Afterlife exists says top brain surgeon

A prominent scientist who had previously dismissed the possibility of the afterlife says he has reconsidered his belief after experiencing an out of body experience which has convinced him that heaven exists.

Dr Eben Alexander, a Harvard-educated neurosurgeon, fell into a coma for seven days in 2008 after contracting meningitis.

During his illness Dr Alexander says that the part of his brain which controls human thought and emotion "shut down" and that he then experienced "something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after death." In an essay for American magazine Newsweek, which he wrote to promote his book Proof of Heaven, Dr Alexander says he was met by a beautiful blue-eyed woman in a "place of clouds, big fluffy pink-white ones" and "shimmering beings".

He continues: "Birds? Angels? These words registered later, when I was writing down my recollections. But neither of these words do justice to the beings themselves, which were quite simply different from anything I have known on this planet. They were more advanced. Higher forms." The doctor adds that a "huge and booming like a glorious chant, came down from above, and I wondered if the winged beings were producing it. the sound was palpable and almost material, like a rain that you can feel on your skin but doesn't get you wet."

Dr Alexander says he had heard stories from patients who spoke of outer body experiences but had disregarded them as "wishful thinking" but has reconsidered his opinion following his own experience.

He added: "I know full well how extraordinary, how frankly unbelievable, all this sounds. Had someone even a doctor told me a story like this in the old days, I would have been quite certain that they were under the spell of some delusion. 

"But what happened to me was, far from being delusional, as real or more real than any event in my life. That includes my wedding day and the birth of my two sons." He added: "I've spent decades as a neurosurgeon at some of the most prestigous medical institutions in our country. I know that many of my peers hold as I myself did to the theory that the brain, and in particular the cortex, generates consciousness and that we live in a universe devoid of any kind of emotion, much less the unconditional love that I now know God and the universe have toward us.

"But that belief, that theory, now lies broken at our feet. What happened to me destroyed it."

Population decline is the elephant in the world's living room

The fifth horseman of the apocalypse
By Spengler

(The essay below appears as a preface to my book How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too). [1]

Population decline is the elephant in the world's living room. As a matter of arithmetic, we know that the social life of most developed countries will break down within two generations. Two out of three Italians and three of four Japanese will be elderly dependents by 2050. [1] If present fertility rates hold, the number of Germans will fall by 98% over the next two centuries. No pension and health care system can support such an inverted population pyramid. Nor is the problem limited to the industrial nations. Fertility is falling at even faster rates - indeed, at rates never before registered anywhere - in the Muslim world. The world's population will fall by as much as a fifth between the middle and the end of the 21st century, by far the worst decline in human history.

The world faces a danger more terrible than the worst Green imaginings. The European environmentalist who wants to shrink the world's population to reduce carbon emissions will spend her declining years in misery, for there will not be enough Europeans alive a generation from now to pay for her pension and medical care. [2] For the first time in world history, the birth rate of the whole developed world is well below replacement, and a significant part of it has passed the demographic point of no return.

But Islamic society is even more fragile. As Muslim fertility shrinks at a rate demographers have never seen before, it is converging on Europe's catastrophically low fertility as if in time-lapse photography. The average 30-year-old Iranian woman comes from a family of six children, but she will bear only one or two children during her lifetime. Turkey and Algeria are just behind Iran on the way down, and most of the other Muslim countries are catching up quickly. By the middle of this century, the belt of Muslim countries from Morocco to Iran will become as gray as depopulating Europe. The Islamic world will have the same proportion of dependent elderly as the industrial countries - but one-tenth the productivity. A time bomb that cannot be defused is ticking in the Muslim world.

Imminent population collapse makes radical Islam more dangerous, not less so. For in their despair, radical Muslims who can already taste the ruin of their culture believe that they have nothing to lose.

Political science is at a loss in the face of demographic decline and its consequences. The wasting away of nations is an insoluble conundrum for modern political theory, which is based on the principle of rational self-interest. At the threshold of extinction, the political scientists' clever models break down. We "do not negotiate with terrorists". But a bank robber holding hostages is a terrorist of sorts, and the police negotiate with such miscreants as a matter of course. And what if the bank robber knows he will die of an incurable disease in a matter of weeks? That changes the negotiation. The simple truth - call it Spengler's Universal Law #1 - A man, or a nation, at the brink of death does not have a "rational self-interest".

Conventional geopolitical theory, which is dominated by material factors such as territory, natural resources, and command of technology, does not address how peoples will behave under existential threat. Geopolitical models fail to resemble the real world in which we live, where the crucial issue is the willingness or unwillingness of a people inhabiting a given territory to bring a new generation into the world.

Population decline, the decisive issue of the 21st century, will cause violent upheavals in the world order. Countries facing fertility dearth, such as Iran, are responding with aggression. Nations confronting their own mortality may choose to go down in a blaze of glory. Conflicts may be prolonged beyond the point at which there is any rational hope of achieving strategic aims - until all who wish to fight to the death have taken the opportunity to do so.
Analysis of national interests cannot explain why some nations go to war without hope of winning, or why other nations will not fight even to defend their vital interests. It cannot explain the historical fact that peoples fight harder, accepting a higher level of sacrifice in blood and treasure, when all hope of victory is past. Conventional geopolitical analysis cannot explain the causes of population collapse either, any more than its consequences - for example, under what circumstances strategic reverses (notably the two world wars of the past century) may crush the aspirations of the losers and result in apathy and demographic death.

Why do individuals, groups, and nations act irrationally, often at the risk of self-destruction? Part of the problem lies in our definition of rationality. Under normal circumstances we think it irrational for a middle-aged man to cash in his insurance policy and spend money as fast as possible. But if the person in question has a terminal illness and no heirs, we think it quite reasonable to spend it all quickly, like Otto Kringelein in Grand Hotel or his updated equivalent, Queen Latifah's character in The Last Holiday. And if we know that we shall presently die of rabies, what is to prevent us from biting everyone we dislike? Countries sometimes suffer the equivalent of terminal illness. What seems suicidal to Americans may appear rational to an existentially challenged people confronting its imminent mortality.

