Nepotistic privilege should be a matter of social shame

Woke young millennials should start looking down upon friends who take the easy route of following up on their parents’ careers writes SHIVAM VIJ in The Print 

We don’t know for sure the reason why Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput took his own life, but the resulting debate on nepotism is a turning point in Indian society. Rajput was not only an outsider to the joint family called Bollywood, but an outsider from Patna. As a result, nepotism has now become a Hindi word found in Hindi papers.

Before Rajput’s suicide, it was Kangana Ranaut who took up the matter. Outside of Bollywood, India’s public discourse often discusses ‘dynasty’ and ‘dynastic privilege’ in Indian politics.

This is an opportunity for Indian society to broaden the discussion. Given a chance, we are all nepotistic. There is nobody who won’t promote their children’s careers in the same field as theirs. This is part of our tradition of caste and kinship. To bring down the edifice of nepotism in Bollywood and politics, we have to question nepotism in society at large.

A drain on the GDP

This is a serious issue with implications not only for equality of opportunity but also for India’s economic progress. Nepotism promotes mediocrity, and thus low productivity.

The Congress party insists on being led by Indira Gandhi’s grandchildren, regardless of whether they are the best people suited for the role. The result is for all to see: a most ineffective opposition. Similarly, the Bollywood marketing machine will force you to watch an Arjun Kapoor movie, even if he has the same face and same expression throughout the movie. He can’t act, but the movie will still make a profit thanks to the marketing machine. And even if it flops, he will still get another role. The result is that India has a lot of terrible cinema.

India’s legal profession is said to be controlled by some 500 families. If you are a young lawyer, you have to struggle for years at a pittance of a salary with senior lawyers before the profession will let you stand on your feet. Meanwhile, the fraternity is full of third-rate lawyers who keep getting cases and corporate retainerships only because their fathers or mothers are famous advocates. 

When an internship is a phone call away

In much the same way, nepotistic privilege affects the overall quality of many parts of the Indian economy. Our newsrooms are full of children of journalists and even politicians. A well-known journalist’s son or daughter gets an internship with a phone call whereas those without such access keep emailing their CVs with no one bothering to even open their emails.

The unfairness does not stop there. The other day, I saw a prominent academic promote a senior journalist’s daughter on Twitter, praising her with superlatives for an ordinary cub reporter’s work. Nepotistic privilege is thus a life-long privilege. You get a free pass because you are the son or daughter or relative of XYZ. It’s bad enough that she has the advantage of getting story ideas, leads and contacts at home while an ‘outsider’ in the same newsroom will have to struggle much harder to be at the same level. But for your father’s powerful friends to be promoting you on Twitter blindly is absolutely distasteful.

We are all complicit

It is time for all of us to look within. Do we take someone more seriously because their father or mother is successful in the same field? We do, we often do. This is part of our ethos as a caste society. There is, for example, a huge amount of curiosity among the public about star kids. We reward nepotism. Someone with nepotistic privilege may be competent, but you haven’t even tried an ‘outsider’.

We need to flip this formula, not just to provide equality of opportunity but also because every job should have the most competent person doing it. That is why nepotism is an economic issue.

Copy-paste woke culture

To flip it, we need to start seeing nepotistic privilege as a matter of shame. India’s woke millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha tend to learn political correctness from American shores. But nepotism is not such a big social issue in the US. We need some originality in our woke politics to start shaming nepotistic privilege. When woke millennials say ‘check your privilege’, they don’t include nepotism because American news sites haven’t yet written about it yet.

In the way that woke people go around ‘cancelling’ those who are misogynistic or homophobic or fatphobic or those who think skin colour defines beauty… yeah, riding pillion on your dad’s career should be seen like that.

If you are a young adult planning your career, and you are planning to take up the same career as your parents, you should feel some shame about it. And your friends should judge you for it.

And you should definitely stop your mom and dad from making the phone call that gets you the free pass. Name dropping shouldn’t get you a job — your CV and work should.

Of all the professions in the world, your inner calling turns out to be the same as your parent’s? Where’s the originality, the rebellion, where’s your individualism?

Similarly, parents successful in a profession should encourage their children to find a different profession. In a country where the caste system is literally about profession, this is key to social democratisation.

It will be your turn next

Maybe you really, really want to follow the same profession as your parent. Here’s the challenge. Can you do it on a different turf? If you are a Bollywood star kid, can you ‘launch’ your career in a country other than India or with a less-known, less-glitzy banner? If your father is prominent in national politics but inactive in state politics, can you build your own mass popularity in state politics? If your mother is a criminal lawyer, can you at least go work in a corporate law firm?

If you are literally doing what your dad does, just taking on his clients, just running his business, you should, yes, be a little ashamed of yourself. You are occupying a seat that could be occupied by someone more competent than you, no matter how good you think you are at your work.

You should know that the world judges you for it but doesn’t say it yet. Just like the silence about nepotistic privilege has been broken in politics and Bollywood, one day it will be broken in your profession too.

Who is afraid of Hindutva?

It took a UN envoy to hear how austerity is destroying British lives

Philip Alston’s inquiry into poverty in the UK has heard a shocking truth that British politicians refuse to acknowledge writes Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

 

Philip Alston with pupils from Avenue End primary school in Glasgow. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian


The room is packed, people spilling out of the doors. The atmosphere crackles. So it should, for this is what it feels like when an entire society is held to account. Over 12 days, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights is touring not Bangladesh nor Sudan but the UK. And what Philip Alston has discovered in the fifth-richest country on Earth should shame us all. From Newcastle to Jaywick, he has uncovered stories of families facing homelessness, of people too scared to eat, of those on benefits contemplating suicide.

