The Ghost, The Darkness and Rational Exuberance

I was presenting at a business conference last month, and started my piece with this home-edited five minute clip from a favourite 90s film, The Ghost and The Darkness.



This broke the tedium of hour after hour of Power Point presentations. But that apart, this film clip did try to make a point. The Ghost and The Darkness is about an engineer who is desperate to protect his people from man-eating lions. He has an idea to trap the man-eaters. The idea doesn't work out. Regardless, it remains a very good idea. The point is, in real life, most good ideas don't work out.

It is easy to think ideas that don't work out are bad ideas. Yet, the difference between ideas that work out and ideas that don't are usually small tweaks, timing, or pure dumb luck. I loved this NY Times article published in February 2010, when Apple was making waves with the iPad launch. It is by Dick Brass, a former Microsoft executive who worked on building a Windows Tablet PC way back in 2001. This project failed. The tablet group at Microsoft were eliminated. Regardless, the potential for tablets remained as good as ever.

My presentation went on to describe how my employer's products and services help companies institutionalize innovation, which is not an appropriate topic for this blog. But zooming out, this thought does feel relevant to the zeitgeist.

In the aftermath of the dot com bubble, and then the housing bubble, it is easy to be negative. Most people been stung by too much optimism, too much faith, by irrational exuberance. Rational cynicism feels like an antidote. It is easy to believe that every girl or guy who comes up with a crackpot scheme to catch man-eating lions is stupid, or a self-serving crook, or both. "It will never work" feels intelligent, prudent, a good default setting.

The trouble is, dominant black hat thinking is becoming a self fulfilling prophecy. Kick-starting growth has to start with an act of faith; with believing that lion-catching contraptions are worth building, even if many of them are going to fail. John Maynard Keynes, like Wodehouse's Psmith, described this act of faith as "animal spirits". A metaphor I prefer in today's cautious climate is Leon Walras' tatonnement, French for the trial and error process of groping for a handhold while climbing a rock face. Either way, moving on is going to involve a fair bit of rational exuberance.

Roger Federer: The Middle Class Champion

The dust has now settled on Wimbledon 2011. We have two exciting young champions to celebrate in Petra Kvitova and Novak Djokovic. Rafael Nadal is taking time off to let his fractured foot heal. Maggie May, Andy Murray's dog, is also recovering, from all the stress and media scrutiny that comes with being a celebrity. Yet, after the fun and the excitement have died down, after the Pimm's No. 1 and the strawberries and cream have been put away, the taste that lingers on from Wimbledon 2011 is the taste of a golden age coming to an end: the Age of Roger Federer.

Just how golden the Age of Roger Federer has been became clear to me, thanks, unexpectedly, to the British press.

As is traditional during the Wimbledon fortnight, the British moaned on about the absence of a British champion. The explanation they most commonly trotted out is that British tennis is a middle class game. For instance, here is Peter Preston, the former editor of the Guardian, writing about the Middle Class Malaise: "Why don't the British win Wimbledon anymore? Because we aren't hungry for success".

The term "middle class" merits some translation. In Britain, it does not describe people in the middle of the income distribution, a class now described as the "squeezed middle". It includes, and usually describes, affluent, well-educated, well-connected professionals: corporate executives, civil servants, lawyers, doctors, university professors. This haute bourgeois constitutes a middle class, rather than a privileged elite, because its members are notionally of lower rank than the hereditary landed aristocracy. These are the comfortably-off families who generally play and watch tennis for fun, and who generally fail to turn their children into Wimbledon champions. The claim that this class does not produce champions feels close to the bone, because this is the class I come from, and happily live within.

Prima facie, this reasoning looks like pure rubbish, nothing more than typical Pommy whingeing. But looking around at tennis, maybe the whingers have a point.

