Sachin Tendulkar Winning Ugly @ the World Cup Semis

Sachin's 85 in the semi-finals against Pakistan yesterday has to be one of his worst knocks ever. He had four, maybe six lives. He couldn't pick Saeed Ajmal, he couldn't time the ball, he was not batting like Sachin. Yet, he stuck it out, ground out more runs than any other batsman in either team, and took India through to the finals in Bombay.

Sachin was winning ugly, in Brad Gilbert's immortal phrase. Sachin's companion in winning ugly was his captain MS Dhoni, who must be right up there, along with Simon Katich, as the least elegant batsman in world cricket. I love them both for being willing to win ugly.

Sure, I love watching Sachin blaze away majestically, like he did against South Africa in Nagpur. But I love watching India winning ugly even more.

Brad Gilbert's point is that most top sportsmen win when they are on song. Real champions are the ones who learn to win even when they are not, who can carry a mis-firing serve or forehand, and still scrap through to a win. Winning ugly does not mean sledging or behaving badly. Neither SRT or MSD does Aussie-style sledging. They just do whatever it takes to raise the likelihood of winning. They don't care if it doesn't look pretty.

My admiration for winning ugly has something to do with the world I grew up with.

I grew up when India's heroes were players like Gundappa Vishwanath, Erapalli Prasanna and Bishen Singh Bedi, who wowed the cricketing world with their magical silken artistry, but didn't win matches. I grew up believing, at some pre-cognitive level, that being Indian meant being gifted, graceful, gracious, and losing. Noble and honourable, but still losing. Like Vijay Amritraj and Ramesh Krishnan in tennis. It fitted in perfectly with Nehruvian socialism, the Hindu rate of GDP growth, our non-aligned policy, and Bollywood heroes who never got their girls.

Fortunately, that loser-India is now gone. A whole generation has now come of age - after Kapil Dev lifted the Prudential Cup at Lord's in 1983, after Ravi Shastri drove his Audi around the MCG in 1985 - to whom it is perfectly natural to be Indian and to win.

MS Dhoni was almost two years old in June 1983. Yuvraj Singh is six months younger than Dhoni. They wouldn't get why India winning ugly matters to me. But to me, and to many Indians of my generation, and my father's generation, the most precious Indian wins are the ones which are won ugly. Because winning ugly is the opposite of losing gracefully.

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.

Tennis and the Emigrant Experience

I was down at the club last night. Tennis social. Dusted off my old racket - the same Prince Spectrum composite that I had back when I was in college - and gave my game a spin.

My game was filthy. I still play squash regularly, so I had no problem hitting the ball, but I had no control. I was spraying the ball all over the place. I resorted to tapping the ball back over the net to keep it in play, until I finally lost patience and started giving it a whack and hoping for the best. And, heck, whaddaya know? A few of those whacks actually landed in the court :). All in all, I had fun.

None of the other players at the social knew me. None of them were colleagues, or parents at my daughters' school. I wouldn't blame any of my doubles partners if they didn't remember my name today; I'd struggle to remember their names now. I was just a brown-skinned guy in a blue t-shirt, hitting yellow spheres across the net. I felt no shame, despite the filthy game. That is probably why I had fun.

The nice thing about being away from home is the anonymity, the absence of context, the freedom it brings. That sense of freedom shows in many ways, including the way I hit a tennis ball.

In Suzanne Vega's words, "I was in a timeless, placeless place, out of context, and beyond all consequences".

Yet, the worst thing about being away from home is also the anonymity. Hitting a tennis ball isn't intrinsically fun or not-fun. Tennis is worth my while because of context, because of the references to tennis running through the rest of my life.

I first played tennis at the Madras Cricket Club, my father's spiritual home. My father had been a very good player in his college days, and was still on the MCC tennis team. Marker Venkatesan - the tennis pro in western terms - would toss me a balls as a favour to my dad. Members who walked by easily recognized me as Chandru's son, as Raju's nephew, as Nari's nephew. They would stop to watch me play, throw in a word of encouragement, a well-intentioned tip...they wished me well. One of them, Ayya-mama, bought me a Tintin comic for every Merit Card I won at school. It was all very warm, and intensely personal.

One of my earliest memories is being woken up in the middle of the night by my excited dad, being bundled into a car and driven to my uncle Chander-mama's house. They were showing a recording of the Roscoe Tanner vs. Bjorn Borg Wimbledon final on TV. In my mind's eye, I can still see a blurry black and white image of this game in a crowded, darkened room. Otherwise, my entire clan gathered on our terrace to follow Wimbledon on BBC shortwave radio. By the time the great age of McEnroe, Borg, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova rolled around, tennis already was in my blood-stream.

