Juno

Juno is an outstanding film. It's funny, quirky and cuts as deep as you want it to. Watch it.

This is an old-fashioned movie, a movie with a plot. A monosyllabic dork who runs around in golden shorts gets a sixteen year old pregnant. She is going to have the baby. Complicated situation needs resolution, and that keeps the story-line rolling.

But is that what the movie is about? Naw. In almost all movies worth watching, plot is nothing more than a device that serves to showcase character. What makes the movie is Juno, the title character, brilliantly and authentically played by the twenty year old Canadian actor Ellen Page.

Without giving too much away...Juno is naive, mature, perceptive, cynical, trusting, would love to be wooed by a jock, loves her own dork, is spunky, vulnerable, really into cutting edge music, thinks chemistry lab is kind of cool, just doesn't get her tone-deaf parents, has wonderful parents...she is real.

When Charlie Brown picks up the Little Red Haired Girl's pencil, notices it has been chewed, and beatifically declares "She's human", maybe he is discovering that she is a bit like Juno.

Ideally, Juno, I ain't looking to analyse you, categorize you, or define you, or confine you, all I really want to do is, baby, be friends with you.

But...but Diablo already defined you. By calling you Juno. Not Jane, or Janet, or Jennifer, but Juno. Juno, wife of Jupiter, mother of Mars, Regina of Rome, guardian of the Empire's finances, Lucina (she who brings children to light), spiritual heir to both Hera and Diana. The goddess is back.

Why the IPL works

The IPL, and more generally the Twenty20 format, is producing quality cricket. Commentators who liken the IPL to exhibition cricket or the Harlem Globetrotters are being both unfair and blind. They are simply not observing closely enough.

I'm typing this up the night before the 2009 finals. I just watched my team, the Chennai Super Kings, lose to the Bangalore Royal Challengers. Both teams played hard and produced moments that were as good as anything I've seen in tests. Consider:

- Dravid's immaculate straight drive to welcome Jakati into the attack. It was worth watching the game just to see that one shot

- Murali trapping Dravid LBW bowling around the wicket and straightening the ball into the stumps

- Virat Kohli dancing down to the pitch of the ball and lofting Murali over long on for a match-deciding sixer (the shot in the picture above)

- Parthiv Patel anticipating a short ball from Kallis and upper-cutting him over the slips for four

- Vinay Kumar frustrating Dhoni by bowling very full and outside the off at the death (exactly what Dhoni had Zaheer and Ishant do the the Aussies in the Nagpur test)

Despite the cheerleaders, despite the horrible uniforms, this is the real thing: top quality players competing to win.

Of course, nothing can match test cricket for genuinely memorable drama. But I would have no heartburn about Twenty20 entirely replacing the ODI format.

More generally, sport that has been seriously dumbed-down doesn't seem to sell.

An interesting (and heartening) case in point was the failure of an American Football league, the XFL. It was promoted Vince McMohan, the guy behind WWF wrestling. The idea was to compete with the NFL, despite having second rate players, by having more skimpily clad cheerleaders and morphing the rules to create more "action".

The venture was possibly inspired by the belief that "nobody ever went broke by under-estimating the intelligence of the American public". Well, Mr. McMohan didn't go broke, but he did manage to lose $72 million.

