Atlantis Books, Oia, Santorini, and the triumph of Kindle

My family were on a chilled out vacation in the cliff-top village of Oia, on the Greek island of Santorini, when we discovered one of the world’s great bookshops. Specifically, the tenth best bookshop in the world, as certified by Lonely Planet. Other cities which feature top ten bookshops are London, Paris, San Francisco, Rome, Buenos Aires, Berlin and Beijing. Pattern recognition software would never have completed that list with Oia, Santorini, population 1230, but the editors of Lonely Planet got this one right. Atlantis Books deserves to be on the top ten list. It is almost everything a bookshop should be.



Atlantis Books is lined from floor to ceiling with books, with more books piled up on table tops and benches. It has a two shelves labelled Political Theory, and no airport-style displays featuring the latest John Grisham best seller. The greatest number of books are in English, but it also has shelves of German, French and Greek books. The internal roof is contoured, and supports a paper chandelier. A nook leads up into a cranny, which leads up a twisty chute with poetry stencilled on to the whitewash, which leads up on to a terrace overlooking the caldera, which hosts literary or musical events on summer evenings. It smells like a college library, or a multi-generational family library.

The name Atlantis Books is moist with meaning. Remains of a sophisticated Minoan culture dating back to 1500 BC have been discovered on Santorini. This may well have been the basis for Plato’s writings about Atlantis, about the glorious island civilization which was swallowed by the sea.

The staff at Atlantis Books are great. They are happy smiling youngsters from the USA or the UK who clearly have a college education, love books, and are happy to talk with guests about their shop. Some of the staff sleep in the shop, in neat beds tucked away into little corners. One of them, an English poet wearing a cloth cap and a wispy beard, asked me what I did. “I’m a business executive”, I told him. “You must be a photographer”, he replied, pointing to my Canon DSLR. He was being nice. Poets and photographers fit the Atlantis Books vibe better than executives or lawyers.

I found a book I wanted to buy. It was an autographed copy of a graphic novel called The Corridor, by Sarnath Banerjee. I'd never heard of Sarnath Banerjee, or of contemporary Indian graphic novels, which is great, because the point of browsing in a bookshop is to discover new stuff.

My wife and daughters also picked out books they wanted to buy. We proceeded to the billing counter. For the first time in our long and chatty visit, the staff were nonplussed. They talked among themselves about how to transact a sale. They couldn't get the credit card reader to work, online or offline. We finally paid cash. That struggle to get the credit card reader to work hints at why Atlantis Books, for all its virtues, is not quite everything a bookshop should be. I have a hunch it isn't profitable.

Atlantis Books may not need to be profitable. The gorgeous real estate could make sense as an independent investment. A lot of the books are hand-me-downs, donations from well wishers. I find it easy to imagine the staff are happy to work for a plane ticket, a bed in the bookshop, and a chance to enjoy Santorini through the summer. But the amateur feel of the place, running a bookshop for love rather than for money, connects up with another theme from our vacation: that bookshops selling paper books are not going be around very long. Those that are going to be around are characterful amateur ventures like Atlantis Books, rather than commercial outfits that care about moving merchandise.

We discovered e-books because our daughters packed their own backpacks on this vacation.

Our elder daughter's backpack was seriously heavy. Investigations revealed that this was because it was stuffed full of Enid Blytons and Harry Potters for holiday reading. Carrying this weight on flights was not an option. The negotiated compromise was to download her books onto the Kindle iPad app, which worked beautifully. My daughter discovered how to annotate, and therefore personalize, e-books on Kindle. This format also sorts out the thorny question of archiving (Enid Blytons from my childhood are still around at my mother's place, but they are disintegrating) and of storage (should we get rid of some Dr Seuss to create room for Malory Towers?).

I might be wrong here. People have been predicting the death of the bank branch for twenty years now, with good reason, but there still is no sign that branches are going away. Amazon, Apple, the greedy IPR lobby and captured regulators can still destroy e-books. They will have plenty of opportunity to mess up pricing, technology standards and user rights. But chances are, they won't. Chances are that by the time my children are old enough to explore the Cyclades without their parents, paper books will be quaint, much loved relics from the past; like hand wound wrist watches, Kodachrome slides, fountain pens or vinyl records.

Chennai Super Kings' Feminist Karma

Chennai Super Kings, my home town cricket team, just won IPL 4 in style. They have clearly been the best team on show since the inception of the IPL, with two trophies, one runner up spot, and one semi-final finish.

Many reasons have been ascribed to this performance, from MS Dhoni's captaincy, to the stability of the squad, to Stephen Fleming's coaching. I really like the tactical intelligence of CSK's game plans - Ashwin opening the bowling, Hussey and Vijay playing traditional cricket shots rather than low percentage slogs and Dil-scoops, Badrinath's clear role as the crisis man, Dougie Bollinger's yorkers at the death, shuffling the batting order to maintain left-right pairs - good, smart cricket.

But, as the many erudite Mylapore Mamis in CSK's fan base will be happy to explain, success does not derive only from one's tactics, from the flow of one's deeds on the field of action, from one's karyas on the dharmakshetra. Success also derives from karma, from the stock of goodness accumulated through many small acts of kindness and decency. These acts happened long before the men in yellow stepped onto the dharmakshetra of Chepauk.

One of these karmic factors working for CSK, which mainstream cricket commentators seem to have completely missed, is their co-ed cheering squad. CSK were the only IPL team with both men and women in their cheering squad. They were led by a shaven-headed fifty one year old drummer called Sivamani.

I certainly don't mean to pass judgment on the all-girl cheerleading squads, or on their admirers, as "bad". But CSK's co-ed approach just feels better, more comfortable, more natural. There is no obvious reason why leading a cheer for a sports team should be sexually charged. Cricket has long had a tradition of colourful, noisy and committed fans: Sri Lanka's Percy Abeysekara, India's Sudhir Gautam, West Indies' Trini Posse, England's Barmy Army. This cheering was never sexy (though the Barmy Army's chat with an Aussie fielder at the boundary line could involve pointed references to his sexuality). Sex and cricket always were fulfilling, but distinct, aspects of life.

