"Winning Takes Care of Everything". By Tiger Woods, Barack Obama and Bhagavan Sri Krishna

Tiger Woods on the importance of winning

How far does one go to win? 

As far as one possibly can. 

Most sportsmen would agree with Tiger Woods on that point. 

Win gracefully if that is your style. Win ugly if not. Test the edges of the rules. Win! 

This might stick in the throat of nice, well brought up, middle class boys like this blogger. But fair enough. Tiger Woods is a pro. He is playing hardball. So are his competitors. Maybe winning does take care of everything. For Tiger. 

How well does that generalize? 

Depends. 

On how well winning is defined. And on how well-defined the rules are. 

In most walks of life both winning and the rules of play are very loosely defined. 

Barack Obama with Tim Kaine
On the importance of winning

So how hard does one play? 

Public life is a sphere where hardball might be a bad idea, where the unwritten rules are more important than in sports, where winning doesn’t take care of everything. 

So, it was interesting to learn that Nobel Peace prize laurate ex-President Barack Obama endorses hardball. 

Apparently he told Tim Kaine, then candidate Hillary Clinton’s VP nominee “Tim, remember, this is no time to be a purist. You've got to keep a fascist out of the White House". 

Barack thinks that when the stakes are high, purity is less important than winning. 

This is not a recent question. 

Bhagavan Sri Krishna played hardball. 

Arjuna asked Bhagavan Sri Krishna about dharma at Kurukshetra. Bhagavan Sri Krishna replied with his actions. Whether it was forcing Karna to waste Indra’s Shakthi on Ghatothkacha, obscuring the sun with his Sudarshana-chakra so Arjuna could avenge Abhimanyu’s death, or orchestrating Yudhishthira’s only lie so Dhrishtadhyumna could kill Guru Dronacharya, Bhagavan Sri Krishna was willing to play hardball. The stakes were high enough to justify this. Winning mattered more than purity.

In contexts that are more important than sports, maybe winning doesn’t take care of everything. 

But winning does take care of a lot of things.

Bhagawan Sri Krishna with Arjuna
On the importance of winning

Question for Australia: is Bodyline Okay?

Pujara being hit a bodyline delivery from Pat Cummins

Is bodyline okay now?

Is anybody in the cricket media/ establishment even asking that question?

The Aussies were bowling bodyline. There is no other word for it. 

In the just concluded India-Australia series, the Aussie quick bowlers were clearly trying to hit and intimidate the batters. They targeted top order batsmen like Pujara, who took eleven bodyhits during his heroic resistance in Brisbane. They also targeted lower order batsmen like Shami, whose fractured arm deprived India of a pace spearhead.

Pujara's body-blows on the last day at Brisbane

Media coverage has been mainly about India's courage in braving this assault, not about whether this kind of assault was cricket in the first place.

The Aussie leadership behind this bodyline attack – Tim Paine and Justin Langer – are supposedly the clean-cut role-models who are creating a wholesome new culture, after the win-at-all-costs sandpaper-gate culture created by Steve Smith and Darren Lehmann. They have copped a lot of flak for sledging and losing, but not for bowling bodyline.

The leaders of the cricket world - Gavaskar, Ganguly, Shane Warne, the Waugh twins, the Chappell brothers, England’s Michael Vaughn, thoughtful commentators like Harsha Bhogle – have had little or nothing to say about this tactic. The only murmurs of protest Google could find me are on niche Indian and Kiwi websites.

Michael Atherton seems to have brought up the appropriateness of bodyline in 2017, when Mitchell Johnson was peppering the English top order as well as bunnies like Jake Ball and Jimmy Anderson with short stuff. Steve Smith, then the pre-sandpaper-gate Australian captain, dismissed Atherton's view as "a bit over the top. No doubt, if they had the kind of pace that our bowlers can generate, they'd do the same thing."

Maybe bodyline is the new normal.

Maybe anyone who complains about bodyline is a wuss.

Maybe it is just naïve to expect professional cricketers to respect unwritten codes of conduct.

Maybe.

Mohammad Shami being hit by a bodyline delivery from Pat Cummins.
Shami was sent home with a fractured arm

Virat Kohli deserves credit for India’s amazing win in Australia

Team India at the Gabba with the Border-Gavaskar Trophy 

Victory at the Gabba! What an amazing win! What incredible attitude, spunk, guts and gumption!

Rishabh and Siraj celebrate

India’s amazing test series victory in Australia was achieved while India’s captain and best batsman - Virat Kohli - was away on paternity leave. So, for the past week my social media feed has been buzzing with snarky memes about how Team India is better off without superstar Kohli, or with TED talk style meditations on how “servant leaders” like Ajinkya Rahane are more effective than “alpha leaders” like Virat.

These memes are missing the point. Kohli deserves a ton of credit for this win.

Kohli’s biggest contribution to this moment was in making winning test series abroad India’s #1 priority.

