Will we see the Harbhajan of old?

Aakash Chopra in Cricinfo

India's leading offspinner of the 2000s fell away because of his tendency to overuse the doosra. Can he make enough of an impact in Bangladesh?


If he is to enjoy further success in international cricket, Harbhajan Singh must remember that the offbreak is his stock delivery, not the doosra © BCCI



There are a few boxes you want the ideal offspinner to tick:

1. Turns the ball
2. Gets the ball to drift in the air
3. Gets the ball to drop on the batsman
4. Extracts bounce
5. Has variations
6. Bowls an aggressive outside-off-stump line
7. Pitches fuller, enticing the batsman to drive off the front foot

About a decade and a half ago, when I first played the 17-year-old Harbhajan Singh, he had all of these qualities, even as a youngster. He was the perfect product of the SG Test ball, which offers a pronounced seam and allows the ball to grip the surface and, if maintained well, offers drift in the air too.

The key to achieving these attributes is that the ball must be delivered with the seam slightly tilted towards fine leg. That way it almost always lands half on the seam and half on the leather, and that allows it to grip and spin. If the position of the seam is maintained, the shine of the ball dictates that it drifts in the air, either away from the batsman or into him, depending which side the shine is on. The young Harbhajan was almost miraculously effective at this.

There were a few other things he could do that most of his peers couldn't. His high-arm action coupled with his height produced more bounce than other bowlers could, and so the fielders at short leg and backward short-leg were always in play. You couldn't simply offer a dead bat while defending, for the turn and bounce could take the ball in the direction of the two close-in catching fielders on the on side. Harbhajan would almost always bowl an aggressive outside-off-stump line and bowl full to entice the batsman to play against the spin, through the off side.

He was also the first high-profile Indian offspinner to bowl the doosra. But the good thing was that even when he had mastered it, the regular offbreak continued to be his stock ball, and it produced more wickets for him. The doosra was a surprise ball to keep the batsman guessing, and in any case, Harbhajan's doosra didn't go the other way as much as it did for the likes of Saqlain Mushtaq or Saeed Ajmal. That was a good thing, for it ensured that his focus was always on the stock ball. The only thing that he didn't have at 17 was the strength to sustain bowling quality for long periods. Once he achieved that, he became the complete bowler.

He flourished, the wickets came, and Harbhajan became an important cog in the Indian bowling unit - so much so that for some time he was the first spinner in the side, even when Anil Kumble was in the squad.

His problems arose when India played Test cricket in countries where the Kookaburra ball, which has a less pronounced seam, was used. Anyone who has grown up bowling with an SG ball faces serious issues adjusting to a ball that has close to no seam - like the Kookaburra when it is old. With no seam to grip the surface, you have to put more revolutions on the ball to get purchase off hard and bouncy surfaces.

Harbhajan couldn't quite master the Kookaburra in his heyday, but that wasn't the reason why he was dropped from the Indian team. The reason was the lack of zip in his offspinners, and a corresponding decline in his wicket-taking ability.

In his last five Tests, he has nine wickets at 63.88 apiece. These matches span three series - two at home against England and Australia, and one away against England.

Every player is a product of his conditioning, and Harbhajan was no different. He was always the first to reach the nets of Burlton Park in Jalandhar, was the last to leave, and bowled through the net session. He would bowl a lot of overs, and bowl a lot of orthodox offspin. That is how your bowling muscles are developed: the more you bowl, the better the ball comes out of the hand.



As T20 cricket took root, Harbhajan seemed to focus more on variations and lost his zing © BCCI





I think the reason his offies became less effective was that he didn't bowl enough of them in the nets and in matches. And that might have something to do with the introduction of T20 cricket and with playing a lot of one-day cricket. That's when it began to seem that Harbhajan had started focusing more on his variations than on traditional offspin.

His trajectory got lower, the speeds faster, and the line was more on the pads as opposed to outside off. He would bowl a lot of doosras and topspinners to minimise damage in the shorter format. Now, all of this was not unexpected - the demands of the shorter formats are such that most spinners go down that route when batsmen line them up to hit with the spin through the midwicket region; so if the ball holds its line or goes the other way, it becomes a little tougher for the batsman. But you need to be careful not to overdo the doosra, because you might lose your stock ball in the bargain. Also, there's still some merit in bowling slow in the shorter formats.

That's what Harbhajan did in the last season of the IPL, for Mumbai Indians. He was back to bowling a lot slower in the air, and the overwhelming majority of the deliveries he bowled were proper offbreaks. Now this could be because the doosra in general is less used on the circuit because of the crackdown against it, or the fact that Harbhajan almost always bowls the middle overs in a 20-over innings.