When cheerleading was invented in America, at Princeton University in 1884, it was an all-male activity. Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Franklin Roosevelt were cheerleaders in their time. Somewhere along the way, cheering a sports team morphed into the stylized sexual displays put on in the USA today in football and basketball (but not in cricket's cousin baseball). The IPL imported this into cricket in the name of "marketing".

Perhaps the greatest failure of NFL style cheerleading at the IPL is not moral but material: it doesn't seem to work in marketing terms. Several teams with great looking all-girl cheering squads are failing to fill their stadiums, or to animate their crowds. Ultimately, people who want to watch dancing girls can watch them elsewhere, without the annoying bat-ball distractions. The men and women who pitch up at cricket matches are there to enjoy the cricket. Sivamani and his co-ed troop successfully orchestrated the cheering of these real fans. CSK's fans were easily the most passionate and vocal in the IPL, effectively adding another player to CSK, making them almost invincible at home. Long may the force remain with CSK, and with Sivamani.

Alfred North Whitehead on Civilization

Loved this quote by Alfred North Whitehead:

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them".

By this formulation, civilization is about being able to drink water out of a tap without worrying about infectious diseases. It is about being able to click I Agree to credit card or iTunes terms and conditions without worrying about nasties lurking in the fine print.

The Schengen Agreement, which makes possible paper free travel between 25 countries in Western Europe, is an advance for civilization. That feels like a more important standard than some pseudo-scientific "cost benefit analysis".

By contract, the American tax code - the 70000 page document which keeps an army of tax lawyers in profitable (but profoundly unfulfilling) employment – is not just a drag on the world economy. It is an assault on civilization itself.

BBC North collaboration pods. Or speed dating wheels?

BBC's plush and stylish new offices in Salford, near Manchester, are sprinkled with "collaboration pods".

The idea is that useful work happens when people talk to each other, face to face, rather than sit around in closed-door offices. Doing away with offices and having these collaboration pods should encourage people to do just that. However, having sufferred in new-age work spaces for decades, I have a hunch these pods aren't really going to foster collaboration.

Collaboration generally happens when people sit at right angles to each other, or in an arc, facing a white-board. It happens at coffee machines or water coolers, when people stand at right angles to each other, or in an arc, and the space above the coffee machine or water cooler becomes an air white-board.

Collaboration doesn't happen when two people are sitting squarely opposite each other. This is how people sit at an interview, when they are assessing or evaluating each other. These collaboration pods feel too open for most recruitment interviews, and anyway the interviews I give usually need a table-top work surface and a whiteboard. But these collaboration pods might just have struck the perfect balance between openness and privacy for a speed date. Perhaps speed-romance will now bloom amongst BBC staffers in Salford, near Manchester.

Pippa Middleton's Cricketing Boyfriend

Know who Pippa is dating, dahling? She's with England's finest doosra-man. Palace sources inform us that Pippa Middleton's boyfriend, and date at the Royal Wedding, is former England off spinner Alex Loudon.

Loudon is an old-Etonian friend of Prince William who captained England under 19s. He turned pro and played county cricket for Kent and Warwickshire with some success, when he morphed from a batsman into an off-spinner with a cunning doosra. He was picked for England and toured Pakistan in 2005, but didn't get a game. He played his only ODI in 2006 against Sri Lanka, and was run-out without facing a ball, as a part of a crushing 0-5 series loss to Mahela's Marauders.

He retired in 2007, the ripe old age of 27, to attend London Business School and subsequently pursue a career as a broker in the City. That may have been a very good call, given Swanny's success. It can't be easy to maintain an Old Etonian's lifestyle on a county pro's income.

Is there an event-marketing opportunity here? Prince William plays a bit of cricket too. Wills and A-Lo captaining...rival teams in whites...Kate and Pippa in the pavilion-tent...boaters and floaty dresses...Pimm's No. 1...Wills Navy Cut...Lady Di's favourite charity...no liveried servants, too colonial...Dave and Sam Cam...His Highness Jyotiraditya Scindia might grace the occasion... Live TV coverage might be embarrassing, an edited 10 minute news clip could do the job nicely. An antidote to the IPL. Sure, the IPL is more good than bad. But cricket needs more cultural-flavours than the IPL can provide.

Regardless, well played Alex Loudon. Bowled the doosra maiden over.

Wills Navy Cut @ The Royal Wedding

The Imperial Tobacco Company will launch Wills Navy Cut in the UK tomorrow, to mark the happy and auspicious occasion of the Royal Wedding.

Brand spokesperson Yogi Tobaccowallah explained "The future Emperor William is lovingly referred to as 'Wills' by his subjects. He will be getting married in his smart Navy Cut suit. He and his beloved are perfectly matched, made for each other, just like the filter and tobacco in Wills Navy Cut cigarettes. We have every confidence that the future Emperor and Empress will make Wills Navy Cut their smoke of choice".

Mr Tobaccowallah will be at Westminster Abbey tomorrow to present the UK's first carton of Wills Navy Cut to the royal couple, as a special wedding gift.





Also made for each other...

Gamla Stan, Stockholm, and proto Indo-European

My flight had started boarding. I was gathering up my laptop, iPod, magazine and assorted paraphernalia to head to the gate when my cell phone rang. It was my wife. I told her I'd reached Istanbul airport, was heading to my flight, and that I'd be home soon.

My wife was surprised. She thought I was in Stockholm, Sweden, not in Istanbul, Turkey. As always, my wife was right. I was, in fact, in Stockholm.

In my defence, I had had a long day. And, the part of Stockholm I'd just walked through was called Gamla Stan, which sounds like it could be in Istanbul. How did the heart of the capital of Scandinavia wind up with such an oriental sounding name?

