The myth of the second chance

Janan Ganesh in The FT

In the novels of Ian McEwan, a pattern recurs. The main character makes a mistake — just one — which then hangs over them forever. A girl misidentifies a rapist, and in doing so shatters three lives, including her own (Atonement). A man exchanges a lingering glance with another, who becomes a tenacious stalker (Enduring Love). A just-married couple fail to have sex, or rather have it badly, and aren’t themselves again, either as individuals or as a pair (On Chesil Beach). Often, the mistake reverberates over much of the 20th century.  

This plot trick is said to be unbecoming of a serious artist. McEwan is accused of an obsession with incident that isn’t true to the gradualism and untidiness of real life. Whereas Proust luxuriates in the slow accretion of human experience, McEwan homes in on the singular event. It is too neat. It is written to be filmed. 

Well, I am old enough now to observe peers in their middle years, including some disappointed and hurt ones. I suggest it is McEwan who gets life right. The surprise of middle age, and the terror of it, is how much of a person’s fate can boil down to one misjudgement.  

Such as? What in particular should the young know? If you marry badly — or marry at all, when it isn’t for you — don’t assume the damage is recoverable. If you make the wrong career choice, and realise it as early as age 30, don’t count on a way back. Even the decision to go down a science track at school, when the humanities turn out to be your bag, can mangle a life. None of these errors need consign a person to eternal and acute distress. But life is path-dependent: each mistake narrows the next round of choices. A big one, or just an early one, can foreclose all hope of the life you wanted. 

There should be more candour about this from the people who are looked to (and paid) for guidance. The rise of the advice-industrial complex — the self-help podcasts, the chief executive coaches, the men’s conferences — has been mostly benign. But much of the content is American, and reflects the optimism of that country. The notion of an unsalvageable mistake is almost transgressive in the land of second chances.  

Also, for obvious commercial reasons, the audience has to be told that all is not lost, that life is still theirs to shape deep into adulthood. No one is signing up to the Ganesh Motivational Bootcamp (“You had kids without thinking it through? It’s over, son”) however radiant the speaker. 

A mistake, in the modern telling, is not a mistake but a chance to “grow”, to form “resilience”. It is a mere bridge towards ultimate success. And in most cases, quite so. But a person’s life at 40 isn’t the sum of most decisions. It is skewed by a disproportionately important few: sometimes professional, often romantic. Get these wrong, and the scope for retrieving the situation is, if not zero, then overblown by a culture that struggles to impart bad news.  

Martin Amis, that peer of McEwan’s, once attempted an explanation of the vast international appeal of football. “It’s the only sport which is usually decided by one goal,” he theorised, “so the pressure on the moment is more intense in football than any other sport.” His point is borne out across Europe most weekends. A team hogs the ball, creates superior chances, wins more duels — and loses the game to one error. It is, as the statisticians say, a “stupid” sport.   

But it is also the one that most approximates life outside the stadium. I am now roughly midway through that other low-scoring game. Looking around at the distress and regret of some peers, I feel sympathy, but also amazement at the casualness with which people entered into big life choices. Perhaps this is what happens when ideas of redemption and resurrection — the ultimate second chance — are encoded into the historic faith of a culture. It takes a more profane cast of mind to see through it.

The 12 Rules for Life: Jordan Peterson

 

Don’t date anybody if you only want positive results! Life is poker not chess

Abridged and adapted from Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

Suppose someone says, “I flipped a coin and it landed heads four times in a row. How likely is that to occur?”

It feels that should be a pretty easy question to answer. Once we do the maths on the probability of heads on four consecutive 50-50 flips, we can determine that would happen 6.25% of the time (0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 x 0,.5).

The problem is that we came to this answer without knowing anything about the coin or the person flipping it. Is it a two-sided coin or three-sided or four? If it is two-sided, is it a two-headed coin? Even if the coin is two sided, is the coin weighted to land on heads more often than tails? Is the coin flipper a magician who is capable of influencing how the coin lands? This information is all incomplete, yet we answered the question as if we had examined the coin and knew everything about it.

Now if that person flipped the coin 10,000 times, giving us a sufficiently large sample size, we could figure out, with some certainty, whether the coin is fair. Four flips simply isn’t enough to determine much about the coin

We make this same mistake when we look for lessons in life’s results. Our lives are too short to collect enough data from our own experience to make it easy to dig down into decision quality from the small set of results we experience. If we buy a house, fix it up a little, and sell it three years later for 50% more than we paid. Does that mean we are smart at buying and selling property, or at fixing up houses? It could, but it could also mean there was a big upward trend in the market and buying almost any piece of property would have made just as much money. Bitcoin buyers may now wonder about the wisdom of their decisions.

The hazards of resulting

Take a moment to imagine your best decision or your worst decision. I’m willing to bet that your best decision preceded a good result and the worst decision preceded a bad result. This is a safe bet for me because we deduce an overly tight relationship between our decisions and the consequent results. 

There is an imperfect relationship between results and decision quality. I never seem to come across anyone who identifies a bad decision when they got lucky with the result, or a well reasoned decision that didn’t work out. We are uncomfortable with the idea that luck plays a significant role in our lives. We assume causation when there is only a correlation and tend to cherry-pick data to confirm the narrative we prefer.

Poker and decisions

Poker is a game that mimics human decision making. Every poker hand requires making at least one decision (to fold or to stay) and some hands can require up to twenty decisions. During a poker game players get in about thirty hands per hour. This means a poker player makes hundreds of decisions at breakneck speed with every hand having immediate financial consequences. 

It is a game of decision making with incomplete information. Valuable information remains hidden. There is also an element of luck in any outcome. You could make the best possible decision at every point and still lose the hand, because you don’t know what new cards will be dealt and revealed.

In addition, once the game is over, poker players must learn from that jumbled mass of decisions and outcomes, separating the luck from the skill, and guarding against using results to justify/criticise decisions made,

The quality of our lives is the sum of decision quality plus luck. Poker is a mirror to life and helps us recognise the mistakes we never spot because we win the hand anyway or the leeway to do everything right, still lose, and treat the losing result as proof that we made a mistake,

Decisions are bets on the future

Decisions aren’t ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ based on whether they turn out well on any particular iteration. An unwanted result doesn’t make our decision wrong if we had thought about the alternatives and probabilities in advance and made our decisions accordingly. 

Our world is structured to give us lots of opportunities to feel bad about being wrong if we want to measure ourselves by outcomes. Don’t fall in love or even date anybody if you want only positive results.

"A pessimist is an optimist in full possession of the facts! - Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes

 

"I will not allow my schooling to interfere with my education": Mark Twain Quotes

 

Nandini Rao - Teacher of the Bulbuls

 

Why Is an Ordinary Life Not Good Enough Anymore? – Alain De Botton

 

Why we should be honest about failure

Disappointment is the natural order of life. Most people achieve less than they would like writes JANAN GANESH in The FT  


On a long-haul flight, Can You Ever Forgive Me? becomes the first film I have ever watched twice in immediate succession. Released last month in Britain, it recounts the (true) story of Lee Israel, a once-admired, now-marginal writer who resorts to literary forgery to make the rent on her fetid New York hovel. Her one friend is himself a washout who, as per the English tradition, passes off his insolvency as bohemia. Lee pleads with her agent to answer her calls and, in the rawest scene, confesses her crime with a wistful pang for the success it brought her. 

