Etah, ASBOs and Skybet

"I started my management career in a backward village in Etah, Uttar Pradesh. I lived in the village, as one of the local people, trying to improve their lives.

Women in my village walked five miles each way, every day, to get water for their families. This was obviously a big effort; it left them physically drained. Couldn’t we improve these women’s lives by putting in a water pump, right here, in our village? Of course, easily done. My company bought and installed a new water pump in the village. But that didn’t work out. The women still had to do their daily hike for water because the water pump never worked. It got vandalized at night, either for components or by local boys with nothing better to do. My company repaired the pump, again and again. But it never worked.

The breakthrough came when the company stopped buying the pump, and said the villagers would have to buy a new pump themselves. Sure the company could top the pot up with cash if needed, but each family in the village would have to contribute towards buying the pump. There were no exemptions for poor families. The could make really small contributions of one or two rupees. But everyone had to contribute. It took months of conversation, cajoling and threats of being socially ostracized to get every family to contribute. But once they got there, once the villagers had their pump with their own hard earned money, the pump stayed in repair. People would protect their pump from thieves, vandals knew they would be ostracized. Nobody cares about a company’s pump."

This is not a parable. I heard this story as a historical account, from a friend who now teaches at Stanford. He started his career with Unilever India as a management trainee. This prestigious Unilever program places trainees in villages in Etah, a backward part of Uttar Pradesh, for six weeks.

This placement provides Unilever trainees - who mostly are privileged, ambitious, well-educated, upper-middle-class youngsters from India’s metros - with a lifetime supply of interesting stories. There have been insinuations that the sole purpose of the Etah placement is to equip management trainees with good stories. These insinuations are not true. Unilever has a dairy factory in Etah. The company is engaged in an Integrated Rural Development Program (IRDP) in the surrounding villages to improve the supply of milk to its factory. Management trainee placement in Etah is a part of this larger serious-minded program.

This story keeps coming back to my mind because its insight, call it the Etah Insight - that public enterprises work only if the populace are emotionally invested in the enterprise - feels bleeding obvious, but is so often ignored.

For instance, just last month, the Con - Lib government in the UK announced an emergency budget. They are raising the personal allowance by $1000; so 880,000 families will be taken out of the income tax net. This sounds both pro-poor and fiscally responsible, and has attracted almost no comment from the mainstream media. However, looked at through the lens of the Etah Insight, it could actually mean 880,000 more families have less of an emotional stake in their society’s success.

Taxes need not be about revenues. They could have a role to play even in households who receive more in benefits than they would ever pay in taxes. People who realize that benefits and government services are not free are more likely to use these services responsibly and respect the society which provides these benefits.

Taxes could be re-framed, like voting, as a part of a broader social contract. Benefits become a part of a contract rather than a pure entitlement. Taxes, despite being involuntary, could help foster a sense of ownership in the “broken society” that David Cameron’s Conservatives once cared so much about.

Stimulus spending, which is a bit like buying water pumps for villages, is in the news across the pond. The commentary is predictably sterile and partisan, with the left talking up spending and the right claiming that the $787 billion stimulus did not work. The Etah Insight suggests that the more creative conversation is in the middle and a few levels deeper; about precisely where stimulus spending would work, which depends mostly on whether the social norms to make stimulus work are in place. Will the stimulus pumps remain intact, or will they just get vandalized by the local yobs?

The Etah Insight also suggests that the pain of paying taxes matters. It is clearly easier to collect taxes like VAT and TDS, which are perceived as higher prices or lower incomes rather than as a price paid for governance. However, making it necessary to pay hard cash for government services could produce a more engaged, and ultimately more successful, citizenry.

The Etah insight is not on the public agenda, but the bookies are one constituency who seem to get the idea. Betting remained robustly recession proof through this World Cup. Why? Skybet’s advertising slogan hit the bunny on the nose: it matters more if there’s money on it.

