Is it principled to be principled?

"Nobody ever did anything very foolish except from some strong principle". I chanced upon this quote a couple of months ago, and it has stayed in my mind ever since. It is an old quote, by the 2nd Viscount Melbourne, the young Queen Victoria's political mentor, but it has stayed in mind because it feels contemporary, and is less cynical than it sounds.

Good principles - like, for instance, that all human beings are created equal - tend to be very abstract. It is never obvious how these abstract principles translate into programs of specific action, into doing. However, it is always tempting to invoke these principles to build support for a program of action.

The problem with linking an action plan closely with its animating principle is that it makes it harder to abandon the action plan, which is a pity, because only certainty with any action plan is that it will be made to look silly by "black swans", by real-world conditions that the plan did not, and could not have, known about. The bigger the agenda, the more quickly the black swans will strike.

A program of action which is tightly linked to a cherished principle usually means a program of action that isn't adaptive enough. von Moltke the elder was pointing in the same direction when he said "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy" 

"Let us take what the terrain gives"

"Follow your dream" is advice I have frequently received. This is also advice I have given multiple times. However, in most circumstances, this advice is worse than useless. I need to make choices about my career as a business executive in the here and now. Reminding myself of my childhood dream, to open the batting for the Indian cricket team, doesn't in any way help me make better life choices.

I discussed this in an earlier blog post, titled "Follow your dream, not". More recently, I came across the words "let us take what the terrain gives", which make the same point more elegantly, more positively.

These words were spoken by Daniel Kahneman back in 1996, at a graveside eulogy for his lifelong research partner Amos Tversky. Apparently, "let us take what the terrain gives" was the maxim Amos Tversky lived by. Kahneman went on to win the Nobel prize in 2002, his partner Tversky tragically missed out because he died so young. "Let us take what the terrain gives" is clearly not a case for embracing mediocrity, but it does recognize that "the other side of freedom is the ability to find joy in what one does".

BTW...I loved these pictures of Tversky on holiday in Switzerland in 1972...

Socrates. On beauty and victory

“Beauty comes first. Victory is secondary. What matters is joy.”

 These are the last words in Football Philosophy, a book by the Brazilian legend Socrates. I was doubly bereft as I read these words. First, because I read them in this obituary for Socrates, who died prematurely aged just 57. Second, because the great Brazilian disagrees with me.

Socrates seems to be saying that to abandon beauty for the sake of mere victory would be sacrilege. Yet, I posted earlier this year about the joy of "winning ugly". Where did I go wrong? At the time, I was writing about India winning at cricket during the World Cup. Was I sliding ingloriously into patriotism, that last refuge of scoundrels?

I could try to rebut the argument. I could wade into how players are characters in a larger drama, whose role is to do what it takes to win, not to step out of character seeking elusive beauty. But it somehow feels wrong, un-beautiful, to debate with someone who scored a goal like this in a World Cup:

 

 Adieu Socrates. Long may your tribe of thoughtful sportsmen thrive.

Kolaveri Di and the Eurovision Song Contest

Kolaveri Di has lived out fourteen out of its fifteen minutes of fame. So, one final thought to occupy that last minute: Kolaveri Di has what it takes to win the Eurovision song contest.

This thought comes straight from Only Mr. God Knows Why, an article by Anthony Lane (which, refreshingly, is still visible to the public on the New Yorker website). Anthony Lane's thesis is that a Eurovision contestant's main problem is reach out across a continent which doesn't know your language or culture. Consider these extracts:

“Europe has a problem...if you don’t speak English, you’re immediately at a disadvantage. The Greek guys? Good song, but it’s in Greek. Will they play that on the radio in France?"

...of the songs that have reached the finals over the years, two hundred and sixty-three have been in English, the lingua franca of pop. French, with a hundred and fifty, is the only other language in triple figures; the rest lag far behind...

On the one hand, the contest is an obvious chance for European nations, especially the less prominent ones, to flaunt their wares by singing in their native tongue. On the other hand, when you sing in English, you may be blasting through the language barrier to reach a wider audience, but are you not abasing yourself before the Anglo-American cultural hegemony...

 ...there are three well-established methods for avoiding it.

One is to be France, whose performers, as you would hope, grind away in French, year after year, repelling all intruders, giving only the barest hint that other languages, let alone other civilizations, even exist...

The second method is to be Ireland, the nation that has won the contest more often than any other. Seven times it has struck gold, and no wonder; if you can sing in English without actually being English—all the technical advantages without the shameful imperialist baggage—you’re halfway to the podium already.

The third method, which is by far the most popular, and which has brought mirthful pleasure to millions on an annual basis, is to sing in Eurovision English: an exquisite tongue, spoken nowhere else, which raises the poetry of heartfelt but absolute nonsense to a level of which Lewis Carroll could only have dreamed. The Swedes are predictably fluent in this (“Your breasts are like swallows a-nesting,” they sang in 1973), and the Finns, too, should be hailed as early masters, with their faintly troubling back-to-back efforts from the mid-seventies, “Old Man Fiddle” and “Pump-pump,”

 ...hence such gems as Austria’s “Boom Boom Boomerang,” from 1977 (not to be confused with Denmark’s “Boom Boom,” of the following year), Portugal’s “Bem-bom,” from 1982, and Sweden’s “Diggi-loo Diggi-ley,” which won in 1984. The next year’s contenders, spurred by such bravado, responded with “Magic, Oh Magic” (Italy) and “Piano Piano” (Switzerland). Not that the host nation relinquished the crown without a fight, as anyone who watched Kikki Danielsson can attest. Her song was called “Bra Vibrationer.” It was, regrettably, in Swedish.

Kolaveri Di fits this third formula perfectly. One doesn't need to really know either Tamil or English to get into the spirit of Kolaveri Di. "Distance-u la moon-u moon-u, moon-u colour-u white-u", is right up there with anything the Swedes, Finns or Portuguese can create. Please note: it is entirely conceivable that India will participate in the Eurovision song contest one day, last year's winner was Azerbaijan.

On an aside, maybe the Punjabization of India I posted about last week is because Punjabi is the most onamatopoeic of Indian languages. I don't know Punjabi, yet, I have no problem understanding "Chak de India" or "Tootak tootak tootiyan hey jamaalon". The language used by Premchand, Tagore, Bharatiyar, or for that matter, Shakespeare, is necessarily for narrower audiences.

Kolaveri Di and the Punjabization of India

Once upon a time, grown women in Madras wore sarees. No longer. Now, the default outfit is a salwar kameez, especially among younger women. The saree is gradually becoming formal wear, for special occasions. One of my aunts thinks this is because of the coarsening of Tamil culture – the saree is too revealing for today’s nasty world, women feel safer in the more fully covered-up salwar kameez – and there surely is some truth in her viewpoint. But the more popular interpretation is that this is a part of a wider cultural phenomenon: the Punjabization of India.

