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.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at Wimbledon

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is playing at the Haymarket Theatre this summer. Advertising posters for the play are all over London's tube network. So, this old favourite was on my mind as I made my way to Wimbledon earlier this week.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is a (brilliant) Tom Stoppard play, based on the same characters and events as William Shakespeare's Hamlet, but told with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as the protagonists. These are Hamlet's childhood friends, roped in by the King and Queen to try and coax Hamlet out of his madness. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern only half understand the situation they've let themselves into, fail to change Hamlet, make some brilliant but immediately forgotten discoveries along the way, and are ultimately killed for their troubles. Stoppard makes these unfortunates his tragicomic heroes. Hamlet and OpheIia have bit roles in this play, walking in and out of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's life-story, setting context.

I've always loved the way Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead inverts figure and ground, forcing an expansion of perspective. That is also the reason I love being at Wimbledon during the first week.

During the first week at Wimbledon, one can watch the stars play on Centre Court. I got to see King Rafa stride on to Centre Court as defending champion. Now, he owns this stage. It was fun to watch doubting Prince Andy ask "To be or not to be, that is the question" of his not-quite-adoring home fans. A Miss Marple look alike who was sitting next to me prefers Novak Djokovic to Andy Murray, because Novak always applauds his opponent's shots.

However, the most distinctive and memorable Wimbledon experience is quite possibly watching matches on the outside courts. These are courts with no grandstands or TV cameras, where less famous names play. Fans generally sit court side, yards away from the players, like at the local tennis club. I can't think of any other world class event where fans get so close to the performers; in cricketing terms this is like watching the action from second slip.

Sitting so close to the action, it is easy to tune into the physicality of the game: ball speed, spin and bounce, the player's size and gait. Mood and emotion from the players - a grimace fleeting across a face, a pleading glance at a coach, the slope of a shoulder - communicates in a way that doesn't happen on TV or in the stadium courts. The court side perspective brings these matches alive, despite the unfamiliar names.

For instance, I cheered for a slender Chinese girl called Shuai Zhang who was taking on the muscular Svetlana Kuznetsova. Zhang, who has just stabilized a spot in the top 100, did brilliantly to take the first set before Kuznetsova overpowered her. Zhang's mother and coach were sitting right across the aisle from me. They appreciated the support. They'd exchange thumbs up signs with me whenever I cheered Zhang for threading the needle with a backhand down the line. This sort of interaction is so not going to happen with Andy Murray's mom up on Centre Court.

I watched Monica Niculescu playing a successful underarm drop serve, a shot I thought had retired with Michael Chang. I watched the world #163 Ruben Bemelmans limp off court, visibly exhausted after losing a five set marathon to world #34 Julien Benneteau. Watching court-side, it is a lot easier to respect how good a player the world #163 really is.

Perhaps I am sympathetic to non-superstars because I am primarily a cricket fan. Cricket lends itself especially well to showcasing the spunk and grit of the lesser gods. Balwinder Singh Sandhu always has a place in my cricketing pantheon for THAT delivery to Gordon Greenidge in the 1983 World Cup final. Similarly, Sameer Dighe also has a place in my pantheon for taking India to victory against Waugh's Aussies in that epoch-making Chennai test match in 2001, despite a rampaging Glenn McGrath. In tennis, players of the stature of Balwinder Singh Sandhu and Sameer Dighe don't play in the equivalent of World Cup finals, say in Wimbledon finals.

Watching Zhang, Niculescu and Bemelmans on the outside courts of Wimbledon is perhaps the closest tennis gets to being a game, not just of the superstars, but of ordinary people striving for greatness. The first week at Wimbledon is spacious enough, big-hearted enough, to accommodate not just sweet Prince Hamlet, but also Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

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.

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...

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.

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.

Mithras, Minerva and Murugan

This post is being published on December 25 to honour a deity whose birth is traditionally celebrated on this day: the sun god, Mithras.

I discovered Mithras (or Mitra) while exploring Rome this summer, at the Basilica di San Clemente. Entering at the street level, this Basilica is "one of the most richly decorated churches in Rome". Walk a couple of staircases down, and you're in the ruins of another great church, grand enough to have hosted papal councils, that was destroyed in the Norman sack of Rome in 1084. Another couple of staircases down - it's starting to get chilly now, and you can hear the rush of water from an aqueduct leading to the Tiber - is a cave with long stone benches running along the side. In the middle of the cave is a stone altar with a relief of a boy slaying a bull. This is what remains of the Mithraeum, the temple of Mithras, which was destroyed when the church was built.