Ubuntu, not furniture

Consider yourself at home
Consider yourself one of the family
We've taken to you so strong,
It's clear we're going to get along
Consider yourself well in
Consider yourself part of the furniture

These words were chiming forth from the back seat of my car. My children were practicing for a show while I was dropping them off at school. As they picked up the tempo and emphasis for the crescendo...Consider yourself, one of us!...I did a double take on “consider yourself part of the furniture”.

Is that nice? To be considered a part of the furniture? Sure, being a part of the furniture is better than being bullied. But sitting around being invisible, like the bofa on the sofa, can’t be a ton of fun.

The opposite of being a part of the furniture may be umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. This zulu saying translates, roughly, to a person is a person only through other people. This saying is a part of a South African philosophy called ubuntu, about the inter-connectedness of humanity. This reminds me a little of the traditional Hindu namaste, which means I recognize the divinity in you. Ubuntu seems to have an added element of reflexivity, or self-reference, to it. Like, maybe, re-framing Descartes, I am because I recognize the divinity in you.

I first came across umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu in a management handbook called The Fifth Discipline. Peter Senge welcomes readers to his book with umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, to say that the meaning and value of the book is derived entirely from what we readers get out of it. Since then, Bill Clinton has advised the Labour Party to embrance ubuntu. There is a Linux operating system called Ubuntu.

And, praise the lord, there is even an Ubuntu fair trade cola. They really should quit treating Oliver like a part of the furniture, and should buy him an Ubuntu fair trade cola instead, to recognize the divinity within him.

I’d like to buy the world an Ubuntu... its the real thing.

Barajas and Atocha

Airports and railway stations are boring, functional, de-humanizing places that one passes through, perforce, on one’s way to happier parts of a holiday. Unless, you’re in Madrid. I fell in love with both the Barajas airport and the Atocha railway station during my familiy’s visit to Spain.

Barajas, apparently, is well known in architectural circles. It won the Royal Institute of British Architect’s top design award in 2006 (the architects were British, I hope it is equally well loved at home in Spain).

The head architect, Lord Richard Rogers says “We've tried to make it a palace of fun as well as an airport...it's about colour and light and space and transparency...and it's all about making people look as though they are important in that space; they're not squashed by low ceilings or dominated by retail and shops, you've got great views out to planes and landscape and we have a fantastic landscape all the way around the site”.

Truth be told, the skylights in the gorgeouly crazy curvy roof do look a bit like bugs eyes, but not in a spooky way.

We took a taxi from Barajas to the main train station in the city center for our onward journey. Forty minutes and twenty euros later, we hauled our bags off the taxi, past a snarling and seemingly permanent traffic jam outside the station, and into the concourse. Here is what we saw:



I’m giving a bit of the game away here, because sheer unexpectedness of the jungle in a railway terminus was a part of what made it special. But nonetheless, it is amazing.



Apparently the space inside the old train station became available in 1992, when new high speed train tracks were laid around Spain in preparation for the Barcelona Olympics and the Seville Expo.



They could have tried to maximize revenue per square meter and stuck yet another shopping mall into this space. I'm glad they turned it into a little tropical jungle instead, with chirping birds, turtles riding piggyback,



orchids,





and palm fronds.

Wimbledon, the World Cup, and the price of petrol

Having spent much of the last week vegging out watching Wimbledon and the World Cup, I am struck by the contrast between the slick appeals system at Wimbledon, and the complete absence of a similar system, or even calls for a similar system, at the World Cup. This is despite the fact that bad refereeing decisions have a bigger impact in football, where one goal often is decisive, than in tennis, where hundreds of points are played every match.

For instance, when Italy was down 1-2 against Slovenia, Fabio Quagliarella appeared to have equalized. The goal was disallowed because of an offside call. Replays showed that Quagliarella was onside. If Italy had referred that decision to a third umpire, the goal would have been allowed, with potentially huge consequences. I thought the USA were also robbed of a glorious win against Slovenia, when their goal to go up 3-2 was disallowed. Yet, none of the players, managers or talking heads on TV were outraged at this injustice, or were calling for third umpires. The technology clearly exists. There just doesn’t seem to be any underlying or latent demand for referrals in football. How come?

