Shadow wars, or the tragedy of Monty vs Monty

Monty Panesar celebrates with his England team mates

Whatever happened to Monty?

For years he was international cricket’s quietest, sweetest, most diffident player. He has lived through highs and lows: bowling England to glorious victories, being dropped by his county. The fans loved him, and mocked him. Through all those years, he had nothing but polite, respectful words for everybody, including the opposition. He responded to everything life threw his way with hard work, piety, discipline and “putting the ball in the right areas”.

And now? He is getting thrown out of nightclubs for misbehaving, and getting arrested for pissing on bouncers. Where did this other Monty come from?

My take is that the other Monty was always there, the other Monty is Monty's Shadow. 

The Shadow is a Jungian archetype. Having a Shadow is the inevitable consequence of having a Self. When the Self stands up in the light it naturally and inevitably casts a shadow, a distorted image of itself, that contains the less acknowledged, less developed, more vulnerable aspects of the personality.

Everybody has a Shadow. The real question is not whether Monty had a Shadow, but what Monty did with his Shadow. Like a lot of people-like-us, Monty suppressed his Shadow. He hid it away. He let his Shadow eat his disappointment, his shame, his humiliation, his anger, and came out to play with his game face on, radiating earnestness, belief, team-ship and optimism.

It worked, up to a point. Monty did play test cricket for England. But he remained a curiously mechanical, one-dimensional player. As Shane Warne acutely observed, “Monty hasn’t played thirty-three tests, he has played one test thirty-three times”. Monty was never creative. He was too distant from his Shadow.

Psychologists Barry Michels and Phil Stutz run a cult-practice in Hollywood, helping directors, screen-writers, agents and actors harness their Shadows. They see the Shadow as the key to creativity, in art, and in everything else. I heard about them from this New Yorker article:

As the liaison to the unconscious, Michels says, the Shadow is the source of all creativity and agility in life, business, and art, which he calls “flow.”

Barry Michels' Shadow

...Michels asks his patients to relate to the Shadow as something real, which can be coaxed from the cobwebbed lair of the unconscious into the physical world. The process, as he describes it, is spooky, a kind of daylight séance in which he plays the role of guide. 

In “The Tools,” Michels tells the story of “Jennifer,” a model who lobbies to get her child into a fifteen-thousand-dollar-a-year kindergarten but is too ashamed of her self-described “trailer trash” origins to talk to the other mothers, whom she views as “a superior race of Range-Rover-driving goddesses.” The secret to her crippling sense of inferiority lies with her Shadow, which she must accept and integrate into her public self. “I asked her to close her eyes,” Michels writes. He goes on:

“Go back to the parents’ meeting where you froze up; re-create all those shaky feelings you had.” She nodded. “Now, push the feelings out in front of you and give them a face and body. This figure is the embodiment of everything you feel insecure about.” I paused. “When you’re ready, tell me what you see.”

There was a long silence. Jennifer flinched suddenly, then blinked her eyes open. “Ugh,” she said grimacing. “I saw this 13 or 14 years old girl, overweight, unwashed. Her face was pasty and covered with zits . . . a complete loser.”

Jennifer had just seen her shadow.

In a similar sort of way, I think we’ve just seen Monty’s Shadow. Monty’s Shadow wants to make it with chicks at the nightclub. The Shadow wants to give it back to bullying bouncers. Monty doesn’t know how to, but his Shadow really wants to.

Stutz and Michels’ therapy is about discovering the Shadow, acknowledging it, giving it the respect you long for, and integrating the Shadow with the Self. From that viewpoint, it may not have been a bad thing for Monty’s Shadow to start finding expression. It might have helped him find his mojo, find creativity, re-kindle his career. After all, Monty isn’t much older now than Greame Swann was when he made his test debut (also a second coming).

Tragically, Monty’s Shadow seems to have taken control uninvited, at a moment when Monty’s Self was vulnerable, after having been dropped for the fourth test of the Ashes.

A night out with the lads would have been unremarkable for Swanny, Bressy, Broady or KP. It probably means the end of the road for Monty. I don’t think the cricket media have grasped this thought yet, they’re still taking the piss. But I’m finding it hard to imagine the England establishment forgiving Monty his trespasses. I wish he had had a more dignified farewell. I don’t think he will play another international.

