Atonement

Within minutes of starting Atonement, I had transcended time and gender and stepped into Briony Tallis’ skin. I knew her: her vanity, modesty, self-absorption, idealism. I felt her intoxication, the acuteness of her need. I was in thrall. This clearly was outstanding fiction.

But then, while surfacing for a breath, I made the mistake of reading the blurb on the back cover. The blurb hinted at a sad story. It talked about “Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start. Briony will have…committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone”.

My credit-crunch wearied soul had no appetite for more sadness. For instance, I have no intention of reading A Thousand Splendid Suns, however well it is written. So I put Atonement down and moved on to the (mediocre) consolations of Eragon.

Fortunately, Atonement remained in the stack of books on my bedside table. I picked it up again, and on this second go, I couldn’t put it down. And, best of all, it is not a sad story. I just finished the last chapter, and I was standing on my chair and cheering as I read the words

Here’s the beginning of love at the end of our travail
So farewell,kind friends, as into the sunset we sail.

Or more accurately, despite finishing the last chapter on a transatlantic flight, my spirit was standing and cheering.

I haven’t seen the movie. I know Keira Knightly is in the film, and she could only play Cecilia. I let myself imagine Keira’s face on Cecilia, and that worked fine. Good casting.

But how would this book work on film? The tension in the book is between reality, and another reality that might have been. In a book, that alternative reality can be hinted at, and the imagination will do the rest. In a movie, the imagination does not have the time to conjure up an alternative reality. Mind-states, or streams of consciousness, which are created so precisely in this book, rarely communicate on screen. Recreating a period only goes so far. Where will the narrative tension that drives the film forward come from?

I believe the film is good. Looking forward to it…

BTW…being in thrall, being immersed in a complete world which is known only through the imagination, has got to be the greatest joy, the most important purpose, of fiction. Film doesn’t work that way. Film works by saturating the senses, not by engaging the imagination.

For the exception which proves that rule, watch Picnic at Hanging Rock. Its probably the most gripping suspense film I've seen; first watched as a teenager in Madras, back when a late night English film on Doordarshan was a rare treat.

Bad Science

Read this book. Ben Goldacre is a doctor + blogger. This is his good-natured rant about the manipulative tricks of money grubbing charlatans who adopt the trappings of science. His targets include homeopaths (homeopathic drugs are no better than placebos), pharma companies (trials which show expensive drugs to be ineffective are not published), and the media (who publicise a fake health scare a week). Great fun.

I hereby proclaim that Moonballs from Planet Earth and Bad Science are kindred souls.

The trouble with bad science actually starts where the book leaves off, when one moves beyond pharmacology. There are many fields worthy of scientific enquiry, where placebo-controlled, double-blind, randomized trials are not possible.

For instance, Earth Sciences. It is worth knowing if we are making our planet uninhabitable. However, we can't find out by doing an experiment. We can't hold out a control sample of several dozen similar planets where the fossil fuels were never burnt, and compare the richness of life-forms observed a few thousand years later in the test and control. So scientists have to use models, which are intrinsically fallible.

Calling out the shortcomings of the models used is central to being an honest scientist. However, lists of model caveats don't make for good TV (or for good top-management presentations). So the media coverage of global warming is about as alarmist as the fake-health-scare-a-week stories that Ben Goldacre rants on about.

The guy who first called this non-science, was Bjorn Lomberg, in the Skeptical Environmentalist. It is not light reading, but it is also worth looking up, just to get a sense for how hard it really is to construct good science, with limited data, in the thick of an emotionally charged, politicized debate.

Slumdog Smarts

Slumdog Millionaire makes a good point about intelligence: the chaiwallah knows a lot of answers, if the questions relate to his life experiences.

This thought sits on a serious problem with IQ testing, or with most standardized tests like the SAT, GRE or CAT. They don't test native intelligence. They test familiarity with a specific way of thinking, which is embedded in culture.

