Caesar, the cat?

The assassination of Julius Caesar, when Casca’s hands spoke for him on the Ides of March, when et tu Brute felled Caesar, is surely one of the most pivotal, dramatic and best remembered episodes in world history. The place where this happened, the Area Sacra, with the brick ruins of four Roman era temples and its chipped fluted columns, is still evocative and atmospheric. However, it is not a tourist attraction. It is a sanctuary for stray cats.



This cat is napping on the ruins of the Theatro Pompei, the building where Caesar was killed.



The cats in this sanctuary seem to be healthy, clean and well looked after.



My family and I discovered this place by accident. The tram line we were on happened to terminate at the Largo Argentina, a busy transport hub adjacent to the Area Sacra. Otherwise, this place is simply not promoted as a sight for tourists to see. Other potentially interesting sites in Rome which are off the main tourist map include Ostia Antica, the Circus Maximus and Augustus Caesar's mausoleum.

I often complain that we Indians are so bad at showcasing our fantastic heritage. It is interesting that Italy, which is ten times richer than India but still feels spiritually akin to India, is also not that great at showcasing its heritage. The world champions of showcasing heritage might well be the British. It feels like more work has gone into presenting the Roman Baths at Bath, a spa in a remote outpost of the Roman Empire, than the seat of the Roman Empire itself at the Foro Romano.



Still, I'm glad someone is looking out for the cats :)

Hutton, the toff?

CMJ’s son Robin retired from first class cricket a couple of weeks ago. I looked looked him up on Cricinfo, and came across a delicious little nugget: Robin Martin Jenkins played in the same Radley College XI as Andrew Strauss and Ben Hutton.

The reigning England captain, a county all rounder who was once considered England material, and the captain of the county that calls Lord’s home – these guys all played together in a school team. Wow! What sort of school boasts such a fine cricketing tradition?



A very posh school, it turns out. Radley College is one of three remaining all-boys all-boarding public schools in England, along with Eton and Harrow. Its campus is five miles south of Oxford, sprawls across eight hundred acres, includes a cricket pavilion, a golf course and, since 2008, a real tennis court. It is only about 150 years old - Eton and Harrow are both more than 400 years old - but, regardless, an interactive web-tour of the Radley College campus confirms that it is as comfortably upper class as PG Wodehouse’s Wrykyn ever was.

Christopher Martin-Jenkins, the sonorous voice of the MCC establishment, sent his son to Radley College. That fits. Andrew Strauss’ nickname in the England dressing room is Lord Brock, after an old Etonian TV presenter famous for living the high life. That fits. But Ben Hutton? Does he fit?

The name Hutton is sacred in cricketing lore because of Ben’s grandfather Len Hutton, who, as recently as 1951, became the first professional to captain England. He was the son of a builder from a Yorkshire village called Pudsey. He went to a local council school, trained as a carpenter (perhaps, coincidentally, like Jesus Christ), set the world record for the highest test match score with 364 against Australia, and he captained England to successive Ashes victories.

Len Hutton was more than just a great player. Like Frank Worrell, the West Indies’ first black captain, Hutton’s achievements are drenched in special meaning because of who he is. Yet, this working class hero’s grandson went to one of England’s most exclusive public schools. Interesting.

Arnold Toynbee has a theory on why this is not just OK, but is profoundly good. Toynbee takes it as a given that every civilization is shaped by a ruling elite. This has been empirically true through history, including in supposedly communist or socialist societies. The vast majority in every civilization, the “internal proletariat” in Toynbee-speak, are outside the ruling elite. Toynbee believes that the relationship between this ruling elite and the internal proletariat is the most critical difference between a vital civilization and one that is breaking down.

In a vital civilization, the ruling elite have a natural legitimacy. The elite have a hold on the imagination and aspirations of the internal proletariat, who voluntarily seek to become more like the the ruling elite, a process Toynbee calls mimesis. Conversely, in a civilization which is breaking down “the internal proletariat, that majority in society which had formerly given its voluntary allegiance to a creative leadership, but which is now increasingly alienated from its own society by the coercive despotism of its corrupted masters... registers its secession from society by adopting a spiritual ethos which is alien in inspiration”. In this calculus, the Huttons are a part of a healthy civilization, one in which the best of the working class seek to become like the ruling elite.

Ben Hutton is not the first public-school-man in his family. His father Richard attended Repton, a school as exclusive as Radley College. Richard Hutton would have been eligible to enroll at Repton in 1955, when Len was the reigning England captain. It seems like Len, at the pinnacle of his career, respected the prevailing power structure even though he was not born into it, and chose to give his son a more privileged upbringing than he himself enjoyed.

England’s cricket captain sent his son to the best school that he possibly could. That fits well enough, regardless of whether the captain was a gentleman or a professional.

Rapidex goes to Paris

One of the highlights of our family's trip to Paris this spring was this poster:



It is prominently displayed all around the Paris metro network.

It reminds me of one of my favourite brands, Rapidex English Speaking Courses, which is right up there along with Palmolive and Boost as great Indian brands endorsed by Kapil Dev. Different cultures, exactly the same consumer need.

The market clearly knows that the "right" English is no longer the Queen's English. In case the current turmoil on Wall Street does not abate, we can always look forward to a brand relaunch as Main Street English:



Thanks to Polly-vous Francais for the Main Street English poster.

Gaudi : Architecture :: Grace : Cricket

Gaudi’s work – incredible, phantasmagorical forms set within a city of perfectly straight lines and right angles – captures the spirit of a world gone by, a world that was animated by nature, magic and fantasy, and boldly brings that spirit back into an unremittingly modern world.

