Arun Kumar: India's GDP Data is Incorrect

 

The U bend of Life

 Why, beyond middle age, people get happier as they get older writes The Economist

Dec 16th 2010

 

ASK people how they feel about getting older, and they will probably reply in the same vein as Maurice Chevalier: “Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternative.” Stiffening joints, weakening muscles, fading eyesight and the clouding of memory, coupled with the modern world's careless contempt for the old, seem a fearful prospect—better than death, perhaps, but not much. Yet mankind is wrong to dread ageing. Life is not a long slow decline from sunlit uplands towards the valley of death. It is, rather, a U-bend.

When people start out on adult life, they are, on average, pretty cheerful. Things go downhill from youth to middle age until they reach a nadir commonly known as the mid-life crisis. So far, so familiar. The surprising part happens after that. Although as people move towards old age they lose things they treasure—vitality, mental sharpness and looks—they also gain what people spend their lives pursuing: happiness.

This curious finding has emerged from a new branch of economics that seeks a more satisfactory measure than money of human well-being. Conventional economics uses money as a proxy for utility—the dismal way in which the discipline talks about happiness. But some economists, unconvinced that there is a direct relationship between money and well-being, have decided to go to the nub of the matter and measure happiness itself.

These ideas have penetrated the policy arena, starting in Bhutan, where the concept of Gross National Happiness shapes the planning process. All new policies have to have a GNH assessment, similar to the environmental-impact assessment common in other countries. In 2008 France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, asked two Nobel-prize-winning economists, Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, to come up with a broader measure of national contentedness than GDP. Then last month, in a touchy-feely gesture not typical of Britain, David Cameron announced that the British government would start collecting figures on well-being.

There are already a lot of data on the subject collected by, for instance, America's General Social Survey, Eurobarometer and Gallup. Surveys ask two main sorts of question. One concerns people's assessment of their lives, and the other how they feel at any particular time. The first goes along the lines of: thinking about your life as a whole, how do you feel? The second is something like: yesterday, did you feel happy/contented/angry/anxious? The first sort of question is said to measure global well-being, and the second hedonic or emotional well-being. They do not always elicit the same response: having children, for instance, tends to make people feel better about their life as a whole, but also increases the chance that they felt angry or anxious yesterday.

Statisticians trawl through the vast quantities of data these surveys produce rather as miners panning for gold. They are trying to find the answer to the perennial question: what makes people happy?

Four main factors, it seems: gender, personality, external circumstances and age. Women, by and large, are slightly happier than men. But they are also more susceptible to depression: a fifth to a quarter of women experience depression at some point in their lives, compared with around a tenth of men. Which suggests either that women are more likely to experience more extreme emotions, or that a few women are more miserable than men, while most are more cheerful.

Two personality traits shine through the complexity of economists' regression analyses: neuroticism and extroversion. Neurotic people—those who are prone to guilt, anger and anxiety—tend to be unhappy. This is more than a tautological observation about people's mood when asked about their feelings by pollsters or economists. Studies following people over many years have shown that neuroticism is a stable personality trait and a good predictor of levels of happiness. Neurotic people are not just prone to negative feelings: they also tend to have low emotional intelligence, which makes them bad at forming or managing relationships, and that in turn makes them unhappy.

Whereas neuroticism tends to make for gloomy types, extroversion does the opposite. Those who like working in teams and who relish parties tend to be happier than those who shut their office doors in the daytime and hole up at home in the evenings. This personality trait may help explain some cross-cultural differences: a study comparing similar groups of British, Chinese and Japanese people found that the British were, on average, both more extrovert and happier than the Chinese and Japanese.

Then there is the role of circumstance. All sorts of things in people's lives, such as relationships, education, income and health, shape the way they feel. Being married gives people a considerable uplift, but not as big as the gloom that springs from being unemployed. In America, being black used to be associated with lower levels of happiness—though the most recent figures suggest that being black or Hispanic is nowadays associated with greater happiness. People with children in the house are less happy than those without. More educated people are happier, but that effect disappears once income is controlled for. Education, in other words, seems to make people happy because it makes them richer. And richer people are happier than poor ones—though just how much is a source of argument (see article).

