Let them eat cake

Would you want your brand to be associated with an icon, who, for centuries, has been associated with unearned privilege, wanton indulgence, promiscuity, and the furious hatred of the common people? Apparently, yes, if you are in the luxury goods business.

The exquisite pink marble Trianon palaces in Versailles, from where Marie Antoinette reigned, are being restored to their former glory. This worthy effort is being sponsored by Breguet watches. I noticed the Breguet logo is discreetly but clearly displayed all around the complex on a recent visit.

This is not common or garden corporate philanthropy, it is considered brand-building. Breguet’s advertising boasts that Marie Antoinette wore a watch crafted by the original Mr. Breguet. Breguet bought wood from an oak tree that was being felled near the Petit Trianon palace, under which Marie Antoinette “liked to day dream”, to build a special presentation case for the Marie Antoinette watch. The brand is clearly working hard to enhance this association. Their customers, people who pay ~$25,000 for a wrist watch, are probably telling them that they like the Bourbon heritage.

Will that change? My bet is, it will.

My reflexive associations with Marie Antoinette are negative, probably because I first learnt about her in my middle school history text books. In that austere world of Indira Gandhi’s socialist India, Marie Antoinette’s opulence felt obscene. Breguet chose to invest in the Marie Antoinette association in a different context, in an age of plenty. This was a zeitgiest in which a Labour minister could say that he is “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”, and be better regarded for that attitude. If one is intensely relaxed about the filthy rich being filthy rich, it becomes a lot easier to see Marie Antoinette as a glamourous, gracious but misunderstood heroine.

For better or worse, that age of plenty has come to an end. Whatever comes next, for a few years at least, frugality, conspicuous frugality, is going to matter. History's verdict on Marie Antoinette will continue to shift shape.

The Clintons, the Obamas and Mr Liz Hurley

The Clintons' marriage is famously “complicated”. The Obamas seem a stable and happy couple. This blog believes that Liz Hurley’s marriage to her unlikely Indian beau Arun Nayar is more likely to go the Obama way than the Clinton way; the Hurley-Nayar yin and yang are in balance, as are the Obamas’, while the Clintons’ is not.

Earlier, I had floated a general theory: the psyche seeks a balance of yin and yang in every couple. Happy couples have this balance. The Clintons don’t. Both Bill and Hillary are tough, smart, super-ambitious scrappers. All yang. Where there are differences in style, Bill the charming compromiser seems more in touch with yin energy than Hillary, the doctrinaire disciplinarian. They could easily be best friends; they seem to understand each other perfectly and enjoy each other’s company. But they are too alike to be a couple, their marriage needs more yin.

Michelle Obama, unlike Hillary Clinton, seems very happy being a wife and mom. She is not using her first ladyship as a platform from which to influence policy. She could if she wanted to. She is smart enough and has the necessary training. The Economist ran a thoughtful and sympathetic column a year ago, lamenting the “momification of Michelle”:

...during the campaign she raised a lot of thought-provoking questions—about “the flimsy difference between success and failure” in America, about the removal of rungs from the ladder of opportunity, and about the plight of families at the bottom of the heap. It would be good to hear a bit more about what Mrs Obama thinks and a lot less about what she wears.

The Economist is missing the bigger picture: the Obamas have an endless supply of smart, articulate, well-trained, motivated people capable of raising thought-provoking questions about the flimsy difference between success and failure. They don’t have anybody else who can be Mommy. In choosing to be Mommy, Michelle is doing what she alone can do, and letting others do what they can do as well as she can. David Ricardo would have congratulated her for focusing on her comparative advantage. CJ Jung would have congratulated her for bringing more yin energy to her marriage when it was needed; now that Barack is the most powerful man in the world, he inevitably gathers more yang around him than he ever did before.

When the Obamas first got together, their balance of yin and yang probably was different. Michelle was Barack’s senior at Harvard Law School and his mentor at the law firm in Chicago when they got to know each other. The change in the way their marriage works is a nice example of how plastic identity can be, and how much that identity is shaped by context.