Reminds me of the good doctor Grace. Specifically, of CLR James’ take on WG Grace.

CLR James, cricket’s greatest historian, examines WG Grace at length in Beyond A Boundary. James’ interpretation is that Doctor Grace was a creature of an old England, a pre-industrial, pre-Victorian, yeoman England. This England was vanishing by the time WG played. But by embracing and celebrating WG, by deifying the good doctor and giving him, and the game he bestrode like a colossus, a central place in the pantheon, relentlessly modern Victorian England encapsulated and kept alive the best of the spirit of that older time.

Looked at this way, the cultural meaning of cricket in India and England could hardly be more different. Cricket came to India fully formed, as part of an already modern Victorian empire. Princelings played it to express allegiance with their colonial masters. Nationalists played it to realize the virtues which made the empire so powerful, and so to defeat the invaders at their own game. Either way, cricket in the sub-continent always represented modernity, success, power, the glorious future rather than the idyllic past.

As a post-script, some extracts on WG Grace from CLR James’ text:

WG Grace was a Victorian, but the game he transformed into a national institution was not Victorian in either origin or essence. It was a creation of pre-Victorian England, of the two generations which preceeded the accession of the queen…It was an England still unconquered by the industrial revolution. It travelled by saddle and carriage. Whenever it could, it ate and drank prodigiously. It was not finicky about morals. It enjoyed life. It prized the virtues of frankness, independence, individuality, convivality. There were the rulers and the ruled, the educated and the uneducated. If the two groupings could be described as two nations, they were neither of them conscious of the division as a state of things which ought not be.

In all essentials, the modern game was shaped between 1778 and 1830. It was created by the yeoman farmer, the game keeper, the tinker, the Nottingham coal miner, the Yorkshire factory hand. The artisans made it, men of hand and eye. The rich and idle noblemen, and some substantial city people contributed money, organization and prestige…

At their matches, the players ate and drank with the gusto of the time, sang songs, and played for large sums of money. Bookies sat openly before the pavilion at Lord’s taking bets. The unscrupilous nobleman and the poor and dishonest commoner alike bought and sold matches…

The old England had indeed gone. By 1857 a majority of the population lived in cities. This was the generation, the first of many to come, which was "cut off from the natural country pursuits and amusements which had been the heritage of Englishmen for centuries". They probably felt the loss more than the public school boys…In the ten years that followed the Factory Act of 1847, there had come into existance an enormous urban public, proletarian and clerical lower middle class. They had won for themselves one great victory, freedom on Saturday afternoons. They were ‘waiting to be amused’…

The decade of the sixties, with its rush to organize sports associations of every kind, was just around the corner. In 1862, the first team of English cricketers set sail for Australia. In 1863, the MCC authorized overarm bowling, thus removing the last barrier to the development of the game’s full potentialities. In 1863, WG Grace, then fifteen years old, played in a first class match. He had made his first appearance on a stage that all classes of the nation had helped to build, and which was just about ready for the performance WG was about to give…

Through WG Grace, cricket, the most complete expression of popular life in pre-industrial England, was incorporated into the life of the nation. As far as any social activity can be the work of one man, he did it…

What manner of man was he? He was a typical representative of the pre-Victorian age. His was a Gloucestershire country father who made a good wicket in the orchard and the whole family rose at dawn to get in a few hours of cricket. Their dogs were trained to act as retreivers…

Boys of the Grace clan once walked seven miles to school in the morning, seven miles home for lunch, seven miles back to school and seven miles home in the evening. That was the breed, reared in the pre-Victorian days before railways…

Records show that the family in their West Gloucestershire cricketing encounters queried, disputed and did not shrink from fisticuffs. To the end of their days, EM and WG chattered on the field like magpies. Their talking at and even to batsmen was so notorious that young players were warned against them. They were uninhibited with each other and could be furious at fraternal insults or mistakes. They were uninhibited in general.

In his attitude to book learning he belonged entirely to the school of pre-Arnold Browns. He rebuked a fellow player who was always reading in the dressing rooms “How do you expect to score if you are always reading? I would never be caught that way.”

He is said on all sides to have been one of the most typical of Englishmen, to have symbolised John Bull, and so on and so forth. To this, it is claimed, in addition to his deeds, he owed his enormous popularity. I take leave to doubt it. He was English undoubtedly, very much so. But he was typical of an England which was being superseded. He was the yeoman, the country doctor, the squire, the England of yesterday. But he was no relic, no historical or nostalgic curiosity. He was pre-Victorian in the Victorian age, but a pre-Victorian militant...

There he was using his bat like an axe, building as much of that old as possible into the new, and fabulously successful at it. The more simple past was battling with the more complex, more dominant, present, and the present was being forced to yield ground and make room. In any age, he would have been a striking personality and vastly popular. That particular age he hit between wind and water.

Gaudi in Context

We were in Barcelona, with no specific agenda, thanks to a restless Icelandic volcano. A little Gaudi pilgrimage was noblesse oblige; my father’s brother, an architect, was an ardent devotee. So my wife and I navigated the streets of Barcelona, on foot and in public transport, with the children, with only a hazy plan in mind, to see the Pedrera, Casa Batllo, Parc Guell, and the Sagrada Familia, in situ.

Gaudi’s work - the fluid exterior of the Pedrera, the tile work at Parc Guell, the steepling ant-hills of the Sagrada Familia abuzz with activity, somehow remniscent of a south Indian temple gopuram - was as wonderfully phantasmagorical as ever. What was new was the context, the streets of the Eixample district in which this work is set.

