He’s Happier, She’s Less So

Nice article on the NYT on how happy women and men are.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/26/business/26leonhardt.html?ex=1348545600&en=594e67d014f6dc88&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Today's women have many more choices than their mothers or grandmothers. This is good.
However, choice in itself does not make people more happy. People with more choices are more responsible for their own destiny. This responsibility can, and does, feel onerous.

"All women in my society are housewives, therefore, I am a housewife" is a very comfortable position. "I am a smart, educated woman who chose to walk away from a lucrative, satisfying career to be a housewife" is a much less comfortable position. It's totally unsurprising that women in this position report being less happy.

What the research misses is that these less happy women are better off than their mothers and grandmothers who never had the option of having a career.

This is a serious argument worth making. Serious and influential people, including Professor Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago, have argued that reducing the choices available to individuals is good because it makes people more happy. This is just wrong-headed. Freedom, liberty, the ability to influence one's destiny...these are greater ends than the sort of experienced happiness that gets reported in surveys.

The happy people living in the Matrix were victimes.

Kismat

The Twenty20 finals. It came down to kismat. To a simple twist of fate.

India felt like the team of destiny through this tournament. When is it destiny? And when is it just dumb luck?

For sure. Have I ever had this much fun?

All emotional disengagement from Twenty20 cricket ended yesterday. One of the all time greatest cricket games I've seen. India beat Australia in the Twenty20 World Cup semi-final.

What was terrific was that India didn't scramble home over a lacklustre Australia. Australia played their best cricket. India stayed with them all the way. And pulled the special plays out of the bag to win.

What are my top memories...the ones that will not be captured in the cricinfo report?

Sreesanth's follow through and stare after bowling Gilchrist and Hayden. Nick Knight commented that it was unusual for an Indian bowler. Yeah, right. Joginder Singh's smile when he bowled a dot in the last over. Bhajji doing a bhangra on the boundary line. Robin Uthappa and Gautam Ghambir scampering unlikely, and un-Indian, singles. Gilchrist's ooh-ing grimace after edging Sreesanth to Dhoni; he didn't walk and wasn't given out. Yes, Gilly's still a hero - Gilly is Tubby Taylor's spiritial successor - but let's get real about walking in World Cup semi-finals. Hayden and Symond's ruthlessness in middle overs. The discipline the Aussie quicks kept up through Yuvraj's assault. No gimme balls, no wides, just quality bowling that would have won the game more often than not. Just that today Lee, Clarke, Johnson and Bracken were up against a Yuvraj who was playing out of his skin. To have watched him play in that zone, live, in a semi final...thank you.

Betfair says the likelihood of an India win is 53%. May the force be with India.

Tonight's the night before a World Cup final. Against Pakistan. What will the boys be going through? Will they get to sleep? Will they be able to keep their minds quiet, stay loose, and enjoy the atmosphere without letting the enormity of the occasion sink into their minds?

I think they will. I let myself hope at Lord's and I was proved wrong. Never mind. I'm letting myself hope again.

Are we having fun yet?

The Twenty20 World Cup is well underway.

Some spectacular hitting, close finishes, unexpected heroes. Daniel Vettori and Chris Schofield have been great performers. Yuvraj scored six sixes of a Stuart Broad over yesterday. India have recovered well from around 60-4 to post 150+ against South Africa today (SA haven't started batting at the time of writing).

Yet, through it all, I'm emotionally disengaged. Maybe its all going by too fast.

Great cricket isn't about sixer hitting any more than a great love story is about designer clothing. It takes time to get into the player's skins, to hear their back-stories, reflect on the twists and turns that happen as the game unfolds. It takes time to engage the imagination. It's when the imagination is engaged that cricket is no longer just about slugging the ball 100 yards. Cricket can become high drama. About determination and destiny. About character and human frailty. Cricket becomes a metaphor for life itself.

That happens most effectively in test series, precisely because it is slow moving. Ganguly's India v Waugh's Australia through 2001 - 04. The Ashes in 2005. They were gripping not because of the sixer hitting. Skills served a larger drama. Cricket is fun for the same reason that reading fiction is fun: both invite the use of imagination.

This could change. An India Pakistan final will give even Twenty20 a memorable emotional edge. But so far, its been about guys hitting big sixers. No human drama to capture the imagination, yet.

