Why India’s middle classes are Modi’s ‘Muslims’

PM Modi is transferring wealth from the middle class to the poor, because the middle class will anyway vote BJP for nationalism & dislike of Muslims writes SHEKHAR GUPTA in The Print

Illustration by Soham Sen


One key headline-point from the Narendra Modi government’s latest Budget is the raising of top tax rates for the rich earning more than Rs 2 crore a year. The increase is steeper for the super-rich — above Rs 5 crore per year. The top tax rate now goes to 42.3 per cent.

It seems like such an awful example of the Indira Gandhi-style ‘soak-the-rich’ politics, people like us might say. Many others in deeply pink polity would hail it as uplifting evidence that Modi too has fully embraced the principles of socialism as mandated in the Constitution’s post-Emergency preamble. Never mind that he leads India’s most unabashed government of the Right into its second term.

Both are wrong. Because the Modi government isn’t really soaking the rich, but the middle classes, who also happen to be its most loyal vote bank. Question: Is their unquestioning loyalty the reason the government can afford to treat them like this?

Over the past five years, the Modi government has carried out probably the most spectacular and efficient transfer, or redistribution, of national wealth to the poor. It is tough to estimate it to the last decimal point, but between housing, toilets, cooking gas and Mudra loans, anything between Rs 9-11 lakh crore was distributed to the poor. That it was done with minimal leakage and with no discrimination of caste or religion has been acknowledged. It helped Modi win a bigger second majority. And where did this money come from?

Our immediate instinct would be to imagine it came from the rich. But not quite so. The government kept raising taxes on fuel as crude prices fell, and folding the bonanza into its pocket. Most of this came from the vehicle-owning middle classes.

You can conclude, therefore, that a spectacular transfer of wealth did indeed take place to the poor. But it came from the middle classes of all strata and not particularly the rich. It also bought enough votes from the grateful poor for Modi to sweep the election. 

All exit poll data, from the big cities to the urbanising states, tells you that the middle classes too voted overwhelmingly for the BJP. The rapidly urbanising state of Haryana, the richest in India with very few extreme poor, is a good example. The BJP was marginal here until 2014. This time it collected 58 per cent of the vote.


This is the most important political takeaway from the way Modi has run his economy. He has taken from those in the middle to give to those at the bottom, and both are voting for him with equal enthusiasm. The middle classes have emerged as his most rock-solid vote bank. And they happily pay for it.

Now come to the latest budget. Once again, there is that mere pretence of taking from the rich. But should it bother the rich?

CBDT data shows that in the last financial year only 6,351 individuals returned incomes above Rs 5 crore, with an average income of Rs 13 crore. How much additional revenue will the new tax rate bring? Just about Rs 5,000 crore. Not much more than a year’s turnover of the Indian Premier League. The poor will be thrilled the rich are being socked. And the really rich will complain in whispers but keep buying anonymous electoral bonds and dropping them off in one letter box — you can guess which one. Because if they don’t, the taxman might call. 

The poor are easily fooled, purely for their cheap thrills and entertainment, but the real joke is on the middle classes. Because, as in 2014-19, they’re the ones who will contribute the wealth to be transferred to the poor. To begin with, the finance minister gifted them additional taxes on petrol and diesel in the budget to ‘make up’, hold your breath, for the drop in crude prices.

This has followed a string of policies that can only be described as “soak the middle class” and not the rich. During the Modi years, Long Term Capital Gains tax (LTCG) on equities was introduced, dividend distribution tax (DDT) was increased, additional tax was levied on dividend income above Rs 10 lakh per year, surcharge on incomes between Rs 50 lakh and one crore was raised (unless you call them super-rich today), import duty on gold increased to 12.5 per cent from 10 per cent, and subsidies were reduced and taken away from the middle class, including on cooking gas. We’d welcome the removal of these non-merit subsidies. But remember who is paying.

That Modi and the BJP can continue to treat the rising and expanding middle class this way shows that they have gamed its mind perfectly. Its loyalty to them is fired not so much by economic impulse as by something more visceral: The resurgent, muscular Hindu definition of Indian nationalism that they have bought into. Add to this the dislike of the Muslim. Many of them may still find lynchings abhorrent, but they are quite happy to see Muslims completely out of the power structure: Cabinet, top government positions, and greatly reduced in Parliament.

My colleague and Political Editor D.K. Singh points out a remarkable set of figures on the number of times the BJP finance ministers have mentioned the middle class in their budget speeches. Generally, it’s averaged five. In Piyush Goyal’s interim budget speech, it suddenly shot up to 13 times. It was election eve, after all. In Nirmala Sitharaman’s now, it fell to three. Of course, she also completely forgot the promises Goyal had made to the middle class in his speech in February: Increase in standard deduction, TDS threshold, relaxation of tax slabs. Why should we bother when you will vote for us out of your love for us, while the poor vote with gratitude?