But before Monty goes away, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on Monty’s golden moments: his first test wicket, Sachin Tendulkar in Nagpur 2005, the beauty he bowled Younis Khan with at Old Trafford in 2009, his match winning performance in Bombay in 2012. And this amazing one-handed diving catch, which I haven’t seen before, which is the most watched You tube video featuring Monty.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Starring Johar Tsarnaev

Johar Tsarnaev on the Rolling Stone cover

I spent last weekend wallowing in this Rolling Stone cover story about Johar Tsarnaev, about what a kind, charming, thoughtful, smart, sensitive, popular, wholesome kid Johar was, about how the creeping shadows of political and familial dysfunction haunt his tender mind, and turn him into an Islamist murderer. It’s a great story. It should be made into a movie.

Actually, big part of Johar’s story has already been made into a movie: The Reluctant Fundamentalist, directed by Mira Nair, based on the book by Mohsin Hamid. Reading Johar’s story helped me realise why I disliked The Reluctant Fundamentalist so much.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s protagonist, Changez Khan, is a lot like Johar. Changez too is a kind, charming, thoughtful, smart, sensitive, popular and wholesome kid. Like Johar, Changez arrives in America, assimilates successfully, falls out of love with post 9/11 America, and drifts towards terrorism. The story is well told, that drift towards terrorism feels natural, inevitable, the consequence of integrity.

However, that is where it stops. Changez’s story stops tantalisingly short of where the radicalised Islamist man-child commits murder in the name of God. Mohsin Hamid invites us to sympathise with Changez’s drift towards fundamentalism, he doesn’t show us the consequences of that drift.

Rolling Stone invites us to sympathise with Johar’s drift towards fundamentalism, to understand how his sensitivity and intelligence contributed to his alienation. But in Johar’s case, we already know the consequences. Before reading about Johar, we already know what he did for the sake of his half-baked political ideas. We know Johar murdered eight year old Martin Richards, who was cheering finishers at the Boston Marathon.

The mainstream media, the popular imagination, finds it hard to deal with the fact that a sweet kid can do evil, and therefore be evil. Evil-doers are objectified: we don’t do evil, they do. The narrative is about how a nice kid who was one of us inexplicably transformed into one of them, a monster. A lot of America interpreted the Rolling Stone cover as glamourising a monster, making a rock star of a terrorist, making evil cool. That isn’t how I read it.

To me, the Rolling Stone cover story makes obvious that evil-doers are not monsters, they’re perfectly ordinary people. Often, they're very nice people. They look like Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man, or these happy laughing Nazi officers playing with an accordion at Auschwitz, or like Johar Tsarnaev, hamming it up with his buddies before his high school prom. This doesn’t make them any less evil. But it does make them a lot more scary.

Johar (red tie) before his high school prom

Riz Ahmed as Changez Khan

Aamir Khan as the Ice Candy Man

Nazi officers at Auschwitz

Nazi officers at Auschwitz

Jack Reacher, the twenty first century cowboy

Jack Reacher, the movie, starts with a gripping premise:

Normal people are living their everyday lives on a crisp sunny morning in an American city, when a shot rings out. A nicely dressed lady crumples to the ground, dead. Another shot rings out, another random person is dead. People start running in all directions, trying to escape from the shooter they can't see. The firing continues. Three more shots ring out. Three more people die.

The city is shocked. The authorities must solve this case, do something, show that they are in charge. The police try. But the ordinary police are clearly not up the the task. This special case requires a special kind of policeman...enter Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher...ta tan ta taaan.

Ultimately Jack Reacher does solve the case. On the way he saves damsels in distress, bashes up baddies, nails cruel Russian gangsters, and exposes corruption in high places. It's good in-flight entertainment, though I won't remember it a year from now.

What I found interesting though, was how despite the cheesy plot and predictable characters, Jack Reacher was so unlike a Bollywood movie. A Bollywood hero will typically step into the story, bash up a couple of baddies, and quickly tell the audience his back story: all about his kith and kin, about his struggles in his younger days, about how he became who is his.

Jack Reacher, however, has no back story. He walks into the movie, does his thing, and rides away into the sunset. We know nothing about his loving mother, his noble father, or the evil uncle who stole his khandaani haveli (family property). We don't see him bullied in high-school or picked on by a sadistic teacher, being rejected by his childhood sweetheart, or losing his best buddy in battle. We don't know what shaped him. He doesn't have a context, his people. He stands alone.

Does that make Jack Reacher quintessentially American? Tempting thought, but I don't think so. Superman and Batman are classical Bollywood characters, with their rich back stories about planet Krypton, and the misfortunes of the Wayne dynasty.

Maybe Jack Reacher is what the Western has become. The city is now the wild west, and clean-cut Tom Cruise is the new-look cowboy.

