Altoids: On Britishness and Capitalism

This post was born from the frustration of an unsuccessful shopping trip. I wanted Altoids. I checked the local supermarkets - Sainsbury's, Tesco, Asda. None of them had it. My local independent pharmacy used to carry a few tins, but alas, no longer. As I made peace with poor substitutes like Fox's Glacier mints and Starbuck's After Coffee Mints, I reflected on the irony that such a quirky, idiosyncratically British brand was so popular in America - it was not unusual to see colleagues carrying Altoids tins from meeting to meeting back when I worked in the US - but was unknown in Britain. Perhaps that reflects British identity, which, like India's unity, is more apparent from without than from within.

However, after a little Google powered research, I was left reflecting not on the subtle ironies of Britishness, but on the brutal nihilism of business. Altoids are no longer British. The red and white tins no longer proudly say Made in Great Britain. The factory in Bridgend, Wales, which used to supply the entire world with the curiously strong peppermint has been mothballed. Production has been moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee, so that the product is made closer to its biggest markets, which are in America.

I am generally a fan of globalized, optimized supply chains, but this is ridiculous. It is like moving the Jack Daniel's distillery from Tennessee to Nanjing province so that the whiskey is made close to Shanghai, the world's largest market. It isn't Jack's if it isn't from Tennessee.

The advertising is no longer edgy or self-mocking. The official web site claims that: "Altoids honours the authentic - people who stay true to themselves no matter what. Those who are confident, honest and unwavering. Those who are CURIOUSLY STRONG."

Like, for instance, Altoids honours people who contribute to a blog about beautiful coffee. "For most people, coffee's just a morning beverage. But to the contributors of this blog, it's high art. Dedicated to looking past coffee's buzz, they find a subtlety that other's simply miss. Filled with striking imagery from the world's best latte artists, this cup of Joe is almost too beautiful to drink"

Altoids also honours Cameron Adams, who writes a blog called The Chattanoogan: "highlighting street style in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Cameron Adams' blog focuses on the well-hidden gems of a small town. Why, you might ask? The innocence and spontaneity of the images that capture the residents' local flavor seems to answer, why not?"

Why not, indeed. But does shrinkage ever occur?



I had to find out how this train wreck happened. How did The Man destroy Altoids' spirit by turning it into a motherhood and apple-pie candy from Chattanooga, Tennessee? It turns out that capitalism didn't just destroy Altoids, it also made it the icon it once was. Altoids' golden age came after it was acquired by Kraft, following a series of takeovers and leveraged buy outs.

Altoids were invented in the late 1700s, and were promoted for over a century as a "stomach calmative". The brand was owned first by Smith and Company of London, which became a part of Callard & Bowser-Suchard, which became a part of Beatrice Foods, which was bought and broken up by KKR, when Altoids was sold to Terry's of York, which was then acquired by Kraft General Foods of Chicago in 1993.

At this time, Altoids was a tiny brand, but with a devoted word-of-mouth following among the heavy-smoking, coffee-guzzling Seattle club set. A Kraft marketing manager called Mark Sugden, working with Leo Burnett Chicago, the agency which created the Marlboro Man, "got" this Seattle set's devotion, did not get a big advertising budget, and came up with a campaign that was consistent with what the brand already stood for. "We were talking to a cynical, smart, cutting-edge audience, and nothing mediocre was going to sell," says Burnett Creative Director Steffan Postaer. What sold were advertising posters that looked like this:



Market share rocketed from too small to measure to 10% in 1997, or $40 million. Something good had happened. A curiously strong breath of fun from old Blighty had blown into the lives of millions of people.

I guess the trouble with capitalism is that it doesn't know when to say "enough". Common sense says that a brand can't retain its quirky, smart, foreign, cynical, funny, laconic, iconoclastic soul if it gets very much bigger than 10% of the market. But woe betide the poor brand manager who might naively suggest this. Many new variants were launched, budgets were found for TV advertising. I wasn't able to find out how successful this SKU proliferation was; but in due course Kraft sold Altoids on (along with Lifesavers) to Wrigley for $1.4 billion amidst talk of revenue "headwinds" in 2005.

Wrigley closed the plant in Bridgend and increased capacity utilization at an existing plant in Chattanooga. The humour in the advertising drifted from under-stated to over-the-top, from Sir Humphrey Appleby-funny to Borat-funny. Somewhere along the way, the brand name became associated with enhanced blow jobs.

Mars acquired all of Wrigley for $23 billion in 2008. Altoids was obviously not the main point of the buyout. The current Pottery Barn-esque creative platform, wholesome authenticity, looks more like damage control than an effort to build a brand around either the British legacy or the dedication of the Seattle club cultists.