The Eixample is laid out in a perfect geometrical grid.
The streets are perfectly straight. Each city block is a square with the edges trimmed off into an octogon, to let in more air and light, and to help the traffic see around corners. It is controlled, predictable, methodical, and in its own way, beautiful.

The Eixample was designed in 1859 by Ildefons Cedra, a less storied figure than Antonio Gaudi. This was when the textile industry was booming, the population was growing, there was new money around, and Barcelona had clearly outgrown the Old City - Ciutat Vella - around the Mediterranean port. So the ancient city walls, fortifications which went back to Roman times, were demolished. An extension, eixample in Catalan, was built. It must have been a relief to move from the tiny, twisted, messy, over-crowded streets of the Ciutat Vella into the gracious, tree-lined avenues of the Eixample, with schools, shopping and hospitals within easy access.



When the twenty-one year old Gaudi started studying architecture, in 1873, the Eixample was already there, as large as life, business as usual. Been there, done that, to straight lines and perfect octogons. Beauty was no longer about imposing order on unruly nature, or on a chaotic past. Beauty, and spirituality, was now about evoking and celebrating the shapes and irregularities of nature, a nature which is increasingly far away.

Gaudi, of course, responded to this need with spectacular panache. But the context, the framing needed to hold Gaudi's magical world in place, was already there. So the Eixample now has Cedra’s rigid grid enriched with Gaudi’s fanstastic shapes, in a point counter-point rhythm, which is more layered and meaningful than something either Cedra or Gaudi alone might have built.

Let them eat cake

Would you want your brand to be associated with an icon, who, for centuries, has been associated with unearned privilege, wanton indulgence, promiscuity, and the furious hatred of the common people? Apparently, yes, if you are in the luxury goods business.

The exquisite pink marble Trianon palaces in Versailles, from where Marie Antoinette reigned, are being restored to their former glory. This worthy effort is being sponsored by Breguet watches. I noticed the Breguet logo is discreetly but clearly displayed all around the complex on a recent visit.

This is not common or garden corporate philanthropy, it is considered brand-building. Breguet’s advertising boasts that Marie Antoinette wore a watch crafted by the original Mr. Breguet. Breguet bought wood from an oak tree that was being felled near the Petit Trianon palace, under which Marie Antoinette “liked to day dream”, to build a special presentation case for the Marie Antoinette watch. The brand is clearly working hard to enhance this association. Their customers, people who pay ~$25,000 for a wrist watch, are probably telling them that they like the Bourbon heritage.

Will that change? My bet is, it will.

My reflexive associations with Marie Antoinette are negative, probably because I first learnt about her in my middle school history text books. In that austere world of Indira Gandhi’s socialist India, Marie Antoinette’s opulence felt obscene. Breguet chose to invest in the Marie Antoinette association in a different context, in an age of plenty. This was a zeitgiest in which a Labour minister could say that he is “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”, and be better regarded for that attitude. If one is intensely relaxed about the filthy rich being filthy rich, it becomes a lot easier to see Marie Antoinette as a glamourous, gracious but misunderstood heroine.

For better or worse, that age of plenty has come to an end. Whatever comes next, for a few years at least, frugality, conspicuous frugality, is going to matter. History's verdict on Marie Antoinette will continue to shift shape.

The Clintons, the Obamas and Mr Liz Hurley

The Clintons' marriage is famously “complicated”. The Obamas seem a stable and happy couple. This blog believes that Liz Hurley’s marriage to her unlikely Indian beau Arun Nayar is more likely to go the Obama way than the Clinton way; the Hurley-Nayar yin and yang are in balance, as are the Obamas’, while the Clintons’ is not.

Earlier, I had floated a general theory: the psyche seeks a balance of yin and yang in every couple. Happy couples have this balance. The Clintons don’t. Both Bill and Hillary are tough, smart, super-ambitious scrappers. All yang. Where there are differences in style, Bill the charming compromiser seems more in touch with yin energy than Hillary, the doctrinaire disciplinarian. They could easily be best friends; they seem to understand each other perfectly and enjoy each other’s company. But they are too alike to be a couple, their marriage needs more yin.

Michelle Obama, unlike Hillary Clinton, seems very happy being a wife and mom. She is not using her first ladyship as a platform from which to influence policy. She could if she wanted to. She is smart enough and has the necessary training. The Economist ran a thoughtful and sympathetic column a year ago, lamenting the “momification of Michelle”:

...during the campaign she raised a lot of thought-provoking questions—about “the flimsy difference between success and failure” in America, about the removal of rungs from the ladder of opportunity, and about the plight of families at the bottom of the heap. It would be good to hear a bit more about what Mrs Obama thinks and a lot less about what she wears.

The Economist is missing the bigger picture: the Obamas have an endless supply of smart, articulate, well-trained, motivated people capable of raising thought-provoking questions about the flimsy difference between success and failure. They don’t have anybody else who can be Mommy. In choosing to be Mommy, Michelle is doing what she alone can do, and letting others do what they can do as well as she can. David Ricardo would have congratulated her for focusing on her comparative advantage. CJ Jung would have congratulated her for bringing more yin energy to her marriage when it was needed; now that Barack is the most powerful man in the world, he inevitably gathers more yang around him than he ever did before.

When the Obamas first got together, their balance of yin and yang probably was different. Michelle was Barack’s senior at Harvard Law School and his mentor at the law firm in Chicago when they got to know each other. The change in the way their marriage works is a nice example of how plastic identity can be, and how much that identity is shaped by context.

Readers shocked by this apparent endorsement of a woman’s traditional role... hang in there. Another marriage which seems about right in terms of yin and yang balance, but with a woman being the tougher partner, is that of Liz Hurley and Arun Nayar.