There are serviceable jokes (including the profane farewell between the two friends) but the film is ultimately about failure: social, financial, romantic, professional. Put it down to the lachrymose effects of air travel — a phenomenon that has no definitive explanation — but I found the film unusually affecting. Or perhaps it was the shock of seeing failure addressed so unsentimentally, and from so many angles. 

Failure — not spectacular failure, but failure as gnawing disappointment — is the natural order of life. Most people will achieve at least a little bit less than they would have liked in their careers. Most marriages wind down from intense passion to a kind of elevated friendship, and even this does not count the roughly four in 10 that collapse entirely. Most businesses fail. Most books fail. Most films fail. 

You would hope that something so endemic to the human experience would be constantly discussed and actively prepared for. Instead, what we hear about is failure as a great “teacher”, or as a staging post before eventual success. There are management books about “failing forward”. There are educational methods that teach children the uses of failure. Consult an anthology of quotations about the subject, and it is not just the Paulo Coelho types who sugar-coat it. Churchill, Edison, Capote, at least one Roosevelt: people who should know better almost deny the existence of failure as anything other than a character-building phase. 

There are good intentions behind all this. There is also a lot of naivety and squeamishness. For many people, failure will be just that, not a nourishing experience or a bridge to something else. It will be a lasting condition, and it will sting a fair bit. 

Our seeming inability to look this fact in the eye is not just unbecoming in and of itself, it also inadvertently makes the experience of failure more harrowing than it needs to be. By reimagining it as just a holding pen before ultimate triumph, those who find themselves stuck there must feel like aberrations, when their experience could not be more banal. 

I have known lots of Lee Israels: sensations at 25, under-achievers at 40. Sometimes, there was an identifiable wrong turn — a duff career move, say, or the pram in the hallway. But in most cases, it was just the law of numbers doing its impersonal work. 

In almost all professions, there are too few places at the top for too many hopefuls. Lots of blameless people will miss out. Whether at school or through those excruciating management guides, a wiser culture would not romanticise failure as a means to success. It would normalise it as an end. 

Look again at that list of names who have minted smarmy epigrams about the utility of failure. It is, you realise, a kind of winner’s wisdom. Those who overcome setbacks to achieve epic feats tend to universalise their atypical experience. Amazingly bad givers of advice, they encourage people to proceed with ambitions that are best sat on, and despise “quitters” when quitting is often the purest common sense. 

At the end of Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Lee is an unambiguous failure. There is (and you will excuse the spoilers) no rapprochement with an ex-lover she is plainly not over. There is no conquest of her drink habit. The film could dwell on the real-life Lee’s successful memoir, on which it is based, but only mentions it in text as the screen goes dark. She loses her solitary friend to illness. Even the cat croaks. Why, then, is the film so moreish as to demand an instant repeat over the Atlantic? It is, I think, the honest ventilation of a universal human subject. It is the novelty of being treated as a grown-up.

The 100-year-old couple – still married, still going strong

Paul Laity in The Guardian

We don’t know anyone else over 100. We are really oddities: two people married for 78 years, one 103, the other 100. We’ve outlived everybody. And it’s rare, I recognise that. We’re very lucky. The best I can wish you is our luck.”




Morrie Markoff is sitting on the sofa in his downtown Los Angeles apartment next to his wife, Betty. They are delighted that someone from the “Manchester Guardian” has come to talk to them, though these days they are used to a degree of attention. When Morrie was 100, a gallery in the city put on his first art show, exhibiting his scrap-metal sculptures, photographs and paintings. “Ease up on the 100 business,” he remarked at the time. “I’m trying to pass as 90.” Now the Markoffs are to appear in Aging Gracefully, a book of photos of centenarians by Karsten Thormaehlen; they are the only married couple in its pages. 

“We’ve been together for nearly eight decades, and we still haven’t killed each other!” Morrie says.

“Though we’ve tried a few times,” chimes in Betty. “We’ve had plenty of run-ins, oh my God … but he never hit me, and I never hit him. Though I think I pushed him once.”

In turn, Morrie jokes about trading her in for two 50-year-old women. But whatever arguments they had are a thing of the past. “Now it’s peaceful,” Betty says, her hand touching the back of Morrie’s neck. She dismisses any idea of there being a secret to making a marriage work so long. “Just don’t let every complaint turn to anger. Tolerance and respect. And you’ve got to like them. Morrie would never use the word love; I do, but the actions are the same on either part.”

Why not the word “love”? Morrie replies that “to me, love is possessive; it’s controlling and demanding. The word that I would rather use instead is ‘caring’. You care about people. ‘Care’, to me, has a much deeper meaning. Love is an esoteric word, but one that people also use to mean all sorts of off-hand things. ‘I love playing tennis,’ and such. I hug Betty constantly, I kiss her constantly, I care very much about her.” Morrie assures me that the day they got together was the most fortunate of his life.

They met in New York City in 1938, at the wedding of Betty’s cousin, who happened to be the brother of one of Morrie’s friends. Betty was sitting at the table on Morrie’s left. “On my right,” he picks up the story, “was Rose Lebovsky, a very pretty girl, sophisticated, with wealthy parents. Betty has asked: why did you pick me? And I say: it’s because you ate less.”

Betty’s friends were unsure about the charming machinist, who had grown up in a tenement in East Harlem. But she let him drive her back home to College Point, in Queens.

“He was so handsome, with curly black hair. And on one of our first dates, the car broke down and he fixed it quietly and uncomplainingly, just like that. No fuss, unlike other men. I was impressed. And,” she repeats, “he was so handsome.” What else appealed to you, I ask: his sense of humour? She looks doubtful. “Er, yes, well, I guess so!”

  Morrie and Betty with their children, Judith and Steven in the 1940s.

The dating didn’t last long; Morrie left the East Coast and returned to California, where he had lived for some time having taken a road trip there with friends and fallen in love with the sunshine and easy atmosphere. Was it a memorable marriage proposal? “Oh hell no,” Betty replies. “He never proposed. He just asked: would you like to live in California?”

Morrie sent her the fare for the bus, and picked her up in LA after the four-day journey. They “found a rabbi in our price range” and had a simple ceremony, during which the rabbi said: “May the marriage be as pure as the gold in the ring.” Betty and Morrie “looked at each other and almost burst into laughter” – they had a fake gold ring bought at Woolworths.

For Betty, LA is a fabulous city. “You’ve got the beach, the mountains, and the climate is so nice; I think it’s like paradise.” She shows off the one-room condo where they’ve lived for five years, since moving out of their much-loved modernist home a few miles away. The flat is decorated with Morrie’s artwork, most of it from the 1950s and 60s. There’s a view of blue skies and Bunker Hill skyscrapers; Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, with its luminous swoops and curves, is almost next door.