Lord of the Rings: The Appendices

This is the Tolkien trip for the real Tolkien fans. I noted before that the movie was good, but left an old-time Tolkien fan like me a touch unsatisfied, like having eaten half a meal. Now, having watched the extensive appendices which come with the DVD box set, even I am sated, chock full of Tolkien fundas to inflict on the innocent bystander. Here is a sampling of the nuggets that made the appendices totally worth watching: - Rohan is modelled on Saxon culture. The motifs on the armour, the design of the helmets, they are meant to look like artefacts from the famous Saxon burial sites at Sutton Hoo. Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon, the culture which produced Beowulf, and deeply regretted the loss of a “native” English mythology with the coming of the Normans. Rohan was his way of imagining how Saxon culture may have developed if the Battle of Hastings had been won - The tale of Beren and Luthien, of the elven princess who gives up immortality to wed a man, is incidental to Frodo’s quest. But it is probably the most intensely personal element of the Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s grave refers to himself as John Ronald Reuel Tolkien Beren, and to his wife Edith, buried alongside, as Edith Mary Tolkien Luthien - The original movie script had Arwen fighting alongside Aragorn at Helm’s Deep. Liv Tyler spent months training to use a sword. Several fight sequences with Arwen were filmed. Then, there was a leak, the bloggers found out, and revolted. They accused Liv Tyler of betraying Tolkien because she wanted to play Xena, the Warrior Princess. The online vitriol was so intense that the bloggers won. The elven host finally showed up at Helm’s Deep without Arwen. Liv Tyler was clearly very upset by this, but it was the right outcome. Well done, bloggers - On the shoot, Viggo Mortensen had the hots for the Rohirrim girls. Not for the gorgeous Eowyn. But for the soldiers who rode with Eomer. They’re babes in drag. Apparently, Viggo was really into these lithe, lissom, helmeted ladies, wearing beards and carrying spears. This was gleefully reported by Dominic Monaghan, who plays Merry, and later denied by Viggo - At the party to celebrate victory at Helm’s Deep, Legolas drinks Gimli under the table. That’s what happens in the movie. In real life, Orlando Bloom passes out at the merest whiff of alcohol. In Dominic Monaghan’s words “Orlando is so pure, his breath smells of flowers”. The appendices have enough room to acknowledge, and even enrich, Tolkien’s vast Middle Earth. And they also open up another vast world, the world of Peter Jackson’s film project. Watching the appendices, you’re an insider to one of the biggest films ever made. If you’re the sort of person who has ever dreamt about wearing an elven cloak and canoeing down the Anduin with the fellowship, the appendices are a must watch.

Dissociative Identity Leadership

Companies are like people. Other things being equal, companies which do well believe in themselves. They carry vivid images of victory, they fiercely belive success is their destiny. On the other hand, companies which fret about failure usually succumb to the fielding flu and fail.

Yet, the opposite is also true. My friend Greg Pye, the famous and profound management philosopher, writes here about the importance of staring into the abyss and looking for ways in which things can fail. This is an essential part of planning, both for putting defences (or plan Bs) in the right place and in setting expectations.

Balancing these necessary evils, faith and scepticism, is one of the hardest and most universal problems of leadership. Every healthy organization needs this split personality, or dissociative identity.



The simplest solution is to locate these faculties, and the associated sub-cultures, in different departments. This works fine in organizations of thousands of people, despite the friction between departments. But it is hard to do on a smaller scale, say at a cricket club or on a film crew.

The Six Thinking Hats technique popularized by Edward do Bono is also useful. It involves containing the sceptical imagining of failure within a contained area, called Black Hat thinking, before moving on to creative Green Hat thinking or optimistic Yellow Hat thinking.

My discontent with the Six Thinking Hats is with the assumption that faith - that sense of destiny - is the product of thought. It is not. It is an emotion. It is produced by thought, sure, but also by a whole lot else. I find that the more useful way of balancing faith and scepticism is to remain rooted in the emotional state of faith, even while working through the cognitive process of scepticism.

PS: John Kotter essentially wishes away this problem by labeling the faculty of faith as Leadership and the faculty of scepticism as Management. This is worse than useless, because "leaders" are paid a lot more than "managers". This tilts the playing field away from scepticism, and exagerrates the natural cognitive bias towards optimism.

PPS: The original title for this post was Schizophrenic Leadership. But wikipedia tells me that, despite the etymology, Schizophrenia is not about split personalities. It is about distorted perceptions of reality, typically hallucinations. People with split personalities have a dissolute identity disorder.

