Why the Irish, and Indians, rationally believe in fairies

"Because the upside to disbelief is too small."

Zigackly. I picked this gem up from Michael Lewis' hilarious new book, Boomerang. The passage in question is about Ireland:

Ian (Michael Lewis' Irish guide) will say “Over there, that’s a pretty typical fairy ring,” and then explain, interestingly, that these circles of stones or mushrooms that occur in Irish fields are believed by local farmers to house mythical creatures. “Irish people actually believe in fairies?,” I ask, straining but failing to catch a glimpse of the typical fairy ring to which Ian has just pointed. “I mean, if you walked right up and asked him to his face, ‘Do you believe in fairies?’ most guys will deny it,” he replies. “But if you ask him to dig out the fairy ring on his property, he won’t do it. To my way of thinking, that’s believing.” And it is. It’s a tactical belief, a belief that exists because the upside to disbelief is too small...

To my ears, that rings true of India too. Superstition is about economic, rather than scientific, rationality. Lewis' chapter about Ireland is still visible at Vanity Fair.

Teaching compassion through drama

"Why don't we teach our children compassion?". 

Roshi Joan Halifax asked this question in the TED talk I posted about last week, implying that we don't do enough to teach our children compassion.

On reflection, I think we do more to teach our children than we generally give ourselves credit for. This teaching is not called "compassion class". It is called drama. For instance, my daughters attend a very popular theater workshop in our neighbourhood. The faculty that they develop through theater is compassion; they learn to get into someone else's skin.

I didn't learn drama as a child, but I did attend a couple of corporate leadership workshops, in America, that were built around acting technique. The idea is - learn to act, get into the other's skin, understand others more completely, communicate better, discover yourself, discover your own authentic leadership voice, and therefore ride away into the golden sunset of promotions and profits - which sounds awfully naff, but was actually quite helpful. 

Compassion: Moral Outrage :: Dalai Lama : Arnab Goswami

"Compassion has enemies...like pity, and moral outrage..."

I came across these words in a TED talk by the Buddhist Roshi Joan Halifax, to whom compassion is a higher faculty, a more important experience, than outrage. Obvious maybe, but worth noticing, amidst the cacophony of shrill news-anchors.

   

The Dunbar number: the reason my family consists of just one hundred and fifty people

I was at a marvellous family event in Bangalore recently: an uncle and aunt's fiftieth wedding anniversary. It was a evening of laughter, music and food, brimming over with emotion, triggered in part by family photographs assembled from the past seventy-five years. When I came home, I started to explain to my daughters how all the people at that evening are related to us, and struggled. I still need to call my mother to clarify exactly how I'm related to my relatives.

I know exactly how I'm related to my first cousins, and for most part, to my second cousins. I'm hazy about genealogical links beyond that. Regardless, there are several members of my family, important people who I know and care about, who are in that hazy-genealogical-link zone. There are also several people who operate as members of the family despite not being specifically related either by blood or by marriage.

While my family is large and colourful, it is not unique. I know other Indian families which operate the same way. Mediterranean (and therefore Latino) cultures have a similarly capacious, rambling sense of family. Maybe family is the wrong word: clan, kinsfolk or the Welsh cymri might be closer to the mark. But what is it, this circle of kindred spirits? If it is not delineated by ancestry or marriage, is it infinitely large?

Professor Robin Dunbar thinks my clan isn't infinitely large, it consists of no more than one hundred and fifty people.

Dunbar's theory is that a stable social group is one in which "an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person". Keeping track of this complex web of relationships is cognitively difficult, and gets ever more so as the size of the group increases. Dunbar's observation is that this web of relationships gets unmanageably complex, or too computationally intensive for the human brain, when the group size approaches one hundred and fifty. Empirically, we've lived through most of recorded history in settlements of about one hundred and fifty people.

This is sometimes mis-interpreted as "you can't have more than one hundred and fifty friends". I don't think Dunbar's number makes any such claim.