The view from winter

Lastly, there is age. Ask a bunch of 30-year-olds and another of 70-year-olds (as Peter Ubel, of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, did with two colleagues, Heather Lacey and Dylan Smith, in 2006) which group they think is likely to be happier, and both lots point to the 30-year-olds. Ask them to rate their own well-being, and the 70-year-olds are the happier bunch. The academics quoted lyrics written by Pete Townshend of The Who when he was 20: “Things they do look awful cold / Hope I die before I get old”. They pointed out that Mr Townshend, having passed his 60th birthday, was writing a blog that glowed with good humour.

Mr Townshend may have thought of himself as a youthful radical, but this view is ancient and conventional. The “seven ages of man”—the dominant image of the life-course in the 16th and 17th centuries—was almost invariably conceived as a rise in stature and contentedness to middle age, followed by a sharp decline towards the grave. Inverting the rise and fall is a recent idea. “A few of us noticed the U-bend in the early 1990s,” says Andrew Oswald, professor of economics at Warwick Business School. “We ran a conference about it, but nobody came.”

Since then, interest in the U-bend has been growing. Its effect on happiness is significant—about half as much, from the nadir of middle age to the elderly peak, as that of unemployment. It appears all over the world. David Blanchflower, professor of economics at Dartmouth College, and Mr Oswald looked at the figures for 72 countries. The nadir varies among countries—Ukrainians, at the top of the range, are at their most miserable at 62, and Swiss, at the bottom, at 35—but in the great majority of countries people are at their unhappiest in their 40s and early 50s. The global average is 46.

The U-bend shows up in studies not just of global well-being but also of hedonic or emotional well-being. One paper, published this year by Arthur Stone, Joseph Schwartz and Joan Broderick of Stony Brook University, and Angus Deaton of Princeton, breaks well-being down into positive and negative feelings and looks at how the experience of those emotions varies through life. Enjoyment and happiness dip in middle age, then pick up; stress rises during the early 20s, then falls sharply; worry peaks in middle age, and falls sharply thereafter; anger declines throughout life; sadness rises slightly in middle age, and falls thereafter.

Turn the question upside down, and the pattern still appears. When the British Labour Force Survey asks people whether they are depressed, the U-bend becomes an arc, peaking at 46.

Happier, no matter what

There is always a possibility that variations are the result not of changes during the life-course, but of differences between cohorts. A 70-year-old European may feel different to a 30-year-old not because he is older, but because he grew up during the second world war and was thus formed by different experiences. But the accumulation of data undermines the idea of a cohort effect. Americans and Zimbabweans have not been formed by similar experiences, yet the U-bend appears in both their countries. And if a cohort effect were responsible, the U-bend would not show up consistently in 40 years' worth of data.

Another possible explanation is that unhappy people die early. It is hard to establish whether that is true or not; but, given that death in middle age is fairly rare, it would explain only a little of the phenomenon. Perhaps the U-bend is merely an expression of the effect of external circumstances. After all, common factors affect people at different stages of the life-cycle. People in their 40s, for instance, often have teenage children. Could the misery of the middle-aged be the consequence of sharing space with angry adolescents? And older people tend to be richer. Could their relative contentment be the result of their piles of cash?

The answer, it turns out, is no: control for cash, employment status and children, and the U-bend is still there. So the growing happiness that follows middle-aged misery must be the result not of external circumstances but of internal changes.

People, studies show, behave differently at different ages. Older people have fewer rows and come up with better solutions to conflict. They are better at controlling their emotions, better at accepting misfortune and less prone to anger. In one study, for instance, subjects were asked to listen to recordings of people supposedly saying disparaging things about them. Older and younger people were similarly saddened, but older people less angry and less inclined to pass judgment, taking the view, as one put it, that “you can't please all the people all the time.”

There are various theories as to why this might be so. Laura Carstensen, professor of psychology at Stanford University, talks of “the uniquely human ability to recognise our own mortality and monitor our own time horizons”. Because the old know they are closer to death, she argues, they grow better at living for the present. They come to focus on things that matter now—such as feelings—and less on long-term goals. “When young people look at older people, they think how terrifying it must be to be nearing the end of your life. But older people know what matters most.” For instance, she says, “young people will go to cocktail parties because they might meet somebody who will be useful to them in the future, even though nobody I know actually likes going to cocktail parties.”