Betty says that old age for her has meant a great loss of energy: “My walking isn’t good, and I get confused.” These days, Morrie uses a mobility scooter. “He can’t forgive them for taking his car away,” says Betty. But they still go out for breakfast, and declining vigour is in part made up for by a sharpened appreciation of the world around them. Betty enjoys sitting outside a local cafe to see the play of sunlight and shadow, and likes to watch young children splashing in a nearby fountain, wondering which ones will brave the water, and which, too cautious, will turn away.

“I’ve lived a long life and a full one,” Morrie reflects. “I’ve never known a minute of boredom. I’ve always been busy, with work, or making things, or photography or travel, or most recently writing [he’s finished a memoir]. And there’s always another book to read. I sometimes say: I have so much to do, I don’t have time to die.”

 Morrie Markoff. Photograph: Karsten Thormaehlen

The day before his 99th birthday, he did die, at least for a few moments. Having had a heart attack – “Betty acted quickly and dialled 911; she saved my life” – Morrie was undergoing an operation to put in a pacemaker when something went wrong and he flatlined. “The surgeons killed me – not a good idea as I have relations who are attorneys.” Apparently, his mouth fell open, his tongue dropped out and the grieving family retreated to the hospital’s meditation room – only to be called back a little later to find Morrie alive and joking.

“If I were a religious man, I’d put my longevity down to divine intervention,” Morrie says. “As I’m not, I simply say it’s luck.” Though the fact that his father, a very heavy smoker, died aged 94 suggests his genes aren’t bad.

Morrie’s early life was far from pampered. He remembers the tenement he grew up in as rat-ridden, with a kitchen filled with cockroaches and mattresses alive with bedbugs. Six people lived in three rooms; he slept on two chairs his mother put together, piled with cushions, in front of the stove. But he was never hungry, he insists, even in the Depression years, and was given complete freedom.

He remembers swimming naked as a boy in an East River that was full of floating rubbish, condoms, faeces and flotsam; he loved to dive off the flour barges tied to the dock. Perhaps he built up a great immune system, he wonders. And diet? He relishes the memory of hot dogs on Coney Island, with mustard and sauerkraut, washed down with Dr Brown’s celery tonic. Until he got tongue cancer, Morrie also smoked cigarettes, cigars and a pipe. When working as a machinist, he’d leave the cigarettes in his mouth because his hands were so oily; the smoke would fill his eyes, and in the morning he couldn’t open them.

Betty, on the other hand, puts her long life down to her “seventh grade nutrition class”. She was always aware of preparing a meal with protein and vegetables. Plus every morning for decades they’d walk the three miles or so around the local lake, before breakfast.

They always had energy, they insist, and boredom is not in the family. One of their early drives was politics. Morrie was a member of the Communist Party USA and would often go on protests; Betty was once put in prison for an hour for handing out its leaflets. But the aim was never an overthrow of government, just a fairer society. They were devotees of Roosevelt and even more enthusiastic about Barack Obama. As for Trump: “In my lifetime, he’s the oddest person to be elected president … he’s an egomaniac, a wildcard, a casino-owner: how much tax does he pay?”

“He’s so prejudiced,” Betty adds.

Betty Markoff. Photograph: Karsten Thormaehlen

Politics spawned friendships, and they had a close circle when bringing up their two kids, Judith and Steven. (One odd thing about getting to a very advanced age, Betty has said, is seeing your children becoming senior citizens.) The LA house they lived in for decades was part of a progressive housing co-operative; it was designed as a community, and its residents were in and out of each other’s houses all the time. “The friends are not there any more … they are long since gone,” Betty says. I ask her how that feels. She’s quiet but brisk in reply: “Oh, I’m very adaptable.”

After the war, during which he was deferred from the army to make detonators and contour rockets, Morrie ended up owning his own appliance shop. He used the scrap metal from air-conditioner repairs to make the small, dynamic sculptures that were exhibited decades later. But then a passion for travel and photography took over, and Morrie and Betty shine a bit more brightly when remembering their camping trips and tourist escapades. The photos they show me of their trips around the world, from Mexico to Macau, are of an astonishing quality. What camera did you use, I ask? Morrie begins to enthuse about his Rolleiflex and Leica, before Betty groans and changes the subject.

She is clearly proud of him, however. “He’s very talented in lots of directions,” she says in a moment when he’s not around. “If he had grown up differently, who knows what he might have achieved?”

Morrie still feels his days are not long enough, and insists you don’t need much money to live an active and involved life. Their daughter lives in the next building, so even the death of one of the couple won’t spell utter loneliness. Yet again, he mentions their luck.

As I prepare to leave, he chides me mischievously: “You haven’t asked us about our sex life!” Then he laughs: “that’s just a memory”. With his hand on Betty’s knee, Morrie looks at the woman whom he has never told he loves, and says: “After 78 years, I can say I didn’t make a mistake. We’ve had our ups and downs, but we’re still here.”

Only successful people can afford a CV of failure

Sonia Sodha in The Guardian

A Princeton professor’s frankness hides the grim reality about work for many young people

 

Students at Princeton University. Photograph: Mel Evans/AP



‘One of the most strangely inspirational things I’ve ever read.” “This is a beautiful thing.” These aren’t plaudits about the latest Booker shortlist, but some of the praise directed at a “CV of failure” published by Princeton professor Johannes Haushofer. I have to confess that when I heard about the failure CV, I too thought it was a lovely idea. But when I read it, while it’s clearly very well intentioned, it made me feel a little uncomfortable. Professor Haushofer explains at the top of his CV that most of what he tries fails, but people only see the success, which “sometimes gives others the impression that most things work out for me”. The failures he lists include not getting into postgraduate programmes at Cambridge or Stanford, not getting a Harvard professorship and failing to secure a Fulbright scholarship.

I’m sure this was aimed at a small group of his students, to demonstrate that even successful professors get papers rejected by academic journals, but I suspect that the overwhelmingly positive reaction the CV has received in academic circles and on social media tells us more about our idealised view of success than the reality.

Those who are most successful have an understandable interest in emphasising that they got there through old-fashioned grit, persevering in the face of failure, never letting setbacks beat them down. Quite frankly, it’s a far more attractive way to package success than sharing a story of how it just happened to fall in your lap or how your innate abilities are so brilliant that they effortlessly propelled you to the top. Our favourite success story goes: sure, I may have some natural advantages, but I’m essentially like you, I just worked really hard to get where I am.

This also has the advantage of fitting the narrative that we want young people to buy. Work hard, keep plugging away and success will be round the corner. If you don’t put the effort in you won’t get there. It’s supported by the theory of success documented by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers: people with exceptional expertise have invariably invested at least 10,000 hours of practice.

Of course, this is an important life lesson. We don’t want young people thinking that success is a matter of luck, otherwise they might feel like packing up and going home rather than slogging their guts out at school. There’s no question that effort is often correlated with success. but there there’s a serious danger that in patting ourselves on the back in sharing lessons about failure, we miss out some hard truths about the world. It’s much easier to talk about failure from the vantage of success. Oh yes, I know I get to write columns for a newspaper, but did I tell you about failing my driving test three times?

Sure, that’s a little flippant but there are lots of times when failure doesn’t end in success, and those stories contain as many important truths about how the world works. Those stories are much harder to share: like most people, I’d find it much more painful and difficult to be open about failures in those areas of my life that I don’t consider a triumph than those that I do.