Vir Sanghvi wrote this nice piece about the Punjabization process. The passage which stuck in my mind was:

I went to shoot at a small hotel in the Wayanad region of Kerala. I had been looking forward to some good Kerala food. Instead, the buffet was full of black dal, butter chicken, paneer and seekh kebabs. I remonstrated with the manager. He was helpless, he said. This was what his largely south Indian guests wanted to eat when they were on vacation.

To put this nationwide Punjabi influence into perspective, the distance between Kerala and Punjab is about 1500 miles, which is the distance between London and Moscow. Arguably, the cultural differences within that span are even greater in India than in Europe.

The Punjabi influence isn’t limited to South India. For instance, this Bengali blogger was upset at the wedding sequence in the movie Parineeta. The movie is based on a classic Bengali novel by Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay. However, in the Bollywood version, the bhadralok wedding acquires a Punjabi flavour, with garish costumes, dolaks and song and dance sequences. Parineeta’s leading man was Saif Ali Khan, a son of Bengal’s revered Tagore family, which can’t have helped ease this blogger’s angst.

However, there is a flip side to being offered butter chicken in Kerala: it is not so hard to find a good masala dosa in Chandigarh or Lucknow. Bombay-style bhel puri is consumed with gusto in Calcutta, plenty of rasagollas are enjoyed in Bombay. Indian identity is sometimes compared to a salad bowl. As the salad bowl gets shaken, cultural elements get juxtaposed in unexpected, surprising, random ways. It isn't one-way traffic. What goes around comes around.

This is precisely why "why this kolaveri di" is so refreshing. It is in Tamil, or at least, it is Tamil-flavoured. The video features a bunch of losers in lungis who can't dance. It isn't Punjabi. It doesn't sound Bollywood. Yet, Kolaveri di is going viral right across the country. India just bit into a chilled-out southie ingredient in that cultural salad bowl, and enjoyed it. So did Japan.

Kolaveri Di's refrain translates roughly to "why this murderous rage?", the tone implies that the rage is so not worth it. So the next time a fellow south Indian gets worked up about the cultural imperialism of the north Indians, I can respond in song with "Why this kolaveri kolaveri kolaveri... why this kolaveri di?"

Raj Rajaratnam: Nayagan?

தென் பாண்டி சீமையிலே
தேரோடும் வீதியிலே
மான் போல வந்தவனே
யார்  அடித்தாரோ
யார்  அடித்தாரோ


These lyrics are from the theme song of the Tamil film Nayagan. The refrain, "yaar aditharo?" translates to "who hit you?", which is a pretty accurate description of what this Mani Ratnam film is about.

Nayagan is an exploration of what hit a young Tamil boy called Shakti Velu, and turned him into Velu Nayagan, one of Bombay's most feared crime bosses. It tells the story a frightened boy who runs away from a crumbling home, arrives in distant, alien Bombay, gets caught up by chance with the criminal underworld, rises through the crime ranks with his smarts, and when needed, his decisive brutality, yet retains his innate integrity, his decency, his faith, a capacity for empathy. It is based loosely on the life of the real-life Bombay crime boss Varadarajan Mudaliar, and for my money, is one of the best films ever made.

This film came back to mind because I was reading about, and reflecting on, a similar contemporary story.

In this contemporary telling, the distant alien city the young Tamil boy finds himself in is not Bombay, but New York, the criminal underworld is Wall Street. The crime boss in question - the Nayagan - is Raj Rajarathnam. The story teller is journalist Suketu Mehta, who did several hours of interviews with Raj Rajarathnam shortly after his eleven year prison sentence was announced. These interviews contain a fair bit of new information. Rajaratnam was a very private man in his glory days, and these are the first interviews he has given since being charged.

Suketu Mehta's portrayal of Rajaratnam is generally sympathetic. Rajaratnam is portrayed as The Outsider, doing what he had to, to win at a game where the deck was stacked against him.

"He had grown up, as he tells it, in fear: of the Sinhalese majority in his homeland; of the skinheads in Britain where he’d studied; and of the established elites of Wall Street where he did business. At just about every stage of his life, there were people out to get him."

Mehta emphasizes Rajaratnam's community spirit and generosity:

"In New York’s South Asian community there are many stories of Rajaratnam’s generosity. He has given financial support to the Harlem Children’s Zone; the education reformer Geoffrey Canada testified in his support during the trial. He’s also given $250,000 a year for three years to South Asian Youth Action, a Queens-based NGO; his wife, Asha, is on the board..."

He emphasizes Rajaratnam's dignity in adversity: Raj refuses to wear a wire-tap, and refuses to be drawn into any immigrants vs. insiders conspiracy theory.

"Rajaratnam was...being asked by the government to turn on (Rajat) Gupta. But he wouldn’t wear a wire, he says, so he could sleep at night."

"Why so many Indian names in the indictments, I ask. “Because Roomy Khan’s network was Indian,” he explains simply. “They’re not being unfairly targeted. I don’t believe in conspiracy theories. ” His brother Rengan sees it differently. “For years these guys were sitting around in sports clubs and exchanging information. That wasn’t a crime. And now we immigrants do the same thing and it is?”

Mehta emphasizes the contrast between the moral codes and norms of America, and what Rajaratnam grew up with in Sri Lanka.

"The whole story speaks to the South Asian–American community: its pursuit of success and money at any cost; the differences between immigrants and the first generation; and the immigrants’ incomplete understanding of the rigor of the law in the U.S."

The picture that develops through Suketu Mehta's story is of a proud, big-hearted, dignified man, a spirited underdog, more a victim than a villain, who is facing an unprecedented jail term for doing things that he did not see as a serious crime, because so many others around him were doing the same.

The picture that also emerges if that of someone who comes from a familiar milieu, a milieu that I, and I guess most readers of this blog, would find easy to relate to. Rajaratnam is a Tamil, like me. His father was an upright executive, head of the Singer Sewing Machine Company in South Asia. My father was also an upright executive, he worked for Unilever and Ogilvy & Mather advertising in India. Rajaratnam studied business at Wharton, I studied at the University of Chicago. Rajaratnam's face lights up when talking about PG Wodehouse. Mine would too, I come from a devoutly Wodehousian clan.

However, unlike Rajaratnam, I did not attend Dulwich College, the south London public school that Wodehouse himself attended. Rajaratnam spent three years of his life in what once was Wodehouse's room. This is the point at which the similarity in our backgrounds starts to break down; I know several South Asian professionals, I don't know any who sent their children to public school in England. My parents were very well off by the standards of their time, but I don't think they could have dreamt of sending me to public school in England. If anything Rajaratnam seems to come from a background which is similar to mine, but even more privileged.