Dan Ariely, an always entertaining economist, might have a clue. Here, he talks about why we are much more sensitive to the price of petrol than, say, to the price of milk. He thinks it is because:

“For the several minutes that I stand at the pump, all I do is stare at the growing total on the meter — there is nothing else to do. And I have time to remember how much it cost a year ago, two years ago and even six years ago.

I suspect that if I stood next to the yogurt case in the supermarket for five minutes every week with nothing to do but stare at the price, I would also know how much it has gone up — and I might become outraged when yogurt passed the $2 mark.”

The point is, there is a natural break in the rhythm of our activity when we buy petrol, which is not there when we walk down super market aisles sticking stuff into a trolley. That break changes the way we absorb and respond to information.

With tennis, there is a natural break in the activity after every point. That break makes it easier to work up a rage at bad umpiring calls (remember McEnroe?). That break also makes it easy to insert a referral into the game. Ditto for cricket.

With football or basketball, the ball is back in play immediately. The clock is ticking down. There is less opportunity to work up a rage about a bad decision. Players and fans can't dwell on the past because the future is already playing. Inserting a referral into the game breaks up the tempo of the game in an unnatural, annoying way.

While it is disappointing that Italy crashed out (in the interests of full disclosure, I had a bet on Italy winning the World Cup at 18/1), maybe this is good for the game. A sport with no referrals teaches us to suck up the referee’s calls, shut up, and get on with the game. Maybe, in that way, football builds character.

Caesar, the cat?

The assassination of Julius Caesar, when Casca’s hands spoke for him on the Ides of March, when et tu Brute felled Caesar, is surely one of the most pivotal, dramatic and best remembered episodes in world history. The place where this happened, the Area Sacra, with the brick ruins of four Roman era temples and its chipped fluted columns, is still evocative and atmospheric. However, it is not a tourist attraction. It is a sanctuary for stray cats.



This cat is napping on the ruins of the Theatro Pompei, the building where Caesar was killed.



The cats in this sanctuary seem to be healthy, clean and well looked after.



My family and I discovered this place by accident. The tram line we were on happened to terminate at the Largo Argentina, a busy transport hub adjacent to the Area Sacra. Otherwise, this place is simply not promoted as a sight for tourists to see. Other potentially interesting sites in Rome which are off the main tourist map include Ostia Antica, the Circus Maximus and Augustus Caesar's mausoleum.

I often complain that we Indians are so bad at showcasing our fantastic heritage. It is interesting that Italy, which is ten times richer than India but still feels spiritually akin to India, is also not that great at showcasing its heritage. The world champions of showcasing heritage might well be the British. It feels like more work has gone into presenting the Roman Baths at Bath, a spa in a remote outpost of the Roman Empire, than the seat of the Roman Empire itself at the Foro Romano.



Still, I'm glad someone is looking out for the cats :)

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.

Rapidex goes to Paris

One of the highlights of our family's trip to Paris this spring was this poster:



It is prominently displayed all around the Paris metro network.

It reminds me of one of my favourite brands, Rapidex English Speaking Courses, which is right up there along with Palmolive and Boost as great Indian brands endorsed by Kapil Dev. Different cultures, exactly the same consumer need.

The market clearly knows that the "right" English is no longer the Queen's English. In case the current turmoil on Wall Street does not abate, we can always look forward to a brand relaunch as Main Street English:



Thanks to Polly-vous Francais for the Main Street English poster.

Gaudi : Architecture :: Grace : Cricket

Gaudi’s work – incredible, phantasmagorical forms set within a city of perfectly straight lines and right angles – captures the spirit of a world gone by, a world that was animated by nature, magic and fantasy, and boldly brings that spirit back into an unremittingly modern world.

Reminds me of the good doctor Grace. Specifically, of CLR James’ take on WG Grace.

