Video game or adventure?

"Bosses complain that...Net Geners demand...an over-precise set of objectives on the path to promotion (rather like the missions that must be completed in a video game)." Thus spake the Economist about Net Geners, or Generation Y, those born in the 80s.

The Economist is, as usual, not untrue but a bit harsh. Many people born in previous decades, including me, have thought in terms of "mission accomplished, so I'm entitled to a promotion". But the metaphor, career as a video game, is apt.

In today's economy, the video game no longer works as advertised. Missions accomplished are being quickly replaced by even more arduous missions to accomplish. But the promotions and bonuses to sweeten the journey, which were a part of the deal, are no longer happening. This heightens the angst in the zeitgiest, we all feel like smashing our broken Nintendos.

So, it was refreshing to hear a different metaphor on Radio 4 last week.

Sean B Carroll describes the careers of biologists following in Darwin's footsteps; these careers were not games but adventures, defined by both spirit and deed. Carroll picked this phrase, adventure being defined by both spirit and deed, from CW Ceram, who wrote about "archaeology as a wonderful combination of high adventure, romance, history and scholarship".

This spirit of adventure - with its acknowledgment that every career is a journey into the vast unknown, where the familiar rules no longer apply, where one will make fast friends and combat appalling evil, where there is the possiblity of both spectacular success and awful tragedy, a journey which is essentially a journey of the spirit in which the greatest challenge is to find truth and integrity - this spirit of adventure is sadly missing in corporate life.

Can this spirit be introduced? Individually, yes. A lot of this spirit probably does exist, in private. But institutionally? Maybe...though I'm not about to ask the HR staff to inject the spirit of adventure into my workplace.

"So, what do you do?"

In New Zealand, when this question is asked, it means "do you sail or do you hike?". Not "are you a lawyer or a banker?". Some good Kiwi perspective for these troubled times.

Is this true? Heard it from a colleague of mine, a big outdoors enthusiast, who spent a year in Kiwi-land on a working holiday. Context matters; a management consultant who flies in from Hong Kong would have probably met more people who describe themselves as Business Systems Analysts rather than as (amateur) Yngling Class yatchsmen. But the question is still meaningful: when asked in a neutral context, which identity do people assume? I suspect, and hope, that the story I heard is still true when "So, what do you do?" is asked in a neutral context. Kiwi readers...any comments?

My own culture, the culture of urban middle-class India, mostly devout Hindus and a smattering of Sunnis and Catholics, who live by an impeccably Protestant work ethic, is very different. Back home, you are who you are at work. This is great when one is gunning for 10% GDP growth, but might make India's collective psyche a little less resilient to the business cycle.

This assumption is expressed in sometimes quaint ways: in a typical South Indian wedding invitation, the bridegroom's name is suffixed by his educational qualifications, the name of his employer and his rank/ designation. Or think back to Sen-saab, IAS, from English August; his identity cannot be decoupled from the fact that he is an Indian Administrative Service officer.

This assumption about the source of identity defines an interesting cultural axis.

My Chinese friends tell me that China is pretty close to my slice of India. My reading of Memoirs of a Geisha suggests that Japan, if anything, is further out on the same axis. The USA is, in my personal experience, only a little bit more laid back than India.

England, surprisingly, is a lot closer to New Zealand than the USA. A typical conversation after a game of squash might go:

Prithvi: "So, where do you work?"

English squash player: "About eight miles off the M1".

The same conversation in sub-text should read:

Prithvi: "How do you make a living?". Since I am well brought up and cosmopolitan I don't follow that question up with "So, what is your salary?", which would be quite acceptable at home

English squash player: "How I make a living is strictly my business, but I'm too polite to tell you to butt out, so I'll say something neutral"

I guess England is in Europe after all.

Grabbing the SKU Rationalization bull by the horns

The day after Pongal is mattu Pongal, literally cattle Pongal. The idea is to thank the cattle for their help with the harvest. The cattle are fed sugar cane, which is a nice alternative to hay. They are decorated with flowers and bells, their horns are painted, and they are proudly paraded through their home towns.

Asian Paints, India’s leading paints brand, markets small cans of paint in festive colours during the Pongal season, targeted specially at the horn-painting market. Cool. This is the work of India Inc., woven right into the fabric of Indian life.

Except... extensive googling earlier today reveals no evidence that this Pongal SKU (stock keeping unit) actually exists.

I first heard this story about twenty years ago from my father. My dad was a marketing professional; he was probably trying to impress on his teenage son that marketing is cool, and in that mission he succeeded. Is there a version of events that could make my dad’s story not only successful, but also accurate?