When I was a teen-ager, I was sometimes invited to play doubles with my dad's friends. These were very good players, they played seriously, they played to win. My dad's friends still wished me well. But now, with my young legs and sharp eyes, they also expected me to perform on court. I was eager to impress. But I also understood that the MCC ethos did not smile kindly upon double faults or foozled volleys. I especially didn't want to let myself down and be an embarrassment to my family, so wound up playing a cramped, self-conscious game. But there was never any doubt in my mind that the game was worth playing, and worth playing well.

My dad's friends aren't playing tennis at MCC more. But I still couldn't show up at those courts and play the filthy tennis I played yesterday. At a minimum, I'd need to put myself on a regimen that would get me back to being a good player. No anonymity there, and no freedom.

Yet, Janis Joplin's words, "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose, nothing ain't worth nothing, but its free".

Of course, the ultimate zen state is not perfect freedom, but to be in a context full of meaning and still play with freedom; to be Sachin Tendulkar playing for India in a World Cup final, in Bombay, and still play with freedom to lead India to victory. That dream is still possible as this post goes to press. C'mon India.

Martin Crowe and The Lake Wobegon people-model

"So that is the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking and all the children are above-average."

Every week, Garrison Keillor concludes Prairie Home Companion with these wise words. Similarly, every week, the titans of the corporate world conclude that that they will compete for the future by winning the war-for-talent. They all strive to hire above-average people, and instruct their human resources departments to design "people-models" that allows their company to hire talented employees, as talented as the children of Lake Wobegon.

However, for a practicing business executive, this war-for-talent is mostly irrelevant. Winning the war-for-talent takes too long to matter. I, and most of my peers, have windows of about three years to deliver on our objectives. Over that time frame, the talent we have to work with is usually a given.

Even at Talent Masters, companies supposedly flush with talent like Procter and Gamble or GE, it is rare to step into a role worth doing with a crack team already in place. Best case, one can parachute in a handful of exceptional individuals into key positions. From then on, business leadership is mostly about trying to get your team to punch above their weight, by giving them a sense of unity, direction and belief, and by tactically shaping the game to amplify strengths and cover weaknesses.

A cricket captain’s job is like that of a practicing business executive. As a captain, you can preach, or whinge, about how your cricket board should have invested in the grass-roots game years ago, bringing better players through to the professional level. True, but irrelevant. You’ve got a squad. Your job is to win with that squad, warts and all.

Looked at this way, a good captain is not necessarily one who wins big tournaments. A good captain is one who gets his team to punch above their weight, who wins games he had no right to win given the quality of his players. By this yardstick my all time favourite World Cup captain is not Clive Lloyd, not Steve Waugh, but Martin Crowe in the 1992 World Cup.

Martin Crowe led a bunch of bits and pieces mediocrities, plus one quality player in Crowe himself. Yet, they competed on even terms with clearly superior teams by turning the prevailing cricketing wisdom upside down. Mark Greatbatch opened the batting, slugging the ball over the infield. Dipak Patel opened the bowling with his off-breaks. In the process, Crowe’s Kiwis changed the way 50 over cricket is played, forever.

Crowe’s team, which included dibbly-dobbly merchants like Gavin Larsen, Chris Harris and Willie Watson, were looking good for a spot in the World Cup final until an inspired Inzamam-ul-Haq blitzed Pakistan to a come from behind semi-final victory. Which goes to show that planning, spunk and tactical smarts can’t match god-given talent. However, in a contest between evenly matched teams, smart tactics should make all the difference.

Another brilliant tactician was Shane Warne. I've watched enviously as he conjured up victories out of nothing for Hampshire and Rajasthan Royals. Clearly the greatest captain Australia never had.

MS Dhoni has one of the best minds in contemporary cricket and can be genuinely inventive. One of my favourite passages of play in recent history was the Nagpur test against Australia in 2008, when Ishant and Zaheer dried up the flow of runs by bowling yorkers a foot outside the off stump, frustrating Australia into a epoch-ending series defeat. Another memorable Dhoni innovation was placing a fielder directly behind the bowler to catch-out a rampaging Keiron Pollard in an IPL final. I haven't worked out how the same cricketing mind bowls Ashish Nehra, or Joginder Sharma, in the last over.

I would love to see captains using more tactical inventiveness in this World Cup. Perhaps the ICC should institute a Spirit of Martin Crowe innovation award, along the lines of the ICC Spirit of Cricket or the Kingfisher fair play awards. If the ICC is not up to the task, this blog could fill the breach.

Captain Haddock's Bashi Bazouks

Ever wondered who Bashi-Bazouks are?