Self-immolation of endangered peoples is sadly common. Stone-age cultures often disintegrate upon contact with the outside world. Their culture breaks down, and suicides skyrocket. An Australian researcher writes about "suicide contagion or cluster deaths - the phenomenon of indigenous people, particularly men from the same community taking their own lives at an alarming rate". [3] Canada's Aboriginal Health Foundation reports, "The overall suicide rate among First Nation communities is about twice that of the total Canadian population; the rate among Inuit is still higher - 6 to 11 times higher than the general population." [4] Suicide is epidemic among Amazon tribes. The London Telegraph reported on November 19, 2000,

The largest tribe of Amazonian Indians, the 27,000-strong Guarani, are being devastated by a wave of suicides among their children, triggered by their coming into contact with the modern world. Once unheard of among Amazonian Indians, suicide is ravaging the Guarani, who live in the southwest of Brazil, an area that now has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. More than 280 Guarani have taken their own lives in the past 10 years, including 26 children under the age of 14 who have poisoned or hanged themselves. Alcoholism has become widespread, as has the desire to own radios, television sets and denim jeans, bringing an awareness of their poverty. Community structures and family unity have broken down and sacred rituals come to a halt.

Of the more than 6,000 languages now spoken on the planet, two become extinct each week, and by most estimates half will fall silent by the end of the century. [5] A United Nations report claims that nine-tenths of the languages now spoken will become extinct in the next hundred years. [6] Most endangered languages have a very small number of speakers. Perhaps a thousand distinct languages are spoken in Papua New Guinea, many by tribes of only a few hundred members. Several are disappearing tribal languages spoken in the Amazon rainforest, the Andes Mountains, or the Siberian taiga. Eighteen languages have only one surviving speaker. It is painful to imagine how the world must look to these individuals. They are orphaned in eternity, wiped clean of memory, their existence reduced to the exigency of the moment.

But are these dying remnants of primitive societies really so different from the rest of us? Mortality stalks most of the peoples of the world - not this year or next, but within the horizon of human reckoning. A good deal of the world seems to have lost the taste for life. Fertility has fallen so far in parts of the industrial world that languages such as Ukrainian and Estonian will be endangered within a century and German, Japanese, and Italian within two. The repudiation of life among advanced countries living in prosperity and peace has no historical precedent, except perhaps in the anomie of Greece in its post-Alexandrian decline and Rome during the first centuries of the Common Era. But Greece fell to Rome, and Rome to the barbarians. In the past, nations that foresaw their own demise fell to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Plague, Famine, and Death. Riding point for the old quartet in today's more civilized world is a Fifth Horseman: loss of faith. Today's cultures are dying of apathy, not by the swords of their enemies.

The Arab suicide bomber is the spiritual cousin of the despondent aboriginal of the Amazon rain forest. And European apathy is the opposite side of the coin of Islamic extremism. Both apathetic Europeans and radical Muslims have lost their connection to the past and their confidence in the future. There is not a great deal of daylight between European resignation to cultural extinction at the hundred-year horizon, and the Islamist boast, "You love life, and we love death." Which brings us to Spengler's Universal Law #2: When the nations of the world see their demise not as a distant prospect over the horizon, but as a foreseeable outcome, they perish of despair. Like the terminally ill patient cashing in his insurance money, a culture that anticipates its own extinction has a different standard of rationality than does conventional political science.

Game theorists have tried to make political strategy into a quantitative discipline. Players with a long-term interest think differently than players with a short-term interest. A swindler who has no expectation of encountering his victim again will take what he can and run; a merchant who wants repeat customers will act honestly as a matter of self-interest. By the same token, the game theorists contends, nations learn that it is in their interest to act as responsible members of the world community, for the long-run advantages of good behavior outweigh the passing benefits of predation.

But what if there isn't any long run - not, at least, for some of the "players" in the "game"? The trouble with applying game theory to the problem of existential war is that the players may not expect to be there for the nth iteration of the game. Entire peoples sometimes find themselves faced with probable extinction, so that no peaceful solution appears to be a solution for them.

Situations of this sort have arisen frequently in history, but never as frequently as today, when so many of the world's cultures are not expected to survive the next two centuries. A people facing cultural extinction may well choose war, if war offers even a slim chance of survival. That is just how radical Islamists view the predicament of traditional Muslim society in the face of modernity. The Islamists fear that if they fail, their religion and culture will disappear into the maelstrom of the modern world. Many of them rather would die fighting. 

Paradoxically it is possible for wars of annihilation to stem from rational choice, for the range of choices always must be bounded by the supposition that the chooser will continue to exist. Existential criteria, that is, trump the ordinary calculus of success and failure. If one or more of the parties knows that peace implies the end of its existence, it has no motive to return to peace. That is how the radical Islamists of Hamas view the future of Muslim society. A wealthy and successful Jewish state next to a poor and dysfunctional Palestinian state may imply the end of the moral authority of Islam, and some Palestinians would rather fight to the death than embrace such an outcome. Rather than consign their children to the Western milieu of personal freedom and sexual license, radical Muslims will fight to the death.

But why are Muslims - and Europeans, and Japanese - living under a societal death sentence? Why are populations collapsing in the modern world? Demographers have identified several different factors associated with population decline: urbanization, education and literacy, the modernization of traditional societies. Children in traditional society had an economic value, as agricultural labor and as providers for elderly parents; urbanization and pension systems turned children into a cost rather than a source of income. And female literacy is a powerful predictor of population decline among the world's countries. Mainly poor and illiterate women in Mali and Niger bear eight children in a lifetime, while literate and affluent women in the industrial world bear one or two.

But what determines whether it is one child or two? Children also have a spiritual value. That is why the degree of religious faith explains a great deal of the variation in population growth rates among the countries of the world. The industrial world's lowest fertility rates are encountered among the nations of Eastern Europe where atheism was the official ideology for generations. The highest fertility rates are found in countries with a high degree of religious faith, namely the United States and Israel. And demographers have identified religion as a crucial factor in the differences among populations within countries. When faith goes, fertility vanishes, too. The death-spiral of birth rates in most of the industrial world has forced demographers to think in terms of faith. Dozens of new studies document the link between religious belief and fertility.

But why do some religions seem to provide better protection against the sterilizing effects of modernity than others? The fastest demographic decline ever registered in recorded history is taking place today in Muslim countries; demographic winter is descending fastest in the fifth of the world where religion most appears to dominate. And even more puzzling: why does one religion (Christianity) seem to inoculate a people against demographic decline in one place (America) but not in another (Europe)? In many parts of the world, what once looked like an indestructible rock of faith has melted in the hot light of modernity. In others, modernity has only added compost for the growth of faith. Apparently some kinds of faith will survive in the modern world, and others will fail.