Taken to the extreme, the risk is that telling ourselves these nice stories of success in terms of trying, failing, learning and trying again makes us too complacent that that’s the way the world really works. Sometimes, it does. But not always. Recent research has discredited Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule, suggesting that practice accounts for just 12% of skill mastery and success. Buying too much into this myth in the face of the evidence undermines our understanding of a depressing and universal truth: the world is stacked against some young people before they’re even born.

 

Professor Johannes Haushofer said he had been judged by his successes. Photograph: Princeton University

I think it would be more useful for successful people to write a “CV of good fortune” than a “CV of failure”. A sort of: I’ve had much luck in my life: being born into a middle-class family and having any natural ability nurtured by my parents and then by the education system. It’s not to say that I can’t take any credit for any successes I might have had, but I think my own good fortune CV would contain more hard truths about how the world works than my failure CV.

Of course, good fortune CVs would send the wrong message to young people, who we want to be brimming with determination and resilience even when the world is stacked against them. We’ll never be able to eliminate the role that good fortune plays, but the flipside of encouraging young people to try, fail and try again is that we need to do much more to lessen its influence and to increase the relationship between effort and success.

Today’s labour market is tough enough for young people. Recession has hit their pay packets the hardest and it is not uncommon to find graduates working in a bar on a zero hours contract. Even while businesses complain about young people lacking employability skills, there is evidence that they are underinvesting in young people’s skills. On-the-job training has fallen in recent years and too many businesses have diverted government training subsidies for apprenticeships towards training that they would have been delivering anyway.
It’s only going to get tougher for some groups of young people. Yes, there will be new and exciting jobs in highly skilled careers we haven’t even dreamed of. But some growth sectors will be of a distinctly less glamorous sort, such as caring for our growing older population. These are currently low-skill, low-paid jobs, done mostly by women, held in low esteem. Yet there is a dearth of thinking about how we can make these jobs more fulfilling, better paid and more respected. It’s almost as if we’re hoping that the jobs at new frontiers of artificial intelligence will create enough trickle-down excitement to soften the blow for the young people who won’t get to do them.

Learning from failure is important but so is being able to get a job in which you’re invested in, supported to learn from your failures, and encouraged to progress. Yet we are reluctant to talk about the fact that, for too many young people, those jobs simply don’t yet exist when they reach the end of their education. It’s hard to see what good a failure CV will do them.

Want To Reduce Abortions? Don't Stigmatise Sex

 

The religious conservatives are responsible for high abortion rates; they are responsible for the injury and death of women.

GEORGE MONBIOT 

Here is the fact that everyone debating abortion should know. There is no association between its legality and its incidence. In other words, banning abortion does not stop the practice; it merely makes it more dangerous.

The abortion debate is presented as a conflict between the rights of embryos and the rights of women. Enhance one, both sides sometimes appear to agree, and you suppress the other. But once you grasp the fact that legalising women's reproductive rights does not raise the incidence of induced abortions, only one issue remains to be debated. Should they be legal and safe or illegal and dangerous? Hmmm, tough question.

There might be no causal relationship between reproductive choice and the incidence of abortion, but there is a strong correlation: an inverse one. As the Lancet's most recent survey of global rates and trends notes, "The abortion rate was lower … where more women live under liberal abortion laws."

Why? Because laws restricting abortion tend to be most prevalent in places where contraception and comprehensive sex education are hard to obtain, and in which sex and childbirth outside marriage are anathematised. Young people have sex, whatever their elders say; they always have and always will. Those with the least information and the least access to birth control are the most likely to suffer unintended pregnancies. And what greater incentive could there be for terminating a pregnancy than a culture in which reproduction out of wedlock is a mortal sin?

How many more centuries of misery, mutilation and mortality are required before we understand that women — young or middle aged, within marriage or without — who do not want a child may go to almost any lengths to terminate an unwanted pregnancy? How much more evidence do we need that, in the absence of legal, safe procedures, such sophisticated surgical instruments as wire coathangers, knitting needles, bleach and turpentine will be deployed instead? How many more poisonings, punctured guts and burst wombs are required before we recognise that prohibition and moral suasion will not trounce women's need to own their lives?

The most recent meta-analysis of global trends, published in 2012, discovered that the abortion rate, after a sharp decline between 1995 and 2003, scarcely changed over the following five years. But the proportion that were unsafe (which, broadly speaking, means illegal), rose from 44% to 49%.

Most of this change was due to a sharp rise in unsafe abortions in West Asia (which includes the Middle East), where Islamic conservatism is resurgent. In the regions in which Christian doctrine exerts the strongest influence over legislation — west and middle Africa and central and south America — there was no rise. But that's only because the proportion of abortions that were illegal and unsafe already stood at 100%.

As for the overall induced abortion rate, the figures tell an interesting story. Western Europe has the world's lowest termination rate: 12 per year for every 1000 women of reproductive age. The more godly North America aborts 19 embryos for every 1000 women. In South America, where (when the figures were collected) the practice was banned everywhere, the rate was 32. In eastern Africa, where ferocious laws and powerful religious injunctions should — according to conservative theory — have stamped out the practice long ago, it was 38.

The weird outlier is eastern Europe, which has the world's highest abortion rate: 43 per 1000. Under communism, abortion was the only available form of medical birth control. The rate has fallen from 90 since 1995, as contraception has become easier to obtain, but there's still a long way to go.

Facts, who needs 'em? Across the red states of the US, legislators have been merrily passing laws that make abortion clinics impossible to run, while denying children effective sex education. In Texas, thanks to restrictive new statutes, over half the clinics have closed since 2013. But women are still obliged to visit three times before receiving treatment: in some cases this means travelling 1000 miles or more. Unsurprisingly, 7% of those seeking medical help have already attempted their own solutions.

The only reason why this has not caused an epidemic of abdominal trauma is the widespread availability, through unlicensed sales, of abortion drugs such as misoprostol and mifepristone. They're unsafe when used without professional advice, but not as unsafe as coathangers and household chemicals.

In June, the US Supreme Court will rule on the constitutionality of the latest Texan assault on legal terminations, the statute known as HB2. If the state of Texas wins, this means, in effect,the end of Roe v Wade, the decision that deemed abortion a fundamental right in the United States.

In Northern Ireland the new first minister, Arlene Foster, who took office on Monday, has vowed to ensure that the 1967 abortion act, which covers the rest of the United Kingdom, will not apply to her country. Women there will continue to buy pills (and run the risk of confiscation as the police rifle their post) or travel to England, at some expense and trauma. Never mind the finding of a High Court judge: "there is no evidence before this court that the law in Northern Ireland has resulted in any reduction in the number of abortions". It just warms the heart to see Protestant and Catholic fundamentalists setting aside their differences to ensure that women's bodies remain the property of the state.

Like them, I see human life as precious. Like them, I want to see a reduction in abortions. So I urge states to do the opposite of what they prescribe. If you want fewer induced abortions, you should support education that encourages children to talk about sex without embarrassment or secrecy; contraception that's freely available to everyone; an end to the stigma surrounding sex and birth before marriage.

