When does real learning happen?

Should reference books be in libraries? Or should they be lying around on desk tops and cabinets, within casual stretching distance of where people sit when they work?

I'm debating this exact point with the HR department of the company I work for. I teach a course of business writing. I want my students to leave my class with a set of reference books that they can dip into when wrestling with a complex story. My belief is that this is when the real learning will happen.

HR wants me to put these books in the corporate library. Of course, a student who is serious about writing well could go to the library and check the book out. But the likelihood that a student will do this when wrestling with a real problem is low. So even the serious student will check the book out, flip through it, and put it back in the library without really internalizing any learning.

There's a pretty deep point here. People are receptive to learning at those moments when they most need to the information. The task of the teacher is make that information accessible at those moments. And ideally, to create those precious high-pressure moments when the student is receptive to learning.

O Captain! My Captain!

India beat Pakistan in a World Cup bowl-out. Zimbabwe beat Australia. Bangladesh knocked the West Indies out of a World Cup. S Badrinath and Akash Chopra clocked in double hundreds against a strong South Africa A.

Kapil Dev encouraged and inspired aspiring fashion designers in Delhi...click on this link to check out Paaji having a nice evening. Yet, through all that silliness and noise and hype, the one piece of news that felt like it mattered was Rahul Dravid's resignation.

The pundits seem to think Rahul made a good choice. Rohit Brijnath and Ian Chappel both think so.

It's easy to imagine the debate inside Rahul's head. In the Blue corner, pragmatic self-preservation. In the Red corner, service to a team that really has no alternative captain. Pragmatic self-preservation won. Rahul follows in the footsteps of Sunil Gavaskar, who abandoned a promising Indian team who desperately needed him after winning the Benson and Hedges World Championship in 1985.

But I can't help feeling disappointed. Is there any point to cricket if all it's about is pragmatic self-preservation?

Zooming out a bit, is there a sub-text here about social class? Both Rahul Dravid and Gavaskar are quintessentially middle class Indians. Educated-upper-middle-class if you want to make fine distinctions, as both their families doubtless would.

This is the class which has dominated Indian cricket since independence. Other Indian captains from similar middle class worlds include Ajit Wadekar, Dilip Vengsarkar, Polly Umrigar, Vinoo Mankad, Pankaj Roy, Ravi Shastri, Krishnamachari Srikkanth, Srinivas Venkataraghavan, Gundappa Vishwanath and Sachin Tendulkar. Anil Kumble, Javagal Srinath, Venkatesh Prasad and Bhagwat Chandrasekhar are other Bangalore cricketers from this world. This is a pleasant and comfortable world, a world of tightly knit families, kind words, regular home cooked meals and music tuitions. I can write about this India with some conviction, this is my India.

My India also carries a visceral understanding that this comfortable life is not to be taken for granted. The yawning chasm and the Other India are all too visible. And so we work for our comfortable lives with an ethic that is more Protestant than that of any Protestant nation. And we create outstanding tech companies like Infosys and technically sound but risk averse batsmen like Dravid and Gavaskar.

Interestingly, no middle class Indian captain has ever really given his team pride, self-belief and conviction. Looking around for the most influential captains, my top three sub-continentals are Imran Khan, Arjuna Ranatunga and Saurav Ganguly. All three are from the elite, more privileged than middle class.

All three have more than a whiff of the amateur playing for pride, rather than the professional just getting the job done. All three have been willing to walk away from the job. All three have backed their men to the hilt. I love Ranatunga for getting in the face of the Aussies and backing Murali through the chucker controversy. I love Imran for coming out of retirement to lead Pakistan. He didn't need to, he didn't particularly want to, but he still did. I love Saurav for refusing the play when the selectors tried to foist Sharandeep Singh on him instead of Harbhajan, against Australia in 2001. All three great captains held themselves above the system. They made the system work for them.

Rahul is not hungry for power. Of course he's willing to walk away from the job, he's shown that he is. But he is not using this leverage to make a difference. He is not saying "give me Murali Kartik or I'm not playing". When Dravid's strike bowler Sreesanth shows the aggression that generations of Indians have prayed for, does Dravid back him to the hilt? No. He backs down. Rahul works within the system, as a middle class boy would. A middle class boy's first instinct is pragmatic self-preservation. No wonder he resigned.