This is the reason why cultural minorities tend to do poorly on standardized tests. A favourite example from this piece by Malcolm Gladwell illustrates this point: Kpelle tribals from Liberia naturally group knives with potatoes, because knives are used to cut potatoes. While this is quite logical, standardized tests generally expect knives to be grouped with other tools, and potates with other root vegetables.

Unfortunately, this unsurprising and well understood limitation of standardized testing has led to horribly complicated racial profiling for university admissions in the USA, and in explicit, even more divisive, quotas in India.

Surely the more creative route is in designing culture-neutral tests? And in validating these instruments sufficiently to bring them into mainstream use?

This blog is idealistic enough to believe that better technology can at least alleviate really knotty political problems.

Series = Home + Away

Why not define a test series to span a set of both home and away matches? It seems like the obvious best answer to me. Yet, almost nobody in the cricket establishment is talking about it.

As I write, England are trying to conjure up an unlikely result in Port of Spain to square the test series against the Windies, who seem determined to draw the game and clinch the series. The cricket would be a lot more fun if the Windies were trying to win...but the Wisden Trophy is at stake.

Yet, the Windies arrive in England next month to start a new series. If the series were defined to span games played in both locations, there would be less of a home advantage, there would be fewer dead games, and both sides would play more natural and attacking cricket for more of the time.

In 2008 India and Australia played 8 test matches, four in Australia and four in India. Wisden thinks Australia won one series 2-1 and India won the next series 2-0. I think India won the Border-Gavaskar trophy 3-2, a very fair score.

Think back to South Africa checking out at the Oval in 2008. Or Rahul Dravid not enforcing the follow on at the Oval in 2007. Most test series are already scheduled as home-away combos. Surely there is an obvious way to avoid silliness of this sort.

Gwyneth Paltrow's Hindu Haircut

Regular readers of this blog may not have been aware: Gwyneth Paltrow has had a haircut.

Gwyneth revealed that this was part of the healing process following the death of her father. "I was very very attached to my hair," she says. "I still had hair from when my father was alive. I made it a talisman. Then one day, on a shoot with Mario Testino, I suddenly said 'I need to cut it now'. It was almost as if it was part of the grieving process. I just had to let something go."

Gwyneth may not have known this, but she is a karma yogi going through the process of samskara.

A karma yogi fulfills her destiny, or achieves personal growth, or attains moksha, by facing up to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune with integrity and dignity, in accord with her dharma. Rituals, like cutting one's hair when a father dies, are ways of ways of coping with grief and moving the soul along its natural journey.

Traditional Hindu doctrine might have preferred for the psyche to step into a new life-stage in front of the sacred fire rather than at a Mario Testino photo-shoot, but that surely is a minor detail.

Banker or Blogger (2)

A second innings then for this post...in response to Greg Pye's excellent comments.
____________________________
On the recent increase in US and UK Ginis, the OCED data does actually show a time series. The story doesn't really change if one looks back to the mid 80s. Here are the rankings from ~20 years ago from a sample of 24 (rather than 30) OECD countries:

1. Mexico 0.452
2. Turkey 0.434
4. United States 0.338
8. United Kingdom 0.325
12. Canada 0.287
15. New Zealand 0.271

- The biggest mover is New Zealand, which was a hot little economy in the 90s, and saw a sharp inequality rise then. Kiwi Ginis seem steady over the last decade

- The USA, and most of the OECD, have expectedly seen a steady rise in inequality
since the mid 70s, the earliest data on this table

- Inequality in Britain sems to have peaked 1990 and remained there or thereabouts ever since. The steep rise seems to have happened in Margaret Thatcher's time. Surprisingly, and maybe incorrectly, the last data point actually shows a small Gini decline in the UK
__________________________________
On the irrelevance of national statistics, I do think inequality is experienced most powerfully within a tight reference group. As H.L. Mencken once said, "a man's satisfaction with his salary depends on whether he makes more than his wife's sister's husband". But I do think there is a difference between the angst induced by a brother-in-law's Ferrari, and the unease triggered by the suffering of millions of decent people.