Strategic analysts and politicians are poorly equipped to understand these new and disturbing circumstances, with their overarching implications for political strategy and economics. To make sense of the world today we must do better than secular political science, which pigeon-holes faith as one more belief-structure among the other belief-structures in its collection of specimens.

Our political science is uniquely ill-equipped to make sense of a global crisis whose ultimate cause is spiritual. But was not always so. From the advent of Christianity to the seventeenth-century Enlightenment, the West saw politics through the lens of faith. St Augustine's fifth-century treatise The City of God looked through the state to the underlying civil society, and understood that civil society as a congregation - a body bound together by common loves, as opposed to Cicero's state founded only on common interests. (In the concluding chapter, we will consider Augustine's view as a lodestar for an American foreign policy that realistically addresses the threats created by the imminent demographic collapse of nations.)

We might call Augustine's view "theopolitics." A millennium later, Niccolo Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes changed the subject, to the individual's desire for power, wealth, and personal survival. Hobbes, the 17th-century grandfather of modern political science, introduced a radically truncated anthropology, centered on the individual's struggle for survival. The state, he argued, was a compact among individuals who survival prospects were poor in a "state of nature"; thus they ceded their individual rights to a sovereign in return for protection. A century later Montesquieu added differences in climate, terrain, and resources to the mix. The modern view of atomized man motivated only by the pursuit of material advantage is loosely known as "geopolitics".

What prompted this revolution in political thinking that has left modern political theory without the tools to understand the causes and implications of the current demographic collapse? Undoubtedly, the terrible religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries poisoned the idea of faith-based politics. Europe fought dynastic and political wars under the false flag of religion until the Thirty Years' War of 1618-1648 destroyed almost half the population of Central Europe. The Peace of Westphalia that ended this fearful war forever buried the political model that Christendom had advanced since Augustine: a universal Christian empire that would keep the peace and limit the arbitrary power of kings. Things are not as simple as they seem in the standard account of the violence that soured the West on theopolitics. For - as we shall see - the nation-states that opposed universal empire were founded on a contending kind of faith, a fanatical form of national self-worship whose internal logic was not played out until world war and genocide in the 20th century, and the collapse of faith and fertility in the 21st. But when Thomas Hobbes published his great book Leviathan three years after the end of the Thirty Years' War, it seemed credible that "the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof".

One powerful attraction of the Hobbesian revolution in political thinking was the power it promised to intellectuals. If politics reduces to the individual and his material concerns, then it is possible to manipulate the individual through the alternation of his material circumstances. A clever elite could fix all the problems of the world. Immanuel Kant boasted in 1793 that he could write a constitution for a race of devils, "if only they be rational." Europe ignored him and proceeded to destroy itself in the Napoleonic Wars and the two world wars of the past century. Today, as in Kant's time, the great frustration in world affairs is the refusal of some players to act rationally. Something was gained, but much more was lost, in the 17th-century Hobbesian revolution in political thought. To view human beings as creatures concerned solely with power, wealth, and security is an impoverished anthropology. The missing tools - the ones Machiavelli and Hobbes removed from the toolbox - are exactly the ones we need to understand and cope with the dangers inherent in the wholesale collapse of cultures that faces us today.

Secularism in all its forms fails to address the most fundamental human need. Sociologist Eric Kaufmann, who himself bewails the fecundity of the religious and the infertility of the secular, puts it this way: "The weakest link in the secular account of human nature is that it fails to account for people's powerful desire to seek immortality for themselves and their loved ones." Traditional society had to confront infant mortality as well as death by hunger, disease, and war. That shouldn't be too troubling, however: "We may not be able to duck death completely, but it becomes so infrequent that we can easily forget about it."

Has death really become infrequent? Call it Spengler's Universal Law #3: Contrary to what you may have heard from the sociologists, the human mortality rate is still 100%.

We can stick our fingers in our ears and chant "I can't hear you!" only so long in the face of mortality. Religion offers the individual the means to transcend mortality, to survive the fragility of a mortal existence. Homo religiosus confronts death in order to triumph over it. But the world's major religions are distinguished by the different ways in which they confront mortality. We cannot make sense of the role of religion in demographic, economic, and political developments - and of the different roles of different religions in different places and times - without understanding the existential experience of the religious individual. It is challenging to recount this experience to a secular analyst; it is somewhat like describing being in love to someone who never has been in love. One doesn't have to be religious to understand religion, but it helps.

But without understanding humankind's confrontation of his own morality in religion, political science is confined to analysis on the basis of the survival instinct - which suddenly seems to be failing whole peoples - and rational self-interest - at a time when nations and peoples are not behaving in a conspicuously rational manner.

At the conclusion of a previous irruption of irrationality - the First World War - a young German soldier at a remote post in Macedonia jotted down his thoughts on army postcards in the final months of the First World War. A small, bespectacled man with a thin mustache, he had been groomed to be one of the mandarins of the German academy, a philosopher whose function was to reinforce the country's confidence in its culture. Just before the war began he had returned to Judaism, after a near conversion to Christianity. As the casualty lists rose in inverse proportion to the hope of victory, the consolations of philosophy seemed hollow. Philosophers, he wrote, were like small children who clapped their hands over their ears and shouted "I can't hear you!" before the fear of death. "From death - from the fear of death - comes all of our knowledge of the All," the soldier began. It was not the individual's fear of death that fascinated the young soldier, but the way entire nations respond to the fear of their collective death. He wrote:

Just as every individual must reckon with his eventual death, the peoples of the world foresee their eventual extinction, be it however distant in time. Indeed, the love of the peoples for their own nationhood is sweet and pregnant with the presentiment of death. Love is only surpassing sweet when it is directed towards a mortal object, and the secret of this ultimate sweetness only is defined by the bitterness of death. Thus the peoples of the world foresee a time when their land with its rivers and mountains still lies under heaven as it does today, but other people dwell there; when their language is entombed in books, and their laws and customers have lost their living power.

The soldier was Franz Rosenzweig, and the postcards would become his great book The Star of Redemption. Awareness of death defines the human condition, so that human beings cannot bear their own mortality without the hope of immortality. And our sense of immortality is social. The culture of a community is what unites the dead with those yet to be born.

The death of a culture is an uncanny event, for it erases not only the future but also the past, that is, the hopes and fears, the sweat and sacrifice of countless generations whose lives no longer can be remembered, for no living being will sing their songs or tell their stories.