'A political choice': UN envoy says UK can help all who hit hard times


This UN inquiry could prove one of the most significant events in British civil society this decade, for one simple reason: for once, poor people get to speak their own truth to power. They don’t get talked over or spoken down to, lied about or treated like dirt, as happens on any other day of the week. Instead, at these hearings, they speak to Alston and his aides about their own experience. The white-haired Australian academic lawyer doesn’t cross-examine; no vulgar TV debate ensues with some hired contrarian. In its unadorned humility, the process matters almost as much as the press statement on Friday or the report to be published in a few months. Here is someone above party politics, outside the parameters of national debate, determined to treat all sides – poor people, the politicians, the academics and NGOs – as equal.

Bearing their crutches and their prams, the crowd gathered in this east London hall on this Monday afternoon knows visitors like Alston come along but once. “We’re really glad you’re here,” one person tells him, to general approval. That enthusiasm is widespread: the UN team has been deluged by a record-breaking number of submissions (nearly 300 for the UK, against 50 when it toured the US last year); city councils have passed motions requesting his presence. After eight years of historic spending cuts, a decade of stagnant wages and generations of economic vandalism, these people and places want to bear witness.

Without media training, some speak off mic, others run over time. While talking, they clutch friends’ hands or break down. When the subjects are too raw, they look away. But the stories they tell are raw. In tears, Paula Peters remembers a close friend who jumped to her death after her disability benefits were stopped. With nine days to Christmas, “she left behind two small kids”. Trinity says she and her children eat from food banks and “everything I’m wearing, apart from my hair, is from jumble [sales]”.

The welfare secretary, Esther McVey, has never conducted such a listening project. Instead she makes up her own fantasies about the effect of this government’s austerity. This summer she fabricated stories about the National Audit Office’s report into universal credit, for which she was later forced to apologise. A couple of months later, she told the Tory faithful that claims of cuts to disability benefits were “fake news”, just days after House of Commons research showed that the government planned almost £5bn of cuts to disability benefits.

The effect of those malicious government lies resounds through this afternoon. We hear how ministers talking of “shirkers” creates an environment in which people in wheelchairs are spat at. Still in his school uniform, 15-year-old Adam talks about boys being knifed in his suburb and links it to cuts in youth services, in policing, in schools. In this Victorian-built hall, where Sylvia Pankhurst once spoke and the GMB trade union was formed, he half-shouts, half-pleads with Alston: “Label this government as criminal, because that is what they are.”

Over the weekend, I asked Alston whether he heard any echoes between British experiences and the testimonies he heard last December while investigating Donald Trump’s US. “In many ways, you in the UK are far ahead of the US,” he said. He thinks “the Republicans would be ecstatic” to have pushed through the kind of austerity that the Tories have inflicted on the British.

Like others at the Guardian, I have been writing on the debacle of austerity Britain for years now. Rather than the goriest details, what strikes me is how normalised our country’s depravities have become over the course of this decade. Ordinary people speak in ordinary voices about horrors that are now quite ordinary. They go to food banks, which barely existed before David Cameron took office. Or they go days without food even in London, the city that has more multi-millionaires than any other. They spend their wages to rent houses that have mice or cockroaches or abusive landlords. Any decent society would see these details are shocking; yet they no longer shock anyone in that hall. What will remain with me of that afternoon is the sheer prosaic weight of the abuse being visited on ordinary people who could be my friends or family.

Alston has heard so many stories about the toxic failings of universal credit and the malice that is the disability benefits assessment scheme that he is in no doubt about the truth. The question for McVey, who is due to meet the UN party this week, will be how she responds to the weight of people’s lived experience. None of those giving evidence this afternoon want victim status. They are, as Trinity says, “survivors”. What they want is to be heard – and after that they want remedies.

Whether it’s Tony Blair and his “big conversation” or Cameron and his false belief that the Brexit vote was in the bag, leading British politicians don’t do listening – for the simple reason that they wouldn’t like what they’d hear. The evidence about austerity, about economic hollowing-out, about a shoulder-shrugging bureaucracy was all readily available before Alston flew over from the UN. But the government, like most of the press, didn’t want the truth to be acknowledged – because then it would be compelled to act. This is what Britain has been reduced to: hoping that a foreigner has the stomach and integrity to hear and record our decade of shame.

The Joy of Six: Kevin Pietersen

JFK innings, maestro moments and swaggering slogs, the batsman who made you think: is something brilliant happening?

Kevin Pietersen practices his indie-frontman pose for Observer Sport Monthly in 2005. Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer

1) The KP moment

There is a delightful scene in the final episode of Nathan Barley, Charlie Brooker's documentary about life at the Guardian. A TV executive has a pint poured over him in the pub and, after reacting with anger, suddenly thinks all might not be what it seems. "Are you guys the crew?" he says, looking round the pub. "Are we all in this? Is something brilliant happening?"

That scene came to mind every time Kevin Pietersen batted. Pietersen was a consistent provider of one of sport's greatest thrills: the sense that something brilliant might be about to happen. Sport is an intrinsically underwhelming experience, such is the chasm between fantasy and reality. Yet Pietersen's Ashes-winning 158, which came so early in his career, established the parameters of his talent – or rather that there were hardly any parameters. The reality of Pietersen did not just match the fantasy; it exceeded it. Not even Walter Mitty could have imagined some of those shots he played.

