Rapidex goes to Paris

One of the highlights of our family's trip to Paris this spring was this poster:



It is prominently displayed all around the Paris metro network.

It reminds me of one of my favourite brands, Rapidex English Speaking Courses, which is right up there along with Palmolive and Boost as great Indian brands endorsed by Kapil Dev. Different cultures, exactly the same consumer need.

The market clearly knows that the "right" English is no longer the Queen's English. In case the current turmoil on Wall Street does not abate, we can always look forward to a brand relaunch as Main Street English:



Thanks to Polly-vous Francais for the Main Street English poster.

Gaudi : Architecture :: Grace : Cricket

Gaudi’s work – incredible, phantasmagorical forms set within a city of perfectly straight lines and right angles – captures the spirit of a world gone by, a world that was animated by nature, magic and fantasy, and boldly brings that spirit back into an unremittingly modern world.

Reminds me of the good doctor Grace. Specifically, of CLR James’ take on WG Grace.

CLR James, cricket’s greatest historian, examines WG Grace at length in Beyond A Boundary. James’ interpretation is that Doctor Grace was a creature of an old England, a pre-industrial, pre-Victorian, yeoman England. This England was vanishing by the time WG played. But by embracing and celebrating WG, by deifying the good doctor and giving him, and the game he bestrode like a colossus, a central place in the pantheon, relentlessly modern Victorian England encapsulated and kept alive the best of the spirit of that older time.

Looked at this way, the cultural meaning of cricket in India and England could hardly be more different. Cricket came to India fully formed, as part of an already modern Victorian empire. Princelings played it to express allegiance with their colonial masters. Nationalists played it to realize the virtues which made the empire so powerful, and so to defeat the invaders at their own game. Either way, cricket in the sub-continent always represented modernity, success, power, the glorious future rather than the idyllic past.

As a post-script, some extracts on WG Grace from CLR James’ text:

WG Grace was a Victorian, but the game he transformed into a national institution was not Victorian in either origin or essence. It was a creation of pre-Victorian England, of the two generations which preceeded the accession of the queen…It was an England still unconquered by the industrial revolution. It travelled by saddle and carriage. Whenever it could, it ate and drank prodigiously. It was not finicky about morals. It enjoyed life. It prized the virtues of frankness, independence, individuality, convivality. There were the rulers and the ruled, the educated and the uneducated. If the two groupings could be described as two nations, they were neither of them conscious of the division as a state of things which ought not be.

In all essentials, the modern game was shaped between 1778 and 1830. It was created by the yeoman farmer, the game keeper, the tinker, the Nottingham coal miner, the Yorkshire factory hand. The artisans made it, men of hand and eye. The rich and idle noblemen, and some substantial city people contributed money, organization and prestige…

At their matches, the players ate and drank with the gusto of the time, sang songs, and played for large sums of money. Bookies sat openly before the pavilion at Lord’s taking bets. The unscrupilous nobleman and the poor and dishonest commoner alike bought and sold matches…

The old England had indeed gone. By 1857 a majority of the population lived in cities. This was the generation, the first of many to come, which was "cut off from the natural country pursuits and amusements which had been the heritage of Englishmen for centuries". They probably felt the loss more than the public school boys…In the ten years that followed the Factory Act of 1847, there had come into existance an enormous urban public, proletarian and clerical lower middle class. They had won for themselves one great victory, freedom on Saturday afternoons. They were ‘waiting to be amused’…

The decade of the sixties, with its rush to organize sports associations of every kind, was just around the corner. In 1862, the first team of English cricketers set sail for Australia. In 1863, the MCC authorized overarm bowling, thus removing the last barrier to the development of the game’s full potentialities. In 1863, WG Grace, then fifteen years old, played in a first class match. He had made his first appearance on a stage that all classes of the nation had helped to build, and which was just about ready for the performance WG was about to give…

Through WG Grace, cricket, the most complete expression of popular life in pre-industrial England, was incorporated into the life of the nation. As far as any social activity can be the work of one man, he did it…