CLR James, cricket’s greatest historian, examines WG Grace at length in Beyond A Boundary. James’ interpretation is that Doctor Grace was a creature of an old England, a pre-industrial, pre-Victorian, yeoman England. This England was vanishing by the time WG played. But by embracing and celebrating WG, by deifying the good doctor and giving him, and the game he bestrode like a colossus, a central place in the pantheon, relentlessly modern Victorian England encapsulated and kept alive the best of the spirit of that older time.

Looked at this way, the cultural meaning of cricket in India and England could hardly be more different. Cricket came to India fully formed, as part of an already modern Victorian empire. Princelings played it to express allegiance with their colonial masters. Nationalists played it to realize the virtues which made the empire so powerful, and so to defeat the invaders at their own game. Either way, cricket in the sub-continent always represented modernity, success, power, the glorious future rather than the idyllic past.

As a post-script, some extracts on WG Grace from CLR James’ text:

WG Grace was a Victorian, but the game he transformed into a national institution was not Victorian in either origin or essence. It was a creation of pre-Victorian England, of the two generations which preceeded the accession of the queen…It was an England still unconquered by the industrial revolution. It travelled by saddle and carriage. Whenever it could, it ate and drank prodigiously. It was not finicky about morals. It enjoyed life. It prized the virtues of frankness, independence, individuality, convivality. There were the rulers and the ruled, the educated and the uneducated. If the two groupings could be described as two nations, they were neither of them conscious of the division as a state of things which ought not be.

In all essentials, the modern game was shaped between 1778 and 1830. It was created by the yeoman farmer, the game keeper, the tinker, the Nottingham coal miner, the Yorkshire factory hand. The artisans made it, men of hand and eye. The rich and idle noblemen, and some substantial city people contributed money, organization and prestige…

At their matches, the players ate and drank with the gusto of the time, sang songs, and played for large sums of money. Bookies sat openly before the pavilion at Lord’s taking bets. The unscrupilous nobleman and the poor and dishonest commoner alike bought and sold matches…

The old England had indeed gone. By 1857 a majority of the population lived in cities. This was the generation, the first of many to come, which was "cut off from the natural country pursuits and amusements which had been the heritage of Englishmen for centuries". They probably felt the loss more than the public school boys…In the ten years that followed the Factory Act of 1847, there had come into existance an enormous urban public, proletarian and clerical lower middle class. They had won for themselves one great victory, freedom on Saturday afternoons. They were ‘waiting to be amused’…

The decade of the sixties, with its rush to organize sports associations of every kind, was just around the corner. In 1862, the first team of English cricketers set sail for Australia. In 1863, the MCC authorized overarm bowling, thus removing the last barrier to the development of the game’s full potentialities. In 1863, WG Grace, then fifteen years old, played in a first class match. He had made his first appearance on a stage that all classes of the nation had helped to build, and which was just about ready for the performance WG was about to give…

Through WG Grace, cricket, the most complete expression of popular life in pre-industrial England, was incorporated into the life of the nation. As far as any social activity can be the work of one man, he did it…

What manner of man was he? He was a typical representative of the pre-Victorian age. His was a Gloucestershire country father who made a good wicket in the orchard and the whole family rose at dawn to get in a few hours of cricket. Their dogs were trained to act as retreivers…

Boys of the Grace clan once walked seven miles to school in the morning, seven miles home for lunch, seven miles back to school and seven miles home in the evening. That was the breed, reared in the pre-Victorian days before railways…

Records show that the family in their West Gloucestershire cricketing encounters queried, disputed and did not shrink from fisticuffs. To the end of their days, EM and WG chattered on the field like magpies. Their talking at and even to batsmen was so notorious that young players were warned against them. They were uninhibited with each other and could be furious at fraternal insults or mistakes. They were uninhibited in general.

In his attitude to book learning he belonged entirely to the school of pre-Arnold Browns. He rebuked a fellow player who was always reading in the dressing rooms “How do you expect to score if you are always reading? I would never be caught that way.”