Maybe, though, there is something deeply British about this story, about inventing something that then goes abroad and takes on a completely different character. Like cricket. Or the English language. Or democracy, or capitalism, or scientific method. Altoids is in good company. Maybe I can explain all this to my local pharmacist to get him to import some quirky Britishness from Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Rudo y Cursi y Asif y Amir

Rudo y Cursi is a Mexican film about football, made by the same team as classics like Y tu mama tambien and Amores Perros. My wife and I watched it about a year ago, on an impulse, largely because it had Gael Garcia Bernal. We had the movie theater entirely to ourselves through a Monday 7:00 screening, which was a little odd initially, but that gave us complete freedom to laugh out loud at the many hilarious moments on this rollicking ride.

It came to mind because of the sordid story now unfolding about Pakistani cricket players and their "spot-fixing" (this doesn't give away any more of the movie's plot than the official trailer). How disgusting! Really, how could they? And it hurts just that little bit more because the Pakis look like us. Are we South Asians, and our game, cricket, somehow naturally corrupt?

Rationally, I know that is nonsense. Match fixing has been a problem in many cultures and many sports for generations, yet sport has continued to thrive. Cricket in the time of WG Grace, the baseball world series in 1919, football, tennis, snooker, boxing and sumo wrestling have all been under the cloud at various times.

But my heart still sees the fall of Asif and Amir, of Azharuddin, Ajay Jadeja and Hansie Cronje in vivid technicolour, a vividness that I am unable summon for Nikolai Davydenko, despite being a tennis fan. That is where Rudo y Cursi comes in. It is textured, lively, authentic, funny, good-looking retelling of a familiar tale of simple beginnings, meteoric ascent, the intoxication of the high life, temptation and a tragic fall from grace. The language, music, sport, landscapes, rituals and styles feel unfamiliar, the emotions feel authentic and are entirely familiar.

What to do? We are like that wonley. But we are not alone.

The Unbearable Lightness of Scones

"There was nothing wrong, he reminded himself, in appreciating a bourgeois paradise when every other sort of paradise on offer had proved to be exactly the opposide of what paradise should be."

These wonderful words were spoken by art gallery owner Matthew Duncan of Edinburgh, the kind hearted but unremarkable son of a rich father, in The Unbearable Lightness of Scones. Haven't quite put my finger on it yet, but this sentiment is a big part of the reason why Alexander McCall Smith now occupies such an exalted place on my bookshelf, not too far away from PG Wodehouse.

Avatar: The Worship of Vishnu

Watch Avatar. It’s a great film. If you have watched Avatar as entertainment, I urge you to watch it again, now with a piety in your heart, in the spirit of bhakti, for this is no ordinary Hollywood blockbuster, it is the tale of a blue-skinned hero, animated by a celestial spirit, who was born to save god’s righteous people, and leads them to glorious victory over evil.

Our blue-skinned hero’s people are noble and devout. Yet, our hero arrives among them in troubled times. Many doubt him. Unfazed by the doubters, our glorious hero slays demons, charms the tribal elders, frolics in a scented grove with a beauteous maiden, does battle to save his father’s soul, and rides the skies on a sacred eagle. He is accepted as one of the chosen people, is appointed commander-in-chief, and leads his tribe into an apocalyptic battle that pits right against wrong, good against evil. He leads with courage and cunning in this battle, wins a decisive victory, and restores the natural order of the universe.

You’ve heard this story before, you will hear this story again. In James Cameron's telling of this story, the blue-skinned avatar is called jakesully, the animating spirit is Jake Sully, the righteous tribe are the Na'vi of Pandora, the slain demon is a Thantor, the beauteous maiden is Neytiri, the father figure is Dr Grace Augustine, the sacred eagle is a Toruk, and the evil forces defeated in the apocalyptic battle are the US Marines. In previous tellings of this story, the blue-skinned avatar is called Rama, the animating spirit is Vishnu, the righteous tribe are the Raghuvanshi of Aryavrata, the slain demon is Taataka, the beauteous maiden is Sita (or perhaps Radha is better cast?), the father figure is Dasharatha, the sacred eagle is Garuda, and the evil forces defeated in battle are Ravana's rakshasas.

Other Vaishnavite inspirations are less obvious. Are the floating mountains which protect Pandora's sacred forests inspired by Govardhan? Is the carriage of the Na'vi people, who walk tall and lithe, and swish their tails with pride, inspired by the vanaras of Kishkinda?

Google tells me that these parallels haven't gone unnoticed. Some cranks were offended. Many Hindus, including me, enjoy these resonances. A film maker called Sudipto Chattopadhyay likened Jake Sully to Kalki, the long awaited tenth avatar of Vishnu. One of the beautiful things about Kalki is that every tribe, every culture can locate their own messiah in that placeholder.

The story that you have heard before, that you will hear again, is what Joseph Campbell called the monomyth, the single narrative that underlies all the great stories ever told, the Odyssey, the Norse myths, the stories of Rama, and Gautam Buddha and Jesus. Contemporary mythology - Lord of the Rings, Narnia, Star Wars and now Avatar - follows the same narrative structure, sometimes instinctively, sometimes intentionally.

