Freddy Mercury. A Paki? Or a Zanzibari?

Bohemian Rhapsody - the superb Freddy Mercury biopic which triggered this post

[Scene: Heathrow airport, 1970]

Baggage handlers are on the tarmac unloading suitcases from a plane.

A longhaired, buck toothed, leather jacketed handler pauses. He was distracted by an eye-catching striped bag covered with stickers that hinted at its travels around the world.

Handler 1: “Oi, you missed one, you Paki.”

Handler 2 (Farrokh Bulsara): “I’m not from Pakistan!”

These are his first words. Farrokh Bulsara, soon to become Freddy Mercury, announces himself in his (excellent) biopic Bohemian Rhapsody with “I’m not from Pakistan”.

So, where is he from? 

From Zanzibar. 

Except that that doesn’t actually answer any questions. Why was a middle class Parsi family in Zanzibar? What was Freddy Mercury's back-story?

It turns out that the Bulsara family's back-story parallels that of the Gujaratis who were expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin. 

Zanzibar was a British protectorate in the mid twentieth century. Bomi Bulsara, Farrokh’s dad, worked for the colonial government as an officer in the Zanzibar High Court. Farrokh was born in Stone Town, Zanzibar. The family were comfortably off. They lived in a spacious apartment (now a Freddy Mercury museum) and employed a live-in nanny. They sent their son to boarding school in India, to St. Peter's in Panchgani. This wasn’t unusual. Indian boarding schools were designed for the children of colonial officers stationed in far-flung outposts of the Empire.

The Bulsara family’s comfortable Zanzibari base dissolved along with the Empire. 

In 1963, the British Empire transferred power to the Sultan of Zanzibar, Jamshid bin Abdullah, who was to rule as a constitutional monarch. The Arab Sultan held power for less than a month. He was overthrown in the Zanzibar Revolution, led by a charismatic former brick-layer called John Okkelo. The Socialist Republic of Zanzibar and Pemba was declared.

An orgy of violence was unleashed. Arab and Indian minorities were targeted. A BBC story says 17,000 people (out of a population of about 250,000) were slaughtered on the streets. Genocide claims are still being debated. Those who could fled. 

Six months later, the Socialist Republic of Zanzibar and Pemba ceased to exist. It was merged with Tanganiyka to create Tanzania (a synthetic coined name). This was eight years before Idi Amin expelled Asians from Uganda.

The Bulsara family arrived in the UK in 1964 as refugees from this chaos. Freddy was 17 then.  

How did that tumultuous backdrop shape Freddy Mercury? 

Freddy didn’t talk much about politics or about his family’s heritage. We can only conjecture. My conjecture is that that Zanzibar taught him the truth of Jim Morrison’s immortal words at the end of Roadhouse Blues:

“..Alright! Alright! Alright!

Jim Morrison. Freddy's philosopher?

Hey, listen! Listen! 

Listen, man! listen, man!

I don't know how many you people believe in astrology...

Yeah, that's right...that's right, baby, I...I am a Sagittarius

The most philosophical of all the signs

But anyway, I don't believe in it

I think it's a bunch of bullshit, myself

But I tell you this, man, 

I tell you this,

I don't know what's gonna happen, man, 

But I wanna have my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames.

Alright!”

Farrokh Bulsara was a Virgo, not a Sagittarius. But it seems he came to the same philosophical conclusion as Jim Morrison: that it isn’t all about how long you live, that it is about how much life you live while you’re still alive. 

Thanks Farrokh/ Freddy. For being a Paki, a Zanzibari, a Parsi, a Brit, a hero.

Farrokh Bulsara in Panchgani

Blog Rules

This blog is about everything except family and work.

This blog is not serious. This blog’s only intent is to amuse, engage, entertain.

This blog is not about my work. My work is serious. I will mostly steer away from work-related content. If I do touch on work-life, the views expressed here are strictly personal.