It turns out that Gamla Stan, which means Old Town in Swedish, has familiar Indo-European roots. Stan is a contraction of the Swedish "staden" (sta'n), meaning "the town". This derives from the proto Indo European root sta - to stand, set down or be firm- ; the same root as English words like stand, stance, status or stadium and Sanskrit/ Indian words like sthal, stapit, stupa or Hindustan.

The origins of Gamla are a bit more tricky. Gamla meant camel in ancient Aramaic or Syrian. Gamla morphed into the Hebrew kamal which led to camel. It is tempting to think of Gamla Stan as Camel Town; perhaps ancient caravans from the Sahara trekked right across Europe to do business with the Norsemen of Scandinavia. Unfortunately, linguists seem to think there is no link between camels and Gamla Stan.

Gamla comes from the old Norse gammel, which means old. I find it easier to recognize the comparative forms of gammel: alder and aldest which lead to the modern English elder and eldest . Wikitionary tells me that gammel might be from the proto Indo European word for winter. If so, Gamla Stan could be understood as Winter Town, or perhaps even the Town Nourished Through Many Winters, which would be more evocative of the heart of the Scandinavian capital than just Old Town.

It also turns out that Turkish is not a part of the Indo-European language family at all. While Turkish has borrowed through the Ottoman years from Persian, Arabic and possibly even Sanskrit, it is from a completely distinct family of Turkic central Asian languages.

Hindi and Swedish, however, are cousins. Locating Gamla Stan in Delhi rather than in Istanbul may have made more sense. Gamla Stan sounds like a natural fit in old Delhi...Gamla Stan could roughly translate to Garden City...maybe a few miles past Hazrat Nizamuddin...

Sachin's Century, Zizou Zidane and Slumdog Millionaire

India won the World Cup. Wow!

How did we do it? (A) we cheated (B) we were lucky (C) we have a team of geniuses (D) it is written. And yes! Ladies and gentlemen, you are right. The correct answer is (D). We won the World Cup for the same reason that a chai wallah called Jamal Malik won Rs 2,00,00,000 in a quiz show. We won the World Cup because - it is written.

I didn't just make that up when I was celebrating our win. I have it on good authority that we won because it is written. The authority in question is India's coach Gary Kirsten. Here is what he had to say to Cricinfo:

As the tournament progressed in those knockout stages, I just felt a sense of destiny there. I felt we were going to do this thing. To the point that, the day before the final we knew were going to win. We actually even spoke into it. That we were going to win this thing. It's how we prepare to deal with the success, because we are going to win. Mike spoke about it: we are going to win this thing tomorrow. There was never any doubt at that stage.

I don't think Gary Kirsten is seeing ghosts here. He is talking about something real, a very tangible spirit that was present in this Indian team, that helped them raise their game when it mattered. This spirit is most apparent when it is absent, like when a team or player can't summon up the self-belief to win, and therefore crumbles or chokes, like Jana Novotna at Wimbledon 93 or South Africa in the cricket World Cup 99. But the converse is also true. The presence of this spirit, this deeply experienced sense of destiny, gives a team or player resiliency, an extra edge.

India didn't have this spirit in 83. After that win, Kapil Dev told the media that he had brought champagne into the dressing room before the final, because even if India lost, we'd done quite well to reach the finals, and that was something to celebrate. That quiet sense of destiny was a lot more apparent in Gavaskar's team in 85. Of course, a sense of destiny doesn't guarantee success. Saurav Ganguly's team had a potent sense of destiny in 04, pushing for an epoch-making win at the SCG. But it was not to be, as Steve Waugh denied fate in his final test match.

Destiny's intent for this World Cup was for Sachin Tendulkar to score his hundredth hundred in a World Cup final in Bombay, to lead India to victory. Over thirty thousand India fans at Wankhede had read this destiny in the stars, and in the palms of their hands, and were fervently willing it to happen. It didn't. Malinga punctured that dream.

The aspect of India's performance in the finals I was most impressed with was the calm, purposeful confidence with which we played even after that dream had been punctured. That tells me that the team's dream, the sense of destiny Kirsten talks about, was not about individual performances but about winning the World Cup. Because if the team had believed deeply that Sachin was destined to score his hundredth hundred that day, they would have been shattered by Sachin's dismissal. They would have been shattered like Zizou Zidane was when he head-butted the Italian Materazzi during a football World Cup final.

Here is former England batsman and Kent and Middlesex captain Ed Smith's take on Zidane's World Cup final:

"Scratch a brilliant sportsman deeply enough and you reach a layer of self-certainty in his own destiny. The greater the sportsman, usually the more convinced he is of his own predestined greatness. The big stage means it must be his stage, victory has been prearranged on his terms, it is his destiny to win the World Cup or the Olympics or the Ashes. It might be perfectly rational for a great player to believe he has a good chance of decisively influencing the big occasion. But that isn't what he thinks. He thinks it is inevitable. After all, well-balanced self-awareness and genius seem so rarely to co-exist.

If you could bottle that self-certainty you would have the most potent winning drug. That is why champion teams so often have a talismanic force at their centre - someone who believes the match, the day and the championship have been set up in accordance with his own destiny. His self-belief radiates to the rest of the team. Zidane had exactly that quality. When France really needed something special, he believed he would do it. That belief can be so strong that not only your own team but even the opposition can fall under its spell.

In extra time of the World Cup final, with Thierry Henri off substituted, France again looked to Zidane, almost exclusively to Zidane. We can be sure that Zidane, despite being unusually exhausted and having played longer than he would in normal circumstances, shared that view...the script had gone according to plan. Zidane had taken France to the final... one last moment of pre-destined brilliance was all he required.

And he almost did it. In the 104th minute, summoning up one last effort, Zidane made a decisive run into the penalty box, a cross was delivered just in time, and Zidane's soaring header sailed inevitably towards the top of the goal...Just as it was meant to be.