For decades, India’s Muslim minority was similarly gamed by our ‘secular’ parties. They knew Muslims will vote for them out of their fear of the RSS/BJP. That’s the reason they saw no need to do anything for the Muslims. Their vote came as ransom for protection. The BJP has now realised the majority middle class sees a similar fundamental compulsion to vote for it. That’s the reason we call them Modi’s ‘Muslims’.

Why bhakti in politics is bad for democracy

Ramachandra Guha in The Hindustan Times


Back in 2005, a knowledgeable Gujarati journalist wrote of how ‘Narendra Modi thinks a detergent named development will wash away the memory of 2002’. While focusing on new infrastructure and industrial projects in his state, the then chief minister of Gujarat launched what the journalist called ‘a massive self-publicity drive’, publishing calendars, booklets and posters where his own photograph appeared prominently alongside words and statistics speaking of Gujarat’s achievements under his leadership. ‘Modi has made sure that in Gujarat no one can escape noticing him,’ remarked the journalist.

Since May 2014, this self-publicity drive has been extended to the nation as a whole. In fact, the process began before the general elections, when, through social media and his speeches, Narendra Modi successfully projected himself as the sole and singular alternative to a (visibly) corrupt UPA regime. The BJP, a party previously opposed to ‘vyakti puja’, succumbed to the power of Modi’s personality. Since his swearing-in as Prime Minister, the government has done what the party did before it: totally subordinated itself to the will, and occasionally the whim, of a single individual.

Hero-worship is not uncommon in India. Indeed, we tend to excessively venerate high achievers in many fields. Consider the extraordinarily large and devoted fan following of Sachin Tendulkar and Lata Mangeshkar. These fans see their icons as flawless in a way fans in other countries do not. In America, Bob Dylan has many admirers but also more than a few critics. The same is true of the British tennis player Andy Murray. But in public discourse in India, criticism of Sachin and Lata is extremely rare. When offered, it tends to be met with vituperative abuse, not by rational or reasoned rebuttal.

The hero-worship of sportspeople is merely silly. But the hero-worship of politicians is inimical to democracy. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu were epicentres of progressive social reform, whose activists promoted caste and gender equality, rational thinking, and individual rights. Yet in more recent years, Maharashra has seen the cult of Bal Thackeray, Tamil Nadu the cult of J Jayalalithaa. In each case, the power of the State was (in Jayalalithaa’s case still is) put in service of this personality cult, with harassment and intimidation of critics being common.

However, at a nation-wide level the cult of Narendra Modi has had only one predecessor — that of Indira Gandhi. Thus now, as then, ruling party politicians demand that citizens see the Prime Minister as embodying not just the party or the government, but the nation itself. Millions of devotees on social media (as well as quite a few journalists) have succumbed to the most extreme form of hero-worship. More worryingly, one senior cabinet minister has called Narendra Modi a Messiah. A chief minister has insinuated that anyone who criticises the Prime Minister’s policies is anti-national. Meanwhile, as in Indira Gandhi’s time, the government’s publicity wing, as well as AIR and Doordarshan, works overtime to broadcast the Prime Minister’s image and achievements.

While viewing the promotion of this cult of Narendra Modi, I have been reminded of two texts by long-dead thinker-politicians, both (sadly) still relevant. The first is an essay published by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1937 under the pen-name of ‘Chanakya’. Here Nehru, referring to himself in the third person (as Modi often does now), remarked: ‘Jawaharlal cannot become a fascist. Yet he has all the makings of a dictator in him — a vast popularity, a strong will directed to a well-defined purpose, energy, pride, organisational capacity, ability, hardness, and, with all his love of the crowd, an intolerance of others and a certain contempt for the weak and the inefficient.’

Nehru was here issuing a warning to himself. Twelve years later, in his remarkable last speech to the Constituent Assembly, BR Ambedkar issued a warning to all Indians, when, invoking John Stuart Mill, he asked them not ‘to lay their liberties at the feet of even a great man, or to trust him with powers which enable him to subvert their institutions’. There was ‘nothing wrong’, said Ambedkar, ‘in being grateful to great men who have rendered life-long services to the country. But there are limits to gratefulness.’ He worried that in India, ‘Bhakti or what may be called the path of devotion or hero-worship, plays a part in its politics unequalled in magnitude by the part it plays in the politics of any other country in the world. Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.’

These remarks uncannily anticipated the cult of Indira Gandhi and the Emergency. As I have written in these columns before, Indian democracy is now too robust to be destroyed by a single individual. But it can still be severely damaged. That is why this personality cult of Narendra Modi must be challenged (and checked) before it goes much further.