In the later years of MS Dhoni’s captaincy that commitment was never clear. There was always a feeling that Dhoni’s test team were going through the motions rather than playing with belief, intent, or purpose. That sense of drift was obvious on the abysmal England tours of 2011 and 2014. It seemed obvious that MSD enjoyed limited overs cricket more than test matches. The fog never really lifted until Dhoni retired from test cricket.

At that time, it was easy to imagine that Indian cricket would become IPL-land, happy to have some T20 fun, but with no higher aspirations. With a different leader that could easily have happened.

Fortunately, Kohli never had any doubts that his ambition was to make India a great test team.

He brought in other leaders, like Ravi Shastri, who shared this vision. He committed to the workload of playing more tests, to the more arduous scheduling, to the fitness culture needed to maintain a pack of 8-10 genuine quick bowlers who could bowl with intensity after an entire day’s play in any conditions. Kohli prepped India's test team with away-wins in Sri Lanka and the West Indies, with home wins against New Zealand, South Africa England and Australia before setting out to conquer the final frontier – away wins in the SENA nations.

That prize almost eluded him. With a bit of luck India could have won in South Africa in 2017-18. We lost chasing fourth inning targets of 208 in Cape Town and 287 Pretoria. With a bit more luck India could have won in England in 2018. We lost chasing fourth inning targets of 195 in Birmingham and 245 in Southampton. Compare that with the 328 we hunted down against a better attack in Brisbane.

Mother Cricket finally smiled down on Kohli’s team when India finally beat Australia in Australia in 2018-19 for the first time in history. Captain Kohli’s noble quest hadn’t been in vain. The final frontier had been conquered.

If India had the resources to win again in Australia in 2020-21, it is in significant part because of Kohli’s legacy. There is nothing inevitable about having a team of young test players with the chutzpah to beat the Aussies in Australia. Kohli’s ambition, faith and patient team building set this win up.

The point is not to take anything away from the rest of the leadership group.

Most great achievements have many fathers. Rahane’s calm, Shastri’s mental toughness, even Bharat Arun’s tactical nous all contributed to this glorious moment. But leadership is about more than being the khadoos Maratha rock the rest of the team bat around, it is about more than being calm presence in the dressing room, it is more than making the smart field placings. Leadership is also about having a vision for what we will achieve together and having the resourcefulness and patience to develop a team to deliver on that vision. To that extent the leader who gave us the joy of Brisbane 2021 is the nappy-changing daddy Kohli.

Let there be no doubt that Virat has fire in his belly...

...even if he does have a softer side.

Note: I was surfing the web for pictures of Virat and Anushka with the daughter, who was born on the day India saved the Sydney test. The photos on the net right now are all stock images or fakes.

Zen and the Art of Driving from Mumbai to Goa

Planning a trip from Mumbai to Goa? Drive. It’s more satisfying than flying.

Our family drove from Mumbai to Goa and back last week. It’s a long drive - about twelve hours each way. It was worth the effort because Goa looked so much more beautiful on this trip than on the many earlier trips when I’d just taken a flight into Dabolim.

Why?

Robert Pirsig explained this effect in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

“To arrive in the Rocky Mountains by plane would be to see them in one kind of context, as pretty scenery. But to arrive after days of hard travel across the prairies would be to see them in another way, as a promised land.”

Similarly, to get off a flight, pick up stuff from the baggage carousel, find the coach sent by the beach resort, and then notice the pretty sunset while sipping a welcome drink is one kind of experience.

To leave home early in the morning, drive on to the Eastern Freeway overlooking Mazgaon docks, across the Vashi bridge from Bombay island to the Indian mainland, through the concrete jungle of Navi Mumbai, and then to zigzag up Bhor ghat to Lonavla, spot Duke’s Nose across the range in Khandala, trundle through the anonymous urban sprawl of Pune and then past acres of sugarcane fields in Satara, the railway bridges across the Krishna and Koyna rivers, the brick kilns at Karad, the movie studio signs in Kolhapur, and to then cross the border into Karnataka, zigzag back down to the plains through the waterfalls of Amboli ghat, drive through the buffer zone of the Radhanagari National Park while troops of monkeys bound across the road, get lost on a kuccha road, meet young water buffalos who won’t give way to a car, discover an unexpectedly lovely temple tank at Sawantwadi, reconnect with National Highway system and discover that NH66 is still a kuccha road because of construction work, get off the highway to drive through banyan tree canyons to get to our villa just before dark, and to then notice the sunset on the water while swigging a welcome drink; that is a totally different kind of experience. Goa does objectively look so much more beautiful, more unique, after that experience.

