We're one crucial step closer to seeing Tony Blair at The Hague

Desmond Tutu has helped us see the true nature of what the former prime minister did to Iraq and increased pressure for a prosecution

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 3 September 2012 17.30 BST

Tony Blair arrives at the Royal Courts of Justice in London to give evidence on media ethics to the Leveson inquiry in May 2012. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

For years it seems impregnable, then suddenly the citadel collapses. An ideology, a fact, a regime appears fixed, unshakeable, almost geological. Then an inch of mortar falls, and the stonework begins to slide. Something of this kind happened over the weekend.

When Desmond Tutu wrote that Tony Blair should be treading the path to The Hague, he de-normalised what Blair has done. Tutu broke the protocol of power – the implicit accord between those who flit from one grand meeting to another – and named his crime. I expect that Blair will never recover from it.

The offence is known by two names in international law: the crime of aggression and acrime against peace. It is defined by the Nuremberg principles as the "planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression". This means a war fought for a purpose other than self-defence: in other words outwith articles 33 and 51 of the UN Charter.

That the invasion of Iraq falls into this category looks indisputable. Blair's cabinet ministers knew it, and told him so. His attorney general warned that there were just three ways in which it could be legally justified: "self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UN security council authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case." Blair tried and failed to obtain the third.

His foreign secretary, Jack Straw, told Blair that for the war to be legal, "i) there must be an armed attack upon a state or such an attack must be imminent; ii) the use of force must be necessary and other means to reverse/avert the attack must be unavailable; iii) the acts in self-defence must be proportionate and strictly confined to the object of stopping the attack." None of these conditions were met. The Cabinet Office told him: "A legal justification for invasion would be needed. Subject to law officers' advice, none currently exists."

Without legal justification, the attack on Iraq was an act of mass murder. It caused the deaths of between 100,000 and a million people, and ranks among the greatest crimes the world has ever seen. That Blair and his ministers still saunter among us, gathering money wherever they go, is a withering indictment of a one-sided system of international justice: a system whose hypocrisies Tutu has exposed.

Blair's diminishing band of apologists cling to two desperate justifications. The first is that the war was automatically authorised by a prior UN resolution, 1441. But when it was discussed in the security council, both the American and British ambassadors insisted that 1441 did not authorise the use of force. The UK representative stated that "there is no 'automaticity' in this resolution. If there is a further Iraqi breach of its disarmament obligations, the matter will return to the council for discussion as required in paragraph 12." Two months later, in January 2003, the attorney general reminded Blair that "resolution 1441 does not authorise the use of military force without a further determination by the security council".

Yet when Blair ran out of options, he and his lieutenants began arguing that 1441 authorised their war. They are still at it: on Sunday, Lord Falconer tried it out on Radio4. Perhaps he had forgotten that it has been thoroughly discredited.

The second justification, attempted again by Blair this weekend, is that there was a moral case for invading Iraq. Yes, there was one. There was also a moral case for not invading Iraq, and this case was stronger.

But a moral case (and who has launched an aggressive war in modern times without claiming to possess one?) does not provide a legal basis. Nor was it the motivation for the attack. In September 2000, before they took office, a project run by future members of the Bush administration – including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz – produced a report which said the following: "While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." Their purpose, they revealed, was "maintaining American military pre-eminence". The motivation for deposing Saddam Hussein was no more moral than the motivation for arming and funding him, two decades before.

But while the case against Blair is strong, the means are weak. Twenty-nine people have been indicted in the international criminal court, and all of them are African. (Suspects in the Balkans have been indicted by a different tribunal). There's a reason for this. Until 2018 at the earliest, the court can prosecute crimes committed during the course of an illegal war, but not the crime of launching that war.

Should we be surprised? Though the Nuremberg tribunal described aggression as "the supreme international crime", several powerful states guiltily resisted its adoption. At length, in 2010, they agreed that the court would have jurisdiction over aggression, but not until 2018 or thereafter. Though the offence has been recognised in international law for 67 years, the international criminal court (unlike the Rwanda and Yugoslavia tribunals, which hear cases from before they were established) will be able to try only crimes of aggression committed beyond that date.

The other possibility is a prosecution in one of the states (there are at least 25) which have incorporated the crime of aggression into their own laws. Perhaps Blair's lawyers are now working through the list and cancelling a few speaking gigs.

