Why Virat Kohli has to rid Indian cricket of bad habits

Suresh Menon on BBC website

In cricket, as in any sport, there are two kinds of mistakes.

The bad mistake arises out of confused thinking, lack of focus and a poor understanding of tactics. The good mistake, on the other hand, implies a well-thought out plan gone wrong or an attempt to force the issue backfiring.

Increasingly as his captaincy progressed, India's most experienced and successful Test captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni kept making bad mistakes. Giving his bowlers one-over spells, for instance. Or wasting a fielder at leg gully.

Good fortune and hunches can take you only so far - every captain in the game's history has taken chances with an inexplicable bowling change or an illogical batting line-up and surprised everybody by winning. But that cannot be the basis for captaincy.

Positive attitude

Virat Kohli, at 26, younger than Dhoni by seven years, is not yet tactically sound but has two important things going for him: a positive attitude and enormous self-belief.

Not since Tiger Pataudi has an Indian captain been willing to risk defeat in the pursuit of victory like Kohli in the December 2014 Adelaide Test against Australia.

The essential difference between the past and future of Indian cricket is that while Dhoni was clearly on his way down, Kohli can only improve.

He will face many of the problems Dhoni did - a poor bowling attack, especially abroad, the pressures of being on the field for beyond 50 overs or a single day, the hope that victories in the shorter format will make up for their absence in Tests.

India had caved in without a fight in 13 of 17 Tests abroad before the last Australian tour. They lost the 14th in Adelaide, where Kohli led for the first time, but the texture of the defeat was different. The Anna Karenina Principle applied. "All happy families are alike," wrote Tolstoy in his novel, "each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Similarly, all victories are alike but defeats are wildly different.

Kohli is younger than Dhoni by seven years

India went down in a blaze of glory, attempting to make 364 runs in a day and coming startlingly close.

Playing for a draw was never an option, said Kohli, perhaps aware that India had the batting to win the Test, but not to draw it. Still, there was promise of a change in the standard narrative. Optimism is infectious, and it is easy to catch it off a captain who is full of it.

Kohli projected that optimism and spirit right from the days when he led India to the Under-19 World Cup win. He was marked out as future captain.

The IPL has a lot to answer for. But in Kohli's case, it actually helped.

Finding a balance

After initially tasting its many enticements, Kohli settled down. In his corner was his team Royal Challengers Bangalore coach Ray Jennings, who told him that the Under-19 triumph would soon be forgotten, and that he would be judged as an adult cricketer. Anil Kumble helped to channelise and focus all that energy. And he was made captain in anticipation of the bigger job to come.

While Kohli's captaincy in the one-day format has been aggressive and focused on winning, in Tests he will have to learn - as his bowlers too will - the virtues of patience and long-term planning.

Indian cricket will have to find a balance between Dhoni's tendency to let things drift and Kohli's impatience with uneventful overs and sessions. There is an element of fishing in the longer format. You put out your bait and wait. Kohli will have to learn the waiting game.

Whether it is a reflection of the times, a consequence of playing too many matches in the shorter formats of the game or a question of temperament, India's cricket is currently characterised by an impatience that makes them perform well below potential.

Bowlers are in a hurry to take wickets or simply run through their overs, batsmen seem to have forgotten how to play session-to-session. Kohli will have to rid the team of bad habits.

While many believe that a captain is only as good as his team, the best ones have inspired their teams to play above themselves. Pataudi for one, Mike Brearley or another.

Kohli's advantage is that he is the best batsman in the side, and there are no immediate candidates for his job. In other words, he will be left alone to develop his full potential as captain, unhampered by the need to constantly watch his back - an occupational hazard with Indian captains of the past.

He has it in him to stamp his name on an era.

Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Bomb?

Uri Avnery in Outlook India

I MUST start with a shocking confession: I am not afraid of the Iranian nuclear bomb.
I know that this makes me an abnormal person, almost a freak.

But what can I do? I am unable to work up fear, like a real Israeli. Try as I may, the Iranian bomb does not make me hysterical.

MY FATHER once taught me how to withstand blackmail: imagine that the awful threat of the blackmailer has already come about. Then you can tell him: Go to hell.

I have tried many times to follow this advice and found it sound. So now I apply it to the Iranian bomb: I imagine that the worst has already happened: the awful ayatollahs have got the bombs that can eradicate little Israel in a minute.

So what?