What manner of man was he? He was a typical representative of the pre-Victorian age. His was a Gloucestershire country father who made a good wicket in the orchard and the whole family rose at dawn to get in a few hours of cricket. Their dogs were trained to act as retreivers…

Boys of the Grace clan once walked seven miles to school in the morning, seven miles home for lunch, seven miles back to school and seven miles home in the evening. That was the breed, reared in the pre-Victorian days before railways…

Records show that the family in their West Gloucestershire cricketing encounters queried, disputed and did not shrink from fisticuffs. To the end of their days, EM and WG chattered on the field like magpies. Their talking at and even to batsmen was so notorious that young players were warned against them. They were uninhibited with each other and could be furious at fraternal insults or mistakes. They were uninhibited in general.

In his attitude to book learning he belonged entirely to the school of pre-Arnold Browns. He rebuked a fellow player who was always reading in the dressing rooms “How do you expect to score if you are always reading? I would never be caught that way.”

He is said on all sides to have been one of the most typical of Englishmen, to have symbolised John Bull, and so on and so forth. To this, it is claimed, in addition to his deeds, he owed his enormous popularity. I take leave to doubt it. He was English undoubtedly, very much so. But he was typical of an England which was being superseded. He was the yeoman, the country doctor, the squire, the England of yesterday. But he was no relic, no historical or nostalgic curiosity. He was pre-Victorian in the Victorian age, but a pre-Victorian militant...

There he was using his bat like an axe, building as much of that old as possible into the new, and fabulously successful at it. The more simple past was battling with the more complex, more dominant, present, and the present was being forced to yield ground and make room. In any age, he would have been a striking personality and vastly popular. That particular age he hit between wind and water.

Gaudi in Context

We were in Barcelona, with no specific agenda, thanks to a restless Icelandic volcano. A little Gaudi pilgrimage was noblesse oblige; my father’s brother, an architect, was an ardent devotee. So my wife and I navigated the streets of Barcelona, on foot and in public transport, with the children, with only a hazy plan in mind, to see the Pedrera, Casa Batllo, Parc Guell, and the Sagrada Familia, in situ.

Gaudi’s work - the fluid exterior of the Pedrera, the tile work at Parc Guell, the steepling ant-hills of the Sagrada Familia abuzz with activity, somehow remniscent of a south Indian temple gopuram - was as wonderfully phantasmagorical as ever. What was new was the context, the streets of the Eixample district in which this work is set.

The Eixample is laid out in a perfect geometrical grid.
The streets are perfectly straight. Each city block is a square with the edges trimmed off into an octogon, to let in more air and light, and to help the traffic see around corners. It is controlled, predictable, methodical, and in its own way, beautiful.

The Eixample was designed in 1859 by Ildefons Cedra, a less storied figure than Antonio Gaudi. This was when the textile industry was booming, the population was growing, there was new money around, and Barcelona had clearly outgrown the Old City - Ciutat Vella - around the Mediterranean port. So the ancient city walls, fortifications which went back to Roman times, were demolished. An extension, eixample in Catalan, was built. It must have been a relief to move from the tiny, twisted, messy, over-crowded streets of the Ciutat Vella into the gracious, tree-lined avenues of the Eixample, with schools, shopping and hospitals within easy access.



When the twenty-one year old Gaudi started studying architecture, in 1873, the Eixample was already there, as large as life, business as usual. Been there, done that, to straight lines and perfect octogons. Beauty was no longer about imposing order on unruly nature, or on a chaotic past. Beauty, and spirituality, was now about evoking and celebrating the shapes and irregularities of nature, a nature which is increasingly far away.

Gaudi, of course, responded to this need with spectacular panache. But the context, the framing needed to hold Gaudi's magical world in place, was already there. So the Eixample now has Cedra’s rigid grid enriched with Gaudi’s fanstastic shapes, in a point counter-point rhythm, which is more layered and meaningful than something either Cedra or Gaudi alone might have built.

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.