Gender inequality has been an issue in the City for years, but now the new science of 'neuroeconomics' is proving the point beyond doubt: hormonally-driven young men should not be left alone in charge of our finances…
Tim Adams
Tim Adams
The Observer, Sunday 19 June 2011
Brokers Continue To Trade During Financial Turmoil
Panic hits the trading floor in October 2008. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
For the past few weeks I've had two books by my bed, both of which offer a first draft of what history may well judge the most significant event of our times: the 2008 financial crash. Read together, they are about as close as we might come to a closing chapter of The Rise and Fall of the American Empire. As literature, one of them – the final report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission of the US Treasury – doesn't always make for easy reading: there are far too many nameless villains for a start. And, quite pointedly, there is not a heroine in sight. Reading the report I became preoccupied by, among other things – the fairy steps from millions to billions to trillions, say – the overwhelming maleness of the world described. The words "she", "woman" or "her" do not appear once in its 662 pages. It is a book, like most historical tragedies, written about the follies and hubris of men.
The other book, an entirely compulsive companion volume, is Michael Lewis's best-selling The Big Short, which Google Earths you into the crisis. Rather than looking at a global picture, it lets you into the bedrooms and boardrooms of the individual corporate men who catastrophically lost billions of dollars and, on the other side of those bets, the extraordinary ragtag of obsessive individuals who saw what was coming and made eye-watering fortunes. It gives the crash a human face, and once again that face is universally male.
The books are linked by more than subject matter, though. Lewis, a one-time bond trader himself – he left, 20-odd years ago, in incredulity and disgust to write his insider's account, Liar's Poker – gave evidence to the Crisis Inquiry Commission over the course of its 18-month sitting. In the end, however, he refused to sign off the report; and not only did he refuse to sign it, he also refused to put his name to the dissenters' addenda to the report, which three of the committee insisted upon. And not only that, he did not add his name to that of the single individual who insisted on a further addendum stating that he dissented from the dissenters' view. Lewis was not a fan of the report.
The reason for this was simple, he suggested. He felt that the committee, for all its considered judgment, had not understood, from the outset, a single, pivotal word. That word was "unprecedented". Though the inquiry had set out in the belief that the crash was an event different in kind to anything that had gone before, it nevertheless proceeded to judge it in the terms of previous crashes. What it failed to do, in Lewis's eyes, was this: it neglected to look for the things that might have changed in Wall Street or the City, the things that might have made individuals on the trading floors act in ways that were seen to be entirely, unprecedentedly, reckless. When he came to consider these things himself, Lewis felt that perhaps chief among the unprecedented novelties was this one: women.
"Of course," he observed, with tongue firmly in cheek, "the women who flooded into Wall Street firms before the crisis weren't typically permitted to take big financial risks. As a rule they remained in the background, as 'helpmates'. But their presence clearly distorted the judgment of male bond traders – though the mechanics of their influence remains unexplored by the commission. They may have compelled the male risk-takers to 'show off for the ladies', for instance, or perhaps they merely asked annoying questions and undermined the risk-takers' confidence. At any rate, one sure sign of the importance of women in the crisis is the market's subsequent response: to purge women from senior Wall Street roles…"
When I first read those remarks it was not clear how much in earnest Lewis had been when he made them. Subsequently, though, I heard him speak at the London School of Economics, and he took this idea in a slightly different direction. When asked what single thing he would do to reform the markets and prevent such a catastrophe happening again, he said: "I would take steps to have 50% of women in risk positions in banks." Pressed on this, he went on to suggest how science reveals that women in general make smarter decisions regarding investment than men, that when it comes to money, women in couples are demonstrably better at evaluating risk than their partners, and single women much better still.
Though those of us males who have an uncanny sense of money always slipping through our fingers might anecdotally believe this to be true, I was surprised to hear it stated as a fact. It seemed to beg a number of questions. First, if women really are better at making these judgments, why is it always men, still, without exception, who troop out before select committees to explain where it all went wrong, and how they weren't really to blame. And second, would it really be different if women were in charge?
You don't have to look too far into the science to realise that Lewis's claim, in broad terms, stands up. The first definitive study in this area appeared in 2001 in a celebrated paper that broke down the investment decisions made with a brokerage firm by 35,000 households in America. The study, called, inevitably, "Boys will be Boys" found that while men were confident in making multiple changes to investments, their annual returns were, on average, a full percentage point below those of women who invested the family finances, and nearly half as much again inferior to single women.
A more recent study of 2.7 million personal investors found that during the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, men were much more likely than women to sell any shares they owned at stock market lows. Male investors, as a group, appeared to be overconfident, the author of this study suggested. "There's been a lot of academic research suggesting that men think they know what they're doing, even when they really don't know what they're doing." A fact that will come as a surprise to few of us. Men, it seemed, typically believed they could make sense of every piece of short-term financial news. Women, never embarrassed to ask directions, were on the whole far more likely to acknowledge when they didn't know something. As a consequence, women shifted their positions far less frequently, and made significantly more money as a result.
Naturally, if these findings were widely applicable, then it would be hard not to agree with Lewis's suggestion for reforming the sharpest end of capitalism. Rather than ring-fencing casino investment banks or demanding that high street banks hold vastly greater capital, as we heard at the Mansion House last week, wouldn't a safer model just be to hire more women?
To argue this case, you would probably need more than just behavioural evidence; you might need to understand some of the mechanisms which produced the trillion-dollar bad decision-making that led to what happened in 2008. In recent years, and particularly since the crash, a new science of such decision-making – neuroeconomics – has become fashionable in universities and beyond. It proposes the idea that you will create a better understanding of how people make economic choices if you bring to bear advances in neurobiology and brain chemistry and behavioural psychology alongside traditional economic maths models. Not surprisingly, neuroeconomics has plenty to say about the question of whether decision-making, in high-pressure situations, divides on gender lines.
The problem is that most of the scenarios used to investigate this divide are artificial. It is one thing attaching someone to an MRI scanner and telling him or her that a million pounds rests on their decision in a game; it is another when that person actually stands to lose a million pounds. Only one study, as far as I could discover, has had access to the brain chemistry, the neural biology, of young men actually working on trading floors. But the results it produced were nonetheless startling.
The study was led by a pair of Cambridge researchers. One, Joe Herbert, is a professor of endocrinology, and the other, John Coates, a research fellow in neuroscience and finance. Herbert, a specialist in the effect of hormones on depression, was fascinated to put some of his theories about the role of chemicals on decision making into practice. The curious thing about banks, he told me, "was that they know all about computers and systems and markets but they know next to nothing about the human machine sitting in the chair in front of screens making decisions. Nothing. We aimed to correct that just slightly."
It was Coates, though, who made the experiment possible. Having met Herbert at his lab in Cambridge, I met Coates in a pub in west London. He had a special advantage in gaining access to bond traders' brains, he explained: he used to possess one himself. Sharp-eyed and fit-looking, Coates retains the intensity of a man who used to run a trading desk on Wall Street during the dotcom bubble. He started off at Goldman Sachs and went on to Deutsche Bank. After some years trading, and making a lot of money out of a lot of money, he became increasingly fascinated by the way, during the dotcom years, the traders he worked alongside radically changed behaviour. They became, he says, "euphoric and delusional. They were taking far more risks, and were putting up trades with terrible risk-reward profiles". The dotcom was fun, in a way, he suggests; it was like the roaring 20s. "But I don't think anyone looks back on the housing bubble and laughs."
Coates was a relatively cautious trader himself, but there had been times when he too felt this surge, this euphoria: "When I had been making a lot of money myself, I felt unbelievably powerful," he recalls. "You carry yourself like a strutting rooster, and you can't help it. Michael Lewis talked about 'Big Swinging Dicks', Tom Wolfe talked about 'Masters of the Universe' – they were right. A trader on a winning streak acts exactly that way."
The second thing that Coates noticed was even more revelatory to him. "I noticed that women did not buy into the dotcom bubble at all," he says. "You couldn't find one who did, hardly. And that seemed like a pretty cool fact to me."
With this cool fact in mind, Coates began splitting his time between his trading desk and the Rockefeller University in Manhattan, which is perhaps the world's leading institute for the study of brain chemicals. There he started to become interested in steroids, and in particular something called "the winner effect". This occurs when two males enter a competition and their testosterone levels rise, increasing their muscle mass and the ability of the blood to carry oxygen. It also enhances their appetite for risk. Much of this testosterone stays in the system of the winner of a competition, while the loser's testosterone melts away fast; in evolutionary terms, the loser retires to the woods to lick his wounds. In the next round of competition, though, the winner already has high levels of testosterone, so he starts with an advantage, and this continues to reinforce itself.
"Steroids," Coates explains, "like most chemicals in your body, display what is called an inverted U-shaped response curve." That is to say, when you have low levels of them you lack vitality, and do very poorly at mental and physical tasks. But as the levels rise you get sharper and more focused until you reach an optimum. The key thing is this, however: "If you keep winning, your testosterone level goes past that peak and sliding down the other side. You start doing stupid things. When that happens to animals, they go out in the open too much. They pick too many fights. They neglect parenting duties. And they patrol areas that are too large." In short, they behave like traders on a roll; they get cocky.
Coates became convinced that this winner effect was what he observed in bullish trading markets, and what ended up dramatically distorting them. It also explained why women were mostly immune to the euphoria, because they had only 10% of the testosterone of men. What struck him most, though, was that, for all the literature about financial instability, economics, psychology, game theory, no one had ever clinically looked at a trader who was caught up in a bubble.
Coates wrote a research proposal. He came back to Cambridge where he had done his first degree, and because of his background eventually gained access, with Herbert, to a major City bond-dealing floor in London. They tested the traders for two hormones in particular, testosterone and cortisol (the anxiety induced, depressive "stress hormone"), and mapped their levels over a period of weeks against the success or failure of trades, individual profit and loss. Coates had imagined the experiment to be a preliminary study but the correlations he found – for evidence of irrationality produced by the winner effect and its converse – was "an absolute dream". They not only discovered that a trader's morning testosterone level could be used to predict his day's profitability. They also found that a trader's cortisol rose with both the variance of his trading results and the volatility of the market. The results pointed to a further possibility: as volatility increased, the hormones seemed to shift risk preferences and even affect a trader's ability to engage in rational choice.