Understanding this background makes me see Rajaratnam in different light, makes it harder for me to see him as a victim. Yes, there are immigrants to the USA, say Mexican fruit-pickers, who have the "immigrants’ incomplete understanding of the rigor of the law in the U.S", and may consequently break the law. Yes, there have been Sicilian immigrants who stepped on to American soil staring at a stark choice between joining the mafia and being killed by the mafia. A Columbian cocaine mule escaping from a drug cartel, like in the movie Maria Full of Grace, necessarily faces some very hard life choices, like Shakti Velu did when he found himself in Bombay. The choices Rajaratnam faced are just not comparable to the choices faced by these stereotypical, less fortunate immigrants, immigrants whose lives were hit by fate.

Rajaratnam, and his crooked henchmen from McKinsey and Company like Anil Kumar and (presumably) Rajat Gupta, were brought up to be a part of an elite. These guys had real choices. They were fully equipped - by their native intelligence, their privileged upbringing, and by their first rate education - to very quickly understand the "rigour of the law in the U.S.", with all its nuances of meaning. They were equipped to grasp just how sick and cynical Wall Street was. They had the option of trying to be a force for the good. At a minimum, they had the option of not playing and stepping away if the game got too ugly, and going on to live still very comfortable lives. Instead, despite all the privileges that they had been given, they chose to actively embrace the ugliest and most cynical aspects of life on Wall Street.

At the denouement of the movie Nayagan, Velu Nayagan's grandson asks him "Are you a good man or a bad man?". Choked up, Velu Nayagan replies "I don't know".

Velu Nayagan was a murderous mafia don. Yet, when one makes the effort to get into his skin, understand his back-story, and sees where he is coming from, it is hard not to be sympathetic. It is hard to be judgemental. His own moral ambiguity feels appropriate. With Raj Rajratnam, when one makes the effort to get into his skin, understand his back-story, when one sees all the privileges and choices he had, and the cynicism with which he chose to be a crook, it is hard to be sympathetic. Moral ambiguity doesn't feel nearly as appropriate as it did with Velu Nayagan.

Haimish, Gezellig and the Great Pumpkin

English is the world's most successful language because it is so rich, it has many more words than any comparable language. Yet, frustratingly, English still doesn't have words for so many useful, everyday concepts. Consider, for instance, haimish: a Yiddish word that suggests warmth, domesticity and unpretentious conviviality.

I was looking up the meaning because it is in this (excellent) New Yorker article about IKEA: "IKEA believes that it can make your sleep better and enhance your family life...IKEA's vision of life in its environs is a safe and haimish one. In its rooms, people don't run late, the don't bicker; the have children, but they don't have sex."

The most interesting definition of haimish I found was by David Brooks, the NY Times conservative columnist, talking about why simple, wholesome, communal safari camps are more rewarding than elegant, luxurious camps that lack the haimish spirit. Understood this way, haimish feels a lot like another word I've blogged about before: gezellig, space and people coming together in harmony, that special spirit of cosy fellowship that animates Dutch life.

This sentiment is not unfamiliar to Anglophone cultures. For instance, I've long loved Charles Schulz's Peanuts comics for their haimish or gezellig character. Linus van Pelt lives in the hope that the Great Pumpkin will grace his pumpkin patch on Halloween night for being the most "sincere". I suspect the notion Linus and the Great Pumpkin are searching for is closer to haimish or gezellig than just sincere. Haimish and gezellig include sincere, and a whole lot else besides, except that it would be so ongezellig to use a foreign word like gezellig in Linus' pumpkin patch.

Is it just a matter of time before English co-opts haimish? The casual way in which the New Yorker used the word suggests that that is already happening. My wife and I couldn't find plausible Hindi or Tamil equivalents for haimish or gezellig either. Any suggestions?

How to Play a Limca Cut

Perceptive readers have noticed that this blog's name has changed from Moon Balls from Planet Earth to Limca Cuts from Planet Earth, and have asked me what Limca Cuts are. Like a Moon Ball, which is a spinner's slower ball, a Limca Cut is an obscure cricket term. Unlike a Moon Ball, a Limca Cut comes from the street cricket played in Mylapore, Madras, back in the 1980s.

Here is a step by step guide to playing a Limca Cut:

1. Stride. Get fully forward, right to the pitch of a ball on an off-stump line, and fuller than a good length

2. Stroke. Bring your bat down towards the ball in a smooth, vigourous vertical arc, with your left elbow held high, and with the face of the bat towards extra cover

3. Bamboozle. Mystify your opponents by striking the ball with the inside edge of the bat

4. Bisect. Direct the ball past the leg stump, along the Limca angle, bisecting the wicket-keeper and the fielder at fine leg

5. Acknowledge. Raise your bat and pump fists in the air, as the ball races past the diving fielder at fine leg to cross the boundary line and bring up the winning runs. Celebrate with Lime and Lemoni Limca as the crowd goes wild.

The banter after this shot typically goes:

Bowler: What kind of a shot is that?
Batsman: A stylish cut shot.
Bowler: A cut goes that way, man.
Batsman: No no. This is a special cut, a Limca Cut.

This shot is also referred to as a french cut in some other parts of the world, but hey, we are like that wonley. Mind it!

Why do Dervishes Whirl?

Jalaluddin Rumi was wandering the streets of Konya, overcome with grief at the death of a dear friend, when he was captured by the rhythmic beat of a goldsmith's hammer. He started whirling, found consolation, and inspired a tradition that has continued for seven hundred years.

Sufi whirling has always been laced with lamentation. Though, arguably, the whirling in the cartoon above, whirling to lament a moment which is about to die, is even more poignant than traditional Sufi whirling. I found this cartoon at xkcd.com.

Incidentally, I did get to see a dervish sema ceremony on my last trip to Istanbul, at the Hodja Pasha Cultural Centre. Real dervishes do whirl counter-clockwise.

Hindi: Turkish :: Turkey : English?

I had been in Istanbul for a couple of days, gamely drinking Turkish coffee to keep my clients company. Now, my soul craved the familiar comfort of a Tall Skinny Hazelnut Latte. I spotted a Starbucks - on Istiklal Caddessi, in the Beyoglu district - and homed in.

The Starbucks had a mix of wooden chairs and cushy sofas, posters promising schools in coffee growing areas, a display of coffee beans in various stages of roasting, chocolate muffins, cinnamon swirls, an easy listening jazz sound, the Beyoglu Starbucks had it all. If a brand manager had dropped in as a mystery shopper, she would have glowed with pride. This Starbucks could have been in London, Los Angeles, Stockholm, Vienna, Athens, or at the Sainsbury’s next to my office. With one exception: they had something on the counter labelled “hindi sandwiches”.

