Perth

On the eve of the fourth day's play in the Perth test, I'm way too excited to sleep. 8 wickets to win. Five of those wickets need to be Ponting, Hussey, Clarke, Symonds and Gilcrist.

India are too close to not hope. And Australia have pulled off the impossible too many times (three wickets in five balls?) for me to let myself hope.

If I can't take the pressure 10000 miles away, how are the team coping? The good ones, the ones who've been around a while - Kumble, Sachin, Rahul, Saurav, Laxman, even Dhoni - they'd be immersing themselves in rituals. Sportsmen are called superstitious, but more accurately, they are ritualistic. The regimen anchors the spirit. Keeps the butterflies and demons from taking over. The same thing works on the field..adjusting the top of the pad, tapping the bat to the ground while taking guard, bouncing the tennis ball before serving...they work the same way. They help focus the spirit and mind on the task at hand.

It's harder for the less experienced players to stay calm because their regimen/ rituals are less well established. It's hardest on us watchers; we don't have rituals to anchor us or any task at hand to focus on.

Harmless snobbery

Observing the pristine, clean shoes of other people at the gym. People whose shoes have clearly not run 10 miles on muddy tracks last weekend while training for a marathon.

The Little Mermaid

Some gems from opera director Francesca Zambello's interpretation of Little Mermaid for a Broadway production:

- The mermaid ascends to the surface of the sea, her tail unfurling to reveal shapely legs. There is so much metaphor in that. It is like a rite of passage, her first menstrual cycle

- The wish-fulfillment element would give it broad appeal. Show me anybody in the world who hasn't wanted to be someone else. That's a universal theme. Everybody sees themselves as an outsider

- It was possible to interpret the little mermaid flight from the confines of the sea as a gay theme. The reality is that there are only two minorities who are born into families: disabled people and gay people. Every other minority is born of a family. That Ariel is an outsider in her own family connects...

- Mermaids have no genitalia. That's something you don't really think about until you work on mermaids, but then you think about it a lot.

Benazir Bhutto

The commentary about Benazir's assassination has been mainly about what a dangerous place Pakistan is. That is true. But all that geopolitical risk is obscuring is the poignancy of Benazir's life...the intense, shy, awkward, intellectual, ambitious young woman...wounded and humiliated by the hanging of the father she hero worshipped...who chose to marry to a hard-drinking, extravagantly mustachioed polo player, who swears like a wounded pirate and is nicknamed Mr. Five Percent the size of the bribes he routinely took...the big pile of Mills and Boon novels at her bedside...the pristine white head scarf and the scarlet lipstick...her uneasy truce with the mullahs who murdered her father...her cynical betrayal of the peace process with India...her heartfelt tears at the grave of her brother, a brother she once was close to, whose murder she had allegedly commissioned...her returning to Pakistan even when she could see in Musharraf's eye the shadow of Zia-ul-Haq, the man who murdered her father...

The British still take pride in the dramatic lives of Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. The subcontinent still has royalty whose lives are similarly dramatic.

My wife spotted this great piece in the Asian Age.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/28/opinion/edyusef.php

House Prices

Enjoyed Robert Samuelson's take on housing in America.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/01/can_we_cure_our_house_lust.html

Run, Fat Boy, Run

The ideal in-flight film for a guy running his first marathon. Watch the trailer here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTrfuX1Pb-k

The Strange Rise of Modern India

I have rapidly gone from being delighted with this book - because this is a non-Indian writer who clearly gets India like it is - to being bored stiff - because it is telling me nothing that I don't already know. I'm not going to bother ploughing through the rest of the book. But it probably is a nice introduction to modern India for someone who isn't already immersed in the culture.