We do need some education. But why?

I visited the Iona School yesterday for their Advent Fayre. Some good friends' children attend this excellent school. It was a very nice family morning, with craft activities for the children, live singing, and freshly pressed apple juice. Also picked up a brochure about the Steiner Waldorf system of education followed at Iona, which says:

Integral to the Steiner Waldorf education is its view of each child as a unique, spiritual individual, developing... towards an adulthood in which the individual spirit can find full freedom of expression. Every step in the child's education may be seen as geared to this end.

Was struck by the contrast between this and a thought emerging from my own alma mater, Vidya Mandir, Mylapore:

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All play and no work makes Jack an unemployed adult.

This is taken from an email that came through on the alumni mailing list. Work, in this context, means swotting. Play means loafing around like Aamir Khan in the latest Bollywood flick. The implication, deeply embedded in Mylapore culture, is that the purpose of education is to get a good job, earn a decent living, and support a family.

Does this Mylaporean approach also lead to the individual spirit finding full freedom of expression? Perhaps, yes. Especially if the individual spirit finding expression is similar to that of Mac MacGuff, the dad in the film Juno. Mr MacGuff's teenage daughter, Juno, is searching for her calling. She asks her dad about his career. He tells her that he found his passion, the calling which gave his spirit full expression, in Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) repairs. Which, fortunately, is the means by which he earns a living.

Thierry Henry's Handball and the Philosophy of Sport

See the player in the blue t-shirt? She is Dr Emily Ryall, Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy of Sport at the University of Gloucestershire. She is a committed, competitive sportsperson and a University lecturer, thus embodying the Corinthian ideal of amateurism. As a girl with a Ph.D. who plays rugby, she is reshaping the myths of womanhood. Discovering Dr Ryall, and that there are entire University departments dedicated to the Philosophy of Sport, are some of the few good things to have come out of the Thierry Henry handball incident.

BBC Radio 4 had a story last week on Henry's handball. It featured Simon Barnes, the chief sports columnist for the Times, and Dr. Ryall. Both of them let Thierry Henry off pretty lightly. Neither of them focused on the thirty seconds immediately after the goal, when the Irish players were animatedly appealing to the referee, when Thierry Henry had ample opportunity to 'fess up.



Simon Barnes thinks "sport is no longer about building character, it reveals character"; so Henry's handball was a part of the great spectacle of sport because it gives us an insight into Henry's flawed genius. Dr. Ryall thinks intent matters: the fact that Henry did not intend to cheat makes a difference to her. Which is a very interesting moral argument. For instance, the business leaders who destroyed Enron (or Lehman Brothers for that matter) surely did not intend to do so. Unlike Henry, it is not at all clear that anyone at Enron cheated. But does positive intent absolve them of blame? Things are certainly not working out that way, certainly not in the court of public opinion.

Personally, I find the lack of censure for Thierry Henry, in the court of public opinion, more shocking than the handball itself. People, in all walks of life, will always have opportunities to cheat. Some people will always take the opportunity and cheat. But overall, people will cheat less if they are constantly reminded that cheating is bad, and that honour matters.

Dan Ariely, the behavioural economist, demonstrated this in a neat experiment. One group of students took a test, and were paid according to the number of correct answers they self-reported. Another bunch of students took the same test after having sworn not to cheat. The bunch who swore not to cheat consistently gave themselves lower and more accurate scores than the "control", despite having exactly the same incentives and exactly the same opportunities to cheat.

Many people describe Henry's handball as "understandable", which is true, it was understandable. But in being understanding of Henry's understandable behaviour, we, collectively, are diluting the social norm that cheating is bad.

The Universal Soldier. In Afghanistan

The war in Afghanistan is not going that well. It is not clear what exactly the fighting is for. Young soldiers are getting killed. There is no end in sight.

Yet, Sam Kiley, a British journalist who just brought out this book on touring with the paratroopers of the 16 Air Assault Brigade in Helmand province, reports that the troops are committed and motivated.

Why? In part, says Mr Kiley, it comes from “a basic male instinct” to prove yourself. In part it is about fighting for your friends and, when they are killed, about avenging them. Above all, it is about sheer thrill. As one Para quoted by Mr Kiley says during a battle: “Living the fucking dream mate.”

Without having read the book, my instinct is that Mr Kiley is telling it like it is, no spin. The Para living the dream is a Universal Soldier.

He's five foot two, he's six feet four
He fights with missiles and with spears,
He's all of thirty one, he is only seventeen,
He's been a soldier for a thousand years.

He's a Catholic, a Hindu, an atheist, a Jain
He's a Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew,
He knows he shouldn't kill and he knows he always will
Kill you for me my friend, and me for you.

He's fighting for Canada, he's fighting for France,
He's fighting for the USA
He's fighting for Russia, he's fighting for Japan...

The Universal Soldier is an archetype; vigourous, integral, eternal. He can pack more life into two days of intense experience than most mortals can in entire lifetimes (refer E. Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls).

Yet, this is almost certainly not what Donovan meant when he sang this song in the sixties. Donovan was the guy who replaced Bob Dylan in the Joan Baez sets at the Newport Folk festival, when Bobby quit being political and broke up with Joanie. Donovan had picked this piece up from a Canadian songwriter called Buffy Sainte-Marie. She was a sixties anti-war protester, a pacifist pointing an accusing finger at the Universal Soldier:

He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame,
His orders come from far away no more,
They come from here and there and you and me,
And brothers can't you see,
This is not the way we put an end to war.

Fighting a fighting archetype, huh? Who would've thought...

The Sound of the Fury

...Peter Jackson, requiring a wrathful army for Helm's Deep, bravely ventured onto a cricket pitch, during a break, and asked twenty-five thousand fans to roar in unison. They obliged.

From the New Yorker

The Post-Feminist Goddess

Patriarchal cultures generally build their female characters around two polarized archetypes: the Madonna and the Whore. And so real women casting around for raw material with which to build their identities are forced to make a false choice between these archetypes, and therefore between virtue and sexuality. So, since the days of The Female Eunuch and The Feminine Mystique, one of the themes of the feminist movement has been to create icons who break this polarity, icons who are both caring and potent, who are both babes and moms, and who keep their lives on the rails.