For instance, I play tennis with an Oxford-educated Asian-Brit landscape-architect called Jason. I know Jason as a tennis buddy, and in that limited context, he is a good buddy. I don't know anything about the other spheres of Jason's life - his Oxonian tribe, or his landscape-architect tribe - and therefore my friendship with Jason is not computationally intensive. It is one dimensional, rather than a matrix. I don't think Dunbar's concept in any way limits the number of simple, or one-dimensional, friendships I can have. The Dunbar number is about the number of people in a self-regulating matrix of relationships, not about simple one-to-one friendships.

I also don't think the Dunbar number limits the number of distinct tribes I can belong to. I belong to Dunbar-tribes from family, school, college and from work. Each tribe is manageable because it is no more than one hundred and fifty people. If it were all one network, it would be overwhelming. Facebook's new "smart lists" feature is an attempt to capture this reality.

Understood this way, my family is a constantly shifting network of about one hundred and fifty, with people, or entire branches, coming in and peeling off as time passes and circumstances evolve. At one time, say one hundred and fifty years ago, a large family like mine would have operated to strict command-and-control protocols. Family would have defined every aspect of identity. Now, the family, or the clan, operates as an opt-in network, in which location on the family tree is not irrelevant but is not defining either. Welcome to the brave new world of open source kinship.

Work-family balance: one front where Manmohan Singh has it easier than Barack Obama

Jodi Kantor's new book The Obamas reports that "Barack refuses to miss dinner with his family more than twice a week". Apparently, this is not good. Obama's family-centric approach "left him, when the going got tough, short of friends, short of people who owed him, short of people who felt that the White House was interested in them". Effective presidents are meant to be out and about, schmoozing with potential allies.

Powerful men across the political spectrum face the same trade-off - between family time and schmoozing - on this side of the pond. David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband are all in what the Economist calls their "Gruffolo years", the time when dads read stories to their children. By most accounts, all three party leaders make time for their families. 

I clearly sympathize with Obama's and Cameron's choice (I'm writing this after having read out The Blackberry Mouse to my daughters). I want to believe that work can and should be organized so it can be done within defined working hours. But the truth is, there is a trade-off. I inhabit a less exalted world than the Obamas' and the Camerons', but even in my little world, schmoozing is clearly useful, but it is a potentially infinite drain on time and energy.

How much easier it must be for Manmohan Singh. He didn't have to face these hard trade-offs between bedtime stories and professional schmoozing when he became Prime Minister of India, aged 72.  Maybe working into what used to be the "retirement years" isn't all bad.

  

Would Captain Haddock have had a Scottish accent?

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

Pithecanthropus! Lily livered landlubbers! Troglodytes!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Che Guevara: Fidel Castro :: Jesus: Christ

Che Guevara is an iconic hero, universally beloved and revered. Fidel Castro is often seen as a villain, hated and reviled as one of the world's last Stalinist thugs. But, are they really all that different? Or, did Che just have the advantage of dying young and therefore remaining pure, while Fidel lived on, grappling with and being tainted by an imperfect world?

This thought was triggered by the book I reviewed in my last blog post, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, by Philip Pullman. Pullman's intent was to contrast noble, idealistic Jesus with his cynical fictional twin brother, Christ. Pullman conceived Christ as a metaphor for the institutional church. I understood Christ even more broadly, as a general metaphor for institutional life. The tension between an organization's ideals and its reality is universal. The only way to be genuinely Jesus-like is to die young, and to therefore avoid the failures and compromises that inevitably come from engaging with the messy real world.

To further strengthen the analogy, Che and Fidel have really cool beards, like Jesus and Christ. Though I don't think either Jesus or Christ smoked cigars...

Che smoking a cigar

Fidel smoking a cigar

Che and Fidel

Did Jesus come before Christ? Or Christ before Jesus?

I read, and enjoyed, a book that called Christ a scoundrel. The book is by Philip Pullman, a well known atheist. Pullman isn’t being subtle about his name calling, Christ is referred to as a scoundrel in bold print, in the book’s title.

Initially, I wasn’t sure if I should be blogging about a book that calls Christ a scoundrel, I'm not here to offend people. Then, I found that the Church of England Newspaper called the book “magnificent” (while noting that five hundred years ago Philip Pullman would have been burnt at stake as a heretic). The former Bishop of Edinburgh wrote a thoughtful and positive review in The Guardian. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s review found in it “a voice of genuine spiritual authority”. My blogging about the scoundrel Christ should be okay.

