The political menu of food

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn

EID in Pakistan leaves unwieldy quantities of carcasses to deal with. But the world’s largest festival of ritual slaughter is held every five years in Nepal’s Bariyarpur village, mostly of water buffaloes, for the propitiation of goddess Gadhimai. On the other hand, The Indian Express reported recently that more Indians are turning to meat eating than ever before, leaving vegetarian men in the age group of 15 to 49 — who had never consumed “fish, chicken or meat” — at a faltering 16.6 per cent in 2019-21. Indian gurus cite ancient texts to suggest that meat eating makes us aggressive and vegetarianism has a calming effect.

That’s not the way it always seems to play out though. Are people who kill people in a riot or a massacre vegetarians or meat eaters? It is probably the wrong question to pose. I once ordered a bowl of thukpa at a Tibetan restaurant in Manali. It is a meat dish with noodles popular among Tibetans who are nearly all Buddhist. In the meantime, I wondered if the owner could kindly swat away the flies. There was total refusal to do anything about the pests hovering over the table. “We don’t kill,” was the clear but polite reply. What about the thukpa? It has meat. “I didn’t kill it,” the man smiled.

Within meat-eating and vegetarian groups there are further subdivisions that can be equally needlessly misleading. Giora Becker and Gershon Kedar were Israeli diplomats I came to know in India. Becker was a free-spirited Jew and didn’t hesitate to put on his plate food that was forbidden in his culture. Kedar was an orthodox Jew who turned out to be the opposite of Becker in food habits. He was unprepared, for example, to have a meal anywhere other than the Dasaprakasa, once a popular vegetarian restaurant in Delhi. There was no chance of kosher requirements being violated at the restaurant where meat of any kind was neither cooked or served.

Their different approaches to food and indeed to their religion played little or no role in approaching the Palestinian question. If blood had to flow for their country, rightly or wrongly, it would be spilt, never mind the key commandment that forbids killing of humans as a sin.

Popular belief about food misrepresents men and animals alike. Indian gurus insist vegetarians are of a calmer disposition while meat makes one aggressive. A close look would find little or no evidence for the common claim. In a similar vein, the fact that snakes don’t drink milk caves before popular belief. Sample the faulty but commonly used idiom that refuses to yield to the compelling fact. It insists that feeding milk to a baby snake is to nurture an enemy.

The Express report on the increasing number of meat eaters in India struggles against the number of vegetarian leaders the country has elected, including the current one. The three from the Kashmiri Brahmin stock — Nehru, Indira, Rajiv — ate meat and practised yoga. The other meat eaters were A.B. Vajpayee, a Brahmin from the Hindutva flank. Chandra Shekhar and V.P. Singh, the two thakurs from Uttar Pradesh, and the two gentlemen from Punjab, Inder Gujral and Manmohan Singh were regular omnivores. Gulzari Lal Nanda, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Morarji Desai, Narasimha Rao, Deve Gowda, and now Narendra Modi bring up the vegetarian cluster. Shastri and Indira Gandhi fought wars adroitly despite their different food habits.

There’s another challenge to the vegetarian and non-vegetarian debate. You may be this or that, or, after today’s fashion, even a vegan; it will not take you away from your blood-caked past. If the late Prof Kailash Nath Kaul was right, Indian languages offer a glimpse into our cannibal origins, which we share with the wider world. The common threat to drink someone’s blood in a heated moment or chew somebody raw, or make mincemeat of one’s quarry may have an unaccepted origin in our early evolution as social beings.

Movie actor Dharmendra was more popular than his contemporaries for baying for the enemy’s blood in frequent climax scenes. He was applauded, not booed for using the north Indian idiom of bloodlust. The phenomenon is evenly distributed across many nations. Militaries carry on the tradition of our headhunting past. If one remembers correctly, there was this picture of a British soldier with a bunch of decapitated heads of Malayan communist guerrillas in the 1940s. Accusations abound of Indian and Pakistani troops periodically indulging in the gore.

According to Harikishan Sharma’s report in the Express, while the country is increasingly convulsed in the vegetarian-meat-eating dispute, the truer picture remains studiously aloof from the debate.