Apparently, around 300 years after Christ, the cult of Mithras was one of the biggest of many foreign-inspired religious cults in the Roman empire. Mithras, which comes from the same root as Mitra, the Vedic sun god, was considered Persian. Other popular cults included the Greek-inspired cult of Demeter, the Egyptian-inspired cult of Isis, and the Palestinian cult of Christ. Mithraism was especially important because it was a for-men-only religion, and was popular with soldiers.

A few years later, Constantine converted to Christianity, and triggered Christianity's inexorable rise as the official religion of the world's most powerful Empire. But Constantine had emerged as Emperor after a bloody civil war between the Tetrarchs. He was looking to unite, not divide. He retained his status as Pontifex Maximus, as the symbolic head of the classical Olympian religion. He continued to support naturalist traditions, like worshipping the sun god Sol Invictus on Sundays. He made Christianity more appealing to the powerful Mithraic cult by accommodating its sacred symbols and myths within the Christian canon, including the legend of the three wise men and their gifts of gold, myrrh and frankincense, the taking of meat and blood as holy communion, and celebrating the deity's birthday on December 25.

Constantine issued an edict in 313 AD that declared December 25 to be the birthday of Jesus Christ. Previously Emperor Aurelian, a practicing Mithraist, had declared December 25 to be Mithras' birthday.

Constantine gave his name to his new capital city, Constantinople. But he cut his teeth at the other end of the Empire, in Britain. His approach of integrating elements of older folk religions into a powerful state religion may have been educated by what he observed in Britain, where the Romans successfully accommodated Celtic beliefs within the framework of their classical Olympian religion.

I saw this process beautifully showcased at the Temple of Sulis Minerva in Bath. The local Celtic people had long worshipped Sulis, the Goddess of Healing, at the mineral rich hot springs. When the Romans arrived on the scene, they gave this Celtic goddess a new hyphenated identity as Sulis-Minerva, and turned the hot spring into a thriving Roman Bath.

I believe a similar process also happened at home, in South India.

As Vedic Hinduism spread south through the sub-continent, it encountered a number of very sacred local deities, sites and practices of worship. This spread, for most part, was not orchestrated by empires, armies or a church. It happened through what would now be called "soft power".

This soft power was exercised by expanding the Hindu pantheon, and mythology, to give places of honour to these local deities, so new populations could reach into the philosophy of Hinduism without giving up their treasured local gods. 

So, for instance, Murugan, the peacock riding boy-god who resides on Palani hill, was consecrated as Shiva's exiled second son. Murugan gets married both to Valli, daughter of a local tribe's chieftain, and to Devyani, daughter of Indra, the king of the Vedic gods. 

Or Iyyappa, another revered hill-dwelling boy-god, is understood as Hariharaputra, the son of both Shiva and Vishnu, from when Vishnu was incarnate as the beautiful Mohini. He continued to live in his tropical rain forest home on Sabari Malai, instead of relocating to Mount Kailas in the snow covered Himalayas. Mythic win-win relationships.

Barajas and Atocha

Airports and railway stations are boring, functional, de-humanizing places that one passes through, perforce, on one’s way to happier parts of a holiday. Unless, you’re in Madrid. I fell in love with both the Barajas airport and the Atocha railway station during my familiy’s visit to Spain.

Barajas, apparently, is well known in architectural circles. It won the Royal Institute of British Architect’s top design award in 2006 (the architects were British, I hope it is equally well loved at home in Spain).

The head architect, Lord Richard Rogers says “We've tried to make it a palace of fun as well as an airport...it's about colour and light and space and transparency...and it's all about making people look as though they are important in that space; they're not squashed by low ceilings or dominated by retail and shops, you've got great views out to planes and landscape and we have a fantastic landscape all the way around the site”.

Truth be told, the skylights in the gorgeouly crazy curvy roof do look a bit like bugs eyes, but not in a spooky way.

We took a taxi from Barajas to the main train station in the city center for our onward journey. Forty minutes and twenty euros later, we hauled our bags off the taxi, past a snarling and seemingly permanent traffic jam outside the station, and into the concourse. Here is what we saw:



I’m giving a bit of the game away here, because sheer unexpectedness of the jungle in a railway terminus was a part of what made it special. But nonetheless, it is amazing.



Apparently the space inside the old train station became available in 1992, when new high speed train tracks were laid around Spain in preparation for the Barcelona Olympics and the Seville Expo.



They could have tried to maximize revenue per square meter and stuck yet another shopping mall into this space. I'm glad they turned it into a little tropical jungle instead, with chirping birds, turtles riding piggyback,



orchids,





and palm fronds.

Caesar, the cat?

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



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



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



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

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



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

Rapidex goes to Paris

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



It is prominently displayed all around the Paris metro network.

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

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



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

Gaudi : Architecture :: Grace : Cricket

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gaudi in Context

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

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

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

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



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

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