Death of ambition, birth of acceptance

There are other possible explanations. Maybe the sight of contemporaries keeling over infuses survivors with a determination to make the most of their remaining years. Maybe people come to accept their strengths and weaknesses, give up hoping to become chief executive or have a picture shown in the Royal Academy, and learn to be satisfied as assistant branch manager, with their watercolour on display at the church fete. “Being an old maid”, says one of the characters in a story by Edna Ferber, an (unmarried) American novelist, was “like death by drowning—a really delightful sensation when you ceased struggling.” Perhaps acceptance of ageing itself is a source of relief. “How pleasant is the day”, observed William James, an American philosopher, “when we give up striving to be young—or slender.”

Whatever the causes of the U-bend, it has consequences beyond the emotional. Happiness doesn't just make people happy—it also makes them healthier. John Weinman, professor of psychiatry at King's College London, monitored the stress levels of a group of volunteers and then inflicted small wounds on them. The wounds of the least stressed healed twice as fast as those of the most stressed. At Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Sheldon Cohen infected people with cold and flu viruses. He found that happier types were less likely to catch the virus, and showed fewer symptoms of illness when they did. So although old people tend to be less healthy than younger ones, their cheerfulness may help counteract their crumbliness.

Happier people are more productive, too. Mr Oswald and two colleagues, Eugenio Proto and Daniel Sgroi, cheered up a bunch of volunteers by showing them a funny film, then set them mental tests and compared their performance to groups that had seen a neutral film, or no film at all. The ones who had seen the funny film performed 12% better. This leads to two conclusions. First, if you are going to volunteer for a study, choose the economists' experiment rather than the psychologists' or psychiatrists'. Second, the cheerfulness of the old should help counteract their loss of productivity through declining cognitive skills—a point worth remembering as the world works out how to deal with an ageing workforce.

The ageing of the rich world is normally seen as a burden on the economy and a problem to be solved. The U-bend argues for a more positive view of the matter. The greyer the world gets, the brighter it becomes—a prospect which should be especially encouraging to Economist readers (average age 47).

Follow The Hollow: Politics Of Consumption Among The Middle-Classes In India And Pakistan

 Nadeem F Paracha in The Friday Times

Consumerism, or the preoccupation of society with the acquisition of consumer goods, largely emerged from the 19th century onwards. It began to really take off from the early 20th century, when the idea of mass production of consumer goods fully materialised. Consumer goods are often those that are not exactly a necessity. They are acquired for ‘superficial’ purposes. It is, therefore, not a coincidence that the birth of modern-day advertising and/or marketing ploys, too, began to evolve more rapidly during this period. Their aim was to describe consumer goods as a necessity without which one could not become an identifiable member of society.

In 2018, I went through decades of ‘consumer demographic’ data of some of the world’s leading marketing and advertising firms (between the 1950s and early 2000s). These included advertising firms in Pakistan and India as well. The data shows that most makers of consumer goods and services have continued to ‘target’ the middle-classes, or the ‘aspirational classes.’ These have remained prominent buyers of consumer goods. They are also the most prominent classes in the social and economic spaces of major cities.

However, this is not the case when it comes to politics. The middle-classes may be a part of the electorate, but in most regions, their presence is minimal in the actual corridors of power. The middle-classes have often expressed frustration after feeling that their path towards holding the levers of political power is being blocked by members of the political elite who were born into their status instead of climbing their way up as the middle-classes want to.

1789: An emerging middle-class in France rebels against the King and Church

Modern mainstream politics is the result of certain revolutionary 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century upheavals in Europe which saw the emergence and expansion of the middle-classes. They gradually pushed out the old political elites (the monarchs, the Church, landed gentries, etc.), and replaced these with themselves at the top. The politics that evolved during this process was a product of modernity as defined by the so-called ‘Age of Enlightenment.’

Inch by inch, religion was demystified and relegated to the private sphere; newly formed polities began to be defined as nations that were linked to integrated economies; and the ‘pre-modern’ past was denounced as a realm ravaged by wars, plagues, brutal rulers, widespread poverty, religious persecution and exploitation, superstition, and short lifespans.