Perhaps 20-25 years ago paint was mixed in centralized factories, packaged in cans, and then distributed nationally. This would have meant managing a system with literally millions of colour * can size combinations. Today, pigments and a paint base are probably distributed independently, and mixed and packed at the point of sale. So the farmer painting a bull’s horns can now buy a small quantity of paint, in the colour of his choice, at a retail point in the local farmers’ market....

Or maybe painting contractors re-sell the small sample cans they get free from paint companies to wholesalers, who in turn bundle these small paint cans into special Pongal packages, which include sugar cane stalks, flowers, new clothes, luridly illustrated religious calendars, and cans of paint, to sell at local farmers’ markets.

Either way, the one thing I’m pretty sure of is that the work of India Inc. is woven right into the fabric of Indian life. Asian Paints did try to build this Pongal connection into their brand identity with this excellent TV commercial. Enjoy.

Happy Pongal from the Grateful Dead

Reach out your hand
If your cup be empty
If your cup be full
May it be again...

These words are from Ripple, a classic Grateful Dead song released in 1970. They were on my mind because it was Pongal earlier this week.

Pongal is the main harvest festival along the South East coast of India, where I'm from. Pongal is celebrated by boiling milk in every home; it is literally the moment when the steaming milk brims over, symbolizing abundance.

The Grateful Dead clearly understood the symbolism. So does the Jamaican bloke who makes cappuccinos at the tennis club down the road, there's always a nice head of foamy milk topping off the (expensive) brew.

Happy Pongal to all readers of this blog.

Rules that are meant to be broken, and Broken Windows

I had gone with my children and their cousins for a swim at the Madras Club. My 14 month old nephew was swimming for the first time. I was glad that this rite of passage happened at the Madras Club. My generation of cousins have spent many hours swimming here, accompanied by my father or grandfather. I thoroughly enjoyed the moment, and took a few pictures to remember the occasion by.

By some obscure club by-law taking photos at the poolside is not allowed. I knew about the rule; it’s not a bad rule per se in the age of the internet. I ignored the rule. Nobody objected. A sense of proportion, common sense, prevailed over rigid bureaucracy. Good call.

Except...I have long been a fan of the broken windows theory. This theory maintains that small rule-breaks send out a signal that nobody is in charge, and lead to progressively more severe rule-breaks. For instance, if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, the rest of the windows will soon be broken. A building with many broken windows left unrepaired will soon be looted, and so on. I was delighted to read about experimental evidence confirming this theory.

A sense of proportion and broken windows, do the two thoughts sit together? Apart from the profound truth that rules are great as long as they don’t inconvenience this blogger.

Maybe context matters. My (self-indulgent) interpretation is that in small, personal, closed homogenous groups, when the shadow of the future is a real force, when the stakes are low, broken windows is overkill. At an extreme, broken windows within a family would be pathological. At the other extreme, a sense of proportion is not going to manage millions of fleeting, anonymous interactions on the streets of a city, or in any marketplace. Simple, explicit, rigidly enforced rules are necessary in this context. A private privileged member’s club in my hometown is a lot closer to the family end of that scale.

Bodyline is still so resonant in cricket because that was the point at which the balance tipped. Before bodyline, cricket defined, and was defined by, an implicit gentleman’s code. Douglas Jardine was the man who declared that the game was now too big to be contained within a gentleman’s code.

What they don't teach you at the Australian Cricket Academy

A point worth making when it is obvious, because it will be quickly forgotten.

Cricket schools, and more generally, cricket systems, don't produce great cricket teams. They do produce good teams. The vital gap between good and great is, unfortunately, something that can't be taught at school.

The reason this is worth remembering is that the Australian cricket system, including the Australian Cricket Academy, got a lot of credit for Australia's domination of world cricket through the 90s and the early 2000s. Even at this dark moment for Australia, when the talent cupboard is looking bare, the system is working as well as it ever was.

The system - the ACA, the first class structure, grade cricket, schools cricket, talent scouts, sports science, the whole shebang - just ensures that Australian cricket is competitive, that standards never go into free fall like in the Windies. The Aussie system is very good, but not fundamentally different from the cricket systems in England, India or South Africa.

What made the Border-Taylor-Waugh cricketing dynasty was not the Aussie system, but a bunch of exceptional players.

From Bombay to Baramulla

Here is an argument I heard a lot of six months ago, which, since 26/11, seems so facile that it has vanished from the debate. It is worth noting how dangerous this argument is right now, because this argument will find plausible new clothes and re-appear in six months, or a year, or in six years.

The argument goes roughly as follows:

Kashmir is not worth the bother. Let it go. Give it to Pakistan. Or give it independence. Once the vast resources invested in Kashmir are freed up, India can carry on realizing its manifest destiny as a great nation that all of humanity looks to for moral, spiritual, technological and economic leadership.