From these icons, real women can more easily learn to be… like Angelina Jolie?

Naomi Wolf, the feminist intellectual, thinks Angelina Jolie is the iconic woman who brings it all together. In this article, Ms Wolf writes that

Angelina Jolie... for the first time in modern culture, brings together almost every aspect of female empowerment and liberation... she broke through into mass-market consciousness with her turn as cartoony superheroine Lara Croft... sexy and daring, confrontational and independent...

When Maddox appeared... Jolie revealed a new vision of single motherhood... tender, glamorous, and complete, father figure or no father figure in the picture... she blurs the conventional boundary of what female stars are supposed to do — look pretty, emote, wear designer clothes — by picking up Princess Di's fallen torch and wrapping her elegant bone structure in a shalwar kameez to attend to the suffering of Afghan refugees in Pakistan

So she becomes what psychoanalysts call an "ego ideal" for women — a kind of dream figure that allows women to access, through fantasies of their own, possibilities for their own heightened empowerment and liberation.

The article is a fun read, until you realize that it is not meant to be ironic or tongue in cheek. Is this really Naomi Wolf, the daughter of the legendary Bay Area teacher/poet Leonard Wolf, the Rhodes scholar who advised Al Gore when he was America’s next President, who wrote The Beauty Myth – a book about how modern women have freed themselves from all the traditional feminine myths, except the myth of beauty?

And is she really touting Angelina Jolie as an ideal? The same Angelina who broke off all relations with her abusive dad, french-kissed her brother in public, had a lesbian girl-friend, hit on a married colleague, and wore a vial of her boyfriend’s blood as a pendant. Never mind the bit about being the archetypal ideal woman. Is Angelina even just okay?

Moonballs from Planet Earth would like to propose an alternative feminist icon who brings it all together: Donna Sheridan, the character played by Meryl Streep in Mamma Mia. Donna is a mom, an entrepreneur, has a ton of fun with her girl-friends, doesn’t know which of her old boy-friends is her daughter’s dad, and lives on to enjoy a happy ending.

There’s a fire within my soul
Mamma Mia, here I go again,
My my, how can I resist you?

Sweets for the sweet, but not for Barbie (2)

The last blog post was about Barbie, much reviled by feminists for warping the way girls think about themselves. My take was that Barbie was mostly harmles, and that self-destroying Ophelia was a more scary archetype. To which Radhi had a very interesting comment: "But in our real worlds - madness, despair and anguish are also true, tantalising and in a weird way... much more interesting".

Very true. Which is why Ophelia and Hamlet are compelling characters, but dysfunctional human beings. All happy families are alike, and therefore a bit boring. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and therefore interesting. Compelling stories are almost always about the darker side.

This is why the Ramayana generally makes for a less gripping story than the Mahabharata. Because Rama works great as the maryada purushottam, but he isn't designed for drama. In the Mahabharata, even the Pandavas include Dharmaputra the gambler, and Arjuna, the androgynous warrior.

But the thing about great stories is that they don't just entertain. They shape our ideas of who we are, and how the world works. And these ideas, especially when taken aboard in childhood, can be self-fulfilling life scripts. Which, I guess, is why the stories of Rama and Buddha and Jesus are told over and over again. Not because they are entertaining, but because they just might do a bit of good.

Iconic pop culture has as much power as religion in shaping the mythos, and with it individual destiny. Life imitates art. Star Wars, Sholay, Enid Blyton, Hardy Boys, PG Wodehouse, Batman comics, Peanuts... they all exert mythic power. And there are good myths and bad myths. For instance, Princess Diana seemed in thrall to the same tragic myth as Marilyn Monroe.



Almost a century before either of them came Empress Sisi of Habsburg Austria, stuck in a loveless marriage to an imperial heir, who "became known not only for her beauty but also for her fashion sense, diet and exercise regimens, passion for riding sports, and a series of reputed lovers. She paid extreme attention to her appearance and would spend most of her time preserving her beauty". Empress Sisi refered to herself in poetry as Titania, the fairy queen who falls in love with the donkey-headed "mechanical" Nick Bottom. Titania, unlike Ophelia, survived her stupid infatuation.

And, to come a full circle, where does Barbie line up in this pantheon? Mostly harmless feels like a fair summing up.

Sweets for the sweet, but not for Barbie

Barbie is right up there, along with McDonald’s and the Marlboro Man, as a capitalist icon that liberals love to hate. Not without reason. Barbie is anatomically inaccurate. She might psych women into body-image anxiety. She could trap girls into limiting self-concepts. And so, for a while, my wife and I very deliberately did not buy our daughters Barbie dolls.

But our daughters were gifted Barbie lookalikes. They did watch Barbie movies at friends' homes. Barbie stuff gradually found its way into our lives. And, having now experienced* quite a few Barbie movies, I am convinced Barbie is Mostly Harmless.

What I like about Barbie is that she is a survivor. She is kind to animals, helps her friends, goes on adventures, solves riddles, sings songs, rides on dragons, defeats the baddies. She generally gets herself a hunky boyfriend. But she is the protagonist. The movie is about her. The boyfriend is an accessory. This is in sharp contrast to the standard template Bollywood script, where the only point of being the heroine is to be the hero’s conquest. This probably does hurt the way many Indian women construct their identities, playing bit roles in their own lives.

Sure, her emotional range is an ideal set up for a Botox-enhanced adulthood. And Barbie is never revolutionary. She does not rage against the machine. She will never be out there on the perimeter, like Janis Joplin, Medha Patkar or Maya Lin. Barbie goes with the flow. When it was cool for women to be Stepford wives, she was a Stepford wife. When it became cool for women to be doctors and pilots, Barbie became Doctor Barbie and Captain Barbie, all splendidly kitted out. Maybe she is more like a Griha Lakshmi than a Bhadra Kali... which, actually, is okay.

The archetypal young woman I find scary is not Barbie, but Ophelia. Barbie survives. Ophelia didn’t. When an envious sliver broke off a slanted willow, Ophelia and her weedy trophies fell in the weeping brook, she chanted snatches of old tunes as one incapable of her own distress, or like a creature native and indued unto that element. Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia, and therefore I forbid my tears, for Barbie would have swum to shore.