I first encountered Bashi Bazouks in The Crab With The Golden Claws. At the time, I didn't really wonder who or what they were. I just accepted them as another Haddock-ism, like lily livered landlubbers, or fancy dress fatimas, or ostrogoths, all good ways of describing people who don't understand that Loch Lomond whiskey is sacred. Nonetheless, I was delighted when I found Bashi Bazouks in a totally different context.

It turns out that the story of the Bashi Bazouks is much sadder than that of odd-toed ungulates, or duck-billed platypuses or even billions of bilious blue blistering barnacles.

I came across Bashi Bazouks while reading about the Ottoman-Russian war in 1876. Bashi Bazouks were irregular fighters in the Ottoman Army. They were unpaid, non-uniformed, and used as lookouts or sentries. They gained international notoriety when they were involved in horrific escalating tit-for-tat violence in Bulgaria, between Christian Bulgarian nationalists and Muslim Ottomans, which culminated in the Bashi Bazouks' massacre of the entire mountain-town of Batak.

It is hard to know what actually happened at this time. Open sources like Wikipedia can be unreliable when describing emotionally-charged political history like this. But to the extent that my Googled-up references can be trusted, the Bashi Bazouks were both tragic victims and brutal aggressors. Many of them were Muslim Circassian refugees from the Crimean wars, displaced from their homeland and repeatedly brutalized by the Bulgarian majority, before retaliating with even more brutality when they were finally given license by the Ottomans.

This story has a surprisingly contemporary feel. The soul-destroying ethnic violence in the Balkans and the Caucuses is still going on. The great powers are still learning that fighting proxy wars with low-cost irregular troops usually ends in tragedy, whether you call them Bashi Bazouks, Tamil Tigers, Sandinistas or mujahedeen.

Changing tack a bit, ever wondered who Archibald is? Captain Haddock's first name is Archibald. Fortunately, this Archie is not a carrot-top.

Red Plenty

I generally review books after I have read them, but I'm posting about Red Plenty when its still in my Amazon shopping basket. I heard about this book's premise on the radio, and the premise may turn out to be its most more interesting part.

Here is what the front flap says:

Once upon a time in the Soviet Union...

Strange as it may seem, the grey, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the twentieth century magic called "the planned economy", which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working.

Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to an future of rich communists and envious capitalists...

This was the time between the launch of Sputnik in 1957, and the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, when the Soviet Union looked and felt rich and successful. It felt like the Soviets had invented a wonderful new world, both morally and materially superior to the West. So...this was the illusion, the chimera, that lured Nehru's India into decades of socialism and stagnation.

Red Plenty's hero is Leonid Kantorovich, the only Soviet to win the Nobel Prize for Economics. He invented linear programming (among other things), and so helped create the impression that Soviet science could allocate resources more effeciently than capitalist markets. The book is a melding of fact and fiction about how that vision was, and was not, true.

The other book in my Amazon shopping basket is Michael Lewis' The Big Short. I've actually started reading this book, but I didn't finish my father-in-law's copy on our last trip to Madras. It feels like a nice counter-point to Red Plenty. It too takes us back to a far-away past, the time between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of Lehman Brothers, and reminds us that capitalism can also fall into catastrophic science-induced hubris.

Tiger Mothers and OPEC

Amy Chua's fifteen minutes of fame are almost over. The Tiger Mother story has played itself out as a news item. Yet, after having read the Economist, Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker, David Brooks in the NYT, Larry Summers in the WSJ, The Guardian, Slate and probably a dozen other stories about The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, I feel like the mainstream media are missing the central point, the reason why Tiger Mothers are both so heartening and so scary.

By now, most blog readers probably know the outlines of Ms Chua's story. Her book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, is supposedly a memoir about raising children on a strict regimen of no TV, no video games, no play dates and no sleepovers. The time that was freed up was reinvested in music practice and homework. Her regimen worked. Her daughters, now 18 and 15, grew into music prodigies with straight A grades.

Amy Chua spiced up this unsurprising story with the provocative claim that Chinese mothers are superior to Western ones; that her experience is evidence of this superiority. By mischievously framing the question in racial, or geopolitical, terms, she twanged a bunch of recessionary anxieties about Western decline and the rise of China. She has been rewarded for this cynicism with a firestorm of media commentary, and a place on both Amazon and New York Times bestseller lists. The racial and geopolitical sub-text is so deliciously juicy that it has drawn most of the media attention.

However, to me, the Chinese angle is irrelevant. I grew up among the Tamil Brahmins of Mylapore, a culture which is chock-a-block with Tiger Mothers. This also kills the theory that Tiger Mothers are somehow products of the immigrant experience.

This isn't about Asian values either. Slackistan, a new movie I'm itching to watch, should illustrate this point. It is about the indolent lassitude of privileged young Pakistanis; Asian setting, no Tiger Moms in sight.