The first surviving work of written literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh written perhaps 3,700 years ago, recounts the Sumerian king's quest for immortality. After a journey beset by hardship and peril, Gilgamesh is told: "The life that you are seeking you will never find. When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping."

In the pre-Christian world, Rosenzweig points out, the peoples of the world anticipated their eventual extinction. Every nation's love of itself is pregnant with the presentiment of death, for each tribe knows that its time on earth is limited. Some fight to the death. Others cease to breed. Some do both.

Christianity first taught them the Jewish promise of eternal life. To talk of "man's search for meaning" trivializes the problem. What humankind requires is meaning that transcends death. This need explains a great deal of human behavior that otherwise might seem irrational. One does not have to be religious to grasp this fundamental fact of the human condition, but religion helps, because faith makes explicit the human need to transcend morality. Secular rationalists have difficulty identifying with the motives of existentially challenged peoples - not so much because they lack faith, but because they entertain faith in rationality itself, and believe with the enthusiasm of the convert in the ability of reason to explain all of human experience.

But not only the religious need the hope of immortality. The most atheistic communist hopes that his memory will live on in the heart of a grateful proletariat. Even if we do not believe that our soul will have a place in heaven or that we shall be resurrected in the flesh, we nonetheless believe that something of ourselves will remain, in the form of progeny, memories, or consequences of actions, and that this something will persist as long as people who are like us continue to inhabit the Earth. Humanity perseveres in the consolation that some immortal part of us transcends our death. Sadly, our hope for immortality in the form of remembrance is a fragile and often a vain one. Immortality of this sort depends upon the survival of people who are like us - that is, upon the continuity of our culture. If you truly believe in a supernatural afterlife, to be sure, nothing can really disappoint you. But there is no consolation in being the last Mohican.

And that's because of Spengler's Universal Law #4: The history of the world is the history of humankind's search for immortality. When nations go willingly into that dark night, what should we conclude about human nature?

Human beings may not be the only animals who are sentient of death. (Elephants evidently grieve for their dead, and dogs mourn their dead masters.) But we are the only animals whose sense of continuity depends on culture as much as it does upon genes. Unlike men and women, healthy animals universally show an instinct for self-preservation and the propagation of their species. We do not observe cats deciding not to have kittens the better to pursue their careers as mousers.

I do not mean to suggest that humans beings of different cultures belong to different species. On the contrary, the child of a Kalahari Bushman will thrive if raised in the family of a Glaswegian ship's engineer. (As Jared Diamond, the author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, observes it is easier to be stupid in a modern welfare state than in a hunter-gatherer tribe in New Guinea.)

But culture performs a role among human beings similar to the role species plays for animals. An adult Bushman would never fully adapt to industrial society, any more than a Glaswegian ship's engineer would last a fortnight in the Kalahari. Insofar as an animal can be said to experience an impulse toward the future beyond his own life, that impulse is fulfilled by the propagation of the species. But individual human existence looks forward to the continuation of the culture that nurtures, sustains, and transmits our contribution to future generations. Culture is the stuff out of which we weave the hope of immortality - not merely through genetic transmission but through inter-generational communication.

In the absence of religious faith, if our culture dies, our hope of transcending mere physical existence dies with it. Individuals trapped in a dying culture live in a twilight world. They embrace death through infertility, concupiscence, and war. A dog will crawl into a hole to die. The members of sick cultures do not do anything quite so dramatic, but they cease to have children, dull their senses with alcohol and drugs, become despondent, and too frequently do away with themselves. Or they may make war on the perceived source of their humiliation.

The truth is - to invoke Spengler's Universal Law #5 - Humankind cannot bear mortality without the hope of immortality. When men and women lose the sacred, they lose the desire to live. Despairing of immortality, we stand astonished before the one fact we know with certainty - that someday we must die. This is as true of modern homo sapiens sapiens as it was of our remotest ancestors. Even Neanderthal burial sites have been unearthed with grave gifts. "Man does not live by bread alone," Moses said on the east bank of the Jordan River. The affluent peoples of the world have all the bread they need, but have lost the appetite for life.

Americans are ill-equipped to empathize with the existential fears of other nations. America is the great exception to the demographic collapse sweeping the modern world. As an immigrant nation we regenerate ourselves. We bear no baggage from a tragic past. The glue that holds us together is a common concept of justice and opportunity. The United States is what John Courtney Murray called "a propositional nation". In our benevolence and optimism we assume that all peoples are like us, forgetting that we are or descend from people who chose to abandon the tragic fate of their own nations at the further shore and selected themselves into the American nation. But we have learned that our capacity to influence events in the rest of the world, even in the absence of a competing superpower, is limited, and that the dissipation of our resources can be deadly for us. Our strategic thinking suffers from a failure to take into account the existential problems of other nations. We think in the narrow categories of geopolitics, but we need to study theopolitics - the powerful impact of religious beliefs and aspirations on world events. Even we exceptional Americans must come to grips with the collapse of faith and fertility - especially in the rapidly and dangerously declining Muslim world - in order to prevail in a world in which tragic outcomes are more common than happy endings.

Notes
1. These ratios are based on the Elderly Dependency Ratio calculated by the model of the United Nations World Population Prospects 2010 revision, assuming constant fertility. The model is available at http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/unpp/panel_indicators.htm 2. Jared Diamond’s 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed blames exhaustion of resource and environmental damage. The extinct people of Easter Island and the pre-Columbian Mayans chopped down too many trees, Diamond observes, and thus he argues that environmental damage is the greatest threat to our civilization. (Never mind that America has expanded its forests by 20 million acres during the past quarter century: disaster stories of this sort resonate with a public fed on media reports of global warming and apocalyptic disaster movies.) Easter Island, though, is something of a rarity in world history. The cultures about which we know the most - and from which our own civilization descends - failed from a different cause. Classical Greece and Rome died for the same reason that Western Europe, Japan, and other parts of the modern world are dying today: they lost their motivation to bring children into the world. The infertile Greeks were conquered by Rome’s army and the inexhaustible manpower of the farms of the Italian peninsula; as the Romans later grew childless, they were overrun by a small force of barbarian invaders.
 

 

Advice to cricketers: get a life

Having a pastime outside the game - say, writing a diary - can set you free from the tyranny of results and often make you a better player

Ed Smith

November 7, 2011

I'd like to tell you a story about two cricketers preparing for a new season. It's a true story, but it's also a parable about success and failure. 