Though the sample was limited, and suitable caution was needed in claiming too much, the correlations suggested that over a certain peak, testosterone impaired the risk assessment of traders. "And cortisol," he suggests, "was in some ways even more interesting than testosterone. We thought cortisol would rise when traders lost money," Coates says, making individuals more than usually cautious, "but actually it was going up incredibly when they were faced with just uncertainty. The stress hormones were switching over to emergency states all the time. There was an optimal level but these stress hormones can linger for months. Then you get all sorts of really pathological behaviours. If you are constantly prepared for high tension it affects your brain, and it causes you to recall stressful memories and become exaggeratedly risk-averse and kind of helpless."
Unfortunately this particular study ended in June 2007, before the full effect of the crisis, but its implications account, Coates believes, for some of what he subsequently heard from the trading floor. "If cortisol goes beyond a certain point, then it may become very difficult for traders to assess any risk at all. These guys are not built to handle adversity that well. There is an observable condition called 'learned helplessness', which if you are submitting to great stress over a long period of time makes you give up suddenly. Lab animals develop it: you open the cage and they won't escape. Traders have it too. They just slump in their chairs. In the crisis there were classic arbitrage opportunities as the markets were falling. Free money. But traders would sit there staring at the numbers and not touching it."
Since then, Coates has partly been working on the other strand of his original hypothesis, looking at the brain chemistry of women working in the markets. Because of the small sample sizes he has to work with – there were only three women out of 250 traders on the floor he first tested – the detail of that is far from complete, and he is properly reluctant to draw conclusions. What he will go so far as to say, though, is this. "Central bankers, often brilliant people, spend their life trying to stop a bubble or prevent a crash, and they are spectacularly unsuccessful at it. And I think it is because, at the centre of the market, you have these guys either ripped on testosterone or overwhelmed by cortisol so that they become completely price insensitive." Coates wrote a couple of articles after that research was published, suggesting that, if the winner effect was right, it was possible that bubbles were an entirely young male phenomenon. And if that were the case, then the best way of preventing boom and bust was to have more women and more older men – less in thrall to hormones – in the markets. "We know that opinion diversity is crucial to stable markets. What no one talks about is endocrine diversity, a diversity of hormones. The billion-dollar question is how to achieve it."
To most experienced, male, investment bankers, of course, this sounds like fighting talk. An old friend of mine, who traded his Cambridge English degree for an extremely lucrative life as a bond dealer, offered this, when I presented Coates's evidence to him. "It would be nice to think that having more female traders on the floor would make for less volatility," he said, "but that's wishful thinking. Financial markets are now global, so while we in the west might decide not to chase trends or react instinctively to breaking news because there are mature mothering types in boardrooms and sitting on risk committees, the rest of the world will, and our banks would lose out." And that's not all. "Many of the women I know who have managed money or have put capital at risk for banks have tended to be even more aggressive with risk than their male counterparts, as if perhaps to compensate for their supposed diffidence. Fighting their way through a male-dominated environment to a position in which they can invest/punt/ risk-manage, many women develop an ultra-masculine persona so as to be thought of as ballsy…"
Just a cursory glance through some of the recent spate of books and blogs written by young women who have worked in the City and lived to tell the tale would certainly seem to support this observation. Melanie Berliet, who worked as one of the only female traders in Wall Street, set the tone in her confessional blog: "If anything," she observed, "my token status gave me an extra thrill. I enjoyed being called a 'fucking dullard' or being instructed, patronisingly, to 'remove head from ass', because my reaction – to grin rather than cry – impressed the guys. I loved their attention and the daily opportunities to prove that I fitted in. What separated me from my colleagues was physical: my 5ft 9in, 120lb frame, my long, blondish hair – and my vagina. I had two options with my boss: trade sexual banter or resist. Typically, I chose the former. Like most traders, my base salary wasn't terribly high—$75,000 at the start of my third year. The bonus was all, and getting the right number rested on one thing, as I saw it: my willingness to promote my boss's fantasy of fucking me…"
John Coates doesn't believe the caricature, or at least he believes that in the upper reaches of banks, things have moved on. "A lot of my former colleagues are running divisions, or whole banks," he says. "I don't buy the sexist macho argument. The big investment banks desperately want women traders. But when they interview women who are qualified, the women don't want to do it…"
Neuroeconomics also starts to provide the answers to some of the reasons for that. Muriel Niederle is a professor at Stanford University, looking at gender differences in risk decisions. Over a period of years Niederle has developed clear evidence for the theory that though in non-competitive situations women demonstrate an advantage over men in making investment decisions, they either shy away completely from making those decisions in intensely competitive environments, or they respond less well than men to competition with very short-term high intensity and results-driven focus. This pattern is set, Niederle proves, from a very young age (and no doubt has a good deal to do with the differential presence of troublesome testosterone). Joe Herbert told me at his lab in Cambridge: "What is clear is that there are neurological differences between the sexes. Women, in very general terms, are less competitive, and less concerned with the status of being successful. If you want to make women more present, you have to remember two things: the world they are coming into is a man-made world. The financial world. So, either they become surrogate men… or you change the world."
Ah, changing the world. In the wake of 2008, there was a good deal of talk about that heady idea. Much of this talk concerned the creation of more gender balance in the city. The Economist coined the phrase "Womenomics" and argued that excluding nearly 50% of talent from crucial positions in business and finance was not only discriminatory but caused serious harm to stability and growth. Iceland's banks brought in women to clear up the mess that men had left. A good deal was made of the fact that the extraordinary success of microfinance in the developing world was because 97% of the loans were granted to women (men were – biologically? culturally? – not to be trusted). Science, neuroeconomics, was harnessed to develop some of those themes. And then, well, nothing. The commissions and the select committees decided that a return to something like the status quo, with all its implicit risks and inequalities, was the only option.
Womenomics still persists in a few places, however. The 30% Club was an initiative set up last November by executive women, and some senior men in FTSE 100 companies and accountancy and legal practices, to increase the number of women in decision-making and boardroom positions to that figure. It goes a little further than Lord Davies's recent report on the subject. But 30% is not an arbitrary number; it is thought – by neuroeconomists again, and through observation – to be the minimum proportion of women at the top of an organisation required to begin to change the culture; below that number, women tend to behave "like surrogate men"; above it, the subtle differences produced by gender might begin to influence the way decisions are made. In Britain there is still a good way to go: only 5.5% of executive directors in FTSE 100 companies are women (yet evidence shows that companies with women leaders have a 35% higher return on equity, and companies with more than three women on their corporate board have an 80% higher return on equity). On city trading floors, the percentage remains, for some of the reasons outlined above, at around 3% or 4%. Testosterone rules.
The country that has attempted most radically to change this balance is Norway, where a Conservative minister imposed a quota of 40% female directors in every boardroom. Most of the data suggests the initiative has been a great success, both culturally and commercially (though some, male, commentators argue that the turnaround is better explained by the spike in oil prices).
It would be hard to find many people in the city, even among women, who would favour quotas, though that argument can be made. John Coates, wearing his dealmaker's hat, suggests a practical solution. "The question is not whether men are risk takers and women are risk-averse. It is more what kind of risk do they want to take? My hunch is that women don't like high-frequency trading, so what you have to do is change the accounting period over which they are judged."
He then gives me a potted description of how things remain: "Say you have two traders. One trader makes $20m a year for five years, of which she might typically pocket a couple of million a year herself. At the end of five years she has made the bank the best part of $90m. Another trader makes $100m a year for four years. They don't want that guy to go off to a hedge fund so they let him take home $20m a year. But then in the fifth year – because of the winner effect – he loses $500m. That is essentially what happened in the financial crash. The bank has lost $100m and the trader has gained $80m. If you were judging these things over a five-year period, then you can see which person you would hire."
But, of course, that would require a very different idea of markets, and of money, to the one that is currently desperately being defended and remade. It would certainly require a greater degree of "endocrinal diversity". Still, the next time you hear someone suggest that things are getting back to "normal" in the city, and that we should at all costs start believing in exponential growth again, at least you can look him in the eye and state that you think his hormones might be playing up.
Neuroeconomics: Six things that the science of decision-making reveals
■ If groups of young men are shown pornographic pictures of women and then asked to choose between safe and risky investments, compared with men shown non-pornographic pictures they choose far riskier portfolios.
■ Our brains are designed to seek out novelty, but too much information can overwhelm them; we are generally better at assessing risk when listening to Bach than with the chatter of TV news.
■ Men's brains tend to shut down after they have proposed a deal, waiting for the response. Scans show that women brains continue to be active, analysing whether they have done the right thing.
■ Humans are the only animals that can delay gratification, a function of the prefrontal cortex. However, the prefrontal cortex only matures after the age of 30, and later in men than women. Before that, we are more likely to seek immediate gratification.
■ Our brains reward social interaction with the release of a chemical called oxytocin. It makes us feel good when we follow the herd. Stock market bubbles are one likely result of this.
■ Our brains are wired for human oxytocin-mediated empathy (or HOME). We are biologically stimulated to love (or hate) what is most familiar to us. We are built to form attachments, to value what we own more than what we do not own. This fact skews the rationality of all our investment decisions
'People will forgive you for being wrong, but they will never forgive you for being right - especially if events prove you right while proving them wrong.' Thomas Sowell
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Sunday, 19 June 2011
Friday, 17 June 2011
What is talent in sport?
Is it just natural ability or the consistency that comes from perseverance?
Harsha Bhogle
June 17, 2011
My father believed - as was the norm with respectable middle-class families in the years gone by - it was important that his children were good at mathematics. If your child was good at mathematics, you had imparted the right education and fulfilled one of your primary duties as a parent.
He often quoted to us what his friend, a respected professor of the subject, used to say: "There should be no problem that you encounter in an examination for the first time." It meant you had to work so hard that you had, conceivably, attempted and vanquished every situation that could find its way into an exam paper. It begs the question: if you did achieve 150 out of 150 in an exam (which my wife very nearly did once, much to my awe), was it because you were extraordinarily intuitive or because you had worked harder than the others, so that you didn't "encounter any problem in an exam" for the first time?