Having complied with Zidane's will so far, the gods finally made a mistake. The Italian goalkeeper Buffon made an inspired save in response to an inspired header. What followed was the most revealing and desperate image of the World Cup. Aimed at no one in particular, not at the keeper, not at himself, perhaps at the heavens, Zidane's face contorted into an agonized scream. This should not have happened, cannot have happened, must not be allowed to stand. Zidane's face resembled Edvard Munch's famous painting.

Having come this far with him, how could the gods now abandon him? But they finally went their own way, and left Zidane in solitary despair... Which would weigh more heavily on a champion's mood - a verbal insult to his family (the kind of insult that sportsmen hear all too often and nearly always manage to ignore) or being denied, in a state of physical and mental exhaustion, what he considered to be rightfully his: the winning goal, the perfect narrative, his destiny...

Zidane wasn't thinking logically when he headbutted Materazzi. He wasn't thinking at all. He was acting at a level, as he often did, which was beyond the bounds of normality."

It was written, yet it was not. Zidane was not grieving a game, or even a trophy. He was grieving an entire world. The world in which he had lived had broken apart, the fabric of fate had been shredded. Buffon's unbelievable save threw Zidane squarely within the twisted reach of crazy sorrow. Headbutting Materazzi was only a part, and not an especially important part, of Zidane's experience of crazy sorrow. In Ed Smith's words, "it's not a long journey from extreme self-belief to madness".

Fortunately, the Indian team believed in their destiny to win a World Cup, but they didn't really believe in Sachin's hundredth hundred in the World Cup final. Sure, that would have be nice, but that was icing on the cake. That lack of belief let them keep their heads when Sachin fell. That lack of belief allowed them to give Sachin a glorious World Cup winner's send-off. Zizou Zidane also deserved a send off like that. It was written, even if it didn't come to be.

Sachin Tendulkar Winning Ugly @ the World Cup Semis

Sachin's 85 in the semi-finals against Pakistan yesterday has to be one of his worst knocks ever. He had four, maybe six lives. He couldn't pick Saeed Ajmal, he couldn't time the ball, he was not batting like Sachin. Yet, he stuck it out, ground out more runs than any other batsman in either team, and took India through to the finals in Bombay.

Sachin was winning ugly, in Brad Gilbert's immortal phrase. Sachin's companion in winning ugly was his captain MS Dhoni, who must be right up there, along with Simon Katich, as the least elegant batsman in world cricket. I love them both for being willing to win ugly.

Sure, I love watching Sachin blaze away majestically, like he did against South Africa in Nagpur. But I love watching India winning ugly even more.

Brad Gilbert's point is that most top sportsmen win when they are on song. Real champions are the ones who learn to win even when they are not, who can carry a mis-firing serve or forehand, and still scrap through to a win. Winning ugly does not mean sledging or behaving badly. Neither SRT or MSD does Aussie-style sledging. They just do whatever it takes to raise the likelihood of winning. They don't care if it doesn't look pretty.

My admiration for winning ugly has something to do with the world I grew up with.

I grew up when India's heroes were players like Gundappa Vishwanath, Erapalli Prasanna and Bishen Singh Bedi, who wowed the cricketing world with their magical silken artistry, but didn't win matches. I grew up believing, at some pre-cognitive level, that being Indian meant being gifted, graceful, gracious, and losing. Noble and honourable, but still losing. Like Vijay Amritraj and Ramesh Krishnan in tennis. It fitted in perfectly with Nehruvian socialism, the Hindu rate of GDP growth, our non-aligned policy, and Bollywood heroes who never got their girls.

Fortunately, that loser-India is now gone. A whole generation has now come of age - after Kapil Dev lifted the Prudential Cup at Lord's in 1983, after Ravi Shastri drove his Audi around the MCG in 1985 - to whom it is perfectly natural to be Indian and to win.

MS Dhoni was almost two years old in June 1983. Yuvraj Singh is six months younger than Dhoni. They wouldn't get why India winning ugly matters to me. But to me, and to many Indians of my generation, and my father's generation, the most precious Indian wins are the ones which are won ugly. Because winning ugly is the opposite of losing gracefully.

Pine Boats @ El Piano, Granada

Have you ever been annoyed at a picnic by a paper plate that gets soggy with gravy and starts collapsing in your hands?

Did this paper plate collapse at the precise moment when your eyes met Hers - she of the sparkling eyes and lustrous locks - so you had to cut short that magic moment to prevent the chana masala from descending on to your trousers? Did She then go off for a walk with the creepy guy from Accounts, so true love which was meant to be remained forever unfulfilled? Tragic. My sympathies, dear friend.

And to think that this tragedy would never have happened if the catering was by El Piano of Granada, Spain, a take-away restaurant I discovered on my travels.

El Piano serves delicious, organic, locally grown vegetarian food, not on paper plates, but in pine boats. Unlike paper plates, pine boats don't get soggy. They remain firm through your meal. Ergonomically shaped pine boats fit comfortably into the palm of one hand. And pine boats are morally good, because unlike styrofoam, pine boats are biodegradable.

So the next time true love strikes, dear friend, as it doubtless will, like it did for Oliver in Love Story, be sure that delicious, organic, vegetarian food from El Piano restaurant, of Granada, Spain, is secure in a firm pine boat. Because then you can be certain that true love will blossom.

Though, stepping away from the advertising script, surely the standard dish-design for away-from-table dining ought to be something like a pine boat? If pine is scarce, bamboo or sugarcane based alternatives are also possible. The design specs for any away-from-table dining surface should have asked for something which is rigid, fits into one hand, doesn't absorb moisture, can't dribble over the edges, is cheap, and can be thrown away safely.

Hence, this blog is calling for a revolution. Humanity should herewith be liberated from balancing dinner plates on one hand, from landfills stuffed with styrofoam, and from struggling with soggy paper plates. Until that revolution is complete, humanity is at liberty to sample the excellent veggie food at El Piano while visiting Granada, or the sister restaurant in York.