We drive on the left, so why do we walk on the right?

In England, we drive on the left. So it would be natural to walk on the left, right? Wrong! 

This sign, instructing pedestrians to walk on the right, was photographed in the Green Park tube station, in Central London.

In the Green Park tube station

Why? Because of the high concentration of American tourists in Central London? Maybe...but it might just be random. 

I'm conditioned to think that things are the way they are for a reason. It is much harder to accept that most things are the way they are for no especially good reason. It just is what it is. Get with the programme, baby, go with the flow.

Pedestrian tunnel, Green Park tube station

The Boston Marathon bombings - terrorism, Islamophobia, or something even scarier?

Bomb at the Boston Marathon

A couple of twisted young men kill innocent people at the Boston marathon, and it’s called terrorism. Other twisted young men kill innocent people - at a Batman movie premier in Aurora, Colorado, or at a political rally in Tuscon, Arizona, or at a primary school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut - and there is no mention of terrorism.

What’s the difference? The Boston murderers were Muslims of Chechen origin, the other murderers were “regular” Americans. It’s easy to believe the different coverage is down to xenophobia or Islamo-phobia, and I don’t doubt there is plenty of that going on.

But there may be something deeper going on as well, which is about the way the brain processes information, something that is much harder to correct than xenophobia.

Apparently, new information coming to the brain is not absorbed directly. The brain makes sense of new information by referencing it to old or familiar information. Familiar information becomes a benchmark or a norm. New information is compared and contrasted to this familiar norm. Distinctive features of the new information are made sense of, are explained, by the attributes in which they most obviously differ from the norm. 

For instance, in the corporate world I inhabit, the "norm" is that powerful people are white men. So when a woman exhibits a particular behaviour, say domineering or bullying behaviour, the mind finds an explanation for that behaviour, in her gender. The mind thinks "She's being domineering because she is a woman. Maybe she is over-compensating, trying to get ahead in a man's world." Equally, when a woman is self effacing, the mind thinks "She's being self-effacing because she is a woman, she is the product of generations of gender stereo-typing." The same behaviour observed in a white male might be explained by his biography or personality, but not by his gender.

Critically, this habit of the mind is involuntary. Research shows that it affects passionate liberals as much as bigots, even when the passionate liberals are fully aware of this unreasonable pattern of thought. 

The same mental mechanism looks for an explanation for what happened, a cause, in the bombers' Chechen background - "they did what they did because of what happened in Chechnya". That is less stupid than jumping to the conclusion that the bombings were a part of an Islamist terrorist plot. That doesn't make it true. 

The reality is that it is almost impossible to know why what happened happened.  The mind doesn't accept this vacuum, it fills it up with a plausible story. "Islamist plot", "right wing bigotry", "misunderstood immigrants", whatever - any story will do. The stories don't have to be true. They just need to protect us from accepting that God plays dice with the universe.

God's dice

Why Bollywood does beautiful forevers

Bollywood India

For the same reason that Sweden does crime fiction.

Camilla Lackberg

Sweden's best selling crime writer, Camilla Lackberg, explained to The Independent why a country as sedate as Sweden has spawned such a crop of world-beating crime writers. Her thesis is it's because Sweden is so safe. "Crime stories are our version of sitting round a camp fire and telling tales. We enjoy being scared under safe circumstances. That's why there's no tradition of crime writing in countries that have wars."

Basically, fiction provides the ingredient missing in real life.

Which is precisely why Bollywood is syrupy sweet. India still is poor. Life in India still is tough. Fiction needs to provide the sweetness that is so elusive in real life.

Another India

Learning monetary policy from Monopoly

Ben Bernanke, Mervyn King and D Subbarao ought to play more Monopoly. That would teach them a thing or two about the perils of an expansionary monetary policy.

I learnt about the dangers of monetary expansion last weekend, when my daughter challenged me to a game. I nearly lost inside half an hour. I landed on three houses at Oxford Street and had to mortgage King’s Cross and Liverpool station to survive; the end seemed nigh. But then I picked up £200 as I passed Go, then another £150 from Community Chest, and an hour later both my daughter and I were in rude financial health.

In effect, I’d been bailed out by an expansionary monetary policy.

Monopoly has fixed nominal prices (i.e. a hotel room on Pall Mall always costs £625). However the real price of that hotel room is constantly declining. The Bank pumps £200 per player into the economy every round, so money supply is constantly increasing, so “sticky” prices keep getting smaller compared to the money in the game, so, on average, everybody feels richer.