Every time he was at the crease it was legitimate to think we might be about to witness something epic. And when he got going, it was impossible to contain your excitement. Nobody else made you want to text a friend or rush to the nearest public social-networking house and say excitedly to the nearest person: "Are you watching the cricket? Pietersen's on one here." That's how special Pietersen was: he made you want to talk to strangers.

The excitement of what he might achieve was only half the story. There have been umpteen batsmen with the capacity to dramatically change the population of a bar – emptying them at the ground, filling them in town centres – yet few had Pietersen's combination of omnipotence and fragility. With the obvious exception of Brian Lara, it is hard to think of a batsman with a bigger gap between his top and bottom level of performance. Pietersen could look like Donald Bradman and Phil Tufnell, often in the same innings, sometimes in the same over. He was notoriously nervous at the start of his innings, hence one of his most memorably quirks: the Red Bull single to get off the mark.

With Pietersen, nobody knew anything. You would think you could spot the tell-tale signs that he was going to make a hundred; you'd think you'd visibly see him enter the zone, and two minutes later he'd hook to deep square leg or smack one against the breeze to long-on. Or you'd comment how scratchy he was looking and in the blink of an eye he would be 80 not out and batting like a lord. This, coupled with his mixed popularity and the consequently exaggerated drama of his success and failure, made him the most unputdownable book in sport.

Most of Pietersen's great knocks came after or even during a dodgy spell of form: his Man of the Series performance in England's World T20 win in 2010 was a brief, stratospheric high in the most traumatic year of his career. During the tour of Bangladesh two months earlier, he says he had basically forgotten how to bat and thought his career was in serious jeopardy.

In 2012 he played 17 Test innings in Asia, averaging a modest 39.43. A mediocre year then? Not quite. His scores were 2, 0, 14, 1, 32, 18, 3, 30, 151, 42*, 17, 2, 186, 54, 0, 73, 6 and the two centuries – at Colombo and Mumbai – are the two greatest innings played by an Englishman in Asia. There was a moment in both those centuries when you knew, or you thought you knew, that it was on.

In this age of constant newsflashes, previously reserved for JFK moments, Sky Sports News' yellow ticker should simply have said: BREAKING NEWS: KEVIN PIETERSEN IS BATTING whenever he was at the crease. In sport, JFK moments are supposed to relate to off-field events. We think we know what to expect with the context of the actual sport, so nothing should be so mind-blowing as to become a JFK moment. Yet Pietersen's ability to play with otherworldly genius was such that he became a specialist in JFK innings. Where were you for the 158, the 151, the 149 or the 186?

Within every JFK innings lurked a KP moment, when he did something – a booming drive, a look in his eye, even an ultra-certain defensive stroke – that made you wonder: is something brilliant happening? Whether he succeeded or failed, the answer was usually yes. Pietersen was the point at which sport's three greatest pleasures – partisanship, unpredictability and unimaginable genius – were perfectly in sync.

2) The match-winner

 Kevin Pietersen plays a reverse sweep on the third day of the second cricket Test match against Sri Lanka in 2012 Photograph: Eranga Jayawardena/AP

There are lies, bald-faced lies and this statistic: Ian Bell has scored more hundreds in Test victories than any other England batsman, including Kevin Pietersen. Bell is an exquisite talent, whose batting in last summer's Ashes was the finest we have ever seen by an England batsman over an entire series. But to compare him with Pietersen in this sphere is daft. Pietersen did not make hundreds in England victories; he made match-winning hundreds.

At his best, Pietersen's runs were so resounding and symbolic as to make the rest of the game an apparent formality. He was a master of mental disintegration. There was the brutal 227 at Adelaide – without which England would have been 1-0 down going into the final two Tests of the series. There was the six-laden 151 in Colombo in 2012 , the most spectacular catharsis after moments of DRS torment. In that match at Colombo he scored 193 off 193 balls, including eight sixes, and was out once. So an average of 193 and a strike rate of 100. The other 21 players averaged 29 and scored at a strike rate of 40.

It was not just that Pietersen did things mere mortals could not; he did things that were beyond his fellow immortals. Very few batsmen in history could have played Pietersen's true masterpiece, the reintegration 186 at Mumbai. That was deemed the fourth-best Test innings of all time in the book Masterly Batting, the most forensic study of the greatest Test innings that we have come across. (Yes we did write an essay for the book but that's not the point.)

Pietersen had three innings in the top 100 of that book; only Don Bradman, Brian Lara, Graham Gooch and Gordon Greenidge had more. Since Lara retired, nobody has played as many epics as Pietersen. There is also the weirdly underrated 142 in a low-scoring match at Edgbaston in 2006 (nobody else scored more than 30 in the first innings), when he switch-hit Muttiah Muralitharan for six. There was the Ashes 158, which did not win a match but did win a mildly important series, and our personal favourite, the 149 against South Africa at Headingley on Super Saturday of the Olympics. Trust Pietersen to rise to the big occasion.

In the last couple of years we have seen the development of a dubious, almost smug cliché that Pietersen is a player of great innings rather than a great player. Pietersen's overall record stands up extremely well – his Test average of 47.28 is the highest by an England batsman since Geoff Boycott retired in 1982 – but far more significant are two things not recorded in Wisden: the number of neck hairs he had made stand to attention, and the impact his runs have had.

Let's be clear about this. Without Pietersen, England would not have won the Ashes in 2005 and might not have won them in 2010-11; they would not have won their first Test in Sri Lanka for 11 years; they probably would not have won in India in 2012-13 or triumphed in the World T20 in 2010. Pietersen played a series of exceptional innings that won things for his team and took out a lease in the memory bank. If that's not greatness, then we're not sure what is.