Later this week we shall observe the 60th anniversary of BR Ambedkar’s death. Some well-meaning (and brave) member of the Prime Minister’s inner circle should bring Ambedkar’s speech of 1949 to his attention. And perhaps Nehru’s pseudonymous article of 1937 too.

Don’t force us to join the India Loyalty Programme

Shobha De in The Times of India


One of my all-time favourite anthems is A R Rahman’s stirring tribute to his motherland — India. Each time I hear his voice soar as he sings ‘Maa tujhe salaam…Vande Mataram’, I get goosebumps and a lump in my throat. I had the same intensely emotional response earlier this week when I watched Amitabh Bachchan fervently singing ‘Jana Gana Mana’ at the start of the India-Pakistan cricket match in Eden Garden.(Editor's comment - I think the singing of the national anthem at entertainment events should be banned!) Feeling the way I did, I figured I was experiencing genuine love for my beloved country. As definitions and tests of patriotism go, I had certainly passed mine… in my own eyes, of course. If I’d felt deeply moved, if I had moist eyes, if I was getting mushy and sentimental, clearly something wonderful was happening within. I didn’t have to deconstruct it… I felt it. That was good enough. Gut feelings say it all. If you tune in to the many nationalistic songs your heart remembers, you will instinctively recognize the extraordinary frisson they generate — some would call it patriotic fervour. This is the only truth you need to identify. Why should anyone be asked to produce arbitrary ‘proof’ of patriotism?

It’s such a pity that random netas are subjecting citizens to these ‘tests’ and questioning their commitment to the country. If such a test does exist, why not make it public and let people decide whether or not to appear for it? Pass or fail — please identify the examiners. Who appoints them? Is there a panel of experts drawing up exam papers? May we ask for the listed criteria? Will raising flag poles on top of each school, college, government building, convert Indians into overnight patriots? Assuming that does indeed happen, will there be a jury that has the final vote on the subject? Who frames the ultimate laws of patriotism and what will these be? Singing the national anthem twice a day? Shouting slogans in public places every week? Placing the right hand over the heart each time the flag is spotted? Wearing the tricolour on the sleeve? Organizing workshops on proper patriotic behaviour? Perhaps, designing appropriate uniforms which will have to be sported by one and all on national days and important holidays. There is safety in conformity, say those who conform!



ROUSING RAHMAN: If a nationalistic song gives you goosebumps, then you must love your country

That was the upside. Now, let’s look at the downside: What happens to those who refuse to adhere to the rule book and choose to demonstrate their love for the country in their own singular way? Will that be ‘allowed’ by authorities and their designated troops? Is a special cell going to be (officially) created to keep an eye on the un-patriots, pseudo-patriots, self-confessed ‘traitors’, suspected deshdrohis? How will their crimes be identified, tabulated, judged and punished? Special courts? Judges with extra powers? Along with a few kangaroos jumping around inside court premises, just in case the judge misses a key point during the trial?

Why are we doing this? Are we not confident enough of our identity as Indians? And who are these hyper-patriots trying to browbeat citizens into complying with new-fangled ‘India Loyalty Programmes’? The ugly truth is several netas strutting their patriotic plumes and baying for the blood of those not joining the chorus, have criminal records and serious charges pending in courts. Do lusty cries of ‘Bharat Mata ki jai’ absolve them of all the muck? If for any reason, rational or irrational, someone does not raise a politically approved slogan, does it suddenly debilitate the state? Does India totter because a few citizens refuse to mouth salutations on demand? Let’s get a few things clear: hoisting flags, singing anthems, shouting slogans do not make a nation great. Progress does.

Patriotism is pretty hard to define. It is nuanced and complex. It is about loyalty to one’s country, above all else. Which is why it is dangerous and juvenile to label anybody a ‘deshdrohi’ for not participating in political posturing. Anybody can chant ‘Bharat Mata ki jai’ mechanically, and not feel a thing about the country. A hardcore traitor could shamelessly chant ‘Bharat Mata ki jai’ and win applause. Words like mata and pita are invested with a great deal of emotional weight. Which country earns the right to be defined as a mata or pita? The country that wins the hearts and trust of its citizens and inspires them to invest the same level of love, respect and reverence towards it. These feelings cannot be artificially manufactured. A nation that generates these emotions organically, devoid of manipulation and pressure, automatically creates generations of proud patriots. India has always been such a country. We really don’t need minders and monitors to tell us how to be patriotic. Do us all a favour, you bullies — just vamoose, will you?

Captain Cook and loyalty in sport

Simon Barnes in Cricinfo

If England want to reach the World Cup quarter-finals, they are more likely to do it without Cook, but dropping him would be disloyal © Getty Images

Loyalty is seen as one of sport's cardinal virtues - even though calculated disloyalty is sometimes a shatteringly effective tactic. Take Jimmy Greaves. A great footballer, but the England manager Alf Ramsey showed him no loyalty and dropped him in the course of the World Cup of 1966, preferring Geoff Hurst. Hurst scored a hat-trick in the final, Greaves became an alcoholic.