* I don’t think I’ve ever watched a Barbie movie end to end, but I have watched some pivotal scenes multiple times

The Girl on the Half Shell

Just made sense of a lyric I've heard many times before, but never quite understood. "The girl on the half-shell" from Joan Baez's Diamonds and Rust, as in

... you burst on the scene
Already a legend
The unwashed phenomenon
The original vagabond
You strayed into my arms
And there you stayed
Temporarily lost at sea
The Madonna was yours for free
Yes the girl on the half-shell
Would keep you unharmed...

This refers to Venus emerging from the sea, as, say, depicted by Botticelli. Joanie referred to herself as both the Madonna and the girl on the half-shell in those days.

Re-thinking Clement Attlee

Was Clement Attlee a great Prime Minister? Or was he a bungling idiot?

This feels like an interesting question right now, because the two issues that define Attlee’s legacy are very similar to the issues that President Obama is grappling with – withdrawing from occupied countries and providing health care to the less fortunate.

As an Indian, my first instinct is that Clement Attlee was a bungling idiot. He was responsible for the British withdrawal from India in 1947. However one looks at it, the way the British withdrawal from India was managed, and the consequent partition of India, was an unmitigated disaster (as was Attlee's withdrawal from the British mandate of Palestine). What kind of a fool would chose to dismantle an edifice that had been built up over more than three hundred years - Emperor Jehangir's firman to allow the East India Company to set up a factory in Surat was issued in 1615 - in nine months? The kind of fool who had never before held any substantial responsibility. His Labour party had never been in government before. His sheer ignorance would have given him courage.

However, that is not how the British see Attlee. Surveys generally show that Atlee is one of the best loved British Prime Ministers of the twentieth century. This BBC survey shows Attlee, Churchill’s “modest man with much to be modest about”, at #3 out of 19 behind Churchill and Lloyd George. A more recent Newsnight poll in 2008 ranked Attlee at #2 behind Churchill among 12 post war PMs. His most beloved achievement? The NHS.

When I first read about this, I thought there was a pattern here. The NHS, a comprehensive medical system which is totally free at the point of use, entirely funded and managed by the state, is an astonishing enterprise. It is staggeringly vast and impossibly complex. By rights, it should collapse under its own weight. But, miraculously, it works. Okay, not perfectly, but certainly adequately. Maybe it took a beginner’s mind to even imagine that something as ambitious as the NHS could be created. Lack of experience fooled Attlee and his government of beginners into thinking he could just walk away from India without all hell breaking loose. The same lack of experience told him that it was possible to create something as ambitious as the NHS. The beginner’s mind comes with both risks and possibilities.

It turns out I was being too kind to Attlee. Neither he, nor his health minister Aneurin Bevan, dreamt up the NHS with the innocence of a beginner’s mind, and then willed it into existence. Nobody did. The NHS just happened.

This outstanding article by Atul Gawande talks about how. The entire health infrastructure that existed in Britain had been bombed down to rubble through WWII. Yet millions of injured servicemen, and displaced urbanites, evacuated by the government into the countryside, needed to be looked after. There was nobody to do the looking after except the government. By the time the war ended, the only health services that existed in Britain were delivered through this vast nationalized system that nobody would have dreamt possible, or maybe even wanted, if it didn’t already exist. Attlee and Bevan “creating the NHS” was nothing more than legislating to keep the status quo.

What Attlee’s legacy in India and Palestine demonstrate is that the consequences of incompetence are as grave as the consequences of evil. Attlee meant well, and had long supported the Indian freedom struggle. He did not intend to leave millions dead in the wake of British withdrawal and partition. Nor did he want the hurried British withdrawal from Palestine to destabilize the Middle East for generations. Yet, intended or not, the consequences of his actions were as horrible as those of other politicians with more explicitly evil intent.

The verdict of history? The British public has successfully forgotten about Empire, but lives with the NHS every day. Attlee’s spot in the great Prime Ministers rankings looks secure. The take away for President Obama? America will remember his health care reforms much more vividly than any events that unfold in Iraq or Afghanistan.
____________________________________
Fact check: Clement Attlee did serve as Deputy Prime Minister as a part of a coalition governing arrangement between Labour, the Liberals and the Conservatives during the war. Churchill served as PM, and chaired the War cabinet. Previously, Attlee was a Major in the British Army during WWI, and gave up a legal career to become a social worker in London before being elected to Parliment.

David Cameron goes Dutch?

Gezellig - space and people coming together in harmony, that special spirit of cosy fellowship that animates Dutch life - would be an excellent addition to the English language and to English speaking cultures. Maybe, but maybe not in the way I initially thought. When I first wrote about Gezellig, I assumed that the word that best describes Amsterdam would naturally be liberal (as opposed to Liberal). Having thought about it longer, I’m realizing that gezellig is in fact deeply conservative.

Gezellig cosiness implies a comfort with the status quo, the fellowship a comfort with people like us. A gezellig culture could easily be the culture of a smug, closed-minded, back-slapping clique. The liberal experience is necessarily edgy. It means making peace with the creative destruction wrought by liberal economic ideas, and connecting with the strange people and their unfamiliar customs that liberal social ideas inevitably bring into the mainstream.

About a year ago, until the world was hit by a recession, David Cameron’s Tories were making a strong and very articulate pitch for gezellig in British life. David Brooks, once protégé of William Buckley, wrote about this pitch in his New York Times column:

The central political debate of the 20th century was over the role of government. The right stood for individual freedom while the left stood for extending the role of the state. But the central debate of the 21st century is over quality of life. In this new debate, it is necessary for political leaders to talk about “the whole way we live our lives.”

The David Brooks column pointed me to this paper called On Fraternity, by Danny Kruger, a special advisor to David Cameron.

The title is well chosen. Take the French Revolution’s trinity of liberty, equality and fraternity. Liberty belongs to the right, equality to the left. This paper is a call to make fraternity Tory territory. And Kruger’s diagnosis of what ails Britain?

