Kolaveri Di Takes Europe by Storm

 Kolaveri Di takes Europe by storm, as predicted by Limca Cuts from Planet Earth.

Why Liz Hurley is turning Shane Warne into a metrosexual pretty-boy

I’ve been wrong about Liz Hurley’s love life previously. I predicted that Liz and her Indian husband Arun Nayar would make a good couple, which didn’t quite work out. Liz and Warnie are now an item, tweeting away lovingly to each other.

But is this person with Liz Hurley really Shane Warne?

The ultimate ornery, brawling Aussie has become a metrosexual pretty-boy. Why? I think it is for the same reason that I initially expected Liz Hurley and Arun Nayar to work.

My theory, or more precisely, my understanding of Jungian psychology, is that any couple needs a balance of yin and yang. Liz is one tough honey: determined, hard-working, ambitious, rich, successful and totally in charge. She is a woman with a lot of yang. She needs a man with plenty of yin for the two of them to work as a couple.

Initially I reasoned that the modest and unassuming Mr Nayar would work for Liz because he would provide that yin-yang balance. He would be happy to play the beta-male to Liz’s alpha-female. The way Liz put it in an interview, “Arun is astonishingly good-natured and would be the last man on earth to feel overshadowed by me. He’s thoroughly comfortable in his own skin”. With 20:20 hindsight, perhaps Mr Nayar was not all that comfortable being overshadowed by Liz, dissolving his identity to become Mr Liz Hurley. And actually, I have no reason to believe that Mr Nayar is full of yin-energy. Having a featureless personality and having yin-energy are totally different things.

If one were looking for a man with some yin-energy to balance Liz's yang, the old Shane Warne, the beer-bellied scrapper that cricket fans have known for decades, would have been central casting's last choice. Liz getting back together with her long term boyfriend, the posh, floppy-haired, finely chiselled Hugh Grant, would have felt more natural. Given that landscape, for Liz to step away from an obvious choice, to take on the raw material she found in Shane Warne, and to turn that beast into a pretty-boy with enough yin to keep the couple in balance, that has been an act of astonishing inventiveness and chutzpah that that old leg-spinning wizard Shane Warne himself would have been proud of. And heck, it just might work out for them.

I hope some film makers are following the Liz and Warnie love story. It has terrific potential as a modern, feminist interpretation of William Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew.

Follow your dream, not. By Garry Trudeau

"Let us take what the terrain gives" is kinder...

Is it principled to be principled?

"Nobody ever did anything very foolish except from some strong principle". I chanced upon this quote a couple of months ago, and it has stayed in my mind ever since. It is an old quote, by the 2nd Viscount Melbourne, the young Queen Victoria's political mentor, but it has stayed in mind because it feels contemporary, and is less cynical than it sounds.

Good principles - like, for instance, that all human beings are created equal - tend to be very abstract. It is never obvious how these abstract principles translate into programs of specific action, into doing. However, it is always tempting to invoke these principles to build support for a program of action.

The problem with linking an action plan closely with its animating principle is that it makes it harder to abandon the action plan, which is a pity, because only certainty with any action plan is that it will be made to look silly by "black swans", by real-world conditions that the plan did not, and could not have, known about. The bigger the agenda, the more quickly the black swans will strike.

A program of action which is tightly linked to a cherished principle usually means a program of action that isn't adaptive enough. von Moltke the elder was pointing in the same direction when he said "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy" 

"Let us take what the terrain gives"

"Follow your dream" is advice I have frequently received. This is also advice I have given multiple times. However, in most circumstances, this advice is worse than useless. I need to make choices about my career as a business executive in the here and now. Reminding myself of my childhood dream, to open the batting for the Indian cricket team, doesn't in any way help me make better life choices.

I discussed this in an earlier blog post, titled "Follow your dream, not". More recently, I came across the words "let us take what the terrain gives", which make the same point more elegantly, more positively.

These words were spoken by Daniel Kahneman back in 1996, at a graveside eulogy for his lifelong research partner Amos Tversky. Apparently, "let us take what the terrain gives" was the maxim Amos Tversky lived by. Kahneman went on to win the Nobel prize in 2002, his partner Tversky tragically missed out because he died so young. "Let us take what the terrain gives" is clearly not a case for embracing mediocrity, but it does recognize that "the other side of freedom is the ability to find joy in what one does".

BTW...I loved these pictures of Tversky on holiday in Switzerland in 1972...

Socrates. On beauty and victory

“Beauty comes first. Victory is secondary. What matters is joy.”

 These are the last words in Football Philosophy, a book by the Brazilian legend Socrates. I was doubly bereft as I read these words. First, because I read them in this obituary for Socrates, who died prematurely aged just 57. Second, because the great Brazilian disagrees with me.

Socrates seems to be saying that to abandon beauty for the sake of mere victory would be sacrilege. Yet, I posted earlier this year about the joy of "winning ugly". Where did I go wrong? At the time, I was writing about India winning at cricket during the World Cup. Was I sliding ingloriously into patriotism, that last refuge of scoundrels?

I could try to rebut the argument. I could wade into how players are characters in a larger drama, whose role is to do what it takes to win, not to step out of character seeking elusive beauty. But it somehow feels wrong, un-beautiful, to debate with someone who scored a goal like this in a World Cup:

 

 Adieu Socrates. Long may your tribe of thoughtful sportsmen thrive.

Kolaveri Di and the Eurovision Song Contest

Kolaveri Di has lived out fourteen out of its fifteen minutes of fame. So, one final thought to occupy that last minute: Kolaveri Di has what it takes to win the Eurovision song contest.

This thought comes straight from Only Mr. God Knows Why, an article by Anthony Lane (which, refreshingly, is still visible to the public on the New Yorker website). Anthony Lane's thesis is that a Eurovision contestant's main problem is reach out across a continent which doesn't know your language or culture. Consider these extracts:

“Europe has a problem...if you don’t speak English, you’re immediately at a disadvantage. The Greek guys? Good song, but it’s in Greek. Will they play that on the radio in France?"

...of the songs that have reached the finals over the years, two hundred and sixty-three have been in English, the lingua franca of pop. French, with a hundred and fifty, is the only other language in triple figures; the rest lag far behind...

On the one hand, the contest is an obvious chance for European nations, especially the less prominent ones, to flaunt their wares by singing in their native tongue. On the other hand, when you sing in English, you may be blasting through the language barrier to reach a wider audience, but are you not abasing yourself before the Anglo-American cultural hegemony...

 ...there are three well-established methods for avoiding it.

One is to be France, whose performers, as you would hope, grind away in French, year after year, repelling all intruders, giving only the barest hint that other languages, let alone other civilizations, even exist...

The second method is to be Ireland, the nation that has won the contest more often than any other. Seven times it has struck gold, and no wonder; if you can sing in English without actually being English—all the technical advantages without the shameful imperialist baggage—you’re halfway to the podium already.

The third method, which is by far the most popular, and which has brought mirthful pleasure to millions on an annual basis, is to sing in Eurovision English: an exquisite tongue, spoken nowhere else, which raises the poetry of heartfelt but absolute nonsense to a level of which Lewis Carroll could only have dreamed. The Swedes are predictably fluent in this (“Your breasts are like swallows a-nesting,” they sang in 1973), and the Finns, too, should be hailed as early masters, with their faintly troubling back-to-back efforts from the mid-seventies, “Old Man Fiddle” and “Pump-pump,”

 ...hence such gems as Austria’s “Boom Boom Boomerang,” from 1977 (not to be confused with Denmark’s “Boom Boom,” of the following year), Portugal’s “Bem-bom,” from 1982, and Sweden’s “Diggi-loo Diggi-ley,” which won in 1984. The next year’s contenders, spurred by such bravado, responded with “Magic, Oh Magic” (Italy) and “Piano Piano” (Switzerland). Not that the host nation relinquished the crown without a fight, as anyone who watched Kikki Danielsson can attest. Her song was called “Bra Vibrationer.” It was, regrettably, in Swedish.

Kolaveri Di fits this third formula perfectly. One doesn't need to really know either Tamil or English to get into the spirit of Kolaveri Di. "Distance-u la moon-u moon-u, moon-u colour-u white-u", is right up there with anything the Swedes, Finns or Portuguese can create. Please note: it is entirely conceivable that India will participate in the Eurovision song contest one day, last year's winner was Azerbaijan.

On an aside, maybe the Punjabization of India I posted about last week is because Punjabi is the most onamatopoeic of Indian languages. I don't know Punjabi, yet, I have no problem understanding "Chak de India" or "Tootak tootak tootiyan hey jamaalon". The language used by Premchand, Tagore, Bharatiyar, or for that matter, Shakespeare, is necessarily for narrower audiences.