According to foreign experts, Israel has several hundred nuclear bombs (assessments vary between 80-400). If Iran sends its bombs and obliterates most of Israel (myself included), Israeli submarines will obliterate Iran. Whatever I might think about Binyamin Netanyahu, I rely on him and our security chiefs to keep our "second strike" capability intact. Just last week we were informed that Germany had delivered another state-of-the-art submarine to our navy for this purpose.

Israeli idiots — and there are some around — respond: "Yes, but the Iranian leaders are not normal people. They are madmen. Religious fanatics. They will risk the total destruction of Iran just to destroy the Zionist state. Like exchanging queens in chess."

Such convictions are the outcome of decades of demonizing. Iranians — or at least their leaders — are seen as subhuman miscreants.

Reality shows us that the leaders of Iran are very sober, very calculating politicians. Cautious merchants in the Iranian bazaar style. They don't take unnecessary risks. The revolutionary fervor of the early Khomeini days is long past, and even Khomeini would not have dreamt of doing anything so close to national suicide.

ACCORDING TO the Bible, the great Persian king Cyrus allowed the captive Jews of Babylon to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple. At that time, Persia was already an ancient civilization — both cultural and political.

After the "return from Babylon", the Jewish commonwealth around Jerusalem lived for 200 years under Persian suzerainty. I was taught in school that these were happy years for the Jews.

Since then, Persian culture and history has lived through another two and a half millennia. Persian civilization is one of the oldest in the world. It has created a great religion and influenced many others, including Judaism. Iranians are fiercely proud of that civilization.

To imagine that the present leaders of Iran would even contemplate risking the very existence of Persia out of hatred of Israel is both ridiculous and megalomaniac.

Moreover, throughout history, relations between Jews and Persians have almost always been excellent. When Israel was founded, Iran was considered a natural ally, part of David Ben-Gurion's "strategy of the periphery" — an alliance with all the countries surrounding the Arab world.

The Shah, who was re-installed by the American and British secret services, was a very close ally. Teheran was full of Israeli businessmen and military advisers. It served as a base for the Israeli agents working with the rebellious Kurds in northern Iraq who were fighting against the regime of Saddam Hussein.

After the Islamic revolution, Israel still supported Iran against Iraq in their cruel 8-year war. The notorious Irangate affair, in which my friend Amiram Nir and Oliver North played such an important role, would not have been possible without the old Iranian-Israeli ties.

Even now, Iran and Israel are conducting amiable arbitration proceedings about an old venture: the Eilat-Ashkelon oil pipeline built jointly by the two countries.

If the worst comes to the worst, nuclear Israel and nuclear Iran will live in a Balance of Terror.

Highly unpleasant, indeed. But not an existential menace.

HOWEVER, FOR those who live in terror of the Iranian nuclear capabilities, I have a piece of advice: use the time we still have.

Under the American-Iranian deal, we have at least 10 years before Iran could start the final phase of producing the bomb.

Please use this time for making peace.

The Iranian hatred of the "Zionist Regime" — the State of Israel — derives from the fate of the Palestinian people. The feeling of solidarity for the helpless Palestinians is deeply ingrained in all Islamic peoples. It is part of the popular culture in all of them. It is quite real, even if the political regimes misuse, manipulate or ignore it.

Since there is no ground for a specific Iranian hatred of Israel, it is solely based on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. No conflict, no enmity.

Logic tells us: if we have several years before we have to live in the shadow of an Iranian nuclear bomb, let's use this time to eliminate the conflict. Once the Palestinians themselves declare that they consider the historic conflict with Israel settled, no Iranian leadership will be able to rouse its people against us.

FOR SEVERAL weeks now, Netanyahu has been priding himself publicly on a huge, indeed historic, achievement.

For the first time ever, Israel is practically part of an Arab alliance.

Throughout the region, the conflict between Muslim Sunnis and Muslim Shiites is raging. The Shiite camp, headed by Iran, includes the Shiites in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. (Netanyahu falsely — or out of ignorance — includes the Sunni Hamas in this camp.)

The opposite Sunni camp includes Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Gulf states. Netanyahu hints that Israel is now secretly accepted by them as a member.

It is a very untidy picture. Iran is fighting against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, which is a mortal enemy of Israel. Iran is supporting the Assad regime in Damascus, which is also supported by Hezbollah, which fights against the lslamic State, while the Saudis support other extreme Sunni Syrians who fight against Assad and the Islamic State. Turkey supports Iran and the Saudis while fighting against Assad. And so on.