Pullman’s book is a retelling of the life of Jesus, with a twist.

In Pullman's telling, Jesus is born with a twin brother called Christ. Jesus is a passionate, charismatic idealist. Christ is a clever, careful pragmatist, an apparatchik. Jesus connects with real people, and moves or exhorts them to a more fulfilling life. Christ hero-worships his brother Jesus, diligently records his words, and conceives of an institution he calls “the church” to celebrate and immortalize Jesus, an idea Jesus despises.

Jesus says “if anyone hits you on the right cheek, offer him the left as well...love your enemies, and pray for them...The road that leads to life is a hard one, and it passes through a narrow gate, but the road to destruction is easy, and the gate is broad...do to others as you hope they would do to you.”

Christ says “think of the advantages if there were a body of believers, a structure, an organization already in place...I can see the whole world united in this Kingdom of the faithful...local groups under the guidance of a wise elder in the region, the regional leaders all answering to the authority of one supreme director, a kind of regent of God on earth...I can see Caesar himself having to bow down before this body, and offer obeisance to God’s own kingdom here in the world...I can see the majesty and splendour of the great temples, the courts, the palaces devoted to the glory of God, and I can see this whole wonderful creation lasting for generation after generation.”

Pullman makes no secret of his contempt for the church, his anger about “the Crusades, the witch-hunts, the heretic-burnings, the narrow fanatical zeal that comes so swiftly and naturally to some individuals in positions of power when faith gives them an excuse”. His character Christ is written to be the object of this contempt, this anger. Pullman explains: “I wanted this Christ to embody as much as possible of what the church later did to alter, edit and ignore the words of Jesus, and to benefit from his death and supposed resurrection.”

So, in Pullman's story, Christ betrays Jesus to the Romans. The church needs the crucifixion to happen, to serve as its founding myth. Pullman sees the church as the judas who betrays Jesus.

Yet, paradoxically, by writing Jesus and Christ as distinct characters, and by juxtaposing them, Pullman liberates the good man Jesus from the scoundrel Christ. Jesus' greatness is so much more apparent when the evil that has been done in his name can be decanted into another character.

Even his portrayal of the scoundrel Christ is kinder than it might have been. Pullman explains, “Christ developed in a way I hadn’t expected, and found himself with a human conscience, tempted and torn and compromised”. The modern church has good reason to be so relaxed about Pullman’s heresy.

I find I can relate to this tension - between an ideal and an institution that claims to stand for that ideal - more directly, more emotionally, by porting it into an Indian context. These lines from Tagore’s Gitanjali are often cited as the animating spirit behind India’s freedom:

"Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason
has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action---
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake."

Unsurprisingly, the Republic of India doesn’t always live up to Tagore’s ideal. That isn’t a reason to lose faith in either Tagore’s ideal or in the Indian republic.

Perhaps the only certainty with any institution is that the institution seeks to enhance its own power. This is true for nation states, churches, business corporations, NGOs, universities, armies...the whole shooting match...they’re all out to turn themselves into something majestic, splendid and glorious, lasting generation after generation. In the process, they can do terrible things. Limiting their power, so terrible things happen less often, is good. Yoking that power to a higher ideal, doesn’t always work, but is not bad.

So, just how much of a scoundrel is Pullman's Christ, thought of both as a character in this story, as well as a metaphor for the church as an institution?

Pullman's narrative starts at Jesus' conception. The story continues along Jesus' noble path - rejecting Satan's temptations, the sermon on the mount, the cleansing of the temple - until it descends to the squalor of Christ taking money from Caiaphas to betray Jesus. That narrative arc feels like the fall of man. it shows Christ as a scoundrel.

However, Jesus is not Adam. His story didn't begin at his conception. Jesus was born into a context, a context which is apparent even in Pullman's tight narrative. Jesus was born into a world of brutal Roman oppressors, of the rigid and corrupt Jewish establishment, and of any number of transient spiritual cults. These cults, however transient, gave people something they valued - a sense of purpose and belonging. In that context, creating an durable institution that would provide people with some of this value feels like the right thing to do.