Tennis and the Emigrant Experience

I was down at the club last night. Tennis social. Dusted off my old racket - the same Prince Spectrum composite that I had back when I was in college - and gave my game a spin.

My game was filthy. I still play squash regularly, so I had no problem hitting the ball, but I had no control. I was spraying the ball all over the place. I resorted to tapping the ball back over the net to keep it in play, until I finally lost patience and started giving it a whack and hoping for the best. And, heck, whaddaya know? A few of those whacks actually landed in the court :). All in all, I had fun.

None of the other players at the social knew me. None of them were colleagues, or parents at my daughters' school. I wouldn't blame any of my doubles partners if they didn't remember my name today; I'd struggle to remember their names now. I was just a brown-skinned guy in a blue t-shirt, hitting yellow spheres across the net. I felt no shame, despite the filthy game. That is probably why I had fun.

The nice thing about being away from home is the anonymity, the absence of context, the freedom it brings. That sense of freedom shows in many ways, including the way I hit a tennis ball.

In Suzanne Vega's words, "I was in a timeless, placeless place, out of context, and beyond all consequences".

Yet, the worst thing about being away from home is also the anonymity. Hitting a tennis ball isn't intrinsically fun or not-fun. Tennis is worth my while because of context, because of the references to tennis running through the rest of my life.

I first played tennis at the Madras Cricket Club, my father's spiritual home. My father had been a very good player in his college days, and was still on the MCC tennis team. Marker Venkatesan - the tennis pro in western terms - would toss me a balls as a favour to my dad. Members who walked by easily recognized me as Chandru's son, as Raju's nephew, as Nari's nephew. They would stop to watch me play, throw in a word of encouragement, a well-intentioned tip...they wished me well. One of them, Ayya-mama, bought me a Tintin comic for every Merit Card I won at school. It was all very warm, and intensely personal.

One of my earliest memories is being woken up in the middle of the night by my excited dad, being bundled into a car and driven to my uncle Chander-mama's house. They were showing a recording of the Roscoe Tanner vs. Bjorn Borg Wimbledon final on TV. In my mind's eye, I can still see a blurry black and white image of this game in a crowded, darkened room. Otherwise, my entire clan gathered on our terrace to follow Wimbledon on BBC shortwave radio. By the time the great age of McEnroe, Borg, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova rolled around, tennis already was in my blood-stream.

When I was a teen-ager, I was sometimes invited to play doubles with my dad's friends. These were very good players, they played seriously, they played to win. My dad's friends still wished me well. But now, with my young legs and sharp eyes, they also expected me to perform on court. I was eager to impress. But I also understood that the MCC ethos did not smile kindly upon double faults or foozled volleys. I especially didn't want to let myself down and be an embarrassment to my family, so wound up playing a cramped, self-conscious game. But there was never any doubt in my mind that the game was worth playing, and worth playing well.

My dad's friends aren't playing tennis at MCC more. But I still couldn't show up at those courts and play the filthy tennis I played yesterday. At a minimum, I'd need to put myself on a regimen that would get me back to being a good player. No anonymity there, and no freedom.

Yet, Janis Joplin's words, "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose, nothing ain't worth nothing, but its free".

Of course, the ultimate zen state is not perfect freedom, but to be in a context full of meaning and still play with freedom; to be Sachin Tendulkar playing for India in a World Cup final, in Bombay, and still play with freedom to lead India to victory. That dream is still possible as this post goes to press. C'mon India.

Martin Crowe and The Lake Wobegon people-model

"So that is the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking and all the children are above-average."

Every week, Garrison Keillor concludes Prairie Home Companion with these wise words. Similarly, every week, the titans of the corporate world conclude that that they will compete for the future by winning the war-for-talent. They all strive to hire above-average people, and instruct their human resources departments to design "people-models" that allows their company to hire talented employees, as talented as the children of Lake Wobegon.

However, for a practicing business executive, this war-for-talent is mostly irrelevant. Winning the war-for-talent takes too long to matter. I, and most of my peers, have windows of about three years to deliver on our objectives. Over that time frame, the talent we have to work with is usually a given.

Even at Talent Masters, companies supposedly flush with talent like Procter and Gamble or GE, it is rare to step into a role worth doing with a crack team already in place. Best case, one can parachute in a handful of exceptional individuals into key positions. From then on, business leadership is mostly about trying to get your team to punch above their weight, by giving them a sense of unity, direction and belief, and by tactically shaping the game to amplify strengths and cover weaknesses.

A cricket captain’s job is like that of a practicing business executive. As a captain, you can preach, or whinge, about how your cricket board should have invested in the grass-roots game years ago, bringing better players through to the professional level. True, but irrelevant. You’ve got a squad. Your job is to win with that squad, warts and all.

Looked at this way, a good captain is not necessarily one who wins big tournaments. A good captain is one who gets his team to punch above their weight, who wins games he had no right to win given the quality of his players. By this yardstick my all time favourite World Cup captain is not Clive Lloyd, not Steve Waugh, but Martin Crowe in the 1992 World Cup.

Martin Crowe led a bunch of bits and pieces mediocrities, plus one quality player in Crowe himself. Yet, they competed on even terms with clearly superior teams by turning the prevailing cricketing wisdom upside down. Mark Greatbatch opened the batting, slugging the ball over the infield. Dipak Patel opened the bowling with his off-breaks. In the process, Crowe’s Kiwis changed the way 50 over cricket is played, forever.

Crowe’s team, which included dibbly-dobbly merchants like Gavin Larsen, Chris Harris and Willie Watson, were looking good for a spot in the World Cup final until an inspired Inzamam-ul-Haq blitzed Pakistan to a come from behind semi-final victory. Which goes to show that planning, spunk and tactical smarts can’t match god-given talent. However, in a contest between evenly matched teams, smart tactics should make all the difference.

