Wicked

"That's wicked! Really wicked! Thank you man. Thank you. Wicked!"

Thus spake a man-on-the-street. He wore workman's overalls. He spoke into his cell phone, excitedly, animatedly. I overheard him as I walked to Pret to pick up lunch, and thought it odd that a word that once meant bad has come to mean good. Ours is a topsy-turvy world, a world without roots or moral anchors. A sign, perhaps, that the common people can no longer tell good from bad? A sign, perhaps, of civilizational decline?

It turns out that the word wicked is derived from wicca, or witchcraft. Wicked came to mean evil in a specific medieval context, when witches were burnt at the stake for pagan or occult spiritual practices, even in supposedly secular America, which must count as one of the most horrifying traditions of religious persecution in history.

My Enid Blyton reading daughter instinctively knew this etymology. When I asked her what exactly wicked meant, the first word she associated with it was wizard. Wicked, wizard and smashing can be used interchangably to describe The Famous Five's sumptuous teas.

Wicked's reinstatement into modern English as a stylish, ironic synonym for very good has impeccable antecedents. F Scott Fitzgerald was the first modern writer to use the word in this context. This has since become common usage in both New England and Old England. Though if the global appeal of the Twilight movies, Harry Potter and even classic pop hits like "You can do magic" are anything to go by, understanding the roots of wicked will actually give the word more currency. Go wicked.

Test Cricket at Brabourne

It is great to see test cricket at Brabourne Stadium in Bombay. Not just because of Sehwag's 293, or India attaining the world #1 ranking, but for its political resonance.

Brabourne stadium represents a part of India's culture and cricketing heritage that deserves to be celebrated and brought back into the mainstream. It was built by the Cricket Club of India (CCI) in 1936, to be "India's Lord's". For my money, it is a more beautiful and charismatic cricket venue than Lord's.

The CCI website tells me of one of the founding myths of Brabourne. The Maharaja of Patiala, one of the great patrons of cricket in pre-independence India, went to the Gymkhana to watch a game. He was not allowed to sit with the white skinned Europeans, and was sent to the native enclosure. Hurt, and perhaps inspired by Jamshetji Tata's hotel that stands half a mile from the Bombay Gymkhana, he swore to create a great cricket club where such segregation did not exist. He went on to build the Cricket Club of India. He saw no contradiction in naming this great new stadium after Lord Brabourne, then the British governor of Bombay Presidency.

At the time, the dominant political forces in Indian cricket were the princelings of the Raj. The Maharaja of Patiala was the first President of the CCI, and sponsored the Patiala Pavilion. The Maharaja of Idar, a Rathore prince from North Gujarat whose clan married into Ranji's Jamnagar family, paid for the Governer's pavilion. One of the great banqueting halls at the CCI is the Cooch Behar Room, presumably sponsored by another cricket loving royal family. A more recent CCI president was Raj Singh, once chairman of the Indian team's selection committee, scion of the royal family of Dungarpur.

The aristocrats of the CCI long had the Bombay Cricket Association (BCA) as tenants on their premises. The culture of the BCA was closer to that of the Marathi speaking middle class families of Dadar, Matunga and Shivaji Park - the culture of Umrigar, Phadkar, Mankad, Wadekar, Gavaskar, Shivalkar, Vengsarkar and Tendulkar - rather than the culture of India's erstwhile royalty. Discomfort between these cultures is easy to imagine, but the relationship stayed on the rails through Jawaharlal Nehru's lifetime, up until the early 70s.

By this time, India itself was changing rapidly. India had defeated Pakistan in war in 1971. East Pakistan had broken away and formed the independent nation of Bangladesh. Also in 1971, the Indian cricket team had defeated England - the old colonial masters - at their own game, in their own country. This team was captained not by a princeling like the Maharajkumar of Vijaynagaram, but by a middle-class Mumbaikar called Ajit Wadekar. A hot-headed, curly-haired, twenty two year old called Sunil Manohar Gavaskar opened India's batting. A new India was taking shape. This India had no time for the niceties of older days. Not coincidentally, 1971 was the year Indira Gandhi's parliment abolished the privy purses that had been paid to the royal families of India since independence. The lineages that had built the CCI were no longer royalty in any meaningful sense.

Relations between the CCI and the BCA came to a head during the England tour of India in 1972. The CCI apparently turned down the BCA's request for more ticket allotments. The BCA under SK Wankhede decided to break away from the CCI and build their own stadium. Wankhede stadium, an unremarkable concrete behemoth that sits a couple of blocks north of Brabourne, was completed in 1975. It has since hosted most important matches in the first city of Indian cricket, while Brabourne lies idle.