Was it worth betraying Jesus to create such an institution? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe Pullman's Christ is like one of John Le Carre's spies, Smiley's people, doing shady deals that may or may not work, for a cause that may or may not turn out to be just, like Kim Philby, the upper-class Englishman who betrayed his people to spy for the soviets because he sincerely believed in the communist ideal. Maybe Christ's dilemma was like Brutus': Brutus loved Caesar, but loved Rome more. History judged Brutus kindly. Either way, Christ seen in context is an ambiguous character, not obviously a scoundrel.

Or maybe (I don't like this thought, but it is too strong to resist) it comes down to youth. Jesus had the charisma, idealism and moral clarity of youth. Like John Kennedy, Jim Morrison and James Dean, like Gautam Buddha, Adi Shankara and Swami Vivekananda, Jesus died young, and remained pure. Christ lived on, to be tarnished by an imperfect world, to be called a scoundrel for his troubles. Looked at this way, the benediction that follows most naturally from the life of Jesus and Christ are the words of another man who was once called Judas: "may you stay, forever young".

Kolaveri Di Takes Europe by Storm

 Kolaveri Di takes Europe by storm, as predicted by Limca Cuts from Planet Earth.

Why Liz Hurley is turning Shane Warne into a metrosexual pretty-boy

I’ve been wrong about Liz Hurley’s love life previously. I predicted that Liz and her Indian husband Arun Nayar would make a good couple, which didn’t quite work out. Liz and Warnie are now an item, tweeting away lovingly to each other.

But is this person with Liz Hurley really Shane Warne?

The ultimate ornery, brawling Aussie has become a metrosexual pretty-boy. Why? I think it is for the same reason that I initially expected Liz Hurley and Arun Nayar to work.

My theory, or more precisely, my understanding of Jungian psychology, is that any couple needs a balance of yin and yang. Liz is one tough honey: determined, hard-working, ambitious, rich, successful and totally in charge. She is a woman with a lot of yang. She needs a man with plenty of yin for the two of them to work as a couple.

Initially I reasoned that the modest and unassuming Mr Nayar would work for Liz because he would provide that yin-yang balance. He would be happy to play the beta-male to Liz’s alpha-female. The way Liz put it in an interview, “Arun is astonishingly good-natured and would be the last man on earth to feel overshadowed by me. He’s thoroughly comfortable in his own skin”. With 20:20 hindsight, perhaps Mr Nayar was not all that comfortable being overshadowed by Liz, dissolving his identity to become Mr Liz Hurley. And actually, I have no reason to believe that Mr Nayar is full of yin-energy. Having a featureless personality and having yin-energy are totally different things.

If one were looking for a man with some yin-energy to balance Liz's yang, the old Shane Warne, the beer-bellied scrapper that cricket fans have known for decades, would have been central casting's last choice. Liz getting back together with her long term boyfriend, the posh, floppy-haired, finely chiselled Hugh Grant, would have felt more natural. Given that landscape, for Liz to step away from an obvious choice, to take on the raw material she found in Shane Warne, and to turn that beast into a pretty-boy with enough yin to keep the couple in balance, that has been an act of astonishing inventiveness and chutzpah that that old leg-spinning wizard Shane Warne himself would have been proud of. And heck, it just might work out for them.

I hope some film makers are following the Liz and Warnie love story. It has terrific potential as a modern, feminist interpretation of William Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew.

Follow your dream, not. By Garry Trudeau

"Let us take what the terrain gives" is kinder...

Is it principled to be principled?

"Nobody ever did anything very foolish except from some strong principle". I chanced upon this quote a couple of months ago, and it has stayed in my mind ever since. It is an old quote, by the 2nd Viscount Melbourne, the young Queen Victoria's political mentor, but it has stayed in mind because it feels contemporary, and is less cynical than it sounds.

Good principles - like, for instance, that all human beings are created equal - tend to be very abstract. It is never obvious how these abstract principles translate into programs of specific action, into doing. However, it is always tempting to invoke these principles to build support for a program of action.

