Amateurs talk strategy. Real generals talk logistics

Here's the Economist on the last lap of the Obama-McCain campaign in Pennsylvania, a vital swing state.

...Obama has 81 field offices across the state, many in places where Democrats have never competed before, compared with Mr McCain’s three dozen...

...The McCain office only had a couple of people working the phones when The Economist visited. The young man who was in charge had no idea that Mr McCain was in the state that day. The Obama office, by contrast, was crammed to the brim and hyper-organised. There were plenty of older people sporting “Hillary sent me” badges as well as younger Obamaphiles. The walls were covered with charts telling people where they had to be and when. After dark, it was still buzzing with volunteers. The McCain office was closed...

There's the glimmer of an interesting theory here: winning elections is not about policy, performances, or even mud-slinging. All that is just noise that keeps the commentariat busy. The real business of winning elections is about logistics, keeping the show rolling on the ground. Politics is about Sales, not Marketing.

This may also be the real reason why the Congress, India's Grand Old Party, is now a shambles. It's not the failure of Nehruvian socialism or any such grand theory. It's probably about the about the slow tactical melting away of the grass-roots organization, of the Congressman in each village, of the great sales organization that was built up during the freedom struggle.

The Many Meanings of Moonballs

The word moonball has taken on an important new meaning: a type of squash serve.

This serve is played from the right-hander's forehand court, high and quite softly against the front wall (1). The balls descends steeply into the deep backhand corner (2), too high to comfortably play a backhand volley. It hits the back wall (3) and dies too quickly for a backhand drive (4). It's very effective, especially against average players like this blogger.

Click here for a demo of this serve on youtube, where it is unimaginatively described as a "lob serve".

Seeing the ball like a football

Cricket fans know that a batsman who has spent a lot of time at the crease is hard to dismiss, because he is “seeing the ball like a football”. A batsman who is new to the crease is always easier to dismiss. He struggles to sight the ball.

This is true regardless of the quality of the light. A batsman who is in can bat on comfortably through the gathering caliginosity, while a new man at the crease struggles to sight the ball even in glorious sunshine. This has always been true, something cricketers accept as natural.

The mechanism that makes this natural just became apparent me, from this article by Atul Gawande.

Gawande’s piece is about an emerging scientific understanding about the nature of perception. The new realization: perception is mostly memory. The inputs coming in from the senses are thin/ low fidelity/ low resolution/ highly pixellated compared to the richness with which the brain experiences the sensory input. The mind fills in the blanks.

Our centuries long assumption has been that the sensory data we receive from our eyes, ears, nose, fingers and so on contain all the information we need for perception…Yet, as scientists set about analyzing the sensory signals, they found them to be radically impoverished…The mind fills in most of the picture...Richard Gregory, a British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety percent memory and less than ten percent sensory nerve signals…

Gawande’s article talks a lot about phantom limbs, and intense itches felt on injured tissues which have no nerve endings. These extreme examples are useful because they make a powerful argument; perception of a phantom limb can’t be determined by objective sensory experience, because there is no sensory experience. But to me, this theory is more interesting because of the light it sheds on everyday experiences.

A batsman who is in is literally seeing the ball better than a batsman who has just come to the wicket. His memory has more readily accessible images of the moving ball. He is therefore better able to make meaning of the sketchy data that his eyes pick up.

This is the reason it is hard to listen to an unfamiliar genre of music. The mind simply doesn’t have enough stuff in memory to fill in the blanks and enrich the music.

This is the reason it is hard to drive on unfamiliar roads. The driver literally sees less of the road. The eyes pick up the same volume of information as on a familiar road. But the mind doesn’t have a stock of memories with which to enrich the image.

This is the reason I enjoy watching cricket on TV more than I enjoy watching football. My mind has a bigger bank of cricket memories to draw on, simply because I have watched more cricket over the years.

There is an elaborate academic literature on how Caucasian-Americans are not very good at recognizing Blacks, and to a slightly lesser extent, how Blacks are not very good at recognizing whites. This has sometimes been interpreted as racism, but sheer lack of familiarity seems a simpler and less incendiary explanation. Interestingly, the effects are smaller in racially integrated schools and among children who live in integrated neighbourhoods.

This might also be the reason for the cognitive biases that Greg Pye's blog (and Kahneman and Taversky), keep talking about. The confirmatory bias happens because people, literally, don’t see evidence which goes against their prior beliefs without making a pretty substantial effort.