Another characteristic of great leaders... learning all the time :)

Fielding Flu

The swine flu, that terrible, dangerous contagion, resulted in my trip to a “summit” in the US being called off. Hence, I could veg out in front of the TV yesterday evening and watch the spread of an even more terrible, dangerous contagion: the fielding flu.

Chennai Super Kings managed to drop four easy catches, and fluff a run-out in a manner that would have embarrassed swine-herds, and yet beat the Deccan Chargers. Kolkata Knight Riders had a similar epidemic today (though with a less happy match-result).

The interesting thing about these drops is that they are not random. If the last few chances that went to hand were dropped, the likelihood that the next chance will be dropped is significantly higher*. Fielding flu spreads through exactly the same mechanism described in my previous post: fielders carry a mental image of a colleague grassing the ball, and the subconscious brings that image into reality.

Paradoxically, a strong team ethos may actually make teams more vulnerable* to this contagion. Players who sincerely identify with each other may carry a more vivid mental image of a friend dropping a catch.
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*this is a testable statistical proposition and a wonderful opportunity for ambitious young cricket statisticians looking to emulate the great Bill James

Dangerous Safety Signs

Bikers on twisty mountain roads should carry mental images of stability and control. They should not carry mental images of spectacular crashes. These images make the rider more likely to crash the bike, yet these are exactly the images that the road sign above is trying to evoke.

This is a simple truth that sports coaches know. A good cricket coach does not tell a batter to not fish outside the off stump. He tells the batter to hit through the line. The subconscious does not work with logical operators like not. It simply brings the mental images it holds into reality.

But the people who design signage for roads don't seem to know this. With tragic consequences...



Seriously, this is a completely testable proposition.

Show amateur pilots video footage of gruesome crashes of planes similar to what they fly. Put them in a flight simulator. Ask them to do complex manouveres. Measure their crash rate. Compare with a control group which was shown footage of smooth, successful flights.

And presto...we now have scientific evidence with which to prosecute the road sign chaps for manslaughter. Or at least save a few lives.

On Leadership

I will admit to a blush of embarrassment at blogging about leadership; on no other topic have so many people expended so many words to say so little.

However, having attended a leadership development workshop recently, the group I was with came up with a compact definition of leadership that feels useful enough to share.

What is the purpose of leadership: to get people to do things that they otherwise would not

What do leaders do: they listen, speak and centre

In this context, “centre” has a specific meaning. It means the psyche is located at the centre of the body. A centred leader is calm and purposeful. Leaders don’t rage or panic, except intentionally.

What I like about this definition is that it is profoundly situational. Good leadership is defined almost entirely by context. I find this situational take on leadership a lot more useful than the definitions in the standard readings.

Consider this much quoted article by John Kotter, which makes a distinction between management and leadership: “management involves planning and budgeting, leadership involves setting direction”.

This is sometimes true. There are situations where the ship is running well, but doesn’t know where to go. In which case, it is important to choose a destination.

There are also many situations when the desired direction is bleeding obvious. The hard part is to actually get the ship to move in that direction. At times like this, the task of leadership is management. The truth is often closer to "amateurs talk strategy, real generals talk logistics".

Walking Lothlorien

Clumpy boots, hiking staff, Strider-style stubble
Limestone cliffs, dry stone walls, the tumult of tumbling water,
Trout hold still against the stream,
Spaniels splash right in;
Pentagenarians sandwich together,
Gates shut on grazing sheep.
Wooded slopes, sun spangled meadows, Numenorean ruins,
Ice cream in the parking lot,
Lothlorien;
Without the ring.



The change in the style of this blog, unfortunate or otherwise, was prompted by a hike along the river Wye in the Peak District



Down Monsal Dale, up Brushfield, past the Priestcliffe Lees, down to Litton Mill, through Miller Dale and Cressbrook, and back up to Monsal Head



Sunshine on the water...naw, John Denver doesn't fit the Tolkienian mood



Magic wrought by the Numenoreans, when Middle-Earth was still young



All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost…
Renewed shall be the sword that was broken,
The crownless shall again be king

Cherokee Medicine

"The Cherokee lands furnished herbs to treat every known illness – until the Europeans came". This claim is from a tourist brochure I came across in North Carolina, still home to the Cherokee Nation.