In other words, is getting a "centum" (a peculiarly Tam Bram expression) a matter of genius or a matter of perseverance? It is an issue that many intelligent authors around the world have been debating for a while, and one that is at the heart of sport. Would anybody who solved a certain number of sums get full marks? Would two people, each of whom put in 10,000 hours (Malcolm Gladwell's threshold for achievement) produce identical results? Or are some people innately gifted, allowing them to cross that threshold sooner?
We pose that question a great deal in cricket when we argue about talent. Players who play certain shots - the perfectly balanced on-drive for example - are labelled "talented" and put into a separate category. They acquire a halo, and in a near-equal situation they tend to get picked first. "Talent" becomes this key they flash to gain entry. And yet it is worth asking what talent really is.
Is it the ability to play the on-drive or, more critically, the ability to play that on-drive consistently? It is a critical difference. Consistency brings in an element of perseverance that you do not normally bracket with talent.
Let me explain. I have often, while watching Rohit Sharma bat, said "wow" out loud. I probably said it because I saw him play a shot I did not expect him to. Or maybe it was a shot very few players were able to play. Just as often, I find myself going "ugh" with frustration at him. It is probably because, having had the opportunity to go "wow", I now expected him to play the same shot again. And so, without explicitly stating it, I am invoking the assumption of consistency to assess talent. The old professor of mathematics would have said, "Play the shot so often that it is no longer a new shot when you play it."
It is while I was debating this in my mind that I became aware of why Sachin Tendulkar paid such high compliments to Gary Kirsten for throwing him balls. Tendulkar wanted to perfect a shot and needed someone to throw him enough balls to attain that perfection, so that when he attempted it in a match he wasn't doing it for the first time. And in a recent conversation he said he was at his best when he was in the "subconscious", not distracted by the "conscious", and able to play by instinct - which he had perfected through practice.
Now we often call Tendulkar a genius, and yet, as we see, the talent that we believe comes dazzling through is, in essence, the product of many hours of perseverance. Is Tendulkar, then, the supreme example of my father's friend's theory of doing well at maths? And assuming for a moment that is true, shouldn't we be honouring perseverance because that is what it seems "talent" really is?
And so it follows that when we complain that all talented players don't get to where they should, we are in effect saying that they didn't practise hard enough to be consistent. Maybe it means we should all use the word "talent" more sparingly; not bestow it on a player until ability has been married to hard work long enough to achieve consistency.
This is also the starting premise of a new book I hope to continue reading - Bounce by the former table tennis champion Mathew Syed. I am delighted by its opening pages, one of which said "talent is overrated". It is something I have long believed.
Harsha Bhogle
June 17, 2011
My father believed - as was the norm with respectable middle-class families in the years gone by - it was important that his children were good at mathematics. If your child was good at mathematics, you had imparted the right education and fulfilled one of your primary duties as a parent.
He often quoted to us what his friend, a respected professor of the subject, used to say: "There should be no problem that you encounter in an examination for the first time." It meant you had to work so hard that you had, conceivably, attempted and vanquished every situation that could find its way into an exam paper. It begs the question: if you did achieve 150 out of 150 in an exam (which my wife very nearly did once, much to my awe), was it because you were extraordinarily intuitive or because you had worked harder than the others, so that you didn't "encounter any problem in an exam" for the first time?
In other words, is getting a "centum" (a peculiarly Tam Bram expression) a matter of genius or a matter of perseverance? It is an issue that many intelligent authors around the world have been debating for a while, and one that is at the heart of sport. Would anybody who solved a certain number of sums get full marks? Would two people, each of whom put in 10,000 hours (Malcolm Gladwell's threshold for achievement) produce identical results? Or are some people innately gifted, allowing them to cross that threshold sooner?
We pose that question a great deal in cricket when we argue about talent. Players who play certain shots - the perfectly balanced on-drive for example - are labelled "talented" and put into a separate category. They acquire a halo, and in a near-equal situation they tend to get picked first. "Talent" becomes this key they flash to gain entry. And yet it is worth asking what talent really is.
Is it the ability to play the on-drive or, more critically, the ability to play that on-drive consistently? It is a critical difference. Consistency brings in an element of perseverance that you do not normally bracket with talent.
Let me explain. I have often, while watching Rohit Sharma bat, said "wow" out loud. I probably said it because I saw him play a shot I did not expect him to. Or maybe it was a shot very few players were able to play. Just as often, I find myself going "ugh" with frustration at him. It is probably because, having had the opportunity to go "wow", I now expected him to play the same shot again. And so, without explicitly stating it, I am invoking the assumption of consistency to assess talent. The old professor of mathematics would have said, "Play the shot so often that it is no longer a new shot when you play it."
It is while I was debating this in my mind that I became aware of why Sachin Tendulkar paid such high compliments to Gary Kirsten for throwing him balls. Tendulkar wanted to perfect a shot and needed someone to throw him enough balls to attain that perfection, so that when he attempted it in a match he wasn't doing it for the first time. And in a recent conversation he said he was at his best when he was in the "subconscious", not distracted by the "conscious", and able to play by instinct - which he had perfected through practice.
Now we often call Tendulkar a genius, and yet, as we see, the talent that we believe comes dazzling through is, in essence, the product of many hours of perseverance. Is Tendulkar, then, the supreme example of my father's friend's theory of doing well at maths? And assuming for a moment that is true, shouldn't we be honouring perseverance because that is what it seems "talent" really is?
And so it follows that when we complain that all talented players don't get to where they should, we are in effect saying that they didn't practise hard enough to be consistent. Maybe it means we should all use the word "talent" more sparingly; not bestow it on a player until ability has been married to hard work long enough to achieve consistency.
This is also the starting premise of a new book I hope to continue reading - Bounce by the former table tennis champion Mathew Syed. I am delighted by its opening pages, one of which said "talent is overrated". It is something I have long believed.
Wednesday, 15 June 2011
DRIFT - Spin Bowling
I receive a lot of e-mails asking about drift or curve.
For a right arm leg spin bowler the drift he/she is seeking is in toward a right hand batter which tends to square the batter up and then ideally the ball will spin away toward slip after landing.
Shane Warne created havoc with batsmen because of the drift and spin he achieved.
How does it happen?
Genuine drift, which should not be confused with the ball angling in to the batter by a slicing action at release, comes from several basic areas.
1) side on alignment toward the target area.
2) revolutions on the ball (mostly side spin)
3) strong shoulder rotation (180 degrees)
Breeze over the left shoulder can also encourage the ball to drift in toward the batter.
If, as a couple of boys have told me, the ball is "drifting" toward slip it is most likely the shoulders are rotating around the front leg creating an angle of release in that direction.
For a ball to genuinely drift toward slip the revolutions on the ball would normally be the opposite of the leg break eg; Googly or off spin.
The more over spin (top spin) on the ball at release the more the ball will "drop" on the batter and the less it is likely to curve inwards.
As a rule chest on spinners struggle for drift.
So, improve your alignment and impart lots of spin on the ball and await the outcome.
Tuesday, 14 June 2011
Am I A Product Of The Institutions I Attended?
Amitabha Bagchi
I have been thinking for a while about how the institutions we affiliate ourselves to—or maybe our parents "admit" us to, or social pressures force us into—as students affect us, form us, shape us, turn our lives decisively down one of the many roads available to us. This question—Is what I am a product of the institutions I attended?—falls in the family of questions engendered by the basic question: What makes me who I am? This question, often asked before the perhaps more fundamental question—Who am I?—is not so easily answered. After all, our lives are produced by a complex interplay of factors, some determined in advance—race, class, gender, geography, personality, biology—and some random and contingent. The lens of science fails in the face of this complexity.
But the novelist, unlike the scientist, has a different relationship to questions. His job is not to answer them. His job is to put them into play. The unanswerable question is one of the basic tools of the storyteller's trade. Let me give you an example: Should Ram have made Sita take an agni parkisha because of what the washer man said? This question, so simple to state, is a vortex that begins spinning slowly, but then it widens and becomes stronger and stronger. As we argue and debate, it sucks in ship after ship of the fleet of human experience. What portion of a man's life is subject to his duty? How far does the power of love extend? What constitutes fidelity in a marriage? What is the nature of trust? Keep answering these questions, and like the asura Raktabija, who had a boon that every time a drop of his blood fell to the ground a new Raktabija would be born, a new set of questions emerges with each answer. The novelist's job, then, is to set questions into play, ornament them and lead them through the lives of people, and watch as they draw those lives into their fold.
And so as a novelist, I find myself asking this question—Am I a product of the institutions I attended?—in an attempt to open out a field of questions, in an attempt to add to the form of human knowledge that is full of errors and poetry, that form of human knowledge that is most intimate and personal.
Having used the P word—personal—let me start by saying that in the years since I left school I never thought that I would get an opportunity to thank NCERT for the impact it has had on my life. I could probably find a number of things to say in thanks, but let me just focus on one. In all my English textbooks since class nine I always found at least one story or play by a writer called William Saroyan. His stories of a young Armenian boy's life somewhere in the central part of California made a deep impression on me. In the years since, I have derived many things from those few stories I read. I learned that there is a deep sadness that lies right at the heart of the immigrant experience—something that the now fashionable generation of immigrant writers has never fully captured. I learned that a gentle kind of realism is the best way to describe the lives of people trying to live a dignified life in the face of hardship. I learned—and this is the one realization on which my brief writing career so far has rested, and, I suspect, whatever I write in future will also rest—that the strength of weak people is the stuff of literature. But it was only when I moved to California in 2002 that I learned that Saroyan is all but forgotten in his home country. That's when I really thanked the people who decided to put him into an NCERT textbook for almost every year since class nine.