This blog is public. This blog is a third space. Comments are welcome. I will moderate comments to control spam and random rants.

This blog is mine. The content is mine. All copyrights belong to me (not to Google), unless I’m channeling content that is already owned by someone else.

This blog is not newsy. Pondering eternal, universal truths is more my style than keeping pace with contemporary news cycles.

This blog is alive. It will incarnate at midnight on The Night of the New Moon and stalk the streets of Mumbai meting out rough justice to those with impure hearts. Sort of. 

More specifically, this blog is a living document. It will change, it will grow. Nothing about it is defined apart from the basic rules of the road. I don’t know what it will develop into in this second coming. That is as it should be. 

Time lapse image of the North Star which shows how it does not change position.
Similarly, the Blog Rules on this post won't really change

Moonballs are Back!

Friends, Romans, countrymen, blog readers.

Rejoice! Moonballs are back!

Your correspondent has resolved to restart his beloved blog.

Yes, I've resolved to restart my blog before and not followed through. But this time the restart is for real. Blog posts will start flowing with reasonable frequency from this week on.

What happened? I celebrated a landmark birthday. Hundreds of friends got back in touch. Almost all these friends (now scattered all over the world and socially distancing) mentioned Moonballs from Planet Earth. They nudged/ cajoled/ hassled me to start writing again. I was touched. The nudging/ cajoling/ hassling worked.

And thus it is decreed that Moonballs will fly again.

Thankyou London Underground

The Tube is on strike today. Everybody's cursing (including me). Meaning, it's not a bad day to remember one of my favourite poems, an ode to the London Underground, which I discovered on the London Underground:

Here's to the gaps, the maps
And the elapse of a hundred and fifty years since that first
Steaming monster hurled
Through its Metropolitan Minotaur world.
To all the billiard ball-bottomed straps onto which I've hung.
And here's to the police office, who, when I was illegally
    busking outside Westminster Station, approached me and said,
'Do you know any Neil Young?'

St George the Dragon Slayer? Or St George the Lizard Eater?

St. George's Day Posters in London c. 2014

Is England’s patron Saint George a dragon slayer? Or a lizard eater?

The question is prompted by these posters promoting St. George's Day, prominently displayed across the metropolis, blessed by the Lord Mayor of London himself. The weapon the beast is impaled upon is, obviously, a table fork. In which case, the beast itself can’t be much bigger than a garden lizard. 

Do people eat lizards? Do heroes eat lizards?

Quite different from the way the dragon slayer was depicted in more heroic times….

St. George Slays the Dragon, by Raphael c. 1504

Wikileaks reveals…the importance of table manners

Julian Assange, photographed outside Ellingham Hall

Wikileaks has radically changed the way I see our world. Not the way I see war, liberty or the role of the state – a lot of the material Wikileaks leaked, was, frankly, unsurprising – but the way I see table manners. Wikileaks' leadership team retained what sanity they had, thanks to a regimen of strict table manners.

This thought comes from the excellent documentary We Steal Secrets: the Story of Wikileaks. In it, there is a period when the Wikileaks inner circle of about fifteen people are stuck in Ellingham Hall, Norfolk, on journalist Vaughn Smith’s country estate. They can’t leave Ellingham Hall; the MI6, CIA etc. are out to get them. So they’re stuck in the middle of nowhere, with just each other for company, united only by their distrust of the outside world, each day melting into the next, as weeks run into months which run into years.

How did they manage to keep things civilized? By enforcing very strict rules on table manners. Vaughn Smith and his housekeeper enforced strict table etiquette, three meals a day, for over five hundred days of maddening claustrophobia.

Must have been the same dynamic in colonial officer’s messes, and up in the tea plantations.

Agnieszka Radwanska endorses Cheesecake Factory: the return of real marketing

Aga Radwanska @ Wimbledon

Aga Raswanska now endorses Cheesecake Factory. 