I was a bit preplexed when I first heard about this match. It was reported in the British press as Liz Hurley marrying an Indian textile tycoon. Sure, this was good publicity for India, and a glamourous A list celebrity like Liz Hurley would make a fantastic trophy wife for an Indian tycoon. But who exactly was this Indian textile tycoon? I am pretty close to business circles in India, and nobody I know had ever heard of Arun Nayar, or of his family’s “import export” business. And if Mr Nayar is not exactly an A lister back home in India, why does Liz want him?

Last week’s Sunday Times resolved at least a part of this puzzle. Liz Hurley never was destined to be a trophy for some Indian textile tycoon. She is one tough honey: determined, hard-working, ambitious, rich, successful and totally in charge. She was getting herself a well-built husband who would look appropriate (and not say anything inappropriate) at public events, and would be happy to help mind the animals at the farm back in Gloucestershire. Some extracts:

- Liz says "Chasing goals has less to do with earning more money – although I’m not against it – and more to do with being challenged and trying to win”

- Arun Nayar, her husband [is her] most devoted member of staff. Only the other week, she announces proudly, Arun came home from manning the farm’s stall at Cirencester boasting how many of wifey’s snack bars he’d hawked. “He sold 50!” she beams

- Does she worry that Arun might suffer from a touch of the beta males, given she’s such a big personality and it’s her name on the family business? “Arun is astonishingly good-natured and would be the last man on earth to feel overshadowed by me,” she says, unruffled. “He’s thoroughly comfortable in his own skin and I don’t think he’d swap places with anyone.”

The Times journalist isn’t trying to portray either Liz Hurley or Arun Nayar in flattering light here. But it isn’t hard to imagine that it is easier for the driven Ms Hurley to live with the amiable anonymity of Mr Nayar, than with a man who is as driven as she is. She needs someone to bring some yin to her yang.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Why don’t glamourous hotties ever fall madly in love with nice, well-mannered, hard-working boys? Why are they forever falling in love with over-muscled, mean-spirited, brutes who are so clearly up to no good?

This topic has been debated extensively in my hostel room by my friends, all of whom are nice, well-mannered, hard-working boys. However, the most insightful take on this eternal question came not from my nice-but-angst-ridden hosteller friends, but from one of their moms, a trained psychologist with a Ph.D. in Jungian thought. The way she saw it, the psyche, consciously or otherwise, always seeks a balance between animus with anima, yin with yang. The elements need to be in proportion.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona illustrates this thought. Watch it before you read this post, if you care about suspense. I will give away elements of the plot.

Vicky has her life sorted. She is a serious, hard-working, responsible, well-educated graduate student. She is engaged to a serious, hard-working, responsible, well-employed banker/ lawyer. They will get married when she earns her Masters degree. They are buying a nice house together in a pleasant New York suburb. They are thinking about tennis lessons. Soon they will buy a Volvo and have beautiful children who will get above average grades. Vicky is well on her way to yuppie nirvana, the only nirvana she has ever wanted. That is, until she falls in love.

The man she falls in love with is Juan Antonio, a spontaneous, passionate, intense, expressive, incandescent Catalan painter. She isn’t looking for love, she isn’t even open to being wooed. But her yang senses Juan Antonio’s yin, her earth needs Juan Antonio’s fire. Together, their chi comes into balance, magic happens, and Vicky becomes more vividly alive than she has ever been. Vicky's story is at the emotional core of the movie. She still is the girl who wants to be a suburban mom. But she needs to deal with the depth of her feelings for Juan Antonio. Is this a fleeting infatuation? Or profound love? Or is profound love a fleeting infatuation?

The film’s other emotional core is Juan Antonio’s marriage with Maria Elena, another spontaneous, passionate, intense, expressive, incandescent Catalan painter. Juan Antonia and Maria Elena live, breathe, sleep and dream together. They work together so intensely that their art, their styles, are indistinguishable. They are one mind, one soul, inseparable despite inhabiting distinct bodies. Therefore, their love is dysfunctional. They are too alike. Together they have too much yin, too much fire, their chi is not in balance.

Juan Antonio and Maria Elena need another element, someone who is not like them, to balance the chi in their marriage. That element comes, like a breath of fresh air, in the form of Vicky’s college friend Christina, a film maker bored with her own work and casting around for new experiences. What could be a more exciting new experience than these passionate Spanish artists? It works out, fire needs air. But does air need fire?

Vicky Cristina Barcelona feels like a classic Woody Allen film, which is great for someone like me who has long been a fan of Manhattan and Annie Hall. Woody Allen's characters do sometimes come across as one-dimensional, like vehicles to make his point rather than as messy, real, flesh and blood people. That generally doesn't happen here. British actress Rebecca Hall is appropriately stilted as Vicky, and Scarlett Johansson easily gets into the skin of the beautiful, bored and self-centered Cristina. But the real-life couple who make this movie are Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz. They bring so much guts, gumption and messy passion to their roles as Juan Antonio and Maria Elena that it's impossible not to be carried away.

We watched this DVD shortly after Live Flesh, a Pedro Almodovar film which also had a superb Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz. That cast, the Spanish setting, and the broad open-ended questions about love and the meaning of life give this film a delicious Woody Allen meets Pedro Almodovar feeling. It is great fun. Mind it!

Vishwaroopam and Florida

We’ve found the culprits. We know who dun it. It’s them Adam and Eve, residents of Eden Gardens, Paradise, PL24 2SG. They inspired the Cruella de Vils slaughtering innocent baby pythons in Florida.