Class nine was also my first year at a prominent school in South Delhi. Those of us who live in Delhi think of it as flat but every here and there we do come across small hills and this school is located on one such hill. So it happens that when I think back to this school and my days there I often find myself thinking of walking up an incline towards the large metal gates, manned by a chowkidar. I had been to other schools before that one, whose topography was as flat as the rest of the city's, but somehow when I think of school, I think of walking up a gentle slope, I think of a mass of grey boxy buildings sitting on a hill. Perhaps the fact that it is harder to walk up a hill than it is to walk on flat ground has something to do with it. When you reached those gates, there was an invisible membrane you passed through, like a scene from Star Trek where you stepped through a portal and you reached another dimension. Those gates were a valve, easily entered but hard to exit through. Those gates separated the world within the school from the world outside. Inside those gates we were safe from things we did not even know existed outside them. Within them lay a world of classrooms and corridors, playing field and Principal's office, labs and the library. And in each of these spaces there was a protocol, an acceptable way of carrying yourself, and an unacceptable way.
So school then is the place in which we learn what decorum is, and that each space has its own notion of decorum. But we learn this in what is to my mind the wrong way. We learn that decorum is linked to policing. That we should not be walking down a school corridor without an excuse during class time because a teacher may accost us. We learn that we should not talk too loudly in an unattended classroom, because someone may come in and drag us off to the Principal's office. And this structure of learning engenders another learning. We find those distant corners of the football field where cigarettes may be smoked. We figure out which shadows under which staircase are best suited for stealing kisses with our new love. We share stories of rules broken without consequence, we aspire to create narratives of ourselves as clever lawbreakers. We begin to value duplicity and deceit. Perhaps this process could redeem itself if it helped us lose our fear of authority. I have always believed that fear of authority causes psychic damage that diminishes human society, and that the social control we get in return does not justify what we lose. But the problem is that plotting and scheming to undermine authority because it is a subcultural imperative—as it becomes in these situations—does not rob us of our fear of authority. We remain fearful. And we become sly.
School was not only a spatial category, it was also a temporal one. School was the world of 7:40 am to 1:30 pm. It was a division of the first part of the day into neatly ordered chunks of time, never shorter than 20 minutes, never longer than 45. I have sometimes wondered about the daily routines, and their fixed nature. At first, rather unfairly, I used to think that social control was best enforced by controlling a person's time. Marx, in his own take on this matter, wrote about the centrality of the working day to the capitalist project. Not as theoretically developed as Marx's but I too had—and still have—a rebellious schoolboy's approach to the regimentation of time. But then I also began to think of it in another way. Is unplanned time as threatening as unmapped space? School, the place where space was made safe for us, was also a place where our time was organized for us: the day was chopped into a sequence of intervals, each interval to be used in a particular way.
I was one of those people who stayed on the straight and narrow, but in my school bus there were two older boys who revelled in informing students like me of their escapades. These escapades involved getting off the school bus just like the rest of us, but walking off in the other direction, through the government houses that neighboured our school, onwards to a South Indian restaurant on Rao Tula Ram Marg. They had their breakfast there, it took about half an hour, and then walked leisurely past Moti Bagh to the Sarojini Nagar railway station, reaching there around a quarter to nine. Then they boarded the Ring Railway that took about two hours to take them around the city and bring them back to where they began. Getting off the train they would head towards the now demolished Chanakya cinema, reaching in good time for the eleven o'clock show. That would last till around one pm, a convenient time to take a bus back to school, getting there just before the school bus left for home. It took me a while to realize that although these not-so-orderly schoolboys had rejected the school's way of organizing the morning hours, they had not rejected the notion that the morning hours needed to be organized.
Those two boys fell neatly into one category of the taxonomy we informally maintained in my academically oriented school. They were what were called bad students. After that category came good students and then brilliant students. There were other classifications too: some students were there to improve the school's results, some to fill its coffers and some to ensure that Delhi's political class looked upon our school favourably. But the various categories that we had in my school in Delhi—it was one of what we still call the "good" schools of Delhi—were to prove wholly inadequate when I graduated and found myself at college in IIT.
When I entered IIT Delhi in the early 90s, I happened to be assigned the same hostel that my cousin who had entered IIT in the middle of eighties had lived in. When given a choice between attending class and spending his time in the hostel's music room, I was told by some of my seniors who had known him, he preferred the latter. In this music room, he told me when I asked him, used to live a large collection of cassettes on which generation after generation of hostel residents had painstakingly recorded, from whatever source available, a fund of music that comprehensively represented the popular musical production of the American sixties and seventies. Rock musicians who were long forgotten in the US lived in recordings that were revered in our hostel at IIT. That music room formed the person he was, and the person he continues to be today. But, oddly enough, of the trove of music the music room had housed there remained but three tapes when I got there. I used to go there to study sometimes, because no one else seemed to have any use for that space. Outside that room, in the rest of the hostel, instead of long discussions over the superiority of Deep Purple over Led Zeppelin, now arguments raged between those who worshipped Madhuri Dixit and those whose hearts beat for Urmila Matondkar. In the common room next door, the newly installed cable TV was firmly tuned to the one or two channels that had discovered a business model built around twenty fours hours of Chitrahaar. Something had changed between the time my cousin had left and I had entered.
Today when Hindi soap operas command literally 20 times more viewer- ship than English programming, we know well enough the shape of the change. But at that time this churning was just beginning—obfuscated by pointless debates on the impact of cable television on "Indian culture". Each discipline—Economics, Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science—has its own explanations for this change. I myself think of it as the era in which the spread of coaching classes made it possible for people outside the metropolitan centres to succeed at the IIT entrance exam. At IIT we complain about the influence of the coaching class culture on the quality of our intake. But anecdotal evidence makes it amply clear that the rise of the coaching class culture meant the end of the dominance of English speaking elites from urban centres at IIT. The end of the dominance of people like me.
If someone were to look at the grade sheets from my first year they would conclude that I didn't learn much that year, but the truth of the matter is that I learned a lot. I learned, for example, that I loved carrom board and I was really good at it. I spent hours and hours playing carrom. In the process I made friendships with other people who spent hours and hours playing carrom. One day I was partnering a boy who was one year my senior, and we were playing against two others from his year. One of them, Gaurav, from a "good" school in Chandigarh, pointed to my partner and asked: Do you know what his name is? An odd question, I thought at that time. Of course I knew what his name was, I saw him every other day at the carrom room. His given name was Sumer Lal and his surname was one that I had learned by that time was shared by other people who got into IIT on the Scheduled Caste quota. "I know his name," I said. Gaurav, who hadn't a trace of any negative sentiment in his voice, said: "I didn't find out his name till the end of my first year." Gaurav, who probably became friends with the Rohits and Amits and Viveks within days of reaching the hostel, spent almost 12 months there before he learned Sumer Lal's name.
One of the interesting things we were all made to do during ragging was to read certain texts in Hindi written by a person whose name was always Mast Ram. The technical term for this literature was uttejak sahitya. We all had to read it, especially those of us who found it objectionable. I didn't find it objectionable, but for me a different task was assigned: I was made to translate it. Me and those few others who, the assigner of the task knew, would have trouble translating it. I knew the dirty words, that was not a problem, but I still struggled with the translation, stumbling over the heavily idiomatic language, the richly textured euphemisms that seemed to come so naturally to Mast Ram. It was probably the first time it struck me that my school Hindi textbooks had done me a disservice, and that the Hindi Cell style signage that I saw around the city was a total misrepresentation of a living breathing language. In those early days in the hostel, when I was keen to offer friendship to whoever IIT had arbitrarily chosen to put along with me in the hostel, I struggled to cross a barrier of language that my education in Delhi had created for me. But the people on the other side appreciated the fact that I did struggle, at least I think they did. And even if they didn't, several years later when I picked up and read end to end my first Hindi novel—Shrilal Shukla's Raag Darbari—I had them to thank for showing me that Hindi had a colloquial richness, a richness that would serve as a magnet for a person who loves language. And that magnetic attraction could take me to places I would not have otherwise chosen to go, shown me things about the country of my birth that I would not have otherwise chosen to see.
When I was in school my mother would sometimes go shopping at one of the prominent fresh produce markets of Delhi. On occasion we would stop at a South Indian dhaba that sat at the mouth of this market. Much to my astonishment some time into my stay at IIT I found that the dhaba was owned by the family of one of my closest friends at IIT—he is now a leading computer scientist in a prominent research lab in the US. I cannot forget the day he came to me, some time in our third year, and asked: "Bagchi, tu dose banaa letaa hai?" Before I could answer this question in the affirmative or negative he told me that his father was thinking of locking out the "labour" at the dhaba. "Ek do din maalik logon ko hi kaam karna padega." I nodded my agreement at the kind of prospect that I, the son of a civil servant father and schoolteacher mother, had never contemplated in my brief life. The thought of crossing the counter that I had sat on the customer side of sent a thrill up my spine. Unfortunately, or fortunately, the labour came around by that evening and I never did get to make dosas on the large tavas the dhaba had, but for a brief moment there I teetered at the edge of it, and I had to project out of my own world into another world where shop owners and labour squabbled while dosas waited to be made.
I cannot claim that the life I live now is fundamentally different in its everyday rhythms from the lives of the other English speaking students I went to school with. I cannot claim that what I learned in the years I was thrown into close contact with people who I had only seen from a distance before transformed me, because I have no way of knowing what I would have been like if I had not had that experience. But I do know that while I treasured what my teachers taught me at IIT—and treasured it enough to have joined their ranks today—I treasure equally, if not more, what I learned in the hostel's carrom room, in the canteen, in the corridors.
It is not my contention that we all learned to get along. Please do not think that I am trying to portray IIT as some happy melting pot of India's diversity. It was not that. It was as riven with casteism, communalism, classism, sexism and all the other ugly isms that our society nurtures. How could it not be? But by pretending that these things didn't matter, that exams and grades and job interviews were more important than all these things, it gave an opportunity to those who were willing to learn to get along with people who weren't like themselves. It gave a quixotic notion of an India populated by Indians a chance. Indians who were consumerist, over-ambitious, self-important technocrats perhaps, but who were, nonetheless, more Indian than anything else. And the fact is that this learning was not part of any of the curricula at IIT. But, as all of us who have been teachers for even a short while know, all we can do is give people an opportunity to learn. And if they don't learn, we can give them another opportunity, and another. Because the truth is that in a class of 100, there will only be four or five who get it the first time, only 10 or 15 who understand it in outline, and the remaining will take it in one ear and let it out of the other. I know people who still use the word "shadda" to refer to people who got into IIT through the SC/ST quotas, despite having played hard-fought games of volleyball in the same team as some of them, despite having stayed up long bleary-eyed hours preparing for exams along with them, despite having drunk too much and thrown up with them. Some people never learn. That is the teacher's frustration. But some people do learn and that is the teacher's reward. And, a priori, we teachers never know which is which.
