The Science Delusion by Rupert Sheldrake - A review

                                 

                                  The Science Delusion - Sheldrake 

                                The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke

We must find a new way of understanding human beings

• 
• • Mary Midgley
  • The Guardian, Friday 27 January 2012 09.00 GMT

Dogs: do they really know when you're coming home? Photograph: Laurie and Charles/Getty Images

The unlucky fact that our current form of mechanistic materialism rests on muddled, outdated notions of matter isn't often mentioned today. It's a mess that can be ignored for everyday scientific purposes, but for our wider thinking it is getting very destructive. We can't approach important mind-body topics such as consciousness or the origins of life while we still treat matter in 17th-century style as if it were dead, inert stuff, incapable of producing life. And we certainly can't go on pretending to believe that our own experience – the source of all our thought – is just an illusion, which it would have to be if that dead, alien stuff were indeed the only reality.

 

We need a new mind-body paradigm, a map that acknowledges the many kinds of things there are in the world and the continuity of evolution. We must somehow find different, more realistic ways of understanding human beings – and indeed other animals – as the active wholes that they are, rather than pretending to see them as meaningless consignments of chemicals.

Rupert Sheldrake, who has long called for this development, spells out this need forcibly in his new book. He shows how materialism has gradually hardened into a kind of anti-Christian faith, an ideology rather than a scientific principle, claiming authority to dictate theories and to veto inquiries on topics that don't suit it, such as unorthodox medicine, let alone religion. He shows how completely alien this static materialism is to modern physics, where matter is dynamic. And, to mark the strange dilemmas that this perverse fashion poses for us, he ends each chapter with some very intriguing "Questions for Materialists", questions such as "Have you been programmed to believe in materialism?", "If there are no purposes in nature, how can you have purposes yourself?", "How do you explain the placebo response?" and so on.

In short, he shows just how unworkable the assumptions behind today's fashionable habits have become. The "science delusion" of his title is the current popular confidence in certain fixed assumptions – the exaltation of today's science, not as the busy, constantly changing workshop that it actually is but as a final, infallible oracle preaching a crude kind of materialism.

In trying to replace it he needs, of course, to suggest alternative assumptions. But here the craft of paradigm-building has chronic difficulties. Our ancestors only finally stopped relying on the familiar astrological patterns when they had grown accustomed to machine-imagery instead – first becoming fascinated by the clatter of clockwork and later by the ceaseless buzz of computers, so that they eventually felt sure that they were getting new knowledge. Similarly, if we are told today that a mouse is a survival-machine, or that it has been programmed to act as it does, we may well feel that we have been given a substantial explanation, when all we have really got is one more optional imaginative vision – "you can try looking at it this way".

That is surely the right way to take new suggestions – not as rival theories competing with current ones but as extra angles, signposts towards wider aspects of the truth. Sheldrake's proposal that we should think of natural regularities as habits rather than as laws is not just an arbitrary fantasy. It is a new analogy, brought in to correct what he sees as a chronic exaggeration of regularity in current science. He shows how carefully research conventions are tailored to smooth out the data, obscuring wide variations by averaging many results, and, in general, how readily scientists accept results that fit in with their conception of eternal laws.

He points out too, that the analogy between natural regularities and habit is not actually new. Several distinctly non-negligible thinkers – CS Peirce, Nietzsche, William James,AN Whitehead – have already suggested it because they saw the huge difference between the kind of regularity that is found among living things and the kind that is expected of a clock or a calcium atom.

Whether or no we want to follow Sheldrake's further speculations on topics such asmorphic resonance, his insistence on the need to attend to possible wider ways of thinking is surely right. And he has been applying it lately in fields that might get him an even wider public. He has been making claims about two forms of perception that are widely reported to work but which mechanists hold to be impossible: a person's sense of being looked at by somebody behind them, and the power of animals – dogs, say – to anticipate their owners' return. Do these things really happen?

Sheldrake handles his enquiries soberly. People and animals do, it seems, quite often perform these unexpected feats, and some of them regularly perform them much better than others, which is perhaps not surprising. He simply concludes that we need to think much harder about such things.