Hotels on Pall Mall and Vine Street are life-threatening early on. As the game develops, the board fills up with houses and hotels, and landing at a hotel on Pall Mall is a mere flea-bite. By now the action has shifted to Mayfair and Park Lane. If the dice roll such that all players survive long enough, even a hotel on Mayfair stops being life-threatening.

From that point on, the players are no longer playing Monopoly, they are playing Comfortable Oligopoly. In this game, the veneer of competition is maintained, but the Bank ensures that nobody actually goes bust, despite the fact that nobody is taking any real risks or making valuable things. There is no natural way of ending this meaningless game. My daughter and I stopped our game only when higher authorities stepped in and decreed that it was lunchtime.

So, policy makers, play a few endless games of Monopoly. Learn that in the short term, monetary expansion can save a few dads from going bust. Learn also that monetary expansion that goes on and on and on robs the world of meaning, until the real economy finally breaks through and produces lunch.

PS: I wonder if the great monetarists Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas suffered through a few endless games of Monopoly?

Umwelt

Umwelt: this word deserves to be in more common use. It means "the world as it is experienced by a particular organism".

It comes from zoology, specifically ethology, I found it in this book on dog behaviour. Umwelt has the sense that a dog's, or any organism's, experience of the world is bounded by its range of perception. This range of perception forms a bubble the animal lives within. This perceptual bubble in turn limits (and distorts) the range of emotion and action the organism is capable of.

Human experience is equally circumscribed by perceptual bubbles (except that the more interesting perceptual bubbles are cognitive, or maybe maybe linguistic, rather than sensory). We need a word for those bubbles. Let umwelt be that word.

Let umwelt takes its rightful place in the English lexicon, alongside gestalt, zeitgeist, schadenfreude and cousin weltanschauung.

The wind beneath my wings does NOT make me fly high

Bette Midler singing "Wind beneath my wings"

Actually, it's the wind above my wings that makes me fly.

Air flows faster over the upper surface of the wing, which lowers pressure, and therefore provides lift and enables flight. The mechanics are the same for a airplane wing, a frisbee, a sail, a swinging cricket ball or an eagle's wing. Similarly, the spoiler blades at the back of F1 racing cars are designed so the wind passes beneath the wings. This pulls the car down towards the tarmac, and provides stability.

This science is complex enough to provide many engineers with a lifetime of work, but is neither new nor controversial. It follows from Bernoulli's principle, which I was taught in 8th class by Kanaka Eshwaran-Miss (aka Kinetic Energy-miss).

So why does Bette Midler keep showing up on Muzak tracks around the world singing:

"I can fly higher than an eagle,
'cause you are the wind beneath my wings"?

Wrong! The wind above her wings makes her fly high. The wind beneath her wings brings her down to earth. Ignoramus. Fancy dress Fatima! Bougainvillea! Pithecanthropus! Odd-toed ungulate!! Nit-witted ninepin! Squawking popinjay!

F1 car, that uses wind beneath the wings to stay low

Airplane, that uses wind above the wings to fly high

PS: I'm kidding. It's fun to win an argument conclusively in an age of "it depends".

My beloved homeland: the 1990s

I’m homesick.
I want to go home,
to a place where I feel safe,
to a place where I know stuff,
like I know that democracy is good,
that capitalism will save us from poverty,
that the Rio summit will save the planet,
and that Sanjay Manjrekar’s immaculate technique will elevate him to Gavaskar-esque greatness.

I want to know that MTV VJ Sophiya Haque is cool, achingly so,
and that institutions reinvent themselves,
sort of, like, Tony Blair reinvented the Labour Party.

I want to know that if I follow my passion,
try really really hard,
give all I’ve got to give,
give with my body, mind and soul,
that I will find not just success, but fulfilment.

Papa I want to go,
Mama I want to go,
Show me the way to go home.

How do you solve a problem like Maria Sharapova?

Maria Sharapova and Grigor Dimitrov, in Milan

News from the Aussie Open is that Maria Sharapova has a new boyfriend, fellow tennis pro Gregor Dimitrov. Is this guy Maria's Mr Right?

The great Tamil lyricist Kannadasan might be on the pro-Dimitrov side of the argument. One of the greatest love songs he ever wrote, naan pesa nenaipadellam nee pesa vendum, goes: "naan kaanum ulagangal nee kaana vendum", meaning, "you should see the world's I see". This is a deep insight. Understanding each other's worlds is a critical (and under-celebrated) aspect of love. As an East European tennis pro, Grigor Dimitrov has a better chance of really getting Maria's world, than, say, a Tam Bram management consultant.