3) The skunk punk

 Kevin Pietersen acknowledges the applause of the Oval crowd as he walks off having scored 158 runs during the final day of the fifth test of the 2005 Ashes series. Photograph: Kieran Doherty / Reuters/Reuters

The legend of Kevin Pietersen's life-changing innings is told thus: the greatest Ashes series of all time was at stake, England needed to bat for a draw, and this daft bugger went on a demented joyride! That is how we will remember his Ashes-winning 158 at The Oval on 12 September 2005. There was actually a little more to it than that. Pietersen played four innings in one day, two of them at the same time. Before lunch he was nervous and unsure of how to play; he was a punchbag for Brett Lee and fortunate to survive two dropped chances. Between lunch and tea, he marmalised Lee and Shaun Tait while blocking Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne. And after tea, with the Ashes won, he let his skunk down and had some fun against all-comers.

At lunch England were 127 for five, a lead of 133 with a possible 64 overs remaining. There wasn't a dry nail in the house. It's still a little chilling to reflect how close England were to not winning the Ashes. Pietersen was 35 from 60 balls. He had played scratchily apart from two defiant slog-swept sixes in one Warne over. The story goes that, after a chat with his captain Michael Vaughan, he simply decided "To hell with it" and went after everything that moved. In fact the innings was far subtler.

Warne and Lee continued after lunch. Pietersen launched into Lee, flogging him for a staggering 35 from 13 balls, including two hooked sixes and four fours. Lee's bowling peaked at 96.7mph – notably faster than Mitchell Johnson right now – yet Pietersen took on almost every delivery.

All the while, at the other end, he milked Warne clear-headedly. When Lee was replaced by McGrath, Pietersen pressed the stop button. England scored 19 from the next 11 overs, all bowled by the two champions, before Ricky Ponting replaced McGrath with Tait. The first two balls were flogged for four and in the next half an hour Pietersen savaged Tait for 22 from 12 balls. By tea, the Ashes were all but won. In that decisive session, Pietersen took Lee and Tait for 57 off 25 balls at a strike-rate of 228 runs per 100 balls. Off Warne and McGrath he scored 13 from 41 balls at a strike rate of 32. He had a first gear, a tenth gear and nothing in between. Not bad for someone who can only play one way.

This is not to say Pietersen could not give McGrath and Warne tap. In his first Test innings at Lord's he carted McGrath back over his head for an absurd six born of the most magnificent disrespect, and he spent the summer slog-sweeping his mate Warne into the crowd at midwicket (as well as being dismissed by him on a few occasions). Those slog sweeps are perhaps the most memorable feature of Pietersen's first summer as a Test cricketer, not least because it was a shot he eschewed as time went on. (It made a brief and wonderful comeback during his Mumbai maestropiece in 2012.)

Pietersen became a far better batsman than he was in 2005: technically tighter, more complete, more mature, a lot more accomplished on the off side. He even managed to overcome the nervous 158s. Yet though he remained one of the most entertaining batsman around, he never had quite the same exhilarating skunk punk edge of his first year in international cricket. In that time he also made those three one-day hundreds in South Africa and hammered Jason Gillespie into the knackers' yard in an ODI at Bristol, after which his captain Vaughan became the first significant person to use the G-word. Andrew Flintoff recalls Pietersen sitting in the dressing-room saying "Not bad am I?"

Not bad at all for a man who five years earlier was a tail-end slogger called Pieterson. After 10 ODI innings in 2004-05, his average was 162.25. As with the Prodigy's Experience, Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets and Michael van Gerwen in the second half of 2012, this was a raw, visceral introduction that would eventually become only a small part of a complete body of work. But that subsequent maturity partially obscures just how incredibly fresh and exciting he was in his first year. Pietersen, for richer and poorer, was never the same batsman after 2005. And although he played better innings than the 158, it was his career-defining performance.

4) The pace batsman

 Kevin Pietersen mauls South Africa during the World Twenty20 tournament in 2010. Photograph: Julian Herbert/Getty Images

Kevin Pietersen was a pace batsman. Not in the sense that he scored his runs quickly, but that he thrillingly reversed the traditional relationship between fast bowler and batsman, hunter and hunted, intimidating opponents with his size and aggression. He followed in the swaggering footsteps of Viv Richards, Matthew Hayden and others by playing the batsman as physical bully. Sometimes he even gave the fast bowlers some chin music of their own, belabouring life-threatening straight drives.

Three particular innings stand out. At the Oval in 2005 he drowned Brett Lee and Shaun Tait in their own adrenaline; he played Tarzan cricket against Morne Morkel and Dale Steyn at the World T20, mauling Steyn for 23 from 8 balls – including a flamingo shot to the offside - and sent an unprecedented shiver down Mike Selvey's spine; and at Headingley in 2012 he played the most otherworldly innings the Joy of Six has ever seen, when he was obviously in the zone that he should have had a forcefield around him.

Pietersen loved taking on the spinners, he loved to prove his technical class with off- and on-drives. But nothing stimulated him quite like the chance to assert his alpha-male status via the medium of pummelling 95mph deliveries all round the park. And nothing stimulated us the same way either.

5) The dumbslog millionaire

 A dejected Kevin Pietersen leaves the field after being dimissed on 97 during the first day of the first Test match against West Indies at Sabina Park. Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

Kevin Pietersen took 183 Test wickets. Ten with the ball, and 173 with his own bat. To explain: it is hard to recall a batsman whose dismissals brought such focus – not just because they were an event, but because they were always his fault. Pietersen never got a good ball in his career. He was never got out. He always got himself out.