I asked my Turkish colleague what hindi sandwiches were. He explained that the Turkish word for turkey is hindi, so hindi sandwiches are turkey sandwiches. I may have looked a little quizzical, so he continued, “Turkeys are oriental birds. They come from the East. So in English they are called Turkey, because Turkey is to the east of England, and in Turkish they are called Hindi, because India is to the east of Turkey, and Hindi means Indian in Turkish”. I checked with a couple of other Turkish friends, and they confirmed that this turkeys/ hindis-come-from-the-east theory has widespread currency among young Turks. It makes some sense.

I couldn’t buy this theory, because I just happen to know that turkeys don’t come from India. They are not called “chini” in India, either, in the belief that they come from China. There is no native Indian word for turkey. Even after decades of globalization, turkey is still almost unknown in India.

A more plausible explanation is that hindi came to mean turkey in Turkish for the same reason that native Americans were called Red Indians.

Turkeys are American birds. They were first domesticated by the Aztecs. The conquistadors introduced them to Spain, from where they came to Europe through Turkish merchants in Ottoman North Africa. The Turkish merchants called the birds hindi because they thought Columbus had discovered a route to India. Europeans called the bird turkey, because of the Turkish merchants who sold them.

Incidentally, the Portuguese word for turkey is "peru", which may be more accurate than either hindi or turkey.

On Being a Grown Up

"Life gradually became less a search for meaning than a process of optimization: how to put this sentence the best way in the fewest words, how to choose the right things to buy at the supermarket and pay for them in the fastest-moving line, what to do and ingest in order to keep from getting sick or depressed..."

The essential difference between brahmacharya and grihastashram. Taken, a little out of context and beyond all consequences, from In The World, by Elif Batuman, in a recent New Yorker.

Conserving Brutalism? The curious case of the Preston Bus Station

The English love their heritage. I am continuously amazed and heartened at how much care is lavished on everything from prehistoric dolmens, to Roman ruins, to Victorian facades, to Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. This love isn't limited to a vanishingly small elite. The National Trust, one of many NGOs that look after England's heritage, has a paid up membership of four million people, not including sympathizers like me (my membership has lapsed).

However, I am discovering that my sympathy for heritage has its limits. I am unable to grasp how a large, concrete bus station in a small town in Lancashire is heritage worth preserving. Yet, there is a movement to do just that.

Preston Bus Station has been declared a "monument at risk" by the World Monuments Trust. Dr Jonathan Foyle, chief executive of the trust, described Preston bus station as "fabulously, boldly expressive of the year it was built". Apparently, this bus station is a prime example of the Brutalist style of architecture, which was in vogue in 1969. The term Brutalist comes from beton brut, French for raw concrete, which was the avant garde architect's material of choice in 1969. I suspect the term has stuck because "Brutalist" captures the spirit of these structures precisely.

This argument is happening about a functioning bus station, not a piece of abstract art. The local council, which wants to demolish this structure, says on BBC's Radio Four that this Brutalist structure doesn't work properly as a bus station: it is way out on the edge of the town and too far away from other transportation hubs like the railway station.

With pragmatism and aesthetics on the same side of the argument, usually there would be only one winner. However, in England, I suspect the Brutalist bus station on the edge of Preston has a bright future. Google found me many web-petitions defending the Brutalist bus station, and none supporting the council's demolition plan.

Haka for World Peace

The Rugby World Cup is on. I am cheering for the All Blacks.

India is not playing, so I can swear allegiance to any team in the tournament. I would, ideally, choose my team based on their skills, tactics, character and creativity. However, sadly, I don’t know rugby well enough to exercise that kind of nuanced judgement. I’ve worked out the scoring system and sort of know the main rules – like you can’t pass the ball forward – but I still find penalties baffling, and I can’t tell a fly-half from a hooker. No, I didn’t become an All Blacks fan because of their game.

Some people think I’m supporting the All Blacks just because they are going to win the World Cup. That is not the case. Yes, the Kiwis are the bookie’s favourite, but I’ve been a sports fan for too long to read much meaning into the bookie’s reading of the tea leaves. My natural instinct is the opposite: to support the spunky underdog rather than the favourite. The truth is, I am cheering for the All Blacks because I love the Haka.

There is a lot to love about the Haka. The lilting melody, uplifting lyrics and the balletic grace of the performers never fails to stir the spirit. But, on reflection, I think the main reason the Haka resonates with me is its political symbolism.

The Haka is obviously a Maori war ritual, yet, both Polynesian and Caucasian Kiwis embrace it as their own. It doesn’t seem to be an in-your-face assertion of Maori pride, like say the Tommie Smith’s Black Salute at the 1968 Olympic Games. It doesn’t seem to be an ironic or mocking adoption of Maori imagery by a dominant Caucasian culture either. Daniel Carter and Malili Muliaina both seem to perform the Haka in the same spirit, with the same pride and conviction.

I sometimes hear about being "tolerant" of other identities in multi-cultural societies. Personally, I don't actually like being tolerant. When I'm being tolerant, I'm just keeping the lid on irritation, resentment or even anger that are simmering beneath the surface. A zestful, whole-hearted embrace of another identity, like the Haka, feels so much better than mere tolerance. Maybe that is the path to genuine, successful multi-cultural societies.

The way John Lennon might have put it:

"You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope one day you'll join us
And the world will do the Haka as one...."

C'mon All Blacks!

Yorkshire Souls experiencing the Brahman

"And then a scholar said, Speak of Talking. And he answered, saying...
In much of your talking, thinking is half-murdered. For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings, but cannot fly."

From The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran.

The words were on my mind because my family and I were at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park last weekend. We encountered these Yorkshire Souls: these alphabet-lattice figures sitting under a tree hugging their knees. From certain angles, or in certain light, they were hardly apparent, they melted into the background. From other angles, they looked solid.

We walked through the Yorkshire Souls, and their big brother The House of Knowledge, and looked out at the world through their alphabet lattices. The view from inside the Yorkshire Souls was sort of like my view of the world itself. I perceive the world through words, symbols, which automatically distances and separates me from the world I am perceiving.

The way Paul Simon put it:

"...From the shelter of my mind,
Through the window of my eyes..."

The world seen through words and alphabets is maya, only an illusion. I have to step out of the beautiful alphabet-lattice of maya, step out of the Yorkshire Soul, to experience truth, to experience the Brahman. Many spiritual practices are about escaping this illusion of maya and directly experiencing reality: Vipassana Yoga, or the Trappist practice of silence, or the Japanese tea ceremony, or perhaps even the Mevlevi dervishes, dancing themselves into a trance to escape the boundaries of the self. Today, I could taste a little of that sense of liberation, just by looking through the alphabet-lattice of the Yorkshire Souls and stepping back into the sunlight. Wow.

