Pigs Gone Wild

An American friend I was dining with last week was talking about her life in Mechanicsville, VA. Her neighbour is a wild hog hunter. Maybe he has a boring day job, like being a mechanic or something. But hunting wild hogs is what he really does.

That brought back to life this marvellous story. Wild hogs, feral swine, the offspring of escaped farm pigs which copulated with wild boar imported from Europe as game, are thriving across the vast American wilderness. And with them is thriving a culture of guys who hunt wild hogs, accompanied by packs of dogs, armed with knives, shotguns or even bows and arrows, with the Confederate flag emblazoned on everything they wear.

In America, people hunt hogs. In Britain, hogs hunt people.

Ms. Carla Edmonds, a landowner in Gloucestershire, first encountered wild boar when she and her two dogs were riding along a path in the Forest of Dean, about 100 yards or so from the main road. “I saw a group of 20 or more. I couldn’t make out quite what they were, but then I could see they looked like pigs.” Ms. Edmonds’ dogs started barking and her horse became agitated. The herd of boar gave chase. “I could see them charging at huge pace” she said. Her horse was seriously agitated by the experience, and took a long while to calm down, and a less experienced rider might even have been thrown off her horse.

Subsequently, the wild boar dug up about 100 square feet of the Edmonds’ grounds. But despite these intrusions, Ms. Edmonds and her partner think the boar are “brilliant” and that “it was amazing...would love to see them again”. She may well have an opportunity to do so. After having been hunted to extinction 300 years ago, wild boar have reintroduced themselves to Britain spontaneously and now also live in Sussex, Kent, Hampshire and Devon.

What makes wild boar, Sus Scrofa, so successful? The same factor that makes Homo Sapiens so successful?

The thought was triggered by a book I read back in the 80s, Omnivore by Lyall Watson, a zoologist who observed that our evolutionary resilience owes a lot to our omnivorous diet. Boars (and bears) are omnivorous higher mammals, like us.

Setting Free the Bears

Here’s a heart-warming success story, at a time when good news is a bit thin on the ground.

I visited Wildlife SOS' Agra Bear Rescue Facility earlier this winter. This is part of a program to rescue dancing bears from captivity, and to rehabilitate both the bears and the kalandar families who once depended on dancing bears for their livelihood.

- The rescue facility is a very nice retirement home for the former dancing bears, on a reserve forest between Delhi and Agra

- The past these dancing bears have endured is terrible. Typically, young bears are captured by poachers after the parents have been murdered. They are sold to kalandars, who torture the bears their entire lives to make them perform

- The rescue program essentially buys bears back from the kalandars, and relocates them at this centre where they are well looked after by professional vets. I was especially impressed that the vets were thinking about the bear’s mental state, getting traumatized rescued bears to engage by playing with a ball or climbing a trestle

- Visitors are allowed in only by prior appointment, and are accompanied by wildlife professionals. Otherwise, visitors who have paid good money to see bears may expect to be “entertained” to get their money’s worth, which would create exactly the wrong environment for the bear’s rehabilitation

- There is no breeding program. The rescued bears are simply not in shape to sire a bloodline. The rescue facility is supported only by charity

- The main reason to believe the program will work, longer term, is that it is a buy back coupled with social services. Kalandars get a substantial lump sum, and are being supported in moving on to a new life. One family featured on the visitor centre video used this buy-back money to buy a second hand autorickshaw. Kalandar children are now sent to school, for the first time in over 500 years

- Dancing bears, and the attendant cruelty, have been around since medieval times across all of Eurasia. The Indian program is a part of a larger worldwide effort to rescue dancing bears. The last dancing bears in Europe were rescued as recently as 2007, in Bulgaria. Turkey rescued its last dancing bear in 1998

There is a tantalizing moral question hanging at the edge of this story. Why does this matter? Why is it worth ending the bears’ suffering? Is it because of the acuteness with which bears can experience suffering? I’d be less moved by the suffering of invertebrates. Is it because so little is at stake? I can see the argument for testing life saving drugs on higher mammals, but suffering for the sake of entertainment feels unambiguously wrong. Is it because the horrors we have inflicted on ourselves, from Auschwitz to Abu Ghraib, have taught us that to be human is to be humane? Or more plausibly, that to be civilized is to be humane? Does a society that experiences success in preventing suffering, of whatever sort, build momentum and commitment that serves the cause of preventing even more grievous suffering?