Refreshingly, she actually likes the Cheesecake Factory. She isn't just endorsing a random brand because they paid her lots of money.

She has been writing about visits to Cheesecake Factory restaurants on her blog for a couple of years now. "Can you imagine we tried almost every kind of cheesecake there during Indian Wells and Miami? Well except one — peanut butter... because I don't really like peanut butter," she wrote. "It's very close to the hotel, which is dangerous, because we could end up going there every night. We went yesterday. Maybe we'll try to cut down to every second night.". The Cheesecake Factory marketing people picked up on this, and an endorsement deal resulted. 

This feels like what celebrity endorsements ought to be about: not cynical money-making by a "media property", but a well known person sharing her genuine enthusiasm for a brand.  

Aga Radwanska @ The Cheesecake Factory

What Yesterday, The Beatles' song, is really about

It isn’t a love song. It is about Paul McCartney's mother's death.

I found out from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, from this interview with Paul McCartney airing on NPR this week, in honour of the 50th anniversary of The Beatles’ conquest of America.

In the interview, Paul talks about how he lost his mother as a teenager. John Lennon also lost his mother at about the same age, and that shared experience of loss was a deep bond John and Paul shared. However, as working class lads from the North, they couldn’t talk about it. It just wasn’t done. It was put to Paul much later in life that Yesterday might be about his feelings when his mother died, and it dawned on Paul that that was probably true.

The song sounds different now, now that I know this interpretation. Still a great song. But different.

Satya Nadella: The Rorschach Ink Blot CEO

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO

Since Satya Nadella’s appointment as Microsoft's CEO, my Facebook news feed and email inbox have been chock-a-block with stories about what Mr Nadella's success means.

Some think Satya Nadella’s success is a triumph for “Indian values, like empathy, patience and humility”. Others think it is “a slap in the face for the Indian system” (because Mr Nadella felt the need to emigrate to the USA); that it reflects the “failure of the IITs” (because such a prestigious tech job went to a guy from lowly Manipal University); that it is a triumph for the game of cricket  (because Satya learnt about leadership and teamwork as a cricket playing schoolboy in Hyderabad); that it reflects the greatness of Amercia (because you don’t have to be Bill Gates’ son to become CEO of Microsoft); that it reflects the failure of America (because homegrown talent lags so far behind educated, motivated immigrants); that it reflects the skills Mr. Nadella learnt at his family dinner table (his father was a senior IAS officer who served on India’s Planning Commission); etc. etc.

All these interpretations are have some basis in fact. But having absorbed all these interpretations, my conclusion is that Satya Nadella's success is a contemporary Rorschach Ink Blot test. Any observer’s interpretation tells you a lot about the observer's state of mind. It tells you little or nothing about the meaning of Mr Nadella’s success, because Mr. Nadella’s success doesn’t actually mean anything, beyond the very specific context of Microsoft’s executive team.

The human brain is amazingly good at seeing patterns, even when there aren’t any patterns to see.

"Hindostan is an Italy of Asiatic dimensions", Karl Marx, 1853

Karl Marx didn't have a whole lot to say about India, but this thought - likening India to an Asian Italy - is still fascinating. 

I know it from researching a debate way back when I was in college. It came back to mind this morning, reading Frank Bruni's oped piece in the New York times titled "Italy Breaks Your Heart". Bruni piece describes a country - ancient grandeur and contemporary political dysfunction, a "terrific" high-speed rail line and uncleared garbage on the streets of the capital city - that could be India, almost word for word.

My glass half full interpretation of that parallel: despite everything, Italy's per capita GDP at PPP is above $30,000. India is at about $3,900. Despite everything, things in India can still get a whole lot better.  

Hindostan, Asia's Italy

Italy, Europe's India

BTW...Karl Marx's article on India, in the New York Herald Tribune, is available here. Worth a read. Wish I'd had Google while researching debates back in college.