On the con side of the argument is yin-yang balance, a theme I've riffed on before. Maria is one tough cookie, she has plenty of yang in her soul. She needs a guy with dollops of yin-energy for them to be in harmony. Ex-boyfriend Andy Roddick clearly didn't fit the bill. Apparently, ex-fiancee Sasha Vujacic did't either.

Maria Sharapova and Roger Federer, in Sao Paulo

The problem is, professional sportsmen with yin-energy are rare. But they do exist. Roger Federer is a great example.

So will Grigor Dimitrov be Maria's Mr. Right? It depends, on whether Grigor can be more like Roger Federer than like Andy Roddick, and I'm not talking about winning grand slam titles.

Samudra Manthan: a stitch-up or a path to salvation?

Samudra Manthan

My children were listening to a story. I was sitting with them, squirming with discomfort.

The story was Samudra Manthan: about the churning of the ocean by the devas and asuras that produced Halahala, the terrible poison, and Amrita, the nectar of immortality. We’d chosen this story because it is one of the nicer, less gory Indian puranas, but I still was uncomfortable, because it story reads like a divine con-job.

The devas invite the asuras to work with them to churn the ocean, implying that they would share the Amrita. Yet, when the Amrita does emerge, Lord Narayana shows up disguised as the beautiful Mohini, gives all the Amrit to the devas and none to the asuras. This was justified because the devas were devotees of Lord Narayana, while the asuras were not. Bascially, its okay because “they” are not God’s people.

To my ears, this moral logic sounded a bit like the logic that European colonials used to justify the genocide of Native Americans, or that Nazis used used against the Jews. I needed to step in and re-frame this story. I needed to find a reasonable interpretation.

It turns out that my grandmother, Kamala Subramaniam, had been similarly troubled by the Samudra  Manthan story, and had thought through its implications. I found a considered, and positive, interpretation in her translation of the Srimad Bhagavatam. Here’s her take:

"The incident of the churning of the ocean must be pondered over. The devas and asuras were both working towards the same end: finding of Amrita. Both worked strenuously and equally sincerely towards this end. They both pulled the mountain Mandara with the snake Vasuki as the rope, and both efforts were equal: as a matter of fact, the asuras put in more work since they had more powerful arms.

As a result, however, the devas enjoyed the benefit while the efforts of the asuras were all wasted. This was because the devas had surrendered themselves to the Lord. They had taken the dust off the feet of the Lord, and their labour were duly rewarded.

Men of the world, when they strain their minds, their riches, their actions and other similar things towards benefiting themselves, their children, their homes and their personal happiness, their actions become all futile. If however, man does the same things dedicating the actions to the Lord, man’s actions will never be fruitless."

I like the Samudra Manthan story partly because churning the ocean is such an easy metaphor for the life-work of a karma yogi, of people like you and me who work to earn a living and raise a family. The point of this metaphor is not that God will appear at the denouement, and distribute goodies to “us” but not to “them”. It is that dedicating one's life-work to the Lord, whatever you conceive Her to be, is its own reward.

Looked at this way, the difference between the devas and asuras is not intrinsic or inborn. The difference arises from the way they frame their lives, the lens through which they choose to see their work. The devas dedicate their work to the Lord, they experience bhakti, and bhakti is the difference between the Amrita the devas experienced, and the bitterness and cynicism the asuras must have experienced.

ॐ  नमो  भगवते  वासुदेवाय.

Be an interesting guy

Dom Barton of McKinsey & Company

I'm on my first day at a new job. I've just joined McKinsey and Company, one of the world's finest organizations.

My cohort of new joiners is meeting the Global Managing Partner, Dominic Barton. Very nice for our first day in. Dom welcomes us into the firm, tells us about the firm's heritage and values, and gives us some perspective on what it takes to succeed at the firm. Dom's advice: "Be an interesting guy".

Not client-centricity, thought-leadership, value-creation or some such corporate-speak, but "be interesting". Interesting.

That advice really resonated with me. To me, being interesting is a goal in itself, an essential part of a life well-lived. That is sort of why I started this blog, and keep at it; it keeps open a window to worlds other than family and work-life.

Easier said than done. My blog posting rate, and the complexity of my posts, have dropped off sharply since joining McKinsey. But still, it is nice to know that Dom Barton thinks being interesting is good for your career.

James Bond style woozling

Sitting around staring at brick walls is called "woozling" in my family. I just discovered that James Bond woozles too. From this interview with Daniel Craig:

"I keep an energy level up through filming and then as soon as it finishes I just relax and drop. We all do. You’ll find most of the crew kind of sitting around staring at brick walls because it’s been full on, all day, every day. "

A simple solution to America's fiscal cliff problem

Allow congressmen to vote in private.