Gunther, Mother Cricket and Ice Bath Buddies

It's quite rare for a cricket fan like me, who has been following the game avidly since childhood with an avidity a clinical psychotherapist might worry about, to come across interestingly unfamiliar cricketing words or concepts. This English summer I encountered three. Let's celebrate these three concepts before the hopefully-not-too-emotionally-wrenching India-Australia test series gets underway.

Gunther: "Gunther is a guy who lives in the mountains and doesn't get enough oxygen to the brain and that makes him crazy. As soon as I get thrown the ball, its like a little switch goes in my head. Gunther takes over."

This is Springbok speedster Andre Nel on what happens when he is bowling. Compare that to a typical quote from an English quickie like Ryan Sidebottom, "Hopefully, I'll get the ball in the right areas." Or Mohammad Azharuddin's immortal words, "Well, the boys played very well."

In this age of anodyne political correctness, god bless Gunther.

Mother cricket: "It's amazing. There's a lady up there called Mother Cricket, who doesn't sleep...".

This is South African coach Mickey Arthur, giving credit where it is due, when Michael Vaughan was publicly humiliated for claiming a bump-catch after being morally indignant about AB de Villiers claiming a similar catch that same morning. Was Mother Cricket also behind Jimmy Andersen getting hit on the helmet by Dale Steyn after knocking out Daniel Flynn's tooth?

Cricket does lend itself well to the notion of karma. Maybe Mother Cricket is the sociological reason why cricket is so big in the sub-continent.

Ice bath buddy: Cricket-warriors were introduced on Sky Sports with a little box of fun-facts during the English Twenty20 tournament. This is a marketing tactic I like: any sport is a lot more fun if the viewer knows the player's back-stories. Sky Sport's fun-facts included favourite TV Show (mostly Top Gear), favourite music group, and most intriguingly, ice bath buddy.

Apparently, Duncan Fletcher insisted that all England fast bowlers immerse themselves in an ice-bath straight after stumps, to prevent injury. County dressing rooms were not designed with these sophisticated medical practices in mind. So fast bowlers, like Harmy and Hoggy, had to share ice-baths. The practice has endured into Peter Moore's reign. And so "ice bath buddy" is now county circuit lingo for best friend.

Some of the old guard are mocking this trend. David Lloyd, the former England coach and now Sky Sports commentator, would rather share an ice bath with Beyonce than some "hairy bloke".

Not sure if planting the mental image Ravi Bopara and Samit Patel, or for that matter, David Lloyd and Beyonce, frolicking together in tubs full of ice makes the game more or less appealing. Time will tell.

Morning Raga

Worth the watch, mainly because the music is so much fun.

Here's how I hope this film was made:

A film maker was listening to Sudha Raghunathan singing Thaiye Yashoda. She was moved, moved to tears imagining the love of Yashoda - the foster mother who loved Krishna and Balarama as her own sons. She felt sad that Yashoda is not celebrated in popular culture. Bollywood is saturated with Nirupa Roy like mother characters, who draw on the Jungian archetype of Kunti. But where are the characters like Yashoda? Or Radha - the charioteer's wife who loved Karna as her own son?

So the filmmaker decided to set things right. Despite not having much money, she decided to make a film that showcases both the spirit of Yashoda and Sudha Raghunathan's rendition of Thaiye Yashoda, and to give both a contemporary multi-cultural flavour. And so she made Morning Raga.

If that's how the film was conceived, it worked. Because the last scene, the rock concert in a Deccan fortress with a pulsating Carnatic fusion performance of Thaiye Yashoda, it was cathartic. It washed away 90 minutes of grumbling about amphigory art-house films.

By the way, or, bye the bye, do not watch this scene for the first time on Youtube. I considered posting a link and decided against it. The sense of catharsis, and the emotional resonance of Thaiye Yashoda are greater for having sat through the whole film.

Before the grumbles, what else worked?

Location. Or was it Rajiv Menon's camera work? Almost every location was a visual treat...the traditional south Indian home, the temple, the rock fortress where the concert was held, the bridge.

More music. Pibare Ramarasam was sung beautifully by Kalyani Menon, Rajiv Menon's mother. The reflective, introspective way it was sung made more sense in the context of the movie. The beat version of Mahaganapathim was also fun.

Associations. The film brought back memories of Shankarabharanam and Shubha Mudgal's Ab ke Sawan, both favourites.

Shabana Azmi and Nasser were excellent, as usual.