Re-telling the monomyth becomes interesting because of rich detail which Avatar has in plenty, like, the complete Maori-based Na'vi language invented for the film, or the coral reef inspired jungle-scapes of Pandora. These stories aren’t about surprise endings. They gain meaning, resonance and emotional heft with repetition. The story of Rama is retold every Dussera. The story of Krishna is retold every Janmashtami. Perhaps the story of Jake Sully will be retold every April 22, on Earth Day, to honour the Na'vi's Gaian ethos? Perhaps we will be blessed with an Oscar winning sequel?

Kannadasan and Krishna Consciousness in the Peak District

காட்டுக்கேது தோட்டக்காரன் இதுதான் என் கட்சி

kattukkethu thottakaran, ithuthan en katchi

These words are from a favourite old song by Kannadasan, one of Tamil cinema’s greatest and most celebrated poets. This translates roughly to: does the forest have a gardener? His side is the side I’m on.

As it turns out, the forest does have a gardener. His name is Les Morson. His side is the Hartington Sports Committee. My family and I discovered him, and the woods named in his honour, on a recent walk through the Peak District National Park.





Kannadasan’s lyrics were written for a character disowned by his family, trying to assert that he still is one of God’s people. In that context, the kattukku thottakaran, the forest gardener, probably refers to God. Krishna is vanmaali, literally forest gardener, in many Indian traditions.

It seems perfectly reasonable to assume that when Mr Les Morson starting planting trees to make a forest, he did not intend to discover his inner Krishna-avatar, even if that is in fact what he did. The Lord manifests himself in mysterious ways.

The English: friendly or distant?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big-point players in tennis: NOT a myth

There really are big-point players in tennis. Just found a couple of statistical references to support this claim.

Watching this year’s Wimbledon, Rafael Nadal always looked in charge of his semi final against Andy Murray. Yet, there was a time late in the third set, with Murray down 0-2 on his way to a 0-3 whipping, when Murray had actually won more points than Nadal. Rafa was winning the points that mattered.

Similar claims in other sports have turned out to be false. For instance, baseball long believed in “clutch hitters”, batters who perform especially well in important situations. However, Bill James, the spiritual father of sports statistics, showed that this was simply not supported by the data. Similarly, fans long believed that basketball players have “hot hands”, when they are “in the zone” and sink every attempt. Statistical analysis showed that “hot hands” were fully explained by chance. Is tennis really different?

One reason for believeing tennis is different is comes from this (superb) New Yorker article on the state of the doubles game. The relevant sections say:

The doubles tour might no longer exist, if not for Etienne de Villiers, the chairman of the men’s tour at the time. De Villiers had previously worked at Walt Disney International, so he understood the need for better marketing. The doubles tour could survive, he said, but only if the players agreed to some compromises. The game would be streamlined. Most matches would be kept to two sets, with a “match tie break” in place of the third set. If a game went to 40-40 the next point would decide it, there would be no more endless ads and dueces. (Grand slams would stick with the traditional scoring).

The new format has few fans among the players. Martina Navratilova says it is a “bullshit excuse”. Leander Paes calls it as “Russian roulette”, and Luke Jensen dismisses it as “tennis in a microwave”. Jensen believes that the shorter format favours weaker teams, “Anyone can win one set”.

Oddly enough, though, the statistics don’t bear this out. Not long after the changes were made, Wayne asked Carl Morris, a mathematician at Harvard, to calculate their effect on a team’s chances. In shorter matches, Morris concluded, the likelihood of an upset could increase by as much as five percentage points. And yet, when the ATP later reviewed the tour’s statistics, it found that the best players had improved their records. The new format offered “no second chances”, as Bob Bryan put it, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. “The one thing we didn’t figure in is that the better teams are clutch” Wayne says. “On those big points, they come through”.

That said, this is a roundabout way of making a simple point. My friend Sriram Subramaniam suggested a comparison of % break points won with % other points won. One would expect Rafa to win more break points than Murray. Unfortunately, Google didn’t turn up this specific analysis. The closest thing to this analysis that a few mintues of Googling turned up is this paper by a Franc Klaassen of the University of Amsterdam.

He shows that there really are big points, and that seeded players play better on big points than unseeded players. He observes that seeded players facing a break point on their serve have the same win % as on other points, and that unseeded players have a lower win %, suggesting that it is more about weaker players choking than better players raising their game. He also shows that serving first in a set, or serving with new balls, has no impact. He doesn’t make any conclusions about champions like Rafa or Federer as opposed to the general pool of seeded players; his dataset is small, coming only from Wimbledon 92-95.

Calling for tennis’ Bill James to mine the vast amount of data generated by the ATP tour...

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.