?

Location. Or was it Rajiv Menon's camera work? Almost every location was a visual treat...the traditional south Indian home, the temple, the rock fortress where the concert was held, the bridge.

More music. Pibare Ramarasam was sung beautifully by Kalyani Menon, Rajiv Menon's mother. The reflective, introspective way it was sung made more sense in the context of the movie. The beat version of Mahaganapathim was also fun.

Associations. The film brought back memories of Shankarabharanam and Shubha Mudgal's Ab ke Sawan, both favourites.

Shabana Azmi and Nasser were excellent, as usual.

And the newcomer Sanjay Swaroop was brilliant as a restaurant owner. He asks a searching and insightful question about whether Indian youngsters who want to be rockers think they white, or black? In the interests of full disclosure, I would like to declare that I am generally sympathetic to Sanjay Swaroop. His father, Lakshman Swaroop, is a dashing sportsman who played cricket and hockey for the Madras Cricket Club, and was once featured in a print advert for Enfield Bullet motorcycles.

And the grumbles?

The script and acting were cringe-worthy.

Prakash Rao played Abhinay, the central character, Krishna to Shabana Azmi's Yashoda. He reminded me of the cricketer Yuvraj Singh. The only emotion he communicated was angry, disgruntled arrogance. Though his task wasn't made any easier by the scripting, like "I don't want to write jingles for bubble gum. I want to make music that is remembered for five hundred years. Like the Charminar."

Other cringe-worthy elements included a psychedelic-shirted, wild-haired drummer called Bajali. Alias Bals. Not Balls, just Bals. A guitar player who is stares in fascination at women's bottoms and (literally) gets picked up off the street. A villager who talks to his cow, Annapurna. A south-Bombay-ish socialite who scandalizes the villager by leaning on his arm. Pleeze. A stylish script is the one thing a budget film can afford.

But don't walk out on the film even when the cringes start to hurt. Redemption is around the corner. The cringes make the cleansing release of Thaiye Yashoda that much more welcome.

The Point of County Cricket

Here is Christopher Martin-Jenkins on the eve of a gripping finale to the county cricket season:

...county cricket... fulfil its primary function, the production of a sufficient supply of tough England cricketers for the rigours of the international circuit...

What?

Surely the point of playing county cricket is to win the county championship. At least 90% of the England qualified players competing for the championship have no real chance of playing for England. If nobody cares about winning the championship, not even CMJ, its not surprising that the county scene has "greater issues".

What really got me was that this was not CMJ's main point. It was a point made in the passing. In CMJ's mind, county cricket being nothing more than a talent screening service for international cricket is an unremarkable truism.

Unfortunately, what CMJ thinks is usually a good reflection of what the ECB establishment thinks. They seem to have learnt the wrong lesson from the BCCI's success and concluded that the point of cricket is to promote national pride through international success.

The point of the English Premiership is not to produce England internationals. The point of the ATP Tour is not to produce Davis Cup heroes. The point of the IPL is not to produce Indian internationals. These contests are worthwhile as ends in themselves. Players push themselves to the limit because they care about winning. That intensity of effort, that edge, is what produces the drama which brings in the fans. National flags don't need to be flying for sport to fascinate.

And what terrible timing to be damning the county game with faint praise.

I'm thoroughly enjoying the finale to this season's championships. Notts, the team I support, are in the race. Notts' victory march has just been checked by Imran Tahir, an exciting young leggie from Natal. I'm clicking into Cricinfo between meetings to check the latest scores on Notts v. Hampshire, Somerset v. Lancashire and Durham v Kent. Sky Sports are covering the Notts game live. Exactly what the guys responsible for marketing county cricket should have been praying for.

Anybody want to swap Mark Mascarenhas for CMJ?