Orthodox mechanistic believers might have been expected to say what they think is wrong with this research. In fact, not only have scientists mostly ignored it but, more interestingly still, two professed champions of scientific impartiality, Lewis Wolpert and Richard Dawkins, who did undertake to discuss it, reportedly refused to look at the evidence (see two pages in this book). This might indeed be a good example of what Sheldrake means by the "science delusion".

Imam Al Ghazali - On the ideal role of women

" ... Al-Ghazali is considered to be the greatest Muslim scholar ever. He is called “The Defender of Islam”. He has written around 1,000 books in the Fiqah of The Islamic Human Rights Commission . In his well-renown Book, “The Revival Of The Religious Sciences” Al-Ghazali defines women role: 

- She should stay at home and get on with her spinning


- She can go out only in emergencies


- She must not be well-informed nor must she be communicative with her neighbors and only visit them when absolutely necessary


- She should take care of her husband and respect him in his presence and his absence and seek to satisfy him in everything


- She must not leave her house without his permission and if given his permission she must leave secretly


- She should put on old clothes and take deserted streets and alleys, avoid markets, and make sure that a stranger does not hear her voice, her footsteps, smell her or recognize her


- She must not speak to a friend of her husband even in need


- Her sole worry should be her “al bud” (reproductive organs) her home as well as her prayers and her fast (starvation for Allah)


- If a friend of her husband calls when her husband is absent she must not open the door nor reply to him in order to safeguard her “al bud” (vagina)


- She should accept what her husband gives her as sufficient sexual needs at any moment


- She should be clean and ready to satisfy her husband’s sexual needs at any moment


The great theologian then warns all men to be careful of women for their “guile is immense and their mischief is noxious; they are immoral and mean spirited”.Like a true Muslim cleric Ghazali states “It is a fact that all the trials, misfortunes and woes which befall men come from women” [3.2]


In his Book “Counsel for Kings,” Ghazali sums up all that a woman has to endure because of Eve’s misbehavior in the Garden of Eden:


“When Eve ate fruit which He had forbidden to her from the tree in Paradise, the Lord, be He praised, cursed women with eighteen punishments:
- menstruation
- childbirth
- separation from mother and father and marriage to a stranger
- pregnancy
- not having control over her own person
- a lesser share in inheritance; (one half of the male as per the Quran)
- her liability to be divorced and inability to divorce
- its being lawful for men to have four wives, but for a woman to have only one husband
- the fact that she must stay secluded in the house
- the fact that she must keep her head covered inside the house
- the fact that two women’s testimony has to be set against the testimony of one man
- the fact that she must not go out of the house unless accompanied by a near relative
- the fact that men take part in Friday and feast day prayers and funerals while women do
not
- disqualification for leadership and judgeship
- the fact that merit has one thousand components, only one of which is attributable to women, while 999 are attributable to men
- the fact that if women are profligate they will be given twice as much torment as the rest of the community at the Resurrection Day
- the fact that if their husbands die they must observe a waiting period of four months and ten days before remarrying


The idea that a woman’s sole purpose and “duty is to stay at home to satisfy the sexual appetite of her husband” is again summed up in Ghazali’s Book “Proof Of Islam.” Ghazali is still so highly revered amongst the majority of Muslim clerics that that he is called “Proof of Islam”. The most influential thinker of Islam, Ghazali, molded the minds of billions of Muslims with his opinions on women’s character :
“If you relax the woman’s leash a tiny bit, she will take you and bolt wildly….


Their deception is awesome and their wickedness is contagious; bad character and feeble mind are their predominant traits …”


Ghazali also exhorted women: A wife should never refuse her bud (vagina) to her husband even if it is on the saddle of a camel


Al-Gazali urged those men who teach their women to write : “Do not add evil to unhappiness” learning his lessons from his prophet Muhammad and caliph Omar Ibn al-Khattab who commanded :“Prevent women from learning to write, adopt positions
opposite those of women. There is great virtue in such opposition.”