The political system which the expanding middle-classes adopted and evolved was democracy. Initially, they trod the ‘Aristotelian’ path which posited that a large, prosperous middle class may mediate between rich and poor, creating the structural foundation upon which democratic political processes may operate (J. Glassman, The Middle Class and Democracy in Socio-Historical Perspective, 1995).

Middle-class prosperity and growth were dependent on modern economic activity which functioned outside the old agrarian structures, and took place in the expanding urban spaces. These spaces attracted labour from rural areas who transformed in to becoming the working-class (the proletariat). During the upward-mobility of the middle-classes, they engineered a democracy that was to constitutionally protect their properties and newfound power and wealth. But as the size of the working-classes grew, it became necessary to create room for them in the political system, if social and political upheavals were to be avoided.

Traditionally, working-class interests in democracies leaned left or towards socialist or welfare policies. As a reaction, the middle-classes moved to the right (F. Wunderlich in The Antioch Review, Spring 1945). The middle-classes therefore, became more invested in curbing, or at least lessening, the electoral influence of the working-classes by voting for conservative parties which treated social-democratic ideas as Trojan horses through which communism would invade and usurp all political and economic power of the ‘hard-working middle-classes.’ However, from within the post-19th-century political elites (in industrialised countries) also emerged parties that evolved into becoming the parties of the working-classes. The growing number of blue-collared voters in the cities necessitated this.

This created a fissure within the middle-classes. A large section of them was now willing to undermine democracy, or a system that it had crafted itself. This section began to view it as a threat to its economic interests. Here is where we see the growth of authoritarian and fascist ideas permeating middle-class political discourses in Europe, and the emergence of demagogues such as Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, etc. The aforementioned section’s radical move to the (anti-democracy) right can be understood as an emotional decision born from the fear of being swallowed by the classes below (the ‘masses’).

1900: The founding of the Labour Party in Britain

When the American president F.D. Roosevelt stated that “the only thing we need to fear was fear itself,” he was trying to address just that. He understood that fear was capable of pushing reasonable folk into authoritarian/totalitarian/populist camps.

After the defeat of German and Italian fascisms, social-democratic policies thrived in the democratic West.

They succeeded in largely pacifying middle-class fears. The middle-classes now stood on the left and the right, yet within the mainstream democratic system which continued to safeguard and police their economic interests, and, at the same time, facilitate the interests of the working-classes as well.

But from the mid-1970s, as the nature of capitalism began to change, and the industrialised countries entered the ‘post-industrial stage,’ things flipped. Between the two World Wars, sections of Western middle-classes had largely moved to the right and far-right, whereas the working-classes had moved to the left. But when the service sector began to produce more wealth than the industrial sector, positions switched.

The service sector has always been dominated by the middle-classes. A gradual decrease in industrial activity and/or with this activity shifting to developing countries (due to cheap labour, etc.), the working-classes were left stranded and feeling bitter. They began to break away from mainstream democratic paradigms and embrace a populism which preyed on the fears of this class as it struggled to cope with the drastic economic shift that was eroding blue-collar economic interests.

So, whereas, during the first half of the 20th century, a large number from the middle-class milieu, fearing that they were about to be overwhelmed by the working-classes, had exited the mainstream democratic paradigm, and had embraced authoritarian ideas and regimes, in the second half of the 21st century, it was the working-classes who did the same by supporting the rise of right-wing nationalism and populism.

Post-industrial decay: American manufacturers moved production to cheaper locations to cut costs, leaving unemployment in their wake

 

The South Asian flip: politics of consumption

In developing countries such as India and Pakistan, right-wing nationalism and populism are still very much the domain of the middle-classes. This is understandable because the process of industrialisation was slow and late in these regions, and so was the expansion of the middle-classes. The economies of both the countries during their first few decades were overwhelmingly agrarian. Industrialisation did not begin in earnest till over a decade after their formation.

This meant a large rural population and a steadily growing urban proletariat. Therefore, democracy in this case, though controlled by an elite, was (for electoral purposes) driven to address the interests of the peasants, small farmers and the working-classes. It was social-democratic in nature. This did not sit well with the middle-classes. They were squeezed between a ruling elite and the classes below. They constantly feared being relegated or overwhelmed by the ‘masses’ because the ruling elite in control of political parties were talking to the masses more than they did to the middle-classes. The elite were, of course, courting sections that had larger number of votes.