...Britain is suffering ‘social desertification’... a process that began in the 1980s as hundreds of local institutions... were swept away... small high-street grocers and bakers disappeared. Family-run pubs were subsumed into giant chains... this trend is apparent in the rates of family breakdown and the prevalence of drug addiction and violent, alcohol-fuelled crime; in the neglect of the old and the precocious sexuality of children; in the cult of vicarious narcissism which is ‘reality TV’; in the popular addiction to shopping as a means of self-definition, and in the astronomical scale of private debt which is necessary to maintain the shopping habit...

Everything Kruger doesn’t like is ongezellig, the opposite of gezellig. It’s all so unlike the halcyon past. Terrible isn’t it, old chap?

This blog isn’t about ask if the Thatcher-Blair decades saw the re-birth of British vitality, or guess the correct level of social cohesion needed for liberal institutions to take root. But hopefully, the conservative possibilities of gezellig are apparent.

By the way, lamenting the absence of gezellig is not the same thing as experiencing gezellig. Is it ongezellig to moan about the absence of gezellig?

Dev D

Re-interpreted classics can so easily go wrong. Like, say, The Thomas Crown Affair. Sorry, but nobody compares with Steve McQueen, certainly not Pierce Brosnan. Or Sabrina. Maybe Harrison Ford is in the same league as Humphrey Bogart, but poor Julie Ormond never had a chance of filling Audrey Hepburn’s shoes.

But sometimes it is worth the effort. Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet has to be one of the best movies ever, streets better than Franco Zeffirelli’s kitsch.

Dev D is closer to Romeo + Juliet than to Sabrina or the Thomas Crown Affair. It’s a value added take on Devdas.

The central story is what it always was – Dev finishes his education and returns home, meets his childhood sweetheart Paro, does not marry her, and descends to drinking and whoring as he slowly realizes the enormity of his error. The re-make is stylish, contemporary, edgy, unsentimental and fun to watch. Some reflections it prompted:

- Dev came home. Time slowed down, and kept slowing down. The days were hot, humid, still, sultry, endlessly long. Time hung heavy on Dev’s hands, until the mesmerizing slowness of time caused Dev to abandon good sense and judgment. When time slows down enough, it becomes an independent mind-warping character in any story. It’s the reason why films like Picnic at Hanging Rock work. When time slows down that much, any insanity becomes possible

- “Move on” has to be the world’s cheapest, least helpful advice. If moving on happens easily, it didn’t matter enough. Paro was an essential part of Dev, whether he knew it or not. Paro and Dev, they were meant to be. It was written. He was her lobster. Dev can’t move on and remain intact. The old Dev has to be dead, and well buried, before a new Dev can be conceived. The descent into darkness was a necessary passage of play, to clear the way for a possible rebirth

- Chandramukhi, played by a Tamil speaking French girl from Pondicherry called Kalki Koechlin, was a casting coup. She brings an unexpected sassiness and vulnerability to Chandramukhi, probably without having to act very much. But more than the acting, I love the possibilities her name opens up. Kalki is the avatar who ends Kaliyugam (कलयुग). Does Chandra similarly end Dev’s Kaliyugam? Who says Kalki was meant to be a man? And how different is Kaliyugam from the Islamic concept of jahiliya?

For all its quality, Dev D stopped short of being brilliant, mainly becaue of indiscipline. For instance, why does Dev generally hook off to the Himalayas and ride on a motorbike? Maybe the crew wanted a free holiday, and bullied the screenwriter into adding that Himalayan scene to the story. But still totally worth the watch. And worth buying the superb soundtrack.

Good Banter, Bad Sledging

My previous post on the English crowds booing Ricky Ponting drew some interesting feedback…thanks for the engagement. Some readers suggested that there is no such thing as good banter as opposed to bad sledging. That feedback provides me with a great segue to sledging stories that go back to the deified Dr WG Grace, the original Mr Cricket. I think these anecdotes make the point that on field banter can be funny, and can make the game richer.

- Once, when Dr WG Grace was given out, he refused to walk, and told the bowler “All these people have come to watch me bat, not to watch you bowl”. And the innings continued

- Charles Kortwright, bowling to Dr WG Grace in a county game, had dismissed him four or five times but had had his appeals turned down. Finally he knocked over two of the good doctor’s stumps. As the doctor turned towards the pavilion, Kortwright said “Surely you’re not going, Doctor? There is still one stump standing.”

- More recently, Ian Healy told Arjuna Ranatunga that he couldn’t have a runner for being too fat. And when Arjuna played cautiously off the back foot, Healy asked the bowler to put a Mars bar on the good length spot. Arjuna, the fatty, would surely lunge out of his crease to get the Mars bar

- Another keeper, Rod Marsh, asked the incoming batsman Ian Botham just as he was settling down into his stance: “So Both, how’s your wife? And my kids?”. Botham’s reply, “The wife’s fine, the kids are retarded”

- Merv Hughes had helpful words for Graham Thorpe who was playing and missing: “Read the back of your bat, mate. It has got instructions on it”

Marcus Trescothick, who retired from the international game because of mental health problems, says verbal abuse is “nothing to be worried about”. Justin Langer says sledging is a part of the fun, and that the only time he has seen sledging go beyond fun to being personal was between McGrath and Sarwan. Similarly, the Harbhajan – Symonds – Hayden altercations were no fun at all. A lot of the chat that happens is not funny. There clearly are lines that should never be crossed by either fans or players - like race, personal tragedy or physical handicap.

But in the balance, a game with no chat in the middle will be a poorer game. Trying to legislate away the verbal jousting and scatological self-expression in cricket, trying to turn Headingley into Henley, is just silly.

Boo Ponting - Part 2

I was at Trent Bridge earlier this week for the fifth ODI. I was observing the crowd intently when Ricky Ponting came out to bat. He was booed, loud and clear. But the more decent elements in the crowd were embarrassed enough to try and drown out the booing with cheering.

When Ponting finally walked off the pitch after a masterly match-winning century, the entire house rose to give him a standing ovation. Good show, Trent Bridge.