I’m not trying to answer these deeper questions here. I’m just happy that Ravi the bear can gambol down a forest path, keeping pace with my sprinting five year old nephew, just because he wants to.

Video game or adventure?

"Bosses complain that...Net Geners demand...an over-precise set of objectives on the path to promotion (rather like the missions that must be completed in a video game)." Thus spake the Economist about Net Geners, or Generation Y, those born in the 80s.

The Economist is, as usual, not untrue but a bit harsh. Many people born in previous decades, including me, have thought in terms of "mission accomplished, so I'm entitled to a promotion". But the metaphor, career as a video game, is apt.

In today's economy, the video game no longer works as advertised. Missions accomplished are being quickly replaced by even more arduous missions to accomplish. But the promotions and bonuses to sweeten the journey, which were a part of the deal, are no longer happening. This heightens the angst in the zeitgiest, we all feel like smashing our broken Nintendos.

So, it was refreshing to hear a different metaphor on Radio 4 last week.

Sean B Carroll describes the careers of biologists following in Darwin's footsteps; these careers were not games but adventures, defined by both spirit and deed. Carroll picked this phrase, adventure being defined by both spirit and deed, from CW Ceram, who wrote about "archaeology as a wonderful combination of high adventure, romance, history and scholarship".

This spirit of adventure - with its acknowledgment that every career is a journey into the vast unknown, where the familiar rules no longer apply, where one will make fast friends and combat appalling evil, where there is the possiblity of both spectacular success and awful tragedy, a journey which is essentially a journey of the spirit in which the greatest challenge is to find truth and integrity - this spirit of adventure is sadly missing in corporate life.

Can this spirit be introduced? Individually, yes. A lot of this spirit probably does exist, in private. But institutionally? Maybe...though I'm not about to ask the HR staff to inject the spirit of adventure into my workplace.

"So, what do you do?"

In New Zealand, when this question is asked, it means "do you sail or do you hike?". Not "are you a lawyer or a banker?". Some good Kiwi perspective for these troubled times.

Is this true? Heard it from a colleague of mine, a big outdoors enthusiast, who spent a year in Kiwi-land on a working holiday. Context matters; a management consultant who flies in from Hong Kong would have probably met more people who describe themselves as Business Systems Analysts rather than as (amateur) Yngling Class yatchsmen. But the question is still meaningful: when asked in a neutral context, which identity do people assume? I suspect, and hope, that the story I heard is still true when "So, what do you do?" is asked in a neutral context. Kiwi readers...any comments?

My own culture, the culture of urban middle-class India, mostly devout Hindus and a smattering of Sunnis and Catholics, who live by an impeccably Protestant work ethic, is very different. Back home, you are who you are at work. This is great when one is gunning for 10% GDP growth, but might make India's collective psyche a little less resilient to the business cycle.

This assumption is expressed in sometimes quaint ways: in a typical South Indian wedding invitation, the bridegroom's name is suffixed by his educational qualifications, the name of his employer and his rank/ designation. Or think back to Sen-saab, IAS, from English August; his identity cannot be decoupled from the fact that he is an Indian Administrative Service officer.

This assumption about the source of identity defines an interesting cultural axis.

My Chinese friends tell me that China is pretty close to my slice of India. My reading of Memoirs of a Geisha suggests that Japan, if anything, is further out on the same axis. The USA is, in my personal experience, only a little bit more laid back than India.

England, surprisingly, is a lot closer to New Zealand than the USA. A typical conversation after a game of squash might go:

Prithvi: "So, where do you work?"

English squash player: "About eight miles off the M1".

The same conversation in sub-text should read:

Prithvi: "How do you make a living?". Since I am well brought up and cosmopolitan I don't follow that question up with "So, what is your salary?", which would be quite acceptable at home

English squash player: "How I make a living is strictly my business, but I'm too polite to tell you to butt out, so I'll say something neutral"

I guess England is in Europe after all.