Till the early 2000s, middle-class economic and political interests in Pakistan were mostly stimulated by military dictators (S. Akbar Zaidi, Issues in Pakistan’s Economy: A Political Economy Perspective, 2nd Edition, 2005). This is why the middle-classes in Pakistan are more receptive to non-democratic forces and currents, even though they were only provided a semblance of political power by the dictatorships. But the size of this class is growing and so is its economic influence. It feels blocked by the electoral political elites from complimenting its economic influence with political power. 

Whereas in Pakistan the middle-classes have felt more secure during dictatorships, in India, they have managed to break into the realm of India’s political elites by riding on the wave of a right-wing political party. In 2018, large sections of Pakistan’s urban middle-classes believed that they too had done the same by voting to power Imran Khan’s populist bandwagon, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI). But their nascent experience of democracy imploded when Khan’s regime was ousted by a no-confidence vote. This class is now back to viewing democracy as a corrupt system – engineered to serve an elite that is geared to address the issues of the classes with the most votes.

But the fact is, as the middle-classes in Europe had done between the two World Wars, the middle-classes in India and Pakistan too, consciously or unconsciously, are destroying the very idea and system that was originally crafted to serve their interests the most. This brings us to consumerism.

Between the two World Wars when large sections of the urban middle-classes in various European countries began to fear that the classes below (the ‘masses’) would use democracy to undermine middle-class interests, the middle-classes became antagonistic towards democracy — an ideology and system of government that they had themselves created. They then went on to facilitate the rise of anti-democracy forces that barged in and overthrew the political elites who were engaging with the masses through electoral politics.

In consumer societies, the language of politics becomes a caricature of advertising language. For example, a young man or woman is more likely to come across the word ‘Revolution’ in an advertisement than in politics. Advertisements and political rhetoric both exchange words which may end up meaning nothing

The middle-classes in South Asia have been in a dilemma of being squeezed between two forces (the electoral elite and the working-classes/peasants). So, these middle-classes have failed to fully carve out a place and identity for themselves as a political entity within a political system that is largely informed by the engagement between the aforementioned forces. According to the historian Markus Daechsel, this saw the South Asian middle-classes indulge in what Daechsel calls “politics of self-expression” (Daechsel, The Politics of Self-Expression: The Urdu Middleclass Milieu in Mid-Twentieth Century India and Pakistan, 2009).

This form of politics is a rebellion against the dynamics of mainstream politics, which the middle-class milieu dismisses as being ‘corrupt.’ This corruption is not only denounced in material terms, but is also censured for contaminating or enslaving a community’s or individual’s inner self that needs to be liberated. Instruments such as the constitution, and institutions such the parliament, are seen as restraints that were stopping people from seeking liberation. Liberation from what? This is never convincingly explained.

The aim of the politics of self-expression is not exactly a way to find a place in mainstream societal politics. Instead, it is a flight into an alternative ideological universe where all societal constraints that plague the middle-class self would cease to exist (Daechsel, ibid). In fact, Daechsel explains the politics of self-expression as a product of the consumer society. According to Colin Campbell, a new ethics of romanticism driven by emotional introspection, a hunger for stimulation and arousal and a penchant for daydreaming, helped to give birth to a consumer society that alone could sustain the onward march of capitalism (C. Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, 1987).

Established political instruments and democratic norms are being attacked by the middle-classes through the creation of spectacles that are being beamed by the new media universe

To Daechsel, this drove people to develop an obsession with identities. The middle-classes remain to be at the core of consumerism. A consumer society has been defined as one in which there is no societal reality other than the relationship between consumers and branded commodity. People are entirely what they consume; no immediate relationships of political power, economic exchange or cultural capital matter anymore (J. Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, 1970).

According Daechsel, the middle-class milieu (in South Asia) was, by virtue of its material culture, persuaded to use consumption as an outlet for its frustrated socio-political ambitions. The fact that consumer identities have something ‘hollow’ about them, that they substitute a fetishistic relationship with consumer goods for ‘real’ societal relations, was precisely what made them so attractive. A constituency that could not otherwise exist as a class, due to the constraints imposed by a mainstream political economy that they became suspicious of, found in consumption a space where it could establish some form of a unified cultural consciousness.