The power struggle that led to Brabourne being supplanted by Wankhede is now over. The victors should be secure in their victory. Does that create room to restore Brabourne to some of its former glory as the home of Indian cricket? And hence, can contemporary India recapture some of that spacious, graceful, cosmopolitan spirit that still pervades the CCI?

The betting is that Brabourne will be forgotten and that service as usual will return once the repairs at Wankhede are completed. But, heck, crazier things have happened.

We do need some education. But why?

I visited the Iona School yesterday for their Advent Fayre. Some good friends' children attend this excellent school. It was a very nice family morning, with craft activities for the children, live singing, and freshly pressed apple juice. Also picked up a brochure about the Steiner Waldorf system of education followed at Iona, which says:

Integral to the Steiner Waldorf education is its view of each child as a unique, spiritual individual, developing... towards an adulthood in which the individual spirit can find full freedom of expression. Every step in the child's education may be seen as geared to this end.

Was struck by the contrast between this and a thought emerging from my own alma mater, Vidya Mandir, Mylapore:

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All play and no work makes Jack an unemployed adult.

This is taken from an email that came through on the alumni mailing list. Work, in this context, means swotting. Play means loafing around like Aamir Khan in the latest Bollywood flick. The implication, deeply embedded in Mylapore culture, is that the purpose of education is to get a good job, earn a decent living, and support a family.

Does this Mylaporean approach also lead to the individual spirit finding full freedom of expression? Perhaps, yes. Especially if the individual spirit finding expression is similar to that of Mac MacGuff, the dad in the film Juno. Mr MacGuff's teenage daughter, Juno, is searching for her calling. She asks her dad about his career. He tells her that he found his passion, the calling which gave his spirit full expression, in Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) repairs. Which, fortunately, is the means by which he earns a living.

Thierry Henry's Handball and the Philosophy of Sport

See the player in the blue t-shirt? She is Dr Emily Ryall, Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy of Sport at the University of Gloucestershire. She is a committed, competitive sportsperson and a University lecturer, thus embodying the Corinthian ideal of amateurism. As a girl with a Ph.D. who plays rugby, she is reshaping the myths of womanhood. Discovering Dr Ryall, and that there are entire University departments dedicated to the Philosophy of Sport, are some of the few good things to have come out of the Thierry Henry handball incident.

BBC Radio 4 had a story last week on Henry's handball. It featured Simon Barnes, the chief sports columnist for the Times, and Dr. Ryall. Both of them let Thierry Henry off pretty lightly. Neither of them focused on the thirty seconds immediately after the goal, when the Irish players were animatedly appealing to the referee, when Thierry Henry had ample opportunity to 'fess up.



Simon Barnes thinks "sport is no longer about building character, it reveals character"; so Henry's handball was a part of the great spectacle of sport because it gives us an insight into Henry's flawed genius. Dr. Ryall thinks intent matters: the fact that Henry did not intend to cheat makes a difference to her. Which is a very interesting moral argument. For instance, the business leaders who destroyed Enron (or Lehman Brothers for that matter) surely did not intend to do so. Unlike Henry, it is not at all clear that anyone at Enron cheated. But does positive intent absolve them of blame? Things are certainly not working out that way, certainly not in the court of public opinion.

Personally, I find the lack of censure for Thierry Henry, in the court of public opinion, more shocking than the handball itself. People, in all walks of life, will always have opportunities to cheat. Some people will always take the opportunity and cheat. But overall, people will cheat less if they are constantly reminded that cheating is bad, and that honour matters.

Dan Ariely, the behavioural economist, demonstrated this in a neat experiment. One group of students took a test, and were paid according to the number of correct answers they self-reported. Another bunch of students took the same test after having sworn not to cheat. The bunch who swore not to cheat consistently gave themselves lower and more accurate scores than the "control", despite having exactly the same incentives and exactly the same opportunities to cheat.

Many people describe Henry's handball as "understandable", which is true, it was understandable. But in being understanding of Henry's understandable behaviour, we, collectively, are diluting the social norm that cheating is bad.

The Universal Soldier. In Afghanistan

The war in Afghanistan is not going that well. It is not clear what exactly the fighting is for. Young soldiers are getting killed. There is no end in sight.

Yet, Sam Kiley, a British journalist who just brought out this book on touring with the paratroopers of the 16 Air Assault Brigade in Helmand province, reports that the troops are committed and motivated.