Yet there are times when loyalty counts. During that same tournament, so dear to the English mind, there were calls from British politicians to drop Nobby Stiles because of his "dirty" play - and people in the Football Association thought they had a point. But Ramsey said he'd resign if ordered to drop Stiles. Stiles stayed, was destructive and brilliant, and England won the tournament.

Loyalty, then, is an equivocal thing, in sport as in anything else. Loyalty isn't a virtue plain and simple: it depends on what - and whom - you are loyal to. Liverpool Football Club made a great show of their loyalty to their forward Luis Suarez when he was accused of racism. Suarez was found guilty and Liverpool's loyalty looked like self-serving parochialism.

Indian cricket remained loyal to Sachin Tendulkar and indulged him right to the end. Would it have been wiser, kinder, more dignified to have moved him on while he had that gloriously imperfect - and Bradmanesque - 99 international centuries to his name? Instead of waiting until he had scored his 100th, inevitably in a losing cause against Bangladesh? In the last couple of seasons Tendulkar lost some of his poetry.

This year English cricket has been all about loyalty. I'm not saying this as a fanciful observer: loyalty was the agenda set by those who run the English game. It's as if they had determined that cricket should become a morality play, one in which the good end happily and the bad unhappily.

But they haven't. Good and bad look equally unhappy.

Perhaps they thought that loyalty was a simple issue. If so, they have been sadly disabused. Poor old Alastair Cook: it was never his ambition to be a symbol of righteousness. He just wanted to play cricket and score runs, and for a while he was immensely good at it.

	Be very careful before you get moral in public. Especially in sport. Runs are not the reward for good behaviour. Nasty men can also score centuries

But they forced him into the role of Captain Loyal: compare and contrast with Kevin Pietersen, Batsman Vile. Pietersen was sacked for various crimes of disloyalty, despite being England's top scorer in their disastrous tour of Australia last winter.

They couldn't just drop him: they wanted Pietersen publicly disgraced. Accordingly, they staked everything on Cook as Pietersen's antithesis: hero to Pietersen's antihero; quiet, composed and decent where Pietersen is loud, rude and self-advertising; generous and team-minded where Pietersen is self-obsessed; above all loyal where Pietersen is disloyal.

A lot of that is a pretty good fit, but this is sport, not politics, and in sport you can't get by on bluster and good intentions. Cook is a batsman and a batsman needs runs. Cook at his best is one of the most certain players who ever took guard. But the traumas of the winter made that certainty a thing of shreds and patches.

He began to rebuild his life post Ashes, post KP. He was greatly helped by India's feeble performance in last summer's Test series, but now, as cricket gets ready for the World Cup early next year, the question of loyalty crops up once again.

For Cook is having a disastrous series against Sri Lanka. England haven't a clue about 50-over cricket, never have; beneath their dignity, I suppose. Cook's attempts to be a one-day batsman mix Dad-dancing embarrassment with Candide-like naiveté. And he has scored no runs.

So England are in a difficult situation. When does it become appropriate to be disloyal to Captain Loyal? Ex-players are saying it's time he was dropped as both captain and player from the one-day team. The most intriguing argument, from the Guardian's Mike Selvey, is that his scrappy one-day batting has removed the certainty from his Test match play.

The irrefragable fact is that Cook is not good enough as either batsman or captain in the 50-over game. If England want to put on a respectable show at the World Cup - i.e. reach the quarter-finals - they are more likely to do it without Cook. But dropping him would be rather disloyal, and this is a team that is flamboyantly built on loyalty.

Eoin Morgan, Cook's likely replacement, is in equally poor batting form © Getty Images

Naturally the players are showing public loyalty to Cook: strong man, difficult patch, got the character to pull through etc etc. But that's their job; they are not going to say: Well, Cookie's struggling, I think I ought to do the job instead.

In sport, as in politics, looking loyal is the default position.

The selectors are now wondering about the cost of public disloyalty. So here's some advice: don't do it unless you have a plausible alternative. Don't drop Bradley Wiggins as your main man in the Tour de France unless you have Chris Froome already in the team. Team Sky were bold enough to risk such disloyalty, and that's how they won the event in 2012 and then 2013.

And here's some more advice. Pity it comes too late, really: be very careful before you get moral in public. Especially in sport. You have to accept that runs are not the reward for good behaviour. And that nasty men can also score centuries. It's also true that a person whose nature is fundamentally disloyal can do a fine job for a team. There's something offensive about the very idea but every team that has even known success has experienced it to some degree. Certainly England have.