Were other people who came across the Yorkshire Souls similarly reminded of maya and the Brahman?

I wasn't sure. So I asked my daughters what they made of the Yorkshire Souls. My nine-year old said "They must be chatterboxes. They have so much to say." My six-year old was reminded of a trick the children play on Mam'zelle in Malory Towers. Mam'zelle sat on a stool and came away with a bright pink "OI" on her black-skirted behind. Maybe the children played a similar trick on the Yorkshire Souls' beds, so they were completely covered with alphabets. Which makes sense, because the Brahman can be experienced by a chatterbox, or in children's pranks, just as much as it can be experienced in the sanctum sanctorum of St Peter's Basilica, or in an ice-cave at Gangotri.

More pictures of the Yorkshire Souls and The House of Knowledge are here. The Jaume Plensa exhibit that these Yorkshire Souls are a part of is still on, and is totally worth a visit.

Lover's Bridge, Sofia, Bulgaria

I spread my map out across the reception desk, pointed to a scribble on a chit of paper, and asked the concierge, "How do I get to this restaurant?"

"No problem, sir." the concierge gesticulated broadly towards the Hilton Hotel's glass frontage. "Just walk across the Lover's Bridge, through to the end of the park, and the restaurant is just two streets away." He bent down to ink the restaurant on the map.

"Lover's Bridge?" I asked, remembering the Bridge of Sighs in Venice and Pont Neuf in Paris. "It is right here, near the hotel?"

"Yes sir", said the concierge. "Very famous in Sofia. Loving couples always come there. It is very nice, sir. You will see on the way to the restaurant." So I joined my colleagues in the hotel lobby and set off for dinner at the restaurant, half imagining a scenic, pastoral walk over tinkling streams.

It turned out that Sofia's Lover's Bridge is a concrete pedestrian walkway, across an enormous eight lane motorway. It is topped by a McDonald's golden arches logo, advertising a restaurant located in the traffic island between the traffic lanes. It is flanked on either side by government issued informational posters about Bulgaria's cultural and archaeological heritage. There were plenty of business people in suits walking over the bridge on that sunny summer evening; there were also a noticeably large number of young couples holding hands.

I asked my Bulgarian colleagues about this Lover's Bridge at dinner, about how young Bulgarian couples feel about romantic rendezvous a few meters above roaring traffic. They explained that at one time this bridge passed over a stream. During the Soviet era, it was found that the path of the stream was ideal for a motorway through the city. So, Soviet engineers built a motorway over the stream. The stream now emerges from under the motorway a few kilometers away from the city. Despite this, the bridge remains an favourite romantic spot. Nobody really minds cars instead of water. Above all, Bulgarians are a pragmatic people.

It was after dark when we walked back from the restaurant to the hotel. The atmosphere on the bridge was now distinctly steamy. My colleagues and I could not help but observe that love was now blooming on the concrete walkway, while the molten yellow stream of traffic flowed underneath the young lovers. A busker started to play as we approached the end of the bridge. He was playing Californication, by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, in English.





More pictures of my walk across this bridge are visible here.

Dhrishtadyumna and Serena Williams

Once upon a time, King Drupada ruled over the land of Panchala. Drupada was wise and just, his subjects were happy and loyal.

However, King Drupada was not as strong as he was wise. He was drawn into war against the Kauravas of Hastinapura, and was comprehensively defeated. He was captured on the battlefield, bound in chains, and presented as a prisoner to Dronacharya, the victorious Kaurava commander. Drona showed mercy on Drupada and spared his life, but annexed half of Panchala.

Humiliated, Drupada swore revenge. He prayed to the gods for a valorous son who would defeat the Kauravas and kill Dronacharya, and performed the putra kameshti yagna. Lo and behold, from the sacred flames rose a perfect warrior, fully armed and ready for battle: Dhrishtadyumna. This fire-born warrior fulfilled his destiny. Dhrishtadyumna was commander-in-chief of the victorious Pandava army through the great eighteen-day war at Kurukshetra; he slew Dronacharya on the fifteenth day of battle.

Yet, as the eons passed, Dhrishtadyumna remained an uncelebrated character. Children are traditionally named after other Pandava heroes like Arjuna, Bheemasena, Krishna, Abhimanyu and Satyaki, even Yudhishtra, but not after Dhrishtadyumna. The defeated Kaurava commanders Bheeshma, Drona and Radheya are all arguably more revered than Dhrishtadyumna, the victorious Pandava commander.

I think this is because Dhrishtadyumna was never more than a warrior, he never became a hero. He was born complete. He therefore never went through the hero's journey. His character was not forged in the crucible of events, like, say, Bheeshma's vow of celibacy, Duryodhana's embrace of Radheya as a true kshatriya, Bheemasena's fury after that fateful game of dice, or Arjuna's reluctance to wage war on his grandfather. It was never obvious that Dhrishtadyumna fully felt the shame of his father's defeat, or of his sister Draupadi's humiliation. His character and destiny were a given, preordained by his progenitors. Therefore he remained a bit of a cynical automaton, more a Terminator-like android than a real hero worthy of adulation.

Dhrishtadyumna's spiritual descendants are modern sports "professionals", who are brought up from birth to fulfil a single, narrow aim. These modern-day Dhrishtadyumnas include a vast number of Soviet era athletes, mass manufactured by the communist machine to win Olympic medals. Tennis once had a surfeit of these bloodless, colourless, insufferably boring androids, especially between the Borg-McEnroe era and the Federer-Nadal era. Anyone want to watch Thomas Muster vs. Michael Stich?

When Serena Williams first came on the scene, I didn't warm to her, I didn't especially want to see her play. She seemed to be just another android, another avatar of Dhrishtadyumna. Serena was conceived by her parents, literally, to win the sweet prize money now on offer in tennis. The only self, the only personality, young Serena seemed to have was her parent’s warped ambition.

Over the years, however, Serena changed. She distanced herself from her pushy dad (he no longer attends Venus vs. Serena matches holding a placard that reads "Welcome to the Williams' Show”). She became a shopping-addict, and went through therapy. She threatened to shove a tennis ball down a match official's throat. She learnt to look sweet and starry-eyed at press interviews. She kept improving her game. She glammed it up at the Oscars. Serena went through a freak injury - she stepped on broken glass in a German night club, and that developed into a life threatening pulmonary embolism, which stole a stole an entire year of Serena's prime. She went through a string of failed relationships with rap artists and sportsmen. She dished out boyfriend advice to Caroline Wozniacki: “I told her never look through the guy’s phone,” Serena said. “That is the worst thing you can do. I told her most relationships end.”

