Peri Lyons' Psychic Technique: Radical Empathy

I hate fortune tellers. This feeling isn't mild, amused scepticism, but fierce antipathy, and comes from Indian upbringing. Back in India, fortune-tellers are not innocent fair-ground amusements. They are serious and powerful people, jyotishtis, seers who can divine the fates on account of their spiritual attainment. Conveniently, these seers can also intervene with the fates on a client's behalf, to prevent dark and dire events that have been foretold from coming to pass.

The conversation between the seer and the client develops along the lines "I see the possibility of a glorious future...but...I also see terrible dangers...the divinity x needs to be appeased with sop y ...to protect your loved ones from these dangers...". Sop y generally contributes to the jyotishti's well-being. The client gradually learns to be dependent on the seer and loses autonomy, as he wins her over with honest trifles and betrays her in matters of the deepest consequence. Divination becomes an extortion racket, reinforced by the Stockholm syndrome.

I find the extortion practiced by jyotishtis more distressing than the simple violent extortion practiced by gangland bosses or cops on the beat. These "god men" are preying on the sacred, on faith, on hope - on human faculties that could be so life-enhancing if they were not abused. So, in my moral hierarchy, fortune-tellers, psychics, seers, astrologers, soothsayers and their ilk fall below common or garden charlatans like Bernie Madoff or Adam Stanford. They sit closer to JRR Tolkien's Grima Wormtongue, whose murmurs and whispers rob Lord Theoden of Rohan of his vitality, or JK Rowling's dementors, killers who do their business not through violence but by robbing their victims of the will to live.  

This attitude is why I was surprised to find myself warming to a psychic I came across while flipping through a back issue of the New Yorker.

Peri Lyons

This is Peri Lyons, "the most expensive psychic in New York". She plays by certain rules. Rule #1 is "readings by Peri Lyons are for entertainment purposes only". Also, she only does "good stuff... I very rarely get "bad" stuff. Either I'm way too positive for that, or my spirit guides are really chicken." Those rules take the whole extortion racket out of the equation, thank God. But what I liked, rather than just didn't hate, was her psychic method.

Peri Lyons does not read the stars, or the entrails of animals, or ancient palm leaves or any such thing. She practices "radical empathy". If I've understood what that means, she does with her clients what a method actor does with a character. She gets into the skin of her subject, experiences what they experience, uses that insight to tell her subjects about themselves, and about any self-fulfilling beliefs that she senses. This is not in any way a mysterious or other-worldly faculty. I routinely do this as a sports fan, tuning into the players' psyche, trying to sense their commitment, intensity and confidence. A good psychic just does this tuning-in very well.

Courtney Love

One of Peri Lyons' good friends and client is Courtney Love, who, apparently, "doesn't do soothsayers". I have a hunch that for Courtney Love, the psychic service that matters is just plain empathy, rather than any sort of forecasting.

Peri Lyons also runs a popular class called "How To Be a Psychic Without Even Trying". Maybe Paul the Octopus was one of her graduates.   

Paul, the psychic octopus 

Why I’m glad Saurav Ganguly has come out of retirement

Ganguly, when he was the God of the off-side

“I don’t plan to retire. I will play for India as long as I am selected. If I’m dropped from the Indian team, I’ll play for Bombay. If I’m dropped from the Bombay team, I’ll play for Dadar Union. If I’m dropped from the Dadar Union team I’ll play galli cricket near my house. I’ll play for as long as I can. I’ll never retire.”

This was Sunil Gavaskar’s reply to a journalist who once asked him when he planned to retire. This may have been in a cricket magazine called Sportsweek I used to subscribe to as a child. This was long before the internet, I wasn’t able to Google up the reference. This was also from a time before sportmen had handlers, or image consultants, telling them what to tell journalists to maximize their brand endorsement income. These words probably were a good reflection of what Sunil Gavaskar thought at the time.

Gavaskar drives through the covers

Those words stayed in my mind for so long because that comment, that attitude, epitomizes why Sunil Gavaskar was my first ever hero. By believing that the game was worth playing no matter how humble the setting, Gavaskar was sticking up for every amatuer cricketer, everywhere. Gavaskar was raising a fist for every kid who has stepped up to the crease in a schoolyard, risking humiliation in front of an army of snarky fourteen year olds, for the pleasure of feeling the thonck of bat on ball. The greatest batsman in the world was effectively punching gloves with every Mumbaikar who has ever burnt up a weekend playing Kanga league cricket in the monsoon rain on Shivaji Park maidan, or every Yorkshireman who has braved the bitter cold and howling winds of an English May to play for his village.