As the supreme cleric Ghazali defined marriage for generations of Muslims :


“Marriage is a form of slavery. The woman is man’s slave and her duty therefore is absolute obedience to the husband in all that he asks of her person. A woman, who at the moment of death enjoys the full approval of her husband, will find her place in Paradise.”

How capital captured politics - Why was TISA kept secret?

WikiLeaks has shown us that western democracies are now ruled by market forces that debase the very notion of freedom

• 
• • Slavoj Žižek
  • The Guardian, Sunday 13 July 2014 20.15 BST

'The Trade in Services Agreement prohibits more regulation of financial services, despite the fact the 2007-08 meltdown is generally perceived as resulting from a lack of regulation.' Photograph: Andy Mueller/Reuters

In May, an international trade agreement was signed that effectively serves as a kind of legal backbone for the restructuring of world markets. While the Trade in Services Agreement (Tisa) negotiations were not censored outright, they were barely mentioned in our media. This marginalisation and secrecy was in stark contrast to the global historical importance of what was agreed upon.

In June, WikiLeaks made public the secret draft text of the agreement. It covers 50 countries and most of the world's trade in services.

It sets rules that would assist the expansion of financial multinationals into other nations by preventing regulatory barriers. It prohibits more regulation of financial services, despite the fact that the 2007-08 financial meltdown is generally perceived as resulting from a lack of regulation. Furthermore, the US is particularly keen on boosting cross-border data flow, including traffic of personal and financial data. Despite all this, we heard little about it.

Yet is this discrepancy between importance and secrecy really surprising? Is it not rather a sad but precise indication of where do we, in western liberal democratic countries, stand with regard to democracy? A century and a half ago, in Das Kapital, Karl Marx characterised the market exchange between worker and capitalist as "a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham." For Marx, the ironic addition of Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher of egotistical utilitarianism, provides the key to what freedom and equality effectively mean in capitalist society. To quote The Communist Manifesto: "By freedom is meant – under the present bourgeois conditions of production – free trade, free selling and buying." And by equality is meant the legal formal equality of buyer and seller, even if one of them is forced to sell his labour under any conditions (like today's precarious workers).

The main culprits of the 2008 financial meltdown now impose themselves on us as experts leading us on the painful path to financial recovery. Their advice should trump parliamentary politics. Or, as Mario Monti put it: "Those who govern must not allow themselves to be completely bound by parliamentarians." What, then, is the higher force whose authority can suspend the decisions of the democratically elected representatives of the people? As far back as 1998, the answer was provided by Hans Tietmeyer, the then governor of the Deutsche Bundesbank, who praised national governments for preferring "the permanent plebiscite of global markets" to the "plebiscite of the ballot box".

Note the democratic rhetoric of this obscene statement: global markets are more democratic than parliamentary elections, since the process of voting goes on in them permanently (and is permanently reflected in market fluctuations) and at a global level, not only within the limits of a nation state.

This, then, is where we stand with regard to democracy, and the Tisa agreement is a perfect example. The key decisions concerning our economy are negotiated and enforced in secret, and set the coordinates for the unencumbered rule of capital. In this way, the space for decision-making by the democratically elected politicians is severely limited, and the political process deals predominantly with issues towards which capital is indifferent (like culture wars).

This is why the release of the Tisa draft marks a new stage in the WikiLeaks strategy: until now its activity has been focused on making public how our lives are monitored and regulated by the intelligence agencies – the standard liberal topic of individuals threatened by oppressive state apparatuses. Now another controlling force appears – capital – which threatens our freedom in a much more twisted way: by perverting our very sense of what the word means.