American Jews are pushy parents, according to stereotype. In this, they are no different from other Western families who want to provide well for their children. Spotting Western Tiger Parents from a wide range of cultures is as easy as watching tennis on TV. Venus and Serena Williams' dad Richard, or Andy Murray's mom Judy, or Martina Hingis' mom Melanie - Tiger Parents all. Every race, religion and ethnicity can and does embrace the Protestant work ethic, in the right circumstances.

Those right circumstances are defined by incentives. Tiger parenting happens when parents respond to incentives. If good grades open up a credible path to a better life, parents will push their children to get good grades. The bigger the gap between the parent's life and the promised life for the children, in terms of either tangible income or status, the harder the parent will push the children.

Slightly less obvious, the same dynamic works with parents further up the food chain. These are parents in high-status positions, who are not wealthy enough to pass the same status on to the next generation. Senior civil servants, army officers or tenured university professors like Amy Chua, who are rich in status but not in wealth, might push their children even harder than the aspiring middle class. One of the clearest results in behavioural economics is that the pain of losing something is far greater than the joy of gaining the same thing.

On the other hand, Bertram Wilberforce Wooster and members of the Drones Club were so completely secure in their privilege that swotting to better one's life made no sense. Ditto for George W Bush. Ditto also for Jawaharlal Nehru, who was never more than an average student through his Harrow and Cambridge years. Similarly, coal miners who can only imagine that their sons will also be coalminers are unlikely to become Tiger Dads who push their sons to straight As.

Looked at this way, Tiger Parents, and the middle-class bourgeois values they reflect, are fundamentally good. They inhabit worlds with social mobility. They inject even more mobility these worlds with their energy, ambition and enterprise. They make democracy and capitalism possible; if this feels like an over-claim please read Fareed Zakaria's The Future of Freedom, a book I loved and wholeheartedly endorse.

So ambition and hard work are good. But how much is too much?

The scary thing about Amy Chua is not her ambition, or her Chinese-ness (she is a second generation American, married to a Jew, whose parents emigrated from the Philippines). Her problem is extent. No TV or video games until homework and music practice are done? Fine. No dinner unless the "The Little White Donkey" is played perfectly? No way. But that, apparently, is what Amy Chua does.

I find the most intuitive way to understand this is with another Econ 101 concept: cartels.

Consider OPEC, the cartel of twelve countries which controls most of the world's crude oil. It is in the best interests of the group as a whole to maintain a high price for crude oil. Their oil ministers meet, agree on production quotas, limit supply, and drive up crude oil prices to profit-maximizing levels. However, it is in the best interests of each individual country to renege on the agreement, and produce more than the agreed quota of crude. The higher the price of crude, the stronger the individual country's incentive to renege (especially if it is a democracy heading into an election year). As more countries renege on their production quotas, the price of crude drops, and ideally the cartel breaks down in a flurry of bitterness, finger-pointing and name calling.

Cartels can also do good. Everybody benefits from low trade barriers. Each country has an incentive to "cheat" and raise protectionist walls for local political gains. Supra-national arrangements, like the WTO or the EEC, are all about making it harder for individual countries to cheat, and therefore making everyone better off. In general, cartels work if they have fewer participants, if cheating is easy to spot, and if punishments for cheating are severe.

The supply of homework hours is analogous to the supply of crude oil. All families would be better off if there were limits on pushy parenting; say, children have at least an hour of unstructured time every day. The problem is with enforcing a cartel to limit the supply of homework time. Lots of suppliers, no way to monitor cheating, no punishments for being caught... this cartel would break down in a flash. Tiger parents will immediately turn that hour of free time to homework, to get ahead of the competition.

One of the few things I love about Amy Chua's story is that for fifteen years she never told her peers how hard she pushed her kids. She fabricated medical reasons why her daughters couldn't go on play dates or sleepovers. Her peers had no way to know she was "cheating", and couldn't punish her with social ostracism. A lot of the vitriol being directed at her now is the finger-pointing and name-calling that happens when a cartel breaks. I'm sure a lot of the finger-pointers and name-callers are secretly vowing to double-down and push their children even harder. I don't think there is a happy and harmonious resolution to having Tiger Mothers in our midst.

Sport as a metaphor for life might work here. A sportsman needs to focus, play hard, and play to win, even when the opponent isn't playing the right way. Say the umpire doesn't call a chucker at cricket. As a batsman, you just mark your guard again and bat on. Say your opponent is calling your shots long at a club tennis match. You stop going for the lines and find another way to win. Playing their game is not an option. Letting them win is also not an option. I guess that is one way to deal with Tiger Parents, because for better and for worse, they are here to stay.