Another brilliant tactician was Shane Warne. I've watched enviously as he conjured up victories out of nothing for Hampshire and Rajasthan Royals. Clearly the greatest captain Australia never had.

MS Dhoni has one of the best minds in contemporary cricket and can be genuinely inventive. One of my favourite passages of play in recent history was the Nagpur test against Australia in 2008, when Ishant and Zaheer dried up the flow of runs by bowling yorkers a foot outside the off stump, frustrating Australia into a epoch-ending series defeat. Another memorable Dhoni innovation was placing a fielder directly behind the bowler to catch-out a rampaging Keiron Pollard in an IPL final. I haven't worked out how the same cricketing mind bowls Ashish Nehra, or Joginder Sharma, in the last over.

I would love to see captains using more tactical inventiveness in this World Cup. Perhaps the ICC should institute a Spirit of Martin Crowe innovation award, along the lines of the ICC Spirit of Cricket or the Kingfisher fair play awards. If the ICC is not up to the task, this blog could fill the breach.

Captain Haddock's Bashi Bazouks

Ever wondered who Bashi-Bazouks are?

I first encountered Bashi Bazouks in The Crab With The Golden Claws. At the time, I didn't really wonder who or what they were. I just accepted them as another Haddock-ism, like lily livered landlubbers, or fancy dress fatimas, or ostrogoths, all good ways of describing people who don't understand that Loch Lomond whiskey is sacred. Nonetheless, I was delighted when I found Bashi Bazouks in a totally different context.

It turns out that the story of the Bashi Bazouks is much sadder than that of odd-toed ungulates, or duck-billed platypuses or even billions of bilious blue blistering barnacles.

I came across Bashi Bazouks while reading about the Ottoman-Russian war in 1876. Bashi Bazouks were irregular fighters in the Ottoman Army. They were unpaid, non-uniformed, and used as lookouts or sentries. They gained international notoriety when they were involved in horrific escalating tit-for-tat violence in Bulgaria, between Christian Bulgarian nationalists and Muslim Ottomans, which culminated in the Bashi Bazouks' massacre of the entire mountain-town of Batak.

It is hard to know what actually happened at this time. Open sources like Wikipedia can be unreliable when describing emotionally-charged political history like this. But to the extent that my Googled-up references can be trusted, the Bashi Bazouks were both tragic victims and brutal aggressors. Many of them were Muslim Circassian refugees from the Crimean wars, displaced from their homeland and repeatedly brutalized by the Bulgarian majority, before retaliating with even more brutality when they were finally given license by the Ottomans.

This story has a surprisingly contemporary feel. The soul-destroying ethnic violence in the Balkans and the Caucuses is still going on. The great powers are still learning that fighting proxy wars with low-cost irregular troops usually ends in tragedy, whether you call them Bashi Bazouks, Tamil Tigers, Sandinistas or mujahedeen.

Changing tack a bit, ever wondered who Archibald is? Captain Haddock's first name is Archibald. Fortunately, this Archie is not a carrot-top.

Red Plenty

I generally review books after I have read them, but I'm posting about Red Plenty when its still in my Amazon shopping basket. I heard about this book's premise on the radio, and the premise may turn out to be its most more interesting part.

Here is what the front flap says:

Once upon a time in the Soviet Union...

Strange as it may seem, the grey, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the twentieth century magic called "the planned economy", which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working.

Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to an future of rich communists and envious capitalists...

This was the time between the launch of Sputnik in 1957, and the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, when the Soviet Union looked and felt rich and successful. It felt like the Soviets had invented a wonderful new world, both morally and materially superior to the West. So...this was the illusion, the chimera, that lured Nehru's India into decades of socialism and stagnation.

Red Plenty's hero is Leonid Kantorovich, the only Soviet to win the Nobel Prize for Economics. He invented linear programming (among other things), and so helped create the impression that Soviet science could allocate resources more effeciently than capitalist markets. The book is a melding of fact and fiction about how that vision was, and was not, true.

The other book in my Amazon shopping basket is Michael Lewis' The Big Short. I've actually started reading this book, but I didn't finish my father-in-law's copy on our last trip to Madras. It feels like a nice counter-point to Red Plenty. It too takes us back to a far-away past, the time between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of Lehman Brothers, and reminds us that capitalism can also fall into catastrophic science-induced hubris.

Tiger Mothers and OPEC

Amy Chua's fifteen minutes of fame are almost over. The Tiger Mother story has played itself out as a news item. Yet, after having read the Economist, Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker, David Brooks in the NYT, Larry Summers in the WSJ, The Guardian, Slate and probably a dozen other stories about The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, I feel like the mainstream media are missing the central point, the reason why Tiger Mothers are both so heartening and so scary.

By now, most blog readers probably know the outlines of Ms Chua's story. Her book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, is supposedly a memoir about raising children on a strict regimen of no TV, no video games, no play dates and no sleepovers. The time that was freed up was reinvested in music practice and homework. Her regimen worked. Her daughters, now 18 and 15, grew into music prodigies with straight A grades.

Amy Chua spiced up this unsurprising story with the provocative claim that Chinese mothers are superior to Western ones; that her experience is evidence of this superiority. By mischievously framing the question in racial, or geopolitical, terms, she twanged a bunch of recessionary anxieties about Western decline and the rise of China. She has been rewarded for this cynicism with a firestorm of media commentary, and a place on both Amazon and New York Times bestseller lists. The racial and geopolitical sub-text is so deliciously juicy that it has drawn most of the media attention.

However, to me, the Chinese angle is irrelevant. I grew up among the Tamil Brahmins of Mylapore, a culture which is chock-a-block with Tiger Mothers. This also kills the theory that Tiger Mothers are somehow products of the immigrant experience.