It's time to revive public ownership and the common good

Despite its dire record, privatisation is rarely questioned. We must push for our shared interests to take precedence

• 
• • Anne Karpf
  • The Guardian, Friday 4 July 2014

Ed Balls on The Andrew Marr Show, where he said: 'I don’t want to go back to the nationalisation of the 1970s.' Photograph: Jeff Overs/BBC/PA

It might sound like an oxymoron, but this is a positive article about public services. So effectively has the coalition rebranded an economic crisis caused by private greed as the consequence of public ownership, that nationalisation has come to be seen as a universally discredited hangover from bad old Labour. So while current Labour is considering taking back parts of the rail network into public ownership the shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, last weekend was intoning the neoliberal catechism: "I don't want to go back to the nationalisation of the 1970s."

But bringing outsourced services into public ownership isn't about looking back: it's about moving forward, and is a popular idea (66% of respondents in a poll last year supported the nationalisation of energy and rail companies, including 52% of Tories). For today, in the face of the combined bungles of G4S, Serco and Atos, not even the slickest PR-turned-politician can sustain the myth that private equals efficient.

Yet privatisation is touted as a panacea and cliches are trotted out about the evils of the "nanny state". We need to develop a new language to talk about public ownership, one that detoxifies it and taps into the wide recognition that natural resources and essential public services should not be treated as commodities.

Instead of talking about the state, Hilary Wainwright, in a powerful new booklet – The Tragedy of the Private, the Potential of the Public – describes water, health and education as "the commons" – an excellent term. What's remarkable, and hitherto fairly undocumented, is how all over the world a quiet process of remunicipalisation is taking place. Wainwright gives examples from Newcastle to Norway. In the UK, she found over half of 140 local councils bringing services back from the private sector. In Germany, by 2011 the majority of energy distribution networks had returned to public ownership. Even in the US, a fifth of all previously outsourced services have been brought back in-house.

The case of water is a particularly powerful one: to most people the idea of privatising it is alarmingly similar to the privatisation of air. Wainwright tracks struggles to resist the privatisation of water and defend it as a public good in Brazil, Uruguay and Italy.

What makes all this heartening is that new social forms of ownership are emerging in which public utilities are run by coalitions of workers and service users. Theirs isn't just a defence of public services but an attempt to democratise them so they are not the top-down bureaucracies of old or simply job-saving strategies (important though these may be). They become what Wainwright calls "new forms of collectivity" – unions and public managing common resources together for shared benefit.

There is a palpable momentum to these ideas. Last summer saw the formation of the We Own It campaign, which is lobbying for a public service users' bill. This would promote public ownership as the default option for public services and give the public a say in whether services are privatised. This week, a New Economics Foundation working paperalso set out alternatives to the marketisation of public services.

These constitute a challenge to the fatalistic there-is-no-alternative narrative that has dominated political discussion. In his recent book, Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All?, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues that the alleged "musts" of political discourse "are nothing other than various aspects of the status quo – of things as they do, but in no way must, stand at the moment".

Wainwright observes that austerity in the aftermath of the second world war applied to everything except the welfare state, which saw generous investment. In a decade or so, will we come to view the privatisation of public utilities as a brief historical interlude of market madness, of ideology trumping not only human values but also value for money?

Making Test cricket interesting

By Girish Menon

Recently most commentators seem to justify lifeless pitches from a commercial point of view i.e. to make the test match last a minimum 4 days if not the full 5. I wondered if there is no other way to have exciting cricket and make it last 4-5 days as well. Then I had an idea which I wish to share with you and which, I hope, will make for exciting test cricket on lively pitches.

If a team collapses in any innings thereby enabling their opponents to win a test match in say 2/3/4 days then the losing team can invoke a third innings wherein it has to score more runs than their opponents whilst taking thirty wickets within the time left in the test match. If the team that invoked the third innings fails to take 30 wickets whilst scoring more runs than their opponents then the victorious result after the second innings will stand.

I look forward to your comments below:

Banks using 'pseudo' solicitor firms to make debtors pay up

Threatening legal letters from what appear to be solicitor firms are actually coming from a department of Lloyds or NatWest

• Rupert Jones and Patrick Collinson
• The Guardian, Friday 4 July 2014 07.00 BST

High street banks use in-house solictors to send letters to struggling customers who may believe the letters were sent by a third party.