He is said on all sides to have been one of the most typical of Englishmen, to have symbolised John Bull, and so on and so forth. To this, it is claimed, in addition to his deeds, he owed his enormous popularity. I take leave to doubt it. He was English undoubtedly, very much so. But he was typical of an England which was being superseded. He was the yeoman, the country doctor, the squire, the England of yesterday. But he was no relic, no historical or nostalgic curiosity. He was pre-Victorian in the Victorian age, but a pre-Victorian militant...

There he was using his bat like an axe, building as much of that old as possible into the new, and fabulously successful at it. The more simple past was battling with the more complex, more dominant, present, and the present was being forced to yield ground and make room. In any age, he would have been a striking personality and vastly popular. That particular age he hit between wind and water.

Gaudi in Context

We were in Barcelona, with no specific agenda, thanks to a restless Icelandic volcano. A little Gaudi pilgrimage was noblesse oblige; my father’s brother, an architect, was an ardent devotee. So my wife and I navigated the streets of Barcelona, on foot and in public transport, with the children, with only a hazy plan in mind, to see the Pedrera, Casa Batllo, Parc Guell, and the Sagrada Familia, in situ.

Gaudi’s work - the fluid exterior of the Pedrera, the tile work at Parc Guell, the steepling ant-hills of the Sagrada Familia abuzz with activity, somehow remniscent of a south Indian temple gopuram - was as wonderfully phantasmagorical as ever. What was new was the context, the streets of the Eixample district in which this work is set.

The Eixample is laid out in a perfect geometrical grid.
The streets are perfectly straight. Each city block is a square with the edges trimmed off into an octogon, to let in more air and light, and to help the traffic see around corners. It is controlled, predictable, methodical, and in its own way, beautiful.

The Eixample was designed in 1859 by Ildefons Cedra, a less storied figure than Antonio Gaudi. This was when the textile industry was booming, the population was growing, there was new money around, and Barcelona had clearly outgrown the Old City - Ciutat Vella - around the Mediterranean port. So the ancient city walls, fortifications which went back to Roman times, were demolished. An extension, eixample in Catalan, was built. It must have been a relief to move from the tiny, twisted, messy, over-crowded streets of the Ciutat Vella into the gracious, tree-lined avenues of the Eixample, with schools, shopping and hospitals within easy access.



When the twenty-one year old Gaudi started studying architecture, in 1873, the Eixample was already there, as large as life, business as usual. Been there, done that, to straight lines and perfect octogons. Beauty was no longer about imposing order on unruly nature, or on a chaotic past. Beauty, and spirituality, was now about evoking and celebrating the shapes and irregularities of nature, a nature which is increasingly far away.

Gaudi, of course, responded to this need with spectacular panache. But the context, the framing needed to hold Gaudi's magical world in place, was already there. So the Eixample now has Cedra’s rigid grid enriched with Gaudi’s fanstastic shapes, in a point counter-point rhythm, which is more layered and meaningful than something either Cedra or Gaudi alone might have built.

Let them eat cake

Would you want your brand to be associated with an icon, who, for centuries, has been associated with unearned privilege, wanton indulgence, promiscuity, and the furious hatred of the common people? Apparently, yes, if you are in the luxury goods business.

The exquisite pink marble Trianon palaces in Versailles, from where Marie Antoinette reigned, are being restored to their former glory. This worthy effort is being sponsored by Breguet watches. I noticed the Breguet logo is discreetly but clearly displayed all around the complex on a recent visit.

This is not common or garden corporate philanthropy, it is considered brand-building. Breguet’s advertising boasts that Marie Antoinette wore a watch crafted by the original Mr. Breguet. Breguet bought wood from an oak tree that was being felled near the Petit Trianon palace, under which Marie Antoinette “liked to day dream”, to build a special presentation case for the Marie Antoinette watch. The brand is clearly working hard to enhance this association. Their customers, people who pay ~$25,000 for a wrist watch, are probably telling them that they like the Bourbon heritage.

Will that change? My bet is, it will.