There have, of course, been many avatars of Sunil Gavaskar, avatars who don’t always see eye to eye. The sulky blocker who made 36 not out off 174 balls against England in the 1975 World Cup probably wouldn’t shake hands with the furious belligerent of 1983 who scored 100 off 94 balls, in a test match, facing Malcolm Marshall and Michael Holding, to equal Sir Donald Bradman’s record of 29 test centuries.

Ultimately, the avatar who refused to retire didn’t win the battle for Gavaskar’s soul. Gavaskar did retire on a high. He stepped down as the Indian captain after winning the 1985 World Championships in Australia, with Ravi Shastri driving the team around the MCG in his Audi. He retired from playing active cricket in 1987, after scoring a century at Lord’s in a five day game to celebrate the MCC’s bicentenary. Gavaskar doesn’t live in Dadar any more, I don’t think he plays galli cricket nowadays outside his swank apartment on the Worli sea face.

Ganguly b Malinga 16

The Indian player who inherited the best of Gavaskar's spirit is Saurav Ganguly. More than any other player since Sunny, Ganguly is the one who is obviously animated by a fierce pride and an entirely irrational passion for the game.

Saurav's stubbornness, his irrationality, that refusal to just accept reality, is what made it possible for him to take charge of the Indian team after the horrors of Azharuddin, and turn it into a team we were proud to support. That same stubbornness, the same refusal to accept reality was on display yesterday. Saurav's IPL team, the Pune Warriors,were up against the Mumbai Indians. Saurav was awful. He made a laboured 16 off 24 balls before Lasith Malinga cleaned him up. What made it even harder to watch was that he clearly was trying hard, and his crawl probably cost his team the game.

Yet, despite that predictable awfulness, I loved him for having the burning desire to come and play. Saurav will play for as long as they let him. He doesn't need to. His image consultants will tell him not to. He doesn't need the glory or the money. He could settle for a safe job, as a coach, or commentator, or "mentor". But for India's captain Saurav the lion heart, yeh dil maange more.

Whether Pune Warriors did the smart thing by inviting Saurav to come out of retirement and captain their team is an entirely different question. That is a topic for another day.

Showing up: the ingredient that makes the game worth playing, and watching

“80% of success is just showing up” - Woody Allen.

Rafael Nadal steam-rolled Novak Djokovic 6-3 6-1 in the Monte Carlo Masters finals last weekend. Previously, Nadal had lost 7 tournament finals in row to Djokovic, including in some epic matches like the Aussie Open finals. Nadal didn’t play to a new game plan to win so easily in Monte Carlo. Apparently Djokovic was missing some emotional energy, his grandfather died the previous week, and that made all the difference. “I definitely don’t want to take anything away from Rafa’s win” said Djokovic, in his post-match interview. “He was a better player. But it’s a fact that I just didn’t have any emotional energy left in me.” Novak not showing up was totally understandable, my condolences to the Djokovic family.

Yet, despite his personal loss, Djokovic did make the finals of a Masters 1000 event. He beat world #7 Tomasz Berdych, #19 Alexander Dolgopolov and #55 Robin Haase to get there. He was good enough to win these matches without emotional energy, without showing up. But Nole he couldn’t beat Rafa without showing up.

I didn’t watch the game last weekend. I don’t regret missing it.

Tennis, or generally any sport, is not about skill, it is about spirit. It is worth watching when the players on court have showed up, when they have their mojo going, are engaged, fully checked-in, stretched, and are playing like it really matters. When players are clinically dismembering weaker opposition, or when they are passively resigned to their fate, no sport is worth watching, regardless of how skilled the players are. It’s why, during the first week at Wimbledon, qualifiers and lowly non-seeds battling it out on the side courts makes for far more compelling tennis than the stars going through the motions on Centre Court. That spirit, that mojo, is exactly what Nole seems to have been missing.