Even so, it was heartening to see glimpses of the old Harbhajan. Sterner tests await him now that he has made it back into the Indian Test side. His first assignment is the one-off Test match against Bangladesh. That will be played with a Kookaburra ball, and likely on a shirtfront. There will also be the small matter of another offspinner bowling from the other end, and comparisons will be inevitable. Comebacks after a certain age hang by a thin thread, so it's important he makes a mark in his first game back. Will Harbhajan do so?

Aspirational parents condemn their children to a desperate, joyless life

George Monbiot in The Guardian


 

'But to what are we aspiring? A life that is better than our own, or worse?' Illustration by Andrzej Krauze

Perhaps because the alternative is too hideous to contemplate, we persuade ourselves that those who wield power know what they are doing. The belief in a guiding intelligence is hard to shake.

We know that our conditions of life are deteriorating. Most young people have little prospect of owning a home, or even of renting a decent one. Interesting jobs are sliced up, through digital Taylorism, into portions of meaningless drudgery. The natural world, whose wonders enhance our lives, and upon which our survival depends, is being rubbed out with horrible speed. Those to whom we look for guardianship, in government and among the economic elite, do not arrest this decline, they accelerate it.

The political system that delivers these outcomes is sustained by aspiration: the faith that if we try hard enough we could join the elite, even as living standards decline and social immobility becomes set almost in stone. But to what are we aspiring? A life that is better than our own, or worse?

Last week a note from an analyst at Barclays’ Global Power and Utilities group in New York was leaked. It addressed students about to begin a summer internship, and offered a glimpse of the toxic culture into which they are inducted.

“I wanted to introduce you to the 10 Power Commandments … For nine weeks you will live and die by these … We expect you to be the last ones to leave every night, no matter what … I recommend bringing a pillow to the office. It makes sleeping under your desk a lot more comfortable … the internship really is a nine-week commitment at the desk … an intern asked our staffer for a weekend off for a family reunion – he was told he could go. He was also asked to hand in his BlackBerry and pack up his desk … Play time is over and it’s time to buckle up.”

Play time is over, but did it ever begin? If these students have the kind of parents featured in the Financial Times last month, perhaps not. The article marked a new form of employment: the nursery consultant. These people, who charge from £290 an hour, must find a nursery that will put their clients’ toddlers on the right track to an elite university.

They spoke of parents who had already decided that their six-month-old son would go to Cambridge then Deutsche Bank, or whose two-year-old daughter “had a tutor for two afternoons a week (to keep on top of maths and literacy) as well as weekly phonics and reading classes, drama, piano, beginner French and swimming. They were considering adding Mandarin and Spanish. ‘The little girl was so exhausted and on edge she was terrified of opening her mouth.’”

In New York, playdate coaches charging $450 an hour train small children in the social skills that might help secure their admission to the most prestigious private schools. They are taught to hide traits that could suggest they’re on the autistic spectrum, which might reduce their chances of selection.

From infancy to employment, this is a life-denying, love-denying mindset, informed not by joy or contentment, but by an ambition that is both desperate and pointless, for it cannot compensate for what it displaces: childhood, family life, the joys of summer, meaningful and productive work, a sense of arrival, living in the moment. For the sake of this toxic culture, the economy is repurposed, the social contract is rewritten, the elite is released from tax, regulation and the other restraints imposed by democracy.

Where the elite goes, we are induced to follow. As if the assessment regimes were too lax in UK primary schools, last year the education secretary announced a new test for four-year-olds. A primary school in Cambridge has just taken the obvious next step: it is now streaming four-year-olds into classes according to perceived ability. The education and adoption bill, announced in the Queen’s speech, will turn the screw even tighter. Will this help children, or hurt them?

Who knows? Governments used to survey the prevalence of children’s mental health issues every five years, but this ended in 2004. Imagine publishing no figures since 2004 on, say, childhood cancer, and you begin to understand the extent to which successive governments have chosen to avoid this issue. If aspirational pressure is not enhancing our wellbeing but damaging it, those in power don’t want to know.

But there are hints. Mental health beds for children in England increased by 50% between 1999 and 2014, but still failed to meet demand. Children suffering mental health crises are being dumped in adult wards or even left in police cells because of the lack of provision (put yourself in their position and imagine the impact).

The number of children admitted to hospital because of self-harm has risen by 68% in 10 years, while the number of young patients with eating disorders has almost doubled in three years. Without good data, we don’t have a clear picture of what the causes might be, but it’s worth noting that in the past year, according to the charity YoungMinds, the number of children receiving counselling for exam stress has tripled.