Herbs to treat every known illness? A strong claim by any standards. Yet I read that claim humbly, respectfully, sympathetically. It is an assertion of Cherokee pride, an assertion worth making after the horrors of native American history. Is there a crime even worse than genocide? The annihilation of an entire civilization?

That respectful, sympathetic moment stuck in memory when I realized that I would never extend the same courtsey to the other sort of Indians, Asian-Indians like myself. This, despite the many terrible things that have been done to us through history.

When a fellow Indian seriously claims that our ancient culture had herbs to treat every known illness (this happens astonishingly often), my irritated instinct is to refer him to Ben Goldacre's excellent book/ blog on Bad Science, and ask to see the data from randomized, double blind, placebo controlled clinical trials.

Why the difference?

I guess I just can't think about India as a Wounded Civilization any more.

Lord of the Rings. At the Racsos

This is to announce a special Racso award for the worst moments in the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. Brought to you by Moonballs from Planet Earth. 

The nominees are: - Gandalf and Saruman. The fight in Orthanc, when the venerable wizards biffed each other's flowing robes and beards into a terrible tangle - 

The last homely house. Rivendell, with its kitschy soft-focus shots and air-brushed effects, looked like something from a Thomas Kinkade painting - 

The paths of the dead. The avalanche of skulls that nearly trapped Strider, Legolas and Gimli inside the Haunted Mountain. This could have been a solemn moment in an action-packed film - 

Arwen and Aragorn. The kiss on a bridge in Rivendell. Of course, it had to be in soft-focus. Why was this limp love-story promoted from the appendix to the main film? More screen time for Liv Tyler is not reason enough - 

Uruk Hai births. The slime-covered creatures emerging from the breeding pits under Orthanc. Some things are better imagined than seen, even in a film 

And the Racso goes to Gandalf and Saruman biffing it out in Orthanc. Thunderous applause. Nothing can beat Saruman and Gandalf twirling each other around Orthanc for sheer goofiness, especially in a film that clearly cares about production values.

Lord of the Rings. At the Oscars

This is to announce a special Oscar for the best moments in the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. Brought to you by Moonballs from Planet Earth. The nominees are: - Minas Tirith. The seven-circled white city on a hill, topped with the Tower of Ecthilion glimmering like a spike of pearl and silver, whose fighting men wore breastplates wrought with the White Tree of Gondor - Lighting the beacons. The bonfire relay across the snowy mountain-tops that brought the Rohirrim thundering south to fight alongside Gondor - Edoras. The setting for Meduseld, hall of Theoden son of Thengel, Lord of the Mark of Rohan. "Before the mountains of the south: white tipped and streaked with black...a tumbled mountain-mass with one tall peak stood like a sentinel a lonely height...set upon a green terrace, there stands aloft a great hall of men. And it seems to my eyes that it is thatched with gold. The light of it shines far over this land..." - Faramir's charge on Osgiliath. The futile cavalry charge Faramir led on an occupied Osgiliath, while Pippin sang at Lord Denathor's sumptuous lunch - Escape from the mines of Moria. The vaulted, crumbling staircase through flaming nothingness that led the Fellowship to the Bridge of Khazad Dum, where Gandalf battled the Balrog And the Oscar goes to...Faramir's charge on Osgiliath. Thunderous applause. All the nominations, the value-add in going from the book to the movie, are about visualization. The film stayed faithful to Tolkien's words, and yet visualized these scenes with a vividness and beauty that is far beyond my own imagination, even as a committed Tolkien fan. The unsung heroes of the film are probably Alan Lee and John Howe, two artists who have been visualizing scenes from Tolkien for decades, long before this film was even conceived. Peter Jackson had the good sense to collaborate with these outstanding old pros. Faramir's charge on Osgiliath wins the Oscar for being more than visualization. This scene is implied rather than described in the book. The movie takes this raw material, and builds it up into an emotional crescendo so intense that I almost dare not imagine it. By rights, it should have crumbled under its own weight. And yet, it works. Well done. Thanks PJ. Blog readers and Tolkien fans, please do chip in with your own Oscar nominees.