The problem with linking an action plan closely with its animating principle is that it makes it harder to abandon the action plan, which is a pity, because only certainty with any action plan is that it will be made to look silly by "black swans", by real-world conditions that the plan did not, and could not have, known about. The bigger the agenda, the more quickly the black swans will strike.

A program of action which is tightly linked to a cherished principle usually means a program of action that isn't adaptive enough. von Moltke the elder was pointing in the same direction when he said "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy" 

"Let us take what the terrain gives"

"Follow your dream" is advice I have frequently received. This is also advice I have given multiple times. However, in most circumstances, this advice is worse than useless. I need to make choices about my career as a business executive in the here and now. Reminding myself of my childhood dream, to open the batting for the Indian cricket team, doesn't in any way help me make better life choices.

I discussed this in an earlier blog post, titled "Follow your dream, not". More recently, I came across the words "let us take what the terrain gives", which make the same point more elegantly, more positively.

These words were spoken by Daniel Kahneman back in 1996, at a graveside eulogy for his lifelong research partner Amos Tversky. Apparently, "let us take what the terrain gives" was the maxim Amos Tversky lived by. Kahneman went on to win the Nobel prize in 2002, his partner Tversky tragically missed out because he died so young. "Let us take what the terrain gives" is clearly not a case for embracing mediocrity, but it does recognize that "the other side of freedom is the ability to find joy in what one does".

BTW...I loved these pictures of Tversky on holiday in Switzerland in 1972...

Socrates. On beauty and victory

“Beauty comes first. Victory is secondary. What matters is joy.”

 These are the last words in Football Philosophy, a book by the Brazilian legend Socrates. I was doubly bereft as I read these words. First, because I read them in this obituary for Socrates, who died prematurely aged just 57. Second, because the great Brazilian disagrees with me.

Socrates seems to be saying that to abandon beauty for the sake of mere victory would be sacrilege. Yet, I posted earlier this year about the joy of "winning ugly". Where did I go wrong? At the time, I was writing about India winning at cricket during the World Cup. Was I sliding ingloriously into patriotism, that last refuge of scoundrels?

I could try to rebut the argument. I could wade into how players are characters in a larger drama, whose role is to do what it takes to win, not to step out of character seeking elusive beauty. But it somehow feels wrong, un-beautiful, to debate with someone who scored a goal like this in a World Cup:

 

 Adieu Socrates. Long may your tribe of thoughtful sportsmen thrive.

Kolaveri Di and the Eurovision Song Contest

Kolaveri Di has lived out fourteen out of its fifteen minutes of fame. So, one final thought to occupy that last minute: Kolaveri Di has what it takes to win the Eurovision song contest.

This thought comes straight from Only Mr. God Knows Why, an article by Anthony Lane (which, refreshingly, is still visible to the public on the New Yorker website). Anthony Lane's thesis is that a Eurovision contestant's main problem is reach out across a continent which doesn't know your language or culture. Consider these extracts:

“Europe has a problem...if you don’t speak English, you’re immediately at a disadvantage. The Greek guys? Good song, but it’s in Greek. Will they play that on the radio in France?"

...of the songs that have reached the finals over the years, two hundred and sixty-three have been in English, the lingua franca of pop. French, with a hundred and fifty, is the only other language in triple figures; the rest lag far behind...

On the one hand, the contest is an obvious chance for European nations, especially the less prominent ones, to flaunt their wares by singing in their native tongue. On the other hand, when you sing in English, you may be blasting through the language barrier to reach a wider audience, but are you not abasing yourself before the Anglo-American cultural hegemony...

 ...there are three well-established methods for avoiding it.

One is to be France, whose performers, as you would hope, grind away in French, year after year, repelling all intruders, giving only the barest hint that other languages, let alone other civilizations, even exist...

The second method is to be Ireland, the nation that has won the contest more often than any other. Seven times it has struck gold, and no wonder; if you can sing in English without actually being English—all the technical advantages without the shameful imperialist baggage—you’re halfway to the podium already.