But if not Cook, who? Eoin Morgan is the obvious choice, but he can't buy a run either and looks like a busted flush. No point in being publicly disloyal to Captain Loyal - and finding yourself even worse off. So here's the moral: sport may be a minefield but it's not half as explosive as morality.

Failing the Tebbit test - Difficulties in supporting the England cricket team

by Girish Menon





The article by second generation British writer Kishan Koria applying the 'cricket test' to examine the behaviour of Britons of Asian origin was interesting and revelatory but it may be a case of blaming the victim and not the perpetrator. So, I am going to raise some issues which are never raised in the politics of Tebbit's followers. 

Firstly, why should it be a natural assumption that if you have resided in England for years you must support the English cricket team? If England's home advantage against India is reduced to fixing the pitch to suit its bowlers then so be it. The English cricket team must earn the support of the ticket buyers with its acts on and off the pitch.

The spectator in a cricket match has paid a high price to be there. That s/he should cheer for the England cricket team was never a condition of the contract. She is a free agent and can support whoever she pleases. 

The manner in which the English cricket establishment has treated players like Pietersen and Panesar gives the outsider an impression that they don't care about the views of their followers in any case. I'm sure even Bopara may be surprised at the number of times he has been in and out of the England team. 

The cricket blog The Full Toss has often highlighted the uncaring way the ECB deals with the supporters of the English cricket team. So, will it not be natural for cricket lovers to express their disgust in manifold ways? 

As far as citizenship in a land goes so long as residents pay taxes and obey the laws of the land then they are free to do what they like with the rest of their lives. This is usually the argument of free marketers like Tebbit, so why then do they wish to deny choice to these consumers of cricketainment with the nanny state telling them who to support in a cricket match? 

So, the likes of the ECB should be happy that it is the English citizens of Indian origin who are putting the bums on stadia seats and the brown pounds in their coffers. Many English bums (pun unintended) stay away from cricket stadia for a variety of reasons  including ticket prices, poor team selection policies etc. Hence the ECB should not further risk their luck by telling these high fare paying spectators who to support. Instead they should earn their support by fair minded policies and listening to the voices of their dwindling support base.

Personally, I fail the Tebbit test every time England play India and I have been unable to understand why. This is funny because in my growing years I supported the Mumbai team against other Indian teams even though my parents were immigrants from the state of Kerala (far away from Mumbai), and despite there always existing  a violent campaign against immigrants in Mumbai. 

It maybe out of alienation in a land where me and my family's future fortune lies. It maybe the jingoism in the highly conservative media. It maybe the 'institutional racism' referred to in the Macpherson report. It may be the 'barging of Gavaskar by Snow'; the negative lines bowled by Giles; the Zaheer Khan jelly beans incident; the failure to criticise Anderson for his foul mouthed pronouncements in the quest for victory; the failure to understand the invalidity of the predicted path in a DRS while castigating the non believer as a Luddite; or invoking the spirit of cricket argument selectively.  As for the booing of Moeen Ali, a fine prospect, to my mind this appears to be a continuation of the Indo-Pak rivalry which has been carried forward by the diaspora. 

However, I have also noticed periods when I begin to like the English team but then something happens and the old English superiority biases surface in the commentariat and I am driven once again to dislike the team, probably wrongly, probably not due to the players' actions. But, most importantly, the overriding reason is the brand of cricket the team plays. I have for long been a fan of the Pietersen, Botham and Gower brand of English cricket. But, so long as the clones of Boycott and Tavare dominate the approach to batting it is a trifle difficult to stay awake let alone support the England team. 

The unquestioning loyalty of the cricket nut

Russell Jackson in Cricinfo 

Innovations like LED bails may come and go. Fans may frown at it, but they will continue watching  © Getty Images

Enlarge

Many moons ago, during my university years, I had my first and last commerce-based epiphany while sitting through a marketing lecture. The speaker, whose name, voice and face I couldn't place if I tried, started talking about the way in which the Harley Davidson motorcycle company essentially had a huge portion of their customers in the palm of their hand because these diehard riders and motorbike enthusiasts displayed what marketers called "loyalty beyond reason".

This meant that no matter how the company behaved, how tacky the licensing deals they pursued or how ubiquitous their brand name became, the lifestyle that surrounded their product and the emotional pull of their bikes for rusted-on diehards was too strong for those customers to resist or abandon. The Apple brand is now probably a more salient example, such is the unquestioning faith a huge number of their customers place in both the brand and the cult of Steve Jobs.

At the time, this idea of loyalty beyond reason made me question whether there were people or ideals or products that I clung to with unquestioning faith. Thinking as loftily of myself as university are wont to do, I concluded that I was a person of intellectual fortitude and couldn't be pushed around and told what to think. In hindsight, not only was this wrong but it was a supremely ironic thing to think as I sat bored stiff in a lecture theatre, partaking in one of life's great symbolic rituals of conformity and fulfillment of parental expectation.