There are serious arguments being made for the extermination of the Florida python. Learned Associate Professors believe that the python is a threat to delicately balanced ecosystems. Yet, I can’t help noticing that other non-native species that are spreading through the American south, like, for instance, wild hogs, are treated differently. Hogs are also large, potentially violent, omnivorous, fast breeding, adaptive, mobile, elusive, and are potentially upsetting the balance of many delicate American ecosystems. But unlike pythons, nobody is trying to wipe them out. Why?

My hunch is that this is simply because pythons are snakes. Snakes have had bad rap, negative symbolic associations, ever since they were cast, through no fault of their own, in the villain’s role in the legend of Adam and Eve. Imagine how easily a magpie, symbolizing excessive attraction to superficial beauty, could have prompted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. But mythology can't easily be undone, and this slander of serpents has played through to modern pop-myths. Like, in Harry Potter, Gryffindor's emblem is a lion, but Slytherin's is a serpent?

I find this uniformly negative portrayal of snakes hard to relate to, probably because snakes are often portrayed in positive light in Indian iconography. Shiva has a garland of cobras coiled around his neck. The traditional depiction of Maha Vishnu, Vishwaroopam, shows him reclining on his friend and protector Adisesha, the sire of the serpents. In some traditions, Adisesha accompanies Maha Vishnu to earth to be his best friend during his avatars, like Krishna and Balarama or Rama and Lakshmana. Vasuki, the king of the serpents, churns the ocean of milk to find Amrit, the nectar of immortality, which the beautiful Mohini delivers to the good Devas rather than the evil Asuras.

Not all Indian snakes are good; Krishna tames the evil ten-headed Kaaliya by dancing on his heads. But, Indian snakes are more good than bad, and in that context, it feels natural to revere real snakes that live near people. It feels natural for Wildlife SOS, a charity I support, to send me email about how they’ve rescued lost or injured pythons. Or for the Chinese zodiac to associate the snake with wisdom, intelligence and grace.

Once, western cultures also depicted snakes in positive light. The snakes coiled around medicine’s Hippocratic staff represent life itself. The Mediterranean Tree of Life once showed a serpent twined around the trunk of a flowering tree, the fertile and the virile, yin and yang. Much that was beautiful was lost in Adam and Eve’s deadly smear campaign.

But maybe, just maybe, the end is in sight. Maybe the magic of Disney can undo two millennia of defamation and injustice. I watched The Princess and the Frog recently. It features Disney’s first black heroine, Tiana, who is not a princess born into riches but an entrepreneur who shapes her own destiny. The fairy godmother who helps Tiana triumph over evil is not some flitty, flighty pretty little thing. She is a tough old lady who knows a thing or two about using Tabasco sauce, who lives out in the bayou. Her name is Mama Odie, and her constant companion is, yes!, a python. At home and happy in Louisiana. Walt Disney Studios may have intuitively understood and accepted America’s serpentine future in a way that the learned Associate Professors have not.

Great Snakes!

The United States is being invaded!! Hundreds of thousands of slimy aliens are slithering around the sacred homeland.

And so, the United States is defending itself. War has been declared on these intruders. Patrols are being mustered to track down these sneaky, elusive aliens. Beagles are being trained to sniff them out. Scientists are working on miniature airborne drones, like the ones used by the armed forces in Afghanistan, that can detect the heat given off by these aliens from the air. Open season has been declared, and from March 8 hunters can buy the right to shoot these aliens for a $29 fee. Officials are even training hunters on how to identify, stalk, capture and remove these aliens.

What crime have these aliens committed? Nothing more than trying to stay alive. They haven't even attempted to cross an international border illegally. Why so much fear and hatred?

The aliens I am sticking up for here are snakes, specifically pythons. Thousands of pythons have been imported into America as pets. Some were released by owners who bought cute little things a few inches long, and found they had more snake than they could handle when their tiddlers grew into 15 foot long giants. Some escaped when Hurricane Andrew ripped through Florida, destroyed a pet store's warehouse, and air lifted python hatchlings in their frizbee-like flat-pack plastic containers out into the Everglades. Most of the ex-pet snakes died. But enough survived in the warm, humid swamps of the Everglades, a climate which may not be all that different from the Asia they came from, to establish a breeding population. There are now an estimated 150,000 pythons in the Florida wilderness.

The campaign against pythons claims that they are dangerous. They are dangerous. A two year old sleeping in her crib was tragically killed by a python, which belonged to her mother's boyfriend. This incident has little bearing on the rights and wrongs of pythons in the wild, but it clearly is bad PR for pythons.

Some ecologists worry that pythons prey on endangered native species, like the Key Largo Woodrat. These same ecologists are also clearly aware of the media potential of a "foreign invader drives local species to extinction" storyline. Consider this New Yorker article, easily the most thoughtful piece I've read on this topic. It carefully refers to the python as the Burmese python at every instance, to emphasize its foreignness, even though the python's range extends from the Himalayas through Indonesia. I was appalled at the cynicism of this extract:

Skip Snow, a wildlife biologist at the Everglades national park, was dissecting a python that had been caught in Summerland Key, one of the southernmost of the Florida Keys. He unspooled the snake...lifted it on to the counter, stuck a scalpel in it, and unzipped it like a ski bag, and examined its guts....Snow's purpose, in this case, was mostly political. If he could prove that the pythons were eating endangered (native) species, it would be much easier to lobby for funds.

The question that is not addressed is why exactly the Key Largo Woodrat is more valuable than the python. And who is to say that the Key Largo Woodrat would not have died out anyway?