Daechsel then adds that the trouble with consumer identities is that consumer goods are believed to reflect a person’s innermost being, but at the same time rely on the garish and the mundane to produce identities. Consumption is not about great deeds in world history, but about the choice of toothpaste and cigarettes. Yet, consumer goods through the manner in which they are marketed, provide the stuff to form identities. Marlboro smokers were rugged individualists, Coca Cola drinkers value the happiness of being part of a wholesome family, iPhone users are savvy folk who are ‘creative’ and ‘fun-loving,’ etc. 

The politics of self-expression is an attempt to make consumer identities secure and ‘serious’ by dressing up consumption activity as politics. The language of politics thus becomes a caricature of advertising language; it retains all the hyperbole. For example, the word ‘liberation’ in such nature of politics is as ‘serious’ as it is when used in ads of male or female undergarments! But in politics of expression, it replaces advertising’s playfulness and self-irony with the certainty of assumed prophetic airs (Daechsel, ibid).

In consumer societies the language of politics becomes a caricature of advertising language. For example, a young man or woman is more likely to come across the word Revolution in an advertisement than in politics. Advertisements and political rhetoric both exchange words which may end up meaning nothing.

The consumer middle-class could well turn out as the destroyer of the world that gave birth to it

The middle-classes in India and Pakistan have gone to war with conventional politics, which they still fear is pitched against them. But even in India, where these classes have succeeded to somewhat break into and disturb the once impenetrable fortress of the country’s ‘rational’ political elites, they have no convincing alternatives. Or the alternatives are creating unprecedented social and political turmoil because they are emerging from the politics of self-expression.

According to Daechsel, the methodology in this context is a direct reflection of the logic of a consumer society. Both in Pakistan and India, ‘rational’ political instruments and democratic norms are being attacked by the middle-classes through the creation of spectacles that are being beamed by the new media universe. They are like marketing stunts.

Events such as openly undermining the constitution, beating up and humiliating foes, burning passports and flags, etc., have turned the perpetrators into political brands that are immediately and often quite literally ‘consumed’. Daechsel views all this as a suicide mission (of the South Asian middle-classes). It is an ultimate extension of the self-expressionist longing for intoxication, a self-indulgent form of ‘political’ activity that is supposedly based on a supreme ideology, but in reality gives the person involved a taste of the ultimate power trip. Just like an expensive brand of car or watch would.

Established political instruments and democratic norms are being attacked by the middle-classes through the creation of spectacles that are being beamed by the new media universe.

Daechsel writes, “If there is a final conclusion to be drawn from this exposition of the politics of self-expressionism in India and Pakistan, it has to be the following: the development of a middle-class through an expansion of the social role of consumption offers no guarantee for a better political culture. Persistent contradictions between a consumer society and other forms of societal organisations will stimulate forms of self-expressionist radicalism that may be very hard to control. Far from being the historical carrier of the voice of reason and modernity, the consumer middle-class could well turn out as the destroyer of the world that gave birth to it.”

This is quite apparent in the ways many middle-class men and women in South Asia have willingly drowned the notion that their acts in this context could be undermining their own political and, especially, economic interests. They seem to have readily gone blind to this fact in their bid to devour politics like they would a consumer brand, but one which is marketed as a product to give them instant bursts of liberation, empowerment and greatness.

India's Democracy Project

 

Buddha in a Traffic Jam

Aakash Chopra - On opening batsmanship

Aakash Chopra in Cricinfo

The IPL is now nine seasons old. Having spent a few seasons in an IPL dressing room, I was soon convinced that T20 was here to stay, and second - a not-so-healthy upshot - that the format would seriously affect the growth of Test openers and spinners in particular. This because no other players are forced to change their basic game to suit the demands of the shortest format as much as Test openers and spinners.

A Test opener is a skeptic by nature. He is trained to distrust the ball till it reaches him. Early signs can be misleading; the ball might appear to be traveling in a straight line after the bowler releases it, but it's wrong for the batsman to assume that it will follow the same path till it reaches him. The new ball could move very late in the air or off the pitch, and so openers are hardwired to view it with suspicion. They are also trained not to commit early to a shot because that can leave them in a tangle. They're told to wait till the ball gets to them and play close to the body. Reaching out with the hands is a temptation a Test opener must guard against.