Consider, for instance, the Williams sisters' story. Their father, Richard Williams, son of a single mom from Shreveport, Louisiana, who now lives in the inner-city war zone of South Central Los Angeles, was idly watching tennis on TV when he was powerfully impressed by the prize money tennis players won. So he coaxed and cajoled his wife into having two more children, children #4 and #5, who would be raised from birth to play tennis and win that sweet prize money. Miraculously, this scheme worked, but it would never have occurred to even the most pushy tennis club members from suburban Long Island or Surrey.

Novak Djokovic, whose parents run a pizza restaurant in Belgrade, talks about growing up in a different kind of war-zone:

Djokovic reflected on how he had to negotiate some serious “ups and downs in life to become a champion”. The downs included a spell in spring 1999 when Djokovic, his parents and two brothers, Marko and Djordje, were living in a small apartment in Belgrade as Nato jets were targeting the Serbian capital.

He and Ana Ivanovic...along with Jelena Jankovic...would sometimes have to disappear into a bomb shelter when their practice in an empty swimming pool, which had been turned into a makeshift tennis court, was alarmingly interrupted.

Djokovic can remember the menacing drone of the low-flying bombers drowning out the renditions of “Happy Birthday to You” when he turned 12. Episodes like that build character. “All of us who went through that came out with their spirit stronger,” he once said. “Now we appreciate the value of life. We know how it feels to be living in 60 square metres being bombed.”

Andy Murray, the great British hope, comes from Dunblane, Scotland. Dunblane is about as far away from the manicured courts of SW19 as South Central LA is from the courts of the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, New York, or Bhagalpur, Bihar, is from the Bombay Gymkhana. Dunblane is best remembered in Britain for a horrific massacre of schoolchildren by a crazy gunman in 1996. Andy's brother Jamie was in school when this massacre happened.

While Andy Murray does come from a tough place, he may be an even better example of another clear pattern: champions created by pushy tennis-parents. Andy's story is less about escaping Dunblane, and more about being Judy Murray's son.

Judy Murray, then Judy Erskine from Glasgow, once tried to make it as a tennis pro. She took buses to European tournaments because she couldn't afford the airfare, slept in tents, and shared cigarettes in the locker room with Mariana Simonescu, then Bjorn Borg's girlfriend. Her tennis career failed. She became a secretary. She got married. Her marriage broke up, bitterly. Andy is her redemption.

Martina Hingis was brought up by an ambitious single mom who named her daughter after the great Martina Navratilova. Jelena Dokic has a famously pushy tennis-dad. The American Bryan twins' parents are tennis coaches, who made sure their boys spent every waking hour on either tennis or music. Bernard Tomic's dad used to coach Goran Ivanisevic. Andre Agassi's dad, who boxed for Iran in the Olympics, fits the pattern well enough.

This pattern isn't entirely new, but it is strengthening. Jimmy Connor's mother Gloria was a tennis teacher, who once attracted a fair bit of comment for being so present in her adult son's life. Gloria Connors was once a remarkable exception. Today she would be routine. In general, players coming through into top tier tennis either come from tough backgrounds, or have laser-focused tennis parents, or both.

An excellent book called Why England Lose looked at this pattern in football. More than 50% of the English population describe themselves as middle-class. They love football more than any other sport, and routinely send their sons to football coaching. Yet England's national team typically doesn't include a single middle-class player. The team consists entirely of men whose fathers were manual labourers, or on benefits, or former football professionals. These guys don't spend their precious teenage years swotting for math and physics A levels, or practicing classical music, or attending family reunions. They just play football. Therefore, they clock in the 10,000 hours of practice needed to be really good at something. The middle-class kids never do.

In this context, the LTA's strategy to develop British tennis is to spend surpluses from Wimbledon on courts in blighted inner-cities, and hope for a British version of Serena Williams, or Gael Monfils, to come through. Commentators talk about how Amir Khan, a boxer from Bolton with Pakistani roots, has breathed new life into British boxing. As a strategy, this makes sense. But at some deeper level, it sticks in my throat.