And the newcomer Sanjay Swaroop was brilliant as a restaurant owner. He asks a searching and insightful question about whether Indian youngsters who want to be rockers think they white, or black? In the interests of full disclosure, I would like to declare that I am generally sympathetic to Sanjay Swaroop. His father, Lakshman Swaroop, is a dashing sportsman who played cricket and hockey for the Madras Cricket Club, and was once featured in a print advert for Enfield Bullet motorcycles.

And the grumbles?

The script and acting were cringe-worthy.

Prakash Rao played Abhinay, the central character, Krishna to Shabana Azmi's Yashoda. He reminded me of the cricketer Yuvraj Singh. The only emotion he communicated was angry, disgruntled arrogance. Though his task wasn't made any easier by the scripting, like "I don't want to write jingles for bubble gum. I want to make music that is remembered for five hundred years. Like the Charminar."

Other cringe-worthy elements included a psychedelic-shirted, wild-haired drummer called Bajali. Alias Bals. Not Balls, just Bals. A guitar player who is stares in fascination at women's bottoms and (literally) gets picked up off the street. A villager who talks to his cow, Annapurna. A south-Bombay-ish socialite who scandalizes the villager by leaning on his arm. Pleeze. A stylish script is the one thing a budget film can afford.

But don't walk out on the film even when the cringes start to hurt. Redemption is around the corner. The cringes make the cleansing release of Thaiye Yashoda that much more welcome.

The Point of County Cricket

Here is Christopher Martin-Jenkins on the eve of a gripping finale to the county cricket season:

...county cricket... fulfil its primary function, the production of a sufficient supply of tough England cricketers for the rigours of the international circuit...

What?

Surely the point of playing county cricket is to win the county championship. At least 90% of the England qualified players competing for the championship have no real chance of playing for England. If nobody cares about winning the championship, not even CMJ, its not surprising that the county scene has "greater issues".

What really got me was that this was not CMJ's main point. It was a point made in the passing. In CMJ's mind, county cricket being nothing more than a talent screening service for international cricket is an unremarkable truism.

Unfortunately, what CMJ thinks is usually a good reflection of what the ECB establishment thinks. They seem to have learnt the wrong lesson from the BCCI's success and concluded that the point of cricket is to promote national pride through international success.

The point of the English Premiership is not to produce England internationals. The point of the ATP Tour is not to produce Davis Cup heroes. The point of the IPL is not to produce Indian internationals. These contests are worthwhile as ends in themselves. Players push themselves to the limit because they care about winning. That intensity of effort, that edge, is what produces the drama which brings in the fans. National flags don't need to be flying for sport to fascinate.

And what terrible timing to be damning the county game with faint praise.

I'm thoroughly enjoying the finale to this season's championships. Notts, the team I support, are in the race. Notts' victory march has just been checked by Imran Tahir, an exciting young leggie from Natal. I'm clicking into Cricinfo between meetings to check the latest scores on Notts v. Hampshire, Somerset v. Lancashire and Durham v Kent. Sky Sports are covering the Notts game live. Exactly what the guys responsible for marketing county cricket should have been praying for.

Anybody want to swap Mark Mascarenhas for CMJ?

Fubsies skirring into the caliginosity

Harper Collins is running a campaign to save rarely used words from oblivion. Heard about it on on Radio 4. They asking influential cultural figures - humorists, poets, bloggers :) - to use these rare words so Harper Collings have a basis for including them in the next edition of the dictionary. Some of the endangered words, and their definitions on the Merriam Webster (since Harper Collins don't have a free online edition): - skirr: to leave hastily. Webster thinks the etymology may be an alteration of scour. The Radio 4 show suggested onomatopoeia, the sound a bird makes when beating its wings in flight, which sounds more plausible - fubsy: chubby and somewhat squat. I can't believe this beauty actually fell out of usage - Caliginosity: dimness or darkness. Has already vanished from the Webster's, so the link is to the free Wikipedia style dictionary. Radio 4 thinks caliginosity deserves to die. But to me, it evokes a sense of the eerie, an image of a hooded candle flickering in the nave of an enormous cathedral casting shadows into the vast stillness, that mere darkness does not convey. Gloaming feels closer to the mark Harper Collins claim that this exercise is needed because they need to drop words from the dictionary. They need to make room for terms like equity injection and credit crunch by dropping fubsy and skirr. I smell bullshit. Surely, in today's world, the real authoritative version of any dictionary is the soft copy, which is not constrained by size. A physical print edition can be cut to any arbitrary number of words. This seems to be an effort to raise the public profile of rare words. A worthy and noble effort in any circumstances. Lets just drop the bs.