It's a complex and random process, this interaction with young people that we teachers enter into for a living. It has many sides. Like so many other teachers I spend a lot of time thinking about my students, and, also like many other teachers, I don't spend enough time thinking about what they think of me. But when I do, I am forced to remember how I saw my teachers. Physically I saw them through a forest of dark haired heads—I always preferred to sit near the back of the class. I saw them standing up on the raised platform at the front of the class, on which the short looked tall and the tall looked taller. I took their careful grooming for granted—not realizing that if one of them turned up looking slovenly I would probably have been as upset or offended as the school's principal. I associated a certain amount of self-possession with them. And I thought of them as older. A small anecdote here: In class nine I entered a CBSE school and took Sanskrit instead of Hindi. My mother was concerned that I wouldn't be able to cope so she went to meet my teacher. Afterwards I asked her how the meeting went and she said: "Your Sanskrit teacher is a very sweet girl." I realized that my mother was probably fifteen or twenty years older than my Sanskrit teacher, and senior in the same profession, but still the idea that my teacher could be thought of, by anyone, as a "girl" was very difficult to comprehend. So difficult that I still remember that statement, long long after, I'm guessing, my mother forgot all about it.
So there you are, you poor teacher, frozen in eternal adulthood, even on those days when you wish you could just curl into a foetal position and suck your thumb instead of having to stand up and talk for an hour to a room full of young people who are looking at you, or at least should be looking at you. Sometimes in the nitty-gritty of the syllabus, the announcements about exams and homework, the clearing of the last class's doubts, you forget about the current that emerges from your body and flows out into the class. You forget what you mean to them.
I was lucky to have some excellent teachers at IIT Delhi, and I am not just saying that because some of them are my colleagues now. Let me explain with a story why I thought well of them. In my second year I had a class in computer architecture. Before the first semester exam, being somewhat lazy I didn't memorise certain assembly language keywords and their meanings. When the exam paper came there was one big question that involved explaining what a fragment of assembly language code did. It was impossible to answer without knowing the meaning of those keywords. One of my friends from the hostel who knew I hadn't memorised the keywords looked at me and snickered. Stung by this I decided to take a risk. I raised my hand and called the professor. "I don't know what these keywords mean," I said. He looked down at the paper, thought for a moment, then went to the board and wrote out the meanings of all the keywords. Right there, on the spot, he decided that this question was not a test of memory, it was a test of understanding. Not only did I snicker back at the friend who had laughed at me, I also never forgot the lesson. I apply it in my classes even today.
I knew from around the age of 19 that I wanted to be a professor. I was 30 when I actually became one. In those 11 years, especially towards the end of that period, I often used to daydream about the time when I would stand in front of my first class. When I dreamt about it I always saw myself standing in a particular lecture room at IIT Delhi, Block VI, Room 301, where most of my lectures in the latter part of my stay at IIT had been held. I would see myself standing up on the platform of VI 301 about to say my first words to my first class, and I knew I would be feeling something. I just didn't know what it was. As it turned out, my first teaching job was at IIT Delhi and when I got the room assignment for that first semester I found out that the class I was teaching would meet in VI 301. I walked up the one floor from my office, my stomach fluttering. I turned into that familiar door, carrying the attendance sheets, the sign of my authority, in my right hand, and walked onto the podium. I put the attendance sheets down on the table and turned towards the class. I looked up at them, seventy something of them, sitting in those long desks where I had so often sat and would never again sit. I looked at their faces and suddenly I ached at the pain they would feel in their lives. They sat there looking up at me, innocent to the suffering their future would bring them, and it came running through me, unexpectedly, this thought: There is so much you all will go through in your lives. Sometimes when I feel I am forgetting what my students mean to me and what I mean to them, I remind myself of that moment when I stood in front of my first class, that hot July day when I learned something about who I was and about the life I had chosen for myself.
I have been thinking for a while about how the institutions we affiliate ourselves to—or maybe our parents "admit" us to, or social pressures force us into—as students affect us, form us, shape us, turn our lives decisively down one of the many roads available to us. This question—Is what I am a product of the institutions I attended?—falls in the family of questions engendered by the basic question: What makes me who I am? This question, often asked before the perhaps more fundamental question—Who am I?—is not so easily answered. After all, our lives are produced by a complex interplay of factors, some determined in advance—race, class, gender, geography, personality, biology—and some random and contingent. The lens of science fails in the face of this complexity.
But the novelist, unlike the scientist, has a different relationship to questions. His job is not to answer them. His job is to put them into play. The unanswerable question is one of the basic tools of the storyteller's trade. Let me give you an example: Should Ram have made Sita take an agni parkisha because of what the washer man said? This question, so simple to state, is a vortex that begins spinning slowly, but then it widens and becomes stronger and stronger. As we argue and debate, it sucks in ship after ship of the fleet of human experience. What portion of a man's life is subject to his duty? How far does the power of love extend? What constitutes fidelity in a marriage? What is the nature of trust? Keep answering these questions, and like the asura Raktabija, who had a boon that every time a drop of his blood fell to the ground a new Raktabija would be born, a new set of questions emerges with each answer. The novelist's job, then, is to set questions into play, ornament them and lead them through the lives of people, and watch as they draw those lives into their fold.
And so as a novelist, I find myself asking this question—Am I a product of the institutions I attended?—in an attempt to open out a field of questions, in an attempt to add to the form of human knowledge that is full of errors and poetry, that form of human knowledge that is most intimate and personal.
Having used the P word—personal—let me start by saying that in the years since I left school I never thought that I would get an opportunity to thank NCERT for the impact it has had on my life. I could probably find a number of things to say in thanks, but let me just focus on one. In all my English textbooks since class nine I always found at least one story or play by a writer called William Saroyan. His stories of a young Armenian boy's life somewhere in the central part of California made a deep impression on me. In the years since, I have derived many things from those few stories I read. I learned that there is a deep sadness that lies right at the heart of the immigrant experience—something that the now fashionable generation of immigrant writers has never fully captured. I learned that a gentle kind of realism is the best way to describe the lives of people trying to live a dignified life in the face of hardship. I learned—and this is the one realization on which my brief writing career so far has rested, and, I suspect, whatever I write in future will also rest—that the strength of weak people is the stuff of literature. But it was only when I moved to California in 2002 that I learned that Saroyan is all but forgotten in his home country. That's when I really thanked the people who decided to put him into an NCERT textbook for almost every year since class nine.
Class nine was also my first year at a prominent school in South Delhi. Those of us who live in Delhi think of it as flat but every here and there we do come across small hills and this school is located on one such hill. So it happens that when I think back to this school and my days there I often find myself thinking of walking up an incline towards the large metal gates, manned by a chowkidar. I had been to other schools before that one, whose topography was as flat as the rest of the city's, but somehow when I think of school, I think of walking up a gentle slope, I think of a mass of grey boxy buildings sitting on a hill. Perhaps the fact that it is harder to walk up a hill than it is to walk on flat ground has something to do with it. When you reached those gates, there was an invisible membrane you passed through, like a scene from Star Trek where you stepped through a portal and you reached another dimension. Those gates were a valve, easily entered but hard to exit through. Those gates separated the world within the school from the world outside. Inside those gates we were safe from things we did not even know existed outside them. Within them lay a world of classrooms and corridors, playing field and Principal's office, labs and the library. And in each of these spaces there was a protocol, an acceptable way of carrying yourself, and an unacceptable way.
So school then is the place in which we learn what decorum is, and that each space has its own notion of decorum. But we learn this in what is to my mind the wrong way. We learn that decorum is linked to policing. That we should not be walking down a school corridor without an excuse during class time because a teacher may accost us. We learn that we should not talk too loudly in an unattended classroom, because someone may come in and drag us off to the Principal's office. And this structure of learning engenders another learning. We find those distant corners of the football field where cigarettes may be smoked. We figure out which shadows under which staircase are best suited for stealing kisses with our new love. We share stories of rules broken without consequence, we aspire to create narratives of ourselves as clever lawbreakers. We begin to value duplicity and deceit. Perhaps this process could redeem itself if it helped us lose our fear of authority. I have always believed that fear of authority causes psychic damage that diminishes human society, and that the social control we get in return does not justify what we lose. But the problem is that plotting and scheming to undermine authority because it is a subcultural imperative—as it becomes in these situations—does not rob us of our fear of authority. We remain fearful. And we become sly.
School was not only a spatial category, it was also a temporal one. School was the world of 7:40 am to 1:30 pm. It was a division of the first part of the day into neatly ordered chunks of time, never shorter than 20 minutes, never longer than 45. I have sometimes wondered about the daily routines, and their fixed nature. At first, rather unfairly, I used to think that social control was best enforced by controlling a person's time. Marx, in his own take on this matter, wrote about the centrality of the working day to the capitalist project. Not as theoretically developed as Marx's but I too had—and still have—a rebellious schoolboy's approach to the regimentation of time. But then I also began to think of it in another way. Is unplanned time as threatening as unmapped space? School, the place where space was made safe for us, was also a place where our time was organized for us: the day was chopped into a sequence of intervals, each interval to be used in a particular way.
I was one of those people who stayed on the straight and narrow, but in my school bus there were two older boys who revelled in informing students like me of their escapades. These escapades involved getting off the school bus just like the rest of us, but walking off in the other direction, through the government houses that neighboured our school, onwards to a South Indian restaurant on Rao Tula Ram Marg. They had their breakfast there, it took about half an hour, and then walked leisurely past Moti Bagh to the Sarojini Nagar railway station, reaching there around a quarter to nine. Then they boarded the Ring Railway that took about two hours to take them around the city and bring them back to where they began. Getting off the train they would head towards the now demolished Chanakya cinema, reaching in good time for the eleven o'clock show. That would last till around one pm, a convenient time to take a bus back to school, getting there just before the school bus left for home. It took me a while to realize that although these not-so-orderly schoolboys had rejected the school's way of organizing the morning hours, they had not rejected the notion that the morning hours needed to be organized.