The religious conservatives who oppose these measures have blood on their hands. They are responsible for high abortion rates; they are responsible for the injury and death of women. And they have the flaming cheek to talk about the sanctity of life.

Why cricket is the greatest of all games

Ian McDonald in Cricinfo 

No other sport compares in terms of the number of skills displayed, and the blend of subtlety, entertainment, sudden thrill and sustained intellectual interest on offer


Twenty-two yard theatre: a good Test match is the equal of a five-act masterpiece of the stage © Getty Images

I have been looking at a great deal of cricket lately from across the world: Test cricket - the Ashes, India versus Sri Lanka - and ODIs and T20 cricket from all over. I am more than ever convinced that cricket is the greatest game that exists for the delight and fascination of mankind. I am also confirmed in my settled view that of all forms of this great game, Test cricket is by far the most interesting, satisfying and lastingly memorable.

When I was young I played a little cricket. Indeed, one of my most precious memories, a memory now nearly 70 years old, is of playing for my school 3rd XI on a rough pitch up near Mount St Benedict in Trinidad and taking five wickets in one eight-ball over with some slow, cunning legbreaks that did not turn - they were an early incarnation of the doosra. However, much to my regret, I never became a serious cricketer. I played tennis hard and grew to love the game. And tennis was certainly good to me, filling my life with much pleasure, excitement, challenge and reasonable achievement. It was a game that introduced me to many lifelong friends and taught me, I think, a few of life's important lessons.

And yet always, in my heart of hearts, I have thought that cricket is the greatest, the most splendid, game of all. If I had been given the choice by some benevolent God between winning Wimbledon and hitting a match-winning century at Lord's for West Indies I always knew which I would have chosen.

I have no doubt that cricket is in fact the greatest game yet invented. No other sport compares with it in the number of skills displayed: batting skill; bowling skill; throwing skill; catching skill; running skill. It requires fitness, strength, delicacy of touch, superb reflexes, footwork like a cat, the eye of a hawk, the precision and accuracy of a master jeweller. It involves individual skill and nerve and also unselfish team play. It calls for short-term tactics and long-term strategy. In the course of a good cricket match there is a mixture of courage, daring, patience, aggression, flair, imagination, expertise and dour defiance that is certainly unequalled in all other, more superficial, games. It is not at all surprising that cricket has inspired by far the best and most varied literature of any sport.

If I had been given the choice by some benevolent God between winning Wimbledon and hitting a match-winning century at Lord's for West Indies, I always knew which I would have chosen

There are games that take more strength, more speed, ones that require a higher level of fitness, and ones that require deeper resources of endurance. But no game equals cricket in its all-round development of all the aptitudes. There are games that contain a greater concentration of excitement per playing hour. But no game approaches cricket in its blend of subtlety, entertainment, sudden thrill and sustained intellectual interest. Cricket, like no other game, takes the whole of a man - his body, soul, heart, will and wits.

Cricket - real cricket; that is, Test cricket - has been stigmatised as being too slow, too leisurely, lacking in colour and excitement. I believe this is simply one more aspect of the malignant modern appetite for instant stimulation and quick-fire titillation. The slash-bang games may satisfy the craving for a quick thrill, but they bear about the same relationship to a good game of cricket as instant food does to a superbly cooked gourmet dinner.

It is like the difference between lust and love. There is, it is true, the temporary excitement of a passionate one-night stand. But who can doubt that the more mature, the more beguiling, the longer-lasting love affair provides the more challenging and the deeper experience?

So it is with Test cricket. Like any lasting love affair a good Test match has its moments when the play is ordinary, slow-moving, and even boring. But the complex interplay of emotion, psychology, collective bonding and individual character, allied with the sudden bursts of excitement and the unexpected twists of fortune, add up to an experience that far outweighs the temporary and quick-fading lust for instant gratification that so many other sports supply.

One of the glories of cricket is the way the drama of a match develops, how the pace varies from the leisurely to the suddenly lethal, how the plot thickens, and the subplots are interlinked as the play goes on, how the heroes and the villains take the stage with time enough to act out their roles. A good Test match is the equal of a five-act masterpiece of the stage. Even the best of the other games can really only compare with one-act spectacles that attract those whose attention span is brief and whose imaginations are lacking. It may be that the latest pop star with his highly charged and hectic act can attract much larger crowds than Shakespeare's King Lear or Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle, but we all know that the one will fade into oblivion long, long before the others' glory ends. For me, T20 cricket is a very popular, quickly-fading-in-the-memory game whose main purpose is to generate the money that will keep Test cricket active.

T20 money may keep Test cricket alive in other countries, but in the West Indies the dissolution of its Test team is a threat to be feared © Caribbean Premier League


Sadly, it will not keep Test activity alive and well in the West Indies. It is becoming clear the we will never again compete at the highest level of Test cricket. Increasingly our players are opting out of Test cricket for the sake of T20 gold. More and more our administrators will concentrate on the shorter, easy-to-make-money game. And more and more of our fans will only be interested in T20. And as these tendencies grow, the forces leading to a break-up of the West Indies team into its constituent parts will gain strength and eventually the countries will find their way in the shorter cricket world as Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, Barbados etc. It is sad but there seems no stopping this. The current sorry lot in charge of West Indies cricket are presiding over the death not only of West Indies Test cricket but also over the dissolution of the West Indies cricket team.

I think there is a large measure of truth in what the old men say - that in cricket today there is too much playing for self, playing for averages, playing for money, and that therefore a lot of the variety, spice, spontaneity and sportsmanship has gone out of the game. Lord Harris, a former England captain, wrote some famous words about cricket:

"You do well to love this cricket, for it is more free from anything sordid, anything dishonourable, anything savouring of servitude, than any game in the world. To play it keenly, honourably, generously, self-sacrificingly is a moral lesson in itself, and the classroom is God's air and sunshine. Foster it, my brothers, so that it may attract all who can find the time to play it, protect it from anything that would sully it, so that it may grow in favour with all men."

These words summon up a view of cricket that, sadly, seems now much too idealistic and almost completely outdated.

And yet, and yet, I wonder. Cricket is a game great enough to rise above the limitations of this overly commercial age. In cricket we will always have dramas and performances to match any in the past. You can be sure there will be games of cricket that generations to come will wish they had seen.

Cricket contains the pure stuff of human nature. As Neville Cardus and CLR James advised long ago, you must go to this best of all games with your imagination's eye, as well as your physical eye, open. To the dull of spirit who merely looks at the scoreboard when, say, a Sobers is batting:

"A Sobers at the crease's rim
A simple Sobers is to him
And he is nothing more."

But to the cricket lover of sensibility this Sobers, and his fellows, are artists all and the game they play is the wonderful game of life itself.

Why life is just one big confidence trick

Matthew Stadlen in The Telegraph


It was supposed to be an event targeted at young people and I’m not that young any more; it was meant to be a campaign designed to build confidence and I don’t see myself as the timid type; and anyway, I was there to interview World and Olympic Champion Jessica Ennis-Hill, not for an education in self-help. Yet I left Sky Studios the other day profoundly influenced by a single sentence.

Find something you love and then stick to it.