Structured Thinking and Writing Resources

Reference books I want on the desk of every person who attends my class on Structured Thinking and Writing:

1. The Pyramid Principle, by Barbard Minto
2. The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White
3. How to Lie With Charts, by Gerald Everett Jones
4. Say it With Presentations, by Gene Zelazny
5. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward Tufte.

When does real learning happen?

Should reference books be in libraries? Or should they be lying around on desk tops and cabinets, within casual stretching distance of where people sit when they work?

I'm debating this exact point with the HR department of the company I work for. I teach a course of business writing. I want my students to leave my class with a set of reference books that they can dip into when wrestling with a complex story. My belief is that this is when the real learning will happen.

HR wants me to put these books in the corporate library. Of course, a student who is serious about writing well could go to the library and check the book out. But the likelihood that a student will do this when wrestling with a real problem is low. So even the serious student will check the book out, flip through it, and put it back in the library without really internalizing any learning.

There's a pretty deep point here. People are receptive to learning at those moments when they most need to the information. The task of the teacher is make that information accessible at those moments. And ideally, to create those precious high-pressure moments when the student is receptive to learning.

O Captain! My Captain!

India beat Pakistan in a World Cup bowl-out. Zimbabwe beat Australia. Bangladesh knocked the West Indies out of a World Cup. S Badrinath and Akash Chopra clocked in double hundreds against a strong South Africa A.

Kapil Dev encouraged and inspired aspiring fashion designers in Delhi...click on this link to check out Paaji having a nice evening. Yet, through all that silliness and noise and hype, the one piece of news that felt like it mattered was Rahul Dravid's resignation.

The pundits seem to think Rahul made a good choice. Rohit Brijnath and Ian Chappel both think so.

It's easy to imagine the debate inside Rahul's head. In the Blue corner, pragmatic self-preservation. In the Red corner, service to a team that really has no alternative captain. Pragmatic self-preservation won. Rahul follows in the footsteps of Sunil Gavaskar, who abandoned a promising Indian team who desperately needed him after winning the Benson and Hedges World Championship in 1985.

But I can't help feeling disappointed. Is there any point to cricket if all it's about is pragmatic self-preservation?

Zooming out a bit, is there a sub-text here about social class? Both Rahul Dravid and Gavaskar are quintessentially middle class Indians. Educated-upper-middle-class if you want to make fine distinctions, as both their families doubtless would.

This is the class which has dominated Indian cricket since independence. Other Indian captains from similar middle class worlds include Ajit Wadekar, Dilip Vengsarkar, Polly Umrigar, Vinoo Mankad, Pankaj Roy, Ravi Shastri, Krishnamachari Srikkanth, Srinivas Venkataraghavan, Gundappa Vishwanath and Sachin Tendulkar. Anil Kumble, Javagal Srinath, Venkatesh Prasad and Bhagwat Chandrasekhar are other Bangalore cricketers from this world. This is a pleasant and comfortable world, a world of tightly knit families, kind words, regular home cooked meals and music tuitions. I can write about this India with some conviction, this is my India.

My India also carries a visceral understanding that this comfortable life is not to be taken for granted. The yawning chasm and the Other India are all too visible. And so we work for our comfortable lives with an ethic that is more Protestant than that of any Protestant nation. And we create outstanding tech companies like Infosys and technically sound but risk averse batsmen like Dravid and Gavaskar.

Interestingly, no middle class Indian captain has ever really given his team pride, self-belief and conviction. Looking around for the most influential captains, my top three sub-continentals are Imran Khan, Arjuna Ranatunga and Saurav Ganguly. All three are from the elite, more privileged than middle class.

All three have more than a whiff of the amateur playing for pride, rather than the professional just getting the job done. All three have been willing to walk away from the job. All three have backed their men to the hilt. I love Ranatunga for getting in the face of the Aussies and backing Murali through the chucker controversy. I love Imran for coming out of retirement to lead Pakistan. He didn't need to, he didn't particularly want to, but he still did. I love Saurav for refusing the play when the selectors tried to foist Sharandeep Singh on him instead of Harbhajan, against Australia in 2001. All three great captains held themselves above the system. They made the system work for them.

Rahul is not hungry for power. Of course he's willing to walk away from the job, he's shown that he is. But he is not using this leverage to make a difference. He is not saying "give me Murali Kartik or I'm not playing". When Dravid's strike bowler Sreesanth shows the aggression that generations of Indians have prayed for, does Dravid back him to the hilt? No. He backs down. Rahul works within the system, as a middle class boy would. A middle class boy's first instinct is pragmatic self-preservation. No wonder he resigned.