I believe the Trent Bridge crowd booed England yesterday, in the sixth ODI, for putting up such a limp performance. Interestinger and interestinger...

Raptor Rapture

England’s ancient cathedral spires are finding an exciting new twenty-first century purpose. They are excellent nesting sites for peregrine falcon. Handsome young falcon families are bringing glitz and glamour to cathedrals at Chichester, Derby, Lincoln and Worcester, having taken up residence in the spires.

This great story didn’t just happen. The first falcon couple to take up residence in Chichester cathedral did so in 2001, in a nesting box helpfully provided by the Sussex Ornithological Society. Since then 26 chicks have hatched in Chichester. The Derby falcons seem to be well marketed, getting the community involved in conservation, as evidenced by this video made by local six year olds.

Is there scope for some cross cultural conservation learning here? There are a number of temple gopurams in South India which might serve as a nice home for falcons, or other revered raptors.

Echoes of गरुडा (garuda) and जटायू (jatayu)?

I'm Not There

Just watched I’m Not There, a movie about Bob Dylan’s life. Watch it. When you do,

What will you see my blue eyed sons?
What will you see my darling young ones?
You will see a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
You will hear the song of a poet who died in the gutter,
You will meet one man who was wounded in love,
You will meet another man who was wounded in hatred.
You will know how it feels to be with the princess on the steeple and all the pretty people, amused at Napoleon in rags and the language that he used.
You will know how it feels to be on your own, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone.

And you will struggle throughout the film to figure out what is going on and why, which is entirely appropriate for a movie about Dylan.

I’m Not There features six avatars of Bob Dylan, played by six different actors, set in different places and periods, beautifully shot in six different styles. The six actors playing Dylan don’t look like Dylan. The one who looks most like Dylan is Cate Blanchett, playing the stoned superstar who hangs out with the Beatles in London in 1966. Another avatar is a little black boy who travels around America in empty railway wagons, accompanied by his guitar, singing songs about the Depression. A third avatar features a folk singer singing political protest songs along with his Joan Baez-like girl friend. There really could have been many more avatars; there is no room for one featuring a middle class Jewish kid growing up in Hibbing, Minnesota.

The soundtrack is great. You will hear more than a trace of skipping reels of rhyme. Like Dylan songs, the movie floats along on a current of metaphor and imagery. It takes you on a trip upon a magic swirling ship, through the smoke rings of your mind, down the foggy ruins of time. Each scene feels rich with layered meaning, every shirt or jacket, every chance encounter and every throwaway phrase feels like an oblique reference to the god behind the avatars. I am glad I watched this film on DVD rather than at the movies. I had to pause multiple times to google up references. Is that girl meant to be Suze Rotolo? Or Sara Lownds? Both, it turns out.

Sure, it is fun to watch, especially for someone brought up with Dylan-lore. But how does it work as a movie? There is no obvious narrative tension. None of the avatar sub-plots have knots that need to be resolved.

Does this movie bust the theory, previously posited on this blog, that all great stories are built around somebody wanting something really badly, and having difficulty getting it? I thought it did, until I realized that the movie is not about the avatars but about Dylan himself.

Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you.
Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you.
The vagabond who’s rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore.
Strike another match go start anew...

Dylan did strike another match and start anew, time and again. Leaving behind the orphan with his gun, crying like a fire in the sun. Yet just when the saints should be coming through, he settles into a new pattern, which becomes as limiting as the one he left. Maybe it ain’t over baby blue, until Bobby realizes that freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.

Freddy, meet Mac

Its a lazy, sunny Saturday afternoon. Went swimming with the kids in the morning, had upma for lunch. The rest of the family are settling into siestas. I am settling down in front of the telly, to watch Freddy Flintoff come out to bat in his last test innings, and reflecting that Flintoff is cricket's McEnroe.

Both Flintoff and McEnroe were unbelieveably gifted. They've treated us fans to some sheer magic: the Ashes in 2005, the Wimbledon finals in 1980 and 1981. Yet, especially when compared with their natural talent, both are underachievers.

Michael Atherton talks here about Flintoff's disappointing career stats. Flintoff averages 32.06 with the bat and 32.59 with the ball. The decimals show that his batting average is slightly lower than his bowling. To put that in perspective, Imran Khan averaged 37 with the bat and 22 with the ball. Botham averaged 33/28. Among Flintoff's contemporaries, Shaun Pollock comes in at 32/23. Flintoff's bowling average is about the same as Kallis; however, Kallis averages more than 50 with the bat.

Given how good Flintoff can be, especially with the ball, his returns are surprisingly meagre. Like McEnroe's seven grand slam titles.

Yet, the Flintoff we want to remember is not the Flintoff we see in the statistics, but the Flintoff who beat South Africa in 2003, who bowled this over at Edgbaston in 2005. Like the McEnroe in the mind is the one who beat Bjorn Borg in 1981.

So long, Freddy. Thanks for all the fun.

Boo Ponting and Boo Hoo Colly

When Australia won the fourth test in two and a half days, Ricky Ponting went up to the podium to receive the winning captain's magnum of champagne, and he was roundly booed by the Headingley crowd.

The was not the first time Ponting was booed this Ashes series. It started back in Cardiff. It has continued through to Headingley, despite the ECB president Giles Clarke's calls to cease and desist. The Australian captain has ignored the booing.

Nor is this the first time booing has been in the news this summer. Paul Collingwood, the then reigning England captain, spoke in a hurt, injured tone about being booed by a predominantly Indian Lord's crowd during the Twenty20 World Cup. At the subsequent India v. South Africa game at Trent Bridge, there was much sanctimonious commentary (by Jeremy Coney, I think) about how it is nicer to cheer your own team than to boo the other team. Many of my Indian friends and family cringed. Are we really the cricket world's most boorish nation?

Well, the Ashes experience suggests that English fans aren't all that different from the Indian fans. English fans will boo Australia even when England are not playing, as I discovered at the Australia v. Sri Lanka T20 game at Trent Bridge.

Expanding the frame a bit, yes it is undeniably nicer to cheer your own team than to boo the other team. But it is easy to over-steer.