Those two boys fell neatly into one category of the taxonomy we informally maintained in my academically oriented school. They were what were called bad students. After that category came good students and then brilliant students. There were other classifications too: some students were there to improve the school's results, some to fill its coffers and some to ensure that Delhi's political class looked upon our school favourably. But the various categories that we had in my school in Delhi—it was one of what we still call the "good" schools of Delhi—were to prove wholly inadequate when I graduated and found myself at college in IIT.
When I entered IIT Delhi in the early 90s, I happened to be assigned the same hostel that my cousin who had entered IIT in the middle of eighties had lived in. When given a choice between attending class and spending his time in the hostel's music room, I was told by some of my seniors who had known him, he preferred the latter. In this music room, he told me when I asked him, used to live a large collection of cassettes on which generation after generation of hostel residents had painstakingly recorded, from whatever source available, a fund of music that comprehensively represented the popular musical production of the American sixties and seventies. Rock musicians who were long forgotten in the US lived in recordings that were revered in our hostel at IIT. That music room formed the person he was, and the person he continues to be today. But, oddly enough, of the trove of music the music room had housed there remained but three tapes when I got there. I used to go there to study sometimes, because no one else seemed to have any use for that space. Outside that room, in the rest of the hostel, instead of long discussions over the superiority of Deep Purple over Led Zeppelin, now arguments raged between those who worshipped Madhuri Dixit and those whose hearts beat for Urmila Matondkar. In the common room next door, the newly installed cable TV was firmly tuned to the one or two channels that had discovered a business model built around twenty fours hours of Chitrahaar. Something had changed between the time my cousin had left and I had entered.
Today when Hindi soap operas command literally 20 times more viewer- ship than English programming, we know well enough the shape of the change. But at that time this churning was just beginning—obfuscated by pointless debates on the impact of cable television on "Indian culture". Each discipline—Economics, Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science—has its own explanations for this change. I myself think of it as the era in which the spread of coaching classes made it possible for people outside the metropolitan centres to succeed at the IIT entrance exam. At IIT we complain about the influence of the coaching class culture on the quality of our intake. But anecdotal evidence makes it amply clear that the rise of the coaching class culture meant the end of the dominance of English speaking elites from urban centres at IIT. The end of the dominance of people like me.
If someone were to look at the grade sheets from my first year they would conclude that I didn't learn much that year, but the truth of the matter is that I learned a lot. I learned, for example, that I loved carrom board and I was really good at it. I spent hours and hours playing carrom. In the process I made friendships with other people who spent hours and hours playing carrom. One day I was partnering a boy who was one year my senior, and we were playing against two others from his year. One of them, Gaurav, from a "good" school in Chandigarh, pointed to my partner and asked: Do you know what his name is? An odd question, I thought at that time. Of course I knew what his name was, I saw him every other day at the carrom room. His given name was Sumer Lal and his surname was one that I had learned by that time was shared by other people who got into IIT on the Scheduled Caste quota. "I know his name," I said. Gaurav, who hadn't a trace of any negative sentiment in his voice, said: "I didn't find out his name till the end of my first year." Gaurav, who probably became friends with the Rohits and Amits and Viveks within days of reaching the hostel, spent almost 12 months there before he learned Sumer Lal's name.
One of the interesting things we were all made to do during ragging was to read certain texts in Hindi written by a person whose name was always Mast Ram. The technical term for this literature was uttejak sahitya. We all had to read it, especially those of us who found it objectionable. I didn't find it objectionable, but for me a different task was assigned: I was made to translate it. Me and those few others who, the assigner of the task knew, would have trouble translating it. I knew the dirty words, that was not a problem, but I still struggled with the translation, stumbling over the heavily idiomatic language, the richly textured euphemisms that seemed to come so naturally to Mast Ram. It was probably the first time it struck me that my school Hindi textbooks had done me a disservice, and that the Hindi Cell style signage that I saw around the city was a total misrepresentation of a living breathing language. In those early days in the hostel, when I was keen to offer friendship to whoever IIT had arbitrarily chosen to put along with me in the hostel, I struggled to cross a barrier of language that my education in Delhi had created for me. But the people on the other side appreciated the fact that I did struggle, at least I think they did. And even if they didn't, several years later when I picked up and read end to end my first Hindi novel—Shrilal Shukla's Raag Darbari—I had them to thank for showing me that Hindi had a colloquial richness, a richness that would serve as a magnet for a person who loves language. And that magnetic attraction could take me to places I would not have otherwise chosen to go, shown me things about the country of my birth that I would not have otherwise chosen to see.
When I was in school my mother would sometimes go shopping at one of the prominent fresh produce markets of Delhi. On occasion we would stop at a South Indian dhaba that sat at the mouth of this market. Much to my astonishment some time into my stay at IIT I found that the dhaba was owned by the family of one of my closest friends at IIT—he is now a leading computer scientist in a prominent research lab in the US. I cannot forget the day he came to me, some time in our third year, and asked: "Bagchi, tu dose banaa letaa hai?" Before I could answer this question in the affirmative or negative he told me that his father was thinking of locking out the "labour" at the dhaba. "Ek do din maalik logon ko hi kaam karna padega." I nodded my agreement at the kind of prospect that I, the son of a civil servant father and schoolteacher mother, had never contemplated in my brief life. The thought of crossing the counter that I had sat on the customer side of sent a thrill up my spine. Unfortunately, or fortunately, the labour came around by that evening and I never did get to make dosas on the large tavas the dhaba had, but for a brief moment there I teetered at the edge of it, and I had to project out of my own world into another world where shop owners and labour squabbled while dosas waited to be made.
I cannot claim that the life I live now is fundamentally different in its everyday rhythms from the lives of the other English speaking students I went to school with. I cannot claim that what I learned in the years I was thrown into close contact with people who I had only seen from a distance before transformed me, because I have no way of knowing what I would have been like if I had not had that experience. But I do know that while I treasured what my teachers taught me at IIT—and treasured it enough to have joined their ranks today—I treasure equally, if not more, what I learned in the hostel's carrom room, in the canteen, in the corridors.
It is not my contention that we all learned to get along. Please do not think that I am trying to portray IIT as some happy melting pot of India's diversity. It was not that. It was as riven with casteism, communalism, classism, sexism and all the other ugly isms that our society nurtures. How could it not be? But by pretending that these things didn't matter, that exams and grades and job interviews were more important than all these things, it gave an opportunity to those who were willing to learn to get along with people who weren't like themselves. It gave a quixotic notion of an India populated by Indians a chance. Indians who were consumerist, over-ambitious, self-important technocrats perhaps, but who were, nonetheless, more Indian than anything else. And the fact is that this learning was not part of any of the curricula at IIT. But, as all of us who have been teachers for even a short while know, all we can do is give people an opportunity to learn. And if they don't learn, we can give them another opportunity, and another. Because the truth is that in a class of 100, there will only be four or five who get it the first time, only 10 or 15 who understand it in outline, and the remaining will take it in one ear and let it out of the other. I know people who still use the word "shadda" to refer to people who got into IIT through the SC/ST quotas, despite having played hard-fought games of volleyball in the same team as some of them, despite having stayed up long bleary-eyed hours preparing for exams along with them, despite having drunk too much and thrown up with them. Some people never learn. That is the teacher's frustration. But some people do learn and that is the teacher's reward. And, a priori, we teachers never know which is which.
It's a complex and random process, this interaction with young people that we teachers enter into for a living. It has many sides. Like so many other teachers I spend a lot of time thinking about my students, and, also like many other teachers, I don't spend enough time thinking about what they think of me. But when I do, I am forced to remember how I saw my teachers. Physically I saw them through a forest of dark haired heads—I always preferred to sit near the back of the class. I saw them standing up on the raised platform at the front of the class, on which the short looked tall and the tall looked taller. I took their careful grooming for granted—not realizing that if one of them turned up looking slovenly I would probably have been as upset or offended as the school's principal. I associated a certain amount of self-possession with them. And I thought of them as older. A small anecdote here: In class nine I entered a CBSE school and took Sanskrit instead of Hindi. My mother was concerned that I wouldn't be able to cope so she went to meet my teacher. Afterwards I asked her how the meeting went and she said: "Your Sanskrit teacher is a very sweet girl." I realized that my mother was probably fifteen or twenty years older than my Sanskrit teacher, and senior in the same profession, but still the idea that my teacher could be thought of, by anyone, as a "girl" was very difficult to comprehend. So difficult that I still remember that statement, long long after, I'm guessing, my mother forgot all about it.
So there you are, you poor teacher, frozen in eternal adulthood, even on those days when you wish you could just curl into a foetal position and suck your thumb instead of having to stand up and talk for an hour to a room full of young people who are looking at you, or at least should be looking at you. Sometimes in the nitty-gritty of the syllabus, the announcements about exams and homework, the clearing of the last class's doubts, you forget about the current that emerges from your body and flows out into the class. You forget what you mean to them.
I was lucky to have some excellent teachers at IIT Delhi, and I am not just saying that because some of them are my colleagues now. Let me explain with a story why I thought well of them. In my second year I had a class in computer architecture. Before the first semester exam, being somewhat lazy I didn't memorise certain assembly language keywords and their meanings. When the exam paper came there was one big question that involved explaining what a fragment of assembly language code did. It was impossible to answer without knowing the meaning of those keywords. One of my friends from the hostel who knew I hadn't memorised the keywords looked at me and snickered. Stung by this I decided to take a risk. I raised my hand and called the professor. "I don't know what these keywords mean," I said. He looked down at the paper, thought for a moment, then went to the board and wrote out the meanings of all the keywords. Right there, on the spot, he decided that this question was not a test of memory, it was a test of understanding. Not only did I snicker back at the friend who had laughed at me, I also never forgot the lesson. I apply it in my classes even today.
