Cultural learnings of Eng-a-land for make benefit glorious nation of Hindustan

Kevin, our electrician/ plumber/ handyman came in over the weekend to help assemble the kid's bunk bed. He's a genial, happy and very helpful guy we've worked with a lot. We offered him tea or coffee. He turned us down...because he drinks only freshly ground coffee. How posh is that!

Tony Blair once famously claimed that "we're all middle class now." Is he right?

The Guardian survey below shows that the children of the old upper classes (think Bertie Wooster and colonial colonels) now describe themselves as middle class. Truck drivers and electricians want the best schools for their children and drink tall skinny lattes while referring to themselves as working class.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2195560,00.html

My take is that there is a real convergence of identities and values happening. Slowly. It's being driven by the emergent service economy. The fascinating twist is that the old notions of class are still self-defining, even while this convergence is happening.

My clearest window into English culture is Watching the English, by Kate Fox. The author is an English anthropologist, who has an insider's right to make un-PC anthropological observations that can never really be made about Amazonian tribes.

One of her central theses is that every English person comes with a built in radar that automatically switches on during social interactions to plot the other person onto a fine, richly layered social hierarchy. The English are uncomfortable with foreigners because this radar no longer works.

Will that class-radar get slowly ground to dust by the service economy? Hard to say. My money is on the service economy winning.

Flight 714

Just watched my favourite Tintin, Flight 714, on DVD.

It works. It was fun. But it doesn't work as well as the comic. Mainly because the DVD goes by too fast to soak up and enjoy the details.

I remember the comic frame when Professor Calculus demonstrates a "savate" move in Jakarta airport. I've spent hours laughing at the hundreds of things that flood out of his pockets. That frame lasts just a fraction of a second on the DVD. There's another frame when Captain Haddock pours some liquid (mineral water?) into a potted plant at the airport...and the plant wilts. I didn't spot that at all in the DVD.

A less visually rich comic, like Peanuts, probably works better on DVD than Tintin.

Blood Diamond, Syriana. The Economics

To me (and fellow geeks like me), the economic truth Blood Diamond and Syriana illustrate are as fascinating as the movies themselves.

Resource based economies tend to breed truly horrible social and political systems. Because to get rich and powerful in resource economies, all one needs to do is control the resource in question. The tycoon/ mogul/ sheikh/ oligarch who owns the oil well is the boss. The rest of society is all about getting on the gravy train that this tycoon/ mogul/ sheikh/ oligarch maintains. There is no reason (or room) to create or cooperate.

This is often phrased as "why is Bihar the poorest state in India despite it's wealth of natural resources?" This question is almost precisely invested. The real question is "how to save Bihar from it's wealth of natural resources?".

It's a hard question. One thing we do know is that nationalizing the resources does not work. Just look at Bihar or Putin's Russia for proof.

Blood Diamond, Syriana. The Movies

Watched (and enjoyed) a couple of recent Hollywood movies with overtly political themes.

Blood Diamond is about the horrible things that happen while mining diamonds in war-torn Africa. It features a superb performance by Leonardo DiCaprio as the Rhodesian mercenary: Danny Archer. It left a phrase embedded in my mind: TIA - This Is Africa. It had a happy ending.

Syriana is about the horrible things that happen while mining oil in the war-torn Middle East. It features a superb performance by Matt Damon as an American investment banker. It left a couple of gritty montages embedded in my mind: a lush, luxurious, sensuous party in Tehran, Pakistani migrant workers so bored that they would walk through the desert for entertainment. It had an ambigious and possibly tragic ending...and probably suffered in the box office for it.

Both movies have a ring of truth. Horrible things happen in oil and diamond mining.

Marathon training

The score:

Week 5
Thu Nov 29: 30 min intervals + 10 min rowing m/c. 5 km
Wed Nov 28: 36 min @ 10 kmph. 6 km
Mon Nov 26: Skiing on Capital One fun day (it's tiring)

Week 4
Sun Nov 25: 50 min @ 10+ kmph. 8.3 km
Friday Nov 23: 42 min canalside. 7 km?
Thu Nov 22: 4 games squash
Wed Nov 21: 36 min intervals. 6km
Tue Nov 20: 40 min canalside. 6.6km?
Mon Nov 19. 40 min @ 10+ kmph. 6.6km

Total for week: 34.5 kmph + 4 games (bad) squash

Observations:

- Running outdoors is a huge enthusiasm builder. I need to slot in more time in the natural light

- I'm not really pushing myself hard. Will do that this weekend, when I run early in the day when I have a lot of energy

- I'm sorely tempted to blow £100+ on a GPS enables stopwatch that keeps track of my distance and time when I'm running outdoors

- I played lousy squash on Thursday. I was tired after some pretty focused training. I'd had a heavy and oily lunch at Red Hot Buffet Shack with Lalit K. I was in no mental shape to compete. Next time, I'll organize my day in a way that I have the energy to compete

- Protein bars at my desk in the office are working quite well at providing a good 4 pm snack. Not sure where that leaves me on net nutrition and calorie balance, though...