I am not enamored with Arab military dictatorships and corrupt monarchies. Frankly, I detest them. But if Israel succeeds in becoming an official member of any Arab coalition, it would be a historic breakthrough, the first in 130 years of Zionist-Arab conflict.

However, all Israeli relations with Arab countries are secret, except those with Egypt and Jordan, and even with these two the contacts are cold and distant, relations between the regimes rather than between the peoples.

Let's face facts: no Arab state will engage in open and close cooperation with Israel before the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is ended. Even kings and dictators cannot afford to do so. The solidarity of their peoples with the oppressed Palestinians is far too profound.

Real peace with the Arab countries is impossible without peace with the Palestinian people, as peace with the Palestinian people is impossible without peace with the Arab countries.

So if there is now a chance to establish official peace with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, and to turn the cold peace with Egypt into a real one, Netanyahu should jump at it. The terms of an agreement are already lying on the table: the Saudi peace plan, also called the Arab Initiative, which was adopted many years ago by the entire Arab League. It is based on the two-state solution of the Israeli-Arab conflict.

Netanyahu could amaze the whole world by "doing a de Gaulle" — making peace with the Sunni Arab world (as de Gaulle did with Algeria) which would compel the Shiites to follow suit.

Do I believe in this? I do not. But if God wills it, even a broomstick can shoot.

And on the day of the Jewish Pesach feast, commemorating the (imaginary) exodus from Egypt, we are reminding ourselves that miracles do happen.

Homeopathy not effective for treating any condition, Australian report finds

Report by top medical research body says ‘people who choose homeopathy may put their health at risk if they reject or delay treatments’

 

Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council hopes report will discourage private health insurers from offering rebates on homeopathic treatments. Photograph: Alix/Phanie/Rex Features

Melissa Davey in The Guardian

Homeopathy is not effective for treating any health condition, Australia’s top body for medical research has concluded, after undertaking an extensive review of existing studies.

Homeopaths believe that illness-causing substances can, in minute doses, treat people who are unwell.

By diluting these substances in water or alcohol, homeopaths claim the resulting mixture retains a “memory” of the original substance that triggers a healing response in the body.

These claims have been widely disproven by multiple studies, but the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) has for the first time thoroughly reviewed 225 research papers on homeopathy to come up with its position statement, released on Wednesday.

“Based on the assessment of the evidence of effectiveness of homeopathy, NHMRC concludes that there are no health conditions for which there is reliable evidence that homeopathy is effective,” the report concluded.

“People who choose homeopathy may put their health at risk if they reject or delay treatments for which there is good evidence for safety and effectiveness.”

An independent company also reviewed the studies and appraised the evidence to prevent bias.

Chair of the NHMRC Homeopathy Working Committee, Professor Paul Glasziou, said he hoped the findings would lead private health insurers to stop offering rebates on homeopathic treatments, and force pharmacists to reconsider stocking them.

“There will be a tail of people who won’t respond to this report, and who will say it’s all a conspiracy of the establishment,” Glasziou said.

“But we hope there will be a lot of reasonable people out there who will reconsider selling, using or subsiding these substances.”

While some studies reported homeopathy was effective, the quality of those studies was poor and suffered serious flaws in their design, and did not have enough participants to support the idea that homeopathy worked any better than a sugar pill, the report found.

In making its findings the NHMRC also analysed 57 systematic reviews, a high-quality type of study that assesses all existing, quality research on a particular topic and synthesises it to make a number of strong, overall findings.

Glasziou said homeopathy use declined in the UK following a House of Commons report released in 2010 which found the treatments were ineffective, and that he hoped the NHMRC report would have a similar effect in Australia.

Dr Ken Harvey, a medicinal drug policy expert and health consumer advocate, said private colleges were charging thousands of dollars for courses in homeopathy, and he hoped students would reconsider taking them.

The government’s Tertiary Education Quality Standards Agency (TEQSA) should stop accrediting homeopathic courses, he said, while the private health insurance rebate should be not be offered on any policies covering homeopathy and other unproven treatments.

“I have no problems with private colleges wanting to run courses on crystal-ball gazing, iridology and homeopathy, and if people are crazy enough to pay for it, it’s their decision,” Harvey said.

“But if those courses are approved by a commonwealth body, that’s a different story and a real problem.”