I'm all for social mobility. But surely, that is a serious question for schools, policing and public policy. Tennis is a game. Tennis is not meant to create pathways for social mobility, or win the Battle of Waterloo, or prove the superiority of the Aryan race, or of the Communist system, or serve any other political agenda. It shouldn't be about fulfilling a parent's frustrated dream either; that is just bad parenting. Tennis shouldn't really be about anything more than the pleasure of playing with a bat and ball.

The amateur ideal of previous generations was an attempt, however flawed, at letting the game just be a game. That ideal is now gone. As recently as the 1970s, the future of American tennis was the Stanford University tennis team. Now, kids who are serious about tennis wouldn't waste their time at Stanford University. Tennis, and sport in general, suffers from what Arnold Toynbee called a schism in the soul. The spirit in which amateurs play tennis is now completely disconnected from the spirit in which top professionals play.

Until Roger Federer.

Federer's greatness isn't fully captured by his sixteen grand slam titles. His reign is a golden age because of the spirit with which he played to win those sixteen titles, a spirit which is primarily about his love for playing the game. Here is a an extract from a story about Federer in the New Yorker:

... beneath that unflappable exterior I could sense that he was enjoying himself enormously—a deep, visceral joy that vibrated like an electric current in certain shots. Some of the top tennis players have given the opposite impression: Pete Sampras’s hangdog look on the court always made you want to cheer him up, and Andre Agassi, in his 2009 memoir, tells us again and again how he secretly hated the game. Federer clearly loves to play, and this is no small part of the pleasure in watching him.

Roger Federer didn't need to escape from a ghetto or a war zone. Federer's parents both work for Ciba-Geigy, the pharmaceuticals company, near Basel, Switzerland. This is the sort of upbringing I, and most readers of this blog, can totally relate to. My father was a tennis-playing executive at a multinational corporation. So am I.

Federer didn't need to fulfil the ambitions of a tennis-parent. His parents played recreational tennis at the firm's club. "We’d spend weekends on the tennis court," Lynette (his mother) recalled, "and the kids"—Roger and his sister, Diana, who was two years older—"would join us... It was Roger’s decision, at twelve, to quit playing soccer and to enter the program at the Swiss National Tennis Center, in Ecublens, two and a half hours by train from home.

Roger Federer's balanced perspective, his view of tennis as just a part of life, is why it now feels like a golden age is ending. Novak Djokovic has taken tennis to an entirely new level. Andy Murray has sworn to catch up by "working two per cent three per cent harder". These guys already work very hard. The marginal cost of that extra "two per cent three per cent" is high.

With his sixteen titles already in the bag, with his two young daughters at home, I doubt that Federer will put in that extra two per cent three per cent. He could spend that time at home, attending, say, a teddy bear's tea party. I know I would. Despite that, I think Roger Federer will will himself on to one more grand slam title before he rides off into the sunset. His best chance is at Wimbledon next year. One final chance then for Wimbledon, and the tennis world, to enjoy its great middle-class champion.

Test Cricket's Invisible TRPs

I woke up this morning, poured myself a cup of coffee, and reflected on the possibilities. India are playing a test match in Bridgetown, Barbados. Has India's batting crumbled again? Did Fidel Edwards bounce out Virat Kohli? Did my home town openers, Mukund and Vijay, do well? Are we scoring runs quickly enough to declare and force a win? Did it rain?

I had experienced hope, dread, and technical curiosity even before I checked the score on Cricinfo, when I was flooded with relief. My mind then went on to consider further possibilities. A thrilling Dhoni blitz before a lunchtime declaration? An Indian batting collapse followed by an attritional run chase? A bathetic century nurdled out en route to a tame draw? More rain?

This is the beauty of test cricket. I haven't been watching this test match on TV. But it is on my mind. The game has been playing on my imagination. Test cricket is spacious enough, rich enough in its range of narrative possibilities, to capture the imagination. No other cricket format, perhaps no other sport, has that ability.