Lord of the Rings. On film?

I recently re-watched the Lord of the Rings Trilogy on DVD, and thoroughly enjoyed the spectacle, all nine hours of it. Yet I came away with a nagging sense that something was missing. And having mulled it over, here is my take.

Superficially, the Lord of the Rings is about Frodo’s hero-quest to destroy the ring of power. At this level, Frodo’s quest is no more or less compelling than that of Luke Skywalker, Clark Kent, Eragon, Zorro, Captain Kirk or Harry Potter. What makes Lord of the Rings special is the richness, the detail, the layered folk lore and the resonances of the vast Middle Earth within which Tolkien sets Frodo’s hero-quest.

Clearly the hero-quest matters. Anyone who ever picked up the Silmarillion was already a Tolkien fan. But what differentiates Tolkien from mere mortals is the texture and the staggering scale of the Middle Earth he imagined.

When the book was translated into the movie the balance shifted away from the folk lore and resonances of Middle Earth, towards the driving action of Frodo’s hero-quest. Film, even nine hours of film, doesn’t have much room for discursive reflection. Something was necessarily lost.

Some of this loss is obvious. Parts of the book have just been edited out. Leaving out Tom Bombadil and his wife Goldberry, daughter of the river Withywindle, was sacrilege to many old-time Tolkien fans. There is no room either for Radagast the Brown, the wizard steeped in the lore of wild animals, or for Gil Galad the elven king, of whom the harpers sadly sing. One would never know from the movie that Pippin’s Took clan had a reputation unusual behaviour, perhaps because a Took ancestor may have married a fairy. When Sam sees an oliphaunt, he has no time to put his hands behind his back and “speak poetry”, to trot out the fireside rhyme about oliphaunts he learnt back in the Shire.

A more subtle loss also runs through passages that were amplified in the movie.

Consider Anduril, Aragon’s sword. The sword is a big part of the movie. It is shown in the first scene, slicing the ring of Sauron’s hand. The movie introduces new scenes starring Anduril, like when Arwen and Aragon share a special moment over the broken blade, and when Elrond presents Aragon with the re-forged sword on the eve of battle (Aragon leaves Rivendell carrying Anduril in the book). Yet, the meaning of Anduril is overwhelmed by the urgency and tumult of war all around; the sword remains just a weapon.

Reading the book, I had time for my own imagination to work on Anduril, to transform Anduril from a weapon into a talisman. I knew that Boromir had come to Rivendell because he heard a voice saying:

Seek for the sword that was broken
In Imladris it lies…
For Isildur’s bane shall waken
And the Halfling forth shall stand.

I could let the rhythms of Bilbo’s little poem to Aragon ring in my ears:

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost…
Renewed shall be the sword that was broken,
The crownless shall again be king.

I had time to understand that Aragon is Elendil’s heir because he is the man who wields Elendil’s sword. A great sword forged by elvensmiths can’t be handled by just anybody. The sword chooses its wielder, and in so doing, defines the wielder’s destiny. I simply wouldn’t have understood that if I had watched the movie first.



That said, if something was lost, something was also created. There were scenes in the movie which were way more powerful than anything I’d imagined before. More about that in my next post.

Looking back, I am very fortunate to have experienced Lord of the Rings in three different mediums, in the right sequence. First, as a story told by a favourite aunt to the children in the family, second, as a summer holidays’ reading along with my cousins (competitively exchanging cool Tolkien trivia), third, as a big-budget film.