The third method, which is by far the most popular, and which has brought mirthful pleasure to millions on an annual basis, is to sing in Eurovision English: an exquisite tongue, spoken nowhere else, which raises the poetry of heartfelt but absolute nonsense to a level of which Lewis Carroll could only have dreamed. The Swedes are predictably fluent in this (“Your breasts are like swallows a-nesting,” they sang in 1973), and the Finns, too, should be hailed as early masters, with their faintly troubling back-to-back efforts from the mid-seventies, “Old Man Fiddle” and “Pump-pump,”

 ...hence such gems as Austria’s “Boom Boom Boomerang,” from 1977 (not to be confused with Denmark’s “Boom Boom,” of the following year), Portugal’s “Bem-bom,” from 1982, and Sweden’s “Diggi-loo Diggi-ley,” which won in 1984. The next year’s contenders, spurred by such bravado, responded with “Magic, Oh Magic” (Italy) and “Piano Piano” (Switzerland). Not that the host nation relinquished the crown without a fight, as anyone who watched Kikki Danielsson can attest. Her song was called “Bra Vibrationer.” It was, regrettably, in Swedish.

Kolaveri Di fits this third formula perfectly. One doesn't need to really know either Tamil or English to get into the spirit of Kolaveri Di. "Distance-u la moon-u moon-u, moon-u colour-u white-u", is right up there with anything the Swedes, Finns or Portuguese can create. Please note: it is entirely conceivable that India will participate in the Eurovision song contest one day, last year's winner was Azerbaijan.

On an aside, maybe the Punjabization of India I posted about last week is because Punjabi is the most onamatopoeic of Indian languages. I don't know Punjabi, yet, I have no problem understanding "Chak de India" or "Tootak tootak tootiyan hey jamaalon". The language used by Premchand, Tagore, Bharatiyar, or for that matter, Shakespeare, is necessarily for narrower audiences.

Kolaveri Di and the Punjabization of India

Once upon a time, grown women in Madras wore sarees. No longer. Now, the default outfit is a salwar kameez, especially among younger women. The saree is gradually becoming formal wear, for special occasions. One of my aunts thinks this is because of the coarsening of Tamil culture – the saree is too revealing for today’s nasty world, women feel safer in the more fully covered-up salwar kameez – and there surely is some truth in her viewpoint. But the more popular interpretation is that this is a part of a wider cultural phenomenon: the Punjabization of India.

Vir Sanghvi wrote this nice piece about the Punjabization process. The passage which stuck in my mind was:

I went to shoot at a small hotel in the Wayanad region of Kerala. I had been looking forward to some good Kerala food. Instead, the buffet was full of black dal, butter chicken, paneer and seekh kebabs. I remonstrated with the manager. He was helpless, he said. This was what his largely south Indian guests wanted to eat when they were on vacation.

To put this nationwide Punjabi influence into perspective, the distance between Kerala and Punjab is about 1500 miles, which is the distance between London and Moscow. Arguably, the cultural differences within that span are even greater in India than in Europe.

The Punjabi influence isn’t limited to South India. For instance, this Bengali blogger was upset at the wedding sequence in the movie Parineeta. The movie is based on a classic Bengali novel by Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay. However, in the Bollywood version, the bhadralok wedding acquires a Punjabi flavour, with garish costumes, dolaks and song and dance sequences. Parineeta’s leading man was Saif Ali Khan, a son of Bengal’s revered Tagore family, which can’t have helped ease this blogger’s angst.

However, there is a flip side to being offered butter chicken in Kerala: it is not so hard to find a good masala dosa in Chandigarh or Lucknow. Bombay-style bhel puri is consumed with gusto in Calcutta, plenty of rasagollas are enjoyed in Bombay. Indian identity is sometimes compared to a salad bowl. As the salad bowl gets shaken, cultural elements get juxtaposed in unexpected, surprising, random ways. It isn't one-way traffic. What goes around comes around.

This is precisely why "why this kolaveri di" is so refreshing. It is in Tamil, or at least, it is Tamil-flavoured. The video features a bunch of losers in lungis who can't dance. It isn't Punjabi. It doesn't sound Bollywood. Yet, Kolaveri di is going viral right across the country. India just bit into a chilled-out southie ingredient in that cultural salad bowl, and enjoyed it. So did Japan.