This isn't about Asian values either. Slackistan, a new movie I'm itching to watch, should illustrate this point. It is about the indolent lassitude of privileged young Pakistanis; Asian setting, no Tiger Moms in sight.

American Jews are pushy parents, according to stereotype. In this, they are no different from other Western families who want to provide well for their children. Spotting Western Tiger Parents from a wide range of cultures is as easy as watching tennis on TV. Venus and Serena Williams' dad Richard, or Andy Murray's mom Judy, or Martina Hingis' mom Melanie - Tiger Parents all. Every race, religion and ethnicity can and does embrace the Protestant work ethic, in the right circumstances.

Those right circumstances are defined by incentives. Tiger parenting happens when parents respond to incentives. If good grades open up a credible path to a better life, parents will push their children to get good grades. The bigger the gap between the parent's life and the promised life for the children, in terms of either tangible income or status, the harder the parent will push the children.

Slightly less obvious, the same dynamic works with parents further up the food chain. These are parents in high-status positions, who are not wealthy enough to pass the same status on to the next generation. Senior civil servants, army officers or tenured university professors like Amy Chua, who are rich in status but not in wealth, might push their children even harder than the aspiring middle class. One of the clearest results in behavioural economics is that the pain of losing something is far greater than the joy of gaining the same thing.

On the other hand, Bertram Wilberforce Wooster and members of the Drones Club were so completely secure in their privilege that swotting to better one's life made no sense. Ditto for George W Bush. Ditto also for Jawaharlal Nehru, who was never more than an average student through his Harrow and Cambridge years. Similarly, coal miners who can only imagine that their sons will also be coalminers are unlikely to become Tiger Dads who push their sons to straight As.

Looked at this way, Tiger Parents, and the middle-class bourgeois values they reflect, are fundamentally good. They inhabit worlds with social mobility. They inject even more mobility these worlds with their energy, ambition and enterprise. They make democracy and capitalism possible; if this feels like an over-claim please read Fareed Zakaria's The Future of Freedom, a book I loved and wholeheartedly endorse.

So ambition and hard work are good. But how much is too much?

The scary thing about Amy Chua is not her ambition, or her Chinese-ness (she is a second generation American, married to a Jew, whose parents emigrated from the Philippines). Her problem is extent. No TV or video games until homework and music practice are done? Fine. No dinner unless the "The Little White Donkey" is played perfectly? No way. But that, apparently, is what Amy Chua does.

I find the most intuitive way to understand this is with another Econ 101 concept: cartels.

Consider OPEC, the cartel of twelve countries which controls most of the world's crude oil. It is in the best interests of the group as a whole to maintain a high price for crude oil. Their oil ministers meet, agree on production quotas, limit supply, and drive up crude oil prices to profit-maximizing levels. However, it is in the best interests of each individual country to renege on the agreement, and produce more than the agreed quota of crude. The higher the price of crude, the stronger the individual country's incentive to renege (especially if it is a democracy heading into an election year). As more countries renege on their production quotas, the price of crude drops, and ideally the cartel breaks down in a flurry of bitterness, finger-pointing and name calling.

Cartels can also do good. Everybody benefits from low trade barriers. Each country has an incentive to "cheat" and raise protectionist walls for local political gains. Supra-national arrangements, like the WTO or the EEC, are all about making it harder for individual countries to cheat, and therefore making everyone better off. In general, cartels work if they have fewer participants, if cheating is easy to spot, and if punishments for cheating are severe.

The supply of homework hours is analogous to the supply of crude oil. All families would be better off if there were limits on pushy parenting; say, children have at least an hour of unstructured time every day. The problem is with enforcing a cartel to limit the supply of homework time. Lots of suppliers, no way to monitor cheating, no punishments for being caught... this cartel would break down in a flash. Tiger parents will immediately turn that hour of free time to homework, to get ahead of the competition.

One of the few things I love about Amy Chua's story is that for fifteen years she never told her peers how hard she pushed her kids. She fabricated medical reasons why her daughters couldn't go on play dates or sleepovers. Her peers had no way to know she was "cheating", and couldn't punish her with social ostracism. A lot of the vitriol being directed at her now is the finger-pointing and name-calling that happens when a cartel breaks. I'm sure a lot of the finger-pointers and name-callers are secretly vowing to double-down and push their children even harder. I don't think there is a happy and harmonious resolution to having Tiger Mothers in our midst.

Sport as a metaphor for life might work here. A sportsman needs to focus, play hard, and play to win, even when the opponent isn't playing the right way. Say the umpire doesn't call a chucker at cricket. As a batsman, you just mark your guard again and bat on. Say your opponent is calling your shots long at a club tennis match. You stop going for the lines and find another way to win. Playing their game is not an option. Letting them win is also not an option. I guess that is one way to deal with Tiger Parents, because for better and for worse, they are here to stay.

The Sultan's Seal, en route to Istanbul

I was on a business trip to Istanbul recently. All I had time for was the airport, hotel, and conference center - annoying when visiting one of the world’s most fascinating cities. Fortunately, my hotel was Absolut Istanbul, on the grounds of the old Dolmabache Palace, overlooking the Bosphorus. Plus, I got another shot of Istanbullu from my in-flight reading. The Sultan's Seal, by an American anthropologist called Jenny White, successfully transported me to the Ottoman capital circa 1887.

I entered a world where the Ottoman sultan was very much in charge, but the glories of empire could no longer be taken for granted. The campfires of the Russian army were visible from Istanbul rooftops, as the Czar’s troops chipped away at the empire’s former Balkan heartland. The British resident was a big figure in Istanbul, since it was the British guarantee of protection that kept the Russians at bay. The resident’s sweet, pretty and idealistic daughter believes, in all sincerity, that the Ottoman empire becoming a British protectorate would be good for all concerned, as had been amply demonstrated in India and Africa.

At this time, the province of Syria, which included all of modern Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and parts of modern Iraq, was an integral part of the Ottoman empire. Mecca and Medina were also a part of Ottoman Arabia, a natural part of the domain of the Sunni Caliph.