People who look at Television Rating Points to measure the appeal of test cricket are missing something big. Enjoying the game and watching it on TV are not the same thing.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at Wimbledon

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is playing at the Haymarket Theatre this summer. Advertising posters for the play are all over London's tube network. So, this old favourite was on my mind as I made my way to Wimbledon earlier this week.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is a (brilliant) Tom Stoppard play, based on the same characters and events as William Shakespeare's Hamlet, but told with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as the protagonists. These are Hamlet's childhood friends, roped in by the King and Queen to try and coax Hamlet out of his madness. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern only half understand the situation they've let themselves into, fail to change Hamlet, make some brilliant but immediately forgotten discoveries along the way, and are ultimately killed for their troubles. Stoppard makes these unfortunates his tragicomic heroes. Hamlet and OpheIia have bit roles in this play, walking in and out of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's life-story, setting context.

I've always loved the way Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead inverts figure and ground, forcing an expansion of perspective. That is also the reason I love being at Wimbledon during the first week.

During the first week at Wimbledon, one can watch the stars play on Centre Court. I got to see King Rafa stride on to Centre Court as defending champion. Now, he owns this stage. It was fun to watch doubting Prince Andy ask "To be or not to be, that is the question" of his not-quite-adoring home fans. A Miss Marple look alike who was sitting next to me prefers Novak Djokovic to Andy Murray, because Novak always applauds his opponent's shots.

However, the most distinctive and memorable Wimbledon experience is quite possibly watching matches on the outside courts. These are courts with no grandstands or TV cameras, where less famous names play. Fans generally sit court side, yards away from the players, like at the local tennis club. I can't think of any other world class event where fans get so close to the performers; in cricketing terms this is like watching the action from second slip.

Sitting so close to the action, it is easy to tune into the physicality of the game: ball speed, spin and bounce, the player's size and gait. Mood and emotion from the players - a grimace fleeting across a face, a pleading glance at a coach, the slope of a shoulder - communicates in a way that doesn't happen on TV or in the stadium courts. The court side perspective brings these matches alive, despite the unfamiliar names.

For instance, I cheered for a slender Chinese girl called Shuai Zhang who was taking on the muscular Svetlana Kuznetsova. Zhang, who has just stabilized a spot in the top 100, did brilliantly to take the first set before Kuznetsova overpowered her. Zhang's mother and coach were sitting right across the aisle from me. They appreciated the support. They'd exchange thumbs up signs with me whenever I cheered Zhang for threading the needle with a backhand down the line. This sort of interaction is so not going to happen with Andy Murray's mom up on Centre Court.

I watched Monica Niculescu playing a successful underarm drop serve, a shot I thought had retired with Michael Chang. I watched the world #163 Ruben Bemelmans limp off court, visibly exhausted after losing a five set marathon to world #34 Julien Benneteau. Watching court-side, it is a lot easier to respect how good a player the world #163 really is.

Perhaps I am sympathetic to non-superstars because I am primarily a cricket fan. Cricket lends itself especially well to showcasing the spunk and grit of the lesser gods. Balwinder Singh Sandhu always has a place in my cricketing pantheon for THAT delivery to Gordon Greenidge in the 1983 World Cup final. Similarly, Sameer Dighe also has a place in my pantheon for taking India to victory against Waugh's Aussies in that epoch-making Chennai test match in 2001, despite a rampaging Glenn McGrath. In tennis, players of the stature of Balwinder Singh Sandhu and Sameer Dighe don't play in the equivalent of World Cup finals, say in Wimbledon finals.