The first player gives up almost everything outside cricket. There will be no distractions, he has told himself. He has decided that this will be his breakthrough season; everything else must be relegated to the status of an irrelevant distraction. Cricket is not just the main thing, it is the only thing. He becomes fitter than ever, he spends all his days in the nets and studying televised cricket matches; he even obsesses about the bowlers he will face in the first match, weeks before the game arrives. His quest is to become a machine-like player. He is so eager to learn that he soaks up every piece of advice he can find. Everyone praises his "professionalism".

The second player approaches the season in a more shambolic, human state. He moves house just before the season begins, and spends the first night in his new home without even a lightbulb to help him find his toothbrush. He breaks up with his girlfriend and finds for the first time that he is relying on the warmth of the team life, with its mischief and mickey-taking. Previously he has always been very self-contained; strangely, he is happy to find himself less so. Off the field, he is busy and engaged, having agreed to write a book. The arrival of the season - what season? - comes almost as a surprise, before he is quite in control of his life. He finds that uncertainty - am I ready or not? - energising rather than depressing. Above all, he knows that a life fully lived will make for a good book. He desperately wants to succeed, but he knows that even failure will have its uses.

The first player scores 415 first-class runs at an average of 23. The second player scores 1534 runs at 53. That doesn't prove anything, I hear you say. But what if I told you that they were the same player? It was me - first in 2000, when I dropped off the map as a promising player, then in 2003, when I scored seven hundreds in nine innings and played for England. I learnt my lesson the hard way. I had to feel alive to play cricket properly. I needed a life outside the game to play at my best. The player derives from the man; the man does not emerge from the player.

I am not the only cricketer to have had a purple patch while engaging with life beyond the boundary. Steve Waugh told me that writing a diary coincided with his best seasons. Peter Roebuck produced his best season (1702 runs with seven hundreds) in the year he wrote It Never Rains. Mark Wagh was one of only five Englishmen to score 1000 runs in the first division in 2008, while he was writing Pavilion to Crease… and Back.

And now, best of all, the Tasmania and Australia A opening batsman Ed Cowan has produced a happy ending to top the lot. He kept a diary of his 2010-11 season for Tasmania, now published as In the Firing Line. I'm not spoiling the ending (the scorecard is just a click away on ESPNcricinfo) when I let on that the last page of the book describes Tasmania winning the Shield final. Man of the Match? EJM Cowan, with 133. Both Cowan and his publishers would have settled for that narrative arc when they agreed the deal.

It's also a very good book - honest, analytical, perceptive and brave. You get to know the author and you come to like him. He is not falsely modest, but he looks for the good in others. In years to come, when he reopens his own book, he may find he was a little too generous - but that is all part of the book's warmth and spirit.

	What is it about writing a diary that helps cricketers play at their best? You might expect it to lead to over-analysis and too much self-absorption. Paradoxically, writing a diary has the opposite effect: it seems to set cricketers free. Instead of a burden, writing becomes an exorcism

He embraces the tensions that every reflective sportsman must face - between growing up and staying immature, between self-obsession and team-spiritedness, between honesty and denial, between clear-eyed analysis and the wilful illusion of mastery and control.

I couldn't resist a smile of recognition at one inconsistency. Cowan describes his admiration for Nassim Taleb's books on randomness and the power of forces outside our control. Then he goes out to bat in his lucky socks, having had a lucky haircut, eaten at his lucky Italian restaurant, drunk lucky coffee made for him by his wife (did he choose the wife on the grounds that she was lucky, one wonders!). Analytically Cowan understands randomness. In practice, he clings to superstition. Madness? Maybe. Perhaps we all need to be a little bit crazy, especially if you are an opening batsman.

What is it about writing a diary that helps cricketers play at their best? You might expect it to lead to over-analysis and too much self-absorption. Paradoxically, writing a diary has the opposite effect: it seems to set cricketers free. Instead of a burden, writing becomes an exorcism.

There is an even broader point. Every sportsman lives on the knife-edge of outcomes. He either wins or loses, on a daily basis. For the writer, it is very different. All experience, however uncomfortable, contributes to the well of his material. A writer is necessarily an alchemist, and no metal is too dull for him to turn into gold.

Here's a radical thought. Perhaps every sportsman should try to find the pastime that releases him from the tyranny of results. Writing will only work for very few. But almost every athlete, I suspect, would benefit from a complementary challenge of some kind. Michael Bevan told me that once you are a seasoned cricketer, poor form is almost never caused by technical failings. Instead, the root cause is always emotional. So you've got to sort out how you are feeling before the backswing can be corrected.

Professionalism, when it is properly understood, is having the discipline to attend to your whole personality as well as your game. They are, after all, inextricably intertwined - as Ed Cowan has shown us once again.

Former England, Kent and Middlesex batsman Ed Smith is a writer with the Times.

Students name best (and worst) universities

By Richard Garner, Education Editor and Laurie Martin
Wednesday, 17 August 2011

 

A year is a long time in the world of higher education. A university that has been the most expensive in the country will become one of the best in terms of value for money next year.

The University of Buckingham is ranked third in a table of student satisfaction published today – but those above it will be charging the maximum £9,000 a year for a three-year course.

Professor Terence Keeley, the vice-chancellor, said "We're going from the most expensive university in the UK to the cheapest," he said yesterday, "and we still don't know how to handle that psychologically."
Buckingham, the UK's only private university, scores 93 per cent in a table showing the percentage of students sat each university satisfied with their courses – putting it in third place.

Top of the league table is the higher charging Brighton and Sussex Medical School followed by Cambridge University.

The table, however, would appear to show that if students are looking for value for money next year, they need to look outside of the traditional state-funded university you can go away to and study at for three years.
All those in the top ten that can charge £9,000 a year for their courses and those in England are doing so.
Buckingham University, who will be charging £7,500 a year for a three-year course, and the Open University, which is charging £5,000 a year, are the exceptions.

In Buckingham's case, courses are spread over a two-year period – so the actual cost is £11,250. However, that is still significantly less than the £27,000 for a three-year course at a university charging the maximum.
Professor Keeley is clear as to why students rate the university.

"That's straightforward," he said. "In every other university in Britain, the client is the Government – so they have to work to government targets. Here the client is the student."