Yes, invasive species can destroy ecosystems. I had blogged earlier about a tiny aphid called the Woolly Adelgid destroying Eastern Hemlock stands in the Appalachians. The Red Lionfish, a native of the Pacific, has emerged as a super-predator in the Caribbean coral reefs, and is now threatening these (valuable) ecosystems.

There may well be a case for acknowledging the law of intended consequences, and drastically cutting down on the international trade in exotic species. Who anticipated that importing decorative water hyacinth from South America would choke the life out of South Indian waterways? But slaughtering hundreds of thousands of pythons is not going to stop that on-going global species trade.

In all likelihood, this war on the python will fail despite the beagles, the drones, the "open-season" hunters, and all the attendent cruelty. A case of shutting the stable door after the snake has bolted. Many of the scientists involved in python war acknowledge that "In one week we went from 'No problem at all' to 'You might as well give up'". Pythons are omnicarnivorous, they eat almost anything that moves. They breed fast, a single female python can lay up to a hundred eggs in a single clutch. They are already extending their range north, beyond the Florida peninsula. They could find climatic conditions that match their Asiatic range across all the Southern states, and portions of Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona and California (map below). Why not just accept the inevitable and embrace a new vision of an American future, one in which the python is as much a part of the American south as the alligator?

Its not what you drink, its how you drink

When is drinking good clean fun, and when is it dangerous and destructive? The dividing line is mostly about how you drink rather than how much you drink, according to this recent Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker.

For instance, recent Italian-American immigrants drink a lot. They drink with every meal, they drink with their families, they drink when friends come over, they drink while watching television. Italian-Americans think about drink as if it were food. Alcohol consumption follows the same quotidian rhythms as the consumption of pasta and cheese. So, alcohol-fuelled loutishness or alcoholism are almost unknown, despite the vast amount consumed. Similarly, the Camba of Bolivia drink a lot, within a well-defined social ritual, with no ill-effects.

Contemporary problems with alcohol are more cultural, related to the meaning associated with alcohol, than physiological. Good point.

Unfortunately, Gladwell concedes another myth which goes against the grain of his argument: the belief that alcoholism is genetic. Consider some of his phrases:

- Around the middle of the last century, alcoholism began to be widely considered a disease: it was recognized that some proportion of the population was genetically susceptible to the effects of drinking

- Philomena Sappio (an Italian-American whose alcohol consumption was studied) could have had within her genome a grave susceptibility to alcohol. Because she lived in the protective world of New Haven's Italian community, it would never have become a problem

This excellent paper Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth College tries to seperate the impact of nature and nurture on a number of life-outcomes by studying adpoted children. It compares Korean children adopted by American families with their non-adopted siblings. I like this paper because the data is so clean, certainly compared to most natural experiments in the social sciences. These adoptive parents can't choose the children they want. They meet their child for the first time at an airport, unlike, say, in India, where it is not uncommon to adopt from within the clan.

The paper's main finding about drinking is that adopted children behave no differently from biological children. This would not be the case if alcoholism were genetic. Alcoholism does run in families, but this probably has more to do with upbringing than the genome.

Sit down, I think I love you

A Buffalo Springfield classic just shuffled up on my iPod. It goes:

Sit down, I think I love you
Anyway, I’d like to try
I can't stop thinking of you
If you go, I know I'll cry...

...Oh you know what they say about the bird in the hand
And that’s why I ain’t leaving without you...

...So if you want someone to love you
Pretty baby, I’m your guy.

Really?

Experts like Dear Prudence clearly know more about matters of the heart than me. But even I can tell that Dear Prudence would not recommend “I think I love you, anyway I’d like to try” as the ideal declaration of undying love. You had to think about it? And having thought about it, you were so completely convinced that you were willing to “give it a try”? Dude… really...

And what’s the deal with “the bird in the hand”? Is the girl worth trying to love because she is a bird in hand? Or should the girl settle for you because you’re worth two in the bush?

These lyrics are by Stephen Stills, who also wrote "if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with". Bit of a theme developing here.

Maybe Stephen Stills knows something that Dear Prudence and I don't. Maybe this ironic, laconic, self-deprecating approach really works. Real-romantik, a la real-politik?

Either way, great song. Click here to hear it on You Tube.

Were we ever #1?

Were we ever #1? This feels like a question worth asking after the whipping at South Africa’s hands in Nagpur. Maybe the ICC ratings don’t actually mean anything.

For several years I have trusted the Rediff ratings more than the ICC ratings. The Rediff ratings suggest that India never were #1. The latest Rediff ratings Google could find, published in December 2009, show India at #2 behind Australia.

The nice thing about the Rediff ratings is that they set more value on wins against better teams, and wins away from home. They were developed back in 2001 by two geeky cricket fans, one of whom was the Director of the Economics Department at Bombay University. The good professor might have felt the need to develop an intelligent ratings scale because the official ICC ratings developed earlier in 2001 were so bad. These ratings were designed by a panel of distinguished cricketers, like Sunil Gavaskar and Ian Chappell, and treated all test wins as equally valuable. This is not a bad attitude for a player, who should play equally hard against any opposition. But from a fan's viewpoint this original ICC scale is asinine. I thought this post was going to be a rant about the stupidity of the ICC ratings.

However, it turns out that over time the ICC have improved their ratings methodology. They have now incorporated the best idea from the Rediff methodology, that wins against stronger teams matter more. With that improvement, the ICC ratings are not meaningless. India topped a meaningful table in 2009.

There still are interesting differences between the Rediff and ICC scales. The ICC scale gives extra weight to test series outcomes, which is nice. It does not weight-up away wins, which is odd. But the biggest difference is that the ICC ratings give double the weight to wins in the last two years, while the Rediff scale treats an entire cycle of home-away tests as one equally important block.