That the prospect of prosecution currently looks remote makes it all the more important that the crime is not forgotten. To this end, in 2010 I set up a bounty fund –www.arrestblair.org – to promote peaceful citizens' arrests of the former prime minister. People contribute to the fund, a quarter of which is paid out to anyone who makes an attempt which meets the rules. With our fourth payment last week, we've now disbursed more than £10,000. Our aim is the same as Tutu's: to de-normalise an act of mass murder, to keep it in the public mind and to maintain the pressure for a prosecution.

That looked, until this weekend, like an almost impossible prospect. But when the masonry begins to crack, impossible hopes can become first plausible, then inexorable. Blair will now find himself shut out of places where he was once welcome. One day he may find himself shut in.

Why can anyone shovel cash into the UK without any enquiry into its provenance?

Mary Dejevsky in the Independent.

Today is the day when English justice delivers its verdict on the oligarchs. After seven months spent poring over the evidence, Mrs Justice Gloster returns to London's Commercial Court to hand down her judgment in the case of Berezovsky v Abramovich – Boris Berezovsky being a one-time Kremlin adviser now in exile in Britain; Roman Abramovich being the owner of Chelsea Football Club. Berezovsky claimed Abramovich cheated him in a share deal, and demanded £3bn in damages. Abramovich said he did nothing of the kind.

The huge sums of money, the intricacy of the arguments, and the ever-shifting political context in which the disputed events took place, all make this a landmark case. But there will be many Britons, myself shamefacedly included, who have already given up and pronounced a plague on both their houses. Whoever wins – and having sat in the courtroom a couple of days, I admit to flailing hopelessly in the rights and wrongs of it – here are two men of a certain age and uncertain wealth seeking to settle old scores through the British courts. Which of them emerges victorious troubles me very little.

It may be that one can afford to lose more than the other, and I would hazard who that might be. But each exploited the turmoil of immediate post-Soviet Russia to his own – considerable – advantage. Acumen came into it, but so – I suspect – did bluff, acquired street wisdom and not a little chance. Whether one behaved honourably and one less so, I would hesitate to wager, but the likelihood is of at least 50 shades of grey.

Corruption was endemic in the Soviet Union; it is endemic in Russia today. In between, there was corruption plus chaos. The times were brutal, and I almost doubt that it is worth raking over old coals in any court at all. Let any aggrieved oligarchs fight it out, in the old-fashioned way, and let the cannier, more ruthless man win. If there is blood on the floor, or the doors, or the car bumper, so be it.

The trouble is that Berezovsky v Abramovich, and the parade of other oligarchs resorting to the London courts, says something not just about a very particular period in Russia (which is now gone), but also about Britain today. And I do care about that, as should the UK Government and the country at large. If Russians cannot get it together to run an honest state, then that reflects at least in part their state of development and their chequered history.

It is no good for us to try to impose our civic standards on them, as various do-gooding NGOs have long tried to do. If there is no domestic power or consensus to sustain change, no improvement will last. A quorum of Russians has to demand a less corrupt state, and there are signs – in recent protests and the rise of internet exposés – that they will.

No doubt that is why Berezovsky and his compatriots have petitioned the English courts to rule on events that have only the most tangential connection with this country – a meeting here, a hotel room there. In a way, that shows a flattering confidence in British justice and a distressing lack of faith in Russia's own. But has the arrival of so much Russian money in Britain, with high-profile members of its privilegentsia not far behind, really been an untrammelled good, or even neutral in its effects?

Someone who believes it has a downside is Alexei Navalny, the frontman for Russia's populist anti-corruption campaign. He has speculated that, while much of the Russian money oiling the wheels of London society is honestly acquired, some of it – obviously – is not. And he asked the question that we Britons should have been asking for a decade or more. Why is it so easy for someone with no obvious ties to Britain to set up shop here and shovel in the cash without any enquiries being made into its provenance? The image of a Russian paying for a Mayfair flat with a suitcase of cash became almost a cliché of the late 1990s. But why did we laugh it off, rather than ask how that could be acceptable or even legal?

Navalny notes that all a rich, or even modestly well-off, Russian had to do – if he chose not to invest £2m in a business to acquire a resident's visa – was to buy a flat, produce his ID and a utility bill, and lo he could set up a bank account and start transferring his billions. In his book, the process was too easy. In my book, as a Briton, opening and operating a bank account and transferring money across borders is too difficult. The very same procedures – the address, the ID, the utility bill – that make it so simple for a foreigner to import his ill-gotten gains cause endless hassles for us natives. Plus the UK bank must declare to the taxman outgoing transfers above a certain amount – but not those coming in.