The term Turk referred to the unsophisticated peasants of Anatolia. The genteel upper classes of Istanbul were Ottomans, not Turks. Idealistic, romantic sons of this genteel class met in Parisian coffee houses and debated whether reform could restore the empire’s glory, or if revolution was necessary, and if talk of revolution constituted heresy since the Ottoman sultan was also the Caliph. The Jews of Istanbul's Galata ghetto, loyal subjects of the Caliph for over four hundred years since Catholic Queen Isabella kicked them out of Spain after the reconquista, were fighting to keep the liberal Ottoman Caliph in power.

This was a world where village boys, or even grown men, would never have seen a woman's face outside the immediate family. In genteel society, men and women would see and greet each other, but would converse in gender-segregated groups. Eunuchs from the Sultan's harem were a powerful and respected cadre in this Istanbul, where casual homosexual encounters at the hamam were unremarkable, but where full male nudity was shocking and strictly taboo.

In this world, a girl from a poor family could be sold to richer relatives to work in their home as a servant and companion. This girl would be educated and married in an honourable way, as a family member, but would sleep on the floor in separate quarters and eat her meals after the host family, as a servant. I was a little shocked at how easily I got the ambiguity and duplicity of that relationship.

Notionally, this book is a murder mystery, but the plot is too byzantine for a whodunit. By the time I got to the denouement in which the hero rescues the heroine from terrible danger, I had entirely lost track of which baddie wanted to bump which heroine off, and for what reason. I didn't mind.

I enjoyed the book for transporting me to a fully-realized world, one which is both familiar and strange, not for the cleverness of the detective's investigative work. I have a hunch that Jenny White wrote the book in much the same spirit. The whodunit never was anything more than a vehicle in which to package Jenny White's encyclopaedic knowledge of Ottoman society and politics. Regardless, it injected some local flavour into what might have been a sterile business trip, and illustrated a favourite old perverse-theory: that the point of tourism is to work up the enthusiasm to read the guidebook.

Cyborgs Creating Self

I just listened to a podcast by Amber Case, an anthropologist who studies how people use digital technology. She said something that really resonated with me:

What I'm really worried about is that people aren't taking time for mental reflection any more, and they aren't slowing down and stopping... And really, when you have no external input, that is the time when there is creation of self, when you can do long term planning, when you can figure out who you really are.

And once you figure out who you really are, you can present yourself in a legitimate way, instead of just dealing with everything as it comes in: oh, I have to do this, I have to do this, I have to do this...I am really worried today that kids are not going to have this downtime. They have this instantaneous button clicking culture, and that everything comes to them...

I'll say the important part again, to make the words mine: when you have no external input, that is the time when there is creation of self.

I value downtime, and the sense for who I really am that that gives me. I'd assumed that is because of my INTJ personality type, but maybe it is a more universal need. Most spiritual practice, or long distance running, or hip contemporary spa experiences seem to be about creating quiet spaces where self can be created.

I don't share Amber Case's worry that kids brought up with smart phones and facebook will lose their sense of self, any more than kids brought up with twenty four hour television, or in crowded joint-family homes, lost their sense of self. If the psyche needs quiet time, it will generally find a way to get that quiet time, in whatever context.

Also, this is excellent time management advice. Responding to email as it streams in all day long is exhausting. I try to keep specific blocks of calendar time for email, and to not respond at other times, even though my Blackberry makes it possible.

The Trouble With Being Swanny

Swanny’s Ashes video diaries are coming thick and fast now. Episode 7 came out on Jan 2, a mere 4 days after the Christmas special episode on Dec 29.

Interesting, then, that Swanny did not bring out an Ashes video diary for a sixteen day period between Dec 13 and Dec 29. Swanny did not do an episode after the Perth test, when England got walloped. He went straight from celebrating the Adelaide win with videos of England fans doing the sprinkler dance, to celebrating the Melbourne win with the England team doing the sprinkler dance on the hallowed MCG turf, to the eternal delight of the Barmy Army.

Swanny knows that jokey banter is great on a winning team. Jokes sour very quickly in a team that rarely wins. That equation, between joking and winning, cost him ten years of his career.

Graeme Swann was first called up for England duty as a gifted twenty year old, in 1999, when England were officially the worst team in the test world. Nasser Hussain and Duncan Fletcher were tasked with giving that rabble, who had made a habit of losing, some grit and backbone. They had no time for a self-confessed “obnoxious loud-mouth”, who missed the team’s tour bus because he overslept. Swanny was dropped after bowling five overs in an ODI. Ashley Giles was their spinner of choice.

When Swanny finally made his test debut as a seasoned thirty year old, in Madras in Dec 08, England were a competitive team. Now, they had discipline, they had spunk. They needed inspiration and effervescence, which Swanny brought to the party. Critically, they won often enough to have self-belief. Their boats floated high enough in the water for Swanny’s juvenile jokes (about Alistair Cook’s resemblance to Woody from Toy Story, or Steve Finn’s bad haircut, or Tim Bresnan stealing all the chocolate bars) to raise a laugh rather than to grate. The same personality which made Swanny a non-option ten years ago now makes him the talismanic spirit of a winning team.

Is he a better bowler now than in 1999? Yes, of course. But I suspect he always was a better bowler than Ashley Giles, Shaun Udal, Jamie Dalrymple, Michael Yardy or even Monty Panesar, all of whom played for England. That feels unfair. But in my judgement, there are very few players who are so much better than the next best alternative that it is worth disrupting a team's spirit or ethos for that extra ability. Maybe I'd consider fitting in Brian Lara, KP or Shoaib Akthar...very rare.

Regardless, Swanny leading the England team in doing the sprinkler dance on the MCG has to be one of the great moments in cricket's history, precisely because it is so silly. It reminds us that cricket, like life itself, is just a game.