These words emerged from the mouth of Melvyn Bragg, the enduring broadcaster who has reached the very top of his profession. They amounted to Lord Bragg’s recipe for confidence. He was speaking on a panel put together by Sky Academy, a bursary scheme that supports emerging talent in the worlds of sport and the arts. His advice immediately lodged somewhere deep inside me, partly perhaps because Bragg is a luminary in my own field, partly perhaps because I’ve enjoyed meeting and interviewing him in the past. Its real impact, though, stems from its essential truth. If you love something, you’re more likely to be confident at it and therefore to succeed.

Despite my self-assurance, bred in me by my privileged schooling, my parents and a childhood environment in which I was surrounded by successful role-models, I do sometimes doubt my career trajectory. The life of the self-employed can provoke uncomfortable journeys into dark corners of the mind where confidence seems a distant relative. But Bragg reminded me that I do love what I do and that there is a very strong argument for sticking at it. There are echoes of a line from Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist in Bragg’s philosophy: “Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure.”

Of course, Bragg’s winning cocktail must include a decent dose of natural ability if it’s to translate into success. Simply loving something isn’t enough, you have to have some talent or aptitude too. It's a maxim that England’s rugby players must now know only too well. They no doubt love what they do (much of the time) and they are talented; but not talented enough, it turns out.

There were plenty of confident noises emanating from in and around the England camp last week ahead of the do-or-die match against Australia. Ben Morgan, one of the 18-stone forwards, threatened to expose the Wallabies’ infamous insecurities in the scrum; Danny Cipriani, the talented back excluded from England’s tournament squad, claimed that not a single Australian would get into the England team. In the event, England crashed out of their own World Cup, the English pack was humiliated in retreat and it was hard to see how more than one or two Englishmen would make it into the Australian team.

Stuart Lancaster's England appeared to suffer a crisis of confidence during their World Cup games Photo: REUTERS

So much for English confidence. But then again, maybe they were faking it. I was in the stands to watch their disintegration, part physical, part mental, in the final excruciating minutes against Wales the week before. Could every England player really have been that sure of themselves after such a bruising defeat, facing an Australian team fresh from winning the southern hemisphere’s coveted Rugby Championship? Perhaps. Or maybe self-doubt had crept in but they decided to subscribe to the Davina McCall blueprint for confidence.

The former Big Brother host, was, together with Ennis-Hill, Mumsnet founder Justine Roberts and YouTube personality Alfie Deyes, on the same panel as Bragg. McCall is not an obvious candidate for self-doubt, but speaking with impressive candidness, she talked about her own teenage issues with a chronic lack of confidence. Her remedy was to act as if she really were confident. Fake it, she advised. If you’re not confident, teach yourself to project confidence instead and eventually you might end up believing it.

Fake it to make it: Davina McCall admits to suffering from low confidence as a teenager Photo: Andrew Crowley

Mahatma Gandhi seemed to be saying something similar when he reflected, “Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.”

Roger Uttley, a former England rugby coach, offered advice to the incumbent, Stuart Lancaster, via an interview with The Telegraph between the Wales and Australia games. “You have got to get over things quickly,” he said. “Stuart has to look the part in terms of his body language. It is tough to do that but important. Players feed off it.” Lancaster did put on a brave face, but he had already admitted to being “absolutely devastated” following the loss to Wales. Hardly the sort of message to be sending down from on high. The scoreline worsened against Australia and this time Lancaster was “absolutely gutted.”

Just how critical confidence is in sport had already been spelt out in an ITV interview given by Warren Gatland ahead of his side’s thrilling victory over the English. England have more money, more fans, more players – yet still Wales won. “When are you at your best?” Gatland was asked. “When I'm under a bit of pressure. It's always been my biggest challenge often with the Welsh players to keep building on that confidence and that self-belief that they are good enough to compete with the best teams in the world and they're good enough to go out there and win.”

Gatland was then asked what was the one quality he had as a player that has never left him. “Self-belief,” came the reply. Together with greater skill and fitness, what Wales demonstrated in those final frantic minutes was a core belief that they could still win a game that seemed lost at half-time. The players aped the confidence of their coach.

In the eye of the storm: Wales coach Warren Gatland Photo: AFP

During the recent Ashes summer, Sky Sports ran a series of programmes profiling some of cricket’s greatest stars of the past. Listening to Glenn McGrath speak about his record-breaking career, it was immediately obvious how pivotal self-belief was to his success. Just like the Welsh rugby team, confidence was welded onto ability, in his case onto his metronomic accuracy with the ball.

“The biggest battle I ever had when I was bowling out in the middle was with myself,’ he said. “And if I won that battle the rest was pretty easy. It's about having a bit of mongrel in you. You've got to be aggressive.” His two main strengths, he said, were that accuracy and a little bit of bounce. Then he added: “And just self-belief.” Interviewed for the same profile, McGrath’s former new ball partner, Jason Gillespie, reflected: “I don't think anyone came close to believing in their own ability as much as Glenn McGrath.”

Confidence is essential in politics too. It’s something that David Cameron projects so effectively that it is rarely, if ever, questioned in profiles of the Prime Minister. Despite his pledge to end “Punch and Judy politics" when he became leader, he has often been forthright and confrontational at the despatch box and exudes an air of watertight self-confidence that borders on a sense of entitlement. To what extent this is contrived, we don’t know, but much of it may have its roots in an elite public school education at Eton.

Wherever Cameron’s confidence comes from, it now stands in stark contrast to the hesitancy of Jeremy Corbyn. Maybe the Labour leader’s indecisiveness in interviews can be spun as the supreme confidence of a man with a mandate from his party’s grass roots not to play by the long established rules of Westminster politics. Up goes the cry: 'It’s the new politics!' But, if he continues to dither, he will continue to be cast by others as un-Prime Ministerial and as an uncertain figurehead.

Margaret Thatcher came across as even more self-assured than Cameron (and she was a state-educated grocer’s daughter). No one could claim that confidence is a male preserve. But it is, perhaps, worth asking whether gender sometimes plays a role. If you haven’t heard of impostor syndrome, it’s a phenomenon thought to be particularly prevalent among high-achieving women. It is, essentially, a conviction that success, however merited, is actually undeserved.

There is also that feeling of guilt so common, we’re told, among new mothers. In my interview with Ennis-Hill, she explained how anxious she’d been ahead of this summer’s World Championships in Beijing. When training wasn’t going so well, she imagined how she’d feel if she didn’t perform as she hoped. “I would have been away from my son for two weeks and I would have been absolutely devastated because I would be so mad with myself for being away. As a mum as well you feel guilty about everything, so it’s definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever, ever done,” she told me. How many men would have questioned themselves in this way?

Ennis-Hill spoke openly about one of the more challenging consequences of childbirth. “Your confidence does [take a] knock,” she said. “I was thinking, 'Oh gosh, I’ve got to train now as well and fit all this in. You’re up through the night and that has an impact on how you feel about everything and whether you can do it, and your self-belief. Everything’s a million times worse when you’re tired.” In a changing world, men also travel emotional postnatal journeys and undoubtedly suffer from sleep deprivation too. But they certainly aren’t forced to battle through changes to body shape.