You can only laugh really about error-prone ID checks that cause us untold delays in the name of preventing money-laundering, yet give foreign shysters a fast-track to legitimacy – so long, that is, that any actual fraud has not been committed here. As HSBC's admitted involvement in Mexican drug money-laundering showed, you have to be a big fish not to get caught in the anti-corruption safety net of a British bank.

It is not just Russians, of course, who feed dirty money into Britain. But it is their millions that have had some of the most obviously pernicious consequences. At the less harmful end are those flats paid for in cash and all the "bling"; at the opposite extreme are some mysterious killings and attempted killings. In between is the court time taken up by internal Russian squabbles – how many homegrown cases have to wait? – and the damaging effect on diplomatic relations of the UK's generous political asylum policy towards economic, if not criminal, exiles.

It might be said that every country gets the emigrés it deserves. In being more interested in the money than how it was acquired, we have brought many of these difficulties upon ourselves. But they are not ours alone. We can fulminate against corruption in Russia as we like, but unless the UK does more to stop dubious Russian money coming to London, we need to recognise that our own greed and regulatory laxness have also played their part.

Why shouldn't three people get married?

As three Brazilians are legally joined as a 'thruple' it starts to look illiberal to insist that marriage must be between two people

• 
• • Jean Hannah Edelstein
  • guardian.co.uk, Thursday 30 August 2012 12.47 BST

'If three, or four, or 17 people want to marry each other simultaneously and equally, why should they not be granted the same status as two people who want to become a legal family?' Photograph: Stone/Getty Images

Three Brazilians in love have their nation up in arms over whether their relationship, now enshrined in a three-way marriage, is legal. The public notary who conducted their marriage says there's no reason the threesome – or "thruple", as the internet has charmingly labelled it – shouldn't enjoy the same kinds of rights imparted upon two people who get hitched. But traditionalists are not impressed: lawyer Regina Beatriz Tavares da Silva, of the Commission for the Rights of the Family, has it "absurd and totally illegal".

Speaking of absurd, shall we take a moment to consider traditional marriage? We do adore it: in the UK, just under half the population has chosen to pledge to love another person as long as they both shall live, or as long as they don't get divorced. And yet as we shoehorn ourselves into two-by-two formation, we're not that good at keeping our promises: as Helen Croydon has pointed out, breaking the boundaries of monogamy is far from unusual. Plenty of marriages have three people in them. They're just not legal ones.

A good old-fashioned monogamous marriage works beautifully for some. But even the most successful marriages are special and unique and incredibly weird. For much as we have a sweet collective imagining of what a happy union entails, the reality is that they all deviate from the fantasy norm, pretty much from the time that the certificate is signed, the chicken is noshed and the bouquet is chucked. The government can dictate that two people should be in a marriage, but it can't legislate what will make them feel happy or stable or emotionally complete together. And if we accept that, as we do every time we allow anyone the freedom to make a decision about who they'll marry, and furthermore allow them the freedom to call each other by execrable pet names in public, then does it not begin to seem strange, just a bit, that we do allow the government to dictate how many people are allowed to pledge to be together forever? Perhaps even as strange as it is for government to dictate who can do it based on their gender?

This is not about the advocacy of patriarchal polygamy that regards wives as unequal to, or property of, their husbands. But if three, or four, or 17 people want to marry each other simultaneously and equally, why should they not be granted the same status as two people who want to become a legal family? Without reverting to religious arguments, or logistical ones (does Ikea manufacture a big enough bed to accommodate this union?), it begins to feel a bit illiberal.

Is it possible that if we allowed more people to marry simultaneously that more marriages might be successful? Fewer breakups over infidelity might occur, for example, if those who found themselves in love with more than one person didn't have to choose or conceal their feelings. And relaxing the expectation that one partner should fulfil all of one's needs – good sex, complementary taste in television and shared preference for dogs over cats may just be too much to ask for – might mean that people who opt for a portfolio of other halves (or thirds) could outdo the rest of us in happiness.

Legalisation wouldn't send stampedes of people to the registry office in five-aside squads; for many of us, monogamy does feel the most comfortable option, whether it's because our brains aren't wired to love more than one person or because the prospect of making multiple people happy is too complex. But three's not a crowd for everyone. And as long as everyone is entering a marriage equally, as long as everyone is really going to make an effort to be open and honest to everyone else, it's probably not the government's job to tell them how many of them there should be.