This isn’t my idea. I’m channelling the noted political philosopher, Sir Humphrey Appleby. Sir Humpy explains to Jim Hacker in the very first episode of Yes Minister that Jim’s election winning slogan, “Open Government”, is in fact an oxymoron. You can be open, or you can have government, you can’t have both. I’m also channelling Fareed Zakaria’s excellent (and serious) book, The Future of Freedom.

Zakaria’s argument is that most American politicians are not stupid. Most of them don’t want to drive off the fiscal cliff. Most of them would happily cut a deal to avoid disaster, if they could. They can’t. Because they lack the privacy needed to cut deals.

For most of America’s history, Congress could do its work in private. Politicians could imply one thing while talking to constituents, go to Washington, exercise their better judgment on what is best for the country, and go back to their constituents with a shrug and an I-tried-my-best story. For most of America’s history, that worked well enough.

At some time in the 1960s some well-intentioned people thought pols should not be allowed to tell lies to the public, and decided to make their deliberations and voting records public. As a result, politicians live in a fish bowl, utterly at the mercy of special interest groups. They can’t exercise mature judgment, and therefore can’t fulfil the design of representative democracy.

This shouldn’t be hard to explain. Perfect transparency is unhelpful in most everyday contexts: in family life, in sports teams, with friends or at work. But, unfortunately, even my ardent inner optimist doesn't think politicians are going to be allowed to escape their fish bowl world any time soon.

Wish you were here, Sir Humpy. We miss you.

Sir Humphrey Appleby

Hommage: Yannick Noah chante Bob Marley

I've been tripping on Hommage this morning. Its an album of Bob Marley songs, covered by Yannick Noah, a delicious double-dose of nostalgia.

Here's the album's trailer video:

 

Yannick Noah: stolen from Africa

Also discovered that Yannick's son Joacim Noah plays pro basketball for the Chicago Bulls. Will he do cover versions of Ziggy Marley one day?

Yannick Noah in action

Joacim Noah in action

Re-imagining Snow White

Snow White and the Huntsman

Just watched Snow White and the Huntsman. Enjoyed the movie, in much the same way that I enjoy watching Brendan Nash bat. 

Brendan Nash in action

Nash doesn’t strike the ball especially sweetly. However, as a white guy playing for the West Indies, he asks some interesting questions of unspoken assumptions, and for that reason is one of my favourite contemporary cricketers.

Similarly, Snow White and the Huntsman suffers from wooden acting, and a plot line that occasionally stalls. However, it does challenge the assumption that fairy tales are meant for children, and therefore need to be told in a brightly-lit Disney-esque style. This telling is dark. The palette is wintry: all greys, blacks, browns and whites, broken only by the occasional splash of blood red. This menacing mood works. It feels more true to the dark heart of the Grimm Brothers’ story than Disney’s incongruously cheery style.

I would love to see an even more radical reinvention of Snow White. Say, one in which Snow White is offered the throne, and refuses, because she prefers to live in the woods with her beloved dwarves. Unfortunately, this telling isn’t that adventurous or brave. It’s about style, not revolution. But its still worth the watch just for its style.

Michaelmas: the original thanks-giving festival

St Michael

Yesterday, Saint Michael saved me from a terrible fate.

I could have wasted my Friday evening watching the Indian cricket team getting savaged by Australia. Instead, I attended a very pleasant Michaelmas service at my children's school. I was grateful for having been saved from hours of TV-misery, and was a little embarrassed that I had no idea what Michaelmas was. Such ignorance is inexcusable in this age of Google, and so, I Googled-up Michaelmas.

The interpretation I like best is that Michaelmas is an autumn festival. It is a thanks-giving to the earth for the bounty of summer, a moment of reflection as the earth and the spirit turn inwards for renewal through the winter. Rudolf Steiner - the inspiration behind the Waldorf school my children attend - thought Michaelmas and Easter were the year's most important festivals, yin and yang, each completing the other, together forming the circle of life. Looked at this way, Michaelmas is like Pongal, the harvest festival of South India; Michaelmas is Shiva to Easter's Brahma.

If Michaelmas is so important, why is it so little known? Competition, maybe? In Britain, the Anglican church replaced Catholic Michaelmas with the Harvest Festival. In America, two big-budget blockbusters, Thanksgiving and Halloween, sit in the same perceptual space. In Latin America, Santa Muerte is venerated in autumn, typically on November 1. The top Google search term associated with Michaelmas is secular: Oxford and Cambridge refer to Fall Semester as Michaelmas Term.