What I failed to admit then was that my almost daily displays of loyalty beyond reason are tied to sport. Cricket primarily, but also Australian Rules football, basketball, tennis, soccer, and any number of other essentially trivial events around which I organise my entire life and to which I've devoted the lion's share of my discretionary waking hours.

Maybe you're a little like me and think that your cynicism and finely-tuned worldview acts as a shield to the avarice, corruption and simmering sense of discontent that characterize modern sport but I'd follow up the establishment of that point by asking you how many times you've sat and watched these sports in the last two weeks. In my head I can tick off a checklist of many ills that have blighted cricket in the last ten years and many more reasons for which a perfectly reasonable person could abandon the sport and take up a new hobby. I don't though because they've got me by the balls.

It makes me wonder just how bad cricket could get before I stopped watching it. That's no insult to the game in its current form because I love it as I always have, but the last ten years have proven that all of the subtle shifts in the landscape have a cumulative effect of altering the game markedly and not always for the better

I'll probably end up paying $400 for a World Cup final ticket, I'll upgrade my pay-TV subscription so I can watch a meaningless 10-game ODI tournament and I'll probably even buy the reissued 1992 Zimbabwe World Cup shirt because I'm a cricket nuffy. I decry the gauche incursion of monster trucks on the Big Bash League but then I'll go ahead and watch nearly every single game of the tournament. My loyalty goes beyond reason, as yours might too, and the marketing people know it. They could drive the monster trucks onto the ground mid-over and I'll keep watching.

In a way it makes me wonder just how bad cricket could get before I stopped watching it. That's no insult to the game in its current form because I love it as I always have, but the last ten years have proven that all of the subtle shifts in the landscape have a cumulative effect of altering the game markedly and not always for the better. By the time I'm 70 years old there might be no suitable willow left to make bats so they'll use aluminum ones or some composite fibre that hasn't even been invented yet. India, England and Australia might be the only teams playing in ICC events. The ICC might have been disbanded. Grounds might be half the size and the spectacle unrecognisable to what we see today, but it will still be called cricket and therefore I'll still be watching it.

This fan dilemma plays out elsewhere obviously. Hardened football fans who romanticise about the away days at ramshackle suburban pitches of the '70s might be physically repulsed by the obscene wages paid to English Premier League players and the ludicrous cost of a seat at the new mega-stadia, but mostly they keep watching, reading and forking out their dough to take part. Sport lovers are like those Harley Davidson-riding bikies and not just in a tribal sense, the love of these games that lives within them is as crucial to the beating of their hearts as the atrial septum.

One thing I would say is that for me sport has never stood in the way of maintaining a healthy amount of interpersonal relationships, but increasingly I find that it fills most other crevices of life. I'm more resigned to this than chastened or sad, but there are times when you've got to question that level of loyalty. I'll probably just wait until the cricket has finished though.

'You Are Not So Smart: Why Your Memory is Mostly Fiction....

So you remember your wedding day like it was yesterday. You can spot when something is of high quality. You keep yourself well-informed about current affairs but would be open to debate and discussion, You love your phone because it's the best, right? Are you sure? David McRaney from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, is here to tell you that you don't know yourself as well as you think. The journalist and self-described psychology nerd's new book, You Are Not So Smart, consists of 48 short chapters on the assorted ways that we mislead ourselves every day. "The central theme is that you are the unreliable narrator in the story of your life. And this is because you're unaware of how unaware you are," says McRaney. "It's fun to go through legitimate scientific research and pull out all of the examples that show how everyone, no matter how smart or educated or experienced, is radically self-deluded in predictable and quantifiable ways." Based on the blog of the same name, You Are Not So Smart is not so much a self-help book as a self-hurt book. Here McRaney gives some key examples

Expectation

The Misconception: Wine is a complicated elixir, full of subtle flavours only an expert can truly distinguish, and experienced tasters are impervious to deception.

The Truth: Wine experts and consumers can be fooled by altering their expectations.

An experiment in 2001 at the University of Bordeaux had wine experts taste a red and white wine, to determine which was the best. They dutifully explained what they liked about each wine but what they didn't realise was that scientists had just dyed the same white wine red and told them it was red wine. The tasters described the sorts of berries and tannins they could detect in the red wine as if it really was red. Another test had them judge a cheap bottle of wine and an expensive one. They rated the expensive wine much more highly than the cheap, with much more flattering descriptions. It was actually the same wine. It's not to say wine-tasting is pointless, it's to show that expectation can radically change experience. Yes, these people were experts, but that doesn't mean they can't be influenced by the same things as the rest of us, whether it be presentation or advertising or price. This drives home the idea that reality is a construction of the brain. You don't passively receive the outside world, you actively construct your experience moment by moment.