Readers shocked by this apparent endorsement of a woman’s traditional role... hang in there. Another marriage which seems about right in terms of yin and yang balance, but with a woman being the tougher partner, is that of Liz Hurley and Arun Nayar.

I was a bit preplexed when I first heard about this match. It was reported in the British press as Liz Hurley marrying an Indian textile tycoon. Sure, this was good publicity for India, and a glamourous A list celebrity like Liz Hurley would make a fantastic trophy wife for an Indian tycoon. But who exactly was this Indian textile tycoon? I am pretty close to business circles in India, and nobody I know had ever heard of Arun Nayar, or of his family’s “import export” business. And if Mr Nayar is not exactly an A lister back home in India, why does Liz want him?

Last week’s Sunday Times resolved at least a part of this puzzle. Liz Hurley never was destined to be a trophy for some Indian textile tycoon. She is one tough honey: determined, hard-working, ambitious, rich, successful and totally in charge. She was getting herself a well-built husband who would look appropriate (and not say anything inappropriate) at public events, and would be happy to help mind the animals at the farm back in Gloucestershire. Some extracts:

- Liz says "Chasing goals has less to do with earning more money – although I’m not against it – and more to do with being challenged and trying to win”

- Arun Nayar, her husband [is her] most devoted member of staff. Only the other week, she announces proudly, Arun came home from manning the farm’s stall at Cirencester boasting how many of wifey’s snack bars he’d hawked. “He sold 50!” she beams

- Does she worry that Arun might suffer from a touch of the beta males, given she’s such a big personality and it’s her name on the family business? “Arun is astonishingly good-natured and would be the last man on earth to feel overshadowed by me,” she says, unruffled. “He’s thoroughly comfortable in his own skin and I don’t think he’d swap places with anyone.”

The Times journalist isn’t trying to portray either Liz Hurley or Arun Nayar in flattering light here. But it isn’t hard to imagine that it is easier for the driven Ms Hurley to live with the amiable anonymity of Mr Nayar, than with a man who is as driven as she is. She needs someone to bring some yin to her yang.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Why don’t glamourous hotties ever fall madly in love with nice, well-mannered, hard-working boys? Why are they forever falling in love with over-muscled, mean-spirited, brutes who are so clearly up to no good?

This topic has been debated extensively in my hostel room by my friends, all of whom are nice, well-mannered, hard-working boys. However, the most insightful take on this eternal question came not from my nice-but-angst-ridden hosteller friends, but from one of their moms, a trained psychologist with a Ph.D. in Jungian thought. The way she saw it, the psyche, consciously or otherwise, always seeks a balance between animus with anima, yin with yang. The elements need to be in proportion.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona illustrates this thought. Watch it before you read this post, if you care about suspense. I will give away elements of the plot.

Vicky has her life sorted. She is a serious, hard-working, responsible, well-educated graduate student. She is engaged to a serious, hard-working, responsible, well-employed banker/ lawyer. They will get married when she earns her Masters degree. They are buying a nice house together in a pleasant New York suburb. They are thinking about tennis lessons. Soon they will buy a Volvo and have beautiful children who will get above average grades. Vicky is well on her way to yuppie nirvana, the only nirvana she has ever wanted. That is, until she falls in love.

The man she falls in love with is Juan Antonio, a spontaneous, passionate, intense, expressive, incandescent Catalan painter. She isn’t looking for love, she isn’t even open to being wooed. But her yang senses Juan Antonio’s yin, her earth needs Juan Antonio’s fire. Together, their chi comes into balance, magic happens, and Vicky becomes more vividly alive than she has ever been. Vicky's story is at the emotional core of the movie. She still is the girl who wants to be a suburban mom. But she needs to deal with the depth of her feelings for Juan Antonio. Is this a fleeting infatuation? Or profound love? Or is profound love a fleeting infatuation?