Why is the heroic warrior-angel Michael, who defeated proud Lucifer in battle and cast him out of heaven, associated with this introspective autumnal festival? It isn't obvious. The Archangel Michael might have been a Christian element layered onto a ancient and much-beloved pagan tradition, like Christmas. Regardless, St. Michael has done me a good deed this weekend. Today is his day. Happy Michaelmas!

St Michael vanquishing Satan

Meister Eckhart on Noble Work

"Our works do not ennoble us; we must ennoble our works"

- Meister Eckhart.

I came across these words at a corporate training program, and liked them enough to latch on. 

It is easy to think school teachers and nurses do "noble work", and that plumbers, fork-lift operators, and corporate appartchiks like me, don't. Meister Eckhart's perspective feels more helpful, and more true.

The difference between the United States of America and the States of a United Europe, explained on a taxi ride

NYC taxi

I was flying from New York to Frankfurt. I got a taxi in New York. My cabbie was a brown skinned guy with an accent.

"Where are you from?", I asked him.

"I'm from Queens" he replied.

"Really? From the Queens?"

"Yeah, man. I live in Queens." He didn't sound like a Queens native.

"How long have you lived there?" 

"Six months. But I'm from the Queens. I live in the Queens" he insisted. 

"And before the Queens?"

"Gautemala" he replied. "But all that was a long time ago, man. Now I'm from Queens."

I reached Frankfurt and got a taxi. Again, my cabbie was a brown skinned guy with an accent.

Frankfurt skyline

"Where are you from?", I asked him.

"I'm from Turkey", he replied.

"How long have you lived in Frankfurt", I asked.

"My grandfather came here in 1952. But I am from Turkey."

I heard this story years ago, at a business conference in Budapest, as an explanation for why the states of a united Europe will never morph into the United States of Europe. This was back in 2005, when the European project felt secure and looked like a stunning success.

It comes back to mind frequently because the future of Europe is so much in the news. For instance, the latest Economist has this story about Jose Manuel Barosso, the president of the European Commission, speaking of a the EU becoming a "federation of nation-states". I guess he didn't vet the idea with his cabbie.

Khalil Gibran on how Jeffery Johnson became a murderer

"Oftentimes have I heard you speak of one who commits a wrong as though he were not one of you, but a stranger unto you and an intruder upon your world. 

But I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each one of you,

So the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also." 

I came across these words thumbing through The Prophet, and was ported to this story about Jeffery Johnson, the Empire State Building gunman. In it, Johnson’s mother talks about how she can’t comprehend how her kind-hearted little boy, “who loved the Boy Scouts and animals, and grew up into a patriotic and thoughtful man”, snapped and turned into a calculating murderer. Khalil Gibran’s uncomfortable thought is that the murderer was always in there, lurking inside the kind and thoughtful man.

David Brooks, the NYT’s conservative cloumnist, agrees with Khalil Gibran. Writing about Robert Bales, the American soldier who murdered sixteen sleeping Afghans in their family home, he quotes CS Lewis, who believed “there is no such thing as an ordinary person, each person you sit next to on the bus is capable of extraordinary horrors and extraordinary heroism.”

Why Andrew Strauss shows MS Dhoni's captaincy in such good light

Andrew Strauss

Andrew Strauss retired yesterday. Strauss is a good egg, a decent chap. He has been a fine player and captain, has served cricket well. It is sad that he is retiring.

What made Strauss' retirement even sadder was the timing of his announcement. It came a day after England were crushed by South Africa, with the batting crumbling yet again. Kevin Pietersen hammered a century for Surrey that day, to highlight what might have been but for the rift between the English captain and his best player. Strauss and the England management didn't want to talk about KP. The media clearly did, understandably so, because the KP melodrama highlights both the best and worst thing about Strauss' captaincy.

Strauss' greatest achievement, and his greatest weakness, is that he built a team in his own image. Strauss is a diligent, hard-working, respectful, determined, virtuous, fair-minded guy who puts the team's interests above his own. Andy Flower shares his personality. Strauss and Flower have built a team that values and develops players with Strauss' temperament - like Cook, Trott, Prior and Bresnan - whose game is built around discipline and professionalism. I'm naturally sympathetic to this approach. It feels proper and just that the Protestant (or Tam Bram) ethic should pay off, will pay off.