Fubsies skirring into the caliginosity

Harper Collins is running a campaign to save rarely used words from oblivion. Heard about it on on Radio 4. They asking influential cultural figures - humorists, poets, bloggers :) - to use these rare words so Harper Collings have a basis for including them in the next edition of the dictionary. Some of the endangered words, and their definitions on the Merriam Webster (since Harper Collins don't have a free online edition): - skirr: to leave hastily. Webster thinks the etymology may be an alteration of scour. The Radio 4 show suggested onomatopoeia, the sound a bird makes when beating its wings in flight, which sounds more plausible - fubsy: chubby and somewhat squat. I can't believe this beauty actually fell out of usage - Caliginosity: dimness or darkness. Has already vanished from the Webster's, so the link is to the free Wikipedia style dictionary. Radio 4 thinks caliginosity deserves to die. But to me, it evokes a sense of the eerie, an image of a hooded candle flickering in the nave of an enormous cathedral casting shadows into the vast stillness, that mere darkness does not convey. Gloaming feels closer to the mark Harper Collins claim that this exercise is needed because they need to drop words from the dictionary. They need to make room for terms like equity injection and credit crunch by dropping fubsy and skirr. I smell bullshit. Surely, in today's world, the real authoritative version of any dictionary is the soft copy, which is not constrained by size. A physical print edition can be cut to any arbitrary number of words. This seems to be an effort to raise the public profile of rare words. A worthy and noble effort in any circumstances. Lets just drop the bs.

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.

My Blueberry Nights and the Theory of Script Writing

All great stories are built around one essential element: somebody wants something really badly, and has difficulty getting it.

Frodo Baggins really wants to destroy the ring. Dorothy really wants to go home to Kansas. Jai and Veeru really want to get Gabbar Singh. Bhuvan, in Lagaan, really wants to beat the British. Hamlet really wants to avenge his father's death. Romeo really wants Juliet. There is no story if Romeo and Juliet are just sort of fond of each other. Or if the Montagues and Capulets are willing to let bygones be bygones.

My Blueberry Nights fails because it ignores this basic rule.

Its about a charming, pretty and kind girl (Norah Jones) who is abandoned by her boyfriend. She leaves her apartment keys with a hunky guy who owns a cafe (Jude Law), sets off on a journey to nowhere specific, randomly runs into interesting people on the way, and returns to New York to fall into the arms of the hunky guy who runs the cafe. At no stage is the desire powerful enough, or the obstacle to attaining that desire steep enough, for the viewer to care about what happens next.

The real tragedy is that so much good work is wasted because of this lack of purpose. There is a beautifully crafted sub-plot about an alcoholic cop. Natalie Portman is electric in a bit role as a roving gambler. The sound track is moody and hypnotic. The photography is completely stunning. Not enough; because film isn't about visual technique. It's about story-telling.

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.

Adam Smith and the Mystery of Mushie

I finally discovered why Mushtaq Ahmed, the Pakistani leg spinner, was so much more successful bowling for Sussex than any other team. Angus Fraser writes:

"When Sussex signed him for the 2003 season not even the club expected him to have such an impact. His initial deal was on a modest basic salary with huge bonuses for taking wickets. The contract worked. Mushtaq claimed five 10-wicket hauls to become the first bowler in five years to take 100 county championship wickets in a season, and Sussex's 164-year wait for the county championship ended."

The power of incentives. Angus goes on:

"It is a mystery why such a fine bowler failed to have similar success in Test cricket."

Was the Pakistan Cricket Board enlightened enough to offer Mushtaq steeply sloped incentives linked to an objective measure of performance? No. It is stunningly unsurprising that Mushtaq bowled with more heart for Sussex than for Pakistan.

A more serious point: the incentives need to matter at a visceral level. At a cognitive level, every player always wants to win. The bones don't always agree. South Africa are playing like their bones packed up and went home home after the Edgbaston test.

And the point was?

Having lived through the tumult of the Beijing Olympics through the last two weeks, today is a good day to step back and reflect on what the Olympics are about. Or more generally, what sport is about.

Rohit Brijnath kicked off the Olympics with this piece about Natalie du Toit, the South African swimmer and flag bearer at the opening ceremony. She lost a leg in a motor accident in 2001. At Beijing she swam the 10km open race; not a special event for disabled people, she swam the main event.

Simon Barnes experienced the Olympics in a three level hierarchy of partisanship, drama, and greatness. To Barnes, observing the greatness of a Michael Phelps, Yelena Isinbayeva or Usian Bolt is the high point of the Olympics.

Ed Smith, who played test cricket for England and is now captain of Middlesex CCC, had the most interesting and querulous take on the Olympics. Having paid due homage to the record British gold medal haul, he goes on to observe:

“The proof about whether these Olympics have witnessed a true British sporting renaissance will come later, as we watch whether there is any trickle-down effect. Elite sport should inspire new fans to play games themselves. Among the greatest legacies a sportsman can leave is to inspire people to take up and express themselves at sport.