The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy

The Misconception: We take randomness into account when determining cause and effect.

The Truth: We tend to ignore random chance when the results seem meaningful or when we want a random event to have a meaningful cause.

Imagine a cowboy shooting at the side of a barn over and over again with a gun. The side of the barn fills up with holes. If you walk over and paint a bullseye around clusters of holes it will make it look like you have made quite a lot of correct shots. It's a metaphor for the way the human mind naturally works when trying to make sense out of chaos. The brain is very invested in taking chaos and turning it into order. For example, in America it's very popular to discuss how similar the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations were. Elected 100 years apart, Lincoln was killed in the Ford theatre; Kennedy was in a Lincoln automobile made by Ford. They were both killed on a Friday, sitting next to their wives, by men with three names. And so on and so on. It's not spooky. People take hold of the hits but ignore the misses. They are pulled into the things that line up, and are similar or coincidental, but they ignore everything else that's not. The similarities are merely bullseyes drawn around the many random facts.

Confirmation Bias

The Misconception: Your opinions are the result of years of rational, objective analysis.

The Truth: Your opinions are the result of years of paying attention to information that confirmed what you believed, while ignoring information that challenged your preconceived notions.

Any cognitive bias is a tendency to think in one way and not another whenever your mind is on auto-pilot; whenever you're going with the flow. Confirmation bias is a tendency to pay attention to evidence that confirms pre-existing beliefs and notions and conclusions about life and to completely ignore other information. This happens so automatically that we don't even notice. Say you have a flatmate, and you are arguing over who does most of the housework, and both people believe that they do most of the work. What is really happening is that both people are noticing when they do the work and not noticing when they don't. The way it plays into most of our lives is the media that we choose to put into our brains; the television, news, magazines and books. We tend to only pick out things that line up with our pre-existing beliefs and rarely choose anything that challenges those beliefs. It relays the backfire effect, which is a cognitive bias where if we're presented with contradictory evidence, we tend to reject it and support our initial belief even more firmly. When people watch a news programme or pundit, they aren't looking for information so much as confirmation of what they already believe is going in.

Brand Loyalty

The Misconception: We prefer the things we own over the things we don't because we made rational choices when we bought them.

The Truth: We prefer the things we own because we rationalise our past choices to protect our sense of self.

Why do people argue over Apple vs Android? Or one car company versus another? After all, these are just corporations. Why would you defend a brand as if you are their PR representative? We believe that we prefer the things we own because we made these deep rational evaluations of them before we bought them, but most of the rationalisation takes place after you own the thing. It's the choosing of one thing over another that leads to narratives about why you did it, which usually tie in to your self-image.

There are at least a dozen psychological effects that play into brand loyalty, the most potent of which is the endowment effect: you feel like the things you own are superior to the things you don't. When you buy a product you tend to connect the product to your self-image, then once it's connected to your self-image you will defend it as if you're defending your own ego or belief structure.

The Misinformation Effect

The Misconception: Memories are played back like recordings.

The Truth: Memories are constructed anew each time from whatever information is currently available, which makes them highly permeable to influences from the present.

You might think your memory is a little fuzzy but not that it's completely inaccurate. People believe that memory is like a video or files stored in some sort of computer. But it's not like that at all. Memories are actually constructed anew each time that you remember something.

Each time you take an old activation sequence in your brain and re-construct it; like building a toy airplane out of Lego and then smashing the Lego, putting it back into the box, and building it again. Each time you build it it's going to be a little bit different based on the context and experience you have had since the last time you created it.

Oddly enough, the least remembered memory is the most accurate. Each time you bring it into your life you edit it a little more. In 1974 Elizabeth Loftus had people watch a film of two cars having a collision and divided them into groups. Asking each group the same question, she used a slightly different description: how fast were the cars going when they contacted, hit, bumped, collided or smashed? The more violent the wording, the higher they estimated the speed. The way in which questions were worded altered the memories subjects reported.

They weren't looking back to the memory of the film they watched, they were building a new experience based on current information. Memory is actually very malleable and it's dangerous to think that memory is a perfect recording of a past event.

'You Are Not So Smart: Why Your Memory is Mostly Fiction, Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself' by David McRaney (Oneworld, £8.99)

Don't lose sight of why the US is out to get Julian Assange

Ecuador is pressing for a deal that offers justice to Assange's accusers – and essential protection for whistleblowers

• 
• • Seumas Milne
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 21 August 2012 21.30 BST

A supporter of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, outside the Ecuadorean embassy in London. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty

Considering he made his name with the biggest leak of secret government documents in history, you might imagine there would be at least some residual concern for Julian Assange among those trading in the freedom of information business. But the virulence of British media hostility towards the WikiLeaks founder is now unrelenting.