Surprisingly, the IPL is turning out to be quite watchable because the players are showing up, because the guys on the field are fully present in the contest. This season, I’ve watched stars like Lasith Malinga and Dale Steyn, journeyman pros like Owais Shah and James Franklin, golden oldies like Saurav Ganguly and rookies like Ajinkya Rahane, all show up and give it everything they’ve got. That commitment is what makes the game worth playing, and watching. Format doesn’t really matter as long as the players show up. Sure, the drama on offer in the IPL isn’t ever going to develop into something unforgettable, like, say, the 2005 Ashes. But it isn’t insipid either, like India in England circa 2011.

The IPL is more than a novelty now. It’s a regular part of the cricket scene. And it seems to be working - despite the kitsch, the lurid costumes, the cheerleaders, the “DLF maximums” and the “Citi moments of success” – because the players really are showing up.

What Ross, Chandler and the F.R.I.E.N.D.S really lived through, by Joshua Ferris

F.R.I.E.N.D.S was more than a successful TV serial, it was a cultural phenomenon. I think it had such a big impact, beyond what one would expect of any well-written, well performed sitcom, because it filled in a gap in popular culture. It was the first extensive exploration of a life stage that people like us now routinely live through, but which falls outside our traditional frameworks of life stages.

Ross, Chandler, Rachel, Monica, Phoebe and Joey have finished with formal education, have started careers, but haven't yet married or started families. This time in life falls somewhere between youth and adulthood, somewhere between brahmacharya and grihastashram in the Hindu tradition. This life-stage is growing: people live longer, young men no longer get drafted into armies, more women are becoming professionals, careers demand ever longer apprenticeships. This is clearly a formative stage in life, at least as formative as the university years. This is the time in life when most of my peers found their professions and life-partners, and solidified their identities. While the angst of both youth and middle age have been mined extensively in popular culture - think Rebel Without A Cause and American Beauty - the angst of this life stage remains relatively unexplored. F.R.I.E.N.D.S captured the public imagination so powerfully because it was good, but also because it was the first show to extensively explore this life-space (the closest benchmark I can think of are one-dimensional rom-coms).

However, for all that, even F.R.I.E.N.D.S didn't explore one huge aspect of this life stage: work. In my experience, this is the life stage when work consumes more psychic energy than anything else. This is the time when the soaring expectations of youth are still very much alive, when the frustrations of the real world are an everyday reality, and when the tension between those two haven't yet found a happy equilibrium.

In real life, a young scientist like Ross probably spends a vast chunk of his energy obsessing about whether his research paper will get published, about where he will get his next grant from, and about how he can get on to this high profile consortium that might lead to a couple of Nobel Prizes. He would spend most of his social time with other research scientists. They would share, and therefore amplify, each other's career anxieties, and gossip endlessly about other research scientists. A young business executive like Chandler would obsess about departmental politics, about the hopeless incompetence of his colleagues, and about whether he should go work on Wall Street and get seriously rich. A few blocks away, journalist Carrie Bradshaw might obsess about whether freelance writing about her friend's love lives will ever win her the Pulitzer Prize, and if she should become a real journalist who risks losing an eye reporting from a war-zone.

In F.R.I.E.N.D.S, work forms the backdrop to the characters' lives. In reality, work would be in the foreground. I accepted that easily, assuming that other people's work-lives are intrinsically boring. It turns out, that assumption was wrong.

I just read this outstanding book called Then We Came To The End, by Joshua Ferris, which takes the work-lives of people like us as its raw material, and turns it into a thoroughly entertaining novel. It is set in an advertising agency, in Chicago. This agency is a big little world. It includes people of all sorts - married people, blacks, people with kids, people with cancer, people who die. But "we", the collective of cool kids from whose viewpoint this story is written, the gang who are the social and spiritual core of the agency, are squarely in the F.R.I.E.N.D.S stage in life.  

A sample of one character's thoughts:

"good God, was work so meaningless? Was life so meaningless? It reminded him of when an ad got watered down by a client, and watered down, until everything interesting about the ad disappeared. Carl still had to write copy for it. The art director still had to put the drop shadow where the drop shadow belonged and the logo in its proper place. That was the process known as polishing the turd. Those two poor saps hosing down the alleyway were just doing the same thing. All over America, in fact, people were up and out of their beds today in a continuing effort to polish turds. Sure, for the sake of survival, but more immediately, for the sake of some sadistic manager or shit-brained client whose small imagination and numbingly dumb ideas were bleaching the world of all relevancy and hope..."