Approved courses are reviewed by TESQA every seven years, with its own guidelines stating the content of a course should be “drawn from a substantial, coherent and current body of knowledge and scholarship in one or more academic disciplines and includes the study of relevant theoretical frameworks and research findings”.

A TESQA spokesperson said independent experts were used to assess whether or not a course complied with its standards. He said homeopathy courses already accredited would not be re-evaluated in light of the NHMRC’s findings, and would only be reviewed when their accreditation was next due for renewal.

In a statement responding to the NHMRC report, the Australian Homeopathic Association (AHA) claimed around a million Australians used homeopathy.

However, the NHMRC states there are no reliable estimates of Australians’ current use of homeopathic medicines, though a 2009 World Health Organisation review found Australians spent an estimated $9.59m on the industry annually.

“The Australian Homeopathic Association recommend to the NHMRC that it take a more comprehensive approach to the analysis of homeopathy’s efficacy, and consider a large-scale economic evaluation of the benefits of a more integrated system and one which respects and advocates patient choice in healthcare provision,” the AHA said.

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.

Easy to sneer at arts graduates. But we’ll need their skills

Creative types have the confidence to take risks. And they understand that money isn’t everything

• 
• • Simon Jenkins
  • The Guardian, Thursday 1 January 2015 16.10 GMT

'Millions indulge their children in careers they know will yield neither financial reward nor national advantage.' Illustration by Nate Kitch

Anthony Ward Thomas, of Ward Thomas Removals, has a problem that he shares with the public. After a life spent turning a man with a van into a multimillion-pound firm, he finds his children are not interested in taking over. “They have different interests,” he says. He is sad, but agrees “there should be no divine right that they get the business”. They should make their own way in the world. This they are doing. His daughters are country and western singers and his son is an actor. I doubt if they are as rich.

When penal supertaxes were ended in the 1980s, the surplus spending power was expected to go on cars, yachts and houses. Much of it did. But a new form of supertax emerged, no less insistent than the last. It was called children. And not just any children, who might look after their parents in old age, but ones seeking a life of fashionable but impecunious “creativity”.

Statistics say the chief cost of child-rearing occurs in the teens. To get an offspring housed, clothed, fed and educated to the age of 21 takes an average of £225,000, or half a million if privately educated. This has more than doubled over the past decade. But ask most parents, and the expense does not stop at 21. It continues through further education, travel, internship, ongoing board and lodging, even early marriage.

Thousands the world over are returning to live at home after university. Australians have “boomerang” children, Italians bamboccioni (big babies), the Japanese parasaito shinguru (parasite singles) and the Germans “hotel mama”. To the youth psychologist Haim Omer, this “entitled dependency” has become “the new hedonism … an ideology at the parents’ expense, nothing less than a pandemic”. Behind this phenomenon stands the famous “bank of mum and dad”, notably in the matter of housing: its motto is “pay up or we stay”. In Britain this bespoke baby bank reportedly hands out a staggering £27bn annually. The loans have nothing to do with investment. The bank would go swiftly bust if they did. Money is spent, above all, on property. A trivial £600m is reckoned to go on business ventures. The bank is too proud to fail. The Ward Thomas branch of this bank is more specific. I am not privy to the family’s circumstances, but if the bank is like many I know, it existed to fund careers in “something creative”, often what the parents once called a hobby but their children consider a talent in need of full occupational rein. This bank of mum and dad becomes a private arts council, far outstripping the resources available to the real one.

A cultural economist might welcome this. It forces down pay and costs in the arts, making it cheaper to run literary festivals, music venues, provincial rep, galleries and publishing. Children are far more expert at extracting “grants” from parents than is the Treasury; HMRC has no clout to compare with “Edinburgh could be our big break, Dad”.

But the phenomenon has consequences. It biases “subsidy”, and the jobs to which they give access, towards the children of the rich. It also seriously distorts higher education, with a booming demand for courses in drama, dance, fine art, music, film, photography, design and creative writing.

Britain now has 160,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students in “creative arts and design”, with more than 20,000 in drama alone. This is more than in the whole of engineering or in maths and computing combined.

This academic bias is far beyond what the market for such skills can sustain. Just 28% of graduates in performing arts find jobs in the arts or media, while almost the same proportion find their way into retail and catering. Britain’s bursting drama schools are training a better class of waiter.

Does this matter? The lethargy afflicting Japan’s once-tiger economy over the past decade is attributed to precisely this career demotivation of the post-salaryman generation. Young Japanese have been able to afford to turn away from their parents’ grinding labour and its karoshi, or death from overwork. A similar collapse may one day afflict Chinese entrepreneurialism. Even the continued vitality of the US and Germany is attributed not to natives but to migrant talent drawn from less favoured countries.