The film’s other emotional core is Juan Antonio’s marriage with Maria Elena, another spontaneous, passionate, intense, expressive, incandescent Catalan painter. Juan Antonia and Maria Elena live, breathe, sleep and dream together. They work together so intensely that their art, their styles, are indistinguishable. They are one mind, one soul, inseparable despite inhabiting distinct bodies. Therefore, their love is dysfunctional. They are too alike. Together they have too much yin, too much fire, their chi is not in balance.

Juan Antonio and Maria Elena need another element, someone who is not like them, to balance the chi in their marriage. That element comes, like a breath of fresh air, in the form of Vicky’s college friend Christina, a film maker bored with her own work and casting around for new experiences. What could be a more exciting new experience than these passionate Spanish artists? It works out, fire needs air. But does air need fire?

Vicky Cristina Barcelona feels like a classic Woody Allen film, which is great for someone like me who has long been a fan of Manhattan and Annie Hall. Woody Allen's characters do sometimes come across as one-dimensional, like vehicles to make his point rather than as messy, real, flesh and blood people. That generally doesn't happen here. British actress Rebecca Hall is appropriately stilted as Vicky, and Scarlett Johansson easily gets into the skin of the beautiful, bored and self-centered Cristina. But the real-life couple who make this movie are Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz. They bring so much guts, gumption and messy passion to their roles as Juan Antonio and Maria Elena that it's impossible not to be carried away.

We watched this DVD shortly after Live Flesh, a Pedro Almodovar film which also had a superb Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz. That cast, the Spanish setting, and the broad open-ended questions about love and the meaning of life give this film a delicious Woody Allen meets Pedro Almodovar feeling. It is great fun. Mind it!

Vishwaroopam and Florida

We’ve found the culprits. We know who dun it. It’s them Adam and Eve, residents of Eden Gardens, Paradise, PL24 2SG. They inspired the Cruella de Vils slaughtering innocent baby pythons in Florida.

There are serious arguments being made for the extermination of the Florida python. Learned Associate Professors believe that the python is a threat to delicately balanced ecosystems. Yet, I can’t help noticing that other non-native species that are spreading through the American south, like, for instance, wild hogs, are treated differently. Hogs are also large, potentially violent, omnivorous, fast breeding, adaptive, mobile, elusive, and are potentially upsetting the balance of many delicate American ecosystems. But unlike pythons, nobody is trying to wipe them out. Why?

My hunch is that this is simply because pythons are snakes. Snakes have had bad rap, negative symbolic associations, ever since they were cast, through no fault of their own, in the villain’s role in the legend of Adam and Eve. Imagine how easily a magpie, symbolizing excessive attraction to superficial beauty, could have prompted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. But mythology can't easily be undone, and this slander of serpents has played through to modern pop-myths. Like, in Harry Potter, Gryffindor's emblem is a lion, but Slytherin's is a serpent?

I find this uniformly negative portrayal of snakes hard to relate to, probably because snakes are often portrayed in positive light in Indian iconography. Shiva has a garland of cobras coiled around his neck. The traditional depiction of Maha Vishnu, Vishwaroopam, shows him reclining on his friend and protector Adisesha, the sire of the serpents. In some traditions, Adisesha accompanies Maha Vishnu to earth to be his best friend during his avatars, like Krishna and Balarama or Rama and Lakshmana. Vasuki, the king of the serpents, churns the ocean of milk to find Amrit, the nectar of immortality, which the beautiful Mohini delivers to the good Devas rather than the evil Asuras.

Not all Indian snakes are good; Krishna tames the evil ten-headed Kaaliya by dancing on his heads. But, Indian snakes are more good than bad, and in that context, it feels natural to revere real snakes that live near people. It feels natural for Wildlife SOS, a charity I support, to send me email about how they’ve rescued lost or injured pythons. Or for the Chinese zodiac to associate the snake with wisdom, intelligence and grace.