Kolaveri Di's refrain translates roughly to "why this murderous rage?", the tone implies that the rage is so not worth it. So the next time a fellow south Indian gets worked up about the cultural imperialism of the north Indians, I can respond in song with "Why this kolaveri kolaveri kolaveri... why this kolaveri di?"

Raj Rajaratnam: Nayagan?

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

Mehta emphasizes Rajaratnam's community spirit and generosity:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Haimish, Gezellig and the Great Pumpkin

English is the world's most successful language because it is so rich, it has many more words than any comparable language. Yet, frustratingly, English still doesn't have words for so many useful, everyday concepts. Consider, for instance, haimish: a Yiddish word that suggests warmth, domesticity and unpretentious conviviality.

I was looking up the meaning because it is in this (excellent) New Yorker article about IKEA: "IKEA believes that it can make your sleep better and enhance your family life...IKEA's vision of life in its environs is a safe and haimish one. In its rooms, people don't run late, the don't bicker; the have children, but they don't have sex."

The most interesting definition of haimish I found was by David Brooks, the NY Times conservative columnist, talking about why simple, wholesome, communal safari camps are more rewarding than elegant, luxurious camps that lack the haimish spirit. Understood this way, haimish feels a lot like another word I've blogged about before: gezellig, space and people coming together in harmony, that special spirit of cosy fellowship that animates Dutch life.

This sentiment is not unfamiliar to Anglophone cultures. For instance, I've long loved Charles Schulz's Peanuts comics for their haimish or gezellig character. Linus van Pelt lives in the hope that the Great Pumpkin will grace his pumpkin patch on Halloween night for being the most "sincere". I suspect the notion Linus and the Great Pumpkin are searching for is closer to haimish or gezellig than just sincere. Haimish and gezellig include sincere, and a whole lot else besides, except that it would be so ongezellig to use a foreign word like gezellig in Linus' pumpkin patch.

Is it just a matter of time before English co-opts haimish? The casual way in which the New Yorker used the word suggests that that is already happening. My wife and I couldn't find plausible Hindi or Tamil equivalents for haimish or gezellig either. Any suggestions?

How to Play a Limca Cut

Perceptive readers have noticed that this blog's name has changed from Moon Balls from Planet Earth to Limca Cuts from Planet Earth, and have asked me what Limca Cuts are. Like a Moon Ball, which is a spinner's slower ball, a Limca Cut is an obscure cricket term. Unlike a Moon Ball, a Limca Cut comes from the street cricket played in Mylapore, Madras, back in the 1980s.

Here is a step by step guide to playing a Limca Cut:

1. Stride. Get fully forward, right to the pitch of a ball on an off-stump line, and fuller than a good length

2. Stroke. Bring your bat down towards the ball in a smooth, vigourous vertical arc, with your left elbow held high, and with the face of the bat towards extra cover

3. Bamboozle. Mystify your opponents by striking the ball with the inside edge of the bat

4. Bisect. Direct the ball past the leg stump, along the Limca angle, bisecting the wicket-keeper and the fielder at fine leg

5. Acknowledge. Raise your bat and pump fists in the air, as the ball races past the diving fielder at fine leg to cross the boundary line and bring up the winning runs. Celebrate with Lime and Lemoni Limca as the crowd goes wild.

The banter after this shot typically goes:

Bowler: What kind of a shot is that?
Batsman: A stylish cut shot.
Bowler: A cut goes that way, man.
Batsman: No no. This is a special cut, a Limca Cut.

This shot is also referred to as a french cut in some other parts of the world, but hey, we are like that wonley. Mind it!

Why do Dervishes Whirl?

Jalaluddin Rumi was wandering the streets of Konya, overcome with grief at the death of a dear friend, when he was captured by the rhythmic beat of a goldsmith's hammer. He started whirling, found consolation, and inspired a tradition that has continued for seven hundred years.

Sufi whirling has always been laced with lamentation. Though, arguably, the whirling in the cartoon above, whirling to lament a moment which is about to die, is even more poignant than traditional Sufi whirling. I found this cartoon at xkcd.com.

Incidentally, I did get to see a dervish sema ceremony on my last trip to Istanbul, at the Hodja Pasha Cultural Centre. Real dervishes do whirl counter-clockwise.

Hindi: Turkish :: Turkey : English?