And then there’s the question of why there are so many more prominent male comedians. Earlier this year, I asked Jason Manford for his explanation in an interview for the Radio Times. “Audiences on a Friday, Saturday night are a bit rowdy and I always think stand-up is a bit like flirting,” he said. “So when a bloke comes out and he does his thing, he’s making people laugh, this is what you do when you’re flirting one on one.

“So it’s harder for females sometimes to come on and be on the forefront because that’s not what we’re used to in our societal rules. It’s a bloke who’s on the forefront and generally the woman’s passive. For a female to be aggressive is not what we’re used to. So I think female comics generally have to work harder because of an audience’s preconceptions.”

Handling rejection, Manford believed, is another factor. “Blokes are more used to rejection. Generally it’s a bloke who asks a girl out. I’m stereotyping but that’s what we do. And I’ve noticed it on the circuit. A girl will come off stage, she’s had a bad gig, and she’ll go, ‘I must have said something wrong.’

“A guy will come offstage and he’ll go, ‘Maybe the sound was off’ or, ‘It was definitely the audience’. He’ll find an external reason for his failure."

Whether or not there’s something in Manford’s analysis, we still live in a society where – last time I checked anyway – the onus is more frequently on the man to chat up a woman. That involves confidence. Peacocking isn’t a ritual confined to the animal kingdom.

There’s no doubt that confidence is an attractive quality in both men and women. It can transform appearances and draw in admirers who would otherwise walk on by. It can also be, as we’ve seen, a pivotal ingredient in successful careers. But overconfidence not only becomes unappealing, it can mutate into arrogance, pride and, ultimately, a fall.

The ancient Greeks knew about nemesis following hubris thousands of years ago and I’ve always thought Piers Morgan’s Twitter profile is brilliantly clever. He is one of the most confident men on social media, but he’s carved an indemnity clause into his online presence with a simple, biographical bon mot: “One day you’re the cock of the walk, the next a feather duster.”

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The big secret nobody wants to tell

Mani Shankar Aiyar on Charlie Hebdon

Courtesy NDTV.com

I was as horrified as you to hear of 12 lives being lost in the armed assault on a Paris satirical weekly for their repeatedly sneering at the Prophet of Islam (PBUH) and running cartoons denigrating him and the religion he has brought to hundreds of millions of families the world over. That such horror at terrorism was not just my reaction as a non-Muslim to the Paris outrage, but widely shared by Muslims too was brought home to me by a statement issued by a collegium of Imams and preachers of Bahrain who said: "Violence and extremism have always been - and still are - the biggest enemies of Islam, and contravene its teachings, tolerance and genuine precepts. All countries should take unified stances against terrorism. We call for the need to devise a unified international strategy to combat its forms and manifestation everywhere." 

That precisely reflects the position taken by the Dar-ul-Uloom. It precisely reflects my own personal position. To go by the Congress President's reaction, it also reflects my party's position: "The Congress President, Smt Sonia Gandhi, has condemned the cowardly and dastardly terror attack on Media in Paris. Shocked at the audacity of the gruesome act, Smt Gandhi said that extremism and intolerance will never be able to curb freedom of expression and will only result in perpetuation of violence."
 
What then is the controversy about? It is about my describing the incident as a "backlash" to the War on Terrorism. That is not a justification of terrorism. It is an explanation. The distinction is important. I condemn terrorism. I do not commend it. If, however, war is declared on terrorists, it is stupid to imagine that the terrorists will take it lying down; inevitably they will hit back - that is a consequence we have to be prepared for. 

Charlie Hebdo, the satirical weekly, was so obviously on the hit list that it was virtually inviting a reaction week after week. The threat to the Editor was so palpable that he had been personally provided with just about the highest level of security that France could offer. Why the magazine's office was not protected with an adequate posse of armed security is being investigated.  But it also reflects the mind-set that thinks the West can mount a war and get away with little or no loss to themselves. The West is so militarily powerful and so technologically superior that it is able to unleash an unequal war in which their resources in money and machines cannot be matched even remotely by those whom they are combating.
 
Therefore, terrorists resort to an asymmetrical response. They target non-combatants by way of avenging themselves on those whose war machines kill - daily - scores, hundreds, even thousands of the non-combatants in whose midst the terrorists live and shield themselves.
 
A dead innocent is a dead innocent. Terrorists deliberately target the innocent. The War on Terrorism does not target innocents. It kills them indiscriminately by way of what is delicately called "collateral damage". But the loved ones and the community are equally affected - whether the killing is deliberate or incidental. The rage is the same. The urge to revenge is the same. For, as Gandhi said - and I quoted him to the TV agency - "Violence begets violence".
 
The West is near perfecting the art of killing their enemies (plus "collateral damage") without risking their own lives. When eight American body bags returned from Somalia, Bill Clinton immediately called off the operation "Black Hawk Down". When eight Pathan bodies of helpless mothers, hapless children, and innocent by-standers lie in the midst of the carnage wrought by a Drone attack, the wailing families do not react differently. They seek justice, each in his or her own way. The Drone wins out because even if it is downed, as it is unmanned, no American family is left with a tear in its eye. When terrorists attack, they know they are going to be killed - or kill themselves. They take the vicious consequences of their vicious action. The Drone just flies away - to come back another day.
 
Till even the First World War, war was fought on the terrain of war - the battle-field. Those who died or got injured were soldiers. 

Civilians only accidentally got in the way. That changed when the Germans started assassinating mayors of towns where snipers shot at German soldiers. It horrified the world and contributed more to Britain coming in against Germany than perhaps any other single action. Not even into the Thirties had men been desensitized to the atrocity of civilian beings killed in armed attack. Picasso earned eternal fame because his painting captured and symbolized the horror experienced by all civilized people at the aerial bombing of the Spanish village of Guernica.
 
But by the Second World War, these niceties were abandoned. The terror opened by the Nazis through their Blitzkrieg on England, followed by their merciless genocide of Jews in the East European countries they occupied, started the process of desensitizing the hitherto-unknown horror of innocents being mown to death. 

Stalingrad finally dulled sensitivities to the point where Churchill could order the bombing of Dresden and kill more innocents in a single night than all the terrorist attacks since 9/11 and after. 
Truman's atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki removed the final constraints on sparing non-combatants the terrible fate of the battle-field. Since then, it has been open house for those with the military means to do so.
 
I was posted as a young diplomat to Hanoi in the middle of the US-Vietnam war. Day after day, twice a day, US Air Force planes would pound the city without regard to civilian habitation or military target, shooting to death and severely injuring any living being - man, woman or child - they could fit into their sights. Uncounted millions died. Many were non-combatant civilians. A young British colleague said to me that American U-2s flying at such speed that they could cross the country in 10 minutes at a height of 60,000 feet could take a photograph of the saucer I held in my hand that would be more accurate than my naked eye could see. "How," he asked, "do you think these guys on bicycles will ever drive them out?" The bicyclists did; they won. But only after millions of civilians had been slaughtered. 
 
I condemn what happened in Paris with all the strength in my voice. It was dreadful. But I regard all forms of terrorism, especially by armed force that takes the lives of non-combatants as equally - perhaps even more -  terrible. That is why my heart bleeds when 1,500 Palestinians are killed in their homes by bombs rained on them from the skies because they have the temerity to ask for the right to return to their homeland. The Modi government had little or nothing to say about that outrage. It is this lack of balance in the BJP's approach to terrorism that fills me with dread and despair.
 