My reflexive associations with Marie Antoinette are negative, probably because I first learnt about her in my middle school history text books. In that austere world of Indira Gandhi’s socialist India, Marie Antoinette’s opulence felt obscene. Breguet chose to invest in the Marie Antoinette association in a different context, in an age of plenty. This was a zeitgiest in which a Labour minister could say that he is “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”, and be better regarded for that attitude. If one is intensely relaxed about the filthy rich being filthy rich, it becomes a lot easier to see Marie Antoinette as a glamourous, gracious but misunderstood heroine.

For better or worse, that age of plenty has come to an end. Whatever comes next, for a few years at least, frugality, conspicuous frugality, is going to matter. History's verdict on Marie Antoinette will continue to shift shape.

The Clintons, the Obamas and Mr Liz Hurley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Why don’t glamourous hotties ever fall madly in love with nice, well-mannered, hard-working boys? Why are they forever falling in love with over-muscled, mean-spirited, brutes who are so clearly up to no good?

This topic has been debated extensively in my hostel room by my friends, all of whom are nice, well-mannered, hard-working boys. However, the most insightful take on this eternal question came not from my nice-but-angst-ridden hosteller friends, but from one of their moms, a trained psychologist with a Ph.D. in Jungian thought. The way she saw it, the psyche, consciously or otherwise, always seeks a balance between animus with anima, yin with yang. The elements need to be in proportion.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona illustrates this thought. Watch it before you read this post, if you care about suspense. I will give away elements of the plot.

Vicky has her life sorted. She is a serious, hard-working, responsible, well-educated graduate student. She is engaged to a serious, hard-working, responsible, well-employed banker/ lawyer. They will get married when she earns her Masters degree. They are buying a nice house together in a pleasant New York suburb. They are thinking about tennis lessons. Soon they will buy a Volvo and have beautiful children who will get above average grades. Vicky is well on her way to yuppie nirvana, the only nirvana she has ever wanted. That is, until she falls in love.

The man she falls in love with is Juan Antonio, a spontaneous, passionate, intense, expressive, incandescent Catalan painter. She isn’t looking for love, she isn’t even open to being wooed. But her yang senses Juan Antonio’s yin, her earth needs Juan Antonio’s fire. Together, their chi comes into balance, magic happens, and Vicky becomes more vividly alive than she has ever been. Vicky's story is at the emotional core of the movie. She still is the girl who wants to be a suburban mom. But she needs to deal with the depth of her feelings for Juan Antonio. Is this a fleeting infatuation? Or profound love? Or is profound love a fleeting infatuation?

The film’s other emotional core is Juan Antonio’s marriage with Maria Elena, another spontaneous, passionate, intense, expressive, incandescent Catalan painter. Juan Antonia and Maria Elena live, breathe, sleep and dream together. They work together so intensely that their art, their styles, are indistinguishable. They are one mind, one soul, inseparable despite inhabiting distinct bodies. Therefore, their love is dysfunctional. They are too alike. Together they have too much yin, too much fire, their chi is not in balance.

Juan Antonio and Maria Elena need another element, someone who is not like them, to balance the chi in their marriage. That element comes, like a breath of fresh air, in the form of Vicky’s college friend Christina, a film maker bored with her own work and casting around for new experiences. What could be a more exciting new experience than these passionate Spanish artists? It works out, fire needs air. But does air need fire?

Vicky Cristina Barcelona feels like a classic Woody Allen film, which is great for someone like me who has long been a fan of Manhattan and Annie Hall. Woody Allen's characters do sometimes come across as one-dimensional, like vehicles to make his point rather than as messy, real, flesh and blood people. That generally doesn't happen here. British actress Rebecca Hall is appropriately stilted as Vicky, and Scarlett Johansson easily gets into the skin of the beautiful, bored and self-centered Cristina. But the real-life couple who make this movie are Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz. They bring so much guts, gumption and messy passion to their roles as Juan Antonio and Maria Elena that it's impossible not to be carried away.

We watched this DVD shortly after Live Flesh, a Pedro Almodovar film which also had a superb Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz. That cast, the Spanish setting, and the broad open-ended questions about love and the meaning of life give this film a delicious Woody Allen meets Pedro Almodovar feeling. It is great fun. Mind it!