I had been in Istanbul for a couple of days, gamely drinking Turkish coffee to keep my clients company. Now, my soul craved the familiar comfort of a Tall Skinny Hazelnut Latte. I spotted a Starbucks - on Istiklal Caddessi, in the Beyoglu district - and homed in.

The Starbucks had a mix of wooden chairs and cushy sofas, posters promising schools in coffee growing areas, a display of coffee beans in various stages of roasting, chocolate muffins, cinnamon swirls, an easy listening jazz sound, the Beyoglu Starbucks had it all. If a brand manager had dropped in as a mystery shopper, she would have glowed with pride. This Starbucks could have been in London, Los Angeles, Stockholm, Vienna, Athens, or at the Sainsbury’s next to my office. With one exception: they had something on the counter labelled “hindi sandwiches”.

I asked my Turkish colleague what hindi sandwiches were. He explained that the Turkish word for turkey is hindi, so hindi sandwiches are turkey sandwiches. I may have looked a little quizzical, so he continued, “Turkeys are oriental birds. They come from the East. So in English they are called Turkey, because Turkey is to the east of England, and in Turkish they are called Hindi, because India is to the east of Turkey, and Hindi means Indian in Turkish”. I checked with a couple of other Turkish friends, and they confirmed that this turkeys/ hindis-come-from-the-east theory has widespread currency among young Turks. It makes some sense.

I couldn’t buy this theory, because I just happen to know that turkeys don’t come from India. They are not called “chini” in India, either, in the belief that they come from China. There is no native Indian word for turkey. Even after decades of globalization, turkey is still almost unknown in India.

A more plausible explanation is that hindi came to mean turkey in Turkish for the same reason that native Americans were called Red Indians.

Turkeys are American birds. They were first domesticated by the Aztecs. The conquistadors introduced them to Spain, from where they came to Europe through Turkish merchants in Ottoman North Africa. The Turkish merchants called the birds hindi because they thought Columbus had discovered a route to India. Europeans called the bird turkey, because of the Turkish merchants who sold them.

Incidentally, the Portuguese word for turkey is "peru", which may be more accurate than either hindi or turkey.

On Being a Grown Up

"Life gradually became less a search for meaning than a process of optimization: how to put this sentence the best way in the fewest words, how to choose the right things to buy at the supermarket and pay for them in the fastest-moving line, what to do and ingest in order to keep from getting sick or depressed..."

The essential difference between brahmacharya and grihastashram. Taken, a little out of context and beyond all consequences, from In The World, by Elif Batuman, in a recent New Yorker.

Conserving Brutalism? The curious case of the Preston Bus Station

The English love their heritage. I am continuously amazed and heartened at how much care is lavished on everything from prehistoric dolmens, to Roman ruins, to Victorian facades, to Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. This love isn't limited to a vanishingly small elite. The National Trust, one of many NGOs that look after England's heritage, has a paid up membership of four million people, not including sympathizers like me (my membership has lapsed).

However, I am discovering that my sympathy for heritage has its limits. I am unable to grasp how a large, concrete bus station in a small town in Lancashire is heritage worth preserving. Yet, there is a movement to do just that.

Preston Bus Station has been declared a "monument at risk" by the World Monuments Trust. Dr Jonathan Foyle, chief executive of the trust, described Preston bus station as "fabulously, boldly expressive of the year it was built". Apparently, this bus station is a prime example of the Brutalist style of architecture, which was in vogue in 1969. The term Brutalist comes from beton brut, French for raw concrete, which was the avant garde architect's material of choice in 1969. I suspect the term has stuck because "Brutalist" captures the spirit of these structures precisely.

This argument is happening about a functioning bus station, not a piece of abstract art. The local council, which wants to demolish this structure, says on BBC's Radio Four that this Brutalist structure doesn't work properly as a bus station: it is way out on the edge of the town and too far away from other transportation hubs like the railway station.

With pragmatism and aesthetics on the same side of the argument, usually there would be only one winner. However, in England, I suspect the Brutalist bus station on the edge of Preston has a bright future. Google found me many web-petitions defending the Brutalist bus station, and none supporting the council's demolition plan.