“More people are eating non-vegetarian food than ever before, and the proportion of Indian men who do so has gone up sharply in the six years between 2015-16 and 2019-21,” the Express quotes the National Family Health Survey as revealing. Women meat eaters too have increased, albeit glacially.

"They don't want to extradite Assange. They want to kill him."

 

Why they lynched Mashal Khan. Lessons for humans.

Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Dawn

THE mental state of men ready and poised to kill has long fascinated scientists. The Nobel Prize winning ethologist, Konrad Lorenz, says such persons experience the ‘Holy Shiver’ (called Heiliger Schauer in German) just moments before performing the deed. In his famous book On Aggression, Lorenz describes it as a tingling of the spine prior to performing a heroic act in defence of their communities.

This feeling, he says, is akin to the pre-human reflex that raises hair on an animal’s back as it zeroes in for the kill. He writes: “A shiver runs down the back and along the outside of both arms. All obstacles become unimportant … instinctive inhibitions against hurting or killing disappear … Men enjoy the feeling of absolute righteousness even as they commit atrocities.”

While they stripped naked and beat their colleague Mashal Khan with sticks and bricks, the 20-25 students of the Mardan university enjoyed precisely this feeling of righteousness. They said Khan had posted content disrespectful of Islam on his Facebook page and so they took it upon themselves to punish him. Finally, one student took out his pistol and shot him dead. Hundreds of others watched approvingly and, with their smartphone cameras, video-recorded the killing for distribution on their Facebook pages. A meeting of this self-congratulatory group resolved to hide the identity of the shooter.

Khan had blasphemed! Until this was finally shown to be false, no proper funeral was possible in his home village. Sympathy messages from Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and opposition leaders such as Bilawal Bhutto came only after it had been established that Khan performed namaz fairly regularly.

Significantly, no protests of significance followed. University campuses were silent and meetings discussing the murder were disallowed. A demonstration at the Islamabad Press Club drew about 450, a miniscule figure against the estimated 200,000 who attended Mumtaz Qadri’s last rites.

This suggests that much of the Pakistani public, whether tacitly or openly, endorses violent punishment of suspected blasphemers. Why? How did so many Pakistanis become bloodthirsty vigilantes? Evening TV talk shows — at least those I have either seen or participated in — circle around two basic explanations.

One, favoured by the liberal-minded, blames the blasphemy law and implicitly demands its repeal (an explicit call would endanger one’s life). The other, voiced by the religiously orthodox, says vigilantism occurs only because our courts act too slowly against accused blasphemers.

Both claims are not just wrong, they are farcical. Subsequent to Khan’s killing, at least two other incidents show that gut reactions — not what some law says — is really what counts. In one, three armed burqa-clad sisters shot dead a man near Sialkot who had been accused of committing blasphemy 13 years ago. In the other, a visibly mentally ill man in Chitral uttered remarks inside a mosque and escaped lynching only upon the imam’s intervention. The mob subsequently burned the imam’s car. Heiliger Schauer!

While searching for a real explanation, let’s first note that religiously charged mobs are also in motion across the border. As more people flock to mandirs or masjids, the outcomes are strikingly similar. In an India that is now rapidly Hinduising, crowds are cheering enraged gau rakshaks who smash the skulls of Muslims suspected of consuming or transporting cows. In fact India has its own Khan — Pehlu Khan.
Accused of cattle-smuggling, Pehlu Khan was lynched and killed by cow vigilantes earlier this month before a cheering crowd in Alwar, with the episode also video-recorded. Minister Gulab Chand Kataria declared that Khan belonged to a family of cow smugglers and he had no reason to feel sorry. Now that cow slaughter has been hyped as the most heinous of crimes, no law passed in India can reverse vigilantism.

Vigilantism is best explained by evolutionary biology and sociology. A fundamental principle there says only actions and thoughts that help strengthen group identity are well received, others are not. In common with our ape ancestors, we humans instinctively band together in groups because strength lies in unity. The benefits of group membership are immense — access to social networks, enhanced trust, recognition, etc. Of course, as in a club, membership carries a price tag. Punishing cow-eaters or blasphemers (even alleged ones will do) can be part payment. You become a real hero by slaying a villain — ie someone who challenges your group’s ethos. Your membership dues are also payable by defending or eulogising heroes.