For instance, the Rediff scale gives Australia’s 5-0 whitewash of England in the 2006-07 Ashes as much weight as the 1-2 loss in England in 2009. Rediff’s logic is that these are the two most recent home-away series. In the ICC ratings, the 5-0 hammering in 2006 gets only half the weight as the 1-2 loss in 2009, because the 5-0 hammering happened more than two years ago. Clearly, weighting-up recent matches makes it harder to apply a home-away factor, because very few pairs of teams will have both home and away matches in the most recent two years.

Neither approach is right or wrong, different scales serve different purposes. The ICC ratings will respond more quickly to changes in performance. It will therefore have more predictive power, will generate more rapid rating changes and therefore more news. The Rediff ratings are probably a more fair and comprehensive summing up of a complete block of historical performance. The swapping of ranks indicates that there probably is no real (statistically significant) difference in the performance of the best test teams since Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath retired.

Rediff ratings don’t seem to have been updated and published on schedule. The most current Rediff ratings don’t reflect South Africa’s drawn series against England, or Australia’s annihilation of Pakistan. Unfortunately, this might be for a good reason. As a profit maximizing brand, Rediff might not want to tell the Indian public things they don’t want to hear. Judging by the mean-spirited and jingoistic reader comments that were posted under the last Rediff update, this is a real concern.

Maybe the chest-thumping nationalism of a big chunk of Indian fans is much more worthy of a rant than the ICC’s rating methodology.

Follow your dream, not (2)

Building on the thread from the last post about following one's dreams...

Consider a fairly routine career choice facing a college graduate, say, advertising vs. IT. Neither job quite counts as living-the-dream, like playing cricket for India. But the college grad finds advertising more interesting than IT. The follow-your-dream school of thought would typically recommends taking the advertising job, since that initial interest is a sign that the grad will enjoy advertising, more and therefore be more successful. My hunch is that that initial interest in advertising contains no information about whether the grad will ultimately enjoy her job.

Post Grad, a movie I watched on a flight recently, broadly in the Reality Bites genre, illustrates the point. It is about a smart, spunky college grad who loves literature, and has dreamed her entire life of working in publishing. After many ups and downs, she finally gets her dream job at the top publishing house in town. Her boss is a jerk. The job sucks. She quickly moves on.

The factors that actually predict whether someone enjoys a job are profoundly situational. Things specific to a particular role, in a particular organization, at a particular time. Questions like: is her boss a good people manager? Does she get along with her colleagues? Does she have the right level of independence, the right support, and prospects for advancement? Does she get paid enough to cheerfully suck up the inevitable hiccups? Is the organization as a whole growing, and filling colleagues with a spirit of generousity? Or is it shrinking, and making colleagues mean-spirited?

Asking situational questions like these feels less pure than looking within and asking "Is this the real me?". But they probably matter more.

Follow your dream, not

"Follow your dream" is career advice I have frequently received. This is also advice I have given multiple times. I must confess that, on reflection, this is really bad advice. I don't feel too bad about having given this advice, I will pass the blame on to the omnipresent self-help management gurus, but it still remains really bad advice.

The only dream I've ever had that feels worthy of the name was to play cricket for India. My inner ten-year-old still believes that it is my destiny to open the batting in a test match at Chepauk, take strike at the Wallajah Road end, and drive the third ball of the day past extra cover for four. But, heck, that was not meant to be. Gautam Gambhir and Virender Sehwag are doing that job on my behalf; they're doing the job pretty well.

I shared this dream with tens of millions of Indian boys. The dream had some chance of coming true for about fifty of those boys. "Follow your dream" was excellent advice for that gifted fifty. What about the remaining tens of millions? Mostly, they've made peace with real life, and are getting on with their careers as Business Systems Analysts, or Sales Managers or tax lawyers.

Sure, the Business Systems Analysts and Sales Managers need direction, purpose, meaning and fulfullment in their work-lives too. But when an everyday professional is looking for direction, when she is at a career crossroads and asking herself what to do next, asking her to "follow her dream" is worse than useless. It provides no insight or intelligence that is relevant to the here and now, and makes mockery of her childhood dream to be a ballerina, or cowboy, or cricketer or whatever.

A colleague of mine came up with a much more useful formulation to provide direction to his own career, an outside-in view rather than the inside-out view of the "Follow your dream" merchants. His take was, "I try to put myself in a place where lots of good things are happening around me. If I do, chances are, good things will happen to me." It is hard to predict what those good things will be, except that it will not be an India cap. But, heck, maybe that is real life.

Diseased?

Tiger Woods is now a patient at Pine Grove, a Behavioural Health and Addiction Services clinic in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

He is on the Gentle Path program, which will help him regain freedom from the disease of sexual addiction. The treatment includes Exercise Fitness Therapy (aerobics, weight training and jogging) and a ROPES course: a combination of an obstacle course and group therapy among the pine trees surrounding Pine Grove. Tiger will also take part in Expressive Therapy, in which the collective mediums of art, movement, music and drama are combined, which should elevate self-esteem through discipline and accomplishment.

This is lovely for Tiger. If art, movement and a ROPES course give him the self-esteem and sense of accomplishment that winning seventeen majors did not, that is marvellous.

The part I find irritating about this story is the way in which meaning is being leached out of language by this psycho-babble. Addict used to mean something.

