JRR Tolkien, the lousy teacher

"At Oxford in the nineteen-forties, Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was generally considered the most boring lecturer around, teaching the most boring subject known to man, Anglo-Saxon philology and literature, in the most boring way imaginable. “Incoherent and often inaudible” was Kingsley Amis’s verdict on his teacher. Tolkien, he reported, would write long lists of words on the blackboard, obscuring them with his body as he droned on, then would absent-mindedly erase them without turning around. “I can just about stand learning the filthy lingo it’s written in,” Philip Larkin, another Tolkien student, complained about the old man’s lectures on “Beowulf.” “What gets me down is being expected to admire the bloody stuff.”

It is still one of the finest jests of the modern muses that this fogged-in English don was going home nights to work on perhaps the most popular adventure story ever written..."

More evidence that genius in one aspect of life, even in one aspect of communication, can go hand in hand with mediocrity in other related aspects of life, or communication.

Extracted from this (very nice) story in the New Yorker, which is still visible online...

Slip Slidin' Away into a Bed of Roses

I've never thought of Paul Simon and Jon Bon Jovi as kindred souls, until these words rolled shortly after each other on my iPod:

“...a bad day’s when I lie in bed and think of things that might have been...” in Paul Simon's Slip Slidin' Away, followed by

“...as I dream about movies they won’t make of me when I’m dead...” in Bon Jovi's Bed of Roses.

The same emotion, the same sentiment, the same thought. Maybe that is a universal experience...thinking of the different branching paths life might have taken...the alternative universes we might have inhabited. Regardless, I love the shuffle function on my iPod.

Why the Irish, and Indians, rationally believe in fairies

"Because the upside to disbelief is too small."

Zigackly. I picked this gem up from Michael Lewis' hilarious new book, Boomerang. The passage in question is about Ireland:

Ian (Michael Lewis' Irish guide) will say “Over there, that’s a pretty typical fairy ring,” and then explain, interestingly, that these circles of stones or mushrooms that occur in Irish fields are believed by local farmers to house mythical creatures. “Irish people actually believe in fairies?,” I ask, straining but failing to catch a glimpse of the typical fairy ring to which Ian has just pointed. “I mean, if you walked right up and asked him to his face, ‘Do you believe in fairies?’ most guys will deny it,” he replies. “But if you ask him to dig out the fairy ring on his property, he won’t do it. To my way of thinking, that’s believing.” And it is. It’s a tactical belief, a belief that exists because the upside to disbelief is too small...

To my ears, that rings true of India too. Superstition is about economic, rather than scientific, rationality. Lewis' chapter about Ireland is still visible at Vanity Fair.

Teaching compassion through drama

"Why don't we teach our children compassion?". 

Roshi Joan Halifax asked this question in the TED talk I posted about last week, implying that we don't do enough to teach our children compassion.

On reflection, I think we do more to teach our children than we generally give ourselves credit for. This teaching is not called "compassion class". It is called drama. For instance, my daughters attend a very popular theater workshop in our neighbourhood. The faculty that they develop through theater is compassion; they learn to get into someone else's skin.

I didn't learn drama as a child, but I did attend a couple of corporate leadership workshops, in America, that were built around acting technique. The idea is - learn to act, get into the other's skin, understand others more completely, communicate better, discover yourself, discover your own authentic leadership voice, and therefore ride away into the golden sunset of promotions and profits - which sounds awfully naff, but was actually quite helpful. 

Compassion: Moral Outrage :: Dalai Lama : Arnab Goswami

"Compassion has enemies...like pity, and moral outrage..."

I came across these words in a TED talk by the Buddhist Roshi Joan Halifax, to whom compassion is a higher faculty, a more important experience, than outrage. Obvious maybe, but worth noticing, amidst the cacophony of shrill news-anchors.

   

The Dunbar number: the reason my family consists of just one hundred and fifty people

I was at a marvellous family event in Bangalore recently: an uncle and aunt's fiftieth wedding anniversary. It was a evening of laughter, music and food, brimming over with emotion, triggered in part by family photographs assembled from the past seventy-five years. When I came home, I started to explain to my daughters how all the people at that evening are related to us, and struggled. I still need to call my mother to clarify exactly how I'm related to my relatives.