It's true that there were plenty of notorious shots. The dumbslog millionaire incident in Jamaica 2009, and a similar dismissal against South Africa at Edgbaston a year earlier. (Both times he was trying to reach a hundred with a six. Pietersen often could not resist going to a hundred on his terms: he did so with a reverse sweep in the 2012 epics at Colombo and Mumbai.) There was the lap sweep off Nathan Hauritz at Cardiff in 2009, and plenty of flat-footed wafts or pulls straight to long leg or deep-square leg.

Sometimes his confidence could backfire comically. In 2006 he said there was simply no way he could be bowled round his legs by Shane Warne; guess what dismissal catalysed the miracle of Adelaide. The same winter, Pietersen treated an ageing Glenn McGrath with disdain, walking down the wicket repeatedly during the one-dayers. McGrath broke his ribs with a bouncer.

It does nonetheless feel that Pietersen dismissals invited disproportionate opprobrium. While he found many weird and wonderful ways to get out in Australia last winter, for example, so did Ian Bell. Bell dragged a full toss from a part-time spinner to midwicket; he drove his first ball straight to mid-off; he played a late cut straight to gully. Hardly a word was said.

The idea that Pietersen couldn't care less about the team was not fair. For one thing he knew, from the moment he made that 158 against Australia, that individual glory was multiplied tenfold when it facilitated team glory. And he often knuckled down. In that 158 at The Oval he played like Chris Tavare and Viv Richards at the same time, while his tone-setting double-century against India at Lord's 2011 – an innings whose brilliance has been obscured by the 4-0 mauling that it set up - was a masterpiece of moving through the gears as conditions get easier: his four fifties respectively took 134 balls, then 82,85 and 25.

There's no question that Pietersen was occasionally driven to excessive stubborn, hiding behind the catch-all phrase "That's the way I play". Yet there was an essential truth in that. The poor strokes were inextricably linked to the outrageous shots; both came from the instinctive, often flawed shot selection that also allowed him to play innings of staggering genius. It borders on infantile to celebrate the audacious shots and chastise the cheap dismissals. Dolly Parton and David Brent would have understood Pietersen.

Pietersen had to do things on his terms; without that he was nothing. To criticise him for a poor shot is like moaning about an ecstasy comedown or a broken heart at the end of the best relationship of your life. It may be a simple case of English suspicion of unusual talent, the same that manifested itself when David Gower wafted lazily to slip. In this country, certain types of dismissals are morally acceptable. This is not to absolve Pietersen of all blame. No man can bat with impunity. Yet as with Gower there seemed to be a damaging desire to mould Pietersen into something he could never be. He had to play it as he saw it. And he saw cricket through different eyes to normal human beings.

Those eyes allowed him to conceive and play some of the most extraordinary strokes. He took advantage of the possibilities afforded Test batsmen first by Steve Waugh and then by Twenty20. The established norms and mores of five-day cricket have been shattered, as has the coaching manual. Just as language has never been more flexible and exciting, nor has Test batting. Pietersen developed his own urban coaching manual, full of unique and totally modern shots.

The most celebrated, the switch hit, never really got the Joy of Six going: it was brilliant and audacious but not unique. Far more spine-tingling were the established, conventional shots that Pietersen remixed. The flick through midwicket, with added flamingo; the straight drive played wristily and on the run; and our favourite, this dreamy slow-motion pull off Dale Steyn.

In an interview with All Out Cricket last year, Pietersen picked out that and anotherdreamy swipe off Pragyan Ojha at Mumbai as his favourite shots. "The slowness of my bat speed through those balls is what stands out to me," he said. "I look at those two shots – and I don't normally like to talk about my shots – but I do occasionally look at those and go, 'How the hell did you do that?' I don't know …"

Some things are best left unexplained.

6a) The dressing-room influence

 England's Alastair Cook and Kevin Pietersen look-on from the dressing room balcony during day four of the third Test at the WACA on 16 December, 2013. Photograph: Anthony Devlin/PA

In 2012, the sarcastic air violins came out when Kevin Pietersen said: "It's not easy being me in that dressing-room." In fact it's the most undeniable thing he's ever said. For much of his nine-and-a-bit years in international cricket It was clearly not easy being Pietersen in the England dressing-room; the only thing worthy of debate is whose fault that was.

There have been tedious assumptions about who did what to prompt Pietersen's sacking. The principal emotion should be sadness, not anger. It is wrong to assume that England need to give a specific example of Pietersen's behaviour, or even that there is a specific example; often it's an accumulation of incidents that create a sense that is not easy to articulate. Pick the person you most dislike at work and then try to explain to an outsider why that is so. It doesn't look nearly as powerful on the page as it is in your head. The same is probably true of England's intractable conviction that Pietersen was a damaging dressing-room influence.

It's insulting to suggest that this was a decision taken on a whim, because Alastair Cook, Paul Downton and the rest didn't fancy the hassle. The fact we have seen this storyline played out so many times before suggests Pietersen cannot be entirely innocent. It is probably a failure of management to some extent, but then there is always a point at which something becomes unmanageable. There is always something beyond the pale.

That doesn't mean the decision was necessarily fair on Pietersen. He will argue that his problems on the recent Ashes tour, and with Peter Moores, came from nothing more than a desire for excellence and an abhorrence of mediocrity that was too much for weak minds. It would be extremely unwise to assume that just because Pietersen is in a minority, he is intrinsically wrong; there are umpteen historical examples, in far more important walks of life of sport, that remind us of that.