Pakistan and Israel are identical twins

India and Israel are often likened to each other, but it is Pakistan that Israel resembles the most

Much is made these days of the apparent likeness between India and Israel. Both are supposed to be modern democracies. Both, it is pointed out, are also fighting Islamic terrorism. But this is a superficial comparison. There is no dearth of modern democracies in the post-Cold War world, and no dearth of nations fighting Islamic terror either, post-9/11. For two nations to be considered alike, they ought to be similar in ways that are more fundamental and, at the same time, that also set them apart from other nations.

It is not India but Pakistan that shares a number of such traits with Israel.

Violent partition

Both Pakistan and Israel were carved out through partitions of historically and culturally unified territories within a year of each other: Pakistan in August 1947 and Israel in May 1948. Pakistan was created by splitting the Indian subcontinent, tearing asunder people who, while belonging to different religions, shared a common cultural heritage and had together fought their war of Independence. It created fissures even within ethnic communities — Punjabis in the west, Bengalis in the east and, a year later, Kashmiris in the north. The same happened when Israel was carved out of historical Palestine, dividing Arabs to the west of the Jordan river for the first time.

Two, neither partition was peaceful. Hundreds of thousands of people had to leave their homes in both instances to become refugees in what, just days earlier, had been their own land. Pakistan’s creation saw more than 10 million people migrate on either side of the border, many driven away by their neighbours. Nearly a million are believed to have died in the pogroms that ensued. While eloquent espousals of nationalism and patriotism poured out of leaders at bully pulpits, the slit throats of citizens spattered blood in the streets.

Israel’s creation was similarly gory. More than 700,000 Palestinians were hounded out of their homes by Zionist militias in what the Arabs have since called the Nakba, or catastrophe. Thousands perished. Many migrated to West Bank, Gaza and the refugee camps of Lebanon, Jordan and the Sinai; many others fled to Europe and the United States — places from where harried Jews had been moving to Palestine in preceding decades to escape persecution. One diaspora replaced another, and Arab became the new Jew of the West. The irony was profound.

Three, neither Pakistan nor Israel has clearly defined its borders since its creation. It’s not just that their neighbours don’t agree with them, but both these nations have themselves stopped short of stating precisely where they want their borders to be. While India categorically specifies the borders it claims in Kashmir, Pakistan’s position is ambiguous at best. It calls the portion it conquered in 1947-48 “Azad Kashmir” (Independent Kashmir), but Pakistan’s army exercises even more control over the lives of Azad Kashmiris than over the average Pakistani. It even has an Azad Kashmir Regiment — headquartered in Punjab.

Israel has also desisted from stating exactly how large or small it intends to be. For more than 20 years, even the Palestinian Authority has recognised the so-called Green Line — which defined Israeli territory until the 1967 war — as the international border subject to a two-state solution (that would create a Palestinian state). Israel itself, however, does not recognise the Green Line anymore. Nor does it say where it would draw its own Line, all the while grabbing more land in the West Bank for Jewish settlements.

Four, both Pakistan and Israel have fought wars of aggression against neighbours. The India-Pakistan conflicts of 1947-48, 1965 and 1999 were the result of Pakistani aggression. It also waged a proxy war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, a misadventure from which it is yet to dissociate itself. Israel’s wars are still more numerous. It attacked Egypt in 1956, Lebanon in 1982 and 2006, and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza on numerous occasions. Gaza remains under Israeli siege even today.

Dominated by religion, military

Five, being born in blood and bred in wars, both Pakistan and Israel have developed societies and polities that are dominated by religion and the military. The green uniform has been at the helm of Pakistan’s affairs for nearly half its independent history, and lords over politicians even when not formally in charge. Its hand has been strengthened by the appropriation of Islam as a political ideology, and the nation is effectively run by a nexus of generals and mullahs.

Israel’s military has similarly clawed its way into the heart of the nation’s society and politics in the name of protecting its Jewish character. Making a name for yourself in wars is the surest way to a successful political career, ministerial posts and prime ministership. Just like Pakistan, Israel seems to be run by a league of generals and rabbis.