Once, western cultures also depicted snakes in positive light. The snakes coiled around medicine’s Hippocratic staff represent life itself. The Mediterranean Tree of Life once showed a serpent twined around the trunk of a flowering tree, the fertile and the virile, yin and yang. Much that was beautiful was lost in Adam and Eve’s deadly smear campaign.

But maybe, just maybe, the end is in sight. Maybe the magic of Disney can undo two millennia of defamation and injustice. I watched The Princess and the Frog recently. It features Disney’s first black heroine, Tiana, who is not a princess born into riches but an entrepreneur who shapes her own destiny. The fairy godmother who helps Tiana triumph over evil is not some flitty, flighty pretty little thing. She is a tough old lady who knows a thing or two about using Tabasco sauce, who lives out in the bayou. Her name is Mama Odie, and her constant companion is, yes!, a python. At home and happy in Louisiana. Walt Disney Studios may have intuitively understood and accepted America’s serpentine future in a way that the learned Associate Professors have not.

Great Snakes!

The United States is being invaded!! Hundreds of thousands of slimy aliens are slithering around the sacred homeland.

And so, the United States is defending itself. War has been declared on these intruders. Patrols are being mustered to track down these sneaky, elusive aliens. Beagles are being trained to sniff them out. Scientists are working on miniature airborne drones, like the ones used by the armed forces in Afghanistan, that can detect the heat given off by these aliens from the air. Open season has been declared, and from March 8 hunters can buy the right to shoot these aliens for a $29 fee. Officials are even training hunters on how to identify, stalk, capture and remove these aliens.

What crime have these aliens committed? Nothing more than trying to stay alive. They haven't even attempted to cross an international border illegally. Why so much fear and hatred?

The aliens I am sticking up for here are snakes, specifically pythons. Thousands of pythons have been imported into America as pets. Some were released by owners who bought cute little things a few inches long, and found they had more snake than they could handle when their tiddlers grew into 15 foot long giants. Some escaped when Hurricane Andrew ripped through Florida, destroyed a pet store's warehouse, and air lifted python hatchlings in their frizbee-like flat-pack plastic containers out into the Everglades. Most of the ex-pet snakes died. But enough survived in the warm, humid swamps of the Everglades, a climate which may not be all that different from the Asia they came from, to establish a breeding population. There are now an estimated 150,000 pythons in the Florida wilderness.

The campaign against pythons claims that they are dangerous. They are dangerous. A two year old sleeping in her crib was tragically killed by a python, which belonged to her mother's boyfriend. This incident has little bearing on the rights and wrongs of pythons in the wild, but it clearly is bad PR for pythons.

Some ecologists worry that pythons prey on endangered native species, like the Key Largo Woodrat. These same ecologists are also clearly aware of the media potential of a "foreign invader drives local species to extinction" storyline. Consider this New Yorker article, easily the most thoughtful piece I've read on this topic. It carefully refers to the python as the Burmese python at every instance, to emphasize its foreignness, even though the python's range extends from the Himalayas through Indonesia. I was appalled at the cynicism of this extract:

Skip Snow, a wildlife biologist at the Everglades national park, was dissecting a python that had been caught in Summerland Key, one of the southernmost of the Florida Keys. He unspooled the snake...lifted it on to the counter, stuck a scalpel in it, and unzipped it like a ski bag, and examined its guts....Snow's purpose, in this case, was mostly political. If he could prove that the pythons were eating endangered (native) species, it would be much easier to lobby for funds.

The question that is not addressed is why exactly the Key Largo Woodrat is more valuable than the python. And who is to say that the Key Largo Woodrat would not have died out anyway?

Yes, invasive species can destroy ecosystems. I had blogged earlier about a tiny aphid called the Woolly Adelgid destroying Eastern Hemlock stands in the Appalachians. The Red Lionfish, a native of the Pacific, has emerged as a super-predator in the Caribbean coral reefs, and is now threatening these (valuable) ecosystems.