The novel takes a little dig at itself. There is a writer at the agency,

Joshua Ferris

"working on a failed novel. He described it as "small and angry". We all wondered who the hell would buy small and angry. We asked him what it was about. "Work," he replied. A small, angry book about work. Now there was a guaranteed best seller. There was a fun read on the beach. We suggested alternative topics on subjects that mattered to us. "But those don't interest me" he said. "The fact that we spend most of our lives at work, that interests me." Truly noble, we said to him."

That is what this book is. It is a small, angry book about us at work. It has observed us so precisely that the blurb from The Times printed on the back cover is entirely true. "Very funny, intense and exhilarating...for the first time in fiction, it has truly captured the way we work". In a way, Joshua Ferris' book completes the F.R.I.E.N.D.S life experience.

The Mystery of the Pisa Airport Hippos

Pisa's Galileo Galilei airport is the largest in Tuscany. Hundreds of thousands of tourists will pass through this summer, on their way to pay homage to some of Western civilization's greatest works of art, like Michelangelo's David.

En route, these tourist-pilgrims (like me, on holiday last week) will also encounter other more contemporary Western works of art, like this statue of two hippos baring their teeth at each other. In fact, these hippos will probably be the first work of art a visitor to Tuscany encounters: they are located just outside the airport's arrivals lounge.

Hippos @ Galileo Galilei airport

What spark lit the artist's imagination, inspiring these airport hippos? 

Is it a critique of the contemporary human condition, a lament that we now are just a bunch of corpulent beasts, submerged in mud, snarling at each other? Is it advertising, meant to promote sales of the candy brand Happy Hippos?. Did the bureaucrat responsible for decorating Pisa airport go on a safari along the Limpopo River? Is it a joke?

Unfortunately, even Google is not able to answer this question. If you do find out, dear reader, please post a comment to let me know. As clues, consider that the hippos are not alone. They are accompanied by crocodiles and dolphins.

Dolphins @ Galileo Galilei airport

Crocodile @ Galileo Galilei airport

Things can get messy for hippos in Tuscany. Like when rainwater fills up in a hippo's nostrils...

"Oh, my sinuses!"

Happy Easter from Anthony Gonsalves

An old friend put me on the spot recently, and quizzed me on how I found the enthu to keep blogging.

I wasn't expecting the question. So, understandably, I lapsed into my native language: geek-speak. I chuntered on about "intrinsic motivation" and "the universal need for self-expression, for which there are only limited opportunities in contemporary corporate life". Instead, I really should have answered my friend musically, by serenading him with the Amitabh Bachchan - Kishore Kumar classic "My name is Anthony Gonsalves".

Anthony Gonsalves has a real insight into an amateur blogger's psyche. His phrase "you are a sophisticated rhetorician intoxicated by the exuberance of your own verbosity", is spot on. In fact, if I'm asked the same question this Easter weekend, I might enhance my answer by emerging from an egg, unless "such extenuating circumstances coerce me to preclude you from such extravagance".

Happy Easter blog readers. For further clarification, please refer roop mahal, prem galli, koli नंबर चार सौ बीस . Excuse me, please!

JRR Tolkien, the lousy teacher

"At Oxford in the nineteen-forties, Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was generally considered the most boring lecturer around, teaching the most boring subject known to man, Anglo-Saxon philology and literature, in the most boring way imaginable. “Incoherent and often inaudible” was Kingsley Amis’s verdict on his teacher. Tolkien, he reported, would write long lists of words on the blackboard, obscuring them with his body as he droned on, then would absent-mindedly erase them without turning around. “I can just about stand learning the filthy lingo it’s written in,” Philip Larkin, another Tolkien student, complained about the old man’s lectures on “Beowulf.” “What gets me down is being expected to admire the bloody stuff.”

It is still one of the finest jests of the modern muses that this fogged-in English don was going home nights to work on perhaps the most popular adventure story ever written..."

More evidence that genius in one aspect of life, even in one aspect of communication, can go hand in hand with mediocrity in other related aspects of life, or communication.

Extracted from this (very nice) story in the New Yorker, which is still visible online...