Celebration of such ‘heroes’ precedes Qadri. The 19-year old illiterate who killed Raj Pal, the Hindu publisher of a controversial book on the Prophet (PBUH), was subsequently executed by the British but the youth was held in the highest esteem. Ghazi Ilm Din is venerated by a mausoleum over his grave in Lahore. An 8th grade KP textbook chapter eulogising him tells us that Ilm Din’s body remained fresh days after the execution.

In recent times, backed by the formidable power of the state, Hindu India and Islamic Pakistan have vigorously injected religion into both politics and society. The result is their rapid re-tribalisation through ‘meme transmission’ of primal values. A concept invented by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, the meme is a ‘piece of thought’ transferrable from person to person by imitation. Like computer viruses, memes can jump from mind to mind.
Memes containing notions of religious or cultural superiority have been ‘cut-and-pasted’ into millions of young minds. Consequently, more than ever before, today’s youth uncritically accepts the inherent morality of their particular group, engages in self-censorship, rationalises the group’s decisions, and engages in moral policing.

Groupthink and deadly memes caused the lynching and murder of the two Khans. Is a defence against such viral afflictions ever possible? Can the subcontinent move away from its barbaric present to a civilised future? One can so hope. After all, like fleas, memes and thought packages can jump from person to person. But they don’t bite everybody! A robust defence can be built by educating people into the spirit of critical inquiry, helping them become individuals rather than groupies, and encouraging them to introspect. A sense of humour, and maybe poetry, would also help.

Why the bouncer is not essential to cricket

Pranay Sanklecha in Cricinfo

The bouncer: not worth the risk  © Getty Images

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The death of Phillip Hughes was also the death of a certain kind of false, if sincere, innocence about the game. We are reminded that cricket balls can kill. So what should we do about bouncers?

The standard answer - unanimous, even, when it comes to the old pros who constitute the majority of those who write and talk about cricket, is: nothing. There is nothing to do. Keep calm and carry on. We must understand that what happened to Hughes was a tragic but freak accident (by the way, as Andy Bull wrote in the Guardian, such tragedies happen more often than we might unthinkingly assume). Be sad because it's a tragedy, but don't let it change anything because it was a freakish one. 

Let one view stand for the rest. This is what Mark Richardson had to say:

Don't get me wrong. I don't want to see people getting seriously hurt and what happened to Phillip Hughes is just awful but what people have to accept is that this was such a freak occurrence and serious injury is still so rare that it does not in any way suggest cricket has a problem with the short ball at all. In fact, if cricket took away the bouncer, then we would have a problem. So let's mourn the loss of Phillip Hughes but not use it to grandstand unnecessarily.

I agree. Let's not grandstand unnecessarily. But let's also realise that this is a difficult question, and to dismiss the view that bouncers ought to be banned is itself unnecessary grandstanding, just from the opposite direction.

Let's first realise that there is a moral question here. When you run in and bowl a bouncer, you are (often, not always) aiming it at the batsman. If you're even halfway quick, you know - or after the death of Hughes you ought to, anyway - that you're doing something that carries a risk of causing death, a much greater risk than most other actions carried out while playing cricket.

It doesn't follow that you ought not to do it, or that you are to blame for doing it. What does follow is that you need a valid justification for doing it, and this is not provided by the trope that the bowler doesn't intend to hurt the batsman. Good for the bowler, but it still doesn't address the question of whether he's morally justified in imposing the risk of a very great harm on the batsman.

Now imposing a risk of a very great harm is not the same as imposing a great risk of harm. For instance, each time you fly, you run a tiny risk of a very great harm, while if you gently lob a pebble at someone from a few metres away, you impose a very big risk of a very small harm.