Six, both Pakistan and Israel nurture exclusivist national identities, concerned more with who does not belong to them than with who does. Created as a homeland for Muslims, Pakistan has always treated Hindus, Sikhs and other non-Muslims as second-class citizens. But that isn’t all.

Various categories of Muslims — migrants from India, Ahmadis, Shias, Baluchis and so on — have also found it difficult to integrate into Pakistani society and are perpetually blamed for all its social and political ills.

Israel was created as a homeland for Jews, and it treats Arabs as second-class citizens. But many Jews too — black Jews, Sephardic Jews, Mizrahi Jews, Russian-origin Jews and so on — face rampant discrimination. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis of Jewish ancestry are simply not considered Jews by law and struggle to be a part of Israeli society.

Benedict Anderson has called nations “imagined communities,” comprising people who share a deep bond of unity even with those they have never met or do not personally know. But Pakistan and Israel exhibit an extraordinary lack of imagination in the construction of their nationhood. Exclusivist identities, religious chauvinism, military dominance and a history of belligerence have rendered them societies that are perpetually at war — with their neighbours and with themselves. Their own uncertainty over their borders betrays this existential insecurity.

That is where India differs from both these nations. Imagined as a country of infinite communities, we have largely remained true to this founding principle. Muslims running away from riots in Gujarat or Assam, Biharis fleeing persecution in Maharashtra and Northeasterners escaping prejudice in South India are still exceptions in a nation that culturally and constitutionally believes in diversity. This belief, more than anything else, is the source of our national identity.

Let us hope that is how, and who, we remain.

(Saif Shahin is a doctoral research scholar in political communication at the University of Texas, Austin, U.S.)

Andrew Strauss: more straight bat than flashing blade

Robert Colville in The Telegraph

One of humanity’s besetting sins is that we’re addicted to charisma. Besotted by it, even. We look for the leader with the movie-star looks, the resounding oratory – the sheer, obvious talent. A Steve Jobs can behave abominably to his underlings, can decide that deodorant is for the little people, and still we swoon.

But is this really a good idea? Over the past few decades, English cricket has been conducting what might be termed an uncontrolled experiment in management theory. The lab rats in question have been those poor souls faced with the uniquely impossible demands of the national captaincy: helping to select a team, motivating the players, producing tactical plans and modifying them on the fly, coping with media scrutiny, and all the while maintaining their own level of performance.

Sometimes, there has been an obvious candidate – as yesterday, when Alastair Cook accepted the job with the air of a crown prince assuming his birthright. Cook, like Mike Atherton, was an “FEC”, a player always earmarked as a Future England Captain. But in their absence, the authorities invariably haver between charisma and character. For every Mike Brearley, whose man-management skills lay behind Ian Botham’s destruction of the Aussies, there is a – well, an Ian Botham, who had only just resigned the captaincy after a miserable tenure.

The temptation is often to hand the leadership to the player who shines the brightest, to a Botham or an Andrew Flintoff or Kevin Pietersen, in the (usually forlorn) hope that he can galvanise others with his sheer ability. There is, however, another path. Andrew Strauss, who resigned as captain yesterday, shares Pietersen’s South African birthplace, yet is his opposite in terms of character, temperament and playing style. Pietersen is the stupendously athletic strokemaker. Strauss is the man who had to work for his place, for his captaincy, for every one of his 7,037 Test runs.

As an England novice, he was “Lord Brocket” and “PT” (the P stands for “Posh”; the T is less kind). He failed an audition for the captaincy, losing out to Flintoff, only getting the job after Pietersen’s intrigues against the then coach resulted in both losing their jobs.

Here’s the strange thing, though. As a leader, Pietersen was a flop: on a tour of India, wrote team-mate Graeme Swann in his autobiography, the superstar was briefly reduced “to a period of screaming '----ing bowl ----ing straight’ at everyone”. It was his replacement as captain who led England to back-to-back Ashes victories (the second gloriously crushing), and briefly to the status of No 1 in the world.

Strauss would perhaps not make the short list for history’s greatest captain: as well as the many Australian or West Indian contenders, there is Graeme Smith of South Africa, who finished off not just Strauss’s captaincy, but those of Michael Vaughan and Nasser Hussain too. Even in purely English terms, Vaughan probably eclipses his former lieutenant for his hint of unorthodoxy, his tactical flair.

