I sympathize with Dubya

CIA Asks Bush To Discontinue Blog

WASHINGTON, DC-In the interest of national security, President Bush has been asked to stop posting entries on his personal web log.

Tom and Jerry

Having successfully avoided Tom and Jerry through my childhood, I'm now consuming it at a rate that feels like 90 minutes per day. My impressions:

- The music is superb, and under-appreciated

- I'm surprised that my children enjoy this. They generally dislike violence on TV...even in Disney films. The probably get that the violence here is stylized

- I'm surprised the violence, stylized or otherwise, hasn't worried the censors or the morality police

- I find it a lot easier to identify with the predator (Tom) than the prey. That might be part of the reason I don't enjoy the violence

Attack of the Thermo-Nuclear Mosquitoes

Marathon training is really not happening here in Madras. I started off training outdoors. The heat and humidity sound manageable: 22C and 88% humidity. Just did not work out. I was dripping sweat, struggling to concentrate and was ready to drop after just 2 miles.

Have given up on road running for now. Did 5 comfortable and satisfying miles on the treadmill in an air-conditioned gym this morning.

The first unexpected hazard is the mosquitoes. They hang in the air in swarms thick enough to be opaque. They are able to bite even under my t-shirt.

The more interesting unexpected hazard is the culture. Road running is so counter-cultural in Madras, I almost expect the scrawny urchins loitering around on the pavements to break out into hoots or whistles as I pass. I was running in the Boat Club area partly because the roads are clean enough for a run to be possible, but also because it is an unambiguously posh area. Urchins just seem less likely to hoot at rich people in posh surroundings. The only other people running on the Boat Club roads were white. It's weird being a foreigner in my home town.

What are Moonballs?

This is my 50th post. It is time to clarify what moonballs are. Or more specifically, what moonballs are not. 

I have been surprised to learn that moonballs sounds risque to some of my peers and potential readers. While my imagination is piqued, I must confess that as a married, heterosexual, 37 year old banker of middle class south Indian antecedents, I am completely ignorant of the risque connotations of moonballs.

Rather than coarsen the tone of this blog by speculating on the possible risque connotations, here are a bunch of other possible meanings of moonballs: 

1. A nick name for idlis. A soft, white, round and iconic Tamil staple food 

2. A nick name for rossogollas. A soft, white, round, very sweet and iconic Bengali staple food 

3. Collector's item golf balls made from rocks that were brought back from the moon by Neil Armstrong 

4. Balls made of flubber, the material invented by The Absent Minded Professor in the film of the same name 

5. Formal dance balls (think Cinderella) held by the light of the harvest moon 

6. Brand name for a green cheese. This is a sphere of synthetically coloured cheddar cheese about the size and shape of a bulls-eye which is being test marketed as a healthy snack for American children 

7. Special white bowling balls used in the final, decisive round of professional bowling matches if the previous rounds fail to identify a clear winner 

8. A very high and slow lob played in tennis. As in: hit the ball all the way up to the moon. This is a cunning shot ideally played on floodlit courts. The ball is hard to spot if it goes above the height of the floodlights 

 9. Balls bowled by Mr Moon. Which translates to Mr Chandra in Sanskrit or Hindi. Planet Earth translates to Planet Prithvi 

10. A cricket delivery mastered by Jeremy Snape, captain of the Leicestershire Foxes and occasional England one-day specialist. A spinner's slower ball. Typically an offbreak bowled so slowly that the batter tends to mistime his hoick and holes out to mid wicket.

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.

Flight 714

Just watched my favourite Tintin, Flight 714, on DVD.

It works. It was fun. But it doesn't work as well as the comic. Mainly because the DVD goes by too fast to soak up and enjoy the details.

I remember the comic frame when Professor Calculus demonstrates a "savate" move in Jakarta airport. I've spent hours laughing at the hundreds of things that flood out of his pockets. That frame lasts just a fraction of a second on the DVD. There's another frame when Captain Haddock pours some liquid (mineral water?) into a potted plant at the airport...and the plant wilts. I didn't spot that at all in the DVD.

A less visually rich comic, like Peanuts, probably works better on DVD than Tintin.

Blood Diamond, Syriana. The Economics

To me (and fellow geeks like me), the economic truth Blood Diamond and Syriana illustrate are as fascinating as the movies themselves.

Resource based economies tend to breed truly horrible social and political systems. Because to get rich and powerful in resource economies, all one needs to do is control the resource in question. The tycoon/ mogul/ sheikh/ oligarch who owns the oil well is the boss. The rest of society is all about getting on the gravy train that this tycoon/ mogul/ sheikh/ oligarch maintains. There is no reason (or room) to create or cooperate.