A hobo on crack whose body-chemistry has changed so much because of the drug that he can't bring himself to eat anymore, that's an addict. That hobo does need some serious medical and behavioural help to get his life back on the rails. A sports superstar sleeping with ten women over eight years? That's not addiction. That would have been unremarkable, if Tiger hadn't successfully cultivated such a wholesome image. Calling Tiger's affairs, or Serena Williams' shopping habit, addictions somehow feels disrespectful to real addicts. It is clearly attractive for PR consultants to present their clients as victims of some terrible disease, but that diminishes the seriousness of the disease itself.

What Tiger probably needs is not a cure from addiction, but penance. The rhythm of sin and atonement, paap and praayashchit in the Indian tradition, are as old as civilization itself. When Arjuna the Pandava broke the rules of his marriage, he sent himself into exile. When Henry II of England needed closure following the murder of Thomas Becket, he performed his penance by kneeling before Becket's tomb in Canterbury cathedral, while every priest or monk in turn struck him with a rod.

Ideas like ritual penance feel odd in our secular times, when it is tempting to medicalize essentially spiritual problems. But it would feel more honest to say that Tiger is doing his penance, rather than try to believe that art, movement and a ROPES course are somehow going to cure him of his libido.

Crocodile Safari

Had stopped by at the Madras Crocodile Bank recently. The overwhelming impression I came away with was one of plenty. Plenty of crocs, piled up on top of each other. Well fed, too. Tourists can pay Rs. 60 for the privilege of watching the crocs eat dead rats which are tossed into the croc enclosures. Sometimes the crocs don't bother moving and simply ignore the rats; they're too full.

The crocs which are most obviously thriving at the Croc Bank are Mugger or Marsh Crocodiles. Other species are hard to spot in their enclosures; the Muggers are the ones piled up on top of each other. Muggers at the Croc Bank have taken to double clutching, one female laying two clutches of eggs in a season, a phenomenon that has not been observed in the wild. This astounding fertility has led to a Mugger-boom and allowed the Croc Bank to supply Muggers to zoos and wilderness restocking programs around the world - Bangladesh was down to a single crocodile in a tank at a shrine before the Croc Bank shipped some across the border. It has also led to a surplus stock at the Croc Bank of 1000 Muggers. My inner economist can't help asking the question - should these animals be harvested?

The stock answer is NO! A legal trade in wildlife products generally makes poaching more lucrative. If the Croc Bank sells Mugger hides to licensed dealers, it becomes harder to protect more vulnerable sub-species like the Philippine Crocodile from poachers. This is why, say, ivory from elephant culls is not sold.

However, it turns out that trade in crocodilian skin is entirely legal, and that this seems to be helping conservation. There are now commerical crocodile (or alligator) farms in Australia, Africa and the USA. And commerical farming seems to be working. Here's a quote from an American alligator farm web site:

In the 60's, the American alligator had almost become extinct and was placed on the endangered species list by the Federal Government. Commercial farming was correctly seen as a way to ensure the preservation of this reptile.

Why is this working? There is a nice little Powerpoint presentation on the CITES website which provides a clue. Back in the early 80s, the international trade in croc skins was over a million skins a year. Almost all these skins came from the wild. Today, the volume of trade is about the same. But 80% of this trade is in skins from ranches or captive breeding facilities. This is relatively easy to regulate because there are only five tanneries in the world which process croc skins. Skins which don't get processed at these tanneries are basically worthless, and so are unattractive to poachers. So croc conservation becomes this self supporting little econo-system, saving the crocs from extinction without competing for tax revenues or charity.

This conservation success story also has a cultural benefit in the American south. Alligator meat is a part of traditional Cajun cuisine, and thanks to the alligator's remarkable comeback, its meat is back on the dinner table.

The only little grouse I have with this story is that the majesty of a wild animal in its natural setting is somehow lost in this business of commercial farming and theme parks. But even here there may be a marketing opportunity. Maybe red blooded men could go adventuring into the swampy jungles of Queensland on a crocodile safari, hunt down their reptilian prey, cook it Cajun style over a campfire, and capture their experience in free verse. A new-age male-bonding rite-of-passage. It wouldn't sell in Bangalore or Chennai. But in Queensland? Would Queenslanders like Matthew Hayden or Andrew Symonds buy an all expenses covered wilderness experience like that? They just might...

Galli Galli Sim Sim

An auspicious post to wish all readers a happy new year...

Just discovered a piece of children's entertainment which is not just mostly harmless, but positively good. It is teaching my children that the differences between cultures around the world are there to be enjoyed, but that underneath these differences human beings are essentially the same, that we are The Family of Man (I think). This is a collection of video and music clips from Sesame Street around the world, published by Putumayo, a favourite music label.

My family is now singing along with Elmo, Big Bird and Sesame Street stars from India, Israel, Mexico, Russia and South Africa. The look and sound of each of these video clips are distinctive and local. Yet, the same spirit and mood clearly animates each of these local executions. Unity in diversity, that old mantra of Indira Gandhi-esque national integration, applies not just to India but to all of humanity.

More generally, I also think this is a fair representation of how globalisation impacts local cultures and identity. At one time, even serious and well-intentioned people in India would have had doubts about whether letting Coca Cola and their ilk operate in the country would somehow dilute India's Indianness. The first debate I ever won, back in high school in the mid 80s, was about "Have we sold our culture for a pair of jeans?". I opposed the motion back then.

Now, two decades after liberalization started, that argument feels settled. Coca Cola and Sesame Street are very much a part of the Indian landscape, and have figured out that it makes a ton of commercial sense to adopt an Indian idiom. India is changing rapidly, India is becoming ever more closely connected to the rest of humanity, and yet India remains as distinctively Indian as it ever was.

And exactly the same logic probably applies to Israel, Mexico, Russia and South Africa as well.