Grabbing the SKU Rationalization bull by the horns

The day after Pongal is mattu Pongal, literally cattle Pongal. The idea is to thank the cattle for their help with the harvest. The cattle are fed sugar cane, which is a nice alternative to hay. They are decorated with flowers and bells, their horns are painted, and they are proudly paraded through their home towns.

Asian Paints, India’s leading paints brand, markets small cans of paint in festive colours during the Pongal season, targeted specially at the horn-painting market. Cool. This is the work of India Inc., woven right into the fabric of Indian life.

Except... extensive googling earlier today reveals no evidence that this Pongal SKU (stock keeping unit) actually exists.

I first heard this story about twenty years ago from my father. My dad was a marketing professional; he was probably trying to impress on his teenage son that marketing is cool, and in that mission he succeeded. Is there a version of events that could make my dad’s story not only successful, but also accurate?

Perhaps 20-25 years ago paint was mixed in centralized factories, packaged in cans, and then distributed nationally. This would have meant managing a system with literally millions of colour * can size combinations. Today, pigments and a paint base are probably distributed independently, and mixed and packed at the point of sale. So the farmer painting a bull’s horns can now buy a small quantity of paint, in the colour of his choice, at a retail point in the local farmers’ market....

Or maybe painting contractors re-sell the small sample cans they get free from paint companies to wholesalers, who in turn bundle these small paint cans into special Pongal packages, which include sugar cane stalks, flowers, new clothes, luridly illustrated religious calendars, and cans of paint, to sell at local farmers’ markets.

Either way, the one thing I’m pretty sure of is that the work of India Inc. is woven right into the fabric of Indian life. Asian Paints did try to build this Pongal connection into their brand identity with this excellent TV commercial. Enjoy.

Happy Pongal from the Grateful Dead

Reach out your hand
If your cup be empty
If your cup be full
May it be again...

These words are from Ripple, a classic Grateful Dead song released in 1970. They were on my mind because it was Pongal earlier this week.

Pongal is the main harvest festival along the South East coast of India, where I'm from. Pongal is celebrated by boiling milk in every home; it is literally the moment when the steaming milk brims over, symbolizing abundance.

The Grateful Dead clearly understood the symbolism. So does the Jamaican bloke who makes cappuccinos at the tennis club down the road, there's always a nice head of foamy milk topping off the (expensive) brew.

Happy Pongal to all readers of this blog.

Rules that are meant to be broken, and Broken Windows

I had gone with my children and their cousins for a swim at the Madras Club. My 14 month old nephew was swimming for the first time. I was glad that this rite of passage happened at the Madras Club. My generation of cousins have spent many hours swimming here, accompanied by my father or grandfather. I thoroughly enjoyed the moment, and took a few pictures to remember the occasion by.

By some obscure club by-law taking photos at the poolside is not allowed. I knew about the rule; it’s not a bad rule per se in the age of the internet. I ignored the rule. Nobody objected. A sense of proportion, common sense, prevailed over rigid bureaucracy. Good call.

Except...I have long been a fan of the broken windows theory. This theory maintains that small rule-breaks send out a signal that nobody is in charge, and lead to progressively more severe rule-breaks. For instance, if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, the rest of the windows will soon be broken. A building with many broken windows left unrepaired will soon be looted, and so on. I was delighted to read about experimental evidence confirming this theory.

A sense of proportion and broken windows, do the two thoughts sit together? Apart from the profound truth that rules are great as long as they don’t inconvenience this blogger.

Maybe context matters. My (self-indulgent) interpretation is that in small, personal, closed homogenous groups, when the shadow of the future is a real force, when the stakes are low, broken windows is overkill. At an extreme, broken windows within a family would be pathological. At the other extreme, a sense of proportion is not going to manage millions of fleeting, anonymous interactions on the streets of a city, or in any marketplace. Simple, explicit, rigidly enforced rules are necessary in this context. A private privileged member’s club in my hometown is a lot closer to the family end of that scale.

Bodyline is still so resonant in cricket because that was the point at which the balance tipped. Before bodyline, cricket defined, and was defined by, an implicit gentleman’s code. Douglas Jardine was the man who declared that the game was now too big to be contained within a gentleman’s code.