We seem comfortable with the former. Driving, for example, kills hundreds of thousands of people every year, but we do not believe that it should be banned. Why not? Because of roughly these two reasons: first, we believe that the benefits of the practice of driving outweigh the harm of the tragedies it causes; second, we believe that the risk of causing those harms is to some extent unavoidable. We try to minimise those risks, but we accept that given current technology we cannot eliminate them, and we accept them because of the value to us of being able to drive.

And this has been roughly the argument when it comes to bouncers. People outline its benefits: it's thrilling (which Test cricket needs to stay alive), it maintains the balance between bat and ball, it's a test of courage and thereby reveals character (men from boys and all that), it is part of the tradition of the game.

We can accept all of that, for the sake of the argument. But even after we do, we haven't justified the use of bouncers because there is one crucial difference between the practices of driving and of bowling bouncers.

For the justification of driving, it's crucial that its benefits can't be realised without running the accompanying risks. If they could, there would be absolutely no justification left for running those risks.

The bouncer does indeed create benefits. But it does not seem indispensable to creating them. Tradition is not justification, and even if it were, our traditions are mostly the innovations of an earlier time. Eliminating the bouncer would end a tradition, but it would simply be part of the story of the evolution of cricket, and many other traditions would remain. And if you want thrilling Test cricket and a competitive balance between bat and ball, you can achieve both by the simple expedient of making pitches better.

Eliminating the bouncer would end a tradition, but it would simply be part of the story of the evolution of cricket, and many other traditions would remain

One way of doing this would be, of course, to make pitches bouncier, which would increase the risk of inflicting harm, and this might seem to contradict my argument. To quote Mill, via Kipling, "nay, nay, not so, but far otherwise". First, leaving grass on, and allowing pitches to take spin, both make pitches more competitive without necessarily imparting greater bounce. Second, a bouncy pitch would certainly make it more likely that harm will be inflicted, but it's short-pitched bowling that would make it more likely to inflict great harm. And my argument is in part to do with proportionality. I'm not saying take the risk of harm out of the game, I'm saying (well, I will be shortly) that I can't see a good argument from risk vs benefit for imposing the great risks of bowling bouncers.

Make boundaries bigger while you're at it. As for courage and revealing character, well, there are any number of ways cricket does that without the bouncer. Sacrificing your wicket, playing in an unnatural style, bowling into the wind, your response to defeat and victory and misfortune - all these things reveal character. Facing spin on turning pitches is a test of courage, of confronting the fear of looking stupid. Calling for a crucial catch, standing under a ball that steeples high into the air and on which the fate of the game depends - this requires courage.

Ah, but the bouncer is special, people will say, because it's about physical courage. I agree with the latter but disagree with the former. A game with a hard ball travelling at speed will necessarily test physical courage. A game that requires the kind of unnatural exertion demanded of fast bowlers will necessarily test physical courage. A game that people play with niggling injuries, with broken fingers and torn hamstrings, as with in Michael Clarke's case basically no back - this game will test physical courage.

Some may have the intellectual honesty here to go the extreme position. The bouncer is special, they will say, because it tests - especially now, after the death of Hughes - the fear of death. And this testing creates benefits that nothing else can.

But even this, sadly, isn't true. It is not special in carrying the risk of death. To take the most recent example, think of the Israeli umpire who died because of a shot that ricocheted off the stumps. Simply by virtue of the hard ball, and the speeds at which it can be thrown and struck, cricket will always intrinsically carry the risk of causing death. People can die without bouncers being bowled. So even if you maintain that the fear of death is an essential part of cricket, you don't need bouncers to do it.

The point is not that we must make the game riskless. The only way this could even be attempted to be done is to make the ball soft. This would indeed destroy cricket. The point is that we must aim to reduce unnecessary risks. What are unnecessary risks? Well, a pretty good example is something which is not essential to creating the benefits associated with it, and something which directly increases the risk of deaths on the cricket field.

The bouncer.

I love the bouncer. It's electrifying, both to play and to watch. Atherton v Donald, Morkel v Clarke, Johnson 2.0 (or 3 or 4 or 7.7, new Mitch, moustachioed Mitch) v everyone. Who doesn't want to see that?