Roger Federer's Next Career: Doubles #1

Federer and Wawrinka. Olympic Gold medalists in 2008

Earlier this week, Roger Federer lost to Gael Monfils in the third round of the Shanghai Open, setting off a flurry of twittering among the Roger-ists. Many think their hero is better off retiring now, still close to the top, rather than fading away slowly and inelegantly.

On the flip side of the argument, Roger clearly still wants to show up and play, despite the indignities of his declining win:loss ratio. As a fan, surely this is something to be happy about. Surely Roger gives more to the world with a racquet in his hand than as another talking head on TV (like Boris Becker), or as an underwear manufacturing entrepreneur (like Bjorn Borg).   

Leander Paes, Grand Slam champion at 40

In that context, Moonballs from Planet Earth would like to propose a path that allows Roger, and fans like us, have it both ways: quit singles, focus on doubles.

Roger, 32, can realistically expect to play another decade of top flight doubles. Roger's classical style lends itself well to doubles. Leander Paes just demonstrated the longevity of doubles players by winning the US Open at 40.

Roger’s presence also gives a much needed injection of glamour to the doubles game. Doubles is the mainstay of amateur tennis. It is every bit as watchable as singles (refer Davis Cup), but still gets so little media coverage because it lacks narratives, lacks personalities. A bit of Federer stardust will help set that right. 

Moonwalking with Einstein. On why I blog, and take pictures

Just finished this excellent book called Moonwalking with Einstein, by Joshua Foer. Among its many pleasures was this passage, which feels close to the heart of what keeps me blogging, or taking photographs, for that matter:

Until relatively recently…people had only a few books – the Bible, an almanac, a devotional work or two – and they read them over and over again, usually aloud and in groups, so that a narrow range of traditional literature became deeply impressed on their consciousness.

But after the printing press appeared around 1440, things began gradually to change. In the first century after Gutenberg, it because possible for the first time, for people without great wealth to have a small library in their own homes...

Today, we read books “extensively”, without much in the way of sustained focus, and with rare exceptions, we read each book only once. We value quantity over quality of reading. We have no choice, if we want to keep up with the broader culture. Few of us make any serious effort to remember what we read…

We read and read and read, and forget and forget and forget. So why do we bother? Michael de Montaigne expressed the dilemma of extensive reading in the sixteenth century: “I leaf through books, I do not study them”, he wrote. “What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else’s. It is only the material from which my judgment has profited, and the thoughts and ideas with which it has become imbued; the author, the place, the words, and other circumstances, I immediately forget.”

He goes on to explain how “to compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory”, he adopted the habit of writing in the back of every book a short critical judgment, so as to have at least some general idea of that the tome was about and what he thought of it.

I know that works for me too. Synthesizing a thought on what a book, or movie, or trip was about, and writing it down, makes the experience itself richer, more memorable.

Joshua Foer

Gumption, not grit, is the key to success

This popular TED talk by ex-management-consultant Angela Lee Duckworth reports that the key to success, in academics and in life, is...ta dah...grit. Not talent, but fighting spirit and the resilience to battle on despite setbacks. This feels like a limp conclusion, because Ms Duckworth doesn't know where grit comes from.

Gumption might be a more useful word that grit in this context. It includes grit, and it also captures a little bit of where the grit comes from. Gumption includes enthusiasm, an amateur's passion, that fuels grit and therefore resilience. And gumption can be made.

I first met the word gumption during my first term in college, when I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance several times over (when I really should have been studying calculus). One of Pirsig's examples has stayed with me since: making your own motorcycle parts builds gumption. 

I'm still constantly on the lookout for that sort of gumption, for a quiet heartfelt enthusiasm that runs deeper than the "look at me, I've worked so hard, I'm so cool, I really deserve a raise/bonus/ promotion" rhythm that is so pervasive today. I like TED talks, but TED talks are actually a part of this "I'm so cool" culture.

BTW, I also found this picture of Pirsig and his son Chris on their legendary road trip across America...thanks guys.