Let's stop pretending fielding is a huge deal

It's time to call the emperor's new clothes. Fielding is simply not worth this price:

Cricket: Sussex excel despite Rana's shoulder agony Cricket Guardian Unlimited Sport

Sussex lose one of their main bowlers, Naved Rana, sliding near the boundary. Earlier this summer, the West Indies lost captain Sarwan to a fielding injury, sliding near the boundary. Flintoff injured his knee during the ODI at Bristol, sliding near the boundary. Flintoff went all the way into the advertising boards. The game needs it's stars to stay fit more than it needs the spectacle of sliding saves.

This need not mean standing around like Saurav or Munaf. We can have superbly athletic fielding without asking 6 ft 4 in 240 pound fast bowlers running full tilt to launch themselves at the advertising boards in the hope of saving one or two runs. We need to steer back towards the middle ground.

This is a great baseball funda from Moneyball that applies to cricket. Fielding is the most systematically over-valued discipline in baseball. Fielding is a great spectacle. This creates the impression that the fielder is a committed and gifted athlete, and this in turn has a big impact on the price of the fielder on the transfer market. Careful analysis of the data shows that the same spectacular fielding has little or no impact on winning more games.

So the smart team, the Oakland A's, sells the hot shot fielders. It buys fat, ugly batters who get on base a lot. In cricketing terms, they buy players who nurdle the ball around and rotate the strike. And so the A's win a lot. The Oakland A's would play Laxman and Kumble.

Swingers

Been working through a New Yorker article about bonobos in the wild. Was reflective, well researched, emotionally rich. Loved it. Click through to read

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/07/30/070730fa_fact_parker

It turns out the popular belief that bonobos are "...into peace and love and harmony...equal parts dolphin, Dalai Lama, and Warren Beatty..." is at best a partial truth. This belief was based largely on observing a group of pubescent bonobos in captivity. They outgrow their rampant teenage sexuality. They have their own systems of social dominance. They are capable of murder, maybe even the murder of infants.

A trained social psychologist wouldn't be surprised. Their experiments show that most human behaviour is situational. Almost any human being can be kind, cruel, nurturing, willfully destructive, cynical, starry-eyed, social, organized, lazy...anything...in the right context and with the right conditioning. Other apes are just like us.

An interesting side-story I picked up was that we've been fooling ourselves about the nature of great apes for over a long time. Consider:

- "The bonobo of the modern popular imagination has something of the quality of a pre-scientific great ape, from the era before live specimens were widely known in Europe. An Englishman of the early eighteenth century would have had no argument with the thought of an upright ape, passing silent judgment on mankind, and driven by an uncontrolled libido."

- "(In 1972...Goodall had confidence that chimpanzees were “by and large, rather ‘nicer’ than us....In 1974...Goodall witnessed...the War in Gombe. A chimpanzee population split into two...one group wiped out the other, in gory episodes of territorial attack and cannibalism".

Consider the main theme of the article: bonobos can be from Mars. Consider the Margaret Mead mythology of idyllic primitive societies (I learnt that this was just flatly untrue from Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel).

There is a pattern here. We seem to have a need in our collective unconscious for a noble nearly-human figure. Letting that need project on to some poor unsuspecting great ape or primitive society leads to really bad science. Fortunately, the great apes haven't physically suffered because of that bad science.

Performance under pressure

After the surrender at Lord's on Saturday, the hacks and cynics will be out in force. They will rant and rave about how India lack killer instinct, about how Sachin doesn't fire when it matters most. The pseudo-intellectuals might read deeper meaning into this. Our lack of a killer instinct is cultural. We are, after all, the land of ahimsa.

Humbug.

My take is that India, England, Pakistan and South Africa are evenly matched teams. Who wins on a particular day is down to chance. India have had a run of bad luck in clutch games. It has happened to South Africa. It happened to Ricky Ponting against Harbhajan Singh. Our boys aren't playing worse than usual in clutch games.

In case old friends are wondering if I've suddenly become a sentimental apologist for mediocrity...no.

I believe the bad luck theory mainly because a very similar hypothesis has been rigorously testing in baseball. For generations baseball had a rich mythology about clutch-hitters, great batters who score when it matters most. However, when trained statisticians examined the data, there was no evidence at all that the fabled clutch hitters did any better in clutch situations than in other situations. A purely random event had spawned a rich and convincing mythology. Read Money Ball by Michael Lewis for more fundas (strongly recommended if you like this post). Or just look up clutch hitting or Bill James on Wikipedia (link below)

Clutch hitter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Similar academic quality analysis showed no evidence of the equivalent in basketball - a Hot Hand, when a player who is in the Zone shoots baskets at will. The memorable sequences of great shots in basketball are fully explained by chance. The mind sees patterns where there are none.

There is a real opportunity here for an ambitious statistician. There is little or no rigorous statistical analysis of cricket data in circulation.
_________________________________

I have seen professional sportsmen lose self-belief at crucial moments in their careers. I saw it most recently in the Twenty20 finals when Carl Greenidge of Gloustershire, Gordon Greenidge's son and Andy Robert's cousin, went to pieces bowling the last over. I saw Jana Novotna slip into that same state of mind during a Wimbledon final against Steffi Graf. Zaheer might have been in that state of mind in the 2003 World Cup finals. Though, he seemed too wound-up rather than going-to-pieces. We might have gone to pieces against England in Mumbai in 2005, when we collapsed to Shaun Udal.

That sort of mental disintegration happens to people of all races. It is rare. It didn't happen on Saturday. The dice just rolled for England.

Tamil film clips on You Tube

I was online last night looking for another clip of Quick Gun Murugan. The closest that I could find was a couple of Kattabomman scenes. Notice the similarity in the subtitles (which are only tangentially related to the dialogues).

YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.

Found some other super old stuff. Puttam Pudhu Bhoomi from Thiruda Thiruda.

YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.

Andhi Mazhai from Raaja Paarvai

YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.

The climax scene from Thalapathi. The court scene from Parashakti...the original Parashakti Ganesan. Two years ago, it would have taken me weeks of digging in Madras to lay my hands on this sort of Tamil film software. This is fantastic.

Showdown at Lord's

About an hour to go for the final game of the India tour of England. I'm allowing myself to hope India will win. But before the game starts, and my emotions are no longer in my control, I just want to record my thanks for a memorable summer's cricket.

What will I remember?

Saurav-da defining the meaning of character. Stuart Broad pulling off the impossible at Old Trafford, in front of his father Chris. Sachin back in his pomp. A savage Dravid batting at the death in Bristol. Ian Bell ending the chat about his weak chin and his "I don't really belong here" sheepish smile. Dimitri Mascarenhas' sixer hitting. Chawla rattling Pietersen's stumps, and Ian Bell's. Agarkar, the eternal scapegoat, also hitting Bell's off stump with a Sandhu-like inswinger. Jamie Andersen proving that quicks can field. Uthappa flipping Broad over short fine leg, forcing long off to come up, and then drilling Broad down to the long off boundary...how long we've waited for an Indian Bevan. Yes, I am daring to hope. And I haven't started talking about the tests yet.

What will I remember of the tests?

Dhoni playing the unlikely match-saver at Lord's. Kartik and Jaffer batting like openers. Zaheer bowling around the wicket. Jelly beans. Michael Vaughan's century. Sreesanth losing his cool and his line. Monty trapping Dravid at short extra cover. Chris Tremlett keeping his purpose alive bowling for a lost cause. Kumble's century at the Oval. The famous follow-on not enforced. Sachin's stumps splattered. The picture of Sachin with the trophy, as exhillarated as a teenager. After all the dirtyness and stupidity, this is why the game is still worth playing.

Link to another blogger expressing the same sentiment.

Cricinfo - Blogs - Rob's Lobs

I did consider going down to Lord's for the season finale. Tickets are selling on eBay for about £500 for a pair. At £250 per pair I would have bought it. But 500 is a little too far beyond my budget.