But I can't see an argument from the morality of risk that justifies it. I can see one other possibility, an argument from, roughly, the value of self-realisation. But reasons of space mean that will have to be the topic of a separate piece.

Why chess is really an extreme sport

The deaths of two players at the Chess Olympiad in Norway shows that it’s time tournaments came with a health warning

• 
• • Stephen Moss
  • theguardian.com, Saturday 16 August 2014 09.00 BST

Chess. 'One false step and you will have lost. This imposes enormous pressure on players.' Photograph: 18percentgrey/Alamy

It seemed to me one of the strangest coincidences of all time: two chess players dying on the same day at the end of the biennial Chess Olympiad in Norway. But when I spoke to a chess-playing friend of mine, he said “Is it really so odd?” There were almost 2,000 players taking part in the event, quite a few of them – especially the men – getting on in years, unfit, sedentary. Healthwise, they were high risk. Are two deaths really so surprising?

My friend is right and wrong at the same time. It is a bizarre coincidence that two players – one from the Seychelles, one from Uzbekistan, the former at the board, the latter in his hotel room after the tournament had ended – should die within hours of each other. That’s why there has been news interest in the case, and why he is wrong in this respect. But he is spot on about the susceptibility of chess players to stress-related conditions. Chess, though the non-player might not believe this, is in many ways an extreme sport.

At the Olympiad, participants were playing a game a day over a fortnight – 11 rounds with just a couple of rest days on which to recuperate. For up to seven hours a day, they would be sitting at the board trying to kill – metaphorically speaking – their opponent, because this is the ultimate game of kill or be killed. In some positions, you can reach a point where both sides are simultaneously within a single move of checkmating the other. One false step and you will have lost. This imposes enormous pressure on players.

These days, some top players use psychologists to help them deal with this stress. They are also paying increasing attention to diet and fitness. I was staying in the same hotel as many of the world’s top players during the great annual tournament at Wijk aan Zee on the Dutch coast in January, and was struck by the regime adopted by Levon Aronian, the Armenian-born world number two, who started each day with a run followed by a healthy breakfast.

These elite players, however, are the exception within the chess world: they have the money and the specialist entourage that allows them to put a high priority on fitness and well-being. They realise that to play top-level chess, you have to be extremely fit and mentally settled. Any physical ailment or mental distraction is likely to stop you playing well. You need to be at the top of your game to perform. In that sense, it is as much a sport as football or rugby; indeed, it has been suggested that in the course of a long chess game a player will lose as much weight as he does during a football match.

Outside the elite – among professional players who are struggling to make a living, or among the hordes of us middle-aged blokes trying to get to grips with this stressful, frustrating, exhausting game – there is far less attention paid to health. Chess clubs often meet in pubs and many players like a pint; the number of huge stomachs on show at any chess tournament is staggering. The game – and I realise this is a wild generalisation, but one based on more than a grain of truth – tends to attract dysfunctional men with peculiar home lives. You can bet their diet will not be balanced; many will be living on bacon and eggs and beer. This is not a recipe for a long, healthy life.

The great Soviet players of the postwar period had the most ridiculous lifestyle: they more or less lived on vodka, cigarettes and chess, and many of them died young. Take Leonid Stein as an example. A three-times champion of the USSR in the 1960s, he dropped dead of a heart attack in 1973 at the age of just 38. Mikhail Tal, world champion in the early 1960s, was dogged by ill health during his career, and died at the age of 55 – a desperate loss to the sport. Vladimir Bagirov, who was world senior champion in 1998, was 63 when he dropped dead at the board while playing in Finland in 2000.

The current crop of top players have learned from the mistakes of their Soviet predecessors, but those outside the world elite haven’t. Too many are overweight, keen to have a drink, too sedentary – and then they try to play this game which makes huge demands on mind and body. I know, because I do it too. I spend a day at work, rush home, bolt down a meal, then go to my chess club and play a three-hour game which often makes me feel ill, especially if I lose. After that, usually around 10.30pm, I go home, go to bed, and frequently fail to sleep as my moves and mistakes revolve around my head.