This is often phrased as "why is Bihar the poorest state in India despite it's wealth of natural resources?" This question is almost precisely invested. The real question is "how to save Bihar from it's wealth of natural resources?".

It's a hard question. One thing we do know is that nationalizing the resources does not work. Just look at Bihar or Putin's Russia for proof.

Blood Diamond, Syriana. The Movies

Watched (and enjoyed) a couple of recent Hollywood movies with overtly political themes.

Blood Diamond is about the horrible things that happen while mining diamonds in war-torn Africa. It features a superb performance by Leonardo DiCaprio as the Rhodesian mercenary: Danny Archer. It left a phrase embedded in my mind: TIA - This Is Africa. It had a happy ending.

Syriana is about the horrible things that happen while mining oil in the war-torn Middle East. It features a superb performance by Matt Damon as an American investment banker. It left a couple of gritty montages embedded in my mind: a lush, luxurious, sensuous party in Tehran, Pakistani migrant workers so bored that they would walk through the desert for entertainment. It had an ambigious and possibly tragic ending...and probably suffered in the box office for it.

Both movies have a ring of truth. Horrible things happen in oil and diamond mining.

Marathon training

The score:

Week 5
Thu Nov 29: 30 min intervals + 10 min rowing m/c. 5 km
Wed Nov 28: 36 min @ 10 kmph. 6 km
Mon Nov 26: Skiing on Capital One fun day (it's tiring)

Week 4
Sun Nov 25: 50 min @ 10+ kmph. 8.3 km
Friday Nov 23: 42 min canalside. 7 km?
Thu Nov 22: 4 games squash
Wed Nov 21: 36 min intervals. 6km
Tue Nov 20: 40 min canalside. 6.6km?
Mon Nov 19. 40 min @ 10+ kmph. 6.6km

Total for week: 34.5 kmph + 4 games (bad) squash

Observations:

- Running outdoors is a huge enthusiasm builder. I need to slot in more time in the natural light

- I'm not really pushing myself hard. Will do that this weekend, when I run early in the day when I have a lot of energy

- I'm sorely tempted to blow £100+ on a GPS enables stopwatch that keeps track of my distance and time when I'm running outdoors

- I played lousy squash on Thursday. I was tired after some pretty focused training. I'd had a heavy and oily lunch at Red Hot Buffet Shack with Lalit K. I was in no mental shape to compete. Next time, I'll organize my day in a way that I have the energy to compete

- Protein bars at my desk in the office are working quite well at providing a good 4 pm snack. Not sure where that leaves me on net nutrition and calorie balance, though...

The lion, the witch and the wardrobe

My six year old daughter, Arundhati, is buzzed with the excitement of being able to read by herself. She is devouring books too quickly for my wife or I to edit what she's reading, or frame and contextualize her books for her. She's on her own now.

She has just devoured Enid Blyton's the Magic Faraway Tree (four times), Roald Dahl's Charile and the Chocolate Factory, and C. S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe. She's a hop, skip and jump away from the rest of Enid Blyton, moving moving on to the Ramayana and Mahabharata, and perhaps Tolkien.

This is potent stuff. Fiction like this can shape values for a lifetime. Which is why I was a little worried when I noticed Arundhati reading C. S. Lewis. Because C. S. Lewis was, "not to put too fine a point on it, a racist and sexist pig."

Should I point out the racism to Arundhati, so she is better able to protect herself from toxic attitudes? Or should I just let her enjoy the narrative, and trust that the rest of her upbringing will give her enough protection from toxic thoughts? In the balance, my wife and I chose to let her just enjoy the narrative. But it wasn't an easy choice.

_____________________________________________

Am I being being paranoid about C. S. Lewis? Nope. Tragic but true. A bigot is he. Here's Anne Fadiman's take on C. S. Lewis in her excellent introduction to Rereadings:

When my son was eight, I read C. S. Lewis's The Horse and His Boy aloud to him...

Henry loved The Horse and His Boy, the tale of two children and two talking horses who gallop across an obstacle-fraught desert in hope of averting the downfall of an imperilled kingdom that lies to the north...

My jaw dropped when I realized that Aravis, its heroine, is acceptable to Lewis only because she acts like a boy - she's interested in "bows and arrows and horses and dogs and swimming"- and even dresses like a boy whereas the books only girly girl, a devotee of "clothes and parties and gossip" is an object of contempt. Even more appaling is Lewis's treatment of the Calormenes, a brown-skinned people who wear turbans and carry scimitars. Forty years ago the near homonym slipped me...