I know exactly how I'm related to my first cousins, and for most part, to my second cousins. I'm hazy about genealogical links beyond that. Regardless, there are several members of my family, important people who I know and care about, who are in that hazy-genealogical-link zone. There are also several people who operate as members of the family despite not being specifically related either by blood or by marriage.

While my family is large and colourful, it is not unique. I know other Indian families which operate the same way. Mediterranean (and therefore Latino) cultures have a similarly capacious, rambling sense of family. Maybe family is the wrong word: clan, kinsfolk or the Welsh cymri might be closer to the mark. But what is it, this circle of kindred spirits? If it is not delineated by ancestry or marriage, is it infinitely large?

Professor Robin Dunbar thinks my clan isn't infinitely large, it consists of no more than one hundred and fifty people.

Dunbar's theory is that a stable social group is one in which "an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person". Keeping track of this complex web of relationships is cognitively difficult, and gets ever more so as the size of the group increases. Dunbar's observation is that this web of relationships gets unmanageably complex, or too computationally intensive for the human brain, when the group size approaches one hundred and fifty. Empirically, we've lived through most of recorded history in settlements of about one hundred and fifty people.

This is sometimes mis-interpreted as "you can't have more than one hundred and fifty friends". I don't think Dunbar's number makes any such claim.

For instance, I play tennis with an Oxford-educated Asian-Brit landscape-architect called Jason. I know Jason as a tennis buddy, and in that limited context, he is a good buddy. I don't know anything about the other spheres of Jason's life - his Oxonian tribe, or his landscape-architect tribe - and therefore my friendship with Jason is not computationally intensive. It is one dimensional, rather than a matrix. I don't think Dunbar's concept in any way limits the number of simple, or one-dimensional, friendships I can have. The Dunbar number is about the number of people in a self-regulating matrix of relationships, not about simple one-to-one friendships.

I also don't think the Dunbar number limits the number of distinct tribes I can belong to. I belong to Dunbar-tribes from family, school, college and from work. Each tribe is manageable because it is no more than one hundred and fifty people. If it were all one network, it would be overwhelming. Facebook's new "smart lists" feature is an attempt to capture this reality.

Understood this way, my family is a constantly shifting network of about one hundred and fifty, with people, or entire branches, coming in and peeling off as time passes and circumstances evolve. At one time, say one hundred and fifty years ago, a large family like mine would have operated to strict command-and-control protocols. Family would have defined every aspect of identity. Now, the family, or the clan, operates as an opt-in network, in which location on the family tree is not irrelevant but is not defining either. Welcome to the brave new world of open source kinship.

Work-family balance: one front where Manmohan Singh has it easier than Barack Obama

Jodi Kantor's new book The Obamas reports that "Barack refuses to miss dinner with his family more than twice a week". Apparently, this is not good. Obama's family-centric approach "left him, when the going got tough, short of friends, short of people who owed him, short of people who felt that the White House was interested in them". Effective presidents are meant to be out and about, schmoozing with potential allies.

Powerful men across the political spectrum face the same trade-off - between family time and schmoozing - on this side of the pond. David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband are all in what the Economist calls their "Gruffolo years", the time when dads read stories to their children. By most accounts, all three party leaders make time for their families. 

I clearly sympathize with Obama's and Cameron's choice (I'm writing this after having read out The Blackberry Mouse to my daughters). I want to believe that work can and should be organized so it can be done within defined working hours. But the truth is, there is a trade-off. I inhabit a less exalted world than the Obamas' and the Camerons', but even in my little world, schmoozing is clearly useful, but it is a potentially infinite drain on time and energy.

How much easier it must be for Manmohan Singh. He didn't have to face these hard trade-offs between bedtime stories and professional schmoozing when he became Prime Minister of India, aged 72.  Maybe working into what used to be the "retirement years" isn't all bad.