Basically, real life happened to Serena. Real life changed Serena, and in those changes authentic self was created. Serena’s humanity is apparent now in a way that Dhrishtadyumna’s never was, which is why watching Serena play today is so much more compelling than it ever was.

The Arranged Marriage Algorithm

“So, Prithvi, we have heard that Indians mostly have arranged marriages. Is this true? How does that work?”

I was out at dinner with a bunch of business colleagues when I was asked this question. Conversation around the table paused. My colleagues were clearly interested in hearing about Indian arranged marriages. These colleagues included smart people from Brazil, Denmark, Poland, Bulgaria, Canada and Britain. I needed to come up with something truthful, credible, and that showed India in good light.

I had a hunch that this perception of Indian arranged marriages was shaped by Western media coverage of normal, happy girls from, say, suburban Birmingham, who are married off, against their will, to tribal chieftains in Kandahar province. These stories are true, and are terrible tragedies. However, my knowledge of this world in negligible, and comes from the same media reports as my Brazilian or Bulgarian colleagues.

My marriage, and marriages in my immediate family, have all been “love marriages”. However, several very good friends of ours have had arranged marriages. These couples generally are educated, professional, affluent, cosmopolitan, urban Indians. As far as I can tell, the texture of these arranged marriages is not all that different from love marriages. If anything, some of the most lovey couples I know - who cuddle together in company, and address each other as “honey” and “sweety” - came together through arranged marriages. I actively dislike the terms arranged and love marriages, partly because of the implication that arranged marriages are loveless.

I told my colleagues that while media reports about girls abducted to be married off against their will are true, they entirely outside my experience. Within the relatively privileged circles I inhabit, arranged marriages are quite common. However, here, they work quite differently from the media stereotype. Here, arranged marriages serve exactly the same purpose as the compatibility matching algorithms in dating websites like eHarmony.com or Match.com.

A couple brought together by an arranged marriage algorithm have a number of things in common. Their parents get along, or at least, are not contemptuous of each other. They are from similar social and economic backgrounds. They have similar levels of education, and are likely to have similar attitudes to a bunch of stuff. All these are good statistically significant predictors of marital success. What the arranged marriage algorithm, or the eHarmony.com algorithm, does not predict is chemistry - the magic electricity that crackles between, say, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Which is OK, because the arranged marriage algorithm works just fine, as long as individuals can keep exploring options until they find someone with the right (or reasonably good) chemistry.

This gambit worked: Everyone at this table was a quant. It led to some companionable geek-talk about how one could improve the quality of these algorithms (should one hold out a control sample, of couples who are intentionally mis-matched, to train the matching algorithm?) until my Bulgarian colleague chipped in. She was one of two women at the table. To her, algorithms to predict compatibility are worse than useless, regardless of whether they’re authored by clans or by eHarmony.com. They totally miss the point. Chemistry is not just one more factor in a marriage. It is the central thing, the only thing that matters.

This served a nice segue to a set of stories about how women are more romantic than men, and my defense of the Indian Arranged Marriage was successfully concluded.

Homogocene at the Istanbul Sheraton

Homogocene: the term ecologists and evolutionary biologists use to describe the current era, when ecosystems are becoming more homogenized, when tough generalist species take over large portions of the globe, pushing out the specialized species that developed in isolation.

I was in Istanbul recently. Typical business trip: airport, hotel, conference, hotel, airport. I had no chance to go exploring, to soak up the atmosphere of the eternal city, a title Istanbul deserves every bit as much as Delhi or Rome.

I did, however, have a ray of hope. We had a formal dinner on the night of the conference, with live entertainment. This live performance might give us some local flavour. Maybe a local poet would recite Jalaluddin Rumi’s poetry, and interpret Rumi’s immortal words for this English-speaking audience. Maybe we’d have some mesmeric, mystical Sufi music, with a black and white film of dervishes whirling playing in the background. Even a contemporary Turkish pop act would be cool.

Instead, we got a couple of guys wearing jeans and t-shirts, carrying guitars, who perched on stools in front of mikes and did cover versions of The Eagles, Dire Straits, and Eric Clapton. They played Tequilla Sunrise, Walk of Life and Hotel California. They finished with an impassioned rendition of Wonderful Tonight, which was especially well-received at my table, which comprised entirely of grown men with families and advanced degrees in quantitative disciplines. We solemnly clinked our glasses together, and congratulated each other on how wonderful we looked tonight.

From Wankhede to Trent Bridge. How? Why? What Next?

How could India lose like that? India are the world number 1, the world champions. And yet, we lost to England. Twice, By big margins. How could the team which won the World Cup just three months ago, playing with so much spunk and conviction, suddenly turn so spineless?

This question feels especially important because I was in the stands at Trent Bridge for three days. I took in the spectacle, the packed stands, the ever-changing conditions, the many pints of lager. I enjoyed the camaraderie, the corporate hospitality and the banter with knowledgeable English fans. I cheered a Rahul Dravid century. Yet, despite all that, I came away from the game feeling miserable, physically beaten up. How could India lose so abjectly? After being so far ahead of England?

The most common explanation flying around is that India play too much cricket, are therefore under-prepared for English conditions, and are carrying too many injuries. This is true. A less greedy cricket board would have scrapped that West Indies tour to give the team a chance to get acclimatized. I'm just not able to see that as an explanation. India have always played too much cricket. India have always been underprepared.

Looking back, India have never been a dominant world #1, obviously better than the rest of the pack. India, Australia, England and South Africa have been pretty evenly matched, player for player, ever since Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne retired. What made this Indian team special was that, despite their brutal workload, despite their limited bowling, they would reach deep within and conjure up exceptional performances when it mattered. This team's great moments have all been about fighting back from adversity... Eden Gardens 01, Headingly 02, Lord's 02, Multan 03, Adelaide 03, Bombay 04, Johannesburg 06, Jamaica 06, Trent Bridge 07, Kanpur 08, Madras 08, Perth 08, Napier 09, Durban 10...our success tasted that much sweeter because it never came easily. India's ascent over the past decade was the result of not just skill, but also exceptional spirit.

Yet, the World Cup, the ultimate prize, remained elusive. In 2003, India played like champions, until the heartbreak in the finals. In 2007, another heartbreak. In 2011, Indian team believed they were destined to win. Belief - vivid internal images which are (literally) the stuff of dreams - is a much stronger force than the will. That belief, that sense of destiny, lifted India during the 2011 World Cup whenever they needed to raise their game.

Now, India have won the World Cup. The dream has come true. This team's destiny has been fulfilled, their most soaring ambition has been realized. The movie is over, the credits have rolled. Now, they are emotionally flat-lining. They no longer have the emotional energy to lift their game, the way they have done over the past decade.