An international survey of children’s wellbeing found that the UK, where such pressures are peculiarly intense, ranked 13th out of 15 countries for children’s life satisfaction, 13th for agreement with the statement “I like going to school”, 14th for children’s satisfaction with their bodies and 15th for self-confidence. So all that pressure and cramming and exhortation – that worked, didn’t it?

In the cause of self-advancement, we are urged to sacrifice our leisure, our pleasures and our time with partners and children, to climb over the bodies of our rivals and to set ourselves against the common interests of humankind. And then? We discover that we have achieved no greater satisfaction than that with which we began.

In 1653, Izaak Walton described in the Compleat Angler the fate of “poor-rich men”, who “spend all their time first in getting, and next in anxious care to keep it; men that are condemned to be rich, and then always busie or discontented”. Today this fate is confused with salvation.

Finish your homework, pass your exams, spend your 20s avoiding daylight, and you too could live like the elite. But who in their right mind would want to?

Dying at 22 is too steep a price for being ‘the best’

Shobhaa De in The Times of India

My heart broke while reading the tragic account written by a devastated father on hearing about his 22-year-old son’s sudden death in a San Francisco parking lot some weeks ago. Sarvshreshth Gupta had done all the ‘right things’ ambitious Indian parents expect from their children. He was supposed to be living the Great American Dream, after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, interning with Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank, before landing a job as a financial analyst with Goldman Sachs in San Francisco. His young life followed the golden script written for — and sometimes by — aspiring desi students. Those who toil hard to get into the best business schools in the US, achieve great grades, repay huge loans, make their folks proud, bag high-paying jobs, work harder still… and then collapse! Like young Sarvshreshth did. The unreasonable pressure of a system that expects young people to sweat blood so as to make other people rich, finally got to the analyst — perhaps, had he listened to his father and walked out of his job a few hours earlier, he would have been alive. Fired, perhaps. But alive.

Sarvshreshth’s exchanges with his sensitive, understanding father tell their own story. And it’s a pretty common one. He writes of being severely sleep deprived, working for 20 hours a day, spending nights in an empty office, completing presentations while prepping for a client meeting early the next morning… all the while putting up with the tyranny of a senior VP breathing down his neck — pushing, pushing, pushing. Whenever his father advised him to take it easy and look after his health, Sarvshreshth would bravely reply, “Come on, Papa. I am young and strong. Investment banking is hard work.” As it turns out, the young man was not as strong as he imagined. And yes, the hard work as an investment banker is precisely what killed him.

When I came across the grieving father’s poignant online essay, ‘A Son Never Dies’, I thought about several parents and their children in similar situations. I thought about my own children and their friends… what a scary world they occupy. Look around and you will find many other Sarvshreshths — young men who are literally killing themselves in jobs that pay big bucks, but extract a gigantic price. Yes, Indians today can lay claim to being the best-educated, highest paid ethnic group in America. But, at what cost?

Right now, hundreds of over-wrought parents are undertaking pricey campus tours of various universities abroad. They believe this is their ‘duty’ since they want their kids to ‘get the best’. Is this what they mean by ‘the best’ ? We have equally good universities in India. What sort of absurd pressure is this that forces parents and students to go overseas in the hope of ‘bettering prospects’? Why not have confidence in your child’s ability to shine in India, without going through the sort of trauma Sarvshreshth suffered? Yes, we have ragging in our colleges, and no, some of our academic laurels are not as prestigious in global job markets as Ivy League degrees. So what? If you’ve got it, you will make it. Anywhere!

Just a short while before Sarvshreshth’s body was found (cause of death not officially declared so far), his father had told him to take 15 days’ leave and come home. The fatigued son’s forlorn response was, “They will not allow”. Hours later, he was dead. This sad story should act as a wake-up call for both over-ambitious parents and over-achieving children. Not everybody can take the almost inhuman pressure of the rat race. This young man was missing home-cooked food, the comfort of family and an emotionally reassuring environment. If only he’d had the courage to say, ‘To hell with it…’ and come home, his devastated father would not be writing that pathos-filled essay today.

It’s time we took a fresh look at our craze for ‘foreign degrees’ and ‘foreign jobs’. Today there are over 100,000 Indian students on US campuses. Most will think of this time as the best years of their lives. Some will stay on and be successful there. Others will return and pursue successful careers back home. But a few will crack, crumble and succumb under pressure. The system sees all kinds. But this is not about the survivors. This is about the vulnerable. Every parent wants a child to succeed. But not at the cost of their life.

I wish Sarvshreshth’s father Sunil Gupta would take this important message to many more parents still debating about their child’s future. Earning a degree and bagging a great job are fine goals. But living a wholesome life with people who love and respect you is infinitely more rewarding in the long run.