In an age of passive-aggressive manipulation, there is something refreshing about Pietersen apparently wanting to have things out in the open with his team-mates (even if, when it comes to briefing and PR, he is as disappointingly snide as the rest). He might also argue that England had no problems with him when they were winning and he was scoring monstrous centuries. It's legitimate to wonder how this England team might have coped with Sir Ian Botham and Shane Warne. The key point is that we simply don't know; at best we are making uneducated guesses.

The relationship between the England team and Pietersen was often described as a marriage of convenience yet in a sense they were more like acquaintances with benefits. We should have known it was going to end like this.

6b) The conversation-starter

 Kevin Pietersen acknowledges the crowd during England's 2005 Ashes celebrations. Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian

Never mind the dressing-room; it was not easy being Pietersen out in the middle. Sometimes it was his sanctuary, other times he batted under unimaginable pressure. Sachin Tendulkar batted with the hopes of millions of India on his shoulders – but at least they all wanted him to succeed. Pietersen batted knowing that 50% of Englishmen were desperate for him to succeed and 50% even more desperate for him to fail. Sometimes he even had to play against two teams, as during his astonishing 149 against South Africa and England at Headingley in 2012.

It's often said that Pietersen batted for himself; as his career went on, he had little choice but to do that, so isolated did he become. Which is the chicken and which is the egg in this situation will be forever debated. Either way, he had to bat knowing that, whatever happened, he would be the watercooler's hottest topic afterwards.

He had a unique burden. He had to hit sixes but not get out trying to hit sixes. He had to counter-attack but not get out counter-attacking. In the 2007 World Cup, England needed him to be pinch-hitter, anchor and death-hitter all in one. It was an absurd burden.

That, coupled with his perpetual sense – fair or not – of being misunderstood and unloved, makes you wonder just what he would have achieved with unconditional love. Sometimes the awkwardness made him bat better. Unpopularity can be the most powerful fuel of all, but only in the short-term, unless you are a WWF wrestler. Over time it will have weighed heavily both on his conscious and unconscious.

The phrase "We need to talk about Kevin" quickly became a boring cliché. It arguably missed the point. We didn't just need to talk about Kevin because of what Kevin did, as in the film; we needed to talk about Kevin whether he did anything or not, because he enlivened our grubby, boring lives. He brought out the village gossip in us all. He was so charismatic that we became addicted to him, so we discussed things that we would not with other players. Our lives will be significantly duller without him.

Food banks in the UK: cowardly coalition can't face the truth about them

Conservatives cannot admit a real fear of hunger afflicts thousands

• 
• • Nick Cohen
  • The Observer, Saturday 28 December 2013 18.29 GMT

Donated food at a a food bank. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

I went to the Trussell Trust food bank round the corner from the Observer's offices just before Christmas. If I hadn't been reading the papers, I would have assumed it represented everything Conservatives admire. As at every other food bank, volunteers who are overwhelmingly churchgoers ran it and organised charitable donations from the public.

What could be closer to Edmund Burke's vision of the best of England that David Cameron says inspired his "big society"? You will remember that in his philippic against the French revolution, Burke said his contemporaries should reject its dangerously grandiose ambitions , and learn that "to love the little platoons we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ, as it were) of public affections". Yet when confronted with displays of public affection – not in 1790 but in 2013 – the coalition turns its big guns on the little platoons.

It would have been easy for the government to say that it was concerned that so many had become so desperate. This was Britain, minsters might have argued, not some sun-beaten African kleptocracy. Regardless of politics, it was a matter of common decency and national pride that Britain should not be a land where hundreds of thousands cannot afford to eat. The coalition might not have meant every word or indeed any word. But it would have been in its self-interest to emit a few soothing expressions of concern, and offer a few tweaks to an inhumanely inefficient benefits system, if only to allay public concern about the rotten state of the nation.

But the coalition is not even prepared to play the hypocrite. Iain Duncan Smith showed why he never won the VC when he was in the Scots Guards when he refused to face the Labour benches as the Commons debated food banks on 18 December. He pushed forward his deputy, one Esther McVey, a former "TV personality". All she could say was that hunger was Labour's fault for wrecking the economy. She gave no hint that her government had been in power for three years during which the number attending food banks had risen from 41,000 in 2010 to more than 500,000. Her remedy was for the coalition to help more people into work.

If she had bothered talking to the Trussell Trust, it would have told her that low-paid work is no answer. Its 1,000 or so distribution points serve working families, who have no money left for food once they have paid exorbitant rent and fuel bills.

But then no one in power wants to talk to the trust. As the Observer revealed, Chris Mould, its director, wrote to Duncan Smith asking if they could discuss cheap ways of reducing hunger: speeding up appeals against benefit cuts; or stopping the endemic little Hitlerism in job centres, which results in unjust punishments for trivial transgressions. In other words, a Christian charity, which was turning the "big society" from waffle into a practical reality, was making a civil request. Duncan Smith responded with abuse. The charity's claims to be "non-partisan" were a sham, he said. The Trussell Trust was filled with "scaremongering" media whores, desperate to keep their names in the papers. But he had their measure.

Oh, yes. "I understand that a feature of your business model must require you to continuously achieve publicity, but I'm concerned that you are now seeking to do this by making your political opposition to welfare reform overtly clear."