Watching Zhang, Niculescu and Bemelmans on the outside courts of Wimbledon is perhaps the closest tennis gets to being a game, not just of the superstars, but of ordinary people striving for greatness. The first week at Wimbledon is spacious enough, big-hearted enough, to accommodate not just sweet Prince Hamlet, but also Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Atlantis Books, Oia, Santorini, and the triumph of Kindle

My family were on a chilled out vacation in the cliff-top village of Oia, on the Greek island of Santorini, when we discovered one of the world’s great bookshops. Specifically, the tenth best bookshop in the world, as certified by Lonely Planet. Other cities which feature top ten bookshops are London, Paris, San Francisco, Rome, Buenos Aires, Berlin and Beijing. Pattern recognition software would never have completed that list with Oia, Santorini, population 1230, but the editors of Lonely Planet got this one right. Atlantis Books deserves to be on the top ten list. It is almost everything a bookshop should be.



Atlantis Books is lined from floor to ceiling with books, with more books piled up on table tops and benches. It has a two shelves labelled Political Theory, and no airport-style displays featuring the latest John Grisham best seller. The greatest number of books are in English, but it also has shelves of German, French and Greek books. The internal roof is contoured, and supports a paper chandelier. A nook leads up into a cranny, which leads up a twisty chute with poetry stencilled on to the whitewash, which leads up on to a terrace overlooking the caldera, which hosts literary or musical events on summer evenings. It smells like a college library, or a multi-generational family library.

The name Atlantis Books is moist with meaning. Remains of a sophisticated Minoan culture dating back to 1500 BC have been discovered on Santorini. This may well have been the basis for Plato’s writings about Atlantis, about the glorious island civilization which was swallowed by the sea.

The staff at Atlantis Books are great. They are happy smiling youngsters from the USA or the UK who clearly have a college education, love books, and are happy to talk with guests about their shop. Some of the staff sleep in the shop, in neat beds tucked away into little corners. One of them, an English poet wearing a cloth cap and a wispy beard, asked me what I did. “I’m a business executive”, I told him. “You must be a photographer”, he replied, pointing to my Canon DSLR. He was being nice. Poets and photographers fit the Atlantis Books vibe better than executives or lawyers.

I found a book I wanted to buy. It was an autographed copy of a graphic novel called The Corridor, by Sarnath Banerjee. I'd never heard of Sarnath Banerjee, or of contemporary Indian graphic novels, which is great, because the point of browsing in a bookshop is to discover new stuff.

My wife and daughters also picked out books they wanted to buy. We proceeded to the billing counter. For the first time in our long and chatty visit, the staff were nonplussed. They talked among themselves about how to transact a sale. They couldn't get the credit card reader to work, online or offline. We finally paid cash. That struggle to get the credit card reader to work hints at why Atlantis Books, for all its virtues, is not quite everything a bookshop should be. I have a hunch it isn't profitable.

Atlantis Books may not need to be profitable. The gorgeous real estate could make sense as an independent investment. A lot of the books are hand-me-downs, donations from well wishers. I find it easy to imagine the staff are happy to work for a plane ticket, a bed in the bookshop, and a chance to enjoy Santorini through the summer. But the amateur feel of the place, running a bookshop for love rather than for money, connects up with another theme from our vacation: that bookshops selling paper books are not going be around very long. Those that are going to be around are characterful amateur ventures like Atlantis Books, rather than commercial outfits that care about moving merchandise.

We discovered e-books because our daughters packed their own backpacks on this vacation.

Our elder daughter's backpack was seriously heavy. Investigations revealed that this was because it was stuffed full of Enid Blytons and Harry Potters for holiday reading. Carrying this weight on flights was not an option. The negotiated compromise was to download her books onto the Kindle iPad app, which worked beautifully. My daughter discovered how to annotate, and therefore personalize, e-books on Kindle. This format also sorts out the thorny question of archiving (Enid Blytons from my childhood are still around at my mother's place, but they are disintegrating) and of storage (should we get rid of some Dr Seuss to create room for Malory Towers?).