The book's hero, Shasta, is the ward of a venial Calormene fisherman, but, as a visitor observes, "this boy is manifestly no son of yours, for your cheek is as dark as mine, but the boy is fair and white." That's how we know he belongs to a noble northern race instead of an uncouth southern one...

It was difficult to read this sort of thing out to Henry without comment...I blurted out "Have you noticed that The Horse and His Boy is not really fair to girls? And that all the bad guys have dark skin?"...

Henry...didn't want to analyze, criticize, evaluate or explicate the book...He wanted to find out if Shasta and Aravis would get to Archenland in time to warn King Lune that his castle was about to be attacked by evil Prince Rabadash and two hundred Calormen horsemen. "Mommy," he said fiercely, "can you just read?"

I sort of trust that Anne Fadiman's son will not turn out to be a racist or sexist despite having swallowed C. S. Lewis's poison.
___________________________________________


And how harshly should one judge C. S. Lewis himself? Was he just reflecting the spirit and attitude of his time? Or was he worse than that? Given his intelligence, erudition and the privilege he enjoyed as an Oxford don, I'm inclined to judge him harshly...but I can see both points of view.

And what about Tolkien? He is, of course, too sacred to be judged. But it does worry me a bit that he was a good friend of C. S. Lewis. I remember seeing their bust side by side when my sister Radhi and I had visited Exeter College, Oxford. This was before Hollywood made these men famous with Shadowlands and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

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

The city magistrates of Nottingham has just banned five notorious, aggressive beggars from begging in the city center, sitting within ten meters of a cash point, or selling the Big Issue without authorization.

In case you're wondering, the UK's per capital GDP at ppp is around $35000.

http://www.thisisnottingham.co.uk/displayNode.jsp?nodeId=133965&command=displayContent&sourceNode=133948&contentPK=18991107&moduleName=InternalSearch&formname=sidebarsearch

Reminds me of a conversation I had with my driver back in Bombay in the late 90s.

My driver then was Anil Thakker, a hard working Gujarati who was carefully saving up money to pay a broker for a job in the Gulf. We were on Marine Drive. A few beggers were hovering around the car. Anil asked me if there were beggers outside India. I told him there were, many. He flatly refused to believe me.

Extremely loud and incredibly close

Just finished this outstanding book. One of the most satisfying fiction reads in at least a couple of years.

What's it about? It's about a nine year old boy whose father dies in the 9/11 attacks. But it's not remotely political. It's about missing dad, thinking too much, wondering about mom and grandma, finding heroes, finding anti-heroes, loving New York city, thinking too much, keys on neckchains, meeting adults, learning judo, visiting the Empire State building, being swamped by New York, hating bullies, missing dad, thinking too much. Most of all, it's about a dad who dies tragically when he still is a hero in his son's eyes.

I know I'm enjoying a book if I feel the need to pick up a pencil and make notes to myself in the margin. This book now has scrawls all over it. Thanks to my cousin Aarti for pushing this my way as a birthday gift.

In praise of Kumar Sangakarra

Kumar Sangakarra, the spiritual heir of David Gower, Mark Waugh and VVS Laxman, is playing out of his skin. Still at the crease. 128 not out.

I'm not calling this the inning of a lifetime because I still hope that Sangakarra can play an innings like this in a winning cause. Looks like his class and courage can't hold off the baying pack of Aussie bowlers. Sri Lanka have slumped from an overnight 263-3 to 272-6 between the time I resolved to write this post and right now, with Lanka need to bat out the fifth day to save the Hobart test.

Still, as long as India are not playing, I don't mind at all if cricket ki jeet hui.

Marathon Training

What's the score?

Week 2

Tue, Nov 6: 5 games of squash
Thu, Nov 8: 30 min. 5 km. Intervals at 7.5 and 12.5 kmph
Fri, Nov 9: 45 min. 7.5 km @ 10 kmph
Sat, Nov 10: 30 min. 5.0 km. At 10 kmph

Total: 17.5 km + 5 games squash

Week 3

Tue, Nov 13: 4 games of squash
Wed, Nov 14: 30 min. 5.2 km. Just slightly over 10kmph
Thu, Nov 15: 36 min. 6 km. Intervals at 7.5 and 12.5 kmph
Sun Nov 18: 36 min. 6 km. Cruise @ 10kmph + 10 min on rowing m/c

Total: 19.2 km + 4 games squash

Observations:

1. My attitude to training has changed since in signed up for the Marathon.

Working out used to be me-time that I looked forward to. Now that I have to do the miles, working out has become a chore to be completed rather than a treat I'm giving myself. I'm feeling apologetic about tearing myself away from work and the children to go clock in the miles. That saps energy. If I slope into a training session feeling apologetic, half-embarrassed and unconsciously thinking I really ought to be elsewhere, I'm not going to find gas in the tank when I want to push myself for another couple of miles or pump up the pace on the last lap.