Britain's high-street banks are routinely issuing legal demands from what appear to be independent firms of solicitors designed to make struggling borrowers pay up. Yet the firms are not regulated by the legal profession's watchdog, and are simply names used by banks' in-house lawyers.

Royal Bank of Scotland and its NatWest arm have been using Green & Co Solicitors in Telford; Lloyds Bank uses SCM Solicitors in Hove, East Sussex, and, until January this year, HSBC used DG Solicitors in Edgbaston, Birmingham.

But a search of the register run by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) reveals that none exist as an entity supervised by the regulator.

The practice is legal because the letters are signed by a lawyer who is individually regulated by the SRA. Yet they give the impression to borrowers that their case has been escalated to a third party, using legal language such as "We are instructed by our client" and "We are likely to be instructed to commence court proceedings". The letter heading is near-identical, too, to that of an independent firm of solicitors, and typically uses a different address from that of the bank concerned.

Critics claim that the letters can be confusing and a scare tactic designed to harass people into paying up. But the good news for consumers is that since Guardian Money and others began probing the issue, the SRA has revealed that it will soon issue guidance after receiving a number of complaints that had given it "cause for concern".

And on Thursday, RBS disclosed that after a review of the letters it sends, it was stopping the use of any solicitor or debt-collection brand names that "could cause confusion".

The banks use a form of wording in the small print of the demands that identifies the solicitor "firm" as a unit of the bank. RBS says Green & Co is the "practising name of solicitors employed by the Royal Bank of Scotland Group", while Lloyds says SCM is "part of the in-house litigation department of Lloyds Banking Group".

Some will be surprised to learn that a company can explicitly use the word "solicitors" in its name and yet not be regulated as a firm by the SRA.

The SRA said that SCM Solicitors, for example, ceased trading as an independent regulated law firm in 2011, adding: "The firm is not a firm as an entity – it's just a trading name."

That, arguably, is a somewhat confusing distinction that may well be lost on the panicking recipients of the letters.

The tactics banks use to persuade people to pay up have come under the spotlight after the already notorious case of payday lender Wonga.

Last week it was ordered to pay £2.6m in compensation after it sent letters, to customers in arrears, from bogus law firms – such as Chainey D'Amato & Shannon – leading customers to believe that their outstanding debt had been passed to a law firm or another third party. There is no suggestion the banks are acting in the same way as Wonga. The crucial difference is that Wonga sent letters from fake lawyers, whereas the individuals signing the letters from the banks are authorised and regulated by the SRA.

But there is concern that, unless the people who receive the letters study the small print, they may feel duped into believing that their bank has escalated their case to a third-party firm, and that proceedings are imminent.

In a statement, Lloyds said: "Letters to our customers identify the qualified solicitor of record and make clear that SCM Solicitors forms part of Lloyds Banking Group's in-house litigation department." It pointed out that every letter sent out bore the name of a solicitor within the department who took responsibility for that letter. The correspondence also confirms the solicitor is authorised and regulated by the SRA, and gives that solicitor's registration number.

A spokesperson for RBS told Money: "Our customers should never be in any doubt about who they are communicating with. We have reviewed our policies in this area, and will stop the use of any solicitor or debt-collection brand names in correspondence with our customers that could cause confusion."

The bank said Green & Co had not taken any new business since 2012, and had only "a handful" of cases open, though it acknowledged that "we must make it clearer" to customers that it is an in-house RBS team.

It added that Green & Co "is a legitimately established law firm, registered with the Law Society, and its solicitors are regulated by the SRA".

HSBC said that in January this year it abandoned sending out legal warnings under the name of DG Solicitors and now just uses the HSBC brand.

"HSBC stopped using DG Solicitors in January 2014. All customer letters from DG Solicitors were compliant with the OFT debt recovery rules, and made clear that the firm was a trading name of HSBC and that its people were HSBC employees. To allow HSBC to be more flexible in how it works with customers in arrears, all legal correspondence to these customers is now under the HSBC brand."