Unfortunately, this is simply not true. All international cricket is now very professional. Paradoxically, that means discipline and professionalism are no longer differentiators. The difference between competent teams and great teams comes down to a handful of geniuses with outrageous god-given gifts. Some of these favourites of the gods - like Muralitharan and Tendulkar - are nice guys who generally share Strauss' ethos. But the gods are capricious. A disproportionate number of the players the gods have bestowed the greatest gifts on - Shane Warne, Chris Gayle, Shoaib Akthar, Yuvraj Singh, Freddy Flintoff, Kevin Pietersen - are egoistic prima donnas.

I can imagine that it is really hard to be on the same team as arrogant superstars: travelling together, sharing a dressing room, sharing meals, year after year. However, a team needs great players more than it needs unity. Bob Woolmer's first action when he became Pakistan's coach was to bring back Shahid Afridi and Shoaib Akthar, which surely wasn't easy for captain Inzamam-ul-Haq, but it was the right thing to do. Leading a cricket team (at any level, actually) is about holding together a naturally fractious coalition. I'm sure Strauss knows this intellectually, but unfortunately for him, that part of the job didn't quite work out.

By contrast, the captain who has done brilliantly at this aspect of captaincy is MS Dhoni.

MS Dhoni with former captain Saurav Ganguly

In a way, Dhoni was dealt a much tougher hand than Strauss. Every team he has led has been chock a block with galacticos. He became captain unexpectedly, when Rahul Dravid resigned after winning a test series in England. In his first test match as captain he was leading Tendulkar, Ganguly, Dravid, Laxman, Kumble, Harbhajan and Zaheer (I don't remember why Sehwag wasn't playing). Each of these players was already a legend in his own right, Dhoni's natural seniors in life and in cricket. Dhoni didn't try to impose his style or method on them. He accepted them as they were - from Dravid's gentlemanliness to Harbhajan's in-your-face aggro - and the grace and charm with which he did that somehow enhanced his authority.

Over time, his task didn't get easier. He has had to manage Yuvraj, Sreesanth, Munaf, Kohli - difficult characters all. He has had to deal with the selectors, the sponsors, the media. MSD has been up to the task every time. I wish I knew how he does it. Regardless, in the frenetic world of Indian cricket, brimming over with outsize egos and chips-on-shoulders, Dhoni's contribution as captain cool has been huge, dwarfing his substantial contribution as a keeper, batsman and tactician.   

Gilcrist caught Strauss bowled Flintoff circa 2005

Looking back on Strauss' career, the English media are going on about his back-to-back Ashes triumphs as a captain. My favourite Strauss moments actually feature him as a player: his catch at Trent Bridge to dismiss Adam Gilchrist in the 2005 Ashes, his century at Wankhede in 2006 to set up England's first test match win in India in twenty years, and his back to back centuries at Chepauk in 2008 (under KP's captaincy) in what turned out to be a losing cause. I'd be very happy to buy Straussy a whiskey-sour at the bar, or a Jagermeister if he so prefers, to raise a toast to those moments.

England's next test match series is in India. As a partisan India supporter, I am not unhappy that Strauss the batsman will not be in the squad. And I'd be delighted if the England management take a "principled" stance and decide to tour India without Pietersen. I'm sure our team would rather be bowling at James Taylor and Johnny Bairstow.

Beautiful Ashes: Sally Mann introduces her exhibition at the Fotografiska, Stockholm

In Samuel Beckett's "Endgame", the madman Hamm stands at the asylum window staring at the beautiful seaside vista, and can only see ashes. His friend begs him to look again, but he turns away. He can only see the dark side.

We need to be able to see both the beauty and the dark side of things, the cornfields and the full sails but the ashes as well. I see them both at the same time, at once ecstatic at the beauty of things and saddened by that ecstasy. The Japanese have a word for this dual perception, mono no aware, it means beauty tinged with sadness, for is there any real beauty without the whiff of decay?

For me, living is the same thing as dying, and loving is the same thing as losing, and this does not make me a madman like Hamm. It makes me better at living, better at loving, and better at seeing.

- Sally Mann. 

I came across these words at the Fotografiska Museet, Sodermalm, Stockholm, which is showing an exhibition by the American photographer Sally Mann titled A Matter of Time. Sally Mann's edginess, her mono no aware perspective, was especially welcome after a couple of days of relentlessly positive tourist commentary. Thanks to my wife for taking the kids to watch the changing of the guard at the palace, while I explored the outstanding Fotografiska.

At the Fotografiska, in Stockholm

Candy cigarette, by Sally Mann

At warm springs, by Sally Mann