Ministers will not confess to making a mistake for fear of damaging their careers. But it is not only their reputations but an entire world view that is at stake. Put bluntly, the Conservatives hope to scrape the 2015 election by convincing a large enough minority that welfare scroungers are stealing their money. They cannot admit that a real fear of hunger afflicts hundreds of thousands. Hence, Lord Freud, the government's adviser on welfare reform, had to explain away food banks by saying: "There is an almost infinite demand for a free good."

My visit to the food bank showed that our leaders' ignorance has become a deliberate refusal to face a social crisis. Of course, the volunteers help working families and students as well as the unemployed and pensioners. Everyone apart from ministers knows about in-work poverty. As preposterous is the Tory notion that the banks are filled with freeloaders.

You cannot just swan in. You get nothing unless a charity or public agency has assessed your need and given you a voucher. The trust is at pains to make sure that the beggars – for hundreds of thousands of beggars is what Britain now has – receive a balanced diet. To feed a couple for five days, it gives: one medium pack of cereal, 80 teabags, a carton of milk, two cans apiece of soup, beans, tomatoes and vegetables, two portions of meat and fish, fruit, rice pudding, sugar, pasta and juice. That this is hardly a feast is confirmed by the short list of "treats", which, "when available", consist of "one bar of chocolate and one jar of jam".

Sharon Cumberbatch, who runs the centre, tells me that she is so worried that shame will deter her potential clients that she packages food in supermarket bags so no one need know its source. The clients, when I met them, reinforced her point that they were not the brazen freeloaders of Tory nightmare. They trembled when they told me how they did not know how they would make it into the new year.

Most of all, it was the volunteers who were a living reproof to a coalition that can cannot correct its errors. They not only distribute food but collect it. They stand outside supermarkets all day asking strangers to buy the tinned food they need or hand out leaflets in the streets or plead with businesses to help. Sharon Cumberbatch is unemployed but she works to help others for nothing. Her colleagues said they manned the bank because hunger in modern Britain was a sign of a country that was falling apart. Or as one volunteer, Richard Moorhead, put it to me: "I am gobsmacked that people are going hungry. I'm ashamed."

The coalition can call such attitudes political if it wants – in the broadest sense they are. But they are also patriotic, neighbourly, charitable and kind. They come from people who represent a Britain the Conservative party once claimed a kinship with, and now cannot bring itself to talk to.

Sledging in cricket - Pump up the volume

It's time to turn the stump mikes all the way up, and leave them that way

Rob Steen

December 4, 2013

	The next time two players discuss the weather in detail, we'd love to hear what they're saying © BCCI  Enlarge

Taking issue with a pair of sage judges of humankind like George Orwell and Mike Brearley might not be the wisest intellectual venture, but into the valley of the ridiculed here I come.

In his 1945 essay "The Sporting Spirit", Orwell decried the competitive arts as "war minus the shooting" (international sport, that is, not sport per se; his incandescent response to a UK football tour by Moscow Dynamo is so habitually misquoted). Given the quotidian deluge of pain inflicted in its name, not to mention the occasional death, "war minus the looting" might be nearer the mark. Or better yet, as the latest renewal of Ashes mania appears bent on reaffirming, "war plus the loathing".

-----Also Read

Doesn't Sledging Hurt Anyone?

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More recently, this very week, Brearley wrote a typically astute article for the Times, lamenting the intolerably abrasive atmosphere of the Brisbane Test, observing that there was "a narrow line" between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. This struck me as being overly generous.

What distinguishes sport from every other branch of the entertainment industry is its relationship with its audience, enforcing as it does an acute awareness of its constant (and constantly annoying) dancing partner - sportsmanship. Nobody talks about actorship or poetship or dancership; musicianship and authorship relate, respectively, to craft and rights, not conduct. But what do we actually mean by sportsmanship? It certainly tells us something about its complexities that no feminist I know has ever demanded that we refer to sportspersonship, let alone sportswomanship.

It seems reasonable to define this slippery virtue, broadly, as the willingness, even determination, to a) win fairly, honestly and modestly, and b) lose gallantly, graciously and, almost needless to add, unintentionally. Liable as they are to be copied in playgrounds, backyards and parks, any antic that even smacks of cheating or disrespect sets the most erroneous of bad examples, primarily to the impressionable young millions who invest so much of their emotion in, and glean so much of their joy from, the curious world of ballgames.

Sure, the older and wiser we get, the more we understand the unique nature of athletic battle and its impact on even the coolest of tempers. On the other hand, sports watchers of all ages are resolutely intolerant of relatively trifling misdemeanours such as time-wasting, feigned injury or even a withheld handshake. And woe betide those perceived to be cowardly, whether in the form of a tackle shirked, a risk untaken or an opponent tongue-lashed. And rightly so.

That's why, even as we grow ever more inured to violent images, and admiring of murderous on-screen drug lords and mobsters, sledging still disturbs disproportionately - because it tells us the perpetrator has given up trying to prevail through skill. There's banter and there's sledging, of course, and it is to the spite-rich, wit-free latter that one takes exception. To many, the Brisbane Test was sickening, not because of the savagery of the bowling but the vile viciousness of the verbals. One of the odder things about the three-for-the-price-of-one product cricket has become is that the least frantic variety is the likeliest to arouse indefensible behaviour.

Before we get to the remedy, a dose of perspective seems in order. Amid the same Gabba gabfest that saw Messrs Anderson and Clarke reiterate how far cricketers are prepared to go - and always have been - in quest of an edge, the media ridicule meted out to Jonathan Trott was equally if not more offensive. How sobering, moreover, to open a magazine that weekend and snuggle up with cuddly Mike Tyson.