Strauss, though, is the man you trust to get the job done – the one to lead a polar expedition, to do everything by the book, and to bring his men back alive. “Strauss is one of those guys who demand respect,” writes Swann, “and on a daily basis you never really fathom why. He just does. He always says the right things, whether it be in team meetings or press conferences, and his word is never questioned.” Except by Pietersen, who disliked his captain so much that he reportedly advised the South Africans on how to get him out.

Was it a failure that Strauss, and coach Andy Flower, could not reconcile this wayward genius to a regime of grinding perfectionism? Perhaps. Yet surveys of what makes for a great corporate leader tend to look surprisingly like profiles of Andrew Strauss. In her book Quiet – which argues that flashiest is not always best – Susan Cain observes that true greats display “extreme humility coupled with intense professional will”: they are not messianic Steve Jobs types, but those “who build not their own egos, but the institutions they run”.

The rivalry between Strauss and Pietersen, then, incarnates not just the great divide within English cricket, but in leadership more generally. Study after study has shown that we pay attention to those who shout the loudest, who make the boldest claims. In the process, we wildly overestimate the role of pure luck and the contribution of others.

True, charisma does have its place. Yet for all that it would be wonderful to see Pietersen light up Lord’s again, it seems somehow fitting that he and Strauss, yin and yang, are locked together on 21 Test centuries, one behind the national record. At the start of his career, you would have found few takers for Strauss ending up in a position of such pre-eminence. But then, as Iain Duncan Smith once noted, you should never underestimate the determination of a quiet man.

Men have a wee problem with sitting down on toilets

It may be more hygienic and accurate, but plans to persuade men to sit down to pee challenge our most basic instincts

• 
• • Ally Fogg
  • guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 29 August 2012 12.04 BST

Men peeing at a urinal: the end of a longstanding tradition? Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

At my primary school, we boys vied for pecking position via the traditional routes of fighting, football and fabricating extravagant fibs, but there was something else. Lined up afore the trough urinal in the toilets, we discovered a crucial test of manhood: the ability to pee skywards. The class weaklings could barely defeat gravity. I was proud to occasionally reach the words "Armitage Shanks" while a few warriors could clear the porcelain and decorate the tiles.

And then there was Phillip. Phillip was no ordinary Scots wean. He was a superhero, a god amongst miniature men. Phillip could squirt a volley which would rise a good six feet in the air before arcing with exquisite accuracy out of the open window. It was spectacular – I swear he must have mastered top spin. That is how the boys learned: there is direct route from bladder to masculine prestige, and the girls learned not to loiter by the big bins at playtime.

At this point, I should probably advise male readers to take a seat. Not because I'm about to tell you something shocking, but because if the rest of the world is to follow the lead of Taiwan, we'll soon have to do so several times a day. Stephen Shen, minister at the country's Environmental Protection Administration, has instigated a policy of requesting men in government buildings to sit down to urinate. He hopes the habit will spread through society to create a cleaner, healthier environment. If my female friends are anything to go by, this plan would go down well with the world's women. They talk of hygiene, bad smells and treading barefoot in puddles by night. That may sound reasonable but don't be fooled, dudes. It's a grand conspiracy to ensure ultimate victory in the battle to keep toilet seats down.

I'm no biomechanic, but it seems to me that if you were to design a waste water drainage system for a semi-intelligent carbon-based lifeform, you could do little better than an easily-accessed length of flexible hosepipe, complete with directional nozzle, that can be tucked out of harm's way when not needed. And thanks to the miracle of evolution, this gadget protrudes at the precise same place on the human body where we find the zip of our trousers. It is such a miracle that one might be tempted to credit it to the intelligent design of a benevolent creator, were it not for one small design flaw – accuracy. Some women may find this hard to believe, but most of the time men are pretty accurate. Nine times out of 10 we could knock a bee off a bottletop with a single blast. The problem is that from time to time, without warning, our trusty nozzle will develop a glitch that suddenly sends an unexpected stream between the basin and the Beano annual or, on a bad day, splat between the eyes. We can't help it. Blame evolution and its shoddy attention to detail.

So, on one side of this debate we have hygiene, public health and a pleasant living environment. On the other we have … OK I admit it – nothing. Nada. Zilch. There is not a single argument to be made for standing up to wee except, damn it, it feels right. So perhaps I could suggest a compromise. Men won't wee standing up in the bathroom on condition we are provided with a well-drained tree in the backyard that we can mark as our own. I suspect that, deep down, that's what we really want.