I might be wrong here. People have been predicting the death of the bank branch for twenty years now, with good reason, but there still is no sign that branches are going away. Amazon, Apple, the greedy IPR lobby and captured regulators can still destroy e-books. They will have plenty of opportunity to mess up pricing, technology standards and user rights. But chances are, they won't. Chances are that by the time my children are old enough to explore the Cyclades without their parents, paper books will be quaint, much loved relics from the past; like hand wound wrist watches, Kodachrome slides, fountain pens or vinyl records.

Chennai Super Kings' Feminist Karma

Chennai Super Kings, my home town cricket team, just won IPL 4 in style. They have clearly been the best team on show since the inception of the IPL, with two trophies, one runner up spot, and one semi-final finish.

Many reasons have been ascribed to this performance, from MS Dhoni's captaincy, to the stability of the squad, to Stephen Fleming's coaching. I really like the tactical intelligence of CSK's game plans - Ashwin opening the bowling, Hussey and Vijay playing traditional cricket shots rather than low percentage slogs and Dil-scoops, Badrinath's clear role as the crisis man, Dougie Bollinger's yorkers at the death, shuffling the batting order to maintain left-right pairs - good, smart cricket.

But, as the many erudite Mylapore Mamis in CSK's fan base will be happy to explain, success does not derive only from one's tactics, from the flow of one's deeds on the field of action, from one's karyas on the dharmakshetra. Success also derives from karma, from the stock of goodness accumulated through many small acts of kindness and decency. These acts happened long before the men in yellow stepped onto the dharmakshetra of Chepauk.

One of these karmic factors working for CSK, which mainstream cricket commentators seem to have completely missed, is their co-ed cheering squad. CSK were the only IPL team with both men and women in their cheering squad. They were led by a shaven-headed fifty one year old drummer called Sivamani.

I certainly don't mean to pass judgment on the all-girl cheerleading squads, or on their admirers, as "bad". But CSK's co-ed approach just feels better, more comfortable, more natural. There is no obvious reason why leading a cheer for a sports team should be sexually charged. Cricket has long had a tradition of colourful, noisy and committed fans: Sri Lanka's Percy Abeysekara, India's Sudhir Gautam, West Indies' Trini Posse, England's Barmy Army. This cheering was never sexy (though the Barmy Army's chat with an Aussie fielder at the boundary line could involve pointed references to his sexuality). Sex and cricket always were fulfilling, but distinct, aspects of life.

When cheerleading was invented in America, at Princeton University in 1884, it was an all-male activity. Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Franklin Roosevelt were cheerleaders in their time. Somewhere along the way, cheering a sports team morphed into the stylized sexual displays put on in the USA today in football and basketball (but not in cricket's cousin baseball). The IPL imported this into cricket in the name of "marketing".

Perhaps the greatest failure of NFL style cheerleading at the IPL is not moral but material: it doesn't seem to work in marketing terms. Several teams with great looking all-girl cheering squads are failing to fill their stadiums, or to animate their crowds. Ultimately, people who want to watch dancing girls can watch them elsewhere, without the annoying bat-ball distractions. The men and women who pitch up at cricket matches are there to enjoy the cricket. Sivamani and his co-ed troop successfully orchestrated the cheering of these real fans. CSK's fans were easily the most passionate and vocal in the IPL, effectively adding another player to CSK, making them almost invincible at home. Long may the force remain with CSK, and with Sivamani.

Alfred North Whitehead on Civilization

Loved this quote by Alfred North Whitehead:

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them".

By this formulation, civilization is about being able to drink water out of a tap without worrying about infectious diseases. It is about being able to click I Agree to credit card or iTunes terms and conditions without worrying about nasties lurking in the fine print.

The Schengen Agreement, which makes possible paper free travel between 25 countries in Western Europe, is an advance for civilization. That feels like a more important standard than some pseudo-scientific "cost benefit analysis".

By contract, the American tax code - the 70000 page document which keeps an army of tax lawyers in profitable (but profoundly unfulfilling) employment – is not just a drag on the world economy. It is an assault on civilization itself.