But in T20 cricket, an opener's role is to set the tone. Go really hard in the first six overs, which is when scoring is considered to be easiest. If you can't find the gaps, go aerial. If you can't go down straight, trust the bounce and go across. Don't get too close to the ball, as that will block the bat-swing. Stay away from the ball and use the arms and hands to reach out and hit. A spell of 12 balls without a boundary in the first six overs is considered to be pushing the team back. Patience might be a virtue in Tests; it's a liability in T20.

The same is true for the spinners. Flight, dip, guile and deception aren't the most sought after virtues in the world of T20. Instead, the focus is on keeping the trajectory low and bowling it a little quicker to discourage the batsmen from using their feet. Bounce is revered in Tests, but the lack of it is a boon in T20. We have seen spinners go extremely roundarm (remember Ravindra Jadeja in the IPL?) to prevent the batsman from getting under the bounce.

It takes a long time to master the art of bowling long spells to plot and plan dismissals in Test cricket - a tactic that's alien to T20 bowlers who are used to bowling four overs across two or more spells. You can't practise crossing the English Channel by spending 30 minutes in the swimming pool everyday. T20 cricket has challenged the fundamentals of spin bowling.

The reason I think middle-order batsmen and fast bowlers haven't been forced to change their game is because T20 hasn't demanded they do anything that they weren't already doing. A middle-order batsman in a Test side, as in a T20 game, is allowed to rotate the strike and play along the ground before accelerating the scoring. He does the same in Tests and ODIs, albeit later in the innings. The only adjustment he is called on to make is to shift gears a little sooner. That's easier to do than being asked to move from riding a bicycle to driving a sports car, as spinners and opening batsmen are.

Similarly, fast bowlers aren't pressed to do anything radically different either. Make the new ball swing, change lengths and pace regularly, and find the blockhole on demand. It's challenging for sure but not a skill-altering demand.

After weighing in these factors, it is only fair to assume that the next generation of spinners and openers for the longer format might take a lot longer to come to the fore, or worse, not do so at all. After all, why would somebody invest in the skill set required to play the longest format given the huge rewards on offer in the shortest format? Unless you just can't cut it in T20, leaving you with no choice whatsoever.

While the likes of David Warner and R Ashwin excel equally in both formats, it's worth noting that both honed their skills as youngsters when playing the longer format was still the way up. Also, both are aberrations and not the norm. Increasingly, Test teams are forced to pick specialists in these two departments.

KL Rahul comes across as the first to challenge my hypothesis, and perhaps he provides an insight into how cricketers of the future will be.

Things that look improbable now, both physically and mentally, could become reality in the near future. And Rahul's early success across formats offers proof. He was only 16 when the IPL started, in 2008, and his first-class debut came two years later, which makes him a wonderful case study.

Rahul is happy leaving the ball that is only a few inches outside the off stump in Tests, and equally adept at flaying anything wide. He puts in a long stride to get close to the ball and then lean into drives in the longer format, but in T20 he doesn't mind staying away from a ball pitched on the same length, the better to allow his hands to go through. Like a true Test opener, he is skeptical at the beginning of a Test innings, but he doesn't mind going down on one knee to scoop the first ball he faces in the shortest format.

He got out pulling from outside off in his debut Test match and since then he hasn't played that stroke early in his innings. By his own admission, he really enjoys playing the pull and hook to anything that is short. To shelve a shot that's dear to you in one format and play it in other formats shows discipline and patience. That's a virtue the new-age opener wasn't mastering, or so I thought.

Most importantly, a fifty or an eighty isn't enough for Rahul. In fact, save for one occasion, he has scored a century every time he has passed 50 in Tests. He has shown that if you train the mind as much as you train the body, it's indeed possible to find a game that's suited to Test cricket without compromising on success in other formats.

Over on the bowling side, we are still struggling to find spinners for the longer format. I won't be surprised if some boards decide to keep young spinners away from T20 cricket till a certain age, for it is widely accepted that the shortest format is affecting the development of young spinners.

Perhaps I'm taking Rahul's initial success too seriously. After all, he could be just like Warner, an aberration. But his style of play is reassuring and has given me hope. Maybe he's the first of the new breed of Test openers. Amen to that thought.