What I'm trying to get at is the impact that that suffering has on the psyche. Does a keenly felt awareness of suffering push the psyche towards work, towards seriousness?

I love the thought that sensitivity to suffering need not be limited by national boundaries. Absolutely. But the boundary could provide the psyche with a prop with which to make peace with the suffering of innocents.

The central point in the first post was that the psyche tends to deal with injustice by wrapping itself around work, around seriousness. I'm sure it sometimes does. But the weakest part of the argument is that the psyche could, and often does, cope by imposing an identity on the people suffering, turning them into the "other". Race, caste, class, religion, nation...any schism will do. Once that boundry has been established, the psyche is free to go ahead and have fun.
___________________________

Was this post triggered, at some subliminal level, by the hoop la around Slumdog Millionaire?

Blogger or banker?

Here's the theory on people who work for a bank and blog for fun. Do they think of themselves as bankers or bloggers?

It boils down to their Ginis. You see, some people have magic lamps inhabited by blue-suited banker Ginis, some people's magic lamps have sailor-suited Ginis... :)

Actually, a Gini coefficient is a measure of statistical dispersion, and is a standard measure of income inequality in a society. My take is that people from more unequal societies are more likely to define their identities in terms of who they are at work.

Why?

Imagine a relatively well-off person living in an obviously unequal country. He needs to make peace with the fact that he lives a comfortable life, but the people from the slum/ favela/ ghetto/ council estate/ inner city live obviously miserable, abysmal lives. The sheer presence of that abyss, the unspoken fear and guilt that that abyss evokes, pulls at the psyche of the comfortably-off like gravity. The psyche protects itself from that pull by believing that privilege and comfort are deserved, earned, by hard work, by education, by qualifications, by seriousness.

In this unequal context, it is hard to think of oneself in purely frivolous terms. It feels like being the surfer on the beach in Apocalypse Now. Its the reason why cricket in India or football in Mexico are not just silly games played for fun, they are about the redemption of national pride.

So what do I expect to observe in the data? I expect people from more unequal societies to wrap their identity ever more tightly around their professional selves.

Here are Ginis for some of the OECD-30. Their rankings are:

1. Mexico: .474
2. Turkey: .430
4. USA: .381
7. Great Britain: .335
8. New Zealand: .335
12. Canada: 0.317

The two most unequal OECD members are Mexico and Turkey. Fortunately, I have friends from Mexico and Turkey who tell me their compatriots unambiguously define who they are in terms of who they are at work.

Also, to my earlier observation, Britain's Gini is the same as New Zealand, and is a lot lower than the USA. Canada is even further away from the USA than is Britain. So if the theory holds, Canadians should be a less likely to derive their identity from work than either Americans or Britons, despite Canada's stereotypical cultural location somewhere in-between the USA and Britain.

India is not in the OECD. So I looked up the World Bank's Ginis metrics, which show that India is better (i.e. more equal) than the USA.

While that is flattering, and says something important about the world's only superpower, the World Bank might be systematically underestimating South Asian inequality. Pakistan looks really good on the same metrics, more equal than the Netherlands, Canada, France or Switzerland. That doesn't ring true. My hunch is that India really is in the mid - 40s pack, along with Mexico, China, Jamaica and Turkey.

A more classical theory, which involves no melodrama about the gravitational pull of the abyss, is the impact of marginal tax rates on labour supply. More equal societies have higher marginal tax rates. People therefore have less reason to work hard to earn money. They therefore invest more of their time, and identity, in leisure rather than labour.

I buy into the conventional theory, but it doesn't quite feel complete. Maybe that is because I remember an India with high marginal tax rates, in Indira Gandhi's time, when people still wrapped their identities around their work, even if they didn't work especially hard. The ways in which people construct their identities change more slowly than tax policy.