The only other works I’ve experienced in roughly the same media, in the same sequence, are the great Indian epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Am I comparing Peter Jackson to Peter Brook? Or to Ramanand Sagar?

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.

A first class map

Here's a cricketing puzzle that's got me stumped.

England has about 39 counties or shires, or maybe that should be 42, or maybe even 46, an interestingly vague number unlike the unimaginative precision of the 50 American states...but the English taste for vagueness is not what this post is about. However one chooses to count, 18 adds up to less then half the English counties. Yet, only 18 counties (the darker coloured counties on the map above) play first class cricket. How did this come to pass?

For instance, Shropshire, that fabled land where the Empress of Blandings covered herself with such glory, would surely have a deep rooted cricketing culture? Or consider Lincolnshire, a well-populated county wedged in between the cricketing powerhouses of Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire. Surely Lincolnshire would be able to muster a decent county team? Club cricket is played in both Shropshire and Lincolnshire. But both seem content to remain Minor Counties, without objecting to the condescension loaded into that term.

Even more mysterious, Durham, the current champions, are the only Minor County to have been promoted to the first class level in 80+ years. This was a one time "historic" event. There is no mechanism by which the top Minor Counties get promoted to the first class level, and the weakest first class counties get relegated to the minors.

This instinctively feels odd to me, as an Indian cricket fan, because the growth of cricket outside India's traditional metropolitan centers is one of the most fascinating changes in Indian cricket over the last 25 years.

The fit and proper persons test

Should the England Cricket Board have ever been doing business with Mr Allen Stanford?

BBC's Radio 4, with a bit of help from Twenty20 hindsight, think not. The BBC have a point. There always was something just a little fishy about the Texan billionaire. The ECB should have applied a "fit and proper persons test", a general sniff test, to check if this Stanford guy was someone they want to do business with.

Or should they?

The trouble with sniff tests is that it is really hard even for well intentioned, honest and experienced people to know exactly what they're sniffing. A generation ago, any sniff test run by the ECB would have failed anybody who was not white, well-bred and Oxbridge educated. Would that have been good sniffing? Or prejudice? One of the great things about the anonymity of markets is that is harder for prejudice to prevail.

There must be an intelligent middle ground somewhere between prejudice and Stanford...but its never obvious how to be both fair and prudent.
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An apology: a previous version of this post mentioned Mr Adam Sanford, a cricketer who played for the West Indies in eleven tests, instead of Mr Allen Stanford, the shady Texan financier. Apologies to Mr Adam Sanford

Boars, Bears and Core Competencies

Being an omnivore is a winning strategy for bears and boars. Does the same logic work for business corporations?

Most management thinkers like corporations to be specialists (like anteaters) rather than omnivores (like boars or bears). CK Prahalad and Gary Hamel, the Core Competency gurus, usually advise businesses to stick to their knitting, do what they do best, and buy the rest on the market. This is not an especially new idea. Think back to Adam Smith’s pin factory or David Ricardo exhorting Portugal to stick with making wine and buy English cloth. Specialization leads to efficiency, which raises productivity and therefore incomes.

But are specialists too fragile? If one wants to think about businesses as institutions which are meant to be resilient to the madness which sometimes infects markets, maybe boars and bears are better role models than anteaters, hummingbirds or cheetah.

Pigs Gone Wild

An American friend I was dining with last week was talking about her life in Mechanicsville, VA. Her neighbour is a wild hog hunter. Maybe he has a boring day job, like being a mechanic or something. But hunting wild hogs is what he really does.

That brought back to life this marvellous story. Wild hogs, feral swine, the offspring of escaped farm pigs which copulated with wild boar imported from Europe as game, are thriving across the vast American wilderness. And with them is thriving a culture of guys who hunt wild hogs, accompanied by packs of dogs, armed with knives, shotguns or even bows and arrows, with the Confederate flag emblazoned on everything they wear.

In America, people hunt hogs. In Britain, hogs hunt people.