Ironically, the other team I've watched emotionally flat-lining after reaching a cherished goal is England. An entire generation of English players grew up dreaming about winning the Ashes. Nasser Hussain, Duncan Fletcher and Michael Vaughan gradually turned England into a tough team with a winning habit. In 2005, England played out of their skins to beat an exceptional Australian team and win the greatest Ashes ever.

Having scaled this summit, England wandered into years of mindless, meandering, mediocrity... meltdown in Pakistan, a 5-0 whitewash in Australia, Freddy Flintoff's adventures with a pedalo, losing in New Zealand, Pietersen's spat with Peter Moores. England finally recovered their sense of purpose only after Freddy Flintoff retired, after Andrew Strauss and Andy Flower were firmly established as the captain and coach, after they had a clear and motivating goal to focus their minds - beating Australia in Australia.

I don't think the return of Sehwag and Zaheer is going to fix the Indian team. The team, collectively, needs a renewed sense of purpose. The tough cricket in England this summer might help shape this purpose. In the meanwhile, we India fans may need to spend a season or two remembering everything our team has achieved over the past decade while this new purpose takes hold.

Death to Rummaging

I am in the market for a new bag. Nothing special, just a simple duffel bag for everyday use. The one specific feature I want is an optic yellow inner lining.

This is the bag I use today.



It isn't bad. It is a Samsonite, the fabric is tough, the zipper works fine. But the inside of the bag can get as dark as the belly-of-a-whale, especially indoors. Finding my wallet, blackberry, goggles or even a dark coloured t-shirt involves a fair bit of rummaging, rather than just spotting.

This is the bag my children use.



It is clearly better than mine. The cheerful optic yellow inner lining makes it easy to spot stuff inside the bag. No rummaging required. I bought it years ago in the USA, without realizing its virtues. I want another bag like this.

However, this is surprisingly hard to find. I looked around the shop at the club. All the bags on display had black inners, even if they had florescent colours on the outside, sort of the wrong way around. I don't know how representative the shop at the club is, but clearly, brightly coloured inner linings for kit bags are not an industry standard.

The same shop sells tennis balls. The tennis balls are all optic yellow, which is mildly irritating, because the tennis balls are optic yellow for exactly the same reason the inside of the kit bags ought to be optic yellow, but are not.

Why has the better-product-wins logic played out so neatly with tennis balls, but not with kit bag linings? It might be because luggage is more about fashion than function, whereas tennis balls are entirely about function. Though, I don't quite buy that; generally, good function is fashionable. It could be because of the institutional unity of tennis. Once the grand slams decide yellow balls are better, the entire tennis world follows their lead. There is no similar grand slam-like authority for luggage, identifying and modelling the better products.

For whatever reason, it seems I can't buy the kit bag I want even on the internet. Shopping websites show luggage outsides, but don't specify the colour of the inner lining. Looks like I will be rummaging around for my wallet in the belly-of-a-whale for a while longer.

The Ghost, The Darkness and Rational Exuberance

I was presenting at a business conference last month, and started my piece with this home-edited five minute clip from a favourite 90s film, The Ghost and The Darkness.



This broke the tedium of hour after hour of Power Point presentations. But that apart, this film clip did try to make a point. The Ghost and The Darkness is about an engineer who is desperate to protect his people from man-eating lions. He has an idea to trap the man-eaters. The idea doesn't work out. Regardless, it remains a very good idea. The point is, in real life, most good ideas don't work out.

It is easy to think ideas that don't work out are bad ideas. Yet, the difference between ideas that work out and ideas that don't are usually small tweaks, timing, or pure dumb luck. I loved this NY Times article published in February 2010, when Apple was making waves with the iPad launch. It is by Dick Brass, a former Microsoft executive who worked on building a Windows Tablet PC way back in 2001. This project failed. The tablet group at Microsoft were eliminated. Regardless, the potential for tablets remained as good as ever.

My presentation went on to describe how my employer's products and services help companies institutionalize innovation, which is not an appropriate topic for this blog. But zooming out, this thought does feel relevant to the zeitgeist.

In the aftermath of the dot com bubble, and then the housing bubble, it is easy to be negative. Most people been stung by too much optimism, too much faith, by irrational exuberance. Rational cynicism feels like an antidote. It is easy to believe that every girl or guy who comes up with a crackpot scheme to catch man-eating lions is stupid, or a self-serving crook, or both. "It will never work" feels intelligent, prudent, a good default setting.

The trouble is, dominant black hat thinking is becoming a self fulfilling prophecy. Kick-starting growth has to start with an act of faith; with believing that lion-catching contraptions are worth building, even if many of them are going to fail. John Maynard Keynes, like Wodehouse's Psmith, described this act of faith as "animal spirits". A metaphor I prefer in today's cautious climate is Leon Walras' tatonnement, French for the trial and error process of groping for a handhold while climbing a rock face. Either way, moving on is going to involve a fair bit of rational exuberance.

Roger Federer: The Middle Class Champion

The dust has now settled on Wimbledon 2011. We have two exciting young champions to celebrate in Petra Kvitova and Novak Djokovic. Rafael Nadal is taking time off to let his fractured foot heal. Maggie May, Andy Murray's dog, is also recovering, from all the stress and media scrutiny that comes with being a celebrity. Yet, after the fun and the excitement have died down, after the Pimm's No. 1 and the strawberries and cream have been put away, the taste that lingers on from Wimbledon 2011 is the taste of a golden age coming to an end: the Age of Roger Federer.

Just how golden the Age of Roger Federer has been became clear to me, thanks, unexpectedly, to the British press.

As is traditional during the Wimbledon fortnight, the British moaned on about the absence of a British champion. The explanation they most commonly trotted out is that British tennis is a middle class game. For instance, here is Peter Preston, the former editor of the Guardian, writing about the Middle Class Malaise: "Why don't the British win Wimbledon anymore? Because we aren't hungry for success".

The term "middle class" merits some translation. In Britain, it does not describe people in the middle of the income distribution, a class now described as the "squeezed middle". It includes, and usually describes, affluent, well-educated, well-connected professionals: corporate executives, civil servants, lawyers, doctors, university professors. This haute bourgeois constitutes a middle class, rather than a privileged elite, because its members are notionally of lower rank than the hereditary landed aristocracy. These are the comfortably-off families who generally play and watch tennis for fun, and who generally fail to turn their children into Wimbledon champions. The claim that this class does not produce champions feels close to the bone, because this is the class I come from, and happily live within.

Prima facie, this reasoning looks like pure rubbish, nothing more than typical Pommy whingeing. But looking around at tennis, maybe the whingers have a point.