A Guardian Money reader raised her concern about SCM Solicitors after it sent demands to her former tenant in Cambridge, saying that it had been instructed by its "client", Lloyds Bank, to demand he repay the outstanding debt on his current account. If payment was not received within 14 days, "legal proceedings may be issued against you", it continued.

The name of SCM Solicitors is prominently displayed in bold type at the top of the letter. In small type at the very bottom, it states that SCM Solicitors is part of Lloyds.

The woman contacted the SRA to find out more about the firm – only to be told that it had closed in June 2011.

The SRA says bank legal departments are able to operate under a trading name, even though the entity is not formally a legal firm in the sense of it having separate SRA regulation, professional indemnity and so on.

In an email to the bank, the Guardian Money reader said she was astonished that it could "apparently be permitted to use a non-existent firm of solicitors to mislead and intimidate its customers into action. I thought our ex-tenant was the bad guy – he's not bad, more hopeless. Lloyds Bank are not hopeless, and you have the capacity to fully understand and select the means by which you operate."

She added that the woman who signed the letter was a registered lawyer, "so for her to represent that she is a member of a solicitor's firm that is threatening legal action but which doesn't, in fact, exist, is rather odd".

In an email to the woman, a senior member of the banking group's legal department described the use of the name SCM Solicitors in letters as "a style for correspondence … the use of the style is one that has been reviewed and deemed appropriate by the SRA".

In a separate email, the woman in Lloyds' legal department who signed the letter appeared to indicate that she was not entirely happy with the way the SCM name was being used. She said she inherited the arrangement when she joined the bank, adding: "At my instigation ... the model is being actively reviewed."

In a statement to Money, Richard Collins, the SRA's executive director, says: "We can confirm we are currently looking into a number of complaints on this theme which have given us cause for concern. We will shortly be issuing guidance for in-house solicitors on our existing requirement that publicity must not be misleading. This will make it clear that they cannot use forms of words that give the impression they are an independent law firm and not employed solicitors."

The debt collectors that aren't what they seem

It's not just banks sending out demands made to look as if they are from a third party. Those from some utility companies and parking firms appear to be from a separate debt collection agency, when the "firm" has been invented as a way of pressurising people to pay up.

Typically, there's small print to the effect the debt recovery firm is a "trading name" of the bank/utility company.

This week the Student Loans Company (SLC) – a government-owned organisation – was found to have sent thousands of letters to graduates appearing to be from an independent debt agency, Smith Lawson & Company Recovery Services. Some began: "We are instructed by our client ..." In fact, Smith Lawson is a trading name of the SLC. On Tuesday, after an outcry, the SLC said it had "suspended all use of Smith Lawson-branded correspondence".

Meanwhile, many customers of Royal Bank of Scotland and NatWest have received letters from "Triton Credit Services", whose address is given as a post office box in Basildon, Essex. Some stated that Triton had been "instructed" by RBS/NatWest, though the small print said Triton was a trading name of the bank. This week RBS said it had decided to "phase out the use of the Triton brand", adding: "In future we will ensure it is much clearer to customers who they are communicating with."

Murali Kartik: How to bowl spin in England

Murali Kartik in Cricinfo

It was my first match for Middlesex and the team's first of the 2007 Championship. We were playing in Taunton against Justin Langer's Somerset. Ed Smith and Richard Pybus, the Middlesex captain and coach, had told me that I would be only filling in for our four seamers with the odd few overs before lunch, tea, and towards the end of the day.

Middlesex had scored 600 for 4 in their first innings. Left-arm spinner Ian Blackwell had taken one wicket. When it was our turn to bowl, Marcus Trescothick smashed our fast bowlers and Somerset racked up 100 for 1 in about ten overs.

Off my first ball I had Trescothick caught bat-pad at short leg. The guy who was told he would bowl only ten overs in the day ended up bowling 50 and finishing with 4 for 168. The seamers picked up six wickets in the drawn match in which more than 1600 runs had been scored.

You need to be big-hearted to bowl in England. It always boils down to your skill and your heart. That is the lesson I learned in my nine years of county cricket, where I played for four different teams.