Ultimately, cricket is fun because it is theatre. Banter is a part of the theatre. Like booing a villain at the pantomime is a part of the fun. There is a very fine line between banter and sledging, defined mostly by the spirit in which the words are spoken and received.

Sure, maybe the booing at Headingley and Lord's was not in the right spirit. But the English ODI captain can surely learn a thing or two about stiff upper lips from his Australian counterpart.

Going Dutch...the gezellig way

Gezellig: a useful new word to import into the English language. Or, more importantly, into Anglo-Saxon (or Tamil Brahmin) culture.

Gezellig, pronounced heh-SELL-ick, is apparently at the heart of Dutch culture. It is the spirit which animates Dutch life. It has this sense of people and space coming together in harmony. It can't be translated. It can't be defined. You know it when you see it.

Friends enjoying a picnic on a canal bank, laughing fondly, sharing a bottle of red wine - clearly gezellig. A slob wolfing down fast food as he sprints to a meeting - not so gezellig. A brown cafe in Amsterdam, panelled in wood that has been darkened by generations of smokers - clearly gezellig. A formica-themed dentist's office - not so gezellig. A ramble in the woods with a big shaggy dog - clearly gezellig. Competitive rock-climbling - not un-worthy, but not so gezellig.
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Disclaimer: My knowledge of gezellig is not through first-hand exposure to Dutch culture. I found the word in this free magazine I picked up at the Paris airport.

Dumbo, the great educator

Psychologists think the ability to delay gratification is central to academic achievement, and more generally, to emotional intelligence.

Consider this Stanford psychology study: four year old children were given the option of a treat right now, say, a marshmallow, or waiting for two marshmallows. Years later, the children who were able to wait had better academic performance (SAT scores) and life outcomes (stronger friendships, fewer behavioural problems) than their more impatient cohorts.

Given this evidence, training children to delay gratification ought to be a central goal of education. The question is how?

The answer: take them to Disneyland.

Last weekend, I witnessed hundreds of children aged between four and twelve stand in line uncomplainingly for over an hour, on a hot, sultry Paris afternoon, to ride Dumbo, The Flying Elephant. The ride itself lasts between two and three minutes. The ride is pretty cool, the rider can make Dumbo fly higher or lower by toggling a little lever. Nonetheless, this was an impressive display of delayed gratification.

If this is what today's youngsters are capable of, it bodes well for the future of civilization.

Play up! play up! and play the game!

There is a breathless hush at the close tonight -
Ten to make and a match to win -
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.

And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season's fame,
But his captain's hand on his shoulder smote
Play up! play up! and play the game!

My family's primary religion is cricket. I grew up with these words echoing inside my head, reminding me that cricket is our spiritual calling.

When I recited this poem at my grandparent's dinner parties, or at junior school elocution competitions in Madras, I was vaguely aware that there was more to the poem. But I stopped the recitation at this point. That was probably a good thing. In the Victorian original the next stanzas go:

The sand of the desert is sodden red -
Red with the wreck of a square that broke
The gatling's jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed its banks,
And England's far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks -
"Play up! Play up! And play the game!"

This is the word that year by year,
While in her place the school is set,
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind -
"Play up! Play up! And play the game!"

Jeremy Paxman quotes this poem, Vitai Lampada, in The English. Paxman's take on the poem:

It is hard not to be carried along in its rhythm, even if there is something so breathtakingly stupid about the poem that it is hard to imagine how on earth it could ever have been taken seriously. Yet, in the balmy days before August 1914, the idea that life was essentially a version of the Game seemed almost plausible.

"The sand of the desert is sodden red, red with the wreck of a square that broke", is a reference to the seige of Khartoum, a colonial misadventure which ended with the entire garrison at Khartoum slaughtered and General Gordon, the British officer in charge of the garrison, beheaded by the Mahdi army.

And that is somehow like a game of cricket? Paxman is spot on: breathtakingly stupid.



Reminds me of Lance Klusener. He was asked how he stayed so calm after South Africa crashed out of the 1999 World Cup semi-finals in one of the greatest games ever. Klusener said "nobody died".

Good perspective. Must remember next time India are playing.

Have you ever thunk about thoughting?

Management is justly famous for doing strange things to the English language. Consider: option value, hedge, synergy, self-actualization, kaizen, off-shoring, intrapreneurism, portfolio, fudge, strategize, ideate, projectize, functionality, robustify, core competencies...

Plus two great new words to add to that lexicon. Both are creative conjugations of that ancient and innocent verb, to think, which can be morphed with modern technology into “thoughting” and “thunk”. I learnt both these words at a recent (and very good) seminar with Jack and Carol Weber at Darden.

“Thoughting” actually is a useful word; I believe it was coined by Jack and Carol. It is meant to describe the unsolicited thoughts that endlessly stream through every consciousness. This unsolicited stream is completely different from the disciplined, structured, methodical thinking needed to, say, prove a mathematical theorem. Or to professionally evaluate a business partner’s performance. Yet, this unsolicited stream often intrudes on formal, methodical thought, and sometimes subverts it.

Giving this formless stream of thought a distinct name, thoughting, to distinguish it from formal thought, thinking, is quite useful. A distinct name helps the mind switch out of the thoughting-mode into the thinking-mode as needed.

Maybe when Krishna told Arjuna to free his mind from the shackles of माया (maya) he was telling Arjuna to stop the thoughting and start thinking. माया is often translated as illusion. Maybe thoughting, the mindless chatter that clutters the consciousness, would be a better translation.

Maybe the meditative practice of emptying the mind is about stopping the thoughting. ध्यान (dhyana), the Sanskrit root of the word Zen, could be understood as freedom from thoughting. So the consciousness is released to prove the theorem, or evaluate the business partner. A mind that is full of thoughting will struggle to hit that little red ball hurtling towards the soft tissues at ninety miles per hour, with just a hint of reverse swing.

This famous story from Zen Flesh Zen Bones might be about thoughting:

Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1869-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen. Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full and then kept on pouring.

The professor watched the overflow until he could no longer restrain himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!"

"Like this cup", Nan-in said, "you are too full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen until you first empty your cup?"