This is a man, after all, who has yet to be charged, let alone convicted, of anything. But as far as the bulk of the press is concerned, Assange is nothing but a "monstrous narcissist", a bail-jumping "sex pest" and an exhibitionist maniac. After Ecuador granted him political asylum and Assange delivered a "tirade" from its London embassy's balcony, fire was turned on the country's progressive president, Rafael Correa, ludicrously branded a corrupt "dictator" with an "iron grip" on a benighted land.

The ostensible reason for this venom is of course Assange's attempt to resist extradition to Sweden (and onward extradition to the US) over sexual assault allegations – including from newspapers whose record on covering rape and violence against women is shaky, to put it politely. But as the row over his embassy refuge has escalated into a major diplomatic stand-off, with the whole of South America piling in behind Ecuador, such posturing looks increasingly specious.

Can anyone seriously believe the dispute would have gone global, or that the British government would have made its asinine threat to suspend the Ecuadorean embassy's diplomatic status and enter it by force, or that scores of police would have surrounded the building, swarming up and down the fire escape and guarding every window, if it was all about one man wanted for questioning over sex crime allegations in Stockholm?

To get a grip on what is actually going on, rewind to WikiLeaks' explosive release of secret US military reports and hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables two years ago. They disgorged devastating evidence of US war crimes and collusion with death squads in Iraq on an industrial scale, the machinations and lies of America's wars and allies, its illegal US spying on UN officials – as well as a compendium of official corruption and deceit across the world.

WikiLeaks provided fuel for the Arab uprisings. It didn't just deliver information for citizens to hold governments everywhere to account, but crucially opened up the exercise of US global power to democratic scrutiny. Not surprisingly, the US government made clear it regarded WikiLeaks as a serious threat to its interests from the start, denouncing the release of confidential US cables as a "criminal act".

Vice-president Joe Biden has compared Assange to a "hi-tech terrorist". Shock jocks and neocons have called for him to be hunted down and killed. Bradley Manning, the 24-year-old soldier accused of passing the largest trove of US documents to WikiLeaks, who has been held in conditions described as "cruel and inhuman" by the UN special rapporteur on torture, faces up to 52 years in prison.

The US administration yesterday claimed the WikiLeaks founder was trying to deflect attention from his Swedish case by making "wild allegations" about US intentions. But the idea that the threat of US extradition is some paranoid WikiLeaks fantasy is absurd.

A grand jury in Virginia has been preparing a case against Assange and WikiLeaks for espionage, a leak earlier this year suggested that the US government has already issued a secret sealed indictment against Assange, while Australian diplomats have reported that the WikiLeaks founder is the target of an investigation that is "unprecedented both in its scale and its nature".

The US interest in deterring others from following the WikiLeaks path is obvious. And it would be bizarre to expect a state which over the past decade has kidnapped, tortured and illegally incarcerated its enemies, real or imagined, on a global scale – and continues to do so under President Barack Obama – to walk away from what Hillary Clinton described as an "attack on the international community". In the meantime, the US authorities are presumably banking on seeing Assange further discredited in Sweden.

None of that should detract from the seriousness of the rape allegations made against Assange, for which he should clearly answer and, if charges are brought, stand trial. The question is how to achieve justice for the women involved while protecting Assange (and other whistleblowers) from punitive extradition to a legal system that could potentially land him in a US prison cell for decades.

The politicisation of the Swedish case was clear from the initial leak of the allegations to the prosecutor's decision to seek Assange's extradition for questioning – described by aformer Stockholm prosecutor as "unreasonable, unfair and disproportionate" – when the authorities have been happy to interview suspects abroad in more serious cases.

And given the context, it's also hardly surprising that sceptics have raised the links with US-funded anti-Cuban opposition groups of one of those making the accusations – or that campaigners such as the London-based Women Against Rape have expressed scepticism at the "unusual zeal" with which rape allegations were pursued against Assange in a country where rape convictions have fallen. The danger, of course, is that the murk around this case plays into a misogynist culture in which rape victims aren't believed.

But why, Assange's critics charge, would he be more likely to be extradited to the US from Sweden than from Britain, Washington's patsy, notorious for its one-sided extradition arrangements. There are specific risks in Sweden – for example, its fast-track "temporary surrender" extradition agreement it has with the US. But the real point is that Assange is in danger of extradition in both countries – which is why Ecuador was right to offer him protection.

The solution is obvious. It's the one that Ecuador is proposing – and that London and Stockholm are resisting. If the Swedish government pledged to block the extradition of Assange to the US for any WikiLeaks-related offence (which it has the power to do) – and Britain agreed not to sanction extradition to a third country once Swedish proceedings are over – then justice could be served. But with loyalty to the US on the line, Assange shouldn't expect to leave the embassy any time soon.