India will know that since England don't have a specialist spinner anymore - after Graeme Swann's retirement and the disciplinary issues Monty Panesar is struggling with - it's highly unlikely that they will prepare pitches that will spin big even on the fourth day.

So apart from your batsmen putting up enough runs on the board to let you go out and bowl with confidence, the key to succeeding and remaining consistent as a spinner is to not be attacking all the time. I read that R Ashwin said he would like to be a more attacking spinner. That's easier said than done, especially in England, and given the way Alastair Cook and his men played spin in India in the 2012-13 Test series.

	One of my ploys was to push a fielder deep into areas where I expected the batsman to hit. I was telling the batsman: I'm attacking you, so try and take me on

In first-class cricket in England you need to understand your role on the first few days. If the pitch is not doing much, you become the stock bowler, play with your flight, set in-out fields, depending on the batsman, and give control to the captain and the team.

The conditions also dictate how you bowl. In England it's important to pitch on the right length; for a spinner that is good length. It is a good defensive and attacking length to stick to, particularly on pitches that can be slow. In overseas series, I have seen Ashwin being cut and pulled a lot. You can't lose your lengths in England; you can, at times, play with your lines.

Another important element to bowling well in England is to put a lot of body behind the ball. As Sanjay Manjrekar has repeatedly pointed out, many Indian spinners use their shoulders and fingers to impart turn, which is why they don't get enough out of unresponsive pitches, unlike Australia's Nathan Lyon, who can generate bounce even on pitches that do not take turn because he uses his body a lot more.

During India's first tour match of the 2011 tour to England, against Somerset, Amit Mishra went for some runs despite having bowled well on the second day. When he asked me how I bowled on such pitches, I told him that he had to realise that spinners will be hit. So you need to play around with the batsman's mind and the field placements.

One of my ploys was to push a fielder deep into areas where I expected the batsman to hit. I would place a deep midwicket to Trescothick, who played the lap shot really well and frequently. People might say it is a defensive mindset but they should understand that I am trying to block the batsman's big shot.

You should not be reacting after a shot has been hit. Instead I was telling the batsman: I'm attacking you. I have close-in fielders but I am also placing a fielder here for the big shot, so try and take me on. Sometimes it plays with his ego but it also brings me comfort and gives me freedom to experiment.

In England it is also a question of mind over matter. It is about sticking to your strengths and doing your job. You know the weather can be cold. You know that sometimes the pitches are going to be really slow and might not take spin. When nothing is going well for you, and this happens to every bowler, you must stay positive and bowl well.

It is not always about thinking of wickets. It is about biding your time. You have to adopt a role: if it is cold, keep lots of hand warmers with you; if the pitch is not taking spin, tell yourself you are going to stick to your lengths; play around with the fields; play with the batsman's mind; stick to your strengths.

Indian seamers won't find it hard to get used to the Dukes ball in England since it's similar to the SG ball they bowl with at home © Getty Images

John Emburey, the former Middlesex and England offspinner, told me that it was always good to try things. He said that at Lord's, spinners, especially left-arm ones, usually bowl from the Nursery End to take advantage of the slope. Emburey, who was accustomed to bowling from the Pavilion End, would switch sides with former England left-arm spinner Phil Edmonds to bowl from the Nursery End and bowl tighter lines on the off stump to force the outside edge. So it is important to be aware and open to doing things that you will not generally do.

One advantage the Indian spinners have is, they will not find it hard to get used to the Dukes ball, because it is similar to the one they use at home, the SG Test ball, which has a pronounced seam. The Dukes ball stays hard throughout, which is a good thing for a spinner, especially on a dry surface.

At times, more than the pitches, it is the success of the seamers up front that plays a vital role in the spinner being effective. Some of the surfaces in England can be really slow, especially at Lord's and The Oval. There is nothing for spinners at Trent Bridge. The Old Trafford pitch can break up, but at the Rose Bowl it won't.

Overall, the pitches are not going to be conducive to spin, especially in the wake of England's series defeat against Sri Lanka.