Irony. This was the worst thing to happen to a young man whose name means ‘The Best’.

We don’t live to work, we work to live. Why don’t we say so?

Zoe Williams in The Guardian

 

‘It appears that you need to be in the bull-headed world of high finance before you can make this simple assertion: I’m don’t have to justify scaling back my work on the basis that I’m swapping one role (‘hardworker') for another (‘mother'). Photograph: Loop Images/ Alamy



“Hardworking” is the ubiquitous political denominator of our age, source of morality, citizenship, respect and status. It slips inanely into even the blandest legislative literature: the psychoactive substances bill, for instance, vowed to “protect hardworking citizens from the risks posed by untested … drugs”. The precise meaning of the phrase is rarely explicitly spelt out (except in the context of benefits and universal credit, where the working week that qualifies as “hard” is endlessly recalibrated by the Department for Work and Pensions). How many hours constitutes hard work? Can you even count it in hours? Does working hard to care for someone count? What about pets? Is there any room in this formulation for work that you find hard – poetry, aerobics – which doesn’t bring in any money? Or is it really a measure of economic productivity, turned by hazy phrasing and sleight of hand into a badge of honour?

This picture jars, rather, with the priorities of the people who are actually doing all this work, as described in the Flexible Jobs Index, out this week. It is compiled by Timewise, a recruitment organisation that also studies cultural attitudes to the workplace. “If you put together the people who work part-time who choose to, plus the people who are working full-time when they would rather work part-time, because they have no choice: that’s half the population,” says Karen Mattison of Timewise. This tells quite a different story to the one we’ve come to accept, of an insecure and underemployed workforce who would like more hours. About 14.1 million people want to work flexibly. One in 10 British workers – or three million people – don’t have enough hours, rising to one in five in so-called elementary or low-skilled occupations. But professionals tend to have more hours than they want.

We could ascribe this to a fundamental difference in outlook between one class and another, with energy levels and can-do attitudes peaking at the lowest pay grades then tailing off among higher earners. But it seems more likely, to me at least, that all these figures point to the same conclusion: people work extremely hard when they can’t live any other way, and steadily less hard – or wish they could work less hard – when they can afford to.

Hard work does not seem to be valued for its own sake, as a marker of identity or bestower of meaning. Work is part of a greater entity known as “life”, and even the fabled “work-life balance” is a bit last-century; given the choice, we see work as a subset of life, and not its rival.

This is already reflected in the reality of work – 95% of companies already offer flexibility – but it’s completely absent from the way people talk about work. In the language of recruitment, ambition and fealty remain inseparable – the truly committed employee thinks only of the job. “The research is saying,” Mattison concludes, “that we have to stop talking about flexible working and start talking about flexible hiring.” From a distance, it is a complicated distinction, but up close, obvious: there is no language in the process of getting a job that allows you to say you want it but only for 60% of the time. Just imagining this crushing awkwardness – when do you even bring it up? – is enough to trap many people in existing jobs they’re overqualified for because the hours work. It’s very wasteful, for them and for employers, who could often get someone much better than they could afford if they were only prepared to have them for fewer hours.

This is one of the critical modern taboos: the way we really feel about work – that it’s OK in its place but cannot be the wellspring of all fulfilment – nor occupy all our hours; versus the role of work in the sociopolitical narrative, in which the solidity of your citizenship is built on the foundations of your fervent industriousness. Partly this is because everyone insists on framing it as a conversation about work versus children; which in turn makes it a women’s issue, which in turn leads people to dismiss flexibility as a signal that ambition has receded, leaving only maturity and reliability in its stead. Going part time is the cultural equivalent of shifting from Cos to Boden.

Furthermore, the new consensus about hardworking people, hardworking families, human units defined by the intensity of their effort, actually sounds, when you decouple it from whichever smooth voice whence it came, a bit Soviet. It calls to mind those glory years of post-revolutionary propaganda in which to work – particularly with your top off – was to wrest back dignity from the capital forces that had tried to steal it from you. And yet we are meant to exist in this era of self-interest, in which our sense of identity is created not by work but by consumption. It’s a totally contradictory trope: of course it couldn’t brook challenge or nuance or an honest account of what work actually means to people. It would disintegrate.

“This is a work-life thing. That life isn’t just children. That life is life,” says Clare Turnbull, who has worked in the famously inflexible world of asset management and hasn’t done a five-day week since 2001. I’d asked her if she would go full time once her children left home. It appears that you need to be in the bull-headed world of high finance before you can make this simple assertion that we should all be able to make: I don’t have to justify scaling back my work on the basis that I’m swapping one duty for another, one role (“hardworker”) for another (“mother”). I don’t have to justify it at all. This life is life.