There may well be a case for acknowledging the law of intended consequences, and drastically cutting down on the international trade in exotic species. Who anticipated that importing decorative water hyacinth from South America would choke the life out of South Indian waterways? But slaughtering hundreds of thousands of pythons is not going to stop that on-going global species trade.

In all likelihood, this war on the python will fail despite the beagles, the drones, the "open-season" hunters, and all the attendent cruelty. A case of shutting the stable door after the snake has bolted. Many of the scientists involved in python war acknowledge that "In one week we went from 'No problem at all' to 'You might as well give up'". Pythons are omnicarnivorous, they eat almost anything that moves. They breed fast, a single female python can lay up to a hundred eggs in a single clutch. They are already extending their range north, beyond the Florida peninsula. They could find climatic conditions that match their Asiatic range across all the Southern states, and portions of Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona and California (map below). Why not just accept the inevitable and embrace a new vision of an American future, one in which the python is as much a part of the American south as the alligator?

Its not what you drink, its how you drink

When is drinking good clean fun, and when is it dangerous and destructive? The dividing line is mostly about how you drink rather than how much you drink, according to this recent Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker.

For instance, recent Italian-American immigrants drink a lot. They drink with every meal, they drink with their families, they drink when friends come over, they drink while watching television. Italian-Americans think about drink as if it were food. Alcohol consumption follows the same quotidian rhythms as the consumption of pasta and cheese. So, alcohol-fuelled loutishness or alcoholism are almost unknown, despite the vast amount consumed. Similarly, the Camba of Bolivia drink a lot, within a well-defined social ritual, with no ill-effects.

Contemporary problems with alcohol are more cultural, related to the meaning associated with alcohol, than physiological. Good point.

Unfortunately, Gladwell concedes another myth which goes against the grain of his argument: the belief that alcoholism is genetic. Consider some of his phrases:

- Around the middle of the last century, alcoholism began to be widely considered a disease: it was recognized that some proportion of the population was genetically susceptible to the effects of drinking

- Philomena Sappio (an Italian-American whose alcohol consumption was studied) could have had within her genome a grave susceptibility to alcohol. Because she lived in the protective world of New Haven's Italian community, it would never have become a problem

This excellent paper Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth College tries to seperate the impact of nature and nurture on a number of life-outcomes by studying adpoted children. It compares Korean children adopted by American families with their non-adopted siblings. I like this paper because the data is so clean, certainly compared to most natural experiments in the social sciences. These adoptive parents can't choose the children they want. They meet their child for the first time at an airport, unlike, say, in India, where it is not uncommon to adopt from within the clan.

The paper's main finding about drinking is that adopted children behave no differently from biological children. This would not be the case if alcoholism were genetic. Alcoholism does run in families, but this probably has more to do with upbringing than the genome.

Sit down, I think I love you

A Buffalo Springfield classic just shuffled up on my iPod. It goes:

Sit down, I think I love you
Anyway, I’d like to try
I can't stop thinking of you
If you go, I know I'll cry...

...Oh you know what they say about the bird in the hand
And that’s why I ain’t leaving without you...

...So if you want someone to love you
Pretty baby, I’m your guy.

Really?

Experts like Dear Prudence clearly know more about matters of the heart than me. But even I can tell that Dear Prudence would not recommend “I think I love you, anyway I’d like to try” as the ideal declaration of undying love. You had to think about it? And having thought about it, you were so completely convinced that you were willing to “give it a try”? Dude… really...

And what’s the deal with “the bird in the hand”? Is the girl worth trying to love because she is a bird in hand? Or should the girl settle for you because you’re worth two in the bush?

These lyrics are by Stephen Stills, who also wrote "if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with". Bit of a theme developing here.

Maybe Stephen Stills knows something that Dear Prudence and I don't. Maybe this ironic, laconic, self-deprecating approach really works. Real-romantik, a la real-politik?

Either way, great song. Click here to hear it on You Tube.