Interviewed, helpfully, by a woman with whom he clearly felt more comfortable not being Mr Macho, here was a champion whose brutality inside and outside the ring is now matched by a self-flagellating honesty that somehow arouses compassion if not pity. Call it a salutary reminder of sport's capacity to simultaneously thrill and disgust. Call it the hidden price of admission. Still, when it comes to ranking the meanest, baddest-assed sportsmen of them all, Iron Mike the Ear-Cruncher was a spayed pussycat next to Ty Cobb.

When Charlie Davis, that endlessly creative Australian statistician, devised a formula to calculate sporting greatness, he focused on one solo endeavour, golf, and four team games - baseball, basketball, cricket and soccer. Using average and standard deviation (σ), the top three emerged as Don Bradman (4.4 σ above the norm); Pelé, whose goals-per-game superiority over other net-bulgers was 3.7 σ; and Cobb, the early 20th century diamond dazzler whose batting average soared 3.6 σ above the baseball mean. But while the Australian and the Brazilian played sport, the American, like Tyson, warred it.

	Denied the release of physical contact, it was inevitable that a cricketer should coin as dastardly a term as "mental disintegration"

"A red-blooded sport for red-blooded men" was how the perpetually snarly Detroit Tiger described his calling. Professional baseball, he insisted, was "something like a war". In acknowledging that the summit of his own profession was "pretty much a war", Alastair Cook at least had the grace to sound a teeny bit bashful.

Cobb was the ultimate ballplayer-warrior: think Steve Waugh, now multiply by a smidge under infinity. Here was a fellow who brazenly and showily sharpened the spikes on his boots, intimidating opponents and making fielders think twice about blocking his ferocious spurts down the baseline. In 1912, he assaulted a one-armed spectator who'd had the temerity to call him a "half-nigger". An enthusiastic racist, he packed a gun wherever he went; he was also reported to have pistol-whipped a man to death. And yes, he was also a mightily accomplished sledger.

The publicity tagline for Ron Shelton's admirably unmanipulative biopic Cobb was perfect: "The Man You Love To Hate". While no cricketer I can think of has ever warranted such a billing, personally speaking, the one who came closest was Matthew Hayden, whose incessant references to his devout Christianity were contradicted so expertly and shamelessly by those crude and cruel on-field tirades.

Sledging is as fertile a field for baseballers as it is for cricketers, because they, too, go about their labours at a leisurely pace; Tom Boswell, the revered Washington Post baseball correspondent, once described his job as "pondering inaction". Sledging seems so unnecessary. After all, another of the many characteristics the two games share is the extent to which they stack the odds. At any given moment, either nine or 11 men are ganging up on one, the avowed aim to negate, nullify and, ideally, exterminate.

Whereas baseball encourages physical contact and even indulges brawls, its more sedate brother from another mother is a subtler beast, albeit no gentler. What it most assuredly is not, has never been, is a game for gentlemen. Officially, that word itself denotes English peerage's lowest rank - below 80-odd others, even Master in Lunacy. When one's place in the pecking order is so insignificant, it is nothing if not pragmatic to be respectful, courteous, well-mannered and occasionally even honourable.

Denied the release of physical contact, it was inevitable that a cricketer should coin as dastardly a term as "mental disintegration". Whether it's Fred Trueman bullying a cowering Cambridge undergraduate, Dennis Lillee and Javed Miandad exchanging goads, Glenn McGrath spewing bile at Ramnaresh Sarwan or Merv Hughes foul-mouthing Graeme Hick, when it comes to rubbishing the game's reputation for civility the exhibits are largely verbal.

Trash-talking is all very well for boxers and those muscular clowns who have made WWE our least credible form of athletic competition. Is it naïve to expect ballplayers to rise above the sort of gratuitous personal abuse that would be stamped on in any other socially conscious workplace? Yes. Are we surprised that Darren Lehmann all but laughed off the suggestion of a "sledging summit"? Definitely not. Transgressors should therefore be pilloried as loudly as possible.

The name of the game must be shame. Shame the sledgers. Shame the needlers and the ranters. Shame the cowards. And the best way to achieve this noble end is not only to keep those stump mics on permanent duty but pump up the volume. Censorship is as pointless as it is dishonest. Why should the guilty be protected? Why shouldn't the audience, spectators as well as viewers, hear every sling and arrow of outrageous verbiage, preferably in Led Zeppelin-esque, Dolby-clarified, Marshall-amplified, 5.1 Surround Sound? They are part of the show. If turning the dial all the way up to 11 encourages wit, splendid. If it exposes nastiness and callousness, even better.

According to international protocol, of course, this ought to be a non-starter rather than a no-brainer. Still, judging by SABC's freewheeling deployment of the stump mic during last week's ODI against Pakistan in Port Elizabeth, let alone the 2006 Durban and Cape Town Tests, which saw Tony Greig and Mike Hussey take bilious exception to such eavesdropping, this doesn't seem to bother the state broadcaster unduly. Regrettably, I cannot report precisely what choice words the fielders selected after Quinton de Kock had given Junaid Khan a gentle shove for invading his space; my command of Urdu, shamefully, is on a par with Shane Warne's acumen in the shrinking-violet department.

Such is the precarious mutual dependence between sport and its most industrious sponsor, the reality is that behaviour will only be improved by stealth. Someday soon, a stump mic will be "accidentally" cranked up, not merely at a heated moment but for an entire day. Technical gremlins will be blamed. Innocence will be asserted. Apologies will be tendered. But the damage, with luck, will have been done. If there really is such a thing as the spirit of cricket - or even The Spirit of Cricket - I can't think of a better way to define what it isn't.