Ms. Carla Edmonds, a landowner in Gloucestershire, first encountered wild boar when she and her two dogs were riding along a path in the Forest of Dean, about 100 yards or so from the main road. “I saw a group of 20 or more. I couldn’t make out quite what they were, but then I could see they looked like pigs.” Ms. Edmonds’ dogs started barking and her horse became agitated. The herd of boar gave chase. “I could see them charging at huge pace” she said. Her horse was seriously agitated by the experience, and took a long while to calm down, and a less experienced rider might even have been thrown off her horse.

Subsequently, the wild boar dug up about 100 square feet of the Edmonds’ grounds. But despite these intrusions, Ms. Edmonds and her partner think the boar are “brilliant” and that “it was amazing...would love to see them again”. She may well have an opportunity to do so. After having been hunted to extinction 300 years ago, wild boar have reintroduced themselves to Britain spontaneously and now also live in Sussex, Kent, Hampshire and Devon.

What makes wild boar, Sus Scrofa, so successful? The same factor that makes Homo Sapiens so successful?

The thought was triggered by a book I read back in the 80s, Omnivore by Lyall Watson, a zoologist who observed that our evolutionary resilience owes a lot to our omnivorous diet. Boars (and bears) are omnivorous higher mammals, like us.

Setting Free the Bears

Here’s a heart-warming success story, at a time when good news is a bit thin on the ground.

I visited Wildlife SOS' Agra Bear Rescue Facility earlier this winter. This is part of a program to rescue dancing bears from captivity, and to rehabilitate both the bears and the kalandar families who once depended on dancing bears for their livelihood.

- The rescue facility is a very nice retirement home for the former dancing bears, on a reserve forest between Delhi and Agra

- The past these dancing bears have endured is terrible. Typically, young bears are captured by poachers after the parents have been murdered. They are sold to kalandars, who torture the bears their entire lives to make them perform

- The rescue program essentially buys bears back from the kalandars, and relocates them at this centre where they are well looked after by professional vets. I was especially impressed that the vets were thinking about the bear’s mental state, getting traumatized rescued bears to engage by playing with a ball or climbing a trestle

- Visitors are allowed in only by prior appointment, and are accompanied by wildlife professionals. Otherwise, visitors who have paid good money to see bears may expect to be “entertained” to get their money’s worth, which would create exactly the wrong environment for the bear’s rehabilitation

- There is no breeding program. The rescued bears are simply not in shape to sire a bloodline. The rescue facility is supported only by charity

- The main reason to believe the program will work, longer term, is that it is a buy back coupled with social services. Kalandars get a substantial lump sum, and are being supported in moving on to a new life. One family featured on the visitor centre video used this buy-back money to buy a second hand autorickshaw. Kalandar children are now sent to school, for the first time in over 500 years

- Dancing bears, and the attendant cruelty, have been around since medieval times across all of Eurasia. The Indian program is a part of a larger worldwide effort to rescue dancing bears. The last dancing bears in Europe were rescued as recently as 2007, in Bulgaria. Turkey rescued its last dancing bear in 1998

There is a tantalizing moral question hanging at the edge of this story. Why does this matter? Why is it worth ending the bears’ suffering? Is it because of the acuteness with which bears can experience suffering? I’d be less moved by the suffering of invertebrates. Is it because so little is at stake? I can see the argument for testing life saving drugs on higher mammals, but suffering for the sake of entertainment feels unambiguously wrong. Is it because the horrors we have inflicted on ourselves, from Auschwitz to Abu Ghraib, have taught us that to be human is to be humane? Or more plausibly, that to be civilized is to be humane? Does a society that experiences success in preventing suffering, of whatever sort, build momentum and commitment that serves the cause of preventing even more grievous suffering?

I’m not trying to answer these deeper questions here. I’m just happy that Ravi the bear can gambol down a forest path, keeping pace with my sprinting five year old nephew, just because he wants to.

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.