Consider, for instance, the Williams sisters' story. Their father, Richard Williams, son of a single mom from Shreveport, Louisiana, who now lives in the inner-city war zone of South Central Los Angeles, was idly watching tennis on TV when he was powerfully impressed by the prize money tennis players won. So he coaxed and cajoled his wife into having two more children, children #4 and #5, who would be raised from birth to play tennis and win that sweet prize money. Miraculously, this scheme worked, but it would never have occurred to even the most pushy tennis club members from suburban Long Island or Surrey.

Novak Djokovic, whose parents run a pizza restaurant in Belgrade, talks about growing up in a different kind of war-zone:

Djokovic reflected on how he had to negotiate some serious “ups and downs in life to become a champion”. The downs included a spell in spring 1999 when Djokovic, his parents and two brothers, Marko and Djordje, were living in a small apartment in Belgrade as Nato jets were targeting the Serbian capital.

He and Ana Ivanovic...along with Jelena Jankovic...would sometimes have to disappear into a bomb shelter when their practice in an empty swimming pool, which had been turned into a makeshift tennis court, was alarmingly interrupted.

Djokovic can remember the menacing drone of the low-flying bombers drowning out the renditions of “Happy Birthday to You” when he turned 12. Episodes like that build character. “All of us who went through that came out with their spirit stronger,” he once said. “Now we appreciate the value of life. We know how it feels to be living in 60 square metres being bombed.”

Andy Murray, the great British hope, comes from Dunblane, Scotland. Dunblane is about as far away from the manicured courts of SW19 as South Central LA is from the courts of the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, New York, or Bhagalpur, Bihar, is from the Bombay Gymkhana. Dunblane is best remembered in Britain for a horrific massacre of schoolchildren by a crazy gunman in 1996. Andy's brother Jamie was in school when this massacre happened.

While Andy Murray does come from a tough place, he may be an even better example of another clear pattern: champions created by pushy tennis-parents. Andy's story is less about escaping Dunblane, and more about being Judy Murray's son.

Judy Murray, then Judy Erskine from Glasgow, once tried to make it as a tennis pro. She took buses to European tournaments because she couldn't afford the airfare, slept in tents, and shared cigarettes in the locker room with Mariana Simonescu, then Bjorn Borg's girlfriend. Her tennis career failed. She became a secretary. She got married. Her marriage broke up, bitterly. Andy is her redemption.

Martina Hingis was brought up by an ambitious single mom who named her daughter after the great Martina Navratilova. Jelena Dokic has a famously pushy tennis-dad. The American Bryan twins' parents are tennis coaches, who made sure their boys spent every waking hour on either tennis or music. Bernard Tomic's dad used to coach Goran Ivanisevic. Andre Agassi's dad, who boxed for Iran in the Olympics, fits the pattern well enough.

This pattern isn't entirely new, but it is strengthening. Jimmy Connor's mother Gloria was a tennis teacher, who once attracted a fair bit of comment for being so present in her adult son's life. Gloria Connors was once a remarkable exception. Today she would be routine. In general, players coming through into top tier tennis either come from tough backgrounds, or have laser-focused tennis parents, or both.

An excellent book called Why England Lose looked at this pattern in football. More than 50% of the English population describe themselves as middle-class. They love football more than any other sport, and routinely send their sons to football coaching. Yet England's national team typically doesn't include a single middle-class player. The team consists entirely of men whose fathers were manual labourers, or on benefits, or former football professionals. These guys don't spend their precious teenage years swotting for math and physics A levels, or practicing classical music, or attending family reunions. They just play football. Therefore, they clock in the 10,000 hours of practice needed to be really good at something. The middle-class kids never do.

In this context, the LTA's strategy to develop British tennis is to spend surpluses from Wimbledon on courts in blighted inner-cities, and hope for a British version of Serena Williams, or Gael Monfils, to come through. Commentators talk about how Amir Khan, a boxer from Bolton with Pakistani roots, has breathed new life into British boxing. As a strategy, this makes sense. But at some deeper level, it sticks in my throat.

I'm all for social mobility. But surely, that is a serious question for schools, policing and public policy. Tennis is a game. Tennis is not meant to create pathways for social mobility, or win the Battle of Waterloo, or prove the superiority of the Aryan race, or of the Communist system, or serve any other political agenda. It shouldn't be about fulfilling a parent's frustrated dream either; that is just bad parenting. Tennis shouldn't really be about anything more than the pleasure of playing with a bat and ball.

The amateur ideal of previous generations was an attempt, however flawed, at letting the game just be a game. That ideal is now gone. As recently as the 1970s, the future of American tennis was the Stanford University tennis team. Now, kids who are serious about tennis wouldn't waste their time at Stanford University. Tennis, and sport in general, suffers from what Arnold Toynbee called a schism in the soul. The spirit in which amateurs play tennis is now completely disconnected from the spirit in which top professionals play.

Until Roger Federer.

Federer's greatness isn't fully captured by his sixteen grand slam titles. His reign is a golden age because of the spirit with which he played to win those sixteen titles, a spirit which is primarily about his love for playing the game. Here is a an extract from a story about Federer in the New Yorker:

... beneath that unflappable exterior I could sense that he was enjoying himself enormously—a deep, visceral joy that vibrated like an electric current in certain shots. Some of the top tennis players have given the opposite impression: Pete Sampras’s hangdog look on the court always made you want to cheer him up, and Andre Agassi, in his 2009 memoir, tells us again and again how he secretly hated the game. Federer clearly loves to play, and this is no small part of the pleasure in watching him.

Roger Federer didn't need to escape from a ghetto or a war zone. Federer's parents both work for Ciba-Geigy, the pharmaceuticals company, near Basel, Switzerland. This is the sort of upbringing I, and most readers of this blog, can totally relate to. My father was a tennis-playing executive at a multinational corporation. So am I.

Federer didn't need to fulfil the ambitions of a tennis-parent. His parents played recreational tennis at the firm's club. "We’d spend weekends on the tennis court," Lynette (his mother) recalled, "and the kids"—Roger and his sister, Diana, who was two years older—"would join us... It was Roger’s decision, at twelve, to quit playing soccer and to enter the program at the Swiss National Tennis Center, in Ecublens, two and a half hours by train from home.

Roger Federer's balanced perspective, his view of tennis as just a part of life, is why it now feels like a golden age is ending. Novak Djokovic has taken tennis to an entirely new level. Andy Murray has sworn to catch up by "working two per cent three per cent harder". These guys already work very hard. The marginal cost of that extra "two per cent three per cent" is high.

With his sixteen titles already in the bag, with his two young daughters at home, I doubt that Federer will put in that extra two per cent three per cent. He could spend that time at home, attending, say, a teddy bear's tea party. I know I would. Despite that, I think Roger Federer will will himself on to one more grand slam title before he rides off into the sunset. His best chance is at Wimbledon next year. One final chance then for Wimbledon, and the tennis world, to enjoy its great middle-class champion.