Skilled thinking can't happen without knowledge, one has to know some math to solve the theorem. Thoughting, however, gets in the way of thinking.



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“Thunk” is not just an uncultured way of saying thought. It is typically used in the context of another management buzzword that includes the word thinking.

Let’s say you have a high-powered corporate mandate to do "customer thinking". This means building or modifying products and processes so they are easy for customers to use. Once this work has been done, the said product or process has been "customer thunk".

The same conjugation works for "possibility thinking", which means creative problem solving, understood as an attitude rather than as a technique. When this "possibility thinking" exercise has been completed, the business itself has been "possibility thunk".

What I love most about thunk are its poetic possibilities:

The CEO was in a funk
His stock options had turned to junk
So to the consultant he quietly slunk
His business processes were customer thunk
His annual bonus went up by a chunk
And he celebrated by styling his hair like a punk

Its surprisingly difficult to come up with positive words ending in unk. Sunk, bunk, dunk…. nothing uplifting or celebratory.

Waugh: The Class Act

Is Ponting an unworthy successor to Steve Waugh? Or are they really peas from a pod, crude and petty sledgers, with Waugh smelling a little better only because he won more often? My friend Shukles got me thinking about this a couple of days ago, when he suggested that Ponting was no worse than Steve Waugh.

Consider the case for Steve Waugh:

- He found the time to support Udayan, a home for disadvantaged children in Barrackpore, Calcutta

- Waugh found the time to take his team to Gallipoli, to honour the ANZAC soldiers who fell there during WWI, starting off a little tradition

- He taught his team to enjoy playing in India, and more generally the sub-continent. Approaching the tour as a fun experience, rather than as a punishment posting probably had a big part to play in their improved results. One of my favourite photos from Waugh's autobiography is of his team, wearing their lurid yellow uniforms and with their backs to the camera, staring mesmerized at the Taj Mahal

- He encouraged Ed Smith, then a colleague at Kent, to write about what it is like to be a county pro. This is one of my favourite books about contemporary cricket

- He mourned the game's loss when Zimbabwe's Neil Johnson retired after a scintillating World Cup in 1999, including a century against Australia, because he needed to earn a living. He made a plea to the cricket community to support the game in Zimbabwe, because the game was poorer if a player of Johnson's quality could not play. For this, Sunil Gavaskar described Waugh as not just a great player, but a great leader of men. BTW, Gavaskar is no reflexive Aussie supporter.

I couldn't Google-up a link to Waugh's comments about Neil Johnson. It stuck in my memory because of Johnson's amazing personal story. Johnson was a superstar at seventeen, and a has-been at twenty. The South African team management (rightly) preferred Lance Klusener and Shaun Pollock to Neil Johnson for that all-rounder slot. Yet, he hung on to his dream, played for Zimbabwe, and got his revenge on the biggest stage of all when he single-handedly beat a South African team that included Klusener and Pollock in the 1999 World Cup, before riding off into the sunset.

Could a cussed captain have been made to look like a hero by a good spin-doctor? Some moments, like Udayan and Gallipoli, could have been stage managed, though they reflect well on Waugh even if those associations were prompted by an image-consultant. But the Ed Smith and Neil Johnson stories would have been hard for a spin-doctor to fabricate. Looking at the whole rather than at the parts, the gestalt, I still am left with the impression that Waugh was a genuinely gracious guy. He understood that he was a part of something bigger than himself.

If so, why did he sledge? In his autobiography he says "sledging invariably occured when a player was frustrated at his poor form and wanted to show how much he was trying and how much he was annoyed with his performance. It is a cheap way of getting attention...". In Waugh's framework, he did not sledge. He tried to engineer a collapse in his opponent's confidence, mental disintegration, which is a part of the game.

He famously tried to bring about Saurav Ganguly's mental disintegration. Ganguly did not disintegrate, and Waugh now talks about "an ongoing verbal battle between Saurav and me, which belied an underlying admiration for each other... I saw in Saurav a committed individual who wanted to inject some toughness and combativeness into a side that had often tended to roll over and expose a soft underbelly".

In Waugh's world, a captain who tries hard enough is a captain who tries to engineer the mental disintegration of his opponents. Nothing personal or disrespectful. It's just part of the game. Which is why Steve Waugh is such a hard act for Ponting to follow.

Spiritual Intelligence and corporate life

कर्मण्ये  वाधिकारस्ते  मा  फलेषु  कदाचन
मा  कर्मफलहेतुर  भूर  मा  ते संगोस्त्व  अकर्मणि

These words from the Bhagavad Gita were first spoken by Lord Krishna to Arjuna at Kurukshetra. They roughly translate to: you contol your actions, but not their more remote consequences. So take the remote consequences off your mind, act, and fulfill your sacred destiny.

These words were also the theme of a corporate leadership development program I was at earlier this week. A bunch of successful and well-compensated executives spoke to us developees about how leadership is about service, about having a bias for action, and not obsessing about moving up the corporate ladder. Absolutely. Following the blockbuster success of Emotional Intelligence, Amazon is now selling a book on Spiritual Intelligence.

Yeah, right…but this program was not naïve. It recognized that the developees cared about money. After all, these were people in corporate jobs. The program advised setting very specific goals on how much wealth one wanted to build.

This advice, from Jack Weber at the Darden School in Virginia, was based on an interesting longitudinal study done by Harvard Business School. The study sampled a class of HBS MBAs at graduation. It asked the graduates to rate how much they cared about money on a scale of 1-10. It also asked them how much they thought their net worth would be in 5, 10 and 15 years. The answer to the second question could also be “don’t know”. The study then went back and measured the net worth of these graduates in 5, 10 and 15 years. The finding was that the first question had no predictive power: the MBAs all cared about making money. The second question was a strong predictor of future net worth, with the people who didn’t know what they would be worth performing even worse than those who had put down modest targets. As an aside, I would love to know if the students with the highest wealth expectations also had the highest variance in wealth outcomes, because of having made lower probability bets (I couldn’t locate this study through googling).