Pirsig and his son Chris, motorbiking across America

The McKinsey Man plays tennis

Novak Djokovic in action

The New Yorker about Novak Djokovic:

"He was a McKinsey man, hitting his percentages. His approach was scientific. He brought to mind a diagram on the side of a workout machine, isolating the necessary muscles required for each stroke, and no more..."

So McKinsey Man is now a part of the English language. It means someone who puts in the precise amount of effort required to perform a specific task, and nothing more. Interesting. That is not quite how they describe it in books like The McKinsey Mind, though.

Should Mother Cricket have punished Michael Clarke for gallant/ stupid declaration?

Clarke and his team. Crushed? Or enough spirit left to learn?

I was in two minds yesterday, following the thrilling/ farcical denouement to the home Ashes. 

One part of me wanted to gods to reward Clarke for his gallant declaration. His spirit, his courage, his sense of adventure, kept the game alive right until the last ball. Most captains, at any level, would have settled for a draw. Surely that spirit deserves to be applauded, nurtured.

My less romantic side couldn't help thinking that Clarke's declaration wasn't gallant at all, it was merely stupid. Siddle, Harris, Faulkner and Lyon were never going to roll England over in one session of play. Even McGrath, Gillespie, Lee and Warne were highly unlikely to win this game. Clarke misjudged the situation. He was wildly over optimistic, and deserved to lose for his stupidity.

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that my unromantic side is right. 

Clarke grew up in an invincible Aussie team. Somewhere deep inside he still thinks the Aussies are invincible. In reality, they're just an average team, with a losing habit. Clarke needs to teach his team to be hard to beat, before he can teach them to win. He has to do for Australia what Nasser Hussain once did for England. Until he realizes that that is his job, he is the wrong man to captain Australia. 

Clarke and umpire Dharmasena

As it turned out, Mother Cricket is more of a romantic than I am. She let Clarke off lightly with just a scare, with a bunch of boos rather than a crushing defeat. Looks like Mother Cricket wants to give Clarke a little more rope, to give him a chance to learn the art of Winning Ugly.

Pierre: the secret behind Novak Djokovic's mental toughness

Superstar Pierre Djokovic with his people

Novak Djokovic reveals the secret behind his mental toughness:

"When I lost to Nadal in that marathon match in Paris, I was feeling down, very, very disappointed in that moment. But when I came back to the house where we were staying, Pierre greeted me by jumping up at me, so pleased to see me. He put a smile back on my face."

...While playing at Wimbledon, Djokovic will steal precious moments walking with his girlfriend and Pierre in the park. ‘People stop to look at Pierre first,’ says Djokovic. ‘Then they see a beautiful woman with him and finally they see this guy who usually has a tennis racket in his hand. Pierre is the superstar here!’

Understanding Yudhishtira through his Shadow

Mahabharata: the game of dice

How could Yudhishtira have done what he did? How could noble King Dharmaputra have gambled away his kingdom, his brothers, his wife? Was it really Yudhishtira playing that fateful game of dice? Or, was it Yudhishtira’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.

I like to think Yudhishtira’s Shadow had taken over, uninvited, when the dice didn’t roll for him during that game. Yudhishtira still was a very young man then. He hadn’t yet found or tamed his Shadow. Yudhishtira finally harnessed his Shadow when he went into exile and became Kanka, teaching King Virata to play dice, thus finding the equilibrium needed to be a great king.

Shadow-puppet of King Yudhishtira

How did Rama, the other great king of Indian mythology, find and harness his Shadow? Did he find and harness his Shadow?

Every Self has a Shadow. But Rama’s Shadow is invisible, we don't know anything about it. Rama is flawless. He was born the perfect man, the maryada purushottam. He didn’t have to struggle to grow into the role, which, paradoxically, makes me less comfortable with Rama; like there is a Shadow out there that might emerge at a crucial moment and do something spectacularly daft.

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