Christina Lloyd, director of teaching and learning at the Open University – which has been in the top three for the past seven years, added: "As students become more focused on their finances, quality, value for money and the student experience are more important than ever."

Overall, 83 per cent of students who responded to this year's national student survey said they were satisfied with their courses, nine per cent were dissatisfied and eight per cent said they did not know.

Individual figures ranged from 95 per cent for Brighton and Sussex Medical school to just 67 per cent for Ravensbourne College, a university sector college specialising in digital media and design.

In the further education sector, the figures were more varied with 100 per cent satisfaction registered at Trafford College in Greater Manchester but only 39 per cent in Barnfield College.in Luton and Bedford.
Whilst universities were pleased that the overall satisfaction figures were a slight increase on last year, there was a warning of the impact cuts and rises in fees could have.

Am I A Product Of The Institutions I Attended?

Amitabha Bagchi

I have been thinking for a while about how the institutions we affiliate ourselves to—or maybe our parents "admit" us to, or social pressures force us into—as students affect us, form us, shape us, turn our lives decisively down one of the many roads available to us. This question—Is what I am a product of the institutions I attended?—falls in the family of questions engendered by the basic question: What makes me who I am? This question, often asked before the perhaps more fundamental question—Who am I?—is not so easily answered. After all, our lives are produced by a complex interplay of factors, some determined in advance—race, class, gender, geography, personality, biology—and some random and contingent. The lens of science fails in the face of this complexity.

But the novelist, unlike the scientist, has a different relationship to questions. His job is not to answer them. His job is to put them into play. The unanswerable question is one of the basic tools of the storyteller's trade. Let me give you an example: Should Ram have made Sita take an agni parkisha because of what the washer man said? This question, so simple to state, is a vortex that begins spinning slowly, but then it widens and becomes stronger and stronger. As we argue and debate, it sucks in ship after ship of the fleet of human experience. What portion of a man's life is subject to his duty? How far does the power of love extend? What constitutes fidelity in a marriage? What is the nature of trust? Keep answering these questions, and like the asura Raktabija, who had a boon that every time a drop of his blood fell to the ground a new Raktabija would be born, a new set of questions emerges with each answer. The novelist's job, then, is to set questions into play, ornament them and lead them through the lives of people, and watch as they draw those lives into their fold.

And so as a novelist, I find myself asking this question—Am I a product of the institutions I attended?—in an attempt to open out a field of questions, in an attempt to add to the form of human knowledge that is full of errors and poetry, that form of human knowledge that is most intimate and personal.

Having used the P word—personal—let me start by saying that in the years since I left school I never thought that I would get an opportunity to thank NCERT for the impact it has had on my life. I could probably find a number of things to say in thanks, but let me just focus on one. In all my English textbooks since class nine I always found at least one story or play by a writer called William Saroyan. His stories of a young Armenian boy's life somewhere in the central part of California made a deep impression on me. In the years since, I have derived many things from those few stories I read. I learned that there is a deep sadness that lies right at the heart of the immigrant experience—something that the now fashionable generation of immigrant writers has never fully captured. I learned that a gentle kind of realism is the best way to describe the lives of people trying to live a dignified life in the face of hardship. I learned—and this is the one realization on which my brief writing career so far has rested, and, I suspect, whatever I write in future will also rest—that the strength of weak people is the stuff of literature. But it was only when I moved to California in 2002 that I learned that Saroyan is all but forgotten in his home country. That's when I really thanked the people who decided to put him into an NCERT textbook for almost every year since class nine.

Class nine was also my first year at a prominent school in South Delhi. Those of us who live in Delhi think of it as flat but every here and there we do come across small hills and this school is located on one such hill. So it happens that when I think back to this school and my days there I often find myself thinking of walking up an incline towards the large metal gates, manned by a chowkidar. I had been to other schools before that one, whose topography was as flat as the rest of the city's, but somehow when I think of school, I think of walking up a gentle slope, I think of a mass of grey boxy buildings sitting on a hill. Perhaps the fact that it is harder to walk up a hill than it is to walk on flat ground has something to do with it. When you reached those gates, there was an invisible membrane you passed through, like a scene from Star Trek where you stepped through a portal and you reached another dimension. Those gates were a valve, easily entered but hard to exit through. Those gates separated the world within the school from the world outside. Inside those gates we were safe from things we did not even know existed outside them. Within them lay a world of classrooms and corridors, playing field and Principal's office, labs and the library. And in each of these spaces there was a protocol, an acceptable way of carrying yourself, and an unacceptable way.

So school then is the place in which we learn what decorum is, and that each space has its own notion of decorum. But we learn this in what is to my mind the wrong way. We learn that decorum is linked to policing. That we should not be walking down a school corridor without an excuse during class time because a teacher may accost us. We learn that we should not talk too loudly in an unattended classroom, because someone may come in and drag us off to the Principal's office. And this structure of learning engenders another learning. We find those distant corners of the football field where cigarettes may be smoked. We figure out which shadows under which staircase are best suited for stealing kisses with our new love. We share stories of rules broken without consequence, we aspire to create narratives of ourselves as clever lawbreakers. We begin to value duplicity and deceit. Perhaps this process could redeem itself if it helped us lose our fear of authority. I have always believed that fear of authority causes psychic damage that diminishes human society, and that the social control we get in return does not justify what we lose. But the problem is that plotting and scheming to undermine authority because it is a subcultural imperative—as it becomes in these situations—does not rob us of our fear of authority. We remain fearful. And we become sly.

School was not only a spatial category, it was also a temporal one. School was the world of 7:40 am to 1:30 pm. It was a division of the first part of the day into neatly ordered chunks of time, never shorter than 20 minutes, never longer than 45. I have sometimes wondered about the daily routines, and their fixed nature. At first, rather unfairly, I used to think that social control was best enforced by controlling a person's time. Marx, in his own take on this matter, wrote about the centrality of the working day to the capitalist project. Not as theoretically developed as Marx's but I too had—and still have—a rebellious schoolboy's approach to the regimentation of time. But then I also began to think of it in another way. Is unplanned time as threatening as unmapped space? School, the place where space was made safe for us, was also a place where our time was organized for us: the day was chopped into a sequence of intervals, each interval to be used in a particular way.