Most of us Indians, except the fringe lunatics of the BJP-RSS-Sangh Parivar, have learned millennia ago to live with diversity, indeed to celebrate our diversity, for out of it is forged our unity as a nation. 

For the West, however, diversity is a totally new experience. They have been compelled for economic reasons to import millions of Third World labourers, and since an arc of Arab countries lies immediately south of France on the other littoral of the Mediterranean, most of France's imported labour comprises Muslims from the Maghreb. France wants them to become Frenchmen as if the Arabs had fostered 1789 and never been subjected to colonial rule. The Arab Muslims wish to remain themselves, notwithstanding their having emigrated to France for the same economic reasons that have led to France and other Western countries importing them in such large numbers. Hence, stupid measures like insisting that no Muslim schoolchild in France may wear the hijab that her sisters wear in their home countries will result in a backlash.

Life getting you down? Learn to bounce back

Even the most fortunate of us can expect setbacks every now and again. Here are some ways to get back on your feet

• Vanessa King
• theguardian.com, Monday 5 January 2015 16.59 GMT

‘When things go wrong, resilient thinkers see it as transitory.’ Photograph: Getty Images

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger” – so the German philosopher Nietzsche famously said. Luckily, the school of hard knocks isn’t the only way to build our resilience. There are a number of tactics that can get us through tough times, help us to bounce back and make us happier. Next time you are struggling, feeling stressed or stuck, give one or more of these a try.

1. Find something you can control (even if it’s small)

Often when we are struggling we can feel overwhelmed or powerless. And it’s true: there are lots of things in life that we can’t control, including big challenges such as redundancy or broken relationships or bereavement. But taking small, positive steps in any area of our life can have a ripple effect, increasing our sense of self-efficacy and eventually enabling us to move forward in the problem area.

2. Focus on what’s right

As a species, we tend to focus on what’s wrong rather than what’s right. Psychologists suggest we developed this “negativity bias” when we were hunter-gatherers, constantly surveying our environment for dangers.

Of course looking out for risks is still important, but we can benefit from paying more conscious attention to what’s going right. In one experiment psychologists asked people to spend a few minutes at the end of each day for a week, making a note of three things they enjoyed, were pleased about or grateful for that day and the reason they found these things good. At the end of the study, participants who did this were happier than those who didn’t – and this effect lasted for as long as six months.

This isn’t about putting on rose-tinted glasses – it’s about a more balanced perspective. Good things happen even on the worst days, even if these are as small as someone making us a nice cup of tea, yet we often let them pass by without much attention. Psychologists have shown that consciously focusing on these good things helps to increase our experience of positive emotions. Over time this has a number of benefits for our resilience and wellbeing as, for example, we become more open to ideas, better at problem-solving and more trusting of others.

3. Check your thinking

Albert Ellis, one of the fathers of cognitive behavioural therapy, wrote that we are remarkably good at disturbing ourselves – in other words, the way we think can undermine our own resilience.

Let’s look at an example: the way we think when things go wrong in our day-to-day lives. Leading psychologist Martin Seligman found that the way we interpret the causes of everyday setbacks can have a significant impact on our ability to cope, our physical health and our persistence in the face of adversity. He also showed that we can learn more resilient thinking styles.

Seligman looked at three key dimensions to our interpretations:

Is it down to me? When bad things happen, resilient thinkers tend to focus on causes outside themselves. For example, if they miss a deadline they will look at the computer issues they had or the other pressing jobs they had to do, rather than only beating themselves up for being late.

How long will this problem last? When things go wrong, resilient thinkers see it as transitory, perhaps thinking: “It didn’t work this time, but next time it will be better.” Someone with a less resilient thinking style might believe it will always be that way: “It didn’t work this time, and it’s never going to.”

What other aspects of my life will this affect? When something goes wrong in one area of a resilient thinker’s life, they put boundaries around the issue, limiting it to that specific area – for example: “I went the wrong way; I find following directions hard.” We can undermine our resilience if we see the problem as spreading out to everything: “I went the wrong way. That’s typical of me – I’m no good at anything.”

This isn’t about being unrealistic or not taking responsibility when problems occur, but about being realistic and flexible in our thoughts about why these issues happened. If we are stressed or down, we can all too easily fall into the trap of thinking that everything is our fault, can’t be changed and trouble will spread to all areas of our life. This makes us feel hopeless and can start a downward spiral towards lower resilience and even depression.

So the next time something goes wrong for you, pause for a moment and think realistically: how did I, others or the situation contribute to this? What can I do that will help now or stop the problem occurring again?

4. Ask others to help

When we have problems, it is very easy to feel isolated. We are bombarded by images of people with perfect lives or who have achieved great things, which can make us feel we’re not good enough or even ashamed that we are struggling. Remember the saying “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle inside” and don’t be afraid to ask for help. We all have ups and downs, strengths and weaknesses, and connecting with other people is a source of resilience.

Human beings evolved to live in social groups. Our relationships with those around us are really important for our wellbeing and resilience (and that of our communities). By asking for help we are showing that we value and respect other people. Scientists are also finding that the act of helping actually boosts the helper’s own wellbeing. Showing our vulnerability makes others see us as human, making them feel more able to ask us for help when they need it, so building the relationship. This helps to increase wellbeing and resilience for both of you.

Your request doesn’t have to place a burden on the other person – it could be as simple as asking them to listen, share their experience, knowledge or ideas to help you move forward, or perhaps make a connection to someone they know. You could even offer to help them with something in return (that could help you too).

5. Distract yourself

It often helps to take time out from the things you are worrying about – even if it’s just a few minutes.

When we are immersed in a problem it is hard to think creatively about ways to deal with it. How many times have your best ideas come when you’ve been in the shower or tidying up? Our brains are amazing organs – they are still working on issues even when we aren’t consciously focusing on them. In fact, allowing time off from the thing we’re grappling with can work wonders.

An effective ways of taking time out is exercise. Not only does this give us a break from what we’re doing and our worries; it’s also great for our minds. Anything moderately aerobic, such as jogging or simply a brisk walk, has a physical impact on our brain, helping us to think more clearly.

Much has been written about mindfulness, and this can be very effective way to boost our resilience. Even a few minutes can give us a little space from our worries and help put things in perspective.

Take time to laugh. We have already looked at the benefits of positive emotions. Years ago I trained as an accountant (we can all make career mistakes). This involved doing a lot of difficult exams and a lot of pre-exam nerves. To deal with that anxiety, my friend Siobhan, who was doing the same training, had a tactic that we all thought was mad at the time but, based on recent psychological research, turned out to be a good one. Outside the exam room, as we waited to meet our destiny, Siobhan would immerse herself in a joke book. She said it helped to put her in an upbeat frame of mind, ready to focus in the exams (which she went on to pass).

And finally, if you can’t get to sleep because your mind won’t switch off, find a way to distract it – for example, counting back from 100 in threes or going through the alphabet trying to think of as many animals/actors/footballers (you choose the topic) for each letter as you can.