This argument was well expressed by Vir Sanghvi, in this piece in the Hindustan Times in Aug 2008. Vir Sanghvi is the Editorial Director of the Hindustan Times, the former editor of Sunday magazine, a fairly mainstream journalistic voice I've agreed with many times in the past.

What 26/11 made painfully obvious is the naivety of this notion: that a surgical excision of Kashmir from India would result in a quid pro quo reduction in violence on this side of the border. This notion now looks as shallow as the conceit, back in 1947, that partition would “solve” the problem of plural identities in India.

India’s federal, democratic structure is not perfect, but it is designed well enough to accommodate the many distinct identities within India. Vir Sanghvi correctly points out that secession movements inspired by language, race and religion have been successfully accommodated within India multiple times, in places like Tamil Nadu, Mizoram and Punjab.

The reason the federal, secular, democratic framework of the Indian constitution does not work for Kashmir is that a scary number of the people who claim to speak for Kashmir are not Kashmiris, and don’t especially care about the political expression of a Kashmiri identity. They are international jihadists. Palestine, Chehnya, Kashmir, Iraq, Afghanistan, American tanks on sacred Saudi soil, Western decadence, apostate regimes in the Islamic world, insults to Islam in Danish newspapers – any grievance is grist to their mill. Understanding who these jihadist terrorists are and what these terrorists are trying to achieve is essential to understanding Kashmir in context, and to getting a sense for what it might mean to surgically excise Kashmir from India.

Terrorism is not especially Islamic. The personal psycho-drama that happens within a terrorist is neither mysterious, nor Islamic, nor the by-product of failed societies. It is commonplace. David Kilcullen, a brilliant Australian anthropologist who first learnt about terror as a soldier serving in Indonesia, gets his students to watch the film Fight Club to understand a terrorist’s psychology.

In essence, contemporary jihad, like all terrorism, is a rational political strategy. It was invented as a modern political strategy in 1946, when David Ben Gurion authorized the bombing of the Hotel King David in the then British Protectorate of Palestine. The consequence of this bombing was that Clement Atlee expedited the withdrawal of British forces from Palestine, thereby establishing the sovereign state of Israel. Wikipedia maintains that a former Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, took part in celebrations to mark the 60th anniversary of this attack, organized by the Menachem Begin center. The most ruthless terrorists in the world today are probably Hindu Tamils in Sri Lanka. The consequence of their ruthlessness, especially in murdering dissenting Tamils, has been that theirs is the only audible voice that claims to speak for Lanka’s Tamil people. The PKK, led by Abdullah Ocalan, killed 40,000 innocent Turks in the name of Kurdistan, winning the sympathy of bleeding heart liberals in Western Europe as a "people without a nation". Danielle Mitterand, the French President's wife was an public supporter of Ocalan, and pleaded for clemency in sentencing when Ocalan was captured by the Turkish army. The hijack of IC 814 from Kathmandu to Kandahar in 1999 led to the release of Masood Azhar, a Jaish e Mohammad operative believed to the involved in the attacks on Mumbai. Another of the IC 814 terrorists released, Omar Sheikh, was involved in the murder of WSJ journalist Daniel Pearl.

The most successful terrorist attack of all time, purely in terms of the political pay-off, must be 911. It resulted in the Al Queda being addressed by the world’s only superpower like it was a force of equal stature. Their preferred tactic, suicide bombings to murder non-combatants, is now dignified by the term War on Terror. Before the War on Terror, the Al Queda was a toxic but small fragment left over from the Soviet war in Afghanistan, with no easily identifiable outcome it was working towards. It felt, or could have been made to feel, like an anachronism. It might have struggled to capture the imagination of young people; it might have struggled to stay alive another generation. That is no longer a problem, not for the Al Queda.

It is now crystal clear that there is no morally justified use of terror, exactly like there is no morally justified use of genocide. It is also clear that terrorism is growing alarmingly because terror works. The only way in which the world-of-order can defeat terror is to make it a strategy that does not work.

Terrorists cannot be engaged and defeated in open battle. They need to be starved. They need to be deprived of the oxygen of media exposure, of new recruits, of arms, of money. Most importantly, they need to be deprived of the sweet smell of success.

The world-of-order needs to realize that this victory will be won slowly. This victory will involve intelligence, media management, paranoia, nonchalance, ruthlessness, mercy, narcotics control, anti-money-laundering operations, inter-national co-operation...lots of stuff. There will be no spectacular television-friendly signing of treaties that constitute a “solution”.

This is the context in which the Kashmir situation must be understood. India’s political class has got this one right. Kashmir needs to stay within the Indian Union, with as humane a police/ military presence as is possible. Not because of jingoistic nationalism. But because throwing a hunk of juicy red meat to the beast of international terrorism, breathing energy and life into the beast, is the most dangerous and irresponsible thing any civilized nation could do, today, or at any time in the foreseeable future.