‘The bank of mum and dad becomes a private arts council, far outstripping the resources available to the real one.’ National Theatre Wales students. Photograph: D Legakis Photography/Athena

Europe is in the economic doldrums. It may produce the best opera singers and write the best novels, but its cars and computers are rubbish. Its bankers can hedge markets and its tour operators can market hedges, but the funds come from Asian enterprise. Either it will discourage its young from dancing, film-making and creative writing and galvanise it to risk-taking innovation, or it will slither into becoming a gigantic Bournemouth, living off the dwindling fat of its past.

So says the economist. Or should we put more faith in the dynamic of a humanistic education? Graduates in the performing arts are actually high achievers in finding work outside their skill group, probably through enhanced confidence and articulacy. They take chances and do not regard money as everything. They seem better equipped to use their imagination and challenge conventional wisdom.

The pop science bestseller Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari, suggests that humans “are now beginning to break the laws of natural selection, replacing them with the laws of intelligent design”. Human advance through natural selection has reached its limit. Strides forward will now be technological rather than biological.

For Harari the question for our species is not “what do we want to become?”, but the far harder question, “what do we want to want?”. Who makes the choices? The answer will not lie in the brave new world of cyborgs and robots. It can only lie in what are rightly called the humanities, the history and imagination of human beings. Alexander Pope was always right: “The proper study of mankind is man.”

Most British adults now believe their offspring will be poorer than themselves. Yet millions indulge their children in careers they know will yield neither financial reward nor national advantage. I am not convinced the world they are creating will really be worse off for that. There is plenty for the robots to do, like running removal firms.

Why the bouncer is not essential to cricket

Pranay Sanklecha in Cricinfo

The bouncer: not worth the risk  © Getty Images

Enlarge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bouncer.

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

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

Sex with more than 20 women reduces risk of prostate cancer, according to study

Antonia Molloy in The Independent

There’s good news for the Casanovas of the world – sleeping with numerous women could help to protect men from prostate cancer, according to a new study.

Researchers at the University of Montreal and INRS-Institut Armand-Frappier found that men who had slept with more than 20 women during their lifetime were 28 per cent less likely to develop the disease.

They were also 19 per cent less likely to develop an aggressive type of cancer, compared to those who had had only one female sexual partner.

However, the same did not apply to gay men, according to the Canadian scientists. They found that having more than 20 male partners doubled the risk of prostate cancer and made an aggressive cancer five times more likely. Sleeping with one male partner did not affect the risk.

Meanwhile, men who were virgins were almost twice as likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer as those who were sexually experienced.

The findings are from the Prostate Cancer & Environment Study in which 3,208 men answered questions about their lifestyle and sex lives.

Of these men, 1,590 were diagnosed with prostate cancer between September 2005 and August 2009, while 1,618 men were part of the control group.

Overall, men with prostate cancer were twice as likely as others to have a relative with cancer, but the study also found a possible link with their number of sexual partners.

Lead researcher Professor Marie-Elise Parent, from the University of Montreal, said: "It is possible that having many female sexual partners results in a higher frequency of ejaculations, whose protective effect against prostate cancer has been previously observed in cohort studies."

According to one theory, large numbers of ejaculations may reduce the concentration of cancer-causing substances in prostatic fluid, a constituent of semen.

They may also lead to fewer crystal-like structures in the prostate that have been associated with prostate cancer.

Suggesting why the same did not apply to male partners Professor Parent admitted she could only provide "highly speculative" explanations.

One explanation she said "could be that anal intercourse produces a physical trauma to the prostate".

The age at which men first had sexual intercourse, and the number of times they had been infected by a sexually transmitted disease, had no bearing on prostate cancer risk.

A total of 12 per cent of the group reported having had at least one sexually transmitted infection (STI) in their lifetime.

Professor Parent added: "We were fortunate to have participants from Montreal who were comfortable talking about their sexuality, no matter what sexual experiences they have had, and this openness would probably not have been the same 20 or 30 years ago.

"Indeed, thanks to them, we now know that the number and type of partners must be taken into account to better understand the causes of prostate cancer."

On the question of whether promiscuity might now be recommended in health advice to men, she said: "We're not there yet."

The research is published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology.

Why chess is really an extreme sport

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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