I knew from around the age of 19 that I wanted to be a professor. I was 30 when I actually became one. In those 11 years, especially towards the end of that period, I often used to daydream about the time when I would stand in front of my first class. When I dreamt about it I always saw myself standing in a particular lecture room at IIT Delhi, Block VI, Room 301, where most of my lectures in the latter part of my stay at IIT had been held. I would see myself standing up on the platform of VI 301 about to say my first words to my first class, and I knew I would be feeling something. I just didn't know what it was. As it turned out, my first teaching job was at IIT Delhi and when I got the room assignment for that first semester I found out that the class I was teaching would meet in VI 301. I walked up the one floor from my office, my stomach fluttering. I turned into that familiar door, carrying the attendance sheets, the sign of my authority, in my right hand, and walked onto the podium. I put the attendance sheets down on the table and turned towards the class. I looked up at them, seventy something of them, sitting in those long desks where I had so often sat and would never again sit. I looked at their faces and suddenly I ached at the pain they would feel in their lives. They sat there looking up at me, innocent to the suffering their future would bring them, and it came running through me, unexpectedly, this thought: There is so much you all will go through in your lives. Sometimes when I feel I am forgetting what my students mean to me and what I mean to them, I remind myself of that moment when I stood in front of my first class, that hot July day when I learned something about who I was and about the life I had chosen for myself.
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Not Every Adulterer is a Villain
Terence Blacker: Not every adulterer is a villain
A Pinter-Bakewell affair would have not the slightest chance of remaining private
Tuesday, 14 June 2011
There are signs that, as in so many areas of modern life, standards of infidelity are in decline. An American congressman called Anthony Weiner has admitted having taken photographs of his crotch and sent them to a number of women he had never met. Here it has been reported that a famous footballer had an affair with his sister-in-law which had resulted in an abortion.
No wonder that audiences are flocking to the Comedy Theatre to see Betrayal, Harold Pinter's famous play from the golden age of adultery, the 1960s, based on his equally famous affair with Joan Bakewell. For the seven years during which they were seeing each other – in the biblical sense – both were glamorous public figures, yet they managed to keep their love out of the public gaze. When, eventually, some of their friends realised what was going on, they took a grown-up approach and kept a discreet silence.
"There was something different about life then," Bakewell wrote this weekend. "People had a sense of the right to privacy... It was assumed that affairs arose from the dynamic of human relations – the unavoidable attraction of more than one person in one's life – and were viewed benignly until people began to get hurt."
Since those days, infidelity has rather gone off the rails. It may be that, away from priapic footballers and weinering politicians, some honourable affairs, passionate and sad, are taking place, but Bakewell is right: the attitude which surrounds the love life of others has changed. The sense of sympathy, the awareness that, even in the best-ordered lives, people can fall in love with the wrong person at the wrong time, has faded. The modern view is prim and unforgiving. We are fascinated by the sex lives of others but, even as we ogle, we tend to take a position of bogus moral superiority.
A man who messes up his marriage by falling in love with another woman is, it is unquestioningly assumed, a rat of misbehaviour who should forever be distrusted. The career of Robin Cook never quite recovered from the way his marriage ended, and that of Chris Huhne may be heading in the same direction.
The betrayed wife is offered an unattractive choice. Either she can make a career out of her victimhood, writing about the awfulness of men in public life every time a new scandal appears in the press. On the other hand, if she fails to rage and vow revenge in a satisfactory manner, she is likely to be treated with particular contempt. She is a doormat, that undignified and old-fashioned thing, the Stand-By-Your-Man wife.
Even when public marriages come to an end in an apparently civilized fashion, as in the recent case of Trevor Nunn and Imogen Stubbs, the public view of them is sceptical, faintly incredulous.
Some might argue that we have become more sensitive in recent decades, that we understand the pain and hurt which betrayal can cause, and are no longer prepared to stand by and accept it. If we did, we would somehow be complicit in the act of infidelity.
With this new moral vigilantism, a Pinter-Bakewell affair would have not the slightest chance of remaining private. A conscientious friend would feel obliged to have a quiet word with a journalist whose paper, again with the most elevated motives, would run a campaign of disapproving revelation.
These are the morals of a Victorian novelette. Any kind of human muddle involving the competing demands of love, desire, loyalty, fear and daring is reduced to the level of villain or victim, bad or good.
Yet what a shallow, priggish view of love, of men and women, these assumptions represent. How absurd – and how dreary – it is to believe that to be decent and honourable, a person should always live and love according to the same unbending precepts.
As Pinter, like all great writers, knew, there is often something true, tragic and noble in betrayal.
A Pinter-Bakewell affair would have not the slightest chance of remaining private
Tuesday, 14 June 2011
There are signs that, as in so many areas of modern life, standards of infidelity are in decline. An American congressman called Anthony Weiner has admitted having taken photographs of his crotch and sent them to a number of women he had never met. Here it has been reported that a famous footballer had an affair with his sister-in-law which had resulted in an abortion.
No wonder that audiences are flocking to the Comedy Theatre to see Betrayal, Harold Pinter's famous play from the golden age of adultery, the 1960s, based on his equally famous affair with Joan Bakewell. For the seven years during which they were seeing each other – in the biblical sense – both were glamorous public figures, yet they managed to keep their love out of the public gaze. When, eventually, some of their friends realised what was going on, they took a grown-up approach and kept a discreet silence.
"There was something different about life then," Bakewell wrote this weekend. "People had a sense of the right to privacy... It was assumed that affairs arose from the dynamic of human relations – the unavoidable attraction of more than one person in one's life – and were viewed benignly until people began to get hurt."
Since those days, infidelity has rather gone off the rails. It may be that, away from priapic footballers and weinering politicians, some honourable affairs, passionate and sad, are taking place, but Bakewell is right: the attitude which surrounds the love life of others has changed. The sense of sympathy, the awareness that, even in the best-ordered lives, people can fall in love with the wrong person at the wrong time, has faded. The modern view is prim and unforgiving. We are fascinated by the sex lives of others but, even as we ogle, we tend to take a position of bogus moral superiority.
A man who messes up his marriage by falling in love with another woman is, it is unquestioningly assumed, a rat of misbehaviour who should forever be distrusted. The career of Robin Cook never quite recovered from the way his marriage ended, and that of Chris Huhne may be heading in the same direction.
The betrayed wife is offered an unattractive choice. Either she can make a career out of her victimhood, writing about the awfulness of men in public life every time a new scandal appears in the press. On the other hand, if she fails to rage and vow revenge in a satisfactory manner, she is likely to be treated with particular contempt. She is a doormat, that undignified and old-fashioned thing, the Stand-By-Your-Man wife.
Even when public marriages come to an end in an apparently civilized fashion, as in the recent case of Trevor Nunn and Imogen Stubbs, the public view of them is sceptical, faintly incredulous.
Some might argue that we have become more sensitive in recent decades, that we understand the pain and hurt which betrayal can cause, and are no longer prepared to stand by and accept it. If we did, we would somehow be complicit in the act of infidelity.
With this new moral vigilantism, a Pinter-Bakewell affair would have not the slightest chance of remaining private. A conscientious friend would feel obliged to have a quiet word with a journalist whose paper, again with the most elevated motives, would run a campaign of disapproving revelation.
These are the morals of a Victorian novelette. Any kind of human muddle involving the competing demands of love, desire, loyalty, fear and daring is reduced to the level of villain or victim, bad or good.
Yet what a shallow, priggish view of love, of men and women, these assumptions represent. How absurd – and how dreary – it is to believe that to be decent and honourable, a person should always live and love according to the same unbending precepts.
As Pinter, like all great writers, knew, there is often something true, tragic and noble in betrayal.
Friday, 10 June 2011
The song No Charge reminds us that Britain used to be less greedy
Those who believe the myth that 1970s Britain was 'the sick man of Europe' forget how progressive the decade was
Neil Clark
Neil Clark
guardian.co.uk, Friday 10 June 2011 10.30 BST
It's regarded by some as one of the slushiest No 1 records of all time. It's exactly 35 years ago this week that No Charge, sung by the Canadian artist JJ Barrie, got to No 1 in the British pop charts – and thanks to the wonders of BBC4, who are repeating Top of the Pops shows from 1976 on a weekly basis, we'll all be able to see it performed on our television screens next Monday.
Some won't be looking forward to it too much – in his Guardian article of a week ago, Alexis Petridis claimed that 1976 was the worst year for pop music ever.
But leaving aside debates about musical merit, what watching the repeats of Top of the Pops and other programmes from the same era on channels such as Yesterday, ITV3 and ITV4 shows us is what a less commercialised age the pre-Thatcherite 1970s were.
No Charge might be considered over-sentimental by some, but it is also a powerful critique of the mentality of putting a dollar sign on things we should be doing for free.
It's extremely unlikely that such a song would be released in the uber-capitalist Britain of today, let alone get to No 1. But in the progressive, left-leaning mid-1970s, it was always likely to be a hit.
Thanks to the glories of the "market economy", many things which were free, or at least very cheap, 35 years ago, cost a small fortune today. In 1976 you didn't have to book up months in advance to find a reasonable train fare from London to Liverpool, you just turned up on the day. Utility bills were not something to be feared in the days when publicly owned bodies and not profit-hungry private companies provided your electricity, gas and water.
Students going on to higher education did not have to worry about building up huge debts in order to pursue their studies. Neither did old people have to worry about selling their homes in order to finance going into care. And in those pre-Sky days, all the best sports – including live coverage of England's summer Test match series – could be watched on television for the very modest cost of the licence fee.
In short, in the social democratic Britain of the 1970s, No Charge was not just the name of a No 1 hit record, it summed up the ethos of the era – an era in which the interests of people came before corporate profits.
This aspect of the 1970s is often lost in accounts of the period. The dominant neoliberal narrative casts 1970s Britain as the "sick man of Europe" – a country rescued from the horrors of collectivism by the great saviour Margaret Thatcher. But even the liberal left have bought in to large parts of this rightwing myth, and have failed to stick up for the 1970s as much as they should. The fact that Britain went to the IMF in the autumn of 1976 is taken as proof that the postwar settlement had failed – even Denis Healey, chancellor at the time, has admitted: "We didn't really need the money at all."