I was one of those people who stayed on the straight and narrow, but in my school bus there were two older boys who revelled in informing students like me of their escapades. These escapades involved getting off the school bus just like the rest of us, but walking off in the other direction, through the government houses that neighboured our school, onwards to a South Indian restaurant on Rao Tula Ram Marg. They had their breakfast there, it took about half an hour, and then walked leisurely past Moti Bagh to the Sarojini Nagar railway station, reaching there around a quarter to nine. Then they boarded the Ring Railway that took about two hours to take them around the city and bring them back to where they began. Getting off the train they would head towards the now demolished Chanakya cinema, reaching in good time for the eleven o'clock show. That would last till around one pm, a convenient time to take a bus back to school, getting there just before the school bus left for home. It took me a while to realize that although these not-so-orderly schoolboys had rejected the school's way of organizing the morning hours, they had not rejected the notion that the morning hours needed to be organized.

Those two boys fell neatly into one category of the taxonomy we informally maintained in my academically oriented school. They were what were called bad students. After that category came good students and then brilliant students. There were other classifications too: some students were there to improve the school's results, some to fill its coffers and some to ensure that Delhi's political class looked upon our school favourably. But the various categories that we had in my school in Delhi—it was one of what we still call the "good" schools of Delhi—were to prove wholly inadequate when I graduated and found myself at college in IIT.

When I entered IIT Delhi in the early 90s, I happened to be assigned the same hostel that my cousin who had entered IIT in the middle of eighties had lived in. When given a choice between attending class and spending his time in the hostel's music room, I was told by some of my seniors who had known him, he preferred the latter. In this music room, he told me when I asked him, used to live a large collection of cassettes on which generation after generation of hostel residents had painstakingly recorded, from whatever source available, a fund of music that comprehensively represented the popular musical production of the American sixties and seventies. Rock musicians who were long forgotten in the US lived in recordings that were revered in our hostel at IIT. That music room formed the person he was, and the person he continues to be today. But, oddly enough, of the trove of music the music room had housed there remained but three tapes when I got there. I used to go there to study sometimes, because no one else seemed to have any use for that space. Outside that room, in the rest of the hostel, instead of long discussions over the superiority of Deep Purple over Led Zeppelin, now arguments raged between those who worshipped Madhuri Dixit and those whose hearts beat for Urmila Matondkar. In the common room next door, the newly installed cable TV was firmly tuned to the one or two channels that had discovered a business model built around twenty fours hours of Chitrahaar. Something had changed between the time my cousin had left and I had entered.

Today when Hindi soap operas command literally 20 times more viewer- ship than English programming, we know well enough the shape of the change. But at that time this churning was just beginning—obfuscated by pointless debates on the impact of cable television on "Indian culture". Each discipline—Economics, Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science—has its own explanations for this change. I myself think of it as the era in which the spread of coaching classes made it possible for people outside the metropolitan centres to succeed at the IIT entrance exam. At IIT we complain about the influence of the coaching class culture on the quality of our intake. But anecdotal evidence makes it amply clear that the rise of the coaching class culture meant the end of the dominance of English speaking elites from urban centres at IIT. The end of the dominance of people like me.

If someone were to look at the grade sheets from my first year they would conclude that I didn't learn much that year, but the truth of the matter is that I learned a lot. I learned, for example, that I loved carrom board and I was really good at it. I spent hours and hours playing carrom. In the process I made friendships with other people who spent hours and hours playing carrom. One day I was partnering a boy who was one year my senior, and we were playing against two others from his year. One of them, Gaurav, from a "good" school in Chandigarh, pointed to my partner and asked: Do you know what his name is? An odd question, I thought at that time. Of course I knew what his name was, I saw him every other day at the carrom room. His given name was Sumer Lal and his surname was one that I had learned by that time was shared by other people who got into IIT on the Scheduled Caste quota. "I know his name," I said. Gaurav, who hadn't a trace of any negative sentiment in his voice, said: "I didn't find out his name till the end of my first year." Gaurav, who probably became friends with the Rohits and Amits and Viveks within days of reaching the hostel, spent almost 12 months there before he learned Sumer Lal's name.

One of the interesting things we were all made to do during ragging was to read certain texts in Hindi written by a person whose name was always Mast Ram. The technical term for this literature was uttejak sahitya. We all had to read it, especially those of us who found it objectionable. I didn't find it objectionable, but for me a different task was assigned: I was made to translate it. Me and those few others who, the assigner of the task knew, would have trouble translating it. I knew the dirty words, that was not a problem, but I still struggled with the translation, stumbling over the heavily idiomatic language, the richly textured euphemisms that seemed to come so naturally to Mast Ram. It was probably the first time it struck me that my school Hindi textbooks had done me a disservice, and that the Hindi Cell style signage that I saw around the city was a total misrepresentation of a living breathing language. In those early days in the hostel, when I was keen to offer friendship to whoever IIT had arbitrarily chosen to put along with me in the hostel, I struggled to cross a barrier of language that my education in Delhi had created for me. But the people on the other side appreciated the fact that I did struggle, at least I think they did. And even if they didn't, several years later when I picked up and read end to end my first Hindi novel—Shrilal Shukla's Raag Darbari—I had them to thank for showing me that Hindi had a colloquial richness, a richness that would serve as a magnet for a person who loves language. And that magnetic attraction could take me to places I would not have otherwise chosen to go, shown me things about the country of my birth that I would not have otherwise chosen to see.

When I was in school my mother would sometimes go shopping at one of the prominent fresh produce markets of Delhi. On occasion we would stop at a South Indian dhaba that sat at the mouth of this market. Much to my astonishment some time into my stay at IIT I found that the dhaba was owned by the family of one of my closest friends at IIT—he is now a leading computer scientist in a prominent research lab in the US. I cannot forget the day he came to me, some time in our third year, and asked: "Bagchi, tu dose banaa letaa hai?" Before I could answer this question in the affirmative or negative he told me that his father was thinking of locking out the "labour" at the dhaba. "Ek do din maalik logon ko hi kaam karna padega." I nodded my agreement at the kind of prospect that I, the son of a civil servant father and schoolteacher mother, had never contemplated in my brief life. The thought of crossing the counter that I had sat on the customer side of sent a thrill up my spine. Unfortunately, or fortunately, the labour came around by that evening and I never did get to make dosas on the large tavas the dhaba had, but for a brief moment there I teetered at the edge of it, and I had to project out of my own world into another world where shop owners and labour squabbled while dosas waited to be made.