So next time someone suggests a nice, quiet game of chess, or paints it as an intellectual pursuit played by wimps, tell them they’ve got it all wrong: this is a fight to the finish played in the tensest of circumstances by two players who are physically and mentally living on the edge. We all need to get fitter to play this demanding game, and society should recognise it for what it is – a sport as challenging, dramatic and exciting as any other. Such recognition would be a tribute of sorts to the two players who sadly played their final games in Tromso.

10 of the best Tony Benn quotes

 

Tony Benn was known as an eloquent and inspirational speaker. Here are ten of his most memorable quotes, as picked by Guardian readers

• Guardian readers and James Walsh
• theguardian.com, Saturday 15 March 2014 12.39 GMT

Tony Benn attends a rally in Hyde Park, London, during a protest organised by the Trades Union Congress called The March for the Alternative on 26 March 2011. Photograph: Kevin Coombs/Reuters

1) “If we can find the money to kill people, we can find the money to help people.”

Tony Benn was interviewed in Sicko, Michael Moore’s documentary film about the health industry in the US. Explaining the post-war creation of the welfare state, he said the popular mood of the 1945 election was: “If you can have full employment by killing Germans, why can’t we have full employment by building hospitals, building schools?”

2) His “Five questions” for the powerful.

Tony Benn’s final speech to the House of Commons as MP was an appropriately eloquent farewell, in which he talked widely on his view of the role of parliament and the wider question of democracy. As Hansard records, he said: 

In the course of my life I have developed five little democratic questions. If one meets a powerful person--Adolf Hitler, Joe Stalin or Bill Gates--ask them five questions: “What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?” If you cannot get rid of the people who govern you, you do not live in a democratic system.

3) “Making mistakes is how you learn.”

 I made every mistake in the book, but making mistakes is how you learn. I would be ashamed if I ever said anything I didn’t believe in, to get on personally.

4) “I now want more time to devote to politics and more freedom to do so”

With a typically memorable turn of phrase, Tony Benn signalled the end of his parliamentary career in 1999, when he announced he would not be standing for re-election at the next general election. Asked whether he would be taking his place in the House of Lords, the former Viscount Stansgate - Benn renounced his peerage back in 1963 - replied: “Don’t be silly.”

5) “The House of Lords is the British Outer Mongolia for retired politicians.”

Given the above, this quote is not especially surprising, but worth repeating. Tony Benn was a lifelong campaigner for constitutional reform, and introduced a bill that would have allowed him to renounce his peerage as early as 1955.

6) “I think there are two ways in which people are controlled. First of all frighten people and secondly, demoralise them.”

Another quote from Tony Benn’s interview with Michael Moore in Sicko, in which he highlighted poverty and healthcare inequality as a democratic issue. “The people in debt become hopeless, and the hopeless people don’t vote... an educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern,” he said.

7) “Hope is the fuel of progress and fear is the prison in which you put yourself”

Tony Benn thought any meaningful change could only come from below, and felt apathy was openly encouraged by those in positions of power. “The Prime Minister said in 1911, 14 years before I was born, that if women get the vote it will undermine parliamentary democracy. How did apartheid end? How did anything happen?”

8) “We are not just here to manage capitalism but to change society and to define its finer values.”

Blamed by many for contributing to Labour’s lack of electoral success during the 1980s, Tony Benn was a totem for those who rejected the shift to the right widely seen as necessary if the party was to regain power. This shift was eventually completed under Tony Blair, who pushed through the abandonment of clause IV and redefined Labour as a party comfortable with privatisation and free market economics. The quote above indicates why Benn resisted such a move.

9) “There is no moral difference between a stealth bomber and a suicide bomber. Both kill innocent people for political reasons.”

10) “A faith is something you die for, a doctrine is something you kill for. There is all the difference in the world.”

Tony Benn’s calcified view of the US as an imperialist force left him on the margins of mainstream opinion during the cold war, but a voice of reason to many after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Tony Benn puffs on his pipe as he listens to speeches during the second day of the 66th annual Labour Party Conference, in Scarborough, England. Photograph: Laurence Harris/AP