Why? In part, says Mr Kiley, it comes from “a basic male instinct” to prove yourself. In part it is about fighting for your friends and, when they are killed, about avenging them. Above all, it is about sheer thrill. As one Para quoted by Mr Kiley says during a battle: “Living the fucking dream mate.”

Without having read the book, my instinct is that Mr Kiley is telling it like it is, no spin. The Para living the dream is a Universal Soldier.

He's five foot two, he's six feet four
He fights with missiles and with spears,
He's all of thirty one, he is only seventeen,
He's been a soldier for a thousand years.

He's a Catholic, a Hindu, an atheist, a Jain
He's a Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew,
He knows he shouldn't kill and he knows he always will
Kill you for me my friend, and me for you.

He's fighting for Canada, he's fighting for France,
He's fighting for the USA
He's fighting for Russia, he's fighting for Japan...

The Universal Soldier is an archetype; vigourous, integral, eternal. He can pack more life into two days of intense experience than most mortals can in entire lifetimes (refer E. Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls).

Yet, this is almost certainly not what Donovan meant when he sang this song in the sixties. Donovan was the guy who replaced Bob Dylan in the Joan Baez sets at the Newport Folk festival, when Bobby quit being political and broke up with Joanie. Donovan had picked this piece up from a Canadian songwriter called Buffy Sainte-Marie. She was a sixties anti-war protester, a pacifist pointing an accusing finger at the Universal Soldier:

He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame,
His orders come from far away no more,
They come from here and there and you and me,
And brothers can't you see,
This is not the way we put an end to war.

Fighting a fighting archetype, huh? Who would've thought...

The Sound of the Fury

...Peter Jackson, requiring a wrathful army for Helm's Deep, bravely ventured onto a cricket pitch, during a break, and asked twenty-five thousand fans to roar in unison. They obliged.

From the New Yorker

The Post-Feminist Goddess

Patriarchal cultures generally build their female characters around two polarized archetypes: the Madonna and the Whore. And so real women casting around for raw material with which to build their identities are forced to make a false choice between these archetypes, and therefore between virtue and sexuality. So, since the days of The Female Eunuch and The Feminine Mystique, one of the themes of the feminist movement has been to create icons who break this polarity, icons who are both caring and potent, who are both babes and moms, and who keep their lives on the rails.

From these icons, real women can more easily learn to be… like Angelina Jolie?

Naomi Wolf, the feminist intellectual, thinks Angelina Jolie is the iconic woman who brings it all together. In this article, Ms Wolf writes that

Angelina Jolie... for the first time in modern culture, brings together almost every aspect of female empowerment and liberation... she broke through into mass-market consciousness with her turn as cartoony superheroine Lara Croft... sexy and daring, confrontational and independent...

When Maddox appeared... Jolie revealed a new vision of single motherhood... tender, glamorous, and complete, father figure or no father figure in the picture... she blurs the conventional boundary of what female stars are supposed to do — look pretty, emote, wear designer clothes — by picking up Princess Di's fallen torch and wrapping her elegant bone structure in a shalwar kameez to attend to the suffering of Afghan refugees in Pakistan

So she becomes what psychoanalysts call an "ego ideal" for women — a kind of dream figure that allows women to access, through fantasies of their own, possibilities for their own heightened empowerment and liberation.

The article is a fun read, until you realize that it is not meant to be ironic or tongue in cheek. Is this really Naomi Wolf, the daughter of the legendary Bay Area teacher/poet Leonard Wolf, the Rhodes scholar who advised Al Gore when he was America’s next President, who wrote The Beauty Myth – a book about how modern women have freed themselves from all the traditional feminine myths, except the myth of beauty?

And is she really touting Angelina Jolie as an ideal? The same Angelina who broke off all relations with her abusive dad, french-kissed her brother in public, had a lesbian girl-friend, hit on a married colleague, and wore a vial of her boyfriend’s blood as a pendant. Never mind the bit about being the archetypal ideal woman. Is Angelina even just okay?

Moonballs from Planet Earth would like to propose an alternative feminist icon who brings it all together: Donna Sheridan, the character played by Meryl Streep in Mamma Mia. Donna is a mom, an entrepreneur, has a ton of fun with her girl-friends, doesn’t know which of her old boy-friends is her daughter’s dad, and lives on to enjoy a happy ending.

There’s a fire within my soul
Mamma Mia, here I go again,
My my, how can I resist you?