I cannot claim that the life I live now is fundamentally different in its everyday rhythms from the lives of the other English speaking students I went to school with. I cannot claim that what I learned in the years I was thrown into close contact with people who I had only seen from a distance before transformed me, because I have no way of knowing what I would have been like if I had not had that experience. But I do know that while I treasured what my teachers taught me at IIT—and treasured it enough to have joined their ranks today—I treasure equally, if not more, what I learned in the hostel's carrom room, in the canteen, in the corridors.

It is not my contention that we all learned to get along. Please do not think that I am trying to portray IIT as some happy melting pot of India's diversity. It was not that. It was as riven with casteism, communalism, classism, sexism and all the other ugly isms that our society nurtures. How could it not be? But by pretending that these things didn't matter, that exams and grades and job interviews were more important than all these things, it gave an opportunity to those who were willing to learn to get along with people who weren't like themselves. It gave a quixotic notion of an India populated by Indians a chance. Indians who were consumerist, over-ambitious, self-important technocrats perhaps, but who were, nonetheless, more Indian than anything else. And the fact is that this learning was not part of any of the curricula at IIT. But, as all of us who have been teachers for even a short while know, all we can do is give people an opportunity to learn. And if they don't learn, we can give them another opportunity, and another. Because the truth is that in a class of 100, there will only be four or five who get it the first time, only 10 or 15 who understand it in outline, and the remaining will take it in one ear and let it out of the other. I know people who still use the word "shadda" to refer to people who got into IIT through the SC/ST quotas, despite having played hard-fought games of volleyball in the same team as some of them, despite having stayed up long bleary-eyed hours preparing for exams along with them, despite having drunk too much and thrown up with them. Some people never learn. That is the teacher's frustration. But some people do learn and that is the teacher's reward. And, a priori, we teachers never know which is which.

It's a complex and random process, this interaction with young people that we teachers enter into for a living. It has many sides. Like so many other teachers I spend a lot of time thinking about my students, and, also like many other teachers, I don't spend enough time thinking about what they think of me. But when I do, I am forced to remember how I saw my teachers. Physically I saw them through a forest of dark haired heads—I always preferred to sit near the back of the class. I saw them standing up on the raised platform at the front of the class, on which the short looked tall and the tall looked taller. I took their careful grooming for granted—not realizing that if one of them turned up looking slovenly I would probably have been as upset or offended as the school's principal. I associated a certain amount of self-possession with them. And I thought of them as older. A small anecdote here: In class nine I entered a CBSE school and took Sanskrit instead of Hindi. My mother was concerned that I wouldn't be able to cope so she went to meet my teacher. Afterwards I asked her how the meeting went and she said: "Your Sanskrit teacher is a very sweet girl." I realized that my mother was probably fifteen or twenty years older than my Sanskrit teacher, and senior in the same profession, but still the idea that my teacher could be thought of, by anyone, as a "girl" was very difficult to comprehend. So difficult that I still remember that statement, long long after, I'm guessing, my mother forgot all about it.

So there you are, you poor teacher, frozen in eternal adulthood, even on those days when you wish you could just curl into a foetal position and suck your thumb instead of having to stand up and talk for an hour to a room full of young people who are looking at you, or at least should be looking at you. Sometimes in the nitty-gritty of the syllabus, the announcements about exams and homework, the clearing of the last class's doubts, you forget about the current that emerges from your body and flows out into the class. You forget what you mean to them.

I was lucky to have some excellent teachers at IIT Delhi, and I am not just saying that because some of them are my colleagues now. Let me explain with a story why I thought well of them. In my second year I had a class in computer architecture. Before the first semester exam, being somewhat lazy I didn't memorise certain assembly language keywords and their meanings. When the exam paper came there was one big question that involved explaining what a fragment of assembly language code did. It was impossible to answer without knowing the meaning of those keywords. One of my friends from the hostel who knew I hadn't memorised the keywords looked at me and snickered. Stung by this I decided to take a risk. I raised my hand and called the professor. "I don't know what these keywords mean," I said. He looked down at the paper, thought for a moment, then went to the board and wrote out the meanings of all the keywords. Right there, on the spot, he decided that this question was not a test of memory, it was a test of understanding. Not only did I snicker back at the friend who had laughed at me, I also never forgot the lesson. I apply it in my classes even today.

I knew from around the age of 19 that I wanted to be a professor. I was 30 when I actually became one. In those 11 years, especially towards the end of that period, I often used to daydream about the time when I would stand in front of my first class. When I dreamt about it I always saw myself standing in a particular lecture room at IIT Delhi, Block VI, Room 301, where most of my lectures in the latter part of my stay at IIT had been held. I would see myself standing up on the platform of VI 301 about to say my first words to my first class, and I knew I would be feeling something. I just didn't know what it was. As it turned out, my first teaching job was at IIT Delhi and when I got the room assignment for that first semester I found out that the class I was teaching would meet in VI 301. I walked up the one floor from my office, my stomach fluttering. I turned into that familiar door, carrying the attendance sheets, the sign of my authority, in my right hand, and walked onto the podium. I put the attendance sheets down on the table and turned towards the class. I looked up at them, seventy something of them, sitting in those long desks where I had so often sat and would never again sit. I looked at their faces and suddenly I ached at the pain they would feel in their lives. They sat there looking up at me, innocent to the suffering their future would bring them, and it came running through me, unexpectedly, this thought: There is so much you all will go through in your lives. Sometimes when I feel I am forgetting what my students mean to me and what I mean to them, I remind myself of that moment when I stood in front of my first class, that hot July day when I learned something about who I was and about the life I had chosen for myself.

About MBA education!

- The principal achievements of a business school education are:

"First, to equip students with a vocabulary that enables them to talk authoritatively about subjects they did not understand.

Second, to give students the ability to withstand any amount of disconfirming evidence.

Third, to give students a ticket of admission to a job where they could learn something about management".
------

- All MBA graduates should have a skull and crossbones on their foreheads along with warnings that they are not fit to manage.
--------

- The business community has run one of the most successful sales campaigns of the 20th century - persuading most of us that business people have the answer to everything from biscuitmaking to hospitals to schools.
------

- Modern business methods based on the so called 'management sciences' taught in business schools are not infallible.
-----

- One of the weaknesses of the business culture and its "management sciences" is that it is too certain; it does not allow for questioning of its wisdom and it often ignores the voice of experience.


Extracted from India's Unending Journey by Mark Tully