I'm going to set this right. I'm going to slot in training carefully into my calendar, so I know I'm not stealing time from another part of my life. I'll spend a couple of minutes warming up and visualizing the run before I set off. And approach each run with focus, enthusiasm and pride.

2. I need an afternoon snack. I'm out of fuel around 4:30 pm. That's prime time for unhealthy and energy sapping snacks. That also takes energy away from my run in the evening.

3. I need to watch my diet more closely because I'm in training. I've let myself indulge a bit. I'm in training has become a bit of an excuse to over-eat and snack on potato chips. This is absurd

4. Squash is actually a nice change from running. I'm going to continue playing through the marathon training period. I'll basically be playing only league matches. That's OK.

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

How did England's cricket captain Paul Collingwood meet his wife?

Here's how he describes the moment in his own words:

"I was at the bar getting the beers in and she was standing about ten yeards away with her friends. I shouted over 'Oi', which wasn't a very good pick up line. She looked around and I thought 'She's lovely'. So I said 'Come here, like' and she started walking over. She said 'Yes?' and I panicked because I didn't expect her to come over. I said 'I don't know what to say.' And that was that. I guess that is one way of breaking the ice."

Stealing Music?

My friend Greg Pye is worried that people-like-us who are "stealing" music are not ashamed.

http://gregpye.wordpress.com/2007/10/05/stealing-music/

Shame is a good word for the feelings that should be involved here. I don't think shame is clicking-in right now, because social norms on what constitutes reasonable music-buying behaviour have not yet evolved. The real problem is that there is no sign of a mechanism emerging to define or shape these new norms.

When I was leaving college my entire gang made and swapped swapped copies of each other's favourite audio tapes. I resent (and reject) the insinuation that that was either illegal or immoral. Most reasonable people agree that ordinary listeners like you or me should be people should be able to share our music with our friends and family.

Almost everyone also agrees that people who make music should be able to make a decent living. Nobody is really fussed about whether that decent living is paid for by CD sales, concerts or royalties from on-line radio stations.

The hard part is finding a set of social norms on what constitutes a "reasonable" level of copying. For instance, I think there is something shady about borrowing a DVD from Blockbuster, burning a few dozen copies and selling the copies on eBay. I don't have any qualms about copying a ~80 GB of music from a high-school buddy's hard drive for my own listening pleasure.

Calibrating personal judgments like this socializing them would help all of us evolve to a new set of norms. This is similar in spirit to calibrating performance ratings or credit decisions at a company like Capital One. The courts could have been the credible authority forcing the calibration to happen. They could have forced results of the calibration to be socialized through the media. Instead, by coming down squarely on the side of the fat-cat media bosses, the courts have simply polarized the situation.

It's been a bit of a needless tragedy. The only silver lining is that enough reasonable and powerful people hate the court's one-sided view passionately enough to hope that something will shake loose.

Starting Training

Training for the London marathon started last week. The score:

Nov 1. 40 min @ 10 kmph = 6.66 km
Nov 3: 45 min @ 10 kmph = 7.5 km
Nov 4: 45 min @ 10 kmph = 7.5 km

Total for the week = 21.6 km

Nov 6: 5 games of squash.

Some other random observations.

- Mindless TV while on the treadmill. Star Wars beats MTV

- It's hard to concentrate running alone along the river bank. Most people are there to relax. People walking dogs, couples desperately making out, kids playing frizbee, a couple of fishermen, a couple of homeless boozers...its really hard to stay focused on my breathing and just clock in the distance. A training partner will really help.

Duncan Fletcher. How could he?

Duncan Fletcher is violating one of the sacred codes in cricket. He has published a mean spirited kiss-and-tell memoir about his time as the England coach. With nasty digs about Flintoff's drinking. And about how the England dressing room hates Ian Botham.

He can't do this. What goes in the dressing room must stay the dressing room. For the coach to do this is appalling. That too, the same coach who made a huge deal of the team sticking up for each other in public.

The tragedy is that this sort of thing can be done nicely and constructively. My best insight into the England dressing room is from Ed Smith's On and Off the Field. Ed wrote respectfully and with rare insight about his colleagues. I doubt if any of his team mates minded the way they were shown in Ed's book. And he brought a hard-core fan like me even closer to the game.

Fletcher is spoiling the game for everybody by not exercising enough judgment on what not to say. Ever team meeting now has to be held in the shadow of a potential media sell-out. And the game will be poorer for it.