A quick course on playing spin in the subcontinent

Aakash Chopra

August 29, 2012

 

	You must look to attack the spinner early in the innings to force him to push back his field, which will help you rotate the strike © AFP  Enlarge
Related Links Series/Tournaments: New Zealand tour of India Teams: New Zealand

After losing 2-0 to a weedy West Indian side, New Zealand slumped to an innings defeat in their first Test in India. It would take a brave man to put his money on them in the second Test in Bangalore. The loss in Hyderabad only underlined the gap between New Zealand and the major Test-playing nations.

Over the years though, New Zealand had gained the reputation of a team that always punched above their weight. Their courage and the never-say-die attitude made up for the lack of the skills needed to excel in different conditions.

On their tour of India in 2003-04, which was my debut series, New Zealand drew both Test matches, and even had India follow on in Mohali. They were routed in the ODIs when they visited in 2010-11, but secured two draws in the three-Test series. They have rarely won in India but haven't surrendered before as feebly as they did in Hyderabad, and that must hurt their fans. The pitch deteriorated a lot faster than many expected it to and had enough in it for the spinners from the second day, yet it was far from being unplayable.

Susceptibility to pace and bounce tends to get far more attention than weakness against spin. That's perhaps because, unlike pace bowlers, spinners don't pose a physical threat but the truth is that being bamboozled by spin can cause long-lasting mental scars.

With the second Test only two days away, New Zealand must be working overtime to find ways to counter India's potent spin threat. Here are a few things their batsmen should keep in mind while taking on R Ashwin and Pragyan Ojha in Bangalore.

Decisive footwork
Read the ball from the hand, not from the pitch, because it will give you a little more time to react. Use both feet to either get to the pitch of the ball with a long forward stride or to go deep inside the crease to shorten the length. Spinners are at their most dangerous when the batsman refuses to get to the pitch of the ball to smother the lateral movement off the surface. That's what New Zealand did in Hyderabad. Most of their batsmen were rooted to the crease and offered unconvincing forward prods to everything that was pitched up, in hope that the ball would find the middle of the bat. Their shots lacked conviction and resulted in many bat-pad catches. Some New Zealand batsmen started shuffling to counter the spin, but little did they realise that sideways movement within the crease can only be effective against fast bowlers because it helps you play in the second line. Only a decisive forward-and-backward movement can save the day against spinners. In England, Hashim Amla did that beautifully against Graeme Swann.

Pushing the fielders back
On turning pitches, you must be aggressive, for no matter how good your defensive technique, the odd ball will turn and jump unexpectedly to abruptly end your stay. If you only concentrate on defending, as New Zealand did in the second innings, the spinners won't feel threatened and will continue to flight the ball. To extract optimum spin and bounce off the surface, spinners must give the ball some air. This becomes easier if the batsman has gone into a shell. All quality players of spin take the aerial route really early in the innings, because it forces the bowler to not only push the fielders back but to also cut down on flighting the ball. Once the fielders are pushed back, batsmen find it easier to rotate the strike, and the moment a spinner starts bowling flatter, he plays into your hands. MS Dhoni did it efficiently against Jeetan Patel the moment he walked in to bat in Hyderabad.

To many batsmen the sweep shot is the only attacking response to the turning ball. But they must understand that they'll get the right balls to sweep only after forcing the bowler to bowl flatter and shorten his length by stepping down the track regularly. Wait for the bowler to release the ball so that he can't alter his length or line, and advance against balls that go higher than the eye level.

	Let the ball come to you © AFP  Enlarge

Playing late, using soft hands and getting the weight transfer right
Since spinners bowl a lot slower than the quicks, it's tempting to reach for the ball. But if you're defending, you must resist the temptation and allow the ball to come to you, as you would when facing a fast bowler. Once you have allowed the ball to come to you, play it as delicately as possible with soft hands. Let the top hand remain firm while barely holding the bat with the bottom hand.

It's imperative to transfer the body weight at the right time. Whether you are defending or playing an aggressive shot against a spinner on a turning pitch, if you transfer your weight a fraction earlier, you will commit yourself to the stroke and struggle to play the ball along the ground. And if you are a fraction late, you won't get any power in your shots.

Playing the turning ball on a crumbling pitch requires just as much expertise as playing the moving ball on a fast and bouncy pitch. Even after taking a crash course in playing the turning ball, New Zealand may not be able to avert defeat, but it's worth using every ounce of their energy to at least delay the inevitable.