Watching television programmes of the 1970s reminds us of the anti-capitalist values which were once mainstream. The year that No Charge got to No 1 saw the television debut of James Mitchell's drama series, When the Boat Comes In, which tells the story of trade union activist and strike organiser Jack Ford. The Onedin Line, currently being re-shown on the Yesterday channel, highlighted the greed of unscrupulous ship-owners and the terrible conditions that sailors had to endure in the 19th century. Upstairs Downstairs, another 70s classic being repeated on ITV3, showed how those "downstairs" saw their position improve in the 20th century. In Poldark, the title character takes the side of the poor against the greedy landowner and banker George Warleggan.
Since the days when those programmes were screened, we've seen the money-grabbing values of the City and Wall Street permeate all aspects of our lives. Who would have thought that water – which falls out of the sky for free – would become a tradable commodity, or that care homes would be owned by City investors?
While in the summer of 1976 we were listening to No Charge and enjoying the lowest levels of inequality in our history, in the grossly unequal Britain of June 2011, we're tuning into The Apprentice. The proto-Thatcherite little boy in No Charge – who wants to bill his mum $5 for "mowin the lawn" and $1 for "takin out the trash" – rightly gets corrected: today he'd probably be lauded as a brilliant up-and-coming entrepreneur.
Neoliberals want us to believe that "market forces" are the only show in town. But watching 1970s television programmes gives us a window into a world where things were different. It's not possible to turn the clock back to 1976, but we can make the title of JJ Barrie's No 1 hit record the slogan for a better and less commercialised Britain.
Neil Clark
Neil Clark
guardian.co.uk, Friday 10 June 2011 10.30 BST
It's regarded by some as one of the slushiest No 1 records of all time. It's exactly 35 years ago this week that No Charge, sung by the Canadian artist JJ Barrie, got to No 1 in the British pop charts – and thanks to the wonders of BBC4, who are repeating Top of the Pops shows from 1976 on a weekly basis, we'll all be able to see it performed on our television screens next Monday.
Some won't be looking forward to it too much – in his Guardian article of a week ago, Alexis Petridis claimed that 1976 was the worst year for pop music ever.
But leaving aside debates about musical merit, what watching the repeats of Top of the Pops and other programmes from the same era on channels such as Yesterday, ITV3 and ITV4 shows us is what a less commercialised age the pre-Thatcherite 1970s were.
No Charge might be considered over-sentimental by some, but it is also a powerful critique of the mentality of putting a dollar sign on things we should be doing for free.
It's extremely unlikely that such a song would be released in the uber-capitalist Britain of today, let alone get to No 1. But in the progressive, left-leaning mid-1970s, it was always likely to be a hit.
Thanks to the glories of the "market economy", many things which were free, or at least very cheap, 35 years ago, cost a small fortune today. In 1976 you didn't have to book up months in advance to find a reasonable train fare from London to Liverpool, you just turned up on the day. Utility bills were not something to be feared in the days when publicly owned bodies and not profit-hungry private companies provided your electricity, gas and water.
Students going on to higher education did not have to worry about building up huge debts in order to pursue their studies. Neither did old people have to worry about selling their homes in order to finance going into care. And in those pre-Sky days, all the best sports – including live coverage of England's summer Test match series – could be watched on television for the very modest cost of the licence fee.
In short, in the social democratic Britain of the 1970s, No Charge was not just the name of a No 1 hit record, it summed up the ethos of the era – an era in which the interests of people came before corporate profits.
This aspect of the 1970s is often lost in accounts of the period. The dominant neoliberal narrative casts 1970s Britain as the "sick man of Europe" – a country rescued from the horrors of collectivism by the great saviour Margaret Thatcher. But even the liberal left have bought in to large parts of this rightwing myth, and have failed to stick up for the 1970s as much as they should. The fact that Britain went to the IMF in the autumn of 1976 is taken as proof that the postwar settlement had failed – even Denis Healey, chancellor at the time, has admitted: "We didn't really need the money at all."
Watching television programmes of the 1970s reminds us of the anti-capitalist values which were once mainstream. The year that No Charge got to No 1 saw the television debut of James Mitchell's drama series, When the Boat Comes In, which tells the story of trade union activist and strike organiser Jack Ford. The Onedin Line, currently being re-shown on the Yesterday channel, highlighted the greed of unscrupulous ship-owners and the terrible conditions that sailors had to endure in the 19th century. Upstairs Downstairs, another 70s classic being repeated on ITV3, showed how those "downstairs" saw their position improve in the 20th century. In Poldark, the title character takes the side of the poor against the greedy landowner and banker George Warleggan.
Since the days when those programmes were screened, we've seen the money-grabbing values of the City and Wall Street permeate all aspects of our lives. Who would have thought that water – which falls out of the sky for free – would become a tradable commodity, or that care homes would be owned by City investors?
While in the summer of 1976 we were listening to No Charge and enjoying the lowest levels of inequality in our history, in the grossly unequal Britain of June 2011, we're tuning into The Apprentice. The proto-Thatcherite little boy in No Charge – who wants to bill his mum $5 for "mowin the lawn" and $1 for "takin out the trash" – rightly gets corrected: today he'd probably be lauded as a brilliant up-and-coming entrepreneur.
Neoliberals want us to believe that "market forces" are the only show in town. But watching 1970s television programmes gives us a window into a world where things were different. It's not possible to turn the clock back to 1976, but we can make the title of JJ Barrie's No 1 hit record the slogan for a better and less commercialised Britain.
What I would do as head of the IMF
What I would do as head of the IMF
My leadership challenge aims to expose the IMF's policy of imposing brutal cuts while protecting indebted states' creditors
Aurelie
Aurélie Trouvé
guardian.co.uk, Friday 10 June 2011 13.42 BST
larger | smaller
IMF ireland
Protesters outside parliament in Dublin in December last year. Photograph: Peter Muhly/AFP/Getty Images
Today is the deadline for nominations in the race for the IMF leadership, and I have put forward a radically alternative candidate to do the job: me.
I am a French economics lecturer and have been the co-chair of the association Attac, an international organisation and network in the global justice movement, for four years. Attac is present in more than 40 countries worldwide, and has tens of thousands of adherents. Founded in France in 1998 by dozens of other associations, unions and alternative media, it has been a mainstay of the construction of the World Social Forum. We are a popular education movement that is action-oriented, and we denounce the mechanisms of neoliberalism while proposing tangible alternatives to both disarm the big world of finances and build an economy at the service of wealth-sharing and the preservation of our planet.
My leadership challeng aims to expose the current and past policies of the IMF, which are to unconditionally defend the interests of the creditors of indebted states while imposing brutal plans of social austerity (look at the state of Hungary, Ukraine and Latvia in 2008, Iceland in 2009, and Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland in 2010). Since the devastation brought by the financial crisis in 2008, neither the G20 nor the IMF or other international institutions have taken any steps to significantly reduce the volatility of international financial markets. Speculation is now raging, both on commodities and the securities of public debts.
With the above with mind, here are five crucial steps to tackle the crisis which I would put forward, should I become head of the IMF:
• I would put a stop to all austerity plans, and establish a tax on financial transactions, as well as implementing a strict regulation of transactions on derivatives products.
• I would put forward the co-ordination of economic policies at the international level, bringing countries with excessive imbalances (China, Germany, Japan on the side of those with a surplus, and the US on the side of countries with a deficit) to rebalance themselves in a co-ordinated manner, through adjustments in exchange rates coupled with active fiscal and wage policies.
• I would push for the development of an international currency based on a basket of the major currencies, as an alternative to the dollar.
• I would guarantee special drawing rights (an international reserve asset created by the IMF to supplement its member countries' official reserves) to help countries in difficulty during the period leading to the reduction of global imbalances, or during unexpected economic shocks.
• I would work towards democratising the IMF by integrating it to the UN system, with one vote for each of the 187 IMF member countries. It is about time to put an end to the exclusive ruling power of the biggest economies.
My leadership challenge aims to expose the IMF's policy of imposing brutal cuts while protecting indebted states' creditors
Aurelie
Aurélie Trouvé
guardian.co.uk, Friday 10 June 2011 13.42 BST
larger | smaller
IMF ireland
Protesters outside parliament in Dublin in December last year. Photograph: Peter Muhly/AFP/Getty Images
Today is the deadline for nominations in the race for the IMF leadership, and I have put forward a radically alternative candidate to do the job: me.
I am a French economics lecturer and have been the co-chair of the association Attac, an international organisation and network in the global justice movement, for four years. Attac is present in more than 40 countries worldwide, and has tens of thousands of adherents. Founded in France in 1998 by dozens of other associations, unions and alternative media, it has been a mainstay of the construction of the World Social Forum. We are a popular education movement that is action-oriented, and we denounce the mechanisms of neoliberalism while proposing tangible alternatives to both disarm the big world of finances and build an economy at the service of wealth-sharing and the preservation of our planet.
My leadership challeng aims to expose the current and past policies of the IMF, which are to unconditionally defend the interests of the creditors of indebted states while imposing brutal plans of social austerity (look at the state of Hungary, Ukraine and Latvia in 2008, Iceland in 2009, and Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland in 2010). Since the devastation brought by the financial crisis in 2008, neither the G20 nor the IMF or other international institutions have taken any steps to significantly reduce the volatility of international financial markets. Speculation is now raging, both on commodities and the securities of public debts.
With the above with mind, here are five crucial steps to tackle the crisis which I would put forward, should I become head of the IMF:
• I would put a stop to all austerity plans, and establish a tax on financial transactions, as well as implementing a strict regulation of transactions on derivatives products.
• I would put forward the co-ordination of economic policies at the international level, bringing countries with excessive imbalances (China, Germany, Japan on the side of those with a surplus, and the US on the side of countries with a deficit) to rebalance themselves in a co-ordinated manner, through adjustments in exchange rates coupled with active fiscal and wage policies.
• I would push for the development of an international currency based on a basket of the major currencies, as an alternative to the dollar.
• I would guarantee special drawing rights (an international reserve asset created by the IMF to supplement its member countries' official reserves) to help countries in difficulty during the period leading to the reduction of global imbalances, or during unexpected economic shocks.
• I would work towards democratising the IMF by integrating it to the UN system, with one vote for each of the 187 IMF member countries. It is about time to put an end to the exclusive ruling power of the biggest economies.
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