The strongest (though rarely articulated) argument for playing sport is that competitive games, especially team sports, can work against a smallness of spirit. I believe that sport's elevating quality should be available to as many young people as possible.”

This is a natural thought for a cricketer, a game which is inseparable from its roots.

Greatness is not just in the metronomic accuracy of Glenn McGrath, bowling in an Ashes match at Lord’s. It is in hundreds of club bowlers in the Melbourne cricket league, who may be tiling roofs weekdays, trying to emulate McGrath, reaching within, and finding depths they had never dreamt of. The spirit of Sunil Gavaskar was forged in the play-hard-but-fair ethos of the Dadar Union playing Kanga league cricket. The spirit of West Indian cricket comes from clubs like Shannon in Trinidad waging pitched battles waged on the Queen’s park Savannah.

This goes beyond cricket.

The greatness of Bjorn Borg was amplified many times over by the Swedish children inspired to hit tennis balls against their garage doors. The spirit of Diego Maradona is in the flair with which hundreds of pick-up games are played in the slums of Buenos Aires. The spirit of Vishy Anand is in the ferocity with which schoolboys in Madras play chess, with a pencil sharpener subbing for a rook.

I like this lens Ed Smith is using. Are the Olympics a vehicle for expressing of the worst sort of jingoistic nationalism? Are they just a synthetic made-for-TV corporate event? Or, do the Olympics really kindle a flame within millions of real people around the world?

When I’m out by the river Trent or the Thames in the summer, I see dozens of amateur rowers on the water. It’s a wonderful sight, and a lot of credit should be given to the Olympian efforts of Sir Steven Redgrave and Matthew Pinsent. They do seem to have kindled flames within regular people. The marathon, the 100m dash, javelin or discus throw – events that evoke the ancient games - are more resonant at the Olympics than anywhere else.

But synchronized swimming? Modern pentathlon? 16 gold medals in canoeing and kayaking? Do any real people play these games, or do I just not know the right people? A baseball tournament that matters less than any Yankees – Red Sox game? A tennis tournament that matters less than any grand slam? A pale shadow of World Cup football? Maybe this would matter more if it were kept simple.

And back home in India, yes, we are the world’s worst Olympic team. It's OK. Let's laugh at ourselves. Let's drop the bristling nationalism; it is the worst emotion the Olympics could inspire.

And when we are rich enough to promote sports in India, let us invest in sports that millons of real people could take part in and love - like football - rather than in some obscure targeted speciality event that might win us the notional glory of an Olympic medal.

Working hours

Found a interesting natural experiment on culture at my workplace.

As a manager, my approach to working hours has always been laissez faire. I'm fine with members of my team working whatever hours suit them, as long as commitments to colleagues are kept. Some people come in at 7:30 and wrap up by 4:30. Other come in at 10:00 and work till 7:30. Still other, like me, frequently do a second shift between 9:00 and 10:30 after the kids are in bed. This works just fine.

I recently discovered that my successor at the department I used to run until early 2007 has a different approach. He expects people to be in at 9:00. And he shoos home the laggards who're still working at 5:30. And while the panache and elan that this department had in my time are missing, this approach also works well enough. There isn't one right answer here.

However, the two right answers produce interestingly different selection effects.

My laissez faire approach tends to favour ambitious people willing to work long hours to get ahead. Other things being equal, people who were willing to put in 70 hours a week instead of the typical 50 would achieve more and be rewarded for that achievement. And I did observe a handful of people who were ravenously hungry for success choosing to burn their weekends at work trying to get ahead.

Under a more rigid 9:00 to 5:30 culture the ambitious can't catch up with more talented, knowledgeable or likable colleagues by sheer dint of hard work. Preventing over-long working hours is sort of like a price-setting mechanism in a cartel. People who work too many hours would be "punished" by an external or superior enforcer.

As a result, one would expect people with boundless raw ambition to self-select out of the organization. The culture would increasingly reflect the choices of people with ambition, but who are less willing to make personal sacrifices for the sake of ambition.

Nothing wrong with that. But over time, it does produce an interestingly different culture.

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?