A third perspective on careers that emerged came not from the faculty but from a fellow developee, chatting after work. Her boss had told her, “Our company is an ocean with many currents running through it. The key to success is to find a current that will become as big as the Gulf Stream, and to ride it.” This makes even more sense if company were replaced by industry or society. Some realpolitick here: how does one respond to mundane work that moves the company forward, but is unlikely to grow into a career-enhancing Gulf Stream?

Maybe staying sane is about balancing these perspectives. Or maybe it is about these elements coming together: ride the Gulf Stream to get wealthy, which enables the generosity of spirit needed to think in terms of मा कर्मफलहेतुर भूर.

There but for the grace of you go I

Came across this story in the New Yorker, a profile of a liberal Iranian economist called Mohammed Tabibian. Has stayed in memory because Iran, seen through Tabibian's eyes, reminds me so much of India.

Here are some nuggets that I really liked:

- Tabibian speaks with a lucidity and directness that is startling in a culture marked by allusiveness and elaborate courtesy

- In Iran the spectrum of economic thought, Tabibian joked, "runs from left to left". The so-called convervatives... talk of redistributing Iran's wealth, not of re-structuring its economy

- "The common morality was that if the rich give a part of their wealth to the poor, then the poor will be helped out. Many days and nights, in my imagination and daydreaming, I distributed the wealth of my family to the poor in my neighbourhood. Always my calculation came to the same conculsion: that such an imaginary scheme, even if it happens, makes us poor and the neighbourhood not much better off"

- Tabibian is not bothered by the negative example (of free markets run amok) unfolding in the West. "We are on two different sides of the spectrum. You need more regulation. We need less regulation and government intervention"

- The senior Iranian clergy at Qom "were nice people, gentle people, very concerned about morality and things to come from the other life". Their economic presriptions, however, were vanishingly vague: society should be prosperous, people should not be greedy

- After the Revolution, the Central Bank had only one clear priority, to abolish the interest rate which was deemed un-Islamic. And yet, no matter which policy the Central Bank pursued, interest quickly reappeared. A bank branch in Tehran would place a red car on its roof and announce that all depositers would be entered into a lottery for that car - a strategy that allowed the bank to pay a variable rate of return on its deposits. Bankers even found ayatollahs who would issue fatwas in support of their schemes

- The revolution had made education available to more Iranians. But there was no role for these people in an economy that depended not on productive industries but on the dispensation of oil-rents

All the Shah’s Men?

Was Barack Obama’s tough talk on Iran the kiss of death for the recent protests?

Great question, because it opens up a pivotal passage in history that needs to be resolved before sanity returns to the Middle East. I didn’t know about this until I read All the Shah’s Men. This book, a breeze at 230 pages of comfortably large fonts, is a must read for anyone who has been following the news coming out of Iran over the last few weeks.

The key to understanding Iran, and why any association with America and/or Britain is so toxic in Iranian politics, goes back to 1953.



This was when the CIA sponsored a coup to unseat the secular, liberal, democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, and install Shah Reza Pahlavi in his place. The point of the coup was to retain western control of the oil fields and refineries at Abadan. Mohammed Mossadegh planned to nationalize these oil fields, which were owned and operated by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now known as British Petroleum).

The coup worked for a quarter century, until the Shah was overthrown in 1979 by a people’s revolution that morphed into the Islamic Republic. These events, not much talked about in today's western media, are vividly remembered in the Middle East.

Interestingly, America’s Democrat leaders are well aware of this history:

- Barack Obama referred to the 1953 coup during his historic speech at Cairo University, “For many years, Iran has defined itself in part by its opposition to my country, and there is in fact a tumultuous history between us. In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government”.

- John Kerry wrote this op-ed piece in the New York Times, “The last thing we should do is give Mr. Ahmadinejad an opportunity to evoke the 1953 American-sponsored coup, which ousted Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and returned Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to power. Doing so would only allow him to cast himself as a modern-day Mossadegh, standing up for principle against a Western puppet”.

Some other interesting nuggets from All the Shah's Men:

- Kermit Roosevelt Jr., Teddy Roosevelt's grandson, was the CIA agent who engineered the 1953 coup

- Norman Schwarzkopf Sr. spoke to the exiled Shah to convince him to return to Iran and take power. His son was the Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. who commanded American forces in Operation Desert Storm in 1991

- Winston Churchill was the British Prime Minister when Mossadegh started moves to nationalize Anglo-Iranian. This felt personal to Churchill, the Admiralty man. Abadan had fueled the Royal Navy through two world wars. Churchill immediately reached out to America for help, and got nowhere with President Harry Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson. The plot to oust Mossadegh really started getting traction when the Eisenhower administration brought the Dulles brothers to the center of power.

Flying through Dulles airport in Washington DC reminds me of the story of Mohammed Mossadegh.

Eoin Morgan and the tragedy of Greame Hick

As I start this post, Ireland have restricted Sri Lanka to 28-2 in 6 overs, after Sri Lanka had scored over 60 in the first 6 against Australia, West Indies and Pakistan. Jayawardene and Jayasuriya are just starting to power away from the Fighting Irish.

I usually back Lanka above all teams except India, but today my heart is with the underdogs. The Irish amateurs playing for pride, taking on the galacticos. If only... if only quality players from Ireland, good enough to make a living playing cricket, were actually playing for Ireland.

Eoin Morgan played for England earlier this year. Admittedly, his only game was England's famous defeat to the Netherlands at Lord's in the opening game of this Twenty20 World Cup. But still, he is good enough to play for England. His first class average is better than either the Irish captain William Porterfield, or their star batsman Niall O'Brien. Ed Joyce is another England international who might have been playing for Ireland today.

How much of a difference would a couple of quality batsmen, or at least better batsmen, make to the Irish run chase today?

The greatest tragedy of this sort was Greame Hick. Playing for England, he was a disappointment. Playing for Zimbabwe, alongside the Flower brothers, Dave Houghton and Eddo Brandes, he might have made the difference between a team capable of making noble gestures and a team capable of winning.



In Hick's time, maybe playing international cricket was the only credible way of making a decent living as a player. Maybe playing county cricket for a lifetime was not ambition enough.

Today, has the IPL changed that dynamic? Hopefully it will. But this generation of the Fighting Irish will have to win with the talent they've got.