The lion, the witch and the wardrobe

My six year old daughter, Arundhati, is buzzed with the excitement of being able to read by herself. She is devouring books too quickly for my wife or I to edit what she's reading, or frame and contextualize her books for her. She's on her own now.

She has just devoured Enid Blyton's the Magic Faraway Tree (four times), Roald Dahl's Charile and the Chocolate Factory, and C. S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe. She's a hop, skip and jump away from the rest of Enid Blyton, moving moving on to the Ramayana and Mahabharata, and perhaps Tolkien.

This is potent stuff. Fiction like this can shape values for a lifetime. Which is why I was a little worried when I noticed Arundhati reading C. S. Lewis. Because C. S. Lewis was, "not to put too fine a point on it, a racist and sexist pig."

Should I point out the racism to Arundhati, so she is better able to protect herself from toxic attitudes? Or should I just let her enjoy the narrative, and trust that the rest of her upbringing will give her enough protection from toxic thoughts? In the balance, my wife and I chose to let her just enjoy the narrative. But it wasn't an easy choice.

_____________________________________________

Am I being being paranoid about C. S. Lewis? Nope. Tragic but true. A bigot is he. Here's Anne Fadiman's take on C. S. Lewis in her excellent introduction to Rereadings:

When my son was eight, I read C. S. Lewis's The Horse and His Boy aloud to him...

Henry loved The Horse and His Boy, the tale of two children and two talking horses who gallop across an obstacle-fraught desert in hope of averting the downfall of an imperilled kingdom that lies to the north...

My jaw dropped when I realized that Aravis, its heroine, is acceptable to Lewis only because she acts like a boy - she's interested in "bows and arrows and horses and dogs and swimming"- and even dresses like a boy whereas the books only girly girl, a devotee of "clothes and parties and gossip" is an object of contempt. Even more appaling is Lewis's treatment of the Calormenes, a brown-skinned people who wear turbans and carry scimitars. Forty years ago the near homonym slipped me...

The book's hero, Shasta, is the ward of a venial Calormene fisherman, but, as a visitor observes, "this boy is manifestly no son of yours, for your cheek is as dark as mine, but the boy is fair and white." That's how we know he belongs to a noble northern race instead of an uncouth southern one...

It was difficult to read this sort of thing out to Henry without comment...I blurted out "Have you noticed that The Horse and His Boy is not really fair to girls? And that all the bad guys have dark skin?"...

Henry...didn't want to analyze, criticize, evaluate or explicate the book...He wanted to find out if Shasta and Aravis would get to Archenland in time to warn King Lune that his castle was about to be attacked by evil Prince Rabadash and two hundred Calormen horsemen. "Mommy," he said fiercely, "can you just read?"

I sort of trust that Anne Fadiman's son will not turn out to be a racist or sexist despite having swallowed C. S. Lewis's poison.
___________________________________________


And how harshly should one judge C. S. Lewis himself? Was he just reflecting the spirit and attitude of his time? Or was he worse than that? Given his intelligence, erudition and the privilege he enjoyed as an Oxford don, I'm inclined to judge him harshly...but I can see both points of view.

And what about Tolkien? He is, of course, too sacred to be judged. But it does worry me a bit that he was a good friend of C. S. Lewis. I remember seeing their bust side by side when my sister Radhi and I had visited Exeter College, Oxford. This was before Hollywood made these men famous with Shadowlands and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Cultural learnings of Eng-a-land for make benefit glorious nation of Hindustan

The city magistrates of Nottingham has just banned five notorious, aggressive beggars from begging in the city center, sitting within ten meters of a cash point, or selling the Big Issue without authorization.

In case you're wondering, the UK's per capital GDP at ppp is around $35000.

http://www.thisisnottingham.co.uk/displayNode.jsp?nodeId=133965&command=displayContent&sourceNode=133948&contentPK=18991107&moduleName=InternalSearch&formname=sidebarsearch

Reminds me of a conversation I had with my driver back in Bombay in the late 90s.

My driver then was Anil Thakker, a hard working Gujarati who was carefully saving up money to pay a broker for a job in the Gulf. We were on Marine Drive. A few beggers were hovering around the car. Anil asked me if there were beggers outside India. I told him there were, many. He flatly refused to believe me.