Here are some pictures we took along the way:

Up Bhor Ghat towards Lonavla

On the Mumbai - Pune Expressway

Across the Koyna River

Service Road along NH48

Highway pitstop (desi-jugaad style)

Ghat roads

Ghat roads - will be a tough drive after dark

School @ Ajara

Vista @ Amboli Ghat

Down Amboli Ghat

Monkey Troop @ Amboli

Entering Sawantwadi

Sawantwadi Talao

Sawantwadi Talao

Kalash @ Sawantwadi Talao in the evening light

Next time, maybe we’ll do the scenic route through Harihareshwar and Ganpatipule. Maybe we’ll do that route on a motorcycle that we actually know how to look after, like Pirsig did in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

"You were born a daughter" - a retro Nike print ad

This post is to share the retro Nike print advertisement below. I came across these images on a blog called ShoeGirl Corner while looking for background info on Nike advertising for my last blogpost. Loved the advert.

It does feel retro.

Does anybody do eight page print spreads in glossy magazines anymore? Including an entire page that has just five words?

The feminism doesn't feel retro, though.

Women as still often seen and portrayed (and see and portray themselves) in relational terms, as mother/ daughter/ wife/ sister/ friend, as significant others. There still are feminist breakthroughs to be had in taking out that scaffolding and portraying women as individuals, as protagonists, as heroes of their own stories.

Is it retro for Nike to feature normal people, like the soccer moms and school teachers who actually pay for Nike products, rather than Wimbledon champions and Olympic gold medallists? I hope not. 

Is Nike’s Just do it the worst tagline ever? Or the best?

Just do it. By Serena Williams.

Say you were Nike’s Chief Marketing Officer. 

Say you were searching for a tagline that would define your brand. 

Just do it. By Alex Morgan.

Would you choose a line associated with good karma, with success, with victory? Or would you choose a line spoken by a notorious serial killer facing the death penalty? 

You’d choose a line associated with success, right? Or maybe not. 

Nike’s famous Just do it slogan is derived from the last words of the serial killer Gary Gilmore.

The story is that the unrepentant serial killer was facing a firing squad and was asked if he had any last words. He said, “Let’s do it”. 

Dan Weiden, the head of the ad agency handling the Nike account, took Gilmore’s words and changed “Let’s do it” to "Just do it". The rest is history. Just do it remains one of the most powerful and successful marketing campaigns ever. 

To be fair, "Just do it" is not really comparable to my previous post about VW Phaeton. “Let’s do it” and “Just do it” could be general purpose English words in a way that Phaeton clearly is not. But the interesting point, the counter-point to the VW Phaeton story, is that good ideas need not originate from sources with good karma.

Let's do it. By Gary Gilmore.
On his way to being executed.

Was VW Phaeton the worst brand name ever?

A VW Pheaton rolling out of its "Transparent Factory"

Say you were a big company’s Chief Marketing Officer. 

Say you were searching for a brand name for your new super-premium flagship product. 

Would you choose a name associated with good karma, with success, with victory? Or would you name your product after one of history’s most notorious losers? 

You’d choose a name associated with success, right? Or maybe not. 

Back in 2002, Volkswagen chose to name their flagship luxury car the Phaeton. 

The Phaeton was the most premium car in VW’s history, a luxury sedan positioned alongside the Mercedes S class range, priced at over USD 100,000 in today's money. 

The German engineering worked. By most contemporary accounts the car was superb, with a Lamborghini class engine, with refined road-handling, fully loaded with features like passenger-specific climate control. It was made in VW’s famous Transparent Factory in Dresden, where customers could visit the shop-floor and watch their cars being assembled.

Yet, despite the superb product, the Phaeton was a commercial disaster. Production had to be stopped in 2014. 

VW Phaeton’s story follows the same narrative arc as that of the mythological Phaeton, the demi-god the car was named after.

The original Phaeton was born to Apollo and a water-nymph Clymene. 

In those days, the sun rode around the heavens in Apollo’s chariot, drawn by four white horses, guided by the charioteer Helios. 

Phaeton had not trained as a charioteer. But the teenager ignored his own unreadiness, took advantage of an unwise divine promise and took control of his father’s sun-chariot. Unable to control the sun-chariot’s incredible power he steered it too close to the earth (therefore scorching the Sahara), he then overcompensated and steered too far away from the earth (therefore freezing the tundra). At this point he panicked and was plunging the sun towards Greece itself. Zeus had no choice but to throw a thunderbolt at his grandson to strike Phaeton dead. Zeus had his duties. He had to save the planet.

So, why did Volkswagen’s Phaeton fail? 

Like all big events this failure doesn’t have a single cause. But let’s not rule out the possibility that Volkswagen invited Zeus’ wrath by invoking Phaeton’s name. 

Maybe the Chief Marketing Officer would have been better off choosing a classical sounding name that Zeus didn’t have strong feelings about, like Lexus or Acura.

Phaeton the unready charioteer plunging toward the earth

_________________________________________________

P.S. This blogpost was triggered by reading the